Short Story Writers (Magill's Choice)

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

Volume 1 Chinua Achebe — Louise Erdrich 1 – 378

edited by

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach

SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: Shawn Gearhart/©iStockphoto.com

Copyright © 1993, 1997, 2008, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Some essays in these volumes originally appeared in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition, 2001. New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Short story writers / edited by Charles E. May. — Rev. ed. v. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58765-389-6 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-390-2 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-391-9 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-392-6 (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Short story. 2. Short stories—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 3. Novelists—Biography—Dictionaries. I. May, Charles E. (Charles Edward), 1941PN3373.S398 2008 809.3’1—dc22 2007032789

First printing

printed in canada

Contents – Volume 1 Contents

Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Complete List of Contents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Achebe, Chinua . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Adams, Alice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Aiken, Conrad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Alexie, Sherman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Allende, Isabel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Andersen, Hans Christian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Anderson, Sherwood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Angelou, Maya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Atwood, Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Babel, Isaac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Baldwin, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Bambara, Toni Cade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Banks, Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Barthelme, Donald. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Beattie, Ann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Bellow, Saul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Bierce, Ambrose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Boccaccio, Giovanni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Borges, Jorge Luis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Bowen, Elizabeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Boyle, Kay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Boyle, T. Coraghessan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Bradbury, Ray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Callaghan, Morley . . . . . Capote, Truman . . . . . . Carver, Raymond . . . . . . Cather, Willa . . . . . . . . Chaucer, Geoffrey . . . . . Cheever, John . . . . . . . . Chekhov, Anton. . . . . . . Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. Chesterton, G. K. . . . . . . Chopin, Kate . . . . . . . . Cisneros, Sandra . . . . . .

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173 182 188 198 205 220 231 242 250 258 264

Short Story Writers

Clark, Walter Van Tilburg Clarke, Arthur C. . . . . . Conrad, Joseph . . . . . . Coover, Robert . . . . . . Coppard, A. E. . . . . . . Cortázar, Julio. . . . . . . Crane, Stephen . . . . . .

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271 277 285 295 303 310 317

De la Mare, Walter . . . . Dinesen, Isak . . . . . . . Dostoevski, Fyodor . . . . Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan . Dubus, Andre . . . . . . . Dybek, Stuart . . . . . . .

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Ellison, Ralph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368 Erdrich, Louise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374

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Publisher’s Note Publisher’s Note

Short Story Writers, Revised Edition, is the first revision of a Magill’s Choice set published in 1997. To that earlier edition’s collection of 102 articles, this edition adds 44 more articles on important authors of short fiction. The revised three-volume set thus has 146 articles on the most frequently taught, most frequently read, most acclaimed, and most often researched short-fiction writers studied in American schools and colleges. The essays in these volumes have been culled from the 480 author essays in Salem Press’s Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2001) and have been updated. They collectively provide an essential look at the best in short-fiction writing in an easy-to-use and student-friendly format. Any list of contents in a work such as this is necessarily subjective, making the inclusion of one author over another open to debate. Nevertheless, the editors have done their best to meet the needs of core-literature curricula in schools by including the authors who most commonly appear on basic reading lists. Thanks to the greater than 40-percent expansion of coverage in Short Story Writers, Revised Edition, users are more likely than ever to find articles on the authors whom they are studying. The selection of authors in these volumes focuses mainly on modern short-story writers, with a brief nod to the classic fourteenth century writings of Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron) and Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales). The set also takes into account the influence of the contes or Märchen, represented here by Germany’s Brothers Grimm. More than two dozen of the authors did most of their writing during the nineteenth century. Among the best known of these are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ivan Turgenev, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Kate Chopin, and Anton Chekhov. By the middle of the nineteenth century, two distinct types of short fiction existed: the tale and the essaysketch. The modern short story brings together the best of these two traditions. Although questions of how, when, and where short fiction developed have generated lively debate, most scholars of the genre agree that the modern short story began in the United States and specifically in the writings of Washington Irving. Indeed, it is often conceded that Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1809) was the first great modern short story. Although Irving is often regarded as the inventor of the short story form, modern short stories appeared at almost exactly the same time he was writing—in Russia, France, Germany, and elsewhere in the United States. Consequently, credit for creating the form has also been attributed to Russia’s Nikolai Gogol, France’s Prosper Mérimée, and America’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Among these other writers, Poe stands out; he not only wrote short stories but also wrote about the short story form in theory. He addressed it as a distinct genre, advancing the thesis that a story should have a unified effect and be compact—principles that still guide short-story criticisms. Many outstanding writers of the genre followed the nineteenth century pioneers. Other authors covered in this set reflect the range and diversity of nineteenth and twentieth century short-story writing. More than half of those covered (87) are from the United States, reflecting the strength of the genre in one of its most important birthplaces. These American writers include 10 African Americans, 4 Native Amerivii

Short Story Writers cans, and 3 Latinos. The second largest national grouping is England (19), added to which are some of the great authors of Ireland (7) and Scotland (3). Readers will also find some of the cornerstone short fiction writers of Canada, the Continent, Russia, Asia, Africa, and South America. Women authors have excelled in the genre, and of the 49 surveyed in these volumes, 21 are new to this edition. Organization The essays are arranged alphabetically, by authors’ surnames, in the three volumes, and their concise and accessible formats follow an easy-to-use template. Each essay begins with the author’s name, birth date and place, death date and place when appropriate, and a chronological list of the subject’s major publications of short fiction. The text of the essay is divided into four subsections: • Other literary forms describes other genres in which the author has worked • Achievements addresses what the author has contributed to the genre and mentions any important honors and awards the author has received • Biography summarizes the author’s life • Analysis, the main body of the text, is a detailed examination of the author’s short-story writing that usually includes three or four subheaded sections focusing on individual stories that help explain the author’s work The back matter of each essay includes “Other major works,” which lists the author’s publications in genres other than the short story, and a solid annotated bibliography. All the bibliographies—which average ten citations—have been substantially updated. More than half the titles cited have been published since 1994, and nearly one-third have been published since the first edition of Short Story Writers was issued. Volume 3 concludes with a glossary of 118 terms and techniques relevant to the study of short fiction, a time line listing all the covered authors by their dates of birth, and a comprehensive index. Achnowledgments Salem Press would like to thank the nearly 170 scholars who contributed their time and knowledge to writing the essays and providing updates for this set. Their names and affiliations are listed the pages that follow this note. Salem especially wishes to thank Dr. Charles E. May of California State University at Long Beach for lending his expertise on the short-story genre to this project by serving as its Editor.

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List of Contributors List of Contributors

Michael Adams City University of New York, Graduate Center

Lynn Z. Bloom University of Connecticut

Thomas P. Adler Purdue University

Julia B. Boken State University of New York, College at Oneonta

Karen L. Arnold Independent Scholar

Jo-Ellen Lipman Boon Independent Scholar

Marilyn Arnold Independent Scholar

Jerry Bradley Original Contributor

Robert W. Artinian University of Virginia

Harold Branam Savanna State University

Stanley S. Atherton Original Contributor

Gerhard Brand California State University, Los Angeles

Bryan Aubrey Independent Scholar

Laurence A. Breiner Boston University

Jane L. Ball Wilberforce University

Keith H. Brower Salisbury State University

Mary Baron University of North Florida

Mary H. Bruce Monmouth College

Melissa E. Barth Appalachian State University

Louis J. Budd Duke University

Bert Bender Original Contributor

Rebecca R. Butler Dalton College

Alvin K. Benson Utah Valley State College

Edmund J. Campion University of Tennessee

Dorothy M. Betz Georgetown University

John Carr Original Contributor

Cynthia A. Bily Adrian College

Warren J. Carson University of South Carolina, Spartunburg

Margaret Boe Birns New York University

Mary LeDonne Cassidy South Carolina State University

Nicholas Birns Eugene Lang College, New School

Thomas Cassidy South Carolina State University

Carol Bishop Indiana University, Southeast

Hal Charles Eastern Kentucky University ix

Short Story Writers Lisa-Anne Culp University of South Florida

Kenneth Funsten Independent Scholar

Bill Delaney Independent Scholar

Ann D. Garbett Averett University

Joan DelFattore University of Delaware

Linda S. Gordon Worcester State College

Kathryn Zabelle Derounian University of Arkansas, Little Rock

Peter W. Graham Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

John F. Desmond Whitman College

Julian Grajewski Original Contributor

Grace Eckley Independent Scholar

James L. Green Arizona State University

Wilton Eckley Colorado School of Mines

William E. Grim Ohio University

Robert P. Ellis Worcester State College

David Mike Hamilton Independent Scholar

Thomas L. Erskine Salisbury University

Stephen M. Hart University College London

Walter Evans Augusta College

Terry Heller Coe College

James Feast Baruch College, City University of New York

Diane Andrews Henningfeld Adrian College

John W. Fiero University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Allen Hibbard Middle Tennessee State University

Edward Fiorelli St. John’s University, New York

Jane Hill Independent Scholar

James K. Folsom University of Colorado, Boulder

Nika Hoffman Crossroads School

Carol Franks Portland State University

William Hoffman Independent Scholar

Timothy C. Frazer Western Illinois University

Theodore C. Humphrey California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Terri Frongia University of California, Riverside

Archibald E. Irwin Indiana University, Southeast

Miriam Fuchs Independent Scholar

Eunice Pedersen Johnston North Dakota State University

Jean C. Fulton Malarishi University of Management

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List of Contributors Theresa Kanoza Lincoln Land Community College

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach

Karen A. Kildahl South Dakota State University

Laurence W. Mazzeno Alvernia College

Sue L. Kimball Methodist College

Kenneth W. Meadwell University of Winnipeg

Cassandra Kircher Elon College

Martha Meek University of North Dakota

Carlota Larrea Pennsylvania University

Ann A. Merrill Emory University

Eugene S. Larson Los Angeles Pierce College

Vasa D. Mihailovich University of North Carolina

Donald F. Larsson Mankato State University

Paula M. Miller Biola University

Norman Lavers Arkansas State University

Robert W. Millett Original Contributor

Leon Lewis Appalachian State University

Christian H. Moe Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Douglas Long Independent Scholar

S. S. Moorty Southern Utah State College

R. C. Lutz CII, Jüterbog, Germany

Robert A. Morace Daemen College

Joanne McCarthy Independent Scholar

Sherry Morton-Mollo California State University, Fullerton

Richard D. McGhee Arkansas State University

Earl Paulus Murphy Harris-Stoew State University

Victoria E. McLure Texas Tech University

Brian Murray Youngstown State College

Bryant Mangum Independent Scholar

John M. Muste Ohio State University

Barry Mann Alliance Theatre

Susan Nayel Original Contributor

Patricia Marks Valdosta State College

William Nelles University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Karen M. Cleveland Marwick Independent Scholar

Evelyn Newlyn Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Paul Marx University of New Haven

Emma Coburn Norris Troy State University xi

Short Story Writers George O’Brien Georgetown University

Paul Rosefeldt Delgado Community College

Keri L. Overall University of South Carolina

Ruth Rosenberg Original Contributor

Cóilín Owens George Mason University

Gabrielle Rowe McKendree College

Janet Taylor Palmer Caldwell Community College & Technical Institute

David Sadkin Nigara University

Robert J. Paradowski Rochester Institute of Technology Leslie A. Pearl Independent Scholar David Peck California State University, Long Beach Susan L. Piepke Bridgewater College Constance Pierce Miami University, Ohio Mary Ellen Pitts Rhodes College Victoria Price Lamar University Karen Priest Lama University, Orange Norman Prinsky Augusta State University Jere Real Lynchburg College Peter J. Reed University of Minnesota Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Charleston Southern University Martha E. Rhynes Independent Scholar Mary Rohrberger University of Northern Iowa Jill Rollins Trafalgar College

Chaman L. Sahni Boise State University David N. Samuelson California State University, Long Beach Victor A. Santi University of New Orleans Barbara Kitt Seidman Linfield College D. Dean Shackelford Concord College Allen Shepherd Original Contributor Jan Sjåvik University of Washington Roger Smith Willamette University Ira Smolensky Monmouth College Katherine Snipes Independent Scholar Jean M. Snook Memorial University of Newfoundland George Soule Carleton College Madison V. Sowell Brigham Young University Sandra Whipple Spanier Pennsylvania State University John Stark Original Contributor

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List of Contributors Karen F. Stein University of Rhode Island

Richard Tuerk Texas A&M University, Commerce

Judith L. Steininger Milwaukee School of Engineering

Scott D. Vander Ploeg Madisonville Community College

Louise M. Stone Bloomsburg University

Dennis Vannatta University of Arkansas, Little Rock

W. J. Stuckey Purdue University

Barbara Wiedemann Auburn University, Montgomery

Alvin Sullivan Southern Illinois University

Albert Wilhelm Tennessee Technological University

Eileen A. Sullivan Original Contributor

Patricia A. R. Williams Texas Southern University

James Sullivan California State University, Los Angeles

Judith Barton Williamson Sauk Valley Community College

Catherine Swanson Independent Scholar

Michael Witkoski University of South Carolina

Roy Arthur Swanson University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Anna M. Wittman University of Alberta

Terry Theodore University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Mary F. Yudin Pennsylvania State University

Lou Thompson Texas Woman’s University

Gay Annette Zieger Independent Scholar

Christine Tomei Columbia University

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Complete List of Contents Complete List of Contents

Volume 1 Achebe, Chinua, 1 Adams, Alice, 7 Aiken, Conrad, 13 Alexie, Sherman, 20 Allende, Isabel, 24 Andersen, Hans Christian, 28 Anderson, Sherwood, 35 Angelou, Maya, 43 Atwood, Margaret, 48 Babel, Isaac, 58 Baldwin, James, 66 Bambara, Toni Cade, 73 Banks, Russell, 79 Barthelme, Donald, 86 Beattie, Ann, 96 Bellow, Saul, 104 Bierce, Ambrose, 112 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 118 Borges, Jorge Luis, 125 Bowen, Elizabeth, 136 Boyle, Kay, 143 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 152 Bradbury, Ray, 160 Callaghan, Morley, 173 Capote, Truman, 182

Carver, Raymond, 188 Cather, Willa, 198 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 205 Cheever, John, 220 Chekhov, Anton, 231 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 242 Chesterton, G. K., 250 Chopin, Kate, 258 Cisneros, Sandra, 264 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 271 Clarke, Arthur C., 277 Conrad, Joseph, 285 Coover, Robert, 295 Coppard, A. E., 303 Cortázar, Julio, 310 Crane, Stephen, 317 De la Mare, Walter, 327 Dinesen, Isak, 333 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 342 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 348 Dubus, Andre, 358 Dybek, Stuart, 364 Ellison, Ralph, 368 Erdrich, Louise, 374

Volume 2 Faulkner, William, 379 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 388 Flaubert, Gustave, 397 Forster, E. M., 407 Gallant, Mavis, 413 García Márquez, Gabriel, 420 Garland, Hamlin, 428 Gogol, Nikolai, 435 Gordimer, Nadine, 444 Greene, Graham, 453 Grimm Brothers, 461

Harte, Bret, 469 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 475 Hemingway, Ernest, 486 Hempel, Amy, 495 Henry, O., 499 Hughes, Langston, 505 Hurston, Zora Neale, 512 Irving, Washington, 519 Jackson, Shirley, 526 James, Henry, 533 xv

Short Story Writers Jewett, Sarah Orne, 543 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 550 Joyce, James, 555 Kafka, Franz, 565 Kincaid, Jamaica, 576 Kingsolver, Barbara, 583 Kipling, Rudyard, 588 Lardner, Ring, 598 Lavin, Mary, 603 Lawrence, D. H., 611 Le Guin, Ursula K., 621 Lessing, Doris, 628 London, Jack, 636

McCullers, Carson, 641 Malamud, Bernard, 649 Mann, Thomas, 659 Mansfield, Katherine, 670 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 680 Maugham, W. Somerset, 687 Maupassant, Guy de, 695 Melville, Herman, 704 Mérimée, Prosper, 712 Mishima, Yukio, 717 Mukherjee, Bharati, 723 Munro, Alice, 734 Nabokov, Vladimir, 743 Narayan, R. K., 752

Volume 3 Oates, Joyce Carol, 759 O’Brien, Edna, 770 O’Connor, Flannery, 778 O’Connor, Frank, 788 O’Faoláin, Seán, 796 O’Flaherty, Liam, 803 Olsen, Tillie, 810 Ozick, Cynthia, 816 Paley, Grace, 823 Parker, Dorothy, 830 Perelman, S. J., 835 Petry, Ann, 841 Pirandello, Luigi, 850 Poe, Edgar Allan, 857 Porter, Katherine Anne, 867 Powers, J. F., 876 Pritchett, V. S., 881 Proulx, E. Annie, 891 Purdy, James, 896 Saki, 905 Salinger, J. D., 910 Saroyan, William, 919 Sillitoe, Alan, 925 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 931 Spark, Muriel, 941 Steinbeck, John, 948 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 954

Tan, Amy, 961 Taylor, Peter, 966 Thomas, Dylan, 973 Thurber, James, 981 Tolstoy, Leo, 987 Trevor, William, 998 Turgenev, Ivan, 1006 Twain, Mark, 1015 Tyler, Anne, 1022 Updike, John, 1029 Viramontes, Helena María, 1042 Vonnegut, Kurt, 1047 Walker, Alice, 1056 Warren, Robert Penn, 1066 Welty, Eudora, 1073 Wharton, Edith, 1083 Williams, Joy, 1090 Williams, Tennessee, 1095 Williams, William Carlos, 1103 Wolff, Tobias, 1109 Woolf, Virginia, 1116 Wright, Richard, 1123 Terms and Techniques, 1129 Time Line, 1140 Index, 1147 xvi

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

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Chinua Achebe Born: Ogidi, Nigeria; November 16, 1930 Principal short fiction • “Dead Men’s Path,” 1953; The Sacrificial Egg, and Other Stories, 1962; Girls at War, 1972. Other literary forms • In addition to his short-story collections, Chinua Achebe is known for essays, children’s literature, and collections of poetry, which include Collected Poems (2004). He is best known, however, for his novel No Longer at Ease (1960), which became a modern African classic. The book is the second in a trilogy about change, conflict, and personal struggle to find the “New Africa.” The first is Things Fall Apart (1958) and the third is Arrow of God (1964). Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966), was followed twenty-one years later by Anthills of the Savannah (1987), his fifth novel. In 1984 he became the founder and publisher of Uwa Ndi Igbo: A Bilingual Journal of Igbo Life and Arts. Achebe edited volumes of African short fiction, including African Short Stories (1985) and The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Fiction (1992), both with C. L. Innes. Achievements • Chinua Achebe received awards or award nominations for each of his novelistic works, from the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize for Things Fall Apart to a Booker McConnell Prize nomination for Anthills of the Savannah. He was also awarded a Rockefeller travel fellowship in 1960 and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Fellowship for creative artists in 1963. In 1979 he received the Nigerian National Merit Award and was named to the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Achebe received honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Dartmouth College in 1972 and Harvard University in 1996. Biography • Chinua Achebe, christened at birth Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, was born in Ogidi in Eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, near the Niger River. His family was Christian in a village divided between Christians and the “others.” Achebe’s great-grandfather served as the model for Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart. Because he was an Ibo and a Christian, Achebe grew up conscious of how he differed not only from other Africans but also from other Nigerians. Achebe was one of the first graduates of University College at Ibadan in 1953. In 1954, he was made producer of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and in 1958 became the founding editor of Heinemann’s African Writers series; this position and the publication, in that series, of Things Fall Apart, account for his vast influence among writers of his and the following generation. Achebe married Christie Chinwe Okoli in 1961 and became the father of four children. When a civil war began in Nigeria in 1966 with the massacre of Achebe’s fellow tribesmen in the northern part of the country, Achebe returned to the east, hoping to establish in the new country of Biafra a publishing house with other young Ibo writers. One of this band was the poet Christopher Okigbo, killed later that year in action against federal forces. After Biafra’s defeat in the civil war, a defeat which

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Short Story Writers

meant for many of his compatriots imprisonment in camps and “reeducation,” Achebe worked as an educator as well as a writer. He traveled to the United States on several occasions to serve as a guest lecturer or visiting professor, and he visited many countries throughout the world. In addition, his interest in politics led to his serving as the deputy national president of the People’s Redemption Party in 1983 and then as the president of the town union in Ogidi, Nigeria, in 1986. Achebe served as visiting professor on an international scale. Universities at which he taught include Cambridge University, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Rocon/Enugu, Nigeria California, Los Angeles. A 1990 car accident injured Achebe’s spine, confining him to a wheelchair. He spent six months recovering, then accepted an endowed professorship at New York’s Bard College. He continued to teach and write throughout the 1990’s. Analysis • Chinua Achebe is an African English-language writer. As an author, Achebe uses the power of English words to expose, unite, and reveal various aspects of Nigerian culture. His subjects are both literary and political. In general, Achebe’s writings reflect cultural diversity in twentieth century African society. He focuses on the difficulty faced by Africans who were once under the rule of British colonials but later had to struggle with issues of democracy, the evils of military rule, civil war, tribal rivalries, and dictatorship. Achebe seeks to preserve the proverbs and truths of his Ibo tribal heritage by incorporating them into his stories, whether they be in his contemporary novels or his children’s tales. His works do more, however, than entertain; they reveal truths about human nature and show the destructiveness of power corrupted. Achebe’s writing does not cast blame but delivers a message to his readers, concerning unity and the necessity for political stability in Nigerian culture. “Vengeful Creditor” • Achebe’s “Vengeful Creditor” is a story that seems to be about what a misconceived government decree guaranteeing free education to all can lead to, including some rather comic developments. It appears to be a story about class struggle, and then, as readers see layer after layer of meaning stripped away and one theme leading directly to another, it seems to be—and is—about something really quite different from either education or the class system. Mr. and Mrs. Emenike are part of the Nigerian upper class: He is a parliamentary secretary, and he and his wife own a Mercedes and a Fiat and employ servants from the still-uneducated masses, most of them from the village of their birth, to which the Emenikes return periodically to shower largesse upon the populace. At the begin-

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ning of the story, a free-education bill has caused a mass desertion of servants, even those of college age, all of whom wish to go back to their villages and qualify for an education. Apparently many others have the same idea, for the turnout for free schooling is double what the government statisticians had predicted. Readers see Emenike and his running buddies at the cabinet meeting at which it is decided to make everyone pay, after all, because the army might have to be called out if new taxes are announced to pay for the unexpected costs of the program. The Emenikes, finding themselves with this “servant problem,” return to their native village and ask Martha, a village woman known to them, if her daughter Vero will be their baby nurse for the princely sum of five pounds per year. Martha has led a rather sad life: She was educated at a Christian school whose reason for being was the education of African girls up to the standards expected of the wives of native pastors. The woman in charge of her school, however, by way of furthering her own romantic aspirations, persuaded Martha to marry a carpenter being trained at an industrial school managed by a white man. Carpentry never came into its own, however, at least not as much as preaching and teaching, and Martha had a “bad-luck marriage,” which eventually left her a widow with no money and several children to support, although she was a Standard Three (beginning of high school) reader and her classmates were all married to prosperous teachers and bishops. The withdrawal of the free-education decree has cast Martha’s daughter, Vero, back onto the streets. When Mr. Emenike says that one does not need education to be great, Martha knows he is patronizing her; she knows exactly what the fate of an uneducated person usually is, but she needs the money from this job. Mr. Emenike rounds out his recruiting pitch by saying he thinks there is plenty of time for the tenyear-old girl to go to school. Martha says, “I read Standard Three in those days and I said they will all go to college. Now they will not even have the little I had thirty years ago.” Vero turns out to be quick, industrious, and creative, but there also begins to be a connection between her charge’s maturing and her own chance of an education. Finally, as she comes to realize the child will need care until hope of an education has passed her, she tries to poison him by making him drink a bottle of red ink. Mrs. Emenike, one of the least sympathetic Africans in any short story ever written by an African, beats Vero unmercifully. They drive back to the village where they were all born and pull her out of the car. Martha hears from Vero that she has been fired, sees the blood on her daughter, and drags her to the Emenikes. Called one who taught her daughter murder, she retorts to Mrs. Emenike that she is not a murderer. Mr. Emenike, trying to break up this confrontation, says, “It’s the work of the devil. . . . I have always known that the craze for education in this country will one day ruin all of us. Now even children will commit murder in order to go to school.” “Uncle Ben’s Choice” • “Uncle Ben’s Choice” is a ghost or magical story which involves the element of human choice. A succubus-goddess known as the Mami-Wota, capable of many disguises, is both a seducer and a betrayer. She makes it possible for a young girl who offers herself to a man to guarantee not only sexual relations but also success, riches, and whatever material things the man desires. The only condition is that the Mami-Wota prevents the man from marrying her. “Uncle Ben’s Choice” is a monologue told by Uncle Ben in a tone that is skeptical yet simultaneously sincere and ingenuous. Uncle Ben is a clerk determined not to marry, whose passions are scotch, a brand-new phonograph, and his bicycle. His affluence brings him to the attention of the Mami-Wota because he not only lives better

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than the average African but also is much more concerned with the material rewards of life than even his fellow clerks. A “light” girl who is Roman Catholic falls for him, and he tries to stay out of her way. However, he comes home one night after some heavy drinking and falls into bed, only to find a naked woman there. He thinks at first that it is the girl who has been making a play for him, then he feels her hair—it feels European. He jumps out of bed, and the woman calls to him in the voice of the girl who has a crush on him. He is suspicious now and strikes a match, making the most fateful decision of his life: to abjure wealth gotten from being the exclusive property of the Mami-Wota, her lover and her slave. “Uncle Ben’s Choice” is about the innate morality of men in society. Uncle Ben honors his society by suppressing his own urges and fantasies in favor of remaining a part of his family, clan, and tribe, whose rewards he values more than riches. “Girls at War” • “Girls at War” is a story about the war between the seceding state of Biafra and Nigeria, and both the theme and the plot are foreshadowed in the spare sentence introducing the principal characters: “The first time their paths crossed nothing happened.” The second time they meet, however, is at a checkpoint at Akwa, when the girl, Gladys, stops Reginald Nwankwo’s car to inspect it. He falls back on the dignity of his office and person, but this fails to impress her, which secretly delights and excites him. He sees her as “a beautiful girl in a breasty blue jersey, khaki jeans and canvas shoes with the new-style hair plait which gave a girl a defiant look.” Before, in the earlier stages of the war, he had sneered at the militia girls, particularly after seeing a group recruited from a high school marching under the banner “WE ARE IMPREGNABLE.” Now he begins to respect them because of the mature attitude and bearing of Gladys, who seems both patriotic and savvy, knowing and yet naïve. The third time they meet, “things had got very bad. Death and starvation had long chased out the headiness of the early days.” Reginald is coming back to Owerri after using his influence as an official to obtain some food, unfortunately under the eyes of a starving crowd who mock and taunt him. He is something of an idealist, and this embarrasses him, but he has decided that in “such a situation one could do nothing at all for crowds; at best one could try to be of some use to one’s immediate neighbors.” Gladys is walking along in a crowd, and he picks her up, but not because he recognizes her. She has changed: She is wearing makeup, a wig, and new clothes and is now a bureaucrat and no doubt corrupt. She reminds him that she was the one who searched him so long ago; he had admired her then, but now he just wants her, and as soon as they get into town he takes her into an air-raid bunker after Nigerian planes fly over, strafing. Later, they go to a party, where in the midst of Biafran starvation there is scotch, Courvoisier, and real bread, but a white Red Cross man who has lost a friend in an air crash tells them all that they stink and that any girl there will roll into bed for a fish or a dollar. He is slapped by an African officer who, all the girls think, is a hero, including Gladys, who begins to appear to the protagonist—and to the readers—as the banal, improvident child she really is. Finally, Gladys goes home and to bed with Reginald, who is shocked by the coarseness of her language. He has his pleasure and writes her off. Then he begins to think she is nothing but a mirror reflecting a “rotten, maggoty society” and that she, like a dirty mirror, needs only some cleaning. He begins to believe she is under some terrible influence. He decides to try to help her;

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he gives her food and money, and they drive off together to her house. He is determined to see who is there and who her friends are, to get to the bottom of her life of waste and callousness. On the way he picks up a soldier who has lost part of one leg. Before, he would not have picked up a mere private, not only sweaty but also an inconvenience with his crutches and his talk of war. Then there is another air raid. He pushes past Gladys, who stops to go back to help the disabled soldier, and, terrified, goes into the timberline, where a near-miss knocks him senseless. When he awakes, he finds the driver sobbing and bloody and his car a wreck. “He saw the remains of his car smoking and the entangled remains of the girl and the soldier. And he let out a piercing cry and fell down again.” With Gladys’s horrible death, the protagonist understands the potential for nobility within the heart and soul of even the most banal and superficial of human beings. “Girls at War” confirms Achebe’s faith in humanity and in Africa. “Civil Peace” • Because of the remarkable portrayal of Nigerian culture, Achebe’s works, like the three stories analyzed above, are frequently anthologized. Achebe himself edited and published the collection African Short Stories (1985). It is subdivided by regions of the African continent. In the West African section, Achebe included his own work “Civil Peace,” originally published in Girls at War. This story takes place in the time period just after the Biafran War. It points out with the ironic title that there may not be much difference between civil war and civil peace. Jonathan Iwegbu feels fortunate that he, his wife, and three of their four children have survived the war. As an added bonus, so has his bicycle, which Jonathan had cleverly buried in his yard to keep it from the marauding troops. After the war, Jonathan’s entrepreneurial instincts can flourish because he has the bicycle. Jonathan’s business ventures do well and, in addition, he receives a cash payment of Nigerian money (called the ex-gratia award or egg-rasher by the Nigerians struggling with the foreign term) for turning in rebel money coined during the conflict. Unfortunately, a band of thieves, many of them former soldiers, armed with machine guns and other weapons, learn of his windfall and terrorize Jonathan and his family in a way reminiscent of wartime, until Jonathan gives them the money. Fatalistically, yet realistically, Jonathan realizes he is back to square one, and, at the end of the story, he and his family are once again preparing to go out and start all over again. In Jonathan’s own words, “I say, let egg-rasher perish in the flames! Let it go where everything else has gone.” This story illustrates one of Achebe’s major themes, a portrayal of both the problems or weaknesses and the strengths of the Nigerian people. The society has been vicious and cruel to itself, yet the strength and spirit of individuals will carry it onward. John Carr With updates by Paula M. Miller and Judith L. Steininger Other major works children’s literature: Chike and the River, 1966; How the Leopard Got His Claws, 1972 (with John Iroaganachi); The Drum, 1977; The Flute, 1977. anthologies: The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories, 1992 (with C.L. Innes); Aka Weta: An Anthology of Ibo Poetry, 1978; Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo, 1932-1967, 1978 (with Dubem Okafor); African Short Stories, 1985 (with C. L. Innes); Beyond Hunger in Africa, 1990 (with others).

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novels: Things Fall Apart, 1958; No Longer at Ease, 1960; Arrow of God, 1964; A Man of the People, 1966; Anthills of the Savannah, 1987. miscellaneous: Another Africa, 1998 (poems and essay; photographs by Robert Lyons). nonfiction: Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975; The Trouble with Nigeria, 1983; Hopes and Impediments, 1988; Conversations with Chinua Achebe, 1997 (Bernth Lindfors, editor); Home and Exile, 2000. poetry: Beware: Soul Brother, and Other Poems, 1971, 1972; Christmas in Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973; Collected Poems, 2004. Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. “The Art of Fiction CXXXIX: Chinua Achebe.” Interview by Jerome Brooks. The Paris Review 36 (Winter, 1994): 142-166. In this interview, Achebe discusses his schooling, work as a broadcaster, and views on other writers, as well as the nature of his writing process and the political situation in Nigeria. ____________. Home and Exile. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Exploration, based on Achebe’s own experiences as a reader and a writer, of contemporary African literature and the Western literature that both influenced and misrepresented it. Booker, M. Keith, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Helpful reference in an encyclopedia format. Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Full-length biography of Achebe, this book benefits from its author’s insights as a former student of Achebe’s, a native of Nigeria, and a speaker of Igbo. Ezenwa-Ohaeto examines Achebe’s life and literary contributions and places them within their social, historical, and cultural contexts. Written with the cooperation of Achebe and his family, the book includes several rare and revealing photographs. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Gikandi, Simon. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991. Analyzes Achebe’s short stories and novels. Joseph, Michael Scott. “A Pre-modernist Reading of ‘The Drum’: Chinua Achebe and the Theme of the Eternal Return.” Ariel 28 (January, 1997): 149-166. In this special issue on colonialism, postcolonialism, and children’s literature, Achebe’s “The Drum” is discussed as a satirical attack on European colonial values and a text dominated by nostalgia for a lost Golden Age. Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Twenty interviews with Achebe in which he discusses African oral tradition, the need for political commitment, the relationship between his novels and his short stories, his use of myth and fable, and other issues concerning being a writer. Olubunmi Smith, Pamela J. “Dead Men’s Path.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 2. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Dead Men’s Path” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Petersen, Kirsten Holst, and Anna Rutherford, eds. Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991. Compilation of essays analyzing Achebe’s work to honor his sixtieth birthday.

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Alice Adams Born: Fredericksburg, Virginia; August 14, 1926 Died: San Francisco, California; May 27, 1999 Principal short fiction • Beautiful Girl, 1979; To See You Again, 1982; Molly’s Dog, 1983; Return Trips, 1985; After You’ve Gone, 1989; The Last Lovely City: Stories, 1999; The Stories of Alice Adams, 2002. Other literary forms • Though Alice Adams was first successful in short fiction, she also published several novels, including Careless Love (1966), Families and Survivors (1974), Listening to Billie (1978), Rich Rewards (1980), Superior Women (1984), Second Chances (1988), Caroline’s Daughters (1991), Almost Perfect (1993), A Southern Exposure (1995), Medicine Men (1997), and After the War (2000). In addition, her story “Roses, Rhododendrons” appeared as an illustrated gift book. Achievements • Alice Adams did not publish her first collection of stories until she was in her fifties, but she quickly assumed a place among the leading practitioners of the genre. Twenty-two of her stories have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. A full collection of her stories appeared in 2002, three years after her death. In 1976, Adams received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 1978, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 1982, Adams received the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, given for only the third time; her predecessors were Joyce Carol Oates (in 1970) and John Updike (in 1976). She also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature in 1992. Biography • Alice Boyd Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on August 14, 1926, the daughter of Nicholson Adams, a professor, and Agatha (née Boyd) Adams, a writer. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Adams spent her first sixteen years. After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1946, she married Mark Linenthal, Jr. Two years later, they moved to California, and in 1951, their only child, Peter, was born. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1958, following which Adams held a number of part-time clerical, secretarial, and bookkeeping jobs while rearing her son and writing short stories. It was not until 1969 that she broke into the magazine market when The New Yorker bought her story “Gift of Grass.” Since then, her stories have continued to appear in The New Yorker as well as Redbook, McCall’s, and The Paris Review. In addition, Adams taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University. She died on May 27, 1999, in San Francisco after being treated for heart problems. Analysis • Most of Alice Adams’s stories revolve around common themes, and her characters, mostly educated, upper-middle-class women, are defined by a set of common traits and situations which reappear in somewhat different combinations. They find their lives flawed, often by unhappy relationships with lovers, husbands, parents,

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friends, sometimes with combinations of these, usually with a living antagonist, occasionally with one already dead. Often, they resolve these problems, but sometimes they do not. Frequently, the tensions of Adams’s plots are resolved when her central female characters learn something new or find a new source of strength, which enables them to part with unsatisfactory husbands, lovers, or friends. Claire, in “Home Is Where” (in Beautiful Girl), leaves both an unsatisfactory marriage and a miserable love affair in San Francisco, where she feels “ugly—drained, discolored, old,” to spend the summer with her parents in her North Carolina hometown, where she had been young and “if not beautiful, sought after.” Refreshed and stimulated by the sensual landscape and a summertime affair, Claire returns to San Francisco to divorce her husband, take leave of her unpleasant lover, and, eventually, to remarry, this time happily. Cynthia, in “The Break-in” (To See You Again), finds herself so different from her fiancé Roger, when he automatically blames the burglary of his home on “Mexicans,” that she leaves him without a word. The narrator of “True Colors” (To See You Again) discovers, in Las Vegas, David’s ugly side as an obsessive gambler and leaves him: “From then on I was going to be all right, I thought.” Clover Baskerville in “The Party-Givers” (To See You Again) leaves behind her malicious friends when she realizes that she need not call them if she does not want to see them. All these characters have learned that “home is where the heart” not only “is” but also chooses to be. Adams’s heroines sometimes reach out from their lonely and isolated lives to find sympathetic bonds with poor or troubled people from other cultures. In “Greyhound People” (To See You Again), a divorced, middle-aged woman’s discovery of kinship with her (mostly black and poor) fellow commuters, along with her discovery that her commuter ticket will take her anywhere in California, is so liberating that she can finally break free of her repressive, domineering roommate and friend Hortense. In “Verlie I Say unto You” (Beautiful Girl), Jessica Todd’s sensitivity to her black maid Verlie’s humanity underscores a fundamental difference between herself and her insensitive husband (see also “The Break-in” in this regard). In “Mexican Dust” (To See You Again), Marian comes to prefer the company of the Mexican peasants to that of her husband, friends, and other Americans as they bus through Mexico on vacation; she abandons her party and returns to Seattle, where she plans to study Spanish, presumably to prepare for a return to Mexico alone. In fact, one sign of a strong character in Adams’s stories is a marked sensitivity to other cultures. Elizabeth, in the story by that name, purchases her Mexican beach house in the name of her Mexican servant Aurelia and leaves Aurelia in full possession of the house at her death. The central focus in “La Señora” (Return Trips) is the friendship between a wealthy, elderly American woman, who vacations annually at a Mexican resort, and Teodola, the Mexican maid in charge of her hotel room. Adams’s own concern for the human plight of those of other cultures can be seen in “Teresa,” in Return Trips, a story about the privation, terror, and grief of a Mexican peasant woman. “Molly’s Dog” and “A Public Pool” • In two of Adams’s most effective stories, female protagonists learn to live confidently with themselves: “Molly’s Dog” and “A Public Pool” (both from Return Trips). In the former, Molly returns with her homosexual friend Sandy to a small cabin by the ocean, where she experienced a love affair so intense she cannot think of it without weeping. A friendly dog attaches itself to

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them on the beach and follows them as they leave; Molly pleads with Sandy to go back for the dog, but he drives faster, and the dog, though running, falls back and shrinks in the distance. Molly and Sandy quarrel over the dog, and Molly, realizing that she is much too dependent on men, comes to see less of Sandy back in San Francisco. She finally learns to think of the dog without pain but cannot forget it, and the place by the ocean becomes in her memory “a place where she had lost, or left something of infinite value. A place to which she would not go back.” In “A Public Pool,” the protagonist, though working class, neither part of the literary or artistic world nor so well educated as many of Adams’s female characters, shares with many of them a dissatisfaction with her body and a sense of being cut off and alone. She cannot bear to meet people or even look for a job (“We wouldn’t even have room for you,” she imagines an employer saying), so that life at the age of thirty is a grim existence in a cold apartment with a penurious mother. Though swimming offers an escape from home and a chance for meeting new people, it also has its fears: of exposing her body in the locker room and enduring the rebukes of strangers, of the faster swimmers whose lane she blocks, of the blond-bearded man who goes by so swiftly that he splashes her, and of a large black woman who tells her that she should stay by the side of the pool. After a few months of lap swimming, her body changes and her fear of others lessens. An early remark of the blond-bearded man made her babble nervously, but now she responds to his conventional questions with brief assent. On the day the black lady compliments her on her stroke and they leave the pool together, she is finally able to find a job and thinks of moving out of her mother’s apartment. She walks happily about the neighborhood, thinking that she and the black woman might become friends. At that moment, she meets in the street the blond-bearded man, who smells of chewing gum and is wearing “sharp” clothes from Sears. He invites her for coffee, but, “overwhelmed” by the smell of gum and realizing that “I hate sharp clothes,” she makes her excuses. Like other Adams women, she has experienced loneliness, but, also like many other women in these stories, she finds new strength that will mitigate her isolation by giving her independence. Yet it is primarily achieved by herself, and Adams’s always masterful use of language here is especially striking. As Adams’s character goes off independently from the blond-bearded man, she says confidently, “I leave him standing there. I swim away.” “You Are What You Own” and “To See You Again” • Not all these stories, however, end so conclusively; in others, it is unclear whether the heroines’ chosen resolutions to the problems confronting them will be satisfactory. The young housewife of “You Are What You Own: A Notebook” (Return Trips) lives in a house crammed with her domineering mother’s furniture, which the girl seems doomed to polish for all eternity. Her boring graduate-student husband complains that she does not polish the furniture enough and even starts to do it himself. She escapes in fantasy, fictionalizing the artists who live in a house down the street from her, assigning them her own names (not knowing their real ones), and indulging in imagined conversations with them. At the end of the story—recorded in her notebook—she tells her husband in a letter that she is leaving him the furniture and going to look for a job in San Francisco. Does she go? Is she capable? Similarly, the lonely young wife in “To See You Again” uses the image of a beautiful adolescent boy in her class to re-create the image of her husband as he was when they fell in love—slim and energetic, not as he is now, overweight and frequently paralyzed by chronic, severe depression. The story ends

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with her fantasizing that somehow she has escaped her grim life with him, that things are as they once were, her husband somehow reclaimed in the body of the young student. “Beautiful Girl” • The story plots summarized here raise a possible objection to Adams’s fiction—that many of her female characters are too obsessed with the attention of men, even to the point where the women’s own highly successful careers seem to matter little. This issue, however, must be placed in historical perspective. Most of the women in her stories, like Adams herself, grew up and entered adulthood during the period after World War II, when women’s roles in American society were constricted, when women were sent home from their wartime jobs to take on what then seemed an almost patriotic duty: submitting themselves to the roles of wife and mother. From this point of view, Adams’s female characters are victims of that culture, dependent on men and falling desperately in love with them because they were expected to do just that. Given these crushing expectations, it is no wonder that Adams’s heroines feel lost when bereft, by divorce or widowhood, of the men in their lives. The young people in these stories often reach out to surrogate parents, usually mothers, when the incredible strain on the postwar nuclear family cracks and splinters it (a character in “Roses, Rhododendrons,” in Beautiful Girl, says “we all need more than one set of parents—our relations with the original set are too intense, and need dissipating”). Emblematic of the plight of this generation is Ardis Bascombe in “Beautiful Girl,” an ironic title because Ardis, though in her youth beautiful and popular, is now fleshy, drinking herself to death in her San Francisco apartment. She has failed as a wife and, as her filthy kitchen attests, failed as a homemaker. She had been independent enough to leave her unhappy marriage, but, like other women of her generation, despite her intelligence, idealism, courage, and sophistication, she was unable to make a new life. The life of this beautiful girl demonstrates graphically the destructive pressures on postwar women. The Last Lovely City • In this, her final collection of stories, Alice Adams also focuses on sophisticated contemporary women dealing with wandering husbands, belligerent children, and the tribulations of being divorced or widowed; however, because Adams was in her late sixties when she wrote most of these stories, her protagonists are older, albeit not always wiser, veterans of the domestic wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Adams was always a favorite of the judges of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and three of these stories were chosen for that prestigious collection: “The Islands” in 1993, “The Haunted Beach” in 1995, and “His Women” in 1996. Two of these are among the best stories in the collection, for they economically and without selfindulgence focus on futile efforts to repeat the past. What “haunts” the beach in “The Haunted Beach” is one woman’s previous marriage. Penelope Jaspers, a San Francisco art dealer, takes her new lover, a middle-aged superior court judge, to a West Coast Mexican resort that she and her dead husband used to visit. Although she remembers it as charming, she now sees it as “unspeakably shabby” and returns to San Francisco, having decided not to marry the judge. The persistence of the past also haunts “His Women,” as a university professor cannot reconcile with his lover because of memories of the previous women in his life. In the title story, Benito Zamora, a Mexican cardiologist and “sadhearted widow,” is forced to dredge up unpleasant moments from his past by an attractive young re-

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porter who he mistakenly thinks is interested in him sexually. In “Old Love Affairs,” a woman’s living room is filled with keepsakes that remind her only that she is growing old and can no longer hope for love in her life. The last four stories in the book—“The Drinking Club,” “Patients,” “The Wrong Mexico,” and “Earthquake Damage”—are linked stories, somewhat like chapters of a novella, in which two Bay Area psychiatrists, who are sometimes lovers, move in and out of various affairs. Both are passive professionals, as are many Adams characters— watchers rather than active participants, caught in a recurrent round of unhappy marriages and unfulfilling affairs. The weakest stories in the collection—“The Islands,” “Raccoons,” and “A Very Nice Dog”—are simple paeans to pets. The most interesting, “The Islands,” begins with the sentence: “What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire and unambivalent way that some of us do?” Although readers who share such a pet passion might find the question intriguing, many others will view this story about the death of a beloved cat as sentimental rather than sensitive. Although the fact that Adams died at the age of seventy-two, a few months after this book appeared, gives it some poignancy, on a purely critical level, these stories represent a falling off from the crisp and sophisticated stories of the writer in her prime. Timothy C. Frazer With updates by Louise M. Stone and Charles E. May Other major works novels: Careless Love, 1966; Families and Survivors, 1974; Listening to Billie, 1978; Rich Rewards, 1980; Superior Women, 1984; Second Chances, 1988; Caroline’s Daughters, 1991; Almost Perfect, 1993; A Southern Exposure, 1995; Medicine Men, 1997; After the War, 2000. nonfiction: Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There, 1990. Bibliography Adams, Alice. Interview by Patricia Holt. Publishers Weekly 213 (January 16, 1978): 8-9. In talking about her life with interior designer Robert McNee, Adams emphasizes the importance of her work as the foundation for the self-respect necessary in a long-term relationship. Blades, L. T. “Order and Chaos in Alice Adams’ Rich Rewards.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27 (Summer, 1986): 187-195. In an issue devoted to four women writers—Adams, Ann Beattie, Mary Gordon, and Marge Piercy—Blades explores the artificially imposed order created by Adams’s female characters and the world of chaos that threatens it. Like Jane Austen’s characters, Adams’s women enter into unstable relationships but eventually realize that they must concentrate on work and friendships, not romance, to have a healthy self-respect. Bolotin, Susan. “Semidetached Couples.” Review of The Last Lovely City: Stories. The New York Times, February 14, 1999. Detailed review of Adams’s collection, commenting on several of the stories, particularly the characters and the social world in which they live. Chell, Cara. “Succeeding in Their Times: Alice Adams on Women and Work.” Soundings 68 (Spring, 1985): 62-71. Work is the catalyst that enables Adams’s characters to realize their self-worth. Chell provides an interesting treatment of this theme throughout Adams’s career.

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Flower, Dean. “Picking Up the Pieces.” The Hudson Review 32 (Summer, 1979): 293307. Flower sets Adams among other American storytellers who look to the past for explanations and intensification of feelings. He explores how this orientation leads to a preoccupation with growing old. Herman, Barbara A. “Alice Adams.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Brief biography and discussion of Adams’s novels and short stories; suggests her two major themes are the maturation of middle-class women seeking self-respect, identity, and independence and women’s relationships with husbands, lovers, and friends. Includes a survey of Adams’s own criticism and a bibliography of works by and about her. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Adams: “Greyhound People” (vol. 3); “Roses, Rhododendron” (vol. 6); and “Snow” and “Truth or Consequences” (vol. 7). Pritchard, William H. “Fictive Voices.” The Hudson Review 38 (Spring, 1985): 120-132. Pritchard examines Adams’s narrative voice in the context of other contemporary writers. Though the section on Adams is not long, it provides a useful approach to analyzing her stories. Upton, Lee. “Changing the Past: Alice Adams’ Revisionary Nostalgia.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Winter, 1989): 33-41. In the collection of stories, Return Trips, Adams’s female characters turn to memories of the past as their most valued possessions. Upton isolates three different relationships with the past and shows how each enables Adams’s characters to interpret nostalgic images so that they produce more satisfying relationships with the present. Woo, Elaine. “Alice Adams.” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1999, p. B8. Biographical and critical sketch and tribute; notes Adams’s specialization in contemporary relationships among white, urban, middle- and upper-class women; charts her career and her critical reception.

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Conrad Aiken Born: Savannah, Georgia; August 5, 1889 Died: Savannah, Georgia; August 17, 1973 Principal short fiction • The Dark City, 1922; Bring! Bring!, and Other Stories, 1925; Costumes by Eros, 1928; “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”, 1932; Impulse, 1933; Among the Lost People, 1934; “Round by Round”, 1935; Short Stories, 1950; Collected Short Stories, 1960; Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1966. Other literary forms • Best known as a poet, Conrad Aiken published dozens of volumes of poetry from 1914 until his death in 1973. He also published novels, essays, criticism, and a play. In addition, he edited a considerable number of anthologies of poetry. Achievements • Conrad Aiken’s reputation as a writer of short fiction rests on two frequently anthologized short stories: “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” which has twice been adapted to film, and “Mr. Arcularis,” which was adapted to a play. Although he published several collections of short stories—they were collected in one volume in 1950—he did not contribute significantly to the development of the short story. Biography • When Conrad Aiken was eleven, his father killed his mother and then committed suicide. This incident could very well have influenced the subject matter of a great number of his stories, where one step more may take a character to an immense abyss of madness or death. After graduating from Harvard University in 1911, Aiken became a member of the famous Harvard group that included T. S. Eliot, Robert Benchley, and Van Wyck Brooks. He published his first volume of poems in 1914. A contributing editor of The Dial from 1917 to 1919, Aiken later worked as London correspondent for The New Yorker. Through the course of his career he was the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for Selected Poems (1929), the National Book Award in 1954 for Collected Poems (1953), and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1956. He died in 1973 at the age of eighty-four. Analysis • The fictional “voice” in Aiken’s stories so closely approximates his poetic “voice” that his stories are often seen as extensions of his more famous poems. His best-known stories, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Mr. Arcularis” are both “poetic” expressions of characters’ psychological states. “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” in fact, is often read as the story of a creative artist, a “poet” in a hostile environment. Aiken’s Freudian themes, his depiction of a protagonist’s inner struggle and journey, and his portrait of the consciousness—these are perhaps better expressed in lengthy poetic works than in prose or in individual poems, which are rarely anthologized because they are best read in the context of his other poems. “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” • In “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” a story once included in almost every anthology of short fiction, Conrad Aiken describes a young boy’s alienation and withdrawal from his world. The story begins one morning in Decem-

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ber when Paul Hasleman, aged twelve, thinks of the postman, whom the boy hears every morning. The progress of the postman as he turns the corner at the top of the hill and makes his way down the street with a double knock at each door is familiar to the boy, and, as he slowly awakens, he begins to listen for the sounds on the cobblestones of the street of heavy boots as they come around the corner. When the sounds come on this morning, however, they are closer than the corner and muffled and faint. Paul understands at once: “Nothing could have been simpler—there had been snow during the night, such as all winter he had been longing for.” With his eyes still closed, Paul imagines the snow—how it sounds and how it will obliterate the familiar sights of the street—but when he opens his eyes and turns toward the window, he sees only the bright morning sun. The miracle of snow has not transformed anything. The moment and his feelings about the snow, however, remain with him, and later in the classroom as his geography teacher, Miss Buell, twirls the globe with her finger and talks about the tropics, Paul finds himself looking at the arctic areas, which are colored white on the globe. He recalls the morning and the moment when he had a sense of falling snow, and immediately he undergoes the same experience of seeing and hearing the snow fall. As the days go by, Paul finds himself between two worlds—the real one and a secret one of peace and remoteness. His parents become increasingly concerned by his “daydreaming,” inattentive manner, but more and more he is drawn into the incomprehensible beauty of the world of silent snow. His secret sense of possession and of being protected insulates him both from the world of the classroom, where Deidre, with the freckles on the back of her neck in a constellation exactly like the Big Dipper, waves her brown flickering hand, and from the world at home where his parents’ concern and questions have become an increasingly difficult matter with which to cope. Aiken’s presentation of the escalation of Paul’s withdrawal is skillfully detailed through the use of symbols. The outside world becomes for Paul fragmented: scraps of dirty newspapers in a drain, with the word Eczema as the addressee and an address in Fort Worth, Texas; lost twigs from parent trees; bits of broken egg shells; the footprints of a dog who long ago “had made a mistake” and walked on the river of wet cement which in time had frozen into rock; the wound in an elm tree. In the company of his parents Paul neither sees them nor feels their presence. His mother is a voice asking questions, his father a pair of brown slippers. These images cluster together in such a way as to foreshadow the relentless progress of Dr. Howells down the street to Paul’s house, a visit which replicates the progress of the postman. The doctor, called by the parents because their concern has now grown into alarm over Paul’s behavior, examines the boy, and, as the examination and questioning by the adults accelerate, Paul finds the situation unbearable. He retreats further into his secret world where he sees snow now slowly filling the spaces in the room—highest in the corners, under the sofa—the snow’s voice a whisper, a promise of peace, cold and restful. Reassured by the presence of the snow and seduced by its whisperings and promises, Paul begins to laugh and to taunt the adults with little hints. He believes they are trying to corner him, and there is something malicious in his behavior: He laughed a third time—but this time, happening to glance upward toward his mother’s face, he was appalled at the effect his laughter seemed to have upon her. Her mouth had opened in an expression of horror. This was too bad! Unfortunate! He had known it would cause pain, of course—but he hadn’t expected it to be quite as bad as this. . . .

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The hints, however, explain nothing to the adults, and, continuing to feel cornered, Paul pleads a headache and tries to escape to bed. His mother follows him, but it is too late. “The darkness was coming in long white waves,” and “the snow was laughing; it spoke from all sides at once.” His mother’s presence in the room is alien, hostile, and brutal. He is filled with loathing, and he exorcizes her: “Mother! Mother! Go away! I hate you!” With this effort, everything is solved, “everything became all right.” His withdrawal is now complete. All contact with the real world is lost, and he gives himself over to a “vast moving screen of snow—but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said Library of Congress sleep.” Paul’s withdrawal is, as the snow tells him, a going inward rather than an opening outward: “It is a flower becoming a seed,” it is a movement toward complete solipsism and a closure of his life. “Strange Moonlight” • “Strange Moonlight,” another story of a young boy’s difficulty in dealing with the realities of life and death, could be a prelude to “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” In “Strange Moonlight” a young boy filches a copy of Poe’s tales from his mother’s bookshelf and in consequence spends a “delirious night in inferno.” The next day the boy wins a gold medal at school which he later carries in his pocket, keeping it a secret from his mother and father. The desire to keep a secret recalls Paul’s need to keep from his parents his first hallucination of snow. The gold medal is “above all a secret,” something to be kept concealed; it is like a particularly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in his trouser pocket. The week’s events include a visit to a friend’s house where the boy meets Caroline Lee, an extraordinarily strange and beautiful child with large pale eyes. Both Caroline Lee and the house in which she lives, with its long, dark, and winding stairways, excite and fascinate him. Within a few days, however, the boy learns that Caroline Lee is dead of scarlet fever. He is stunned: “How did it happen that he, who was so profoundly concerned, had not been consulted, had not been invited to come and talk with her, and now found himself so utterly and hopelessly and forever excluded—from the house as from her?” This becomes a thing he cannot understand. The same night he is confronted with another disturbing mystery. He overhears an intimate conversation between his father and mother. Filled with horror, the boy begins at once to imagine a conversation with Caroline Lee in which she comes back from the grave to talk with him. The next day his father unexpectedly takes the family to the beach, and the boy wanders away and finds a snug, secret hiding place on a lonely hot sand dune. He lies there surrounded by tall whispering grass, and Caroline’s imagined visit of the night before becomes real for him. Rather than ending in

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unreality as one would expect, however, Aiken inexplicably brings the boy back to reality without resolving any of the problems set up in the story. He thus leaves a gap between the protagonist’s conflicts with sexuality, reality, and unreality, and their final resolution. “Your Obituary, Well Written” • In another story, however, “Your Obituary, Well Written,” Aiken presents a young man identified only as Mr. Grant, who confronts a similar circumstance. Told in the first person by the protagonist, Mr. Grant, the story repeats what is basically the same pattern of events. Although supposedly a portrait of Katherine Mansfield, to whom Aiken is strongly indebted for the forms his stories take, the character of Reiner Wilson is also strongly reminiscent of Caroline Lee, the little girl in “Strange Moonlight.” The narrator says of Reiner Wilson: “I was struck by the astonishing frailty of her appearance, an otherworld fragility, almost a transparent spiritual quality—as if she were already a disembodied soul.” Knowing from the first that she is not only married but also fatally ill, he manages to see her one time and fall in love with her, and then he almost simultaneously withdraws. “At bottom, however, it was a kind of terror that kept me away. . . . The complications and the miseries, if we did allow the meetings to go further might well be fatal to both of us.” The same conflicts which Paul, the child in “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” experienced are again faced by the man who is not able to resolve the riddles of sex and love, life and death. The narrator never sees Reiner again, and at her death he is left on a park bench under a Judas tree wanting to weep, but unable to: “But Reiner Wilson, the dark-haired little girl with whom I had fallen in love was dead, and it seemed to me that I too was dead.” Another similarity between “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Your Obituary, Well Written” is Aiken’s use of a natural element as major metaphor. In “Your Obituary, Well Written,” rain functions in the same manner that snow does in “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” During Grant’s one meeting alone with Reiner Wilson, the room had suddenly darkened, and rain fell, sounding to him as though it were inside the room. The sensations the man feels in response to the rain are similar to those Paul feels in response to the snow. Grant tells Reiner about a time when as a boy he went swimming, and it began to rain: The water was smooth—there was no sound of waves—and all about me arose a delicious seething . . . [T]here was something sinister in it, and also something divinely soothing. I don’t believe I was ever happier in my life. It was as if I had gone into another world. Reiner calls Grant “the man who loves rain,” and her estimate of him is correct. Unable to open up himself, unable to make himself vulnerable and live in the real world, he is at the end of the story as withdrawn from reality as is Paul, who chooses the silent and secret snow. “Thistledown” • Besides dealing with various subconscious desires projected by means of hallucinating visions, many of Aiken’s stories reflect preoccupations of the times in which the stories were written. Chief among these themes is the changing roles of women and sexual mores of the 1920’s. In most of Aiken’s stories, these conflicts are presented through the male point of view. “Thistledown,” a first-person narrative told by a man who is married and living with his wife, opens with private musings of the narrator, wherein he associates a young woman named Coralyn with thistledown, which is being swept in every direc-

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tion by the wind but which is ultimately doomed for extinction. Coralyn had been his wife’s secretary, and, attracted to her, Phillip, the narrator, became bent on seduction. Far from being “frighteningly unworldly,” Coralyn is a “new woman” who has had numerous lovers. He finds her cynical and detached, she finds him an oldfashioned and sentimental fool. The affair is brief. Coralyn leaves, and as the years pass she is in and out of his life, until she disappears altogether, leaving him bitter, disappointed, and angry. The irony that marks “Thistledown” is characteristic of the stories in which Aiken examines the conventional sexual mores, holding a doublefaced mirror to reflect the double standard by which men and women are judged. “A Conversation” • In “A Conversation,” the theme of double standards is examined within the framework of a conversation between two men, probably professors, taking place on a train in a sleeping car. The conversation is overheard by a visiting lecturer at the University who occupies the adjacent sleeping car. The lecturer is tired of “being polite to fools” and wants desperately to go to sleep; but the conversation he overhears keeps him awake, as do clock bells that ring marking every quarter hour. The conversation concerns the fiancée of one of the men, and the other is trying to convince his friend that the woman is not as innocent as she looks; indeed, she has been “manhandled.” The engaged man keeps trying to protect his own views of the woman: her central idealism, her essential holiness—views that attach themselves to women who are not prostitutes. By the end of the story, however, the point is made; the engagement will not last, and the woman will be put aside like a used razor or a cork that has been tampered with, images used earlier in the story. The clock bells do not ask a question; they simply continue to toll. In the end, the men cannot accept a female sexuality which is not exclusively directed toward a husband, although there is never a question about their own sexual behavior. Mary Rohrberger With updates by Thomas L. Erskine Other major works plays: Fear No More, 1946, pb. 1957 (as Mr. Arcularis: A Play). anthologies: A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry, 1929, 1944; Twentieth Century American Poetry, 1944. novels: Blue Voyage, 1927; Great Circle, 1933; King Coffin, 1935; A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, 1939; Conversation: Or, Pilgrim’s Progress, 1940; The Collected Novels of Conrad Aiken, 1964. nonfiction: Skepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, 1919; Ushant: An Essay, 1952; A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present, 1958; Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, 1978. poetry: Earth Triumphant, and Other Tales in Verse, 1914; The Jig of Forslin, 1916; Turns and Movies, and Other Tales in Verse, 1916; Nocturne of Remembered Spring, and Other Poems, 1917; Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems, 1918; The Charnel Rose, 1918; The House of Dust, 1920; Punch: The Immortal Liar, 1921; Priapus and the Pool, 1922; The Pilgrimage of Festus, 1923; Changing Mind, 1925; Priapus and the Pool, and Other Poems, 1925; Prelude, 1929; Selected Poems, 1929; Gehenna, 1930; John Deth: A Metaphysical Legend, and Other Poems, 1930; Preludes for Memnon, 1931; The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, 1931; And in the Hanging Gardens, 1933; Landscape West of Eden, 1934; Time in the Rock: Preludes to Definition, 1936; And in the Human Heart, 1940; Brownstone Eclogues,

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and Other Poems, 1942; The Soldier: A Poem by Conrad Aiken, 1944; The Kid, 1947; Skylight One: Fifteen Poems, 1949; The Divine Pilgrim, 1949; Wake II, 1952; Collected Poems, 1953, 1970; A Letter from Li Po, and Other Poems, 1955; The Fluteplayer, 1956; Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems, 1958; Selected Poems, 1961; The Morning Song of Lord Zero, 1963; A Seizure of Limericks, 1964; Cats and Bats and Things with Wings: Poems, 1965; The Clerk’s Journal, 1971; A Little Who’s Zoo of Mild Animals, 1977. Bibliography Aiken, Conrad. Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken. Edited by Joseph Killorin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978. Includes a representative sample of 245 letters (from some three thousand) written by Aiken. A cast of correspondents, among them T. S. Eliot and Malcolm Lowry, indexes to Aiken’s works and important personages, and a wealth of illustrations, mostly photographs, add considerably to the value of the volume. Butscher, Edward. Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. This critical biography emphasizes Aiken’s literary work, particularly the poetry. Butscher’s book nevertheless contains analyses of about fifteen Aiken short stories, including his most famous ones, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Mr. Arcularis.” Includes many illustrations, copious notes, and an extensive bibliography that is especially helpful in psychoanalytic theory. Dirda, Michael. “Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken.” The Washington Post, June 25, 1978, p. G5. A review of Aiken’s Selected Letters, with a brief biographical sketch; suggests that the letters will help redress the neglect Aiken has suffered. Hoffman, Frederick J. Conrad Aiken. New York: Twayne, 1962. The best overview of Aiken’s short fiction. Hoffman’s volume contains careful analyses of several individual stories, including “Mr. Arcularis,” which receives extensive discussion. Hoffman, who believes Aiken’s short stories are more successful than his novels, stresses “Aiken’s attitude toward New England, his obsession with “aloneness,” and his concern about human relationships. Contains a chronology, a biographical chapter, and an annotated bibliography. Lorenz, Clarissa M. Lorelei Two: My Life with Conrad Aiken. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. Lorenz, Aiken’s second wife, discusses the 1926-1938 years, the period when he wrote his best work, including the short stories “Mr. Arcularis” and “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” She covers his literary acquaintances, his work habits, and the literary context in which he worked. The book is well indexed and contains several relevant photographs. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Aiken: “The Dark City” (vol. 2); “Impulse” (vol. 4); “Round by Round” (vol. 6); and “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” (vol. 7). Seigal, Catharine. The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken: A Celebration of Consciousness. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993. Chapters on the Freudian foundation of Aiken’s fiction, on his New England roots, and on many of his novels. Concluding chapters on Aiken’s autobiography, Ushant, and an overview of his fiction. Includes notes, selected bibliography, and index. Spivey, Ted R. Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997. Explores Aiken’s thought processes and how they translate to his fiction.

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Spivey, Ted R., and Arthur Waterman, eds. Conrad Aiken: A Priest of Consciousness. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Though their focus is on Aiken’s poetry, Spivey and Waterman include essays on the short stories and a review of criticism of the short stories. Contains an extensive chronology of Aiken’s life and a lengthy description of the Aiken materials in the Huntington Library. Womack, Kenneth. “Unmasking Another Villain in Conrad Aiken’s Autobiographical Dream.” Biography 19 (Spring, 1996): 137. Examines the role of British poet and novelist Martin Armstrong as a fictionalized character in Aiken’s Ushant; argues that Aiken’s attack on Armstrong is motivated by revenge for Armstrong’s marriage to Aiken’s first wife.

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Sherman Alexie Born: Spokane Indian Reservation, Wellpinit, Washington; October 7, 1966 Principal short fiction • The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993; The Toughest Indian in the World, 2000; Ten Little Indians, 2003. Other literary forms • A prolific writer, Sherman Alexie has published more than three hundred stories and poems. His poetry and poetry/short fiction works include The Business of Fancydancing (1992), I Would Steal Horses (1992), First Indian on the Moon (1993), Old Shirts and New Skins (1993), Seven Mourning Songs for the Cedar Flute I Have Yet to Learn to Play (1994), Water Flowing Home (1994), The Summer of Black Widows (1996), One Stick Song (2000), and Dangerous Astronomy (2005). He has also written the novels Reservation Blues (1995), Indian Killer (1996), and Flight (2007), a contemporary story about an adolescent boy who is half Irish and half Native American. Achievements • Sherman Alexie began accruing his numerous accolades and awards while in college, including a Washington State Arts Commission poetry fellowship (1991) and a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship (1992). He also won Slipstream’s fifth annual Chapbook Contest (1992), an Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award Citation, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award (1994), an American Book Award (1996), and The Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. His first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award, the Murray Morgan Prize, and prompted Alexie to be named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Indian Killer (1996), his second novel, was listed as a New York Times notable book. Biography • A self-described Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who believes “Native American” is a “guilty white liberal term,” Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr., grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His father, an alcoholic, spent little time at home, and his mother supported the family by selling hand-sewn quilts at the local trading post. Born hydrocephalic, Alexie spent most of his childhood at home voraciously reading books from the local library. He later attended high school outside the reservation. His academic achievements there secured him a place at Spokane’s Jesuit Gonzaga University in 1985. While there, he turned to alcohol as a means of coping with the pressure he felt to succeed. His goal to become a medical doctor was derailed by fainting spells in human anatomy class, and Alexie later transferred to Washington State University in 1987, where he began writing and then publishing his poetry and short stories. During a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he wrote his award-winning The Business of Fancydancing and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. With this success came sobriety. Drawing on his collection of short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie wrote and directed the award-winning Smoke Signals (1998), the first feature film ever made with an all-Native American cast and crew. Alexie, his child, and wife Diane, a member of the Hidatsa nation and college counselor, settled in Seattle, Washington.

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Analysis • According to Sherman Alexie in an interview with CINEASTE, the five major influences on his writing are “my father, for his nontraditional Indian stories, my grandmother for her traditional Indian stories, Stephen King, John Steinbeck, and The Brady Bunch.” It is no wonder then that Alexie’s work, in particular the short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, has been described by American Indian Quarterly as resembling a “casebook of postmodernist theory” that revels in such things as irony, parody of traditions, and the mingling of popular and native cultures. The result is a body of work that allows Alexie to challenge and subvert the stereotypes of Native Americans seen in the mass media (the warrior, the shaman, the drunk) and explore what it means to be a contemporary Native American. In commenting on Native American poets and writers, writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko describe how Native American artists often create their strongest work when they write from a position of social responsibility. In Alexie’s case, his work is often designed to effect change by exposing other Indians and whites to the harsh realities of reservation life. In Alexie’s early work—work influenced by his own alcoholism and father’s abandonment (as seen in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven)—he uses the Spokane Indian community as a backdrop for his characters, who often suffer from poverty, despair, and substance abuse. Yet it is his use of dark humor and irony that enables these characters to survive both their own depressions and self-loathing and the attitude and activities of the often ignorant and apathetic white society. Alexie writes in his short story “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”: On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation works. With sobriety, Alexie claims that from The Business of Fancydancing in 1992 to Smoke Signals in 1998, his personal vision of Indian society has brightened and his writing has moved from focusing on the effects to the causes of substance abuse and other selfdestructive behaviors. In CINEASTE, Alexie describes his growth as a writer in this way: As I’ve been in recovery over the years and stayed sober, you’ll see the work gradually freeing itself of alcoholism and going much deeper, exploring the emotional, sociological, and psychological reasons for any kind of addictions or dysfunctions within the [Indian] community. . . . It’s more of a whole journey, you get there and you get back. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven • Alexie’s first collection of (only) short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, received much critical acclaim. Many of the Native American characters that he introduced in his earlier poetry—like the storyteller Thomas Builds-The-Fire and his friend Victor Joseph—appear here as vehicles through which Alexie illustrates how Indians survive both the hardships they face on reservations and the gulfs between similar and dissimilar cultures, time periods, and men and women. In a number of the twenty-two often autobiographical stories in this collection, Alexie infuses irony into tales that illustrate the destructive effects of alcohol on both children and adults on reservations. For example, in “The Only Traffic Signal on the

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Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Any More” he weaves the tradition of storytelling with the contemporary issue of how cultures create their own heroes. In this story, the narrator and his friend Adrian, both recovering alcoholics, are sitting on a porch playing Russian roulette with a BB gun. They stop and watch a local high school TO VIEW IMAGE, basketball player walk by with his friends. PLEASE SEE As the narrator talks, readers learn that contemporary heroes on the reservation PRINT EDITION are often basketball players, and stories OF THIS BOOK. about their abilities are retold year after year. Yet, these heroes, including the narrator himself, often succumb to alcoholism and drop off the team. From the narrator’s reminiscences, it becomes clear that, while all people need heroes in their lives, creating heroes on a reservation can be problematic. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” the nar© Marion Ettlinger rator tells the story of Thomas BuildsThe-Fire and the “second-largest party in reservation history” for which he pays with money he receives from a large utility company land lease. Although the narrator claims that “we can all hear our ancestors laughing in the trees” when Indians actually profit in this way, who the ancestors are truly laughing at is unclear. Are they laughing at the white people for spending a lot of money to put ten telephone poles across some land or the Indians for spending that money on large quantities of alcohol? Later in the story, Victor, Junior, and Thomas go off and experience a night of drug-induced hallucinations about the faraway past, the present, and future. In the present, the boys return to a time before they ever had their first drink of alcohol. From this story, readers learn that it is best for people to stay in the present and keep persevering and not become stuck in the past or an imagined future. Several of the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven that were eventually adapted for the film Smoke Signals explore both the connections and fissures between people of different genders and similar or dissimilar cultures. In “Every Little Hurricane,” readers are introduced to nine-year-old Victor, who is awakened from his frequent nightmares by one of the many family fights, this one occurring between his uncles during a New Year’s Eve party. Memories of other seasonal alcohol and poverty-induced “hurricanes” ensue, such as that of the Christmas his father could not afford any gifts. At the end of the story, as all the relatives and neighbors pick themselves up and go home, Victor lies down between his father and mother, hoping that the alcohol in their bodies will seep into his and help him sleep. This story is about how Indians continue to be “eternal survivors” of many types of storms. In “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock,” the narrator details the love-hate relationship between his mother and his father (who would later leave the family), while using a popular music icon to illustrate how Native Americans and whites share

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at least one common culture. The narrator of this story, the abandoned Victor, later teams up with former childhood friend and storyteller Thomas in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” to collect Victor’s father’s ashes in Phoenix. In their ensuing journey, the characters grow spiritually and emotionally, while exploring what it means today to be a Native American. Lisa-Anne Culp Other major works novels: Reservation Blues, 1995; Indian Killer, 1996; Flight, 2007. miscellaneous: The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, 1992; First Indian on the Moon, 1993; The Summer of Black Widows, 1996 (poems and short prose). poetry: I Would Steal Horses, 1992; Old Shirts and New Skins, 1993; The Man Who Loves Salmon, 1998; One Stick Song, 2000; Dangerous Astronomy, 2005. screenplays: Smoke Signals, 1998; The Business of Fancydancing, 2002. Bibliography Alexie, Sherman. “Sending Cinematic Smoke Signals: An Interview with Sherman Alexie.” Interview by Dennis West. CINEASTE 23, no. 4 (1998): 28-32. Discusses both the film Smoke Signals and short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, followed by an interview with Alexie about his early influences and work. Andrews, Candace E. “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Baxter, Andrea-Bess. “Review of Old Shirts and New Skins, First Indian on the Moon, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” Western American Literature 29, no. 3 (November, 1994): 277-280. A review of the three works with commentary on the appeals of Alexie’s writing and its strengths. Bogey, Dan. Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. Library Journal 118 (September 1, 1993). Admires Alexie’s narrative voice. Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Gives a general social and literary overview of American Indian writers. Low, Denise. The American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter, 1996): 123-125. In examining Alexie’s work through a postmodern lens, Low discusses his characters and rhetorical strategies in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Business of Fancydancing. May, Charles E. “The Toughest Indian in the World.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “The Toughest Indian in the World” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Schneider, Brian. Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Fall, 1993). Praises Alexie’s passionate lyrical voice. Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Bingo Man—Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie.” The Nation 260, no. 23 (June 12, 1995): 856-860. A review, by a celebrated Native American writer, of Alexie’s short stories and poems with special focus on his first novel, Reservation Blues.

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Isabel Allende Born: Lima, Peru; August 2, 1942 Principal short fiction • Cuentos de Eva Luna, 1990 (The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991). Other literary forms • Although greatly respected as a writer of short stories, Isabel Allende is probably better known for her writing in other genres. She published eight novels through 2006. These include La casa de los espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits, 1985), which established her reputation, De amor y de sombra (1984), Eva Luna (1987), El plan infinito (1991), Hija de la fortuna (1999), Portrait sépia (2000; Portrait in Sepia, 2001), Zorro (2005; English translation, 2005), and Inés del alma mía (2006; Inés of My Soul, 2006). Allende has also published an account of her daughter’s death in Paula (1994); a memoir about her homeland, Mi país inventado (2003; My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, 2003); and a collection of humorous pieces poking fun at machismo, originally published in the magazine Paula, entitled Civilice a su troglodita (1974). In 1984 she published a collection of children’s stories in Spanish, La gorda de Porcelana. Two decades later, she returned to that genre with Ciudad de las bestias (2002; City of the Beasts, 2002), El reino del dragón de oro (2003; Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004), and El bosque de los Pigmeos (2004; Forest of the Pygmies, 2005). Achievements • Isabel Allende has been the recipient of numerous prestigious literary prizes, including the Panorama Literario Novel of the Year (1983), Author of the Year in Germany (1984 and 1986), and the Grand Prix d’Évasion in France (1984), as well as the Colima prize for best novel in Mexico (1985). A 1993 film version of La casa de los espíritus, directed by Bille August, was a box-office success. Biography • Though Chilean by nationality, Isabel Angelica Allende was born in Lima, Peru, on August 2, 1942. The niece of the former Chilean president Salvador Allende, who died in September, 1973, during the military coup d’état engineered by Augusto Pinochet, Allende attended a private high school in Santiago, Chile, from which she graduated in 1959. She worked as a secretary at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization until 1965. She married Miguel Frías in 1962, had a daughter, Paula, and a son, Miguel. In Santiago, she worked as a journalist, editor, and advice columnist for Paula magazine from 1967 to 1974 and as an interviewer for a television station from 1970 to 1975. She was also an administrator for Colegio Marroco, in Caracas, from 1979 to 1982. Allende divorced her husband in 1987 and married William Gordon in 1988. Her daughter died in 1993, and this event formed the basis of the novel named after her. Analysis • Isabel Allende’s literary career is notable in that it stands outside the shifting fashions of the Latin American literary scene. Since the 1960’s in Latin America the literary fashion has tended to favor intricate, self-conscious novels that test readers’ interpretative powers. Flying in the face of this trend, however, Allende’s novels favor content over form, reality over novelistic devices. Though her fiction has been

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dismissed by some critics as simply an imitation of Gabriel García Márquez’s work, especially his so-called Magical Realist style, it is clear that Allende enjoys unparalleled popularity. Her novels and short stories have attracted an enormous readership in Spanish as well as in English, French, and German. Allende tends to write plotcentered, reader-friendly fiction. Her stories often focus on love and sex as seen from a feminine perspective. The Stories of Eva Luna • The short-story collection The Stories of Eva Luna is essentially a sequel to her novel Eva Luna (1987), published three years earlier; thus the narrator of The Stories of Eva Luna is the Eva Luna who appeared in the earlier novel, that is, a resourceful, bright young woman who, though born to poverty, rises to riches as a result of becoming a famous soap-opera writer. Two of the stories provide a direct link to Eva Luna the novel. “El huésped de la maestra,” for example, finishes a story that was left unresolved in the novel. The novel describes how Inés, the schoolmistress of Santa Agua, saw her son brutally murdered at the hands of a local man, who caught him stealing mangoes in the garden. Riad Halabí, by an ingenious plan, managed to force the murderer to leave town. In the short story, readers learn that the murderer returns many years later to Santa Agua and is then killed by Inés in an act of revenge; much of the short story is taken up by a description of the ingenious way in which Halabí disposes of the body. Also related to the novel is the short story “De barro estamos hechos.” The novel introduces Rolf Carlé, a cameraman, who eventually becomes Eva’s companion. Here readers see firsthand his experience of the floods that ravaged the country and that caused a young girl called Azucena to die slowly and painfully, even while he was filming her. The short story focuses on how this experience has changed Rolf’s life. These two short stories can be seen as sequels to Allende’s long fiction and show continuity of theme and character. There are twenty-three short stories in The Stories of Eva Luna and only two of them, as described above, use the same characters that the novels do. In other words, above all, they are new stories that Eva Luna has invented for the enjoyment of her lover, Rolf Carlé. The overriding structure is provided by the theme of Alf layla walayla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708), in which the female narrator, Scheherazade, must tell a story each night in order to avoid being executed by the king. The collection of short stories opens, indeed, with Rolf Carlé asking the narrator, who, though unnamed, is obviously Eva Luna, to tell him a story that has never been told to anyone else. The first story, “Dos palabras,” explores the same theme. Here the protagonist, Belisa Crespusculario, wrote a speech for a man who wanted to become president; and she also gave him two secret words. The speech was an enormous success, but the Colonel soon discovers that he is fatally attracted to Belisa as a result of the linguistic spell she has cast over him. There are a number of themes that run through the stories. The most obvious one is that of sexuality and love, which forms the focus for nineteen of the twenty-three stories in the collection. Love is often presented as occurring purely through chance. In “Tosca,” for example, a love relationship begins in this short story as a result of the apparently insignificant fact that Leonardo is seen by Laurizia reading the score of the work Tosca by the famous Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. From this chance encounter a passionate affair develops. Of the nineteen stories that focus on love and sexuality, ten focus on illicit sex. A good example is “Si me tocaras el corazón,” which tells the story of Amadeo Peralta, who, while on a visit to Santa Agua, seduces a fifteen-year-old girl called Hortensia; when he tires of her, he decides to lock her

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up permanently in the basement of a sugar refinery. Years later, some children hear monstrous noises coming from the basement, and Hortensia is discovered, diseased and at the brink of death, which leads to Amadeo’s discomfiture. The moral of this short story seems to be that unbridled sexual passion can have disastrous consequences. Some of the stories, such as “Boca de sapo,” “María, la boba,” and “Walimai,” explicitly allude to prostitution. Other themes covered in the stories include vengeance, as in “Una venganza,” in which revenge for rape is enacted on the rapist; the clash between cultures, as in “Walamai,” which describes the struggles between the tribe of the Sons of the Moon and the white man, told from an Indian perspective; the miracle, as in “Un discreto milagro,” which tells how Miguel, a priest, has his sight restored by a local saint, Juana de los Lirios; as well as predestination, as in “La mujer del juez,” a well-written, suspense story which focuses on the protagonists, Nicolás Vidal and Casilda Hidalgo, who conduct an illicit affair even though they know beforehand that it will lead to their deaths. One particularly powerful story, “Un camino hacia el norte,” contains a strong social critique. It describes how Claveles Picero, and her grandfather, Jesús Dionisio Picero, are tricked into giving up Claveles’s illegitimate son Juan to a United States adoption agency, which is later discovered to be a front for a contraband agency which sells human organs. The story ends with a description of their journey to the capital in an attempt to discover Juan’s fate; they, like the readers, fear the worst. The message is that poverty leads to exploitation and death. A common technique in the stories involves the story opening with a scene (whose import is not understood) and then cutting to the past, at which point the narrative of the lives of the main protagonists is told. This occurs in a number of stories, including “El camino hacia el norte” and “El huésped de la maestra.” Most of the stories are told in the third person, although some, such as “Walimai,” are told in the first person. Stephen M. Hart Other major works children’s literature: La gorda de porcelana, 1984; Ciudad de las bestias, 2002 (City of the Beasts, 2002); El reino del dragón de oro, 2003 (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004); El bosque de los Pigmeos, 2004 (Forest of the Pygmies, 2005). novels: La casa de los espíritus, 1982 (The House of the Spirits, 1985); De amor y de sombra, 1984 (Of Love and Shadows, 1987); Eva Luna, 1987 (English translation, 1988); El plan infinito, 1991 (The Infinite Plan, 1993); Hija de la fortuna, 1999 (Daughter of Fortune, 1999); Portrait sépia, 2000 (Portrait in Sepia, 2001); Zorro, 2005 (English translation, 2005); Inés del alma mía, 2006 (Inés of My Soul, 2006). miscellaneous: Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisiacos, 1997 (Afrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998). nonfiction: Civilice a su troglodita: Los impertinentes de Isabel Allende, 1974; Paula, 1994 (English translation, 1995); Conversations with Isabel Allende, 1999; Mi país inventado, 2003 (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, 2003). Bibliography Allende, Isabel. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Edited by John Rodden. A collection of interviews from the University of Texas’s Pan-American series.

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Correas Zapata, Celia. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 2002. The first biographical discussion of Allende in book form. This intimate glimpse of Allende’s life is written by her admiring but scholarly friend. De Carvalho, Susan. “The Male Narrative Perspective in the Fiction of Isabel Allende.” Journal of Hispanic Research 2, no. 2 (Spring, 1994): 269-278. Shows that “Walimai” is different from the other short stories in Los cuentos de Eva Luna in that it is written in the first person and from a male perspective. Argues that the firstperson, male perspective in this story represents the ideal narrative voice. García Pinto, Magdalena, ed. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Contains an excellent interview with Allende with a great deal of insight into the way she views her writing. It is here that Allende mentions that she sees herself as a troubadour going from village to village, person to person, talking about her country. Hart, Stephen M. White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America. London: Tamesis, 1993. Sets Allende’s work within the context of women’s writing in the twentieth century in Latin America. Examines the ways in which Allende fuses the space of the personal with that of the political in her fiction and shows that, in her work, falling in love with another human being is often aligned with falling in love with a political cause. Levine, Linda Gould. Isabel Allende. New York: Twayne, 2002. This volume from Twayne’s World Authors series includes useful bibliographical references and an index. Marketta, Laurila. “Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile.” In International Women’s Writing, New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. This book is helpful both for Marketta’s analysis of Allende’s use of the language of exile and for other Allende materials in the collection. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Allende: “Clarisa” (vol. 2), “Toad’s Mouth” (vol. 7), and “Wicked Girl” (vol. 8). Roof, Maria. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Isabel Allende, and the Empowerment of Third World Women.” CLA Journal 39, no. 4 (June, 1996): 401-416. A good source for readers interested in the feminist elements in Allende.

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Hans Christian Andersen Born: Odense, Denmark; April 2, 1805 Died: Rolighed, near Copenhagen, Denmark; August 4, 1875 Principal short fiction • Eventyr, 1835-1872 (The Complete Andersen, 1949; also Fairy Tales, 1950-1958; also The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, 1974); It’s Perfectly True, and Other Stories, 1937; Andersen’s Fairy Tales, 1946; Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, 1953. Other literary forms • Hans Christian Andersen’s first publication was a poem in 1828, and his first prose work, a fantasy of a nightly journey titled Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager (1829; a journey on foot from Holman’s canal to the east point of Amager), was an immediate success. He wrote six novels, of which Improvisatoren (1835; The Improvisatore, 1845) securely established his fame. His nine travel books began with En digters bazar (1842; A Poet’s Bazaar, 1846) and mainly concern his European travels. Other works are Billebog uden billeder (1840; Tales the Moon Can Tell, 1855) and I Sverrig (1851; In Sweden, 1852). His autobiographies are Levnedsbogen, 1805-1831 (1926; Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen, 1990), discovered fifty years after his death; Mit Livs Eventyr (1847; The Story of My Life, 1852); and the revised The Fairy Tale of My Life (1855). Other publications include his correspondence, diaries, notebooks and draft material, drawings, sketches, paper cuttings, and plays. Achievements • Although hailed as the greatest of all fairy-tale writers in any language, throughout most of his life, Hans Christian Andersen considered his fairy tales to be of far less importance than his other writings. He considered himself much more of a novelist, playwright, and writer of travel books. It was his fairy tales, however, that spread his fame across Europe and, immediately upon publication, were translated into every European language. Andersen was much more famous, courted, and honored abroad than in his native Denmark. In his later years, however, his compatriots did at last recognize Andersen’s greatness. He became a friend and guest to royalty, was made a state councillor, and had a touching tribute paid to him in the form of the statue of the Little Mermaid, which sits in the Copenhagen harbor. Biography • The son of a shoemaker, who died when Hans was eleven, and an illiterate servant mother, Hans Christian Andersen from his early childhood loved to invent tales, poems, and plays and to make intricate paper cuttings; he loved to recite his creations to any possible listener. Later he yearned to be a creative writer of divine inspiration and an actor. In 1819 he journeyed to Copenhagen where he lived through hard times but developed a talent for attracting benefactors. Among them was Jonas Collin, whose home became Andersen’s “Home of Homes,” as he called it, who acted as a foster father, and whose son Edvard became a close friend. Through Jonas’s influence and a grant from the king, Andersen attended grammar school (1822-1827) and struggled with a difficult headmaster as well as with Latin and Greek. Andersen never married, although he was attracted to several women, among them the singer Jenny Lind. Although he was very tall and ungainly in appearance, with large feet, a large nose, and small eyes, and although he was sentimental and excep-

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tionally concerned with himself, his fears and doubts, Andersen enjoyed the company of Europe’s leading professionals and nobility, including kings and queens; in later life many honors were bestowed on him. His last nine years he lived at the home of the Moritz Melchiors, just outside Copenhagen, and he died there on August 4, 1875. Analysis • Following publication of his 1844 collection of tales, Hans Christian Andersen explained in a letter that he wanted his tales to be read on two levels, offering something for the minds of adults as well as appealing to children. Three examples of such adult tales, “The Snow Queen,” “The Shadow,” and “The Nightingale,” demonstrate how, as Andersen said, in writing from his own breast instead of retelling old tales he had found out how to write fairy tales. “The Snow Queen” • Comprising seven stories, “The Snow Queen” begins with a mirror into which people can look and see the good become small and mean and the bad appear at its very worst. Andersen could remember, in later years, that his father had maintained that “There is no other devil than the one we have in our hearts”; and this provides a clue to the plot and theme of “The Snow Queen.” Only when the demon’s followers confront heaven with the mirror does it shatter into fragments, but unfortunately those fragments enter the hearts of many people. The second story introduces Little Kay and Gerda, who love each other and the summer’s flowers until a fragment of the evil mirror lodges in Little Kay’s eye and another pierces his heart. Having formerly declared that if the Snow Queen visited he would melt her on the stove, Kay now views snowflakes through a magnifying glass and pronounces them more beautiful than flowers. He protests against the grandmother’s tales with a but for the logic of each one, and, apparently arrived at adolescence, transfers loyalty from the innocent Gerda to the knowing Snow Queen. He follows the visiting queen out of town and into the snowy expanses of the distant sky. The journey from adolescence to maturity becomes for Gerda her quest for the missing Kay, her true love and future mate. Fearing the river has taken Kay, she offers it her new red shoes; but a boat she steps into drifts away from shore, and, riding the river’s current, she travels far before being pulled ashore and detained by a woman “learned in magic.” Gerda here forgets her search for Kay until the sight of a rose reminds her. In one of the story’s most abstract passages, she then asks the tiger lilies, convolvulus, snowdrop, hyacinth, buttercup, and narcissus where he might be; but each tells a highly fanciful tale concerned with its own identity. The narcissus, for example, alludes to the Echo and Narcissus myth in saying “I can see myself” and fails to aid Gerda. Barefoot, Gerda runs out of the garden and finds that autumn has arrived. A crow believes he has seen Kay and contrives a visit with the Prince and Princess, who forgive the invasion of their palatial privacy and then outfit Gerda to continue her search. All her newly acquired equipage attracts a “little robber girl,” a perplexing mixture of amorality and good intentions, who threatens Gerda with her knife but provides a reindeer to carry Gerda to Spitsbergen, where the wood pigeons have reported having seen Kay. At one stop, the reindeer begs a Finnish wise woman to give Gerda the strength to conquer all, but the woman points out the great power that Gerda has already evidenced and adds, “We must not tell her what power she has. It is in her heart, because she is such a sweet innocent child.” She sends Gerda and the reindeer on their way, with Gerda riding without boots or mittens. Eventually the reindeer deposits her by a red-berry bush in freezing icebound Denmark, from which she walks to the Snow Queen’s palace.

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Here she finds a second mirror, a frozen lake broken into fragments that is actually the throne of the Snow Queen; the queen calls it “The Mirror of Reason.” Little Kay works diligently to form the fragments into the word “Eternity,” for which accomplishment the Snow Queen has said he can be his own master and have the whole world and a new pair of skates. Gerda’s love, when she sheds tears of joy at finding Kay, melts the ice in his heart and the mirror within his breast; and Kay, himself bursting into tears at recovering Gerda and her love, finds that the fragments magically form themselves into the word “Eternity.” The two young people find many changes on their return journey but much the same at home, where they now realize they are grown up. The grandmother’s Bible verse tells them about the kingdom of heaven for those with hearts of children, and they now understand the meaning of the hymn, “Where roses deck the flowery vale,/ There Infant Jesus, thee we hail!” The flowers of love, not the mirror of reason, make Kay and Gerda inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, the Snow Queen’s elusive eternity. Only the style makes such stories children’s stories, for “The Snow Queen,” with devices such as the snowflakes seen under a microscope, obviously attacks empiricism; at the same time, the story offers the symbol of the foot, important to folklore, and the journey of Gerda through obstacles and a final illumination constitutes a “journey of the hero” as delineated by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. “The Shadow” • Andersen’s “The Shadow” presents an alter-ego with psychic dimensions well beyond the ken of children. The setting with which “The Shadow” begins reflects Andersen’s diary entries from his trip to Naples in June, 1846, when he found the sun too hot for venturing out of doors and began writing the story. With the hot sun directly overhead, the shadow disappears except in morning and evening and begins to assume a life of its own. Its activities, closely observed by its owner, the “learned man from a cold country,” leads him to joke about its going into the house opposite to learn the identity of a lovely maiden. The shadow fails to return, but the learned man soon grows a new shadow. Many years later, once more at home, the original shadow visits him but has now become so corporeal that it has acquired flesh and clothes. Further, it divulges, it has become wealthy and plans to marry. Its threeweek visit in the house opposite, it now reveals, placed it close to the lovely maiden Poetry, in whose anteroom the shadow read all the poetry and prose ever written. If the learned man had been there, he would not have remained a human being, but it was there that the shadow became one. Emerging thence he went about under the cover of a pastry cook’s gown for some time before growing into his present affluence. Later, the learned man’s writing of the good, the true, and the beautiful fail to provide him an income; only after he has suffered long and become so thin that people tell him he looks like a shadow does he accede to the shadow’s request that he become a traveling companion. Shadow and master have now exchanged places, but the king’s daughter notices that the new master cannot cast a shadow. To this accusation he replies that the person who is always at his side is his shadow. When the new master cannot answer her scientific inquiries, he defers to the shadow, whose knowledge impresses the princess. Clearly, she reasons, to have such a learned servant the master must be the most learned man on earth. Against the upcoming marriage of princess and shadow, the learned man protests and threatens to reveal the truth. “Not a soul would believe you,” says the shadow, and with his new status as fiancé he has the learned man cast into prison. The prin-

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cess agrees that it would be a charity to deliver the learned man from his delusions and has him promptly executed. The fact that Poetry would make a human being divine or “more than human” gives Poetry the identity of Psyche, whose statue by Thorvaldsen Andersen had admired in 1833 in the Danish sculptor’s studio. (Also, Andersen in 1861 wrote a story called “The Psyche.”) In “The Shadow,” the human qualities with which Poetry’s presence infuses the shadow function for him as a soul. Thereafter, his incubation under the pastry cook’s gown provides him a proper maturation from which, still as shadow, he looks into people’s lives, spies on their evils and their intimacies, and acquires power over them. This phase of his existence explains the acquisition of wealth, but as the shadow grows human and powerful the learned man declines. The shadow, the other self of the learned man, reflects the psychic stress Andersen suffered in his relationship with Edvard Collin. What Andersen desired between himself and Collin has been recognized by scholars as the Blütbruderschaft that D. H. Lawrence wrote about—a close relationship with another male. Collin persisted, however, in fending off all Andersen’s attempts at informality, even in regard to the use of language. In the story the shadow is obviously Collin, whose separate identity thrives at the expense of the learned man’s—Andersen’s—psyche. Writing in his diary of the distress and illness brought on by a letter from Edvard Collin, Andersen contemplated suicide and pleaded “he must use the language of a friend” (1834); so also the story’s shadow rejects such language and commits the learned man to prison and to death. The problem of language appears twice in the story, although various translations diminish its effect. On the shadow’s first visit to his former master, his newly acquired affluence provides him with the daring to suggest that the learned man speak “less familiarly” and to say “sir” or—in other translations—to replace “you” with “thee” and “thou.” Frequently argued between Andersen and Collin as the question of Du versus De, the problem reappears in the story when the learned man asks the shadow, because of their childhood together, to pledge themselves to address each other as Du. (In some translations, this reads merely “to drink to our good fellowship” and “call each other by our names.”) In the shadow’s reply, Andersen improved on Collin’s objection by having the shadow cite the feel of gray paper or the scraping of a nail on a pane of glass as similar to the sound of Du spoken by the learned man. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” • Such touches of individuality made Andersen’s writing succeed, as evidenced by a tale he borrowed from a Spanish source, the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which he said he read in a German translation from Prince don Juan Manuel. Andersen’s version improved on the original in several respects, including his theme of pretense of understanding as well as ridicule of snobbery and his ending with the objection of the child—an ending which Andersen added after the original manuscript had been sent to the publisher. Andersen’s talent for universalizing the appeal of a story and for capitalizing on personal experiences appears time and again throughout his many tales. Because of his grotesque appearance, which interfered with his longed-for stage career, Andersen knew personally the anguish of “The Ugly Duckling,” but his success as a writer made him a beautiful swan. His extreme sensitivity he wrote into “The Princess and the Pea,” detailing the adventures of a princess who could feel a pea through twenty mattresses. Andersen in this story borrowed from a folktale in which the little girl understands the test she is being put to because a dog or cat aids her by relaying

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the information; however, Andersen contrived that her sensitivity alone would suffice. Nevertheless, some translators could not accept the idea of her feeling a single pea and changed the text to read three peas and the title to read “The Real Princess.” Andersen’s stories thus objectify psychic conditions, and among these his frequent association with nobility enabled him to depict with humor the qualities of egotism, arrogance, and subservience found at court. In “The Snow Queen” the crow describes court ladies and attendants standing around; the nearer to the door they stand the greater is their haughtiness. The footman’s boy is too proud to be looked at. The princess is so clever she has read all the newspapers in the world and forgotten them again. “The Nightingale” • One of Andersen’s best depictions of court life and, at the same time, one of his best satires is “The Nightingale,” which he wrote in honor of Jenny Lind, the singer known as the Swedish Nightingale. The story’s theme contrasts the artificial manners and preferences of the court with the natural song of the nightingale and the ways of simple folk. Far from the palace of the emperor of China where bells on the flowers in the garden tinkle to attract attention to the flowers, the nightingale sings in the woods by the deep sea, so that a poor fisherman listens to it each day and travelers returning home write about it. The emperor discovers this nightingale from reading about it in a book, but his gentleman-in-waiting knows nothing about it because it has never been presented at court. Inquiring throughout the court, he finds only a little girl in the kitchen who has heard it and who helps him find it. Brought to the court, it must sing on a golden perch, and, when acclaimed successful, it has its own cage and can walk out twice a day and once in the night with twelve footmen, each one holding a ribbon tied around its leg. When the emperor of Japan sends as a gift an artificial nightingale studded with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, the two birds cannot sing together, and the real nightingale flies away in chagrin. The court throng honors the mechanical bird with jewels and gold as gifts, and the Master of Music writes twenty-five volumes about it. The mechanical bird earns the title of Chief Imperial Singer-of-the-Bed-Chamber, and in rank it stands number one on the left side, for even an emperor’s heart is on the left side. Eventually the mechanical bird breaks down, and the watchmaker cannot assure repair with the same admirable tune. Five years later the emperor becomes ill, and his successor is proclaimed. Then, with Death sitting on his chest and wearing his golden crown, he calls on the mechanical bird to sing. Although it sits mute, the nightingale appears at the window and sings Death away and brings new life to the emperor. With the generosity of a true heroine, it advises the king not to destroy the mechanical bird, which did all the good it could; however, it reminds the emperor, a little singing bird sings to the fisherman and the peasant and must continue to go and to return. Although it loves the emperor’s heart more than his crown, the crown has an odor of sanctity also. The nightingale will return, but the emperor must keep its secret that a little bird tells him everything. Andersen’s comment comparing the heart and the crown of the emperor may be his finest on the attraction of the great, an attraction which he felt all his life. Early in 1874, after visiting a count in South Zealand, he wrote to Mrs. Melchior that no fairy tales occurred to him any more. If he walks in the garden, he said, Thumbelina has ended her journey on the water lily; the wind and the Old Oak Tree have already told him their tales and have nothing more to tell him. It is, he wrote, as if he had filled

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out the entire circle with fairy-tale radii close to one another. On his seventieth birthday, April 2, 1875, the royal carriage was sent to fetch him to the castle, and the king bestowed another decoration. It was his last birthday celebration, for in a few months Andersen had filled out the circle of his life. Grace Eckley With updates by Leslie A. Pearl Other major works plays: Kjœrlighed paa Nicolai Taarn: Elle, Hvad siger Parterret, pr. 1829; Agnete og havmanden, pr. 1833; Mulatten, pr. 1840. novels: Improvisatoren, 1835 (2 volumes; The Improvisatore, 1845); O. T., 1836 (English translation, 1845); Kun en Spillemand, 1837 (Only a Fiddler, 1845); De To Baronesser, 1848 (The Two Baronesses, 1848); At vœre eller ikke vœre, 1857 (To Be or Not to Be, 1857); Lykke-Peer, 1870 (Lucky Peer, 1871). miscellaneous: The Collected Works of Hans Christian Andersen, 1870-1884 (10 volumes). nonfiction: Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager, 1829; Skyggebilleder af en reise til Harzen, det sachiske Schweitz, 1831 (Rambles in the Romantic Regions of the Hartz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, etc., 1848); Billebog uden billeder, 1840 (Tales the Moon Can Tell, 1855); En digters bazar, 1842 (A Poet’s Bazaar, 1846); I Sverrig, 1851 (In Sweden, 1852); Mit Livs Eventyr, 1855 (The True Story of My Life, 1847; also as The Fairy Tale of My Life, 1855); I Spanien, 1863 (In Spain, 1864); Et besøg i Portugal, 1866 (A Visit to Portugal, 1870); Levnedsbogen, 1805-1831, 1926 (Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen, 1990). poetry: Digte, 1830. Bibliography Andersen, Jens. Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2005. Highly readable and useful biography examining the writer’s life and literary work. Book, Frederik. Hans Christian Andersen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. This biography studies Andersen’s personal and literary history. It considers how psychiatry, folklore, and the history of religion affected Andersen’s life. Andersen’s autobiographies are examined in the light of what was real and what was the fairy tale he was creating about his life. Contains illustrations of his fairy tales and photographs. Bresdorff, Elias. Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work, 1805-1875. New York: Noonday Press, 1994. This book is divided in two sections: The first part is a biographical study of Andersen’s complex personality; the second is a critical study of his most famous fairy tales and stories. Dollerup, Cay. “Translation as a Creative Force in Literature: The Birth of the European Bourgeois Fairy-Tale.” The Modern Language Review 90 (January, 1995): 94102. Discusses the European bourgeois fairy tale’s development as the result of translation of the stories of the Brothers Grimm into Danish and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen into German because children would not be familiar with foreign languages. Argues that the Grimms and Andersen were adapted to European middle-class values. Grobech, Bo. Hans Christian Andersen. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Grobech provides a solid introduction to Andersen’s life told in entertaining narrative style. The book

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includes studies of Andersen’s fairy tales, his international influence, and his influence in the twentieth century. It can be read by the general reader as well as literary specialists. Johansen, Jorgen Dines. “The Merciless Tragedy of Desire: An Interpretation of H. C. Andersen’s Den lille Havfrue.” Scandinavian Studies 68 (Spring, 1996): 203241. Provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of “The Little Mermaid,” focusing on the tension between earthly love and religious reparation in the story. Discusses the themes of love and salvation in an extensive analysis of love and sexuality in the tale. Nassaar, Christopher S. “Andersen’s ‘The Shadow’ and Wilde’s ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’: A Case of Influence.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (September, 1995): 217-224. Argues that Oscar Wilde’s tale is a Christian response to Andersen’s nihilistic tale. Claims that, while Andersen’s tale is about the triumph of evil, Wilde’s story is about the triumph of Christian love. ____________. “Andersen’s ‘The Ugly Ducking’ and Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta.’” The Explicator 55 (Winter, 1997): 83-85. Discusses the influence of Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” on Wilde’s story. Argues that, in spite of the surface differences, Wilde’s story is a direct reversal of Andersen’s. Rossel, Sven Hakon, ed. Hans Christian Andersen: Danish Writer and Citizen of the World. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. This scholarly collection of essays establishes Andersen as a major European writer of the nineteenth century. Special attention is given to his biography as well as his travel writing and fairy tales. Spink, Reginald. Hans Christian Andersen and His World. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972. Excellent overview of Andersen’s life. Emphasizes how his background and childhood affected his art. Extensively illustrated with photographs, drawings, and reprints of the illustrated fairy tales in several foreign-language editions. Wullschlager, Jackie. Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Thorough biography of the writer.

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Sher wood Anderson Born: Camden, Ohio; September 13, 1876 Died: Colón, Panama Canal Zone (now in Panama); March 8, 1941 Principal short fiction • The Triumph of the Egg, 1921; Horses and Men, 1923; Death in the Woods, and Other Stories, 1933; The Sherwood Anderson Reader, 1947. Other literary forms • Sherwood Anderson published seven novels, collections of essays, memoirs, poetry, and dramatizations of Winesburg, Ohio, as well as other stories. He was a prolific article writer and for a time owned and edited both the Republican and Democratic newspapers in Marion, Virginia. In 1921, he received a twothousand-dollar literary prize from The Dial magazine. While employed as a copywriter, Anderson wrote many successful advertisements. Achievements • Sherwood Anderson, a protomodernist, is generally accepted as an innovator in the field of the short story despite having produced only one masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio. In his work, he not only revolutionized the structure of short fiction by resisting the literary slickness of the contrived plot but also encouraged a simple and direct prose style, one which reflects the spare poetry of ordinary American speech. Anderson’s thematic concerns were also innovative. He was one of the first writers to dramatize the artistic repudiation of the business world and to give the craft of the short story a decided push toward presenting a slice of life as a significant moment. His concern with the “grotesques” in society—the neurotics and eccentrics—is also innovative as is the straightforward attention he pays to his characters’ sexuality. Anderson’s contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck were influenced by his work, as were several later writers: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver. Biography • Sherwood Anderson was the third of seven children of a father who was an itinerant harness maker, house painter and a mother of either German or Italian descent. His father was a Civil War veteran (a Southerner who fought with the Union), locally famed as a storyteller. His elder brother, Karl, became a prominent painter who later introduced Sherwood to Chicago’s Bohemia, which gained him access to the literary world. Declining fortunes caused the family to move repeatedly until they settled in Clyde, Ohio (the model for Winesburg), a village just south of Lake Erie. The young Anderson experienced a desultory schooling and worked at several jobs: as a newsboy, a housepainter, a stableboy, a farmhand, and a laborer in a bicycle factory. After serving in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (he saw no combat), he acquired a further year of schooling at Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio, but remained undereducated throughout his life. Jobs as advertising copywriter gave him a first taste of writing, and he went on to a successful business career. In 1912, the central psychological event of his life occurred. He suffered a nervous breakdown, which led him to walk out of his paint factory job in Elyria, Ohio. He moved to

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Chicago, where he began to meet writers such as Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, and Ben Hecht, a group collectively known as the Chicago Renaissance. A significant nonliterary contact was Dr. Trigant Burrow of Baltimore, who operated a Freudian therapeutic camp in Lake Chateaugay, New York, during the summers of 1915 and 1916. It should be noted, however, that Anderson ultimately rejected scientific probing of the psyche, for he typically believed that the human mind is static and incapable of meaningful change for the better. Publication of Winesburg, Ohio catapulted him into prominence, and he traveled to Europe in 1921, where he became acquainted with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. In 1923, while Library of Congress living in New Orleans, he shared an apartment with William Faulkner. Anderson married and divorced four times. He and his first wife had three children. His second wife, Tennessee Mitchell, had been a lover to Edgar Lee Masters, author of the Spoon River Anthology (1915). His last wife, Eleanor Copenhaver, had an interest in the southern labor movement, which drew Anderson somewhat out of his social primitivism, and, for a time in the 1930’s, he became a favorite of communists and socialists. His death, in Colón, Panama Canal Zone, while on a voyage to South America, was notable for its unique circumstances: He died of peritonitis caused by a toothpick accidentally swallowed while eating hors d’œuvres. Analysis • Sherwood Anderson’s best-known and most important work is the American classic, Winesburg, Ohio. It is a collection of associated short stories set in the mythical town of Winesburg in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The stories catalog Anderson’s negative reaction to the transformation of Ohio from a largely agricultural to an industrial society, which culminated about the time he was growing up in the village of Clyde in the 1880’s. Its twenty-five stories are vignettes of the town doctor; the voluble baseball coach; the still attractive but aging-with-loneliness high school teacher; the prosperous and harsh farmer-turned-religious fanatic; the dirt laborer; the hotel keeper; the banker’s daughter, and her adolescent suitors; the Presbyterian minister struggling with temptation; the town drunk; the town rough; the town homosexual; and the town “half-wit.” The comparison to Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is obvious: Both works purport to reveal the secret lives of small-town Americans living in the Middle West, and ironically both owe their popular success to the elegiac recording of this era, which most Americans insist on viewing idyllically. Anderson’s work, however, differs by more directly relating sexuality to the bizarre behavior of many of his characters and by employing a coherent theme. That theme is an exploration of psychological “grotesques”—the casualties of economic progress—and how these grotesques participate in the maturing of George

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Willard, the teenage reporter for the Winesburg Eagle, who at the end of the book departs for a bigger city to become a journalist. By then his sometimes callous ambition to get ahead has been tempered by a sense of what Anderson chooses to call “sophistication,” the title of the penultimate story. The achievement of George’s sophistication gives Winesburg, Ohio its artistic movement but makes it problematic for many critics and thoughtful Americans. “The Book of the Grotesque” • The prefacing story defines grotesques. A dying old writer hires a carpenter to build up his bed so that he can observe the trees outside without getting out of it. (While living in Chicago in 1915 Anderson had his own bed similarly raised so that he could observe the Loop.) After the carpenter leaves, the writer returns to his project—the writing of “The Book of the Grotesque,” which grieves over the notion that in the beginning of the world there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a “truth.” People turned these thoughts into many beautiful truths such as the truth of passion, wealth, poverty, profligacy, carelessness, and others; a person could then appropriate a single one of these truths and try to live by it. It was thus that a person would become a grotesque—a personality dominated by an overriding concern which in time squeezed out other facets of life. This epistemological fable, which involves a triple-reduction, raises at least two invalidating questions: First, Can there be “thoughts” without the truth to establish the self-differentiating process which generates thought?, and second, If universals are denied and all truths have equal value (they are all beautiful), then why should a person be condemned for choosing only one of these pluralistic “truths”? “Hands” • The stories in Winesburg, Ohio nevertheless do grapple with Anderson’s intended theme, and a story such as “Hands” clearly illustrates what he means by a grotesque. The hands belong to Wing Biddlebaum, formerly Adolph Myers, a teacher in a Pennsylvania village who was beaten and run out of town for caressing boys. Anderson is delicately oblique about Wing’s homosexuality, for the story focuses on how a single traumatic event can forever after rule a person’s life—Wing is now a fretful recluse whose only human contact occurs when George Willard visits him occasionally. George puzzles over Wing’s expressive hands but never fathoms the reason for his suffering diffidence. “Hands,” besides giving first flesh to the word grotesque, makes readers understand that a character’s volition is not necessarily the factor that traps him into such an ideological straitjacket; sympathy can therefore be more readily extended. “The Philosopher” • “The Philosopher” provides a more subtle illustration of a grotesque and introduces the idea that a grotesque need not be pitiable or tragic; in fact, he can be wildly humorous, as demonstrated at the beginning of the story with the philosopher’s description: Doctor Parcival, the philosopher, was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow moustache . . . he wore a dirty white waistcoat out of whose pocket protruded a number of black cigars . . . there was something strange about his eyes: the lid of his left eye twitched; it fell down and it snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside playing with the cord.

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It is George Willard’s misfortune that Dr. Parcival likes him and uses him as a sounding board for his wacky pomposity. He wishes to convince the boy of the advisability of adopting a line of conduct that he himself is unable to define but amply illustrates with many “parables” which add up to the belief (as George begins to suspect) that all men are despicable. He tells George that his father died in an insane asylum, and then he continues on about a Dr. Cronin from Chicago who may have been murdered by several men, one of whom could have been yours truly, Dr. Parcival. He announces that he actually arrived in Winesburg to write a book. About to launch on the subject of the book, he is sidetracked into the story of his brother who worked for the railroad as part of a roving paint crew (which painted everything orange); on payday the brother would place his money on the kitchen table—daring any member of the family to touch it. The brother, while drunk, is run over by the rail car housing the other members of his crew. One day George drops into Dr. Parcival’s office for his customary morning visit and discovers him quaking with fear. Earlier a little girl had been thrown from her buggy, and the doctor had inexplicably refused to heed a passerby’s call (perhaps because he is not a medical doctor). Other doctors, however, arrived on the scene, and no one noticed Dr. Parcival’s absence. Not realizing this, the doctor shouts to George that he knows human nature and that soon a hanging party will be formed to hang him from a lamppost as punishment for his callous refusal to attend to the dying child. When his certainty dissipates, he whimpers to George, “If not now, sometime.” He begs George to take him seriously and asks him to finish his book if something should happen to him; to this end he informs George of the subject of the book, which is: Everyone in the world is Christ, and they are all crucified. Many critics have singled out one or another story as the best in Winesburg, Ohio; frequently mentioned are “The Untold Lie,” “Hands,” and “Sophistication.” However, aside from the fact that this may be an unfair exercise—because the stories in Winesburg, Ohio were written to stand together—these choices bring out the accusation that much of Anderson’s work has a “setup” quality—a facile solemnity which makes his fictions manifest. “The Philosopher” may be the best story because Dr. Parcival’s grotesqueness eludes overt labeling; its finely timed humor reveals Anderson’s ability to spoof his literary weaknesses, and the story captures one of those character types who, like Joe Welling of “A Man of Ideas,” is readily observable and remembered but proves irritatingly elusive when set down. “Godliness” • Anderson exhibits a particular interest in the distorting effect that religious mania has on the personality, and several stories in Winesburg, Ohio attack or ridicule examples of conspicuous religiosity. “Godliness,” a tetralogy with a gothic flavor, follows the life of Jesse Bentley, a wealthy, progressive farmer who poisons the life of several generations of his relatives with his relentless harshness until he becomes inflamed by Old Testament stories and conceives the idea of replicating an act of animal sacrifice. Because of this behavior, he succeeds in terrifying his fifteen-yearold grandson, the only person he loves, who flees from him never to be heard from again, thus breaking the grandfather’s spirit. “The Strength of God” • Two stories, “The Strength of God” and “The Teacher,” are juxtaposed to mock cleverly a less extravagant example of piety. The Reverend Curtis Hartman espies Kate Swift, the worldly high school teacher, reading in bed

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and smoking a cigarette. The sight affronts and preoccupies him and plunges him into a prolonged moral struggle, which is resolved when one night he observes her kneeling naked by her bed praying. He smashes the window through which he has been watching her and runs into George Willard’s office shouting that Kate Swift is an instrument of God bearing a message of truth. Kate remains entirely oblivious of the Reverend Hartman, for she is preoccupied with George, in whom she has detected a spark of literary genius worthy of her cultivation. Her praying episode—an act of desperation which Hartman mistook for a return to faith—was the result of her realization, while in George’s arms, that her altruism had turned physical. “Sophistication” • It is exposure to these disparate egoisms, the death of his mother and a poignant evening with Helen White, the banker’s daughter, which are gathered into the components of George’s “sophistication,” the achievement of which causes him to leave town. George’s departure, however, has a decidedly ambivalent meaning. Anderson as well as other writers before and after him have shown that American small-town life can be less than idyllic, but Winesburg, Ohio is problematic because it is not simply another example of “the revolt from the village.” In the story “Paper Pills,” the narrator states that apples picked from Winesburg orchards will be eaten in city apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. A few rejected apples, however, which have gathered all their sweetness in one corner and are delicious to eat, remain on the trees and are eaten by those who are not discouraged by their lack of cosmetic appeal. Thus the neuroses of Anderson’s grotesques are sentimentalized and become part of his increasingly strident polemic against rationality, the idea of progress, mechanization, scientific innovation, urban culture, and other expressions of social potency. Anderson never wonders why pastorals are not written by pastors but rather by metropolitans whose consciousnesses are heightened by the advantages of urban life; his own version of a pastoral, Winesburg, Ohio, was itself written in Chicago. Anderson published three other collections of short stories in his lifetime, and other stories which had appeared in various magazines were posthumously gathered by Paul Rosenfeld in The Sherwood Anderson Reader. These are anthologies with no common theme or recurring characters, although some, such as Horses and Men, portray a particular milieu such as the racing world or rustic life. Many of the stories, and nearly all those singled out by the critics for their high quality, are first-person narratives. They are told in a rambling, reminiscent vein and are often preferred to those in Winesburg, Ohio because they lack a staged gravity. The grotesques are there, but less as syndromes than as atmospheric effects. “Death in the Woods” • The gothic nature of the later stories becomes more pronounced, and violence, desolation, and decay gain ascendancy in his best story, “Death in the Woods,” from the collection of the same name. This work also has another dimension: It is considered “to be among that wide and interesting mass of creative literature written about literature,” for, as the narrator tells the story of the elderly drudge who freezes to death while taking a shortcut through the snowy woods, he explains that as a young man he worked on the farm of a German who kept a bound servant like the young Mrs. Grimes. He recalls the circular track that her dogs made about her body while growing bold enough to get at her bag of meat when he himself has an encounter with dogs on a moonlit winter night. When the woman’s body is found and identified, the townspeople turn against her ruffian husband and

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son and force them out of town, and their dwelling is visited by the narrator after it becomes an abandoned and vandalized hulk. Because Mrs. Grimes is such an unobtrusive and inarticulate character, the narrator is forced to tell her story, as well as how he gained each aspect of the story, until the readers’ interest is awakened by the uncovering of the narrator’s mental operations. This process leads the narrator to ponder further how literature itself is written and guides him to the final expansion: consciousness of his own creative processes. The transfer of interest from the uncanny circumstances of Mrs. Grimes’s death to this awareness of human creativity lends some credibility to Sherwood Anderson’s epitaph, “Life, Not Death, Is the Great Adventure.” “The Man Who Became a Woman” • “The Man Who Became a Woman,” from Horses and Men, is another critic’s choice. A young horse groom is sneaking a drink at a bar and imagines that his image on the counter mirror is that of a young girl. He becomes involved in an appalling barroom brawl (its horror contradicts the popular image of brawls in Westerns), and later, while sleeping nude on top of a pile of horse blankets, he is nearly raped by two drunken black grooms who mistake him for a slim young woman. The several strong foci in this long story tend to cancel one another out, and the built-in narrative devices for explaining the reason for the telling of the story succeed only in giving it a disconnected feel, although it is the equal of “Death in the Woods” in gothic details. “I Am a Fool” • “I Am a Fool,” also from Horses and Men, is Anderson’s most popular story. Here a young horse groom describes a humiliation caused less by his own gaucheness with the opposite sex than by the gulf of social class and education which separates him from the girl. The story re-creates the universe of adolescent romance so well presented in Winesburg, Ohio and brings a knowing smile from all manner of readers. “The Egg” • In “The Egg” (from The Triumph of the Egg), a husband-and-wife team of entrepreneurs try their hand at chicken-raising and running a restaurant. They fail at both, and the cause in both instances is an egg. This is a mildly humorous spoof on the American penchant for quick-success schemes, which nevertheless does not explain the praise the story has been given. “The Corn Planting” • “The Corn Planting” (from The Sherwood Anderson Reader) is Anderson without histrionics. An elderly farm couple are told that their city-dwelling son has been killed in an automobile accident. In response, the pair rig a planting machine and set about planting corn in the middle of the night while still in their nightgowns. At this concluding point, a generous reader would marvel at this poignant and internally opportune description of a rite of rejuvenation. An obdurate one would mutter Karl Marx’s dictum on the idiocy of rural life (not quite apropos since Marx was referring to European peasants, not technologically advanced American farmers); but this reader shall remark that the story itself functions within its confines and breezily add that Anderson’s favorite appellation (and the title of one of his short stories) was “An Ohio Pagan.” Julian Grajewski With updates by Cassandra Kircher

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Other major works plays: Plays: Winesburg and Others, pb. 1937. novels: Windy McPherson’s Son, 1916; Marching Men, 1917; Winesburg, Ohio, 1919; Poor White, 1920; Many Marriages, 1923; Dark Laughter, 1925; Beyond Desire, 1932; Kit Brandon, 1936. nonfiction: A Story Teller’s Story, 1924; The Modern Writer, 1925; Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook, 1926; Tar: A Midwest Childhood, 1926; Hello Towns!, 1929; Perhaps Women, 1931; No Swank, 1934; Puzzled America, 1935; Home Town, 1940; Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, 1942; The Letters of Sherwood Anderson, 1953; Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters, 1984; Letters to Bab: Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finley, 1916-1933, 1985. poetry: Mid-American Chants, 1918; A New Testament, 1927. Bibliography Appel, Paul P. Homage to Sherwood Anderson: 1876-1941. Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Paul P. Appel, 1970. Collection of essays originally published in homage to Anderson after his death in 1941. Among the contributors are Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, and William Saroyan. Also includes Anderson’s previously unpublished letters and his essay “The Modern Writer,” which had been issued as a limited edition in 1925. Bassett, John E. Sherwood Anderson: An American Career. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. Biography of Anderson that focuses on his nonfiction and journalistic writing and takes a look at how he coped with cultural changes during his time. Campbell, Hilbert H. “The ‘Shadow People’: Feodor Sologub and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Winter, 1996): 51-58. Discusses parallels between some of Sologub’s stories in The Old House, and Other Tales and the stories in Winesburg, Ohio. Suggests that the Sologub stories influenced Anderson. Cites parallels to Sologub’s tales in such Anderson stories as “Tandy,” “Loneliness,” and “The Book of the Grotesque.” Ellis, James. “Sherwood Anderson’s Fear of Sexuality: Horses, Men, and Homosexuality.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Fall, 1993): 595-601. On the basis of biographer Kim Townsend’s suggestion that Anderson sought out male spiritual friendships because he believed that sexuality would debase the beauty of woman, Ellis examines Anderson’s treatment of sexuality as a threat in male relationships in “I Want to Know Why” and “The Man Who Became a Woman.” Hansen, Tom. “Who’s a Fool? A Rereading of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘I’m a Fool.’” The Midwest Quarterly 38 (Summer, 1997): 372-379. Argues that the narrator is the victim of his own self-importance and is thus played for a fool. Discusses class consciousness and conflict in the story. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these seven short stories by Anderson: “Death in the Woods” and “The Egg” (vol. 2), “Hands” (vol. 3), “I Want to Know Why” and “I’m a Fool” (vol. 4), “The Man Who Became a Woman” (vol. 5), and “Sophistication” (vol. 7). Papinchak, Robert Allen. Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Introduction to Anderson’s short stories that examines his search for an appropriate form and his experimentations with form in the stories in Winesburg, Ohio, as well as those that appeared before and after that highly influen-

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tial book. Deals with Anderson’s belief that the most authentic history of life is a history of moments when we truly live, as well as his creation of the grotesque as an American type that also reflects a new social reality. Rideout, Walter B., ed. Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Treats Anderson from a variety of perspectives: as prophet, storyteller, and maker of American myths. Small, Judy Jo. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Provides commentary on every story in Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, and Death in the Woods. Small summarizes the interpretations of other critics and supplies historical and biographical background, accounts of how the stories were written, the period in which they were published, and their reception. Ideally suited for students and general readers. Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. In this biography of Sherwood Anderson, Townsend focuses, in part, on how Anderson’s life appears in his writing. Supplemented by twenty-six photographs and a useful bibliography of Anderson’s work.

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Maya Angelou Born: St. Louis, Missouri; April 4, 1928 Principal short fiction • “Steady Going Up,” 1972; “The Reunion,” 1983. Other literary forms • Maya Angelou is known primarily as a poet and autobiographer. She has produced more than a dozen volumes of poetry, ranging from Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie in 1971 to Amazing Peace in 2005 and Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me in 2006. She has also published six volumes of autobiography and autobiographical essay, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1970 and ranging through A Song Flung Up to Heaven in 2002 and Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes in 2004. The latter is both a memoir and a cookbook. Her other writings include six published plays, many screenplays, and nine books for children. The latter include Angelina of Italy, Izak of Lapland, Mikale of Hawaii, and Renie Marie of France, all of which she published in 2004. Achievements • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970, and Maya Angelou’s first volume of poetry (Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. Angelou was also nominated for Tony Awards for her performances in Look Away in 1973 and Roots in 1977, and she won a Grammy Award for best spoken word or nontraditional album for “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem she read at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993. She holds more than two dozen honorary doctorates, among numerous other awards. Biography • Maya Angelou was born (as Marguerite Johnson) in St. Louis, Missouri, and spent time as a young girl in Arkansas (in Stamps, near Hope, where Clinton grew up) and California. She was raped at the age of eight by her mother’s boyfriend (a story that is retold in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), had a son by the time she was sixteen, and worked at a number of jobs before she became an artist. In her early career, she was a singer and an actor, appearing in plays and musicals around the world through the 1950’s and 1960’s. She has since directed plays and films, recorded music and spoken word, and appeared on television as both a narrator and a series host. She has also taught at various American universities since the 1960’s and at Wake Forest University since 1981. She has been an outspoken advocate of civil and human rights most of her adult life, and she has lectured and written widely about these issues for decades. Analysis • Maya Angelou has produced only a few short stories, but those stories, like her multiple volumes of autobiography, deal directly and poignantly with issues of African American life in America. Since her early years, Angelou has been a political activist and educator, and she is knowledgeable and articulate about civil rights and related issues. Her fiction, like her poetry and her nonfiction, reflects social issues and conditions in the second half of the twentieth century, when racial barriers were falling, but the problems behind them continued. In this sense, Angelou must be con-

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“Steady Going Up” • “Steady Going Up” was first published in the collection Ten Times Black in 1972 and has since been reprinted several times, including in Gloria Naylor’s Children Courtesy, Central Arkansas Library of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995). The story seems more dated than “The Reunion” but raises several important questions nonetheless. As the story opens, a young black man, Robert, is traveling by bus from his home in Memphis to Cincinnati. He has never before been out of Tennessee, but this is hardly a pleasure trip, for he is rushing to pick up his younger sister at the nursing school where she has suddenly become ill (possibly from kidney trouble). Robert has raised Baby Sister since their parents died within six months of each other: “He was three years older than she when, at the age of fifteen, he took over as head of the family.” Getting a job as a mechanic at a local garage, he has been able to support Baby Sister, see her through high school, and send her to nursing school. He has had to put his own life on hold (he plans to marry Barbara Kendrick when Baby Sister is finished with school), and now her illness may further complicate his life. The bus ride is full of understandable anxiety for Robert. When the bus makes its last stop before Cincinnati, Robert gets off to relieve himself but is cornered in the “colored” bathroom by two white men, who have also been traveling on the bus. An older black woman, who was sitting across the aisle from Robert during the trip, has already warned him about the two men, who have been drinking and staring at him. Now they confront him, accusing him of going north to find white women. Robert cannot “stand the intention of meanness” in the two men, and he decides to act so that he will not miss the bus: “He wasn’t going to get left with these two crazy men.” When one tries to force him to drink the bourbon that has made them both drunk, Robert kicks him in the groin and then hits the other man over the head with the bottle. Robert manages to get back on the bus, hiding the blood on his hands and shirt, and the bus pulls away with the two men still sprawled in the bathroom. There is no resolution to the story except this escape. Robert has left “those crazy men”—at least for now—but readers wonder what will happen to him. He may be free of them for the moment, but the hatred and violence they repre-

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sent will continue to follow him. The story ends with a neutral description of the continuing bus trip: “Then he felt the big motor turn and the lights darkened and that old big baby pulled away from the sidewalk and on its way to Cincinnati.” Robert’s problems—as for so many African Americans at this time—still lie before him. “The Reunion” • “The Reunion” has been collected several times, first in the Amina and Amiri Baraka collection Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women. The story is short (only five pages) but is a much more positive short fiction than the earlier “Steady Going Up,” with its lack of resolution. The story is set in 1958 and is narrated by a jazz pianist named Philomena Jenkins, who is playing the Sunday matinee at the Blue Palm Café on the South Side of Chicago with the Cal Callen band. It is a club filled with other African Americans, but suddenly on this day Philomena spots Miss Beth Ann Baker, a white woman sitting with Willard, a large black man. The sight sends Philomena back in memory to her painful childhood growing up in Baker, Georgia, where her parents worked for the Bakers, and she lived in the servants’ quarters behind the Baker main house. The memories are painful because these were “years of loneliness,” when Philomena was called “the Baker Nigger” by other children, and she has moved a long way from “the hurt Georgia put on me” to her present success in jazz music. She fantasizes about what she will say to Beth Ann when she meets her, but when they finally face each other at the bar a little later in the story, it is Beth Ann who does all the talking. She is going to marry Willard, who is a south side school teacher, she tells Philomena, and she claims she is very happy. However, her parents have disowned her and even forbidden her to return to Baker. It is clear that she is with Willard to spite her parents, for she sounds to Philomena like “a ten-year-old just before a tantrum,” “white and rich and spoiled.” When Beth Ann invites “Mena” to their wedding, the narrator replies simply, “’Good-bye Beth. Tell your parents I said go to hell and take you with them, just for company.’” When she returns to her piano after this break, she realizes that Beth Ann had the money, but I had the music. She and her parents had had the power to hurt me when I was young, but look, the stuff in me lifted me up above them. No matter how bad times became, I would always be the song struggling to be heard. Through her tears, Philomena has had an epiphany and experienced a form of reconciliation with her true self, in the recognition that art can transcend social inequity. In the story’s last lines, “The piano keys were slippery with tears. I know, I sure as hell wasn’t crying for myself.” Like a number of other artists (James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, among them), Maya Angelou posits art—and thus literature—as one way of getting above and beyond the social injustices that her society has created. Philomena cannot erase the painful childhood memories, but her music can lift her and others above them to another, healthier human plane. The hurt may remain, but the “song struggling to be heard” is stronger. David Peck Other major works children’s literature: Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, 1986 (illustrated by Etienne Delessert); Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, 1993 (poetry; illustrated by Jean-Michel Basquiat); Soul Looks Back in Wonder, 1993; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and

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Me, 1994; Kofi and His Magic, 1996; Angelina of Italy, 2004; Izak of Lapland, 2004; Mikale of Hawaii, 2004; Renie Marie of France, 2004. plays: Cabaret for Freedom, pr. 1960 (with Godfrey Cambridge; musical); The Least of These, pr. 1966; Encounters, pr. 1973; Ajax, pr. 1974 (adaptation of Sophocles’ play); And Still I Rise, pr. 1976; King, pr. 1990 (musical; lyrics with Alistair Beaton, book by Lonne Elder III; music by Richard Blackford). nonfiction: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970 (autobiography); Gather Together in My Name, 1974 (autobiography); Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, 1976 (autobiography); The Heart of a Woman, 1981 (autobiography); All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986 (autobiography); Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, 1993 (autobiographical essays); Even the Stars Look Lonesome, 1997; A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 2002 (autobiographical essays); Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes, 2004 (memoir and cookbook). poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie, 1971; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975; And Still I Rise, 1978; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?, 1983; Poems: Maya Angelou, 1986; Now Sheba Sings the Song, 1987 (Tom Feelings, illustrator); I Shall Not Be Moved: Poems, 1990; On the Pulse of Morning, 1993; Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women, 1994; The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, 1994; A Brave and Startling Truth, 1995; Amazing Peace, 2005; Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me, 2006. screenplays: Georgia, Georgia, 1972; All Day Long, 1974. teleplays: Black, Blues, Black, 1968 (ten epidsodes); The Inheritors, 1976; The Legacy, 1976; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1979 (with Leonora Thuna and Ralph B. Woolsey); Sister, Sister, 1982; Brewster Place, 1990. Bibliography Bair, Barbara J. “Steady Going Up.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Steady Going Up” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. This selection of essays dealing with Angelou’s poetry and prose broaches, among other subjects, the singular relationship of Angelou to her audience and her distinctively African American mode of literary expression. Ducksworth, Sarah Smith. “The Reunion.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “The Reunion” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Elliott, Jeffrey M., ed. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Part of the University Press of Mississippi’s ongoing Literary Conversations series, this work is a collection of more than thirty interviews with Angelou that originally appeared in various magazines and newspapers, accompanied by a chronology of her life. Provides a multifaceted perspective on the creative issues that have informed Angelou’s work as an autobiographer and a poet. Guntern, Gottlieb, ed. The Challenge of Creative Leadership. London: ShepheardWalwyn, 1997. Guntern’s criteria for those who inspire others to move beyond mediocrity are explored in these philosophical pieces. Among these criteria are originality, elegance, and profundity. Hagen, Lynn B. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996.

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Although a number of scholarly works address the different literary forms Angelou has undertaken (most devoted to autobiography), few critical volumes survey her entire opus, and Hagen’s is one of the best. Chapters include “Wit and Wisdom/Mirth and Mischief,” “Abstracts in Ethics,” and “Overview.” King, Sarah E. Maya Angelou: Greeting the Morning. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1994. Includes biographical references and an index. Examines Angelou’s life, from her childhood in the segregated South to her rise to prominence as a writer. Lisandrelli, Elaine Slivinski. Maya Angelou: More than a Poet. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996. Lisandrelli discusses the flamboyance of Angelou, comparing her to the earlier African American author Zora Neale Hurston. Their hard work, optimism, perseverance, and belief in themselves are extolled. Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Although focusing mainly on the autobiographies, Lupton’s study is still useful as a balanced assessment of Angelou’s writings. The volume also contains an excellent bibliography, particularly of Angelou’s autobiographical works. O’Neale, Sondra. “Reconstruction of the Composite Self: New Images of Black Women in Maya Angelou’s Continuing Autobiography.” In Black Women Writers (1950-1980), edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1983. O’Neale argues that Angelou’s primary contribution to the canon of African American literature lies in her realistic portrayal of the lives of black people, especially black women. O’Neale goes on to demonstrate the ways in which Angelou successfully destroys many of the stereotypes of black women. Williams, Mary E., ed. Readings on Maya Angelou. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997. This collection of essays by literary scholars and noted faculty offers diverse voices and approaches to Angelou’s literary canon.

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Margaret Atwood Born: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; November 18, 1939 Principal short fiction • Dancing Girls, and Other Stories, 1977; Bluebeard’s Egg, 1983; Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems, 1983; Wilderness Tips, 1991; Good Bones, 1992 (pb. in U.S. as Good Bones and Simple Murders, 1994); Moral Disorder: Atwood Stories, 2006. Other literary forms • Margaret Atwood’s publishing history is a testimonial to her remarkable productivity and versatility as an author. She is the author of numerous books, including poetry, novels, children’s literature, and nonfiction. In Canada, she is most admired for her poetry, which has been collected in more than two dozen volumes, ranging from Double Persephone in 1964 to Eating Fire in 1998. Outside Canada, Atwood is better known as a novelist, particularly for Surfacing (1972) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Her other novels include The Edible Woman (1969), Lady Oracle (1976), Bodily Harm (1981), and Alias Grace (1996). Among her volumes of poetry are The Circle Game (1964), The Animals in That Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Interlunar (1984), Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Blind Assassin (2000), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Penelopiad (2005). In 1972, Atwood published Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, a controversial critical work on Canadian literature, and in 1982, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, which is in the vanguard of feminist criticism in Canada. She later followed those nonfiction works with Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) and Moving Targets: with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005 (2005). Her published interviews have been collected in several volumes, including Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood (2006). Atwood has also written for television and theater, one of her successful ventures being “The Festival of Missed Crass,” a short story made into a musical for Toronto’s Young People’s Theater. Atwood’s conscious scrutiny, undertaken largely in her nonfiction writing, turned from external political and cultural repression to the internalized effects of various kinds of repression on the individual psyche. The same theme is evident in her fiction; her novel Cat’s Eye (1988) explores the subordination of character Elaine Risley’s personality to that of her domineering “friend” Cordelia. Achievements • Margaret Atwood is a prolific and controversial writer of international prominence whose works have been translated into many languages. She has received several honorary doctorates and is the recipient of numerous honors, prizes, and awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry in 1967 for The Circle Game, the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 1986 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in 1987 for The Handmaid’s Tale, the Ida Nudel Humanitarian Award in 1986 from the Canadian Jewish Congress, the American Humanist of the Year Award in 1987, and the Trillium Award for Excellence in Ontario Writing for Wilderness Tips in 1992 and for her 1993 novel The Robber Bride in 1994. The French government honored her with the prestigious Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994.

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Two of Atwood’s novels have been selected for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads competition: The Handmaid’s Tale, supported by former prime minister Kim Campbell in 2002, and Oryx and Crake (2003), supported by Toronto city councillor Olivia Chow in 2005. Biography • Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on November 18, 1939. She grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. Following graduation from Victoria College, University of Toronto, she attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, receiving a master’s degree in English in 1962. She taught at a number of Canadian universities and traveled extensively. During the early 1990’s Atwood was a lecturer of English at the Courtesy, Vancouver International Writers Festival University of British Columbia at Vancouver. She later settled in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson and their daughter, Jess. Atwood’s output was steady in fiction and particularly in nonfiction. She made successful forays into the fields of script writing for film and musical theater, and she also produced notable novels. It is her prolific, passionate essay and article writing on a variety of national and international social issues, however, of which human rights is her central concern, that made her a bellwether of Canadian opinion. Her involvement with world political and social issues became evident in her vice leadership of the Writers’ Union of Canada and her presidency of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, and Novelists (PEN), where she waged a vigorous battle against literary censorship. Her association with Amnesty International prompted an increasingly strong expression of her moral vision. Analysis • One of Margaret Atwood’s central themes is storytelling itself, and most of her fiction relates to that theme in some way. The short-story collections each focus on key issues. Dancing Girls is primarily concerned with otherness, alienation, and the ways in which people estrange themselves from one another. Bluebeard’s Egg revolves around a favorite theme of Atwood’s, the Bluebeard tale of a dangerous suitor or husband. The title story explores Sally’s excessive concern with her husband and lack of awareness of herself. Wilderness Tips centers on the explanatory fiction people tell themselves and one another, on the need to order experience through such fiction, and on the ways in which humans are posing threats to the wilderness, the forests, and open space. “The Man from Mars” • In Dancing Girls, a gift for comic and satiric invention is evident from the first story, “The Man from Mars.” Christine, an unattractive undergraduate at a Canadian university, is literally pursued by an odd-looking, desperately

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poor exchange student. The daily chases of a bizarre, small, Asian man in hot pursuit of a rather large Christine (a mouse chasing an elephant, as Atwood describes it) attract the attention of other students and make Christine interesting to her male acquaintances for the first time. They begin to ask her out, curious as to the mysterious sources of her charm. She begins to feel and actually to be more attractive. As months pass, however, Christine begins to fantasize about this strange man about whom she knows nothing. Is he perhaps a sex maniac, a murderer? Eventually, through the overreactions and interventions of others, complaints are made to the police, and the inscrutable foreigner is deported, leaving Christine with mingled feelings of relief and regret. She graduates and settles into a drab government job and a sterile existence. Years pass. A war breaks out somewhere in the Far East and vividly revives thoughts of the foreigner. His country is the scene of fighting, but Christine cannot remember the name of his city. She becomes obsessed with worry, studying maps, poring over photographs of soldiers and photographs of the wounded and the dead in newspapers and magazines, compulsively searching the television screen for even a brief glimpse of his face. Finally, it is too much. Christine stops looking at pictures, gives away her television set, and does nothing except read nineteenth century novels. The story is rich in comedy and in social satire, much of it directed against attitudes that make “a person from another culture” as alien as a “man from Mars.” Christine’s affluent parents think of themselves as liberal and progressive. They have traveled, bringing back a sundial from England and a domestic servant from the West Indies. Christine’s mother believes herself to be both tolerant and generous for employing foreigners as domestic servants in her home; she observes that it is difficult to tell whether people from other cultures are insane. Christine also typifies supposedly enlightened, liberal attitudes, having been president of the United Nations Club in high school, and in college a member of the forensics team, debating such topics as the obsolescence of war. Although the story is on the whole a comic and satiric look at the limits of shallow liberalism, there is, however, also some pathos in the end. It seems that the encounter with the alien is the most interesting or significant thing that has ever happened to Christine and that her only feeling of human relationship is for a person with whom she had no real relationship. At the story’s conclusion, she seems lost, now past either hope or love, retreating into the unreal but safe world of John Galsworthy and Anthony Trollope. “Dancing Girls” • Another encounter with the alien occurs in the collection’s title story, “Dancing Girls,” which is set in the United States during the 1960’s. Ann, a graduate student from Toronto, has a room in a seedy boardinghouse. Mrs. Nolan, its American proprietor, befriends Ann because a Canadian does not look “foreign.” Mrs. Nolan’s other tenants are mathematicians from Hong Kong and an Arab who is becoming crazed with loneliness and isolation. Ann’s only other acquaintances are Lelah, a Turkish woman studying Russian literature, and Jetske, a Dutch woman studying urban design. Ann also is studying urban design because she has fantasies of rearranging Toronto. She frequently envisions the open, green spaces she will create, but she seems to have the same limitation as “The City Planners” in Atwood’s poem of that name. People are a problem: They ruin her aesthetically perfect designs, cluttering and littering the landscape. Finally, she decides that people such as Mrs. Nolan, Mrs. Nolan’s unruly children, and the entire collection of exotics who live in the boardinghouse will have to be excluded from urban utopia by a high wire fence.

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Yet an event in the story causes Ann to change her mind. The Arab whose room is next to hers throws a rowdy party one night for two other Arab students and three “dancing girls.” Ann sits in her room in the dark, fascinated, listening to the music, drinking sherry, but with her door securely bolted. As the noise level of the party escalates, Mrs. Nolan calls the police but cannot wait for them to arrive. Overcome by xenophobic and puritanical zeal, she drives the room’s occupants out of her house and down the street with a broom. Ann finally sees Mrs. Nolan for what she evidently is, a “fat crazy woman” intent on destroying some “harmless hospitality.” Ann regrets that she lacked courage to open the door and so missed seeing what Mrs. Nolan referred to as the “dancing girls” (either Mrs. Nolan’s euphemism for prostitutes or a reflection of her confused ideas about Middle Eastern culture). The story concludes with Ann again envisioning her ideal city, but this time there are many people and no fence. At the center of Ann’s fantasy now are the foreigners she has met, with Lelah and Jetske as the “dancing girls.” The implication is clear: Ann has resolved her ambivalent feelings about foreigners, has broken out of the need for exclusion and enclosure, and has rejected the racism, tribalism, and paranoia of Mrs. Nolan, who sees the world in terms of “us” versus “them.” “Polarities” • The question of human warmth and life and where they are to be found is more acutely raised in “Polarities,” a strange, somewhat abstract story which also comments on the theme of alienation. Louise, a graduate student of literature, and Morrison, a faculty member, are both at the same western provincial university (probably in Alberta). Both are “aliens”: Morrison is American and therefore regarded as an outsider and a usurper of a job which should have been given to a Canadian; Louise is a fragile person searching for a place of refuge against human coldness. Louise, a student of the poetry of William Blake, has developed her own private mythology of circles, magnetic grids, and north-south polarities. Her friends, who believe that private mythologies belong in poetry, judge her to be insane and commit her to a mental institution. At first Morrison is not sure what to believe. Finally, he discovers that he loves Louise, but only because she is by now truly crazy, defenseless, “drugged into manageability.” Examining his feelings for Louise and reflecting on her uncanny notebook entries about him, Morrison is forced to confront some unpleasant realities. He realizes that his own true nature is to be a user and a taker rather than a lover and a giver and that all his “efforts to remain human” have led only to “futile work and sterile love.” He gets in his car and drives. At the story’s end, he is staring into the chill, uninhabitable interior of Canada’s far north, a perfect metaphor for the coldness of the human heart that the story has revealed and an ironic reversal of the story’s epigraph, with its hopeful reference to humans who somehow “have won from space/ This unchill, habitable interior.” The polarities between Louise’s initial vision of a warmly enclosing circle of friends and Morrison’s final bleak vision of what poet William Butler Yeats called “the desolation of reality” seem irreconcilable in this story. “Giving Birth” • The final story in Dancing Girls is the most ambitious and complex in this collection. “Giving Birth” is about a physical process, but it is also about language and the relationship between fiction and reality. The narrator (possibly Atwood herself, who gave birth to a daughter in 1976) tells a story of a happily pregnant woman named Jeanie. Jeanie diligently attends natural-childbirth classes and

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cheerfully anticipates the experience of birth and motherhood. A thoroughly modern woman, she does “not intend to go through hell. Hell comes from the wrong attitude.” Yet Jeanie is shadowed by a phantom pregnant woman, clearly a projection of the vague apprehensions and deep fears that Jeanie has repressed. When the day arrives, Jeanie calmly rides to the hospital with her husband and her carefully packed suitcase; the other woman is picked up on a street corner carrying a brown paper bag. As Jeanie waits cheerfully for a room, the other woman is screaming with pain. While Jeanie is taken to the labor room in a wheelchair, the other woman is rolled by on a table with her eyes closed and a tube in her arm: “Something is wrong.” In this story, Atwood suggests that such mysterious human ordeals as giving birth or dying can never be adequately prepared for or fully communicated through language: “When there is no pain she feels nothing, when there is pain, she feels nothing because there is no she. This, finally, is the disappearance of language.” For what happens to the shadowy woman, the narrator says, “there is no word in the language.” The story is concerned with the archaic ineptness of language. Why the expression, “giving birth”? Who gives it? And to whom is it given? Why speak this way at all when birth is an event, not a thing? Why is there no corollary expression, “giving death”? The narrator believes some things need to be renamed, but she is not the one for the task: “These are the only words I have, I’m stuck with them, stuck in them.” Her task is to descend into the ancient tar pits of language (to use Atwood’s metaphor) and to retrieve an experience before it becomes layered over by time and ultimately changed or lost. Jeanie is thus revealed to be an earlier version of the narrator herself; the telling of the story thus gives birth to Jeanie, just as Jeanie gave birth to the narrator: “It was to me, after all, that birth was given, Jeanie gave it, I am the rez senses: the biological birth of an infant, the birth of successive selves wrought by experience and time, and the birth of a work of literature which attempts to rescue and fix experience from the chaos and flux of being.” “Bluebeard’s Egg” • A frequent theme in Atwood’s fiction and poetry is the power struggle between men and women. At times, the conflict seems to verge on insanity, as in “Under Glass,” “Lives of the Poets,” “Loulou: Or, The Domestic Life of the Language,” and “Ugly Puss.” The title story in Bluebeard’s Egg, however, seems less bleak. In a reversal of sexual stereotypes, Sally loves her husband, Ed, because he is beautiful and dumb. She is a dominating, manipulating woman (of the type seen also in “The Resplendent Quetzal”), and her relationship to her husband seems to be that of doting mother to overprotected child, despite the fact that he is a successful and respected cardiologist, and she has no meaningful identity outside her marriage. Bored, Sally takes a writing class in which she is admonished to explore her inner world. Yet she is “fed up with her inner world; she doesn’t need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll and in Ed is Ed’s inner world, which she can’t get at.” The more she speculates about Ed’s inner world, the more perplexed she becomes. Required to write a version of the Bluebeard fable, Sally decides to retell the story from the point of view of the egg, because it reminds her of Ed’s head, both “so closed and unaware.” Sally is shocked into a new assessment of Ed, however, when she witnesses a scene of sexual intimacy between her husband and her best friend. Ed is after all not an inert object, a given; instead, he has a mysterious, frightening potential. Sally is no longer complacent, no longer certain she wants to know what lies beneath the surface.

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“Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” • The first and last stories in Bluebeard’s Egg reveal Atwood in an atypically mellow mood. “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” is a loving celebration of the narrator’s (presumably Atwood’s) mother and father and of an earlier, simpler time. Yet it is never sentimental because Atwood never loses her steely grip on reality. Looking at an old photograph of her mother and friends, the narrator is interested in the background . . . a world already hurtling towards ruin, unknown to them: the theory of relativity has been discovered, acid is accumulating at the roots of trees, the bull-frogs are doomed. But they smile with something that from this distance you could almost call gallantry, their right legs thrust forward in parody of a chorus line. The “significant moments” of the title inevitably include some significant moments in the life of the narrator as well. Amusing discrepancies between mother’s and daughter’s versions of reality emerge, but not all are funny. For example, the narrator sees that her compulsive need to be solicitous toward men may be the result of early, “lethal” conditioning; her mother sees “merely cute” childhood behavior. The narrator recalls the shock she felt when her mother expressed a wish to be in some future incarnation an archaeologist—inconceivable that she could wish to be anything other than the narrator’s mother. Yet when the narrator becomes a mother herself, she gains a new perspective and “this moment altered for me.” What finally emerges between mother and narrator-daughter is not communication but growing estrangement. Recalling herself as a university student, she feels as though she has become as unfathomable to her mother as “a visitor from outer space, a timetraveler come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.” There are distances too great for maternal love to cross. Atwood is too much of a realist to omit this fact. “Unearthing Suite” • The final story, “Unearthing Suite,” another seemingly autobiographical reminiscence, begins with the parents’ pleased announcement that they have purchased their funeral urns. Their daughter is stunned—they are far more alive than she. Mother at the age of seventy-three figure skates, swims daily in glacial lakes, and sweeps leaves off steeply pitched roofs. Father pursues dozens of interests at once: botany, zoology, history, politics, carpentry, gardening. From her torpor, the narrator wonders at their vitality and, above all, at their enviable poise in the face of life’s grim realities, those past as well as those yet to come. Perhaps the answer is that they have always remained close to the earth, making earthworks in the wild, moving granite, digging in gardens, and always responding joyously to earth’s little unexpected gifts such as the visit of a rare fisher bird at the story’s end, for them the equivalent of a visit “by an unknown but by no means minor god.” The narrator appreciates her parents’ wise tranquillity. She cannot, however, share it. Wilderness Tips • Atwood’s stories are frequently explorations of human limitation, presentations of people as victims of history, biology, or cultural conditioning. The theme of isolation and alienation recurs: There are borders and fences; generational gaps, which make parents and children strangers to each other; failed communication between women and men; gaps between language and felt experience. It is easy to overstate the pessimism which is present in her writings, to see only

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the wreckage of lives and relationships with which her work is strewn. It is therefore important not to lose sight of the human strength and tenacity (a favorite Atwood word) which also informs her work. Eight years later, the stories in Atwood’s short-fiction collection Wilderness Tips ultimately celebrated (still grudgingly) the same human strength and tenacity. This and related themes that shaped Atwood’s vision over her writing life are embodied in the sometimes humorous and self-deprecating, often grim and urgent, seekings of the (mostly) female protagonists both to liberate and to preserve themselves in an increasingly ugly world. The conflicts that oppress these characters are rendered more nastily brutish by the realities of middle-class Canadian society in the late twentieth century. The predominant setting is Toronto, no longer “the Good” but now the polluted, the unsafe, the dingy, the dangerous, and, worst, the indifferent. The battle between the sexes is again the focus of most of the ten stories, the combatants ranging from youth through middle age. For the most part, the battles are lost or at best fought to a draw; the victories are Pyrrhic. In “True Trash,” the consequences of adolescent sexual and social betrayals at a wilderness summer camp are dealt with only by escape into the banal anonymity of adulthood in the city. In “Hairball,” Kat, who is in her thirties, is betrayed by both a previously acquiescent lover and her own body. Stripped of the brittle security she had carefully built for herself, she hits back with a spectacularly gross act of revenge. In “Isis in Darkness,” conventional, secretly romantic Richard invests the poet Selena with a spiritual transcendence totally at odds with her real-life alienation and pathetic descent to early death over the years of their tenuous relationship. In “Weight,” the narrator, a woman of substance, lives by compromise, paying defiant homage to the memory of her scrappy, optimistic friend Molly, who was battered to death by her mad husband. For many of these protagonists (as in Atwood’s other works), language is a weapon of choice: In “Uncles,” Susanna, though emotionally unfulfilled, is a successful, ambitious journalist; in “Hack Wednesday,” Marcia is a freelance columnist; in “Weight,” the narrator and Molly, aggressive lawyers, play elaborate word games to ward off threatening realities; in “The Bog Man,” middle-aged Julie mythologizes her disastrous youthful affair with Connor. Nevertheless, as it does so often in Atwood’s works, the gulf between language and understanding yawns, exacerbating the difficulties of human connections. In two of the collection’s most successful stories, however, that gulf is bridged by messages spoken, ironically, by the dead. In “The Age of Lead,” a television documentary chronicles the exhumation from the Arctic permafrost of the body of young John Torrington, a member of the British Franklin Expedition, killed like his fellows by lead poisoning contracted through their consumption of tinned food. The documentary, which protagonist Jane is sporadically watching, weaves in and out of her recollections of Vincent, a friend from her childhood, recently dead. All their lives, his identity was ephemeral and undefined, but as Jane recalls his slow decline and death of an unnamed disease and ponders his enigmatic nature, the television offers the 150-years-dead Torrington, emerging virtually intact from his icy grave to “speak” eloquently to the living. Similarly, in “Death by Landscape,” Lois’s childhood acquaintance Lucy, who vanished on a camp canoe trip, slyly returns to haunt the adult Lois in Lois’s collection of wilderness landscape paintings, assuming a solidity she never had as a live child. Still, despite the pessimism, inadequacies, and guilt of many of the stories’ characters, the readers’ lasting impressions are positive ones. “Hack Wednesday,” the last

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story, speaks the same grumpy optimism that informs much of Atwood’s poetry and prose. Marcia knows she will cry on Christmas Day, because life, however horrific at times, rushes by, and she is helpless to stop it: “It’s all this hope. She gets distracted by it, and has trouble paying attention to the real news.” Good Bones and Simple Murders • Good Bones and Simple Murders incorporates some material from Murder in the Dark. The short pieces in this collection have been termed jeux d’esprit and speeded-up short stories. They showcase Atwood’s wit, control, and wordplay as she speculates about hypothetical situations, such as “What would happen if men did all the cooking?”, and revises traditional tales, such as “The Little Red Hen.” In Atwood’s version, the hen remains “henlike” and shares the loaf with all the animals that refused to help her produce it. In these pieces, characters who were silent in the original tales get to tell their side of the story. In “Gertrude Talks Back,” Hamlet’s mother explains matter-of-factly to her son that his father was a prig and that she murdered him. In “Simmering,” the women have been cast out of the kitchens and surreptitiously reminisce about the good old days when they were allowed to cook. Many of the short pieces here are explicitly about storytelling. The first story, “Murder in the Dark,” describes a detective game and presents the writer as a trickster, a spinner of lies. “Unpopular Gals” tells of the mysterious women of traditional stories, the witches and evil stepmothers who tell their own side of the story here. “Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women” explains that it is not the careful, prudent, rational women who inspire fiction but rather the careless “airheads,” the open, ingenuous, innocent women who set the plots in motion and make stories happen. “Happy Endings” plays with variations on a simple plot, answering in different ways what happens after a man and a woman meet. “The Page” explores the blank whiteness of an empty page and the myriad stories that lurk beneath it. Atwood does not imply that human experience is beyond understanding, that evil is necessarily beyond redemption, or that human beings are beyond transformation. Her wit, humor, irony, imagination, and sharp intelligence save her and her readers from despair, if anything can. To write at all in this negative age seems in itself an act of courage and affirmation, an act Margaret Atwood gives no sign of renouncing. Though her readers already know Atwood’s message, it bears repeating. Karen A. Kildahl With updates by Jill Rollins and Karen F. Stein Other major works novels: The Edible Woman, 1969; Surfacing, 1972; Lady Oracle, 1976; Life Before Man, 1979; Bodily Harm, 1981; The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985; Cat’s Eye, 1988; The Robber Bride, 1993; Alias Grace, 1996; The Blind Assassin, 2000; Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Penelopiad: They Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, 2005. poetry: Double Persephone, 1961; The Circle Game, 1964 (single poem), 1966 (collection); Kaleidoscopes Baroque: A Poem, 1965; Talismans for Children, 1965; Expeditions, 1966; Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein, 1966; The Animals in That Country, 1968; What Was in the Garden, 1969; Procedures for Underground, 1970; The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 1970; Power Politics, 1971; You Are Happy, 1974; Selected Poems, 1976; Two-Headed Poems, 1978; True Stories, 1981; Snake Poems, 1983; Interlunar, 1984; Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976-1986, 1987; Selected Poems, 1966-1984, 1990; Poems, 1965-1975,

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1991; Poems, 1976-1989, 1992; Morning in the Burned House, 1995; Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965-1995, 1998. nonfiction: Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, 1972; Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1982; The CanLit Foodbook: From Pen to Palate, a Collection of Tasty Literary Fare, 1987; Margaret Atwood: Conversations, 1990; Deux sollicitudes: Entretiens, 1996 (with Victor-Lévy Beaulieu; Two Solicitudes: Conversations, 1998); Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, 2002; Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004, 2004 (pb. in U.S. as Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005, 2005); Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, 2006 (with others; Earl G. Ingersoll, editor). children’s literature: Up in the Tree, 1978; Anna’s Pet, 1980 (with Joyce Barkhouse); For the Birds, 1990; Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, 1995 (illustrated by Maryann Kowalski); Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, 2004 (illustrated by Dusan Petricic). anthology: The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, 1982. miscellaneous: The Tent, 2006. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Margaret Atwood. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Collection of critical essays about Atwood that have been assembled for student use, from the series Modern Critical Views. Includes an introduction by Bloom. Brown, Jane W. “Constructing the Narrative of Women’s Friendship: Margaret Atwood’s Reflexive Fiction.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6 (1995): 197-212. In this special journal issue on Atwood, Brown argues that Atwood’s narrative reflects the struggle of women to attain friendship. Maintains Atwood achieves this with such reflexive devices as embedded discourse, narrative fragmentation, and doubling. Discusses the difficulty women have in creating friendships because few women think such friendships are important. Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Part of the publisher’s series of reference books on popular contemporary writers for students, this volume provides detailed plot summaries and analyses of Atwood’s major works, along with character portraits, a biography of Atwood, and an extensive bibliography. Nathalie Cooke is also the author of Margaret Atwood: A Biography (1998). Deery, June. “Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood’s Body of Knowledge.” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (Winter, 1997): 470-486. Shows how the themes of feminine identity, personal and cultural history, body image, and colonization in Atwood’s fiction are described in terms of basic laws of physics. Comments on Atwood’s application of scientific concepts of time, space, energy, and matter to the experience of women under patriarchy in an adaptation of male discourse. Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. In this lively critical and biographical study, Howells elucidates issues that have energized all of Atwood’s work: feminist issues, literary genres, and her own identity as a Canadian, a woman, and a writer. Focuses on the fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Atwood: “The Man from Mars” (vol. 5), “Rape Fantasies” (vol. 6), and “The SinEater” (vol. 7).

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Meindl, Dieter. “Gender and Narrative Perspective in Atwood’s Stories.” In Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, edited by Colin Nelson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Discusses female narrative perspective in Atwood’s stories. Shows how stories such as “The Man from Mars” and “The Sin Eater” focus on women’s failure to communicate with men, thus trapping themselves inside their own inner worlds. Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000. Solid collection of original (not reprinted) criticism of a wide variety of aspects of Atwood’s writing. Stein, Karen F. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Lucid and thorough overview of Atwood’s writing in all genres. Includes references and a selected bibliography. This volume supersedes an equally fine volume in the same series, Jerome Rosenberg’s Margaret Atwood (1984). Suarez, Isabel Carrera. “‘Yet I Speak, Yet I Exist’: Affirmation of the Subject in Atwood’s Short Stories.” In Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, edited by Colin Nelson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Discusses Atwood’s treatment of the self and its representation in language in her short stories. Demonstrates how in Atwood’s early stories characters are represented or misrepresented by language and how struggle with language is a way to make themselves understood; explains how this struggle is amplified in later stories. Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Toronto: HarperFlamingo Canada, 1998. Biography focusing on Atwood’s early life through the 1970’s. Attempts to explain how Atwood became a writer and to describe the unfolding of her career.

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Isaac Babel Born: Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine); July 13, 1894 Died: Butyrka prison, Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia); January 27, 1940 Principal short fiction • Rasskazy, 1925; Istoriia moei golubiatni, 1926; Konarmiia, 1926 (Red Cavalry, 1929); Odesskie rasskazy, 1931 (Tales of Odessa, 1955); Benya Krik, the Gangster, and Other Stories, 1948; The Collected Stories, 1955; Izbrannoe, 1957, 1966; Lyubka the Cossack, and Other Stories, 1963; You Must Know Everything: Stories, 1915-1937, 1969. Other literary forms • Although Isaac Babel spent most of his career writing short stories, he tried his hand at other genres without making significant contributions to them. He wrote two plays: Zakat (1928; Sunset, 1960) and Mariia (1935; Maria, 1966). He also wrote several screenplays, most of which remain unpublished. Babel was known to have worked on several novels, but only a few fragments have been published. If he ever completed them, either he destroyed them or they were confiscated by police when he was arrested in 1939, never to be seen in public again. Because of their fragmentary nature, the tendency among critics is to treat them as short fiction. He also wrote a brief autobiography, a diary, reminiscences, and newspaper articles. Achievements • Isaac Babel’s greatest achievement lies in short fiction. From the outset, he established himself as a premier short-story writer not only in Russian but also in world literature as well. He achieved this reputation not only through his innovative approach to the subject matter—the civil war in Russia, for example, or the Jewish world of his ancestry—but also through his stylistic excellence. His mastery of style earned for him, early in his career, a reputation of an avant-garde writer—a model to be emulated, but at the same time difficult to emulate. He elevated the Russian short story to a new level and attracted the attention of foreign writers such as Ernest Hemingway, who read him in Paris. At the same time, it would be unjust to attribute his greatness only to the uniqueness of his subject matter or to his avant-garde style. Rather, it is the combination of these and other qualities that contributed to his indisputably high reputation among both critics and readers, a respect that seems to grow with time. Biography • Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born in Odessa on July 13, 1894, into a Jewish family that had lived in southern Russia for generations. Soon after his birth, the family moved from this thriving port on the Black Sea to the nearby small town of Nikolayev, where Babel spent the first ten years of his life. His childhood was typical of a child growing up in a colorful Jewish environment and, at the same time, in a Russian society replete with prejudices against Jews. In his stories, Babel describes the difficult lessons of survival that he had to learn from childhood on, which enabled him not only to survive but also to keep striving for excellence against all odds. He was a studious child who read under all conditions, even on his way home, and his imagination was always on fire, as he said in one of his stories. Among many other subjects, he studied Hebrew and French vigorously, becoming more proficient in them than in Russian.

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After finishing high school in Odessa—which was difficult for a Jewish child to enter and complete—Babel could not attend the university, again because of the Jewish quota. He enrolled in a business school in Kiev instead. It was at this time that he began to write stories, in French, imitating his favorite writers, François Rabelais, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant. In 1915, he went to St. Petersburg, already thinking seriously of a writing career. He had no success with editors, however, until he met Maxim Gorky, a leading Russian writer of the older generation, who published two of his stories and took him under his wing. This great friendship lasted until Gorky’s death in 1936. Gorky had encouraged Babel to write and had protected him but had published no more of his stories, and one day Gorky told Babel to go out into the world and learn about real life. Babel heeded his advice in 1917, setting off on a journey lasting several years, during which he volunteered for the army, took part in the revolution and civil war, married, worked for the secret police, was a war correspondent, and finally served in the famous cavalry division of Semyon Mikhaylovich Budenny in the war against the Poles. Out of these dramatic experiences, Babel was able to publish two books of short stories, which immediately thrust him into the forefront of the young Soviet literature. The period from 1921 to 1925 was the most productive and successful of his entire career. By the end of the 1920’s, however, the political climate in the Soviet Union had begun to change, forcing Babel to conform to the new demands on writers to serve the state, which he could not do, no matter how he tried. His attempts at writing a novel about collectivization never materialized. His inability (or, more likely, unwillingness) to change marks the beginning of a decade-long silent struggle between him and the state. Refusing to follow his family into emigration, he tried to survive by writing film scenarios, unable to publish anything else. In May, 1939, he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. On January 27, 1940, he was shot for espionage. His confiscated manuscripts—a large crate of them—were never found. Analysis • Isaac Babel’s short stories fall into three basic groups: autobiographical stories, tales about Jews in Odessa, and stories about the Russian Revolution and civil war. Even though the stories were written and published at different times, in retrospect they can be conveniently, if arbitrarily, classified into these three categories. A small number of stories do not fall into any of these groups, but they are exceptions and do not figure significantly in Babel’s opus. Although it is true that many of Babel’s stories are autobiographical, even if indirectly, a number of them are openly so. Several refer to his childhood spent in Nikolayev and Odessa. In one of his earliest stories, “Detstvo: U babushki” (“Childhood: At Grandmother’s”), Babel pays his emotional due to his kind grandmother, who kept quiet vigil over his studying for hours on end, giving him her bits of wisdom every now and then: “You must know everything. The whole world will fall at your feet and grovel before you. . . . Do not trust people. Do not have friends. Do not lend them money. Do not give them your heart!” Babel loved his childhood because, he said, “I grew up in it, was happy, sad, and dreamed my dreams—fervent dreams that will never return.” This early wistful realization of the inevitable transience of all things echoes through much of his writings. The mixture of happiness and sadness is reflected in one of his best stories, “Istoriia moei golubiatni” (“The Story of My Dovecot”), where a child’s dream of owning a dovecote is realized during a pogrom, but the dove, which his father had promised him if he was accepted to high school, is squashed against his face. The trickling of the dove’s entrails down his face symbol-

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izes the boy’s loss of innocence and a premature farewell to childhood. Babel’s discovery of love as the most potent feeling of humankind came to him rather early. As he describes in “Pervaia liubov” (“First Love”), he was ten years old when he fell in love with the wife of an officer, perhaps out of gratitude for her protection of Babel’s family during the pogrom in Nikolayev. The puppy love, however, soon gave way to fear and prolonged hiccuping—an early indication of the author’s rather sensitive nervous system that accompanied him all his life. This innocent, if incongruous, setting points to a sophisticated sense of humor and to irony, the two devices used by Babel in most of his works. It also foreshadows his unabashed approach to erotica in his later stories, for which they are well known. As mentioned already, Babel lived as a child in a world of books, dreams, and rampant imagination. In addition, like many Jewish children, he had to take music lessons, for which he had no inclination at all. He had little time for play and fun and, as a consequence, did not develop fully physically. He was aware of this anomaly and tried to break out of it. During one such attempt, as he describes it in “Probuzhdenie” (“Awakening”), he ran away from a music lesson to the beach, only to discover that “the waves refused to support” him. Nevertheless, this experience made him realize that he had to develop “a feel for nature” if he wanted to become a writer. Another experience of “breaking out” concerns Babel’s awareness of his social status, as depicted in the story “V podvale” (“In the Basement”). In the story, he visits the luxurious home of the top student in his class and has to use his power of imagination to convince the rich boy that socially he is on equal footing with him. When the boy visits the apartment of Babel’s family, “in the basement,” however, the truth becomes obvious, and the little Isaac tries to drown himself in a barrel of water. This realization of the discrepancy between reality and the world of dreams and the need and desire to break out of various imposed confines were constant sources of aggravation in Babel’s life. Other autobiographical stories, as well as many other stories seemingly detached from the author’s personal life, attest this perennial struggle. Tales of Odessa • The stories about the life of Jews, in the collection Tales of Odessa, demonstrate Babel’s attachment to his ethnic background as well as his efforts to be objective about it. In addition to being an economic and cultural center, Odessa had a strong underground world of criminals made mostly of Jews, which fueled the imagination of the growing Isaac; later, he used his reminiscences about the Jewish mafia in some of his best stories. He immortalized one of the leaders, Benya Krik, alias the King, in “Korol” (“The King”). Benya’s daring and resourcefulness are shown during the wedding of his elderly sister, whose husband he had purchased. When the police plan to arrest Benya’s gang during the wedding celebration, he simply arranges for the police station to be set on fire. He himself married the daughter of a man he had blackmailed in one of his operations. An old man who saw in Babel a boy with “the spectacles on the nose and the autumn in the heart” told him the story of Benya’s rise to fame in “Kak eto delalos v Odesse” (“How It Was Done in Odessa”). Here, Benya orders the liquidation of a man who did not give in to blackmail, but Benya’s executioner kills the wrong man, a poor clerk who had very little joy in life. Benya orders a magnificent funeral for the unfortunate clerk and a lifelong financial support for his mother, thus showing his true nature and revealing that it is not crime that attracted him to the underground life but rather a subconscious desire to right the wrongs and help the downtrodden. Through such characters and their motives, Babel is able to lend

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his stories a redeeming grace, neutralizing the mayhem saturating them. Loyalty is another quality that binds these lawbreakers, as illustrated in the story “Otec” (“The Father”), where Benya helps an old gangster, who had given him his start, to marry off his daughter to the son of a man who had rejected the marriage. They are assisted by another legendary figure, Lyubka, known also from the story “Liubka Kazak” (“Lyubka the Cossack”). Lyubka, a middle-aged shop and whorehouse keeper, reigns supreme in her dealings with customers, who, in turn, help her wean her baby from breast-feeding. This interdependency in a life fraught with danger and risks gives Babel’s characters a human face and his stories a patina of real drama. Not all stories about Jews in Odessa deal with the underground world, as “Di Grasso,” a colorful tale about theater life in Odessa, shows. Di Grasso, a Sicilian tragedian, and his troupe flop the first night of the show. After a favorable newspaper review praising Di Grasso as “the most remarkable actor of the century,” the second night the theater is full and the spectators are so enthralled that the wife of the theater “mogul,” to whom the fourteen-year-old Isaac had pawned his father’s watch, makes the husband return the watch, sparing Isaac much trouble. Babel’s uncanny ability to intertwine high aspirations and small concerns, pathos with bathos, turns seemingly insignificant events into genuine human dramas. This is even more evident in the story “Konets bogadel’ni” (“The End of the Old Folks’ Home”), where the inmates of a poorhouse near the Jewish cemetery make a living by using the same coffins again and again, until one day the authorities refuse to allow a used coffin for the burial of a revolutionary hero. The ensuing rebellion by the inmates leads to their dispersal and to the end of their life-sustaining scheme. Thus, what began as a clever business proposition turns into tragedy, making Babel’s story a timeless statement of the human condition. Red Cavalry • Babel uses a similar technique in the collection Red Cavalry. Although the stories here are based on Babel’s real-life experiences in the war between the Russian revolutionaries and the Poles, their real significance lies beyond the factual presentation of a historical event, as the author endows every gesture, almost every word, with a potential deeper meaning. It is not coincidental that the entire campaign is seen through the eyes of, and told by, a baggage-train officer named Liutov (a persona standing for Babel), not by a frontline participant. Readers learn about the general nature of the conflict, recognize the place names, and even follow the course of the battles, but they cannot piece together the exact history of the conflict simply because that was not the author’s intention. Babel gives readers single episodes in miniature form instead, like individual pieces of a mosaic; only after finishing the book are readers able to take in the complete picture. The first story, “Perekhod cherez Zbruch” (“Crossing into Poland”), sets the tone for the entire collection. The opening lines reveal that a military objective has been taken, but Liutov’s baggage train that follows sinks into a hazy, dreamy, impressionistic atmosphere, as if having nothing to do with the campaign: Fields flowered around us, crimson with poppies; a noontide breeze played in the yellowing rye; on the horizon virginal buckwheat rose like the wall of a distant monastery. The Volyn’s peaceful stream moved away from us in sinuous curves and was lost in the pearly haze of the birch groves; crawling between flowery slopes, it wound weary arms through a wilderness of hops. . . .

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This passage shows a poetic proclivity of Babel, but it is also his deliberate attempt to take his readers away from the factual course of events and move them to what he considers to be more important—the human perception of the events. Many of the stories in the collection bear the same trademark. Although many stories deserve detailed comment, several stand out for their “message” or meaning that can be culled from the story. Nowhere is the brutal nature of the civil war depicted more poignantly than in “Pis’mo” (“A Letter”). A young, illiterate cossack, Vasily, dictates to Liutov a letter to his mother. He inquires about his beloved foal back home, and only after giving detailed advice about handling him does he tell how his father, who is on the other side, killed one of his sons and was then killed in return by another. This most tragic piece of news is relayed matter-of-factly, as if to underscore the degree of desensitization to which all the participants have fallen prey through endless killing. The cruelty of the civil war is brought into sharp focus by an old Jewish shopkeeper in “Gedali.” Gedali reasons like a legitimate humanitarian and libertarian: “The Revolution—we will say ‘yes’ to it, but are we to say ‘no’ to the Sabbath? . . . I cry yes to [the Revolution], but it hides its face from Gedali and sends out on front naught but shooting.” He understands when the Poles commit atrocities, but he is perplexed when the Reds do the same in the name of the revolution. “You shoot because you are the Revolution. But surely the Revolution means joy. . . . The Revolution is the good deed of good men. But good men do not kill.” Gedali says that all he wants is an International of good people. Liutov’s answer that the International “is eaten with gunpowder,” though realistic, falls short of satisfying the old man’s yearning for justice, which, after all, was the primary driving force of the revolution. It is interesting that, by presenting the case in such uncompromising terms, Babel himself is questioning the rationale behind the revolution and the justification of all the sacrifices and suffering. A similar moral issue is brought to a climactic head in perhaps the best story in Red Cavalry, “Smert’ Dolgushova” (“The Death of Dolgushov”). Dolgushov is wounded beyond repair and is left behind the fighting line to die. He is begging Liutov to finish him off because he is afraid that the Poles, if they caught him alive, would mutilate his body. Liutov refuses. The commander gallops by, evaluates the situation, and shoots Dolgushov in the mouth. Before galloping away, the commander threatens to kill Liutov, too, screaming, “You guys in specks have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat has for a mouse.” Aside from the revolutionaries’ mistrust of Liutov (alias Babel) and the age-old question of euthanasia, the story poses a weighty moral question: Has a human being the right to kill another human being? Even though Babel seems to allow for this possibility, he himself cannot make that step, making it appear that he is shirking his responsibility (after all, he is fighting alongside the revolutionaries). More likely, he is hoping that there should be at least someone to say no to the incessant killing, thus saving the face of the revolution (as if answering Gedali’s mournful plea). More important, this hope hints at Babel’s real attitude toward the revolution. For such “misunderstanding” of the revolution he was criticized severely, and it is most likely that through such attitudes he sowed the seeds of his own destruction two decades later. Not all stories in Red Cavalry are weighed down with ultimate moral questions. There are stories of pure human interest, colorful slices of the war, and even some genuinely humorous ones. In “Moi pervyi gus’” (“My First Goose”), Liutov is faced with the problem of gaining the respect of the illiterate cossacks in his unit. As a be-

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spectacled intellectual (“a four-eyed devil,” as they called him), and a Jew at that, he knows that the only way to win them over is by committing an act of bravery. He thinks of raping a woman, but he sees only an old woman around. He finally kills a goose with his saber, thereby gaining the respect of his “peers.” Only then are they willing to let him read to them Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s latest pronouncements. With this mixture of mocking seriousness and irony, Babel attempts to put the revolution in a proper perspective. His difficulties at adjusting to military life are evident also in the story “Argamak,” where he ruins a good horse by not knowing how to handle it. The Jews are frequently mentioned in these stories because the war was taking place in an area heavily populated by them. Babel uses these opportunities to stress their perennial role as sufferers and martyrs, but also to gauge his own Jewish identification. In “Rabbi” (“The Rabbi”), he visits, with Gedali, an old rabbi, who asks him where he came from, what he has been studying, and what he was seeking—typical identification questions. Later, they and the rabbi’s son, “the cursed son, the last son, the unruly son,” sit amid the wilderness of war, in silence and prayers, as if to underscore the isolation of people threatened by an alien war. In “Berestechko,” a cossack is shown cutting the throat of an old Jewish “spy,” being careful not to stain himself with blood. This one detail completes the picture of a Jew as an ultimate victim. Many characters are etched out in these miniature stories. There is Sandy the Christ in the story by the same title (“Sashka Khristov”), a meek herdsman who at the age of fourteen caught “an evil disease” while carousing with his stepfather and who later joined the Reds and became a good fighter. There is Pan Apolek (“Pan Apolek”), an itinerant artist who painted church icons in the images not of the saints but of local people. There is Afonka Bida (“Afonka Bida”), the commander who almost shot Liutov because of Dolgushov, who loses his horse Stepan and disappears hunting for another. After several weeks, he reappears with a gray stallion, but the loss of Stepan still makes him want to destroy the whole world. In “So” (“Salt”), a woman carrying a bundled baby uses him to gain sympathy and hitch a train ride. It turns out that the bundle is nothing but a two-pound sack of salt; she is thrown out of the moving train and then shot from the distance. The man who killed her pronounces solemnly, “We will deal mercilessly with all the traitors that are dragging us to the dogs and want to turn everything upside down and cover Russia with nothing but corpses and dead grass,” which is exactly what he has just done. Finally, in one of the best stories in the book, “Vdova” (“The Widow”), a lover of the dying commander is bequeathed all of his belongings, with the request that she send some of them to his mother. When the widow shows signs of not following the will of the deceased, she is beaten, and, if she forgets the second time, she will be reminded again in the same fashion. These stories are perfect illustrations of Babel’s ability to create unforgettable but credible characters, to set up dramatic scenes, and to conjure a proper atmosphere, while endowing his creations with a truly human pathos—qualities that characterize most of his stories but especially those in Red Cavalry. Among the stories outside the three groups, several are worth mentioning. An early story, “Mama, Rimma, i Alla” (“Mama, Rimma, and Alla”), resembles an Anton Chekhov story in that the domestic problems in a family (a mother finds it difficult to cope with her daughters in absence of her husband) are not solved and the story dissolves in hopelessness. “Iisusov grekh” (“The Sin of Jesus”) is a colorful tale of a woman whose husband is away at war and who goes to Jesus for advice about loneliness. When Jesus sends her an angel, she accidentally smothers him to death in sleep. She goes again to Jesus, but now he damns her as a slut, which she resents, for it is not

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her fault that she lusts, that people drink vodka, and that he has created “a woman’s soul, stupid and lonely.” When finally Jesus admits his error and asks for forgiveness, she refuses to accept it, saying, “There is no forgiveness for you and never will be.” The story displays Babel’s exquisite sense of humor along with a keen understanding of human nature and the complexities of life. A variant, “Skazka pro babu” (“The Tale of a Woman”), another Chekhovian story, again depicts the plight of a widow who, in her loneliness, asks a friend to find her a husband. When she does, he mistreats her and walks out on her, which causes her to lose her job. Finally, “Ulitsa Dante” (“Dante Street”) is a Paris story in the tradition of Guy de Maupassant, showing Babel’s versatility and imagination. Babel’s stylistic excellence has been often praised by critics. His style features a Spartan economy of words, and he is known to have spent years reworking and revising his stories. Babel’s attention to detail, especially to line and color, often result in fine etchings. There is a pronounced poetic bent in his stories, whether they are located in a city milieu or in the countryside. This is reinforced by a prolific use of images and metaphors in the style of the following passages, quoted at random: A dead man’s fingers were picking at the frozen entrails of Petersburg. . . . The gentleman had drooping jowls, like the sacks of an old-clothes man, and wounded cats prowled in his reddish eyes. One finds in Babel also a surprising amount of humor, as if to offset the cruelty and gruesome injustice of his world. Babel’s artfulness is especially noticeable in his treatment of irony as his strongest device. He refuses to accept reality as one perceives it. He also plays games with readers’ perceptions, as he says openly, “I set myself a reader who is intelligent, well educated, with sensible and severe standards of taste. . . . Then I try to think how I can deceive and stun the reader.” This cool intellectual approach, coupled with the strong emotional charge of his stories, gives his stories an aura of not only skillfully executed works of art but also pristine innocence of divine creation. Vasa D. Mihailovich Other major works plays: Zakat, pb. 1928 (Sunset, 1960; also known as Sundown); Mariia, pb. 1935 (Maria, 1966). miscellaneous: Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years, 1925-1939, Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, 1964, 1995; The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 2001 (short stories, plays, screenplays, and diaries). nonfiction: 1920 Diary, 1995. poetry: Morning in the Burned House, 1996. screenplays: Benia Krik: Kinopovest’, 1926 (Benia Krik: A Film Novel, 1935); Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy: Kinostsenarii, 1926. Bibliography Avins, Carol J. “Kinship and Concealment in Red Cavalry and Babel’s 1920 Diary.” Slavic Review 53 (Fall, 1994): 694-710. Shows how a diary Babel kept during his service in the 1920 Polish campaign was a source of ideas for his collection of stories, Red Cavalry. Claims that Babel’s efforts to conceal his Jewishness, recounted in the diaries, is also reflected in the stories.

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Carden, Patricia. The Art of Isaac Babel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. In this discerning study of Babel’s art, Carden combines biography and analysis of his main works and themes, especially his search for style and form, and philosophical, religious, and aesthetic connotations. The meticulous scholarship is accompanied by keen insight and empathy, making the book anything but cut-anddried. Includes a select bibliography. Charyn, Jerome. Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel. New York: Random House, 2005. Fascinating, critically lauded account of Babel’s work and life. Ehre, Milton. “Babel’s Red Cavalry: Epic and Pathos, History and Culture.” Slavic Review 40 (1981): 228-240. A stimulating study of Babel’s chief work, incorporating its literary, historical, and cultural aspects. No attention to detail, but rather a sweeping overview. Falen, James E. Isaac Babel, Russian Master of the Short Story. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. Falen’s appraisal of Babel is the best overall. Following the main stages of Babel’s life, Falen analyzes in minute detail his works, emphasizing the short stories. Lucidly written and provided with the complete scholarly apparatus, the study offers an exhaustive bibliography as well. Luplow, Carol. Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982. This detailed, full-length study of Babel’s most famous collection focuses on the narrative perspective of the stories, the basic dialectic between the spiritual and the physical which they embody, their style and romantic vision, and the types of story structure and epiphanic vision they reflect. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Babel: “Crossing into Poland” and “Di Grasso: A Tale of Odessa” (vol. 2), “Guy de Maupassant” (vol. 3), “How It Was Done in Odessa” and “In the Basement” (vol. 4), “Lyubka the Cossack” and “My First Goose” (vol. 5), and “The Story of My Dovecot” (vol. 7). Mendelson, Danuta. Metaphor in Babel’s Short Stories. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982. Scholarly discussion, drawing from linguistic and psychological studies as well as structuralist studies of narrative. Shcheglov, Yuri K. “Some Themes and Archetypes in Babel’s Red Cavalry.” Slavic Review 53 (Fall, 1994): 653-670. Discusses initiatory and otherworldly thematic patterns in “My First Goose,” showing how Babel used archetypes subtly and selectively. Concludes that “My First Goose,” with its density reinforced by archetypal connotations, is an emblematic prototype of later works of Soviet fiction that focus on similar themes. Sicher, Efraim. Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1986. Primarily a formalist study of the style of Babel’s stories. In addition to discussing Babel’s lyrical prose, the book analyzes setting, characterization, narrative structure, and point of view in Babel’s stories. Terras, Victor. “Line and Color: The Structure of I. Babel’s Short Stories in Red Cavalry.” Studies in Short Fiction 3, no. 2 (Winter, 1966): 141-156. In one of the best treatments of a particular aspect of Babel’s stories, Terras discusses his style in terms of line and color and of his poetic inclination.

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James Baldwin Born: New York, New York; August 2, 1924 Died: St. Paul de Vence, France; December 1, 1987 Principal short fiction • Going to Meet the Man, 1965. Other literary forms • In addition to one edition of short stories, James Baldwin published more than twenty other works, including novels, essays, two plays, a screenplay on Malcolm X, one play adaptation, a children’s book, two series of dialogues, and a collection of poetry, as well as numerous shorter pieces embracing interviews, articles, and recordings. Achievements • James Baldwin received numerous awards and fellowships during his life, including the Rosenwald, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Partisan Review fellowships, a Ford Foundation Grant, and the George Polk Memorial Award. In 1986, shortly before his death, the French government made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor. Biography • James Arthur Baldwin grew up in Harlem. While he was still attending DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx he was a Holy Roller preacher. After high school, he did odd jobs and wrote for The Nation and The New Leader. A turning point for him was meeting Richard Wright, who encouraged him to write and helped him obtain a fellowship that provided income while he was finishing an early novel. After moving to Paris in 1948 he became acquainted with Norman Mailer and other writers. His first major work, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 and was followed by a long list of books. He moved back to New York in 1957, and during the 1960’s his writing and speeches made him an important force in the Civil Rights movement. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Baldwin returned to Europe several times and again settled in France in 1974, where he lived until his death. He continued his productivity in the 1980’s. In 1985, for example, Baldwin wrote three works, including his first book of poetry. He died in 1987 of stomach cancer and is buried near Paul Robeson’s grave at Ferncliff Cemetery, Ardsley, New York. Analysis • James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the United States’ most important writers in the latter part of the twentieth century. Baldwin’s writing career spanned more than four decades and is remarkable for its wide diversity of literary expression, encompassing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays. He was considered the most important American writer during the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s on the issue of racial inequality. The repeated thrust of his message, centered on being black in a white America, touched a responsive chord. Disgusted with American bigotry, social discrimination, and inequality, he exiled himself in France, where he poured out his eloquent and passionate criticism. Baldwin also wrote with compelling candor about the Church, Harlem, and homosexuality. He often fused the themes of sex and race in his work. Today, Baldwin’s essays are considered his most important contribution to literature.

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“The Man Child” • Baldwin’s “The Man Child,” the only story in Going to Meet the Man that has no black characters, scathingly describes whites, especially their violent propensities. The central character is Eric, an eight-yearold. The story opens as he, his mother, and his father are giving a birthday party for Jamie, his father’s best friend. In the next scene Eric and his TO VIEW IMAGE, father walk together and then return PLEASE SEE to the party. After a brief summary of PRINT EDITION intervening events, the story moves forward in time to a day when Jamie OF THIS BOOK. meets Eric, entices him into a barn, and breaks his neck. The story described thus, its ending seems to be a surprise, and it certainly is a surprise to Eric. In fact, his sudden realization that he is in grave danger is an epiphany. “The Man Child” is thus a coming-of-age story, an account of a young person’s realization of the dark side of adult existence. Eric, however, has little time to think about his realization or even to generalize very much on © John Hoppy Hopkins the basis of his intimation of danger before he is badly, perhaps mortally, injured. The story, however, contains many hints that violent action will be forthcoming. A reader can see them even though Eric cannot because Eric is the center of consciousness, a device perfected, if not invented, by Henry James. That is, Eric does not narrate the story so the story does not present his viewpoint, but he is always the focus of the action, and the story is in essence an account of his responses to that action. The difference between his perception of the events he witnesses (which is sometimes described and sometimes can be inferred from his actions) and the perception that can be had by attending carefully to the story encourages a reader to make a moral analysis and finally to make a moral judgment, just as the difference between Huck Finn’s perception and the perception that one can have while reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) at first stimulates laughter and then moral evaluation. Eric’s lack of perception is a function of his innocence, a quality that he has to an even larger extent than has Huck Finn, and thus he is less able to cope in a threatening world and his injury is even more execrable. If the measure of a society is its solicitude for the powerless, the miniature society formed by the three adults in this story, and perhaps by implication the larger society of which they are a part, is sorely wanting. To be more specific about the flaws in this society and in these persons, they enslave themselves and others, as is suggested very early in the story: “Eric lived with his father . . . and his mother, who had been captured by his father on some faroff un-

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blessed, unbelievable night, who had never since burst her chains.” Her husband intimidates and frightens her, and his conversation about relations between men and women indicates that he believes she exists at his sufferance only for sex and procreation. Her role becomes questionable because in the summary of events that happen between the first and last parts of the story one learns that she has lost the child she had been carrying and cannot conceive anymore. The two men enslave themselves with their notions about women, their drunkenness (which they misinterpret as male companionship), their mutual hostility, their overbearing expansiveness, in short, with their machismo. Eric’s father is convinced that he is more successful in these terms. He has fathered a son, an accomplishment the significance of which to him is indicated by his “some day all this will be yours” talk with Eric between the two party scenes. Jamie’s wife, showing more sense than Eric’s mother, left him before he could sire a son. Jamie’s violent act with Eric is his psychotic imitation of the relation of Eric’s father to Eric, just as his whistling at the very end of the story is his imitation of the music he hears coming from a tavern. Eric is thus considered by the two men to be alive merely for their self-expression. His father’s kind of self-expression is potentially debilitating, although somewhat benign; Jamie’s version is nearly fatal. “Going to Meet the Man” • “Going to Meet the Man” is a companion to “The Man Child,” both stories having been published for the first time in Going to Meet the Man. Whereas the latter story isolates whites from blacks in order to analyze their psychology, the former story is about whites in relation to blacks, even though blacks make only brief appearances in it. The whites in these stories have many of the same characteristics, but in “Going to Meet the Man” those characteristics are more obviously dangerous. These stories were written during the height of the Civil Rights movement, and Baldwin, by means of his rhetorical power and his exclusion of more human white types, helped polarize that movement. The main characters in “Going to Meet the Man” are a family composed of a southern deputy sheriff, his wife, and his son, Jesse. At the beginning of the story they are skittish because of racial unrest. Demonstrations by blacks have alternated with police brutality by whites, each response escalating the conflict, which began when a black man knocked down an elderly white woman. The family is awakened late at night by a crowd of whites who have learned that the black has been caught. They all set off in a festive, although somewhat tense, mood to the place where the black is being held. After they arrive the black is burned, castrated, and mutilated— atrocities that Baldwin describes very vividly. This story, however, is not merely sensationalism or social and political rhetoric. It rises above those kinds of writing because of its psychological insights into the causes of racism and particularly of racial violence. Baldwin’s focus at first is on the deputy sheriff. As the story opens he is trying and failing to have sexual relations with his wife. He thinks that he would have an easier time with a black, and “the image of a black girl caused a distant excitement in him.” Thus, his conception of blacks is immediately mixed with sexuality, especially with his fear of impotence. In contrast, he thinks of his wife as a “frail sanctuary.” At the approach of a car he reaches for the gun beside his bed, thereby adding a propensity for violence to his complex of psychological motives. Most of his behavior results from this amalgam of racial attitudes, sexual drives, fear of impotence, and attraction to violence. For example, he recalls torturing a black prisoner by applying a cattle prod to his testicles, and on the way to see the black captive he takes pride in his wife’s

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attractiveness. He also frequently associates blacks with sexual vigor and fecundity. The castration scene is the most powerful rendition of this psychological syndrome. The deputy sheriff, however, is more than a mere brute. For example, he tries to think of his relation to blacks in moral terms. Their singing of spirituals disconcerts him because he has difficulty understanding how they can be Christians like himself. He tries to reconcile this problem by believing that blacks have decided “to fight against God and go against the rules laid down in the Bible for everyone to read!” To allay the guilt that threatens to complicate his life he also believes that there are a lot of good blacks who need his protection from bad blacks. These strategies for achieving inner peace do not work, and Baldwin brilliantly describes the moral confusion of such whites: They had never dreamed that their privacy could contain any element of terror, could threaten, that is, to reveal itself, to the scrutiny of a judgment day, while remaining unreadable and inaccessible to themselves; nor had they dreamed that the past, while certainly refusing to be forgotten, could yet so stubbornly refuse to be remembered. They felt themselves mysteriously set at naught. In the absence of a satisfying moral vision, violence seems the only way to achieve inner peace, and the sheriff’s participation in violence allows him to have sex with his wife as the story ends. Even then, however, he has to think that he is having it as blacks would. He is their psychic prisoner, just as the black who was murdered was the white mob’s physical prisoner. Late in this story one can see that Jesse, the sheriff’s eight-year-old son, is also an important character. At first he is confused by the turmoil and thinks of blacks in human terms. For example, he wonders why he has not seen his black friend Otis for several days. The mob violence, however, changes him; he undergoes a coming of age, the perversity of which is disturbing. He is the center of consciousness in the mob scene. His first reaction is the normal one for a boy: “Jesse clung to his father’s neck in terror as the cry rolled over the crowd.” Then he loses his innocence and it becomes clear that he will be a victim of the same psychological syndrome that afflicts his father: “He watched his mother’s face . . . she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her. . . . He began to feel a joy he had never felt before.” He wishes that he were the man with the knife who is about to castrate the black, whom Jesse considers “the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen.” Then he identifies totally with his father: “At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever.” For Jesse this brutality is thus a kind of initiation into adulthood, and its effect is to ensure that there will be at least one more generation capable of the kind of violence that he has just seen. “Sonny’s Blues” • Whereas “The Man Child” has only white characters and “Going to Meet the Man” is about a conflict between whites and blacks, “Sonny’s Blues” has only black characters. Although the chronology of “Sonny’s Blues” is scrambled, its plot is simple. It tells the story of two brothers, one, the narrator, a respectable teacher and the other, Sonny, a former user of heroin who is jailed for that reason and then becomes a jazz musician. The story ends in a jazz nightclub, where the older brother hears Sonny play and finally understands the meaning of jazz for him. The real heart of this story is the contrast between the values of the two brothers, a contrast that becomes much less dramatic at the end.

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The two brothers have similar social backgrounds, especially their status as blacks and, more specifically, as Harlem blacks. Of Harlem as a place in which to mature the narrator says, “boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in a trap.” Even when he was very young the narrator had a sense of the danger and despair surrounding him: When lights fill the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. For example, he learns after his father’s death that his father, though seemingly a hardened and stoical man, had hidden the grief caused by the killing of his brother. At first the narrator believes that Sonny’s two means for coping with the darkness, heroin and music, are inextricably connected to that darkness and thus are not survival mechanisms at all. He believes that heroin “filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality.” Later, however, he realizes that jazz is a way to escape: He senses that “Sonny was at that time piano playing for his life.” The narrator also has a few premonitions of the epiphany he experiences in the jazz nightclub. One occurs when he observes a group of street singers and understands that their “music seemed to soothe a poison out of them.” Even with these premonitions, he does not realize that he uses the same strategy. After an argument with Sonny, during which their differences seem to be irreconcilable, his first reaction is to begin “whistling to keep from crying,” and the tune is a blues. Finally the epiphany occurs, tying together all the major strands of this story. As he listens to Sonny playing jazz the narrator thinks that freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through. The idea in that passage is essentially what Baldwin is about. Like Sonny, he has forged an instrument of freedom by means of the fire of his troubles, and he has made that instrument available to all, white and black. His is the old story of suffering and art; his fiction is an account of trouble, but by producing it he has shown others the way to rise above suffering. John Stark With updates by Terry Theodore Other major works children’s literature: Little Man, Little Man, 1975. plays: The Amen Corner, pr. 1954, pb. 1968; Blues for Mister Charlie, pr., pb. 1964; A Deed from the King of Spain, pr. 1974. novels: Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953; Giovanni’s Room, 1956; Another Country, 1962; Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, 1968; If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974; Just Above My Head, 1979.

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nonfiction: Notes of a Native Son, 1955; Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, 1961; The Fire Next Time, 1963; Nothing Personal, 1964 (with Richard Avedon); A Rap on Race, 1971 (with Margaret Mead); No Name in the Street, 1971; A Dialogue, 1975 (with Nikki Giovanni); The Devil Finds Work, 1976; The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985; The Price of the Ticket, 1985; Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989; Collected Essays, 1998; Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century, “Notes of a Native Son,” 2004 (with Sol Stein). poetry: Jimmy’s Blues: Selected Poems, 1983. screenplay: One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” 1972. Bibliography Hardy, Clarence E. James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Brief exploration of some the most troubling themes in Baldwin’s writing. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Good introduction to Baldwin’s early work featuring a collection of diverse essays by such well-known figures as Irving Howe, Langston Hughes, Sherley Anne Williams, and Eldridge Cleaver. Includes a chronology of important dates, notes on the contributors, and a select bibliography. Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Biography of Baldwin written by one who knew him and worked with him for the last quarter century of his life. Provides extensive literary analysis of Baldwin’s work and relates his work to his life. McBride, Dwight A. James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Stresses the usefulness of recent interdisciplinary approaches in understanding Baldwin’s appeal, political thought and work, and legacy. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Baldwin: “Come Out the Wilderness” (vol. 2); “Going to Meet the Man” (vol. 3); and “Sonny’s Blues,” “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” and “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” (vol. 7). Miller, D. Quentin, ed. Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Explores the way in which Baldwin’s writing touched on issues that confront all people, including race, identity, sexuality, and religious ideology. Sanderson, Jim. “Grace in ‘Sonny’s Blues.’” Short Story, n.s. 6 (Fall, 1998): 85-95. Argues that Baldwin’s most famous story illustrates his integration of the personal with the social in terms of his residual evangelical Christianity. Argues that at the end of the story when the narrator offers Sonny a drink, he puts himself in the role of Lord, and Sonny accepts the cup of wrath; the two brothers thus regain grace by means of the power of love. Scott, Lynn Orilla. James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. Analyzes the decline of Baldwin’s reputation after the 1960’s, the ways in which critics have often undervalued his work, and the interconnected themes in his body of work. Sherard, Tracey. “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique.” African American Review 32 (Winter, 1998): 691-705. A discussion of Houston

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Baker’s notion of the “blues matrix” in Baldwin’s story; examines the story’s treatment of black culture in America as reflected by jazz and the blues. Discusses how the “blues text” of the story represents how intracultural narratives have influenced the destinies of African Americans. Tomlinson, Robert. “‘Payin’ One’s Dues’: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin.” African American Review 33 (Spring, 1999): 135-148. A discussion of the effect life as an exile in Paris had on Baldwin. Argues that the experience internalized the conflicts he experienced in America. Suggests that Baldwin used his homosexuality and exile as a metaphor for the experience of the African American. Tsomondo, Thorell. “No Other Tale to Tell: ‘Sonny’s Blues’ and ‘Waiting for the Rain.’” Critique 36 (Spring, 1995): 195-209. Examines how art and history are related in “Sonny’s Blues.” Discusses the story as one in which a young musician replays tribal history in music. Argues that the story represents how African American writers try to reconstruct an invalidated tradition.

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Toni Cade Bambara Born: New York, New York; March 25, 1939 Died: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; December 9, 1995 Principal short fiction • Gorilla, My Love, 1972; The Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Collected Stories, 1977; Raymond’s Run: Stories for Young Adults, 1989. Other literary forms • Before Toni Cade Bambara published her first collection of stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972), she edited two anthologies, The Black Woman (1970) and Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971), under the name Toni Cade. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, was well received and won many awards. She was also an active screenwriter whose credits included Louis Massiah’s The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), about the bombing of the Movement (MOVE) Organization’s headquarters in Philadelphia, and Massiah’s W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995). Her friend and editor, Toni Morrison, edited a collection of her previously uncollected stories and essays in 1996 called Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, and her final novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, was published in 1999. Achievements • The Salt Eaters won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Society Award, and an award from the Zora Neale Hurston Society. Toni Cade Bambara’s work on The Bombing of Osage Avenue led to an Academy Award for Best Documentary and awards from the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters and the Black Hall of Fame. Her other honors include the Peter Pauper Press Award (1958), the John Golden Award for Fiction from Queens College (1959), a Rutgers University research fellowship (1972), a Black Child Development Institute service award (1973), a Black Rose Award from Encore (1973), a Black Community Award from Livingston College, Rutgers University (1974), an award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club League, a George Washington Carver Distinguished African American Lecturer Award from Simpson College, Ebony’s Achievement in the Arts Award, and a Black Arts Award from the University of Missouri (1981), a Documentary Award from the National Black Programming Consortium (1986), and a nomination for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award (1997). Biography • Toni Cade Bambara was born Miltona Mirkin Cade in New York City in 1939 and grew up in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Queens, New York, and in Jersey City, New Jersey. She attended Queens College in New York and received a bachelor’s degree in theater arts in 1959, the same year she published her first short story, “Sweet Town.” From 1960 to 1965, she worked on a master’s degree in American literature at City College of New York, while also working as a caseworker at the Department of Welfare, and later as program director of the Colony Settlement House. Starting in 1965, she taught at City College for four years before moving on to Livingston College at Rutgers University in 1969. She also taught at Emory University, Spelman College (where she was a writer-in-residence during the 1970’s), and Atlanta University, at various times teaching writing, theater, and social work.

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Bambara’s publication of The Black Woman, an anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by established writers (such as Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall) and students demonstrated her commitment to both the women’s movement and the Civil Rights campaign. By the time she had published her first collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, in 1972, she had adopted the last name of Bambara from a signature she found on a sketch pad in a trunk of her grandmother’s things. Bambara’s belief in the connection between social activism and art was strengthened by a trip to Cuba in 1973, when she met with women’s organizations there. The increased urgency of concern for social activism appears in her second collection of short stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. After her first novel, The Salt Eaters, was published in 1980 and received numerous awards, she increasingly turned her attention to her work in the arts, becoming an important writer of independent films, though she never stopped working on fiction. She died of cancer on December 9, 1995. Analysis • Toni Cade Bambara’s short fiction is especially notable for its creativity with language and its ability to capture the poetry of black speech. In a conversation that was printed in her posthumous collection Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions as “How She Came by Her Name,” she claimed that in the stories from Gorilla, My Love about childhood, she was trying to capture the voice of childhood, and she was surprised that readers received these efforts to use black dialect as a political act. Nonetheless, her writing (like her work as a teacher, social worker, and filmmaker) was always informed by her sense of social activism and social justice in the broadest sense. In her later work outside the field of short fiction (in films and in her last novel), she focused on the bombing of the black neighborhood in Philadelphia where the MOVE Organization was headquartered, the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Atlanta child murders of the 1980’s, all topics that were rife with political meaning. Nonetheless, what enlivens her writing is her originality with language and a playful sense of form which aims more to share than to tell directly. Another essay from Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, “The Education of a Storyteller” tells of Grandma Dorothy teaching her that she could not really know anything that she could not share with her girlfriends, and her stories seem to grow out of the central wish to share things with this target audience of black women peers. Her stories are usually digressive, seldom following a linear plot. Most of them are structured in an oral form that allows for meaningful side issues with the aim of bringing clear the central point to her audience. Though this technique can be daunting when used in the novel-length The Salt Eaters, it allows her to make her short stories into charming, witty, and lively artistic performances whose social messages emerge organically. Gorilla, My Love • Gorilla, My Love was Toni Cade Bambara’s first collection of her original work, and it remains her most popular book. The stories in it were written between 1959 and 1970, and as she explains in her essay, “How She Came by Her Name,” she was trying to capture the language system in which people she knew lived and moved. She originally conceived it as a collection of the voices of young, bright, and tough girls of the city, but she did not want it to be packaged as a children’s book, so she added some of the adult material to it. “My Man Bovane,” for instance, features a matronly black woman seducing a blind man at a neighborhood political rally, while her children look on in disapproval. Similarly, among the fifteen stories (most of which are written in the first person) that make up this book is “Talkin Bout

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Sonny,” in which Betty and Delauney discuss their friend Sonny’s recent breakdown and assault on his wife. Delauney claims he understands exactly how such a thing could happen, and it is left unclear how this unstable relationship between Betty and Delauney (who is married) will resolve itself. TO VIEW IMAGE, Most of the stories, however, focus on young girls determined to make PLEASE SEE their place in the world and the PRINT EDITION neighborhood. “The Hammer Man,” OF THIS BOOK. for instance, tells of a young girl who first hides from a mentally disturbed older boy she has humiliated in public but later futilely attempts to defend against two policemen who try to arrest him. The adult themes and the childhood themes come together best in “The Johnson Girls,” in which a young girl listens in as a group of women try to console Inez, whose boyfriend has left with no promise of Joyce Middler return. As the young narrator listens in the hope that she will not have to endure “all this torture crap” when she becomes a woman, it becomes clear that the intimate conversation between women is a form of revitalization for Inez. A delightful preface to Gorilla, My Love assures readers that the material in the book is entirely fictional, not at all autobiographical, but it is hard for a reader not to feel that the voices that populate the work speak for Bambara and the neighborhood of her youth. “Gorilla, My Love” • The title story of Bambara’s first book-length collection of her own work, “Gorilla, My Love” is also her most irresistible work. The narrator is a young girl named Hazel who has just learned that her “Hunca Bubba” is about to be married. She is clearly upset about both this news and the fact that he is now going by his full name, Jefferson Winston Vale. The story proceeds in anything but a linear manner, as Hazel sees a movie house in the background of Hunca Bubba’s photos, and starts to tell about going to the movies on Easter with her brothers, Big Brood and Little Jason. When the movie turns out to be a film about Jesus instead of “Gorilla, My Love,” as was advertised, Hazel gets angry and demands her money back, and not getting it, starts a fire in the lobby—“Cause if you say Gorilla My Love you supposed to mean it.” What is really on her mind is that when Hunca Bubba was baby-sitting her, he promised he was going to marry her when she grew up, and she believed him. Hazel’s attempt to keep her dignity but make her feeling of betrayal known by confronting Hunca Bubba is at once both a surprise and a completely natural outgrowth of her character. Her grandfather’s explanation, that it was Hunca Bubba who promised to

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marry her but it is Jefferson Winston Vale who is marrying someone else, is at once both compassionate and an example of the type of hypocrisy that Hazel associates with the adult world. The example she gives in her story about going to the movie makes it clear that she has always seen her family as better than most, but she sees hypocrisy as a universal adult epidemic. “Raymond’s Run” • “Raymond’s Run,” a short story that was also published as a children’s book, is about the relationship between the narrator, Hazel (not the same girl from “Gorilla, My Love,” but about the same age), her mentally disabled brother, Raymond, and another girl on the block, Gretchen. Hazel’s reputation is as the fastest thing on two feet in the neighborhood, but coming up to the annual May Day run, she knows that her new rival, Gretchen, will challenge her and could win. Mr. Pearson, a teacher at the school, suggests it would be a nice gesture to the new girl, Gretchen, to let her win, which Hazel dismisses out of hand. Thinking about a Hansel and Gretel pageant in which she played a strawberry, Hazel thinks, “I am not a strawberry . . . I run. That is what I’m all about.” As a runner, she has no intention of letting someone else win. In fact, when the race is run, she does win, but it is very close, and for all her bravado, she is not sure who won until her name is announced. More important, she sees her brother Raymond running along with her on the other side of the fence, keeping his hands down in an awkward running posture that she accepts as all his own. In her excitement about her brother’s accomplishment, she imagines that her rival Gretchen might want to help her train Raymond as a runner, and the two girls share a moment of genuine warmth. The central point of the story is captured by Hazel when she says of the smile she shared with Gretchen that it was the type of smile girls can share only when they are not too busy being “flowers of fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.” The honest competition that brought out their best efforts and enticed Raymond to join them in his way brought them all together as people, not as social competitors trying to outmaneuver one another but as allies. “The Lesson” • “The Lesson” is a story about a child’s first realization of the true depth of economic inequity in society. The main characters are Miss Moore, an educated black woman who has decided to take the responsibility for the education of neighborhood children upon herself, and Sylvia, the narrator, a young girl. Though it is summer, Miss Moore has organized an educational field trip. This annoys Sylvia and her friend, Sugar, but since their parents have all agreed to the trip, the children have little choice but to cooperate. The trip is actually an excursion to a high-priced department store, F. A. O. Schwartz. The children look with astonishment at a toy clown that costs $35, a paperweight that sells for $480, and a toy sailboat that is priced at $1,195. The children are discouraged by the clear signs of economic inequality. When Miss Moore asks what they have learned from this trip, only Sugar will reply with what she knows Miss Moore wants them to say: “This is not much of a democracy.” Sylvia feels betrayed but mostly because she sees that Sugar is playing up to Miss Moore, while Sylvia has been genuinely shaken by this trip. At the end, Sugar is plotting to split the money she knows Sylvia saved from the cab fare Miss Moore gave her, but Sylvia’s response as Sugar runs ahead to their favorite ice cream shop, “ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nothin’,”

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indicates she has been shaken and is not planning to play the same old games. However, Sylvia cannot so easily slough it off. “Medley” • The most popular story from The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, “Medley” is the story of Sweet Pea and Larry, a romantic couple who go through a poignant breakup in the course of the story. Though neither of them is a musician, both are music fans, and their showers together are erotic encounters in which they improvise songs together, pretending to be playing musical instruments with each other’s body. Sweet Pea is a manicurist with her own shop, and her best customer is a gambler named Moody, who likes to keep his nails impeccable. Because he goes on a winning streak after she starts doing his nails, he offers to take her on a gambling trip as his personal manicurist, for which he pays her two thousand dollars. Sweet Pea takes the offer, though Larry objects, and when she gets back, he seems to have disappeared from her life. Nonetheless, she remembers their last night in the shower together, as they sang different tunes, keeping each other off balance, but harmonizing a medley together until the hot water ran out. Though Sweet Pea is faced with the choice of losing two thousand dollars or her boyfriend and chooses the money, the story does not attempt to say that she made the wrong choice. Rather, it is a snapshot of the impermanence of shared lives in Sweet Pea’s modern, urban environment. This transience is painful, but is also the basis for the enjoyment of life’s beauty. Thomas Cassidy Other major works anthologies: The Black Woman: An Anthology, 1970; Tales and Stories for Black Folks, 1971; Southern Exposure, 1976 (periodical; Bambara edited volume 3). novels: The Salt Eaters, 1980; Those Bones Are Not My Child, 1999. miscellaneous: “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” The Writer on Her Work, 1981 (Janet Sternburg, editor); Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, 1996. screenplays: The Bombing of Osage Avenue, 1986 (documentary); W. E. B. Du Bois—A Biography in Four Voices, 1995 (with Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown, and Thulani Davis). Bibliography Alwes, Derek. “The Burden of Liberty: Choice in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.” African American Review 30, no. 3 (Fall, 1996): 353-365. In comparing the works of Morrison and Bambara, Alwes argues that while Morrison wants readers to participate in a choice, Bambara wants them to choose to participate. Bambara’s message is that happiness is possible if people refuse to forget the past and continue to participate in the struggle. Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. The first book-length study to treat Bambara’s fiction to any extent, this study uses narratology and feminism to explore Bambara’s works. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. In the essay “Salvation Is the Issue,” Bambara says that the elements of her own work that she deems most important

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are laughter, use of language, sense of community, and celebration. Hargrove, Nancy. “Youth in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Thorough examination of an important feature of Bambara’s most successful collection of short fiction—namely, that most of the best stories center on young girls. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Bambara: “Gorilla, My Love” (vol. 3); “The Lesson” (vol. 4); “My Man Bovanne” (vol. 5); and “Raymond’s Run” (vol. 6). Vertreace, Martha M. Toni Cade Bambara. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1998. The first full-length work devoted to the entirety of Bambara’s career. A part of the successful Twayne series of criticism, this will be quite helpful for students interested in Bambara’s career. Williamson, Judith Barton. “Toni Cade Bambara.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Bambara’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into her short fiction. Willis, Susan. “Problematizing the Individual: Toni Cade Bambara’s Stories for the Revolution.” In Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Though largely centered on an analysis of The Salt Eaters, this essay also has clear and informative analysis of Bambara’s most important short fiction.

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Russell Banks Born: Newton, Massachusetts; March 28, 1940 Principal short fiction • Searching for Survivors, 1975; The New World, 1978; Trailerpark, 1981; Success Stories, 1986; The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks, 2000. Other literary forms • Russell Banks has published several collections of poetry and many novels. Continental Drift (1985) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Affliction (1989) was nominated for both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Irish International Prize. His other major works include the novels Family Life (1975), Hamilton Stark (1978), The Sweet Hereafter (1991), Rule of the Bone (1995), Cloudsplitter (1998), and The Darling (2004). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Harper’s. Achievements • Russell Banks has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Ingram Merril Award, the Fels Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction from St. Lawrence University and Fiction International, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for work of distinction. His work has been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Biography • Russell Earl Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1940, and raised in New Hampshire. The first in his family to attend college, Banks found the atmosphere at Colgate University incompatible with his working-class background and relinquished his scholarship after eight weeks. He headed for Florida, fully intending to align himself with rebel Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but, lacking enough incentive and money, worked at odd jobs until his career path became clear. He was at various times a plumber (like his father), a shoe salesman, a department store window dresser, and an editor. In 1964 he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1967. His sense of political and social injustice became more finely honed in this city, which is touted as the most northern of the southern states, the most dramatic incident being the disruption of an integrated party by gunwielding members of the local Ku Klux Klan. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1976 allowed him to move to Jamaica, where he immersed himself in the culture, trying to live as a native rather than as a tourist. The experience of living in an impoverished nation helped him professionally as well as personally and gave him a broad perspective on issues of race. Married four times and the father of four grown daughters, Banks has taught at major universities, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Princeton University. Critic Fred Pfeil called Banks

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Short Story Writers the most important living white male American on the official literary map, a writer we, as readers and writers, can actually learn from, whose books help and urge us to change.

Analysis • Russell Banks’s work is largely autobiographical, growing out of the chaos of his childhood: the shouting and hitting, physical and emotional abuse inflicted on the family by an alcoholic father, who abandoned them in 1953. Being forced at the age of twelve to assume the role of the man in the family and always living on the edge of poverty greatly influenced Banks’s worldview and consequently his writing. Banks’s struggle to understand the tight hold that the past has on the present and the future led him to create a world in which people come face to face with similar dilemmas. Banks’s characters struggle to get out from under, to free themselves from the tethers of race, class, and gender. He writes of working people, those who by virtue of social status are always apart, marginalized, often desperate, inarticulate, silenced by circumstances. He aims to be their voice, to give expression to their pain, their aspirations, their angsts. Their emotional makeup can be as complex as those more favored by birth or power. In an interview in The New York Times Book Review, Banks noted that part of the challenge . . . is uncovering the resiliency of that kind of life, and part is in demonstrating that even the quietest lives can be as complex and rich, as joyous, conflicted and anguished, as other seemingly more dramatic lives. Banks’s main strength, besides his graceful style, keen powers of observation, intelligence, and humanity, is his ability to write feelingly of often unlovable people. He never condescends or belittles. He does not judge. He always attempts to show, rather than tell, why characters are as they are, and it is in the telling that Banks is able to understand himself and exorcise the devils of his own past. He did not necessarily set out on self-discovery, but learned, through writing, who he was and what he thought. He grew to understand himself through understanding the elements of his past that shaped him. Banks is sometimes grouped with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus as writers in a “Trailer-Park Fiction” genre, which, according to critic Denis M. Hennessy, examines American working-class people living their lives one step up from the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder and doing battle every day with the despair that comes from violence, alcohol, and self-destructive relationships. Some of Banks’s plots and themes are derivative, with heavy borrowings from Mark Twain and E. L. Doctorow, but his unique touch sets them apart. Banks is both a chronicler and a critic of contemporary society. Influenced by James Baldwin, who said that the true story about race would have to be “written from the point of view of a member of a lynch mob,” Banks attempts to elicit an understanding of the perpetrators as well as of the victims of crimes, cruelties, and injustices. He believes that understanding a situation depends on knowing how the players who created it were created themselves. His characters all search for transformation, for something that will redeem them, lift them above their present circumstances. Their searches lead them to greater desolation and very seldom to contentment. The lower echelon is forever pitted against and at the mercy of the middle class. Hennessy has called Banks’s short fiction the “testing ground of his most innovative ideas and techniques.” The major themes revolve around dishar-

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mony, both in the family and in society, and the eternal search for the lost family. Banks admits that much of his fiction centers on “Russell Banks searching for his father. . . . I spent a great deal of my youth running away from him and obsessively returning to him.” Searching for Survivors • Banks’s first collection combines reality and fantasy, with the fourteen stories divided into three general groups: five moral and political parables, a trilogy of stories that feature Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, and six substantially autobiographical tales set in New England. Banks’s experiments with narrative style, structure, and point of view met with mixed response. He was credited for trying but faulted for lacking a unifying thread. Critic Robert Niemi says of the parables that if the theme . . . is the modern divorce between cognition and feeling [they] stylistically enact that schism with a vengeance . . . almost all [being] solemn in tone, and written in a detached, clinically descriptive style that tends toward the cryptic. Each story ends on a note of either defeat or disillusionment. Survival is highly unlikely. The American Dream has failed. The opening tale deals with a man driving along the Henry Hudson Parkway, thinking about his childhood friend’s car, a Hudson, and about the explorer, who was set adrift in 1611 in the waters that eventually bore his name. The narrator imagines going to the shores of Hudson Bay to look for evidence of the explorer’s fate. Therein is an attempt to understand the past. Banks often deals with the Old World and the early exploration of North America, and he shows the connections between those who set out from their comfortable but unjust homelands to settle the unknown, and modern Americans who have been shunted out of their safe cocoons of fixed values and family security into the relativistic reality of the latter half of the twentieth century. In a story confirming Thomas Wolfe’s thesis that one “can’t go home again,” a young man returns from adventures with guerrilla leader Che Guevara, only to find his hometown irrevocably changed and himself so different that no one recognizes him. In another story, “With Che at Kitty Hawk,” a newly divorced woman and her two daughters visit the Wright Brothers Memorial. An almost-happy ending has the woman feeling somewhat liberated after being trapped in marriage, but that optimism is fleeting. In yet another, “Blizzard,” Banks shifts the narrator, first having him be omniscient, then having him speak through a man who is losing touch with reality, succumbing to guilt and bleak wintry surroundings. The New World • Banks’s search for a comfortable voice caused him to continue to experiment with narrative voice, switching from first- to second-person, and sometimes third-, at times unsettling readers and critics who deemed his shifts haphazard rather than intentional. Never fully at ease with an omniscient, all-knowing narrator, yet not wanting his storyteller to be a character, an integral player, and hence subject to the vagaries of plot, Banks tries to approach his writing as the telling of a story to a partner, perhaps in a darkened room while lying comfortably in bed. He wants to share his story, yet not to tell it from a position of privilege. This approach gives readers the immediacy needed for involvement in the story, but, at the same time, enough detachment on the part of the narrator to trust him.

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Banks called his second collection, which was far more positively received, “a carefully structured gathering of ten tales that dramatize and explore the process and progress of self-transcendence, tales that . . . embrace the spiritual limits and possibilities of life in the New World.” The collection is divided into two parts: “Renunciation” and “Transformation.” The opening story, “The Custodian,” deals with a forty-three-year-old man whose father’s death finally frees him “to move to a new village . . . to drink and smoke and sing bawdy songs.” As he is now also free to marry, he, “reasoning carefully . . . conclude[s] that he would have good luck in seeking a wife if he started with women who were already married.” Fortuitously, he has many married male friends and thus begins his series of conquests. He proposes to a few likely prospects; they succumb; he changes his mind; they return to their husbands, never to know satisfaction again. In another story, “The Conversion,” a young boy is wracked by guilt at not being a good person, at engaging in excessive masturbation, always falling short of what he thought he should be. Alvin wants to change. He wants to be good, decent, and chaste. He fails miserably until one day he sees an angel in a parking lot and decides to become a preacher. His conversion, readers realize, is not so much religious as it is a hope to start anew. His new religious life starts as a dishwasher in a religious camp. Robert Niemi observes that, “much like Banks in his youth, Alvin is torn between the promise of upward mobility and loyalty to his father’s proletarian ethos.” Alvin’s father suspects him of “selling out his working-class identity by associating himself with a bourgeois profession,” reflecting Banks’s own social background in which attempts to move upward were considered a criticism of what was left behind. Historical figures are featured in some of the stories: Simón Bolívar, Jane Hogarth (wife of the eccentric painter William), Edgar Allan Poe, and others. In the Hogarth tale, “Indisposed,” the wife is sadly used by the husband, who treats her as a sexual convenience and housekeeper. She is overwhelmed by the nothingness of her existence. She is fat and self-loathing until she experiences a sickbed transformation which allows her to move beyond “pitying [her large, slow] body to understanding it.” She is then, according to Niemi, able to “inhabit her body fully and without shame, thus reclaiming herself.” Then, when her husband is caught in the upstairs bed with the young domestic helper, Jane is able to exact swift punishment and completely change the tenor of the home. Niemi observes that Banks’s history shades into fiction and fiction melds into history. [His] central theme, though, is the enduring human need to reinvent the self in order to escape or transcend the constrictions of one’s actual circumstances. This means creating a “new world” out of the imagination, just as the “discovery” of the Americas opened up vast horizons for a culturally exhausted Old World Europe. Banks believes that “the dream of a new life, the dream of starting over” is the quintessential American Dream, the ideological keystone of American civilization from its inception to the present day. Trailerpark • In this collection, perhaps his most structurally satisfying, Russell Banks takes readers into the very heart of a community of people who, while not having lowered expectations, do have less grandiose or unrealistic ambitions than those in the mainstream. They go through life earning enough to meet basic needs, never going far beyond their environs. Some work full time, some seasonally; some leave

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for a while and then return. Most seem to find the day-to-day process of getting by nearly enough. Heartaches, anger, depression, and just plain weirdness are often eased with marijuana and alcohol. This collection’s twelve stories are interrelated because they all deal with the residents of the Granite State Trailerpark in Catamount, New Hampshire. They have little in common other than the circumstances of their housing. They are detached physically as well as emotionally, yet they do form a community with at least some common concerns. One of the residents notes that when you are “a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.” Each story deals with one of the dozen or so denizens, all of whom are “generally alone in the world.” Trailer #1 is the heartbeat of the park, where French Canadian manager Marcelle Chagnon oversees operations. She lost a child when an unscrupulous doctor found her more interesting than her illness. Bank teller Leon LaRoche lives in #2 next to Bruce Severance, in #3, a college student who is an afficionado of homegrown cannabis. Divorcée Doreen Tiede and her five-year-old daughter are in #4 next to the burned remains of #5, where Ginnie and Claudel Bing lived until Ginnie left the stove burner on. Retired army captain Dewey Knox is in #6; Noni Hubner and her mother Nancy are in #7. Merl Ring, in #8, enjoys self-imposed isolation, eagerly awaiting the blasting winters when he can set up his equipment in the middle of frozen Skitters Lake and spend months of solitary ice fishing. The former resident of #9, Tom Smith, killed himself, and the place remains empty. The only black resident, Carol Constant, sometimes shares #10 with her brother Terry. Number 11 houses Flora Pease and more than 115 guinea pigs, which threaten to overtake the trailer and the whole park. The opening story, “The Guinea Pig Lady,” introduces all the residents as they share their concerns about the situation. Most notable is the trailer and occupant not mentioned at all—#12, probably the narrator’s place. Banks’s park people have offbeat but understandable pathologies. Some are just achingly lonely. Critic Johnathan Yardley credits Banks with drawing together a “small but vibrant cast of characters, a human comedy in microcosm” made up of “utterly unconnected people [who] find themselves drawn together by the accident of living in the same place; the trailer park, grim and dreary as it may be, is a neighborhood.” Success Stories • This 1986 collection of twelve stories, six autobiographical, six parabolic, has more to do with failed attempts to change the course of lives than it does with acquisition of fame and fortune. The characters in the collection have been called “dreamers, nourished on giddy expectations, but disenfranchised by accidents of class, economy, looks or simple luck.” They think that life holds all sorts of possibilities but learn quickly that fate has not cast a favorable eye on them. Banks sets out to show that success is more elusive for the disenfranchised. Four stories revolve around Earl Painter, a young child in the story “Queen for a Day,” who writes to the host of the popular television show of the same name numerous times hoping that his mother’s plight will land her a place as a contestant. In subsequent stories, Earl attempts to come to grips with his parents and their lies and imaginings. His search for fulfillment leads him to Florida, where he experiences short-lived success. He toys with the idea of marrying into a new life but instead engages in adultery with a neighbor’s wife, learning from her husband that he is just one of her many dalliances. These stories are interspersed with ones that are either fabular or close to surreal.

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Three deal with situations possibly slated to show a similarity between Third World exploitation and an American tendency to disenfranchise the working class. All deal with the terrible consequences of false promises of success. One story, “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” shows the impermeability of the walls separating the classes. The hero, exceptionally handsome, develops an unlikely relationship with his antithesis, an alarmingly ugly barroom pickup named Sarah. His initial curiosity about lovemaking with someone so badly put together turns into a kind of commitment but not one strong enough to be made public. The contrast in their appearances proves too great for him. He is indeed superficial and acts hatefully. Years later, the truth of his love dawns on him, but Sarah is long gone, and he is left with his shame. Critic Trish Reeves notes in an interview that “the irony of finally becoming a literary success by writing about the failure of the American Dream was not lost on Banks.” He said: I still view myself in the larger world the way I did when I was an adolescent. . . . [as a member of] a working class family: powerless people who look from below up. I’m unable to escape that—how one views oneself in the larger structure is determined at an extremely early age. The great delusion is that if you only can get success then you will shift your view of yourself . . . you will become a different person. That’s the longing, for success is really not material goods, but in fact to become a whole new person. Gay Annette Zieger Other major works anthology: Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Greatness, 1989 (with Michael Ondaatje and David Young). novels: Family Life, 1975 (revised, 1988); Hamilton Stark, 1978; The Book of Jamaica, 1980; The Relation of My Imprisonment, 1983; Continental Drift, 1985; Affliction, 1989; The Sweet Hereafter, 1991; Rule of the Bone, 1995; Cloudsplitter, 1998; The Darling, 2004. nonfiction: The Autobiographical Eye, 1982 (David Halpern, editor); The Invisible Stranger: The Patten, Maine Photographs of Arturo Patten, 1999. poetry: Fifteen Poems, 1967 (with William Matthews and Newton Smith); 30/6, 1969; Waiting to Freeze, 1969; Snow: Meditations of a Cautious Man in Winter, 1974. Bibliography Chapman, Jeff, and Pamela S. Dean. Contemporary Authors 52 (1996). A short but information-packed study under the headings “Personal,” “Career,” “Memberships,” “Awards and Honors,” “Writings,” and “Sidelights” (containing author quotes and discussions, mostly of longer fiction but also touching on Trailerpark), followed by an invaluable list of biographical and critical sources. Contemporary Literary Criticism 37, 1986. Provides a good overview of Banks’s life up to 1985 and gives a substantial sampling of literary criticism. Contemporary Literary Criticism 72, 1992. Strong biographical overview of Banks’s life and influences, followed by critical analyses of work published between 1986 and 1991. Included is a valuable interview conducted by writer Trish Reeves that provides a good understanding of the author. Top literary critics provide illuminating commentary.

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Haley, Vanessa. “Russell Banks’s Use of ‘The Frog King’ in ‘Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story.’” Notes on Contemporary Literature 27 (1997): 7-10. Proposes that the story from the Grimm brothers’ folktale collection is a source for Banks’s narrative. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Banks: “The Moor” (vol. 5), “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” (vol. 6), and “The Visitor” (vol. 8). Meanor, Patrick, ed. American Short Story Writers Since World War II. Vol. 130 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993. Good background material on Banks’s life and the general content of his fiction with some discussion of thematic and narrative approaches. Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. Twayne’s United States Authors series. New York: Twayne, 1997. Comprehensive biography that includes critical analyses of all his major literary works. It is rife with charming and telling details that convey the essence of the author, but it maintains the objectivity necessary to present a fair portrait. ____________. “Russell Banks.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement V—Russell Banks to Charles Wright, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Scribner’s, 2000. This accessible article summarizes and updates Niemi’s book on Banks. The bibliography expands and updates the earlier one. Somerson, Wendy. “Becoming Rasta: Recentering White Masculinity in the Era of Transnationalism.” Comparatist 23 (1999): 128-140. Analyzes Rule of the Bone’s treatment of white masculinity and racial identity politics in an era when national boundaries are becoming more porous.

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Donald Barthelme Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; April 7, 1931 Died: Houston, Texas; July 23, 1989 Principal short fiction • Come Back, Dr. Caligari, 1964; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, 1968; City Life, 1970; Sadness, 1972; Amateurs, 1976; Great Days, 1979; Sixty Stories, 1981; Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983; Forty Stories, 1987. Other literary forms • In addition to his one hundred and fifty or so short stories, Donald Barthelme published four novels, a children’s volume that won a National Book Award, a number of film reviews and unsigned “Comment” pieces for The New Yorker, a small but interesting body of art criticism, and a handful of book reviews and literary essays, two of which deserve special notice: “After Joyce” and “Not Knowing.” Achievements • For nearly three decades, Donald Barthelme served as American literature’s most imitated and imitative yet inimitable writer. One of a small but influential group of innovative American fictionists that included maximalists John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon, Barthelme evidenced an even greater affinity to the international minimalists Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. What distinguishes Barthelme’s fiction is not only his unique “zero degree” writing style but also, thanks to his long association with the mass-circulation magazine The New Yorker, his reaching a larger and more diversified audience than most of the experimentalists, whose readership has chiefly been limited to the ranks of college professors and their students. For all the oddity of a fiction based largely upon “the odd linguistic trip, stutter, and fall” (Snow White, 1967), Barthelme may well come to be seen as the Anthony Trollope of his age. Although antirealistic in form, his fictions are in fact densely packed time capsules—not the “slices of life” of nineteenth century realists such as Émile Zola but “the thin edge of the wedge” of postmodernism’s version of Charles Dickens’s hard times and Charles Chaplin’s modern ones. For all their seeming sameness, Barthelme’s stories cover a remarkable range of styles, subjects, linguistic idioms, and historical periods (often in the same work, sometimes in the same sentence). For all their referential density, Barthelme’s stories do not attempt to reproduce mimetically external reality but instead offer a playful meditation on it (or alternately the materials for such a meditation). Such an art makes Barthelme in many respects the most representative American writer of the 1960’s and of the two decades that followed: postmodern, postmodernist, postFreudian, poststructuralist, postindustrial, even (to borrow Jerome Klinkowitz’s apt term) postcontemporary. Biography • Often praised and sometimes disparaged as one of The New Yorker writers, a narrative innovator, and a moral relativist whose only advice (John Gardner claimed) is that it is better to be disillusioned than deluded, Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia on April 7, 1931, and moved to Houston two years later. He grew up in Texas, attended Roman Catholic diocesan schools, and began his writing career as a journalist in Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps. His father, an architect who favored

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the modernist style of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier, taught at the University of Houston and designed the family’s house, which became as much an object of surprise and wonder on the flat Texas landscape as his son’s oddly shaped fictions were to become on TO VIEW IMAGE, the equally flat narrative landscape of postwar American fiction. While majorPLEASE SEE ing in journalism, Barthelme wrote for PRINT EDITION the university newspaper as well as the OF THIS BOOK. Houston Post. He was drafted in 1953 and arrived in Korea on the day the truce was signed—the kind of coincidence one comes to expect in Barthelme’s stories of strange juxtapositions and incongruous couplings. After his military service, during which he also edited an Army newspaper, he returned to Houston, where he worked in the university’s public relations department (“writing poppycock for the President,” as he put it in one story), and where he founded Forum, a Bill Wittliff literary and intellectual quarterly that published early works by Walker Percy, William H. Gass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Leslie Fiedler, and others. Barthleme published his first story in 1961, the same year that he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston. The following year, Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg offered him the position of managing editor of their new arts journal, Location. The journal was short-lived (only two issues ever appeared), but Barthelme’s move to New York was not. Taking up residence in Greenwich Village, he published his first story in The New Yorker in 1963, his first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, in 1964, and his first novel, Snow White (among other things an updating of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale and the Walt Disney feature-length animated cartoon), in 1967. Although he left occasionally for brief periods abroad or to teach writing at Buffalo, Houston, and elsewhere, Barthelme spent the rest of his life chiefly in Greenwich Village, with his fourth wife, Marion Knox. He lived as a writer, registering and remaking the “exquisite mysterious muck” of contemporary urban American existence, as witnessed from his corner of the global (Greenwich) village. Analysis • Donald Barthelme’s fiction exhausts and ultimately defeats conventional approaches (including character, plot, setting, theme—“the enemies of the novel” as fellow writer John Hawkes once called them) and defeats, too, all attempts at generic classification. His stories are not conventional, nor are they Borgesian ficciones or Beckettian “texts for nothing.” Thematic studies of his writing have proved utterly inadequate, yet purely formalist critiques have seemed almost as unsatisfying. To approach a Barthelme story, the reader must proceed circuitously via various, indeed at times simultaneous, extraliterary forms: collage, caricature, Calder mobile, action

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painting, jazz, atonality, the chance music of John Cage, architecture, information theory, magazine editing and layout, ventriloquism, even Legos (with all their permutational possibilities, in contrast with the High Moderns’ love of cubist jigsaw puzzles). In Barthelme’s case, comparisons with twentieth century painters and sculptors seem especially apropos: comical like Jean Dubuffet, whimsical and sad like Amedeo Modigliani, chaste like Piet Mondrian, attenuated like Alberto Giacometti, composite like Kurt Schwitters, improvisational like Jackson Pollock, fanciful like Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. Like theirs, his is an art of surfaces, dense rather than deep, textured rather than symbolic, an intersection of forces rather than a rendered meaning. Adjusting to the shift in perspective that reading Barthelme entails—and adjusting as well to Barthelme’s (like the poet John Ashbery’s) unwillingness to distinguish between foreground and background, message and noise—is difficult, sometimes impossible, and perhaps always fruitless. However attenuated and elliptical the stories may be, they commit a kind of “sensory assault” on a frequently distracted reader who experiences immediate gratification in dealing with parts but epistemological frustration in considering the stories as wholes, a frustration which mirrors that of the characters. Not surprisingly, one finds Barthelme’s characters and the fictions themselves engaged in a process of scaling back even as they and their readers yearn for that “more” to which Beckett’s figures despairingly and clownishly give voice. Entering “the complicated city” and singing their “song of great expectations,” they nevertheless—or also—discover that theirs is a world not of romantic possibilities (as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction) but of postmodern permutations, a world of words and undecidability, where “our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle” and where “double-mindedness makes for mixtures.” These are stories that, like the red snow in Barthelme’s favorite and most Borgesian work, “Paraguay,” invite “contemplation” of a mystery that there is “no point solving—an ongoing low-grade mystery.” Expressed despondently, the answer to the question, “Why do I live this way?”—or why does Barthelme write this way?—is, as the character Bishop says, “Best I can do.” This, however, sums up only one side of Barthelme’s double-mindedness; the other is the pleasure, however fleeting, to be taken “in the sweet of the here and the now.” “Me and Miss Mandible” • Originally published as “The Darling Duckling at School” in 1961, “Me and Miss Mandible” is one of Barthelme’s earliest stories and one of his best. Written in the form of twenty-six journal entries (dated September 13 to December 9), the story evidences Barthelme’s genius for rendering even the most fantastic, dreamlike events in the most matter-of-fact manner possible. The thirty-five-year-old narrator, Joseph, finds himself sitting in a too-small desk in Miss Mandible’s classroom, having been declared “officially a child of eleven,” either by mistake or, more likely, as punishment for having himself made a mistake in his former life as claims adjuster (a mistake for justice but against his company’s interests). Having spent ten years “amid the debris of our civilization,” he has come “to see the world as a vast junkyard” that includes the failure of his marriage and the absurdity of his military duty. At once a biblical Joseph in a foreign land and a Swiftian Gulliver among the Lilliputians, he will spend his time observing others and especially observing the widening gap between word and world, signifier and signified, the ideals expressed in teachers’ manuals and the passions of a class of prepubescents fueled by film magazine stories about the Eddie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds/ Elizabeth Taylor love triangle. Unlike his biblical namesake, Joseph will fail at reeducation as he has

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failed at marriage and other forms of social adjustment, caught by a jealous classmate making love to the freakishly named Miss Mandible. “A Shower of Gold” • The coming together of unlike possibilities and the seeming affirmation of failure (maladjustment) takes a slightly different and more varied form in “A Shower of Gold.” The former claims adjuster, Joseph, becomes the impoverished artist, Peterson, who specializes in large junk sculptures that no one buys and that even his dealer will not display. Desperate for money, he volunteers to appear on Who Am I?, the odd offspring of the game show craze on American television and of existentialism transformed into pop culture commodity. (There is also a barber who doubles as an analyst and triples as the author of four books all titled The Decision to Be.) Peterson convinces the show’s Miss Arbor that he is both interesting enough and sufficiently de trop to appear on Who Am I?, only to feel guilty about selling out for two hundred dollars. Watching the other panelists be subjected to a humiliating barrage of questions designed to expose their bad faith, Peterson, accepting his position as a minor artist, short-circuits the host’s existential script by out-absurding the absurd (his mother, he says, was a royal virgin and his father, a shower of gold). Peterson’s situation parallels Barthelme’s, or indeed any American writing at a time when, as Philip Roth pointed out in 1961, American reality had begun to outstrip the writer’s imagination, offering a steady diet of actual people and events far more fantastic than any that the writer could hope to offer. What, Roth wondered, was left for the writer to do? “A Shower of Gold” offers one possibility. “The Indian Uprising” • “The Indian Uprising” and “The Balloon” represent another possibility, in which in two quite different ways Barthelme directs the reader away from story and toward the act of interpretation itself (interpretation as story). As Brian McHale and Ron Moshe have demonstrated, “The Indian Uprising” comprises three overlapping yet divergent and even internally inconsistent narratives: an attack by Comanche on an unidentified but clearly modern American city; the narrator’s (one of the city’s defender’s) unsatisfying love life; and the conflict between modern and postmodern sensibilities manifesting itself in a variety of allusions to modernist texts, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Near the end of his poem, Eliot writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” “The Indian Uprising” presents a very different approach, transforming Eliot’s shoring up of high culture into a “barricade” that recycles Eliot and Thomas Mann along with ashtrays, doors, bottles of Fad #6 sherry, “and other items.” Behind Eliot’s poem lies the possibility of psychic, spiritual, and sociocultural wholeness implied by Eliot’s use of the “mythic method.” Behind Barthelme’s story one finds recycling rather than redemption and, instead of the mythic method, what Ronald Sukenick has called “the Mosaic Law,” or “the law of mosaics, a way of dealing with parts in the absence of wholes.” Short but beyond summary, filled with non sequiturs, ill-logic, self-doubts, and anti-explanations, “The Indian Uprising” rises against readers in their efforts to know it by reducing the story to some manageable whole. At once inviting and frustrating the reader’s interpretive maneuvers, “The Indian Uprising” follows the “plan” outlined in “Paraguay” insofar as it proves “a way of allowing a very wide range of tendencies to interact.” Attacking and defending are two operant principles at play here, but just who is attacking and what is being defended are never made clear. Sides change, shapes shift in a story in which American Westerns, the Civil Rights movement, and American in-

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volvement in Vietnam all seem to have their parts to play, but never to the point where any one can be said to dominate the others. Small but indomitable, the story resists the linearity of an interpretive domino theory in favor of a semiotic quagmire (more evidence of Barthelme’s interest in current affairs—Vietnam, in this case—and “mysterious muck”). In “The Indian Uprising,” there is no final authority to come like the cavalry to the rescue and so no release from the anxiety evident in this and so many other Barthelme stories. Although there may be no permanent release, however, there is some temporary relief to be had in the “aesthetic excitement” of “the hard, brown, nutlike word” and in the fact that “Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing ribald whole.” “The Balloon” • “The Balloon” is a more compact exploration and a more relentless exploitation of interpretation as a semiotic process rather than a narrowly coded act. Covering only a few pages (or alternately an area forty-five city blocks long by up to six blocks wide), “The Balloon” is Barthelme’s American tall-tale version of the short French film The Red Balloon and an hommage to Frederick Law Olmsted (who designed New York’s Central Park) and environmental artist Cristo (one of his huge sculptural wrappings). Analogies such as these help readers situate themselves in relation to the inexplicable but unavoidable oddity of “The Balloon” in much the same way that the viewers in the story attempt to situate themselves in relation to the sudden appearance of a balloon which, even if it cannot be understood (“We had learned not to insist on meanings”), can at least be used (for graffiti, for example) and appreciated despite, or perhaps because of, its apparent uselessness. Ultimately the narrator will explain the balloon, thus adding his interpretive graffiti to its blank surface. The balloon, he says, was “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure” occasioned by his lover’s departure; when, after twenty-two days, she returns, he deflates the balloon, folds it, and ships it to West Virginia to be stored for future use. His explanation is doubly deflating, for while the balloon’s “apparent purposelessness” may be vexing, in a world of “complex machinery,” “specialized training,” and pseudoscientific theories that make people marginal and passive, it has come to exist as the “prototype” or “rough draft” of the kind of solution to which people will increasingly turn, to what the Balloon Man calls his best balloon, the Balloon of Perhaps. Until the narrator’s closing comments, the balloon is not a scripted text but a blank page, not an object but an event, not a ready-made product, a prefab, but a performance that invites response and participation. It is a performance that the narrator’s explanation concludes, assigning both an origin (cause) and destination (result, function, use, addressee). Yet even as the explanation brings a measure of relief, it also adds a new level of anxiety insofar as the reader perceives its inadequacy and feels perhaps a twinge of guilty pleasure over having made so much of so little. In a way, however, the balloon was always doomed to extinction, for it exists in a consumer culture in which even the most remarkable objects (including “The Balloon”) quickly become all too familiar, and it exists too in a therapeutic society in thrall to the illusion of authoritative explanations. “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” • Appearing only two months before the real Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” explores epistemological uncertainty by exploiting the contemporary media’s and its audience’s claiming to know public figures, whether politicians or celebrities (a dis-

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tinction that began to blur during the eponymous Kennedy years). The story exists at the intersection of two narrative styles. One is journalistic: twenty-four sections of what appear to be notes, each with its own subject heading and for the most part arranged in random order (the last section being a conspicuous exception) and presumably to be used in the writing of a profile or essay “about” Kennedy. The second narrative style is Kafkaesque fantasy and is evoked solely by means of the reporter’s use of journalistic shorthand, the initial “K,” which “refers” to Kennedy but alludes to the main characters of the enigmatic (and unfinished) novels Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937) and Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930) and ultimately to their equally enigmatic author, Franz Kafka himself. The narrator of “See the Moon?” claims that fragments are the only forms he trusts; in “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” fragments are the only forms the reader gets. The conflicting mass of seemingly raw material—quotes, impressions, even fragments of orders to waiters—saves Kennedy from drowning in a media-produced narcissistic image that turns even the most inane remarks into orphic sayings. Kennedy cannot drown; he can only float on the postmodern surface. Instead of the Kennedy image, Barthelme turns Kennedy into a series of images, the last being the most ludicrous and yet also the most revealing: Kennedy as Zorro, masked and floundering in the sea, his hat, cape, and sword safely on the beach. Saved from drowning (by the narrator), Kennedy is unmasked as a masked image, a free-floating signifier, a chameleon in superhero’s clothing who proves most revealing when most chameleon-like, offering a summary of Georges Poulet’s analysis of the eighteenth century writer Pierre Marivaux. Only here, at this third or even fourth remove, will many readers feel that they have gotten close to the “real” Kennedy: The Marivaudian being is, according to Poulet, a pastless, futureless man, born anew at every instant. The instants are points which organize themselves into a line, but what is important is the instant, not the line. The Marivaudian being has in a sense no history. Nothing follows from what has gone before. He is constantly surprised. He cannot predict his own reaction to events. He is constantly being overtaken by events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement surrounds him. In consequence he exists in a certain freshness which seems, if I may say so, very desirable. This freshness Poulet, quoting Marivaux, describes very well. “Views of My Father Weeping” • “Views of My Father Weeping” combines epistemological uncertainty with typically postmodern problematizing of the relationship between past and present (hinted at in the above quotation). Several days after his father has died under the wheels of an aristocrat’s carriage, the narrator sets out to investigate whether the death was accidental, as the police reported, or an example of the aristocracy’s (and the police’s) indifference to the poor. Spurred on less by a desire for truth and justice than a vague sense of filial obligation and even more by the slight possibility of financial gain, but fearful that he may be beaten for making inquiries, perhaps (like his father) even killed, the narrator-son proceeds, more hesitant than Hamlet. Hamlet had his father’s ghost appear to remind him of his duty to avenge a murder most foul. Barthelme’s story also has a ghost (of sorts), a weeping father who sits on his son’s bed acting in decidedly untragic fashion like a spoiled, sulky child whose very identity as father the son quietly questions. Complicating matters still further, this father seems to appear in a second story within “Views of My Father Weeping,” which takes place in a more contemporary and clearly, although fan-

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tastically, American setting. These important if often blurred differences aside, the two narrators suffer from the same twin diseases that are pandemic in Barthelme’s fiction: abulia (loss of the ability to decide or act) and acedia (spiritual torpor). They certainly would benefit from a reading of a slightly later story, “A Manual for Sons,” a self-contained part of Barthelme’s second novel, The Dead Father (1975), which concludes with this advice: You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him. The enormities go with the job, but close study will allow you to perform the job less well than it previously has been done, thus moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fever. Your contribution will not be a small one, but “small” is one of the concepts that you should shoot for. . . . Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least “turned down” in this generation—by the combined efforts of all of us together. The extreme brevity of his densely allusive and highly elliptical stories suggests that Barthelme sides with the smallness of sons in their comic struggle with their various fathers (biological, historical, cultural). Against the authoritative word of the All Father, Barthelme offers a range of ventriloquized voices. “Here I differ from Kierkegaard,” says one of the characters in “The Leap.” “Purity of heart is not,” as Kierkegaard claimed, to will one thing; it is, rather, “to will several things, and not know which is the better, truer thing, and to worry about this forever.” Barthelme’s own double-mindedness and preference for mixtures and the guilty pleasures of the son’s uncertainty and anxiety of influence become especially apparent in his collages of verbal and visual materials in which he puts the magazine editor’s skills—layout in particular—to the fiction writer’s use in order to achieve for fiction the kind of “immediate impact” generally available only to those working in the visual arts. “At The Tolstoy Museum” • “At the Tolstoy Museum,” one of the best of these collages, literalizes, chiefly through visual means, the canonization of Leo Tolstoy as a metaphorical giant of literature, a cultural institution, an object of public veneration. Visitors to the “Tolstoy museum” must gaze at the prescribed distances and times and in the proper attitude of awe and submission. Readers of “At the Tolstoy Museum” find all the rules broken, temporal and spatial boundaries transgressed, and distances subject to a new and fantastic geometry. Against the museum as a repository of cult(ural) memorabilia, the story serves a narrative riposte in the form of a study in perspective. Barthelme whittles Tolstoy down to manageable size by exaggerating his proportions (much as he does with another dead father in his second novel): the thirty thousand photographs, the 640,086 pages of the Jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s works, the coat that measures at least twenty feet high, the head so large it has a hall of its own (closed Mondays, Barthelme parenthetically adds), even a page-long summary of one of Tolstoy’s shortest stories, “The Three Hermits.” There are also the two huge Soviet-style portraits on facing pages, identical in all but one feature: the tiny figure of Napoleon I (The Little Emperor), from Tolstoy’s Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886), playing the part of viewer/reader. Best of all is Barthelme’s rendering of The Anna-Vronsky Pavilion, devoted to the adulterous pair from Anna Karenina (1875-1877; English translation, 1886), a cutout of a nineteenth century man and woman superimposed on an early (and now adulterated) study in perspective dating from 1603. “At the Tolstoy Museum” does more than merely mix and match, cut and paste. It makes hilariously

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clear the artifice of art and of what the passive consumer of culture may naively assume is both natural and eternal. “Sentence” • “Sentence” makes a similar point, but it does so by exploring the literal in a quite different way. As its title suggests, the story takes the form of a single sentence of approximately twenty-five hundred words and manages to combine the brevity, open-endedness, and formal innovation that together serve as the hallmarks of Barthelme’s idiosyncratic art. The subject of “Sentence” is the sentence itself: its progress and process. Beginning with one of Barthelme’s favorite words, “or” (“etc.” and “amid” are others), it proceeds by means of accretion and ends (if a work without any terminal punctuation can be said to end) as much an “anxious object” as any of those works of modern art to which Harold Rosenberg applied that phrase. Even as it pursues its own meandering, self-regarding, seemingly nonreferential way down the page, “Sentence” remains mindful of its reader, no less susceptible to distraction than the sentence itself and lured on by whatever promise the sentence holds out yet also feeling threatened by the sentence’s failure to play by the rules. As the narrator sums up, “Sentence” is “a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones.” Earlier in “Sentence,” Barthelme alludes to the Rosetta Stone that Champollion used to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Barthelme’s fiction, although written in a familiar language, proves more resistant to decoding. Barthelme uses the past as he uses the present, but neither offers anything approaching an interpretive touchstone, only the raw material, the bits and bytes out of which he constructs his oddly shaped but nevertheless aesthetically crafted “archaeological slices.” “The Glass Mountain” • Built upon the cultural ruins of an ancient Norse tale entitled “The Princess and the Glass Hill,” “The Glass Mountain” resembles “Sentence” and “The Balloon” more than it does its nominal source in that it, too, is largely about one’s reading of it. “I was trying to climb the glass mountain,” the narrator declares in the first of the story’s one hundred numbered sections (most only one sentence long). Like the reader, the narrator is “new to the neighborhood,” persistent, comically methodical, and methodologically absurd; the plumber’s friends he uses to scale the glass mountain at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue seem no less inappropriate than his by-the-book how-to approach drawn from medieval romance—or the reader’s efforts to climb (surmount, master) Barthelme’s seethrough metafiction by means of equally outdated reading strategies. Once atop the glass mountain the narrator finds exactly what he hoped to, “a beautiful enchanted symbol” to disenchant. Once kissed (like the frog of fairy tales), the symbol proves disenchanting in a quite different sense of the word, changed “into only a beautiful princess” whom the narrator (now himself disenchanted) hurls down in disappointment. Having staked his life on the eternal symbol of medieval romance, the narrator finds the temporary and the merely human (princess) disappointing. “The New Music” • Making a postmodern something, however small and selfconsuming, out of the existential nothing became Barthelme’s stock-in-trade, most noticeably in “Nothing: A Preliminary Account.” His art of the nearly negligible works itself out comically but almost always against a sympathetic understanding for the permanence for which the climber in “The Glass Mountain” and the characters

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in so many of his other stories, “The New Music,” for example, yearn. A fusion of two stories published earlier the same year, one with the same title, the other entitled “Momma,” “The New Music” takes the dialogue form that Barthelme often used to new and dizzying heights of nearly musical abstraction, akin to what Philip Roth would accomplish more than a decade later in his novel, Deception (1990). The subject here is slight (even for Barthelme), as the story’s two unidentified, no-longeryoung speakers go through (or are put through) a number of routines analogous to vaudeville comedy and improvisational jazz. After a few opening bars, one speaker suggests that they go to Pool, “the city of new hope. One of those new towns. Where everyone would be happier.” They then segue into an exchange on, or consideration of, the new music done as a version of the familiar song “Momma don’ ’low.” Among the many things that Momma (now dead) did not allow was the new music. “The new music burns things together, like a welder,” or like the sculptor Peterson from “A Shower of Gold” or like Barthelme, who, along with his two speakers, understands that the new music always has been and always will be ever changing, ever ephemeral, ever new, and forever beyond Momma’s prohibitions and the reader’s explanations. Robert A. Morace Other major works children’s literature: The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine: Or, The Hithering Thithering Djinn, 1971. novels: Snow White, 1967; The Dead Father, 1975; Paradise, 1986; The King, 1990. miscellaneous: Guilty Pleasures, 1974; The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories and Plays of Donald Barthelme, 1992 (Kim Herzinger, editor); Notknowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, 1997 (Herzinger, editor). Bibliography Barthelme, Helen Moore. Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. The author, a senior lecturer of English at Texas A&M University, was married to Barthelme for a decade in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She traces his life from his childhood in Houston to his development as a writer. Couturier, Maurice, and Regis Durand. Donald Barthelme. London: Methuen, 1982. This brief study focuses on the performance aspect of Barthelme’s stories and considers them in relation to the multiplicity of varied responses that they elicit from readers. Readings are few in number but highly suggestive. Hudgens, Michael Thomas. Donald Barthelme, Postmodernist American Writer. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. This volume in the series Studies in American Literature examines Barthelme’s novels The Dead Father and Snow White and his short story “Paraguay.” Includes bibliographical references and an index. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Klinkowitz is easily the best informed and most judicious scholar and critic of contemporary American fiction in general and Barthelme in particular. Building on his Barthelme chapter in Literary Disruptions: The Making of a PostContemporary American Fiction (2d ed., 1980), he emphasizes the ways in which Barthelme reinvented narrative in the postmodern age and places Barthelme’s fiction in the larger aesthetic, cultural, and historical contexts. Perhaps the single most important study of Barthelme.

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May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these twelve short stories by Barthelme: “The Balloon” (vol. 1), “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne” (vol. 2), “The Glass Mountain” (vol. 3), “The Indian Uprising” and “Lightning” (vol. 4), “Margins” (vol. 5), “Paraguay” and “See the Moon?” (vol. 6), “A Shower of Gold” and “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” (vol. 7), and “Views of My Father Weeping” and “Wrack” (vol. 8). Molesworth, Charles. Donald Barthelme’s Fiction: The Ironist Saved from Drowning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Objecting to those who emphasize the experimental nature of Barthelme’s fiction, Molesworth views Barthelme as essentially a parodist and satirist whose ironic stance saves him from drowning in mere innovation. Patteson, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Collection of critical essays on Barthelme from book reviews and academic journals. Provides an overview of critical reaction to Barthelme in the introduction. Essays deal with Barthelme’s use of language, his fragmentation of reality, his montage technique, and his place in the postmodernist tradition. Roe, Barbara L. Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Introduction to Barthelme’s short stories, with discussion of the major stories arranged in chronological order. Also includes several interviews with Barthelme, as well as previously published essays by other critics. Stengel, Wayne B. The Shape of Art in the Stories of Donald Barthelme. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Discusses such themes as play, futility, stasis, affirmation, and education in four types of stories: identity stories, dialogue stories, social fabric stories, and art-object stories. Focuses on Barthelme’s emphasis on art in his self-reflexive stories. Waxman, Robert. “Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme’s Dance of Life.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Spring, 1996): 229-243. Examines how the interplay between the Apollonian search for order and the Dionysian longing for freedom from convention informs much of Barthelme’s work and is often embodied in the metaphor of music.

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Ann Beattie Born: Washington, D.C.; September 8, 1947 Principal short fiction • Distortions, 1976; Secrets and Surprises, 1978; Jacklighting, 1981; The Burning House, 1982; Where You’ll Find Me, and Other Stories, 1986; The Best American Short Stories 1987, 1987; What Was Mine, and Other Stories, 1991; Park City: New and Selected Stories, 1998; Perfect Recall: New Stories, 2001; Follies and New Stories, 2005. Other literary forms • Although Ann Beattie’s reputation rests primarily on her short stories, particularly those that first appeared in The New Yorker, she has also written several novels. The first, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), appeared simultaneously with Distortions, a rare occurrence in the publishing world, especially for a first-time author. Her second novel, Falling in Place (1980), is her most ambitious and her best. In Love Always (1985), she uses an approach that is closer to that of her short stories than in either of the previous novels. The subject matter is narrower, and the characters are more distanced from the narrative voice. Picturing Will followed in 1989. Eight years later, she published My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997), which was scorned as her weakest novel to date. The Doctor’s House (2002) did not fare much better with the critics. In 1986 and 1987, Beattie worked on her first nonfiction project, the text to accompany a monograph containing twenty-six color plates of the paintings of Alex Katz. Achievements • The author of ten collections of short stories through 2005, Ann Beattie has been called the most imitated short-story writer in the United States, an amazing claim for a woman whose publishing career did not begin until the early 1970’s. Along with such writers as Raymond Carver, she is a premier practitioner of minimalism, the school of fiction-writing that John Barth has characterized as the “less is more” school. In 1977, she was named Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in English at Harvard, where she was apparently uncomfortable. She used a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant to leave Harvard and move back to Connecticut, where she had attended graduate school. In 1980, she received an award of excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Alumnae award from American University. In 1992, she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Biography • Born on September 8, 1947, Ann Beattie grew up with television, rock music, and all the other accoutrements of the baby boomers. The child of a retired Health, Education, and Welfare Department administrator, Beattie took a bachelor’s degree in English at American University in 1969 and completed her master’s degree at the University of Connecticut in 1970. She began, but did not complete, work on her doctorate. In 1972 she married David Gates, a writer for Newsweek and a singer, whom she later divorced. Together they had one son. Before her appointment at Harvard, Beattie taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. After living in the Connecticut suburbs and in New York City, she returned to Charlottesville and the university in 1985. She appeared as a waitress in the film version of Chilly Scenes of

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Winter and, after her divorce, was named one of the most eligible single women in America. In 1985, Beattie met painter Lincoln Perry, whom she later married. The couple lived for a time in Charlottesville. Later, Beattie and Perry settled in a turn-ofthe-century farmhouse in York, Maine, one of America’s oldest cities. Beattie has said that she does not go to book-publishing parties, does not know many writers, has an unlisted phone number, and shies away from writers’ colonies. Analysis • Ann Beattie has been called the spokesperson for a new lost generation, a sort of Ernest Hemingway for those who came of age during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Many of her themes and much about her style support the assertion that she, like Hemingway, voices a pervasive and universal feeling of despair and alienation, a lament for lost values and lost chances for constructive action. Yet to limit one’s understanding of Beattie’s work to this narrow interpretation is a mistake. Beattie shares much with writers such as Jane Austen, who ironically portrayed the manners and social customs of her era, and with psychological realists such as Henry James, who delved into the meanings behind the subtle nuances of character and conflict. Her primary themes are loneliness and friendship, family life, love and death, materialism, art, and, for want of a better term, the contemporary scene. Her short fiction tends to be spare and straightforward. Her vocabulary and her sentence structure are quite accessible, or minimalist, to use a more literary label. Even when the stories contain symbols, their use is most often direct and self-reflexive. Beattie’s combination of subject matter and style leads to a rather flat rendering of the world, and she is sometimes criticized for that flatness. Because her narrators usually maintain a significant distance from the stories and their characters, critics and readers sometimes assume that Beattie is advocating such remove and reserve as the most feasible posture in contemporary life. Even her most ironic characters and narrative voices, however, experience a profound longing for a different world. Despite the ennui that dominates the texture of their lives, Beattie’s characters hold on to the hope of renewal and redemption, often with great fierceness, even though the fierceness frequently suggests that these people are clutching at hope so hard that they are white-knuckling their way through life. If members of the generation about which she writes are indeed lost, they have not accepted their condition, even though they recognize it. They are still searching for the way out, for a place in which to find themselves or to be found. “Dwarf House” • “Dwarf House,” the first story in Distortions, establishes an interest in the grotesque, the bizarre, and the slightly askew that surfaces several times in this first of Beattie’s collections. The main characters of the story are James and MacDonald, brothers who struggle to find understanding and respect for each other and to deal with their possessive and intrusive mother. Because James, the older of the two, is a dwarf, Beattie immediately plays upon the collection’s title and places the story beyond the plane of realism. The irony of the story develops as the reader realizes that MacDonald’s supposedly normal life is as distorted as the life of his sibling. When MacDonald goes to visit James in the dwarf house where he lives, along with several other dwarfs and one giant, he finds himself repulsed by the foreign environment. Yet, when he gets home, he cannot face his own “normal” world without his martinis. He is as alienated and isolated at home and at work as he would be if he were a dwarf. Beattie uses the ludicrous, the exaggerated scenario of James’s life, complete with his wedding to a fellow

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dwarf, conducted by a hippie minister and culminating in the releasing of a caged parrot, as a symbol of hope and the new freedom of married life, to bring into focus the less obvious distortions of reguTO VIEW IMAGE, lar American life. MacDonald is typical of many PLEASE SEE Beattie characters. He is relatively PRINT EDITION young—in his late twenties—and OF THIS BOOK. well educated. He works, but his work provides little challenge or stimulation. He has enough money to live as he wants, but he struggles to define what it is he does want. His wife is his equal—young, well educated, hip—but they have less than nothing to talk about. MacDonald wants to make his Sigrid Estrada brother’s life more normal—that is, get him out of the dwarf house, the one place where James has ever been happy, and back into their mother’s home, where James and MacDonald will both be miserable. MacDonald is motivated not by malice toward James but by an overdeveloped sense of guilt and responsibility toward his mother, a trait he shares with many of Beattie’s young male characters. By the story’s end, the reader cannot say who is better off: James, whose life is distorted but productive and satisfying to him, or MacDonald, who has everything a man could want but still lacks an understanding of what it is he should do with what he has. “The Lifeguard” • In “The Lifeguard,” the final story in Distortions, Beattie portrays the offbeat and grotesque elements that permeate the collection, in a sharply realistic setting where their humor and irony disappear. The impact of these elements is, then, all the more forceful for the reader’s sense of sudden dislocation. Without warning, the book becomes too real for comfort, and at the same time it continues to use shades of the unreal to make its point. “The Lifeguard” tells the story of the Warner family and their summer vacation. The mother, Toby, finds herself fantasizing about the young college student who is the lifeguard on the beach. Yet when her children Penelope and Andrew die in a boat deliberately set afire by their playmate Duncan Collins, the inappropriateness and incapacity of the lifeguard and of her infatuation are too vividly brought home to Toby. The monstrousness of Duncan Collins’s action is but another kind of distortion; there are no simple lives in a distorted world. “A Vintage Thunderbird” • If Distortions emphasizes the outward manifestations of the disordered contemporary world, Secrets and Surprises, the second collection, turns inward, as its title suggests. “A Vintage Thunderbird” features a woman who comes to New York to have an abortion against the wishes of her husband. The friends to whom she turns, Karen and Nick, have their own problems in love. By mirroring the sense of loss that follows the abortion with the sense of loss felt by Karen

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and Nick when she sells the vintage car of the title, Beattie addresses the connection between spiritual and emotional needs and material needs. Very few of the people in Beattie’s fiction suffer for want of material goods; almost all suffer from lack of spiritual and emotional fulfillment. The interesting aspect of this dichotomy is that the characters do not, as a rule, actively pursue material wellbeing. Their money is often inherited, as are their houses and many of their other possessions. The main character in “Shifting,” for example, inherits an old Volvo from an uncle to whom she was never very close. The money earned by these characters is almost always earned halfheartedly, without conspicuous ambition or enthusiasm. These are not yuppies who have substituted acquisition for all human emotion; they are people who, by accident of birth or circumstance, have not had to acquire material wealth; for whatever reason, wealth comes to them. What does not come is peace, satisfaction, and contentment. When a material object does provide emotional pleasure, as the Thunderbird does for Karen and Nick, Beattie’s characters tend to confuse the emotion with the symbol and to conclude, erroneously, that ridding themselves of the object will also rid them of the gnawing doubts that seem to accompany contentment and satisfaction. It is sometimes as frightening, Beattie seems to suggest, to be attached to things as to people. “The Cinderella Waltz” • In The Burning House, Beattie’s third collection, she turns to the darker, more richly textured veins of her standard subject matter to produce stories that are less humorous but more humane, less ironic but wiser than those in the earlier collections. Infidelity, divorce, love gone bad—all standard Beattie themes—are connected to parenthood and its attendant responsibilities, to homosexuality, to death, and to birth defects. The affairs and the abortions that were entered into, if not concluded, with a “me-generation” bravado suddenly collide with more traditional values and goals. Many of Beattie’s characters, both married and single, have lovers. In fact, having a lover or having had one at some time during a marriage is almost standard. In “The Cinderella Waltz,” Beattie adds a further complication to the de rigueur extramarital affair by making the husband’s lover a male. Yet, in much the same way that she makes the unusual work in a story such as “Dwarf House,” Beattie manages to make this story more about the pain and suffering of the people involved than about the nontraditional quality of the love relationship. The wife in “The Cinderella Waltz,” left to understand what has happened to her marriage and to help her young daughter to reach her own understanding, finds herself drawn into a quiet, resigned acceptance of her husband’s relationship with his lover. She laments the loss of innocence in the world, for her child and for them all, but she chooses to go forward with the two men as part of her life and the child’s. She rejects—really never even considers—the negative, destructive responses that many women would have had. “The Cinderella Waltz” ends with images of enormous fragility—glass elevators and glass slippers. Yet they are images that her characters embrace and cling to, recognizing that fragile hope is better than none. The cautious nature of such optimism is often mistaken for pessimism in Beattie’s work, but her intention is clearly as affirmative as it is tentative. “Winter: 1978” • Another story from The Burning House, “Winter: 1978,” offers a glimpse of most of Beattie’s concerns and techniques. An unusually long story for

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Beattie, “Winter: 1978” features a selfish mother who is hosting a wake for her younger son, who has drowned in a midwinter boating accident. His death is mystifying, for there were life preservers floating easily within his reach, a fact that suggests the ultimate despair and surrender often present in Beattie’s characters. An older son blames the mother for placing too much guilt and responsibility on the dead son, but he himself has done nothing to assume some of that burden. The older son’s former wife, their child, his current girlfriend, and his best friend are all present at the wake. The best friend’s girlfriend is alone back in California, having her uterus cauterized. His former wife seems inordinately grief-stricken, until it is revealed that the dead man was her lover. During the course of the wake, which lasts several days, she becomes the lover of her former husband’s best friend. This extremely baroque and convoluted situation contains much that is ironically humorous, but it also reflects deep pain on the part of all the characters, not only the pain of having lost a loved one but also the pain of reexamining their own lives and measuring them against the idea of death. That sort of existential questioning, rarely overt but frequently suggested, contributes to the idea of a lost generation brought to life on the pages of Beattie’s fiction. Yet Beattie rarely leaves her characters in perpetual existential angst, as is the case in a Hemingway story such as “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” an embodiment of the existential despair and the longing for some minute, self-created order and refuge typical of the original literary lost generation. Instead, Beattie often opts for a neoRomantic, minimalist version of hope and redemption, of continued searching as opposed to acquiescence. “Winter: 1978” concludes with the absentee father, the surviving son, taking his own child upstairs for a bedtime story. The little boy, like the daughter in ”The Cinderella Waltz,” is far too wise to take comfort from the imaginary world of the story; he has been exposed to far too much of the confused adult world of his parents. On this occasion, however, he pretends to believe, and he encourages his father’s tale about the evolution of deer. According to the story, deer have such sad eyes because they were once dinosaurs and cannot escape the sadness that comes with having once been something else. This story serves as a metaphor for the melancholy cast of characters in this and Beattie’s other collections of short fiction. Almost all of her characters have a Keatsian longing to connect with a better, more sublime existence that seems to be part of their generation’s collective consciousness. Far too aware and too ironic to follow the feeling and thereby to transcend reality, they linger in their unsatisfactory lesser world and struggle to accommodate their longing to their reality. “Snow” • More than her other collections, Where You’ll Find Me displays Beattie’s awareness of her own reputation as a writer. In particular, in a story called “Snow,” she appears to write a definition of the kind of story her work has come to define. Fewer than three pages long, the story takes a single image, that of snow, and uses it not only as a symbol of the lost love the narrator is contemplating but also as a metaphor for storytelling as practiced by the author. The remembered lover has explained to the narrator at one point that “any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.” The narrator then tells a story, actually one paragraph within this story, about her return to the place where the lovers had lived in order to be with a dying friend. She offers her story-within-a-story as an example of the way in which her lover said stories should be told.

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The narrator goes on to say that such efforts are futile, bare bones without a pattern to establish meaning. For her, the single image, snow in this case, does more to evoke the experience of her life with the man than does the dramatized story with the details omitted. In the story’s final paragraph, the narrator concludes that even the single image is too complex for complete comprehension. The mind itself, let alone the narratives it creates, is incapable of fully rendering human experience and emotion. The best a writer, a storyteller, can do is to present the essence of the experience in the concrete terms in which his or her consciousness has recorded it. What the reader almost inevitably receives, then, is minimal, to return to John Barth’s theory. It is equally important, however, that Barth argues that the minimal can be more than enough. The characters in this fourth collection are generally older and wiser than their predecessors. They have, as a rule, survived an enormous loss and are still hoping for a richer, more rewarding life, or at least one in which they feel less out of place and alone. “Janus” • Andrea, the real-estate agent who is the main character of “Janus,” is typical. Safely married to a husband who is interesting and financially secure, she is also successful in her career. The two of them take great pleasure in the things that they have accumulated. Yet Andrea takes most pleasure in a relatively inexpensive and quite ordinary-looking ceramic bowl, a gift from a former lover who asked her to change her life, to live with him. Although she has long since turned him down, Andrea finds herself growing increasingly obsessed with the bowl. She begins to believe that all of her career success comes from the bowl’s being precisely placed in the homes that she shows to her clients. A mystery to her, the bowl seems to be connected to the most real, the most private parts of herself. She loves the bowl as she loves nothing else. She fears for its safety. She is terrified at the thought that it might disappear. She has lost the chance that the lover represents, choosing instead stasis and comfort, remaining intransigent about honoring her previous commitments. Sometimes she goes into her living room late at night and sits alone contemplating the bowl. She thinks, “In its way, it was perfect; the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty.” Such is the world that Beattie observes, but Beattie is, after all, an artist, not a realestate agent. All that Andrea can do is contemplate. Beattie can fill the bowl, to use a metaphor, with whatever she chooses. She can capture, again and again, the story behind the “one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon,” that Andrea can only watch disappear. Barth’s description of the impulse behind minimalism, the desire “to strip away the superfluous in order to reveal the necessary, the essential,” is a fair assessment of Beattie’s work. Yet it is equally important to recall what necessary and essential elements remain after the superfluous has been stripped away. They are love, friendship, family, children, music, and creativity. Beattie fills the bowl of her fiction with much the same fruits that other writers have used. “Windy Day at the Reservoir” • In contrast to her earlier, so-called minimalist stories, Beattie’s more recent short fictions seem to be moving more toward length and elaboration, making more use of novelistic techniques of character exploration and realistic detail. “Windy Day at the Reservoir,” the longest story in her collection What Was Mine, focuses on two people who, while house-sitting for another couple, make a number of discoveries both about the homeowners and about themselves—for exam-

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ple, about the vacationing couple’s impending breakup because of the wife’s mastectomy and their own inability to have children. The point of view moves from the house-sitting husband, to the wife, to the mentally disabled son of the housekeeper, who walks into the reservoir and drowns. The final section focuses on the housekeeper, who provides a novelistic resolution to the two couples who have both broken up. Ending with a realistic resolution rather than a metaphoric embodiment of conflict, the story reflects Beattie’s moving away from short-story techniques to novelistic devices. “Going Home With Uccello” and “Park City” • A clear contrast between short-story and novelistic technique can be seen in the difference between two of the eight new stories in Beattie’s collection of selected stories, Park City—“Going Home with Uccello” and the title story “Park City.” In the former, a woman on a trip to Italy with her boyfriend has a realization about why he has taken her there when he flirts with a Frenchwoman about an Uccello painting. She understands that he has taken her to Italy not to persuade her to join him in London forever, but to persuade himself that he loves her so much that no other woman can come between them. The story ends in a typical Beattie ambiguity about whether the man in the story can commit himself to a relationship or whether he is continuing, as so many of Beattie’s male characters do, to look for some ineffable dream. In “Park City” the central character spends a week at a Utah ski resort during the off-season looking after her half-sister’s daughter, Nell, who is three, and her halfsister’s boyfriend’s daughter, Lyric, who is fourteen. The story is filled with dialogue among the three female characters in which it seems increasingly clear that the woman is more naïve than the precocious fourteen-year-old. In one particular encounter, the girl spins out a long invented tale to a stranger about having had breast implants. The story ends when the central character tries to get on a ski lift with the child Nell and the two almost fall off. They are saved by a man who, significantly, tells her, “the one thing you’ve got to remember next time is to request a slow start.” In the twenty-odd years that Beattie has been publishing short stories, mostly in The New Yorker, her milieu and her method have changed little, which has led some to complain that she has nothing new to say about the era she has evoked so sharply. However, Beattie has said, “My test was not did I get it right about the sixties, but is it literature. I am not a sociologist.” Jane Hill With updates by Melissa E. Barth and Charles E. May Other major works children’s literature: Goblin Tales, 1975; Spectacle, 1985. novels: Chilly Scenes of Winter, 1976; Falling in Place, 1980; Love Always, 1985; Picturing Will, 1989; Another You, 1995; My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, 1997; The Doctor’s House, 2002. nonfiction: Alex Katz, 1987. Bibliography Atwood, Margaret. “Stories from the American Front.” The New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1982, 1, 34. Discusses The Burning House as it represents the loss of the American dream for the children of the 1960’s. For Beattie, freedom

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equals the chance to take off, run away, split. Beattie’s stories chronicle domesticity gone awry, where there are dangers and threats lurking beneath the surface of even the most mundane event. Observes that most of the stories in this collection concern couples in the process of separating. Barth, John. “A Few Words About Minimalism.” The New York Times Book Review, December 28, 1986, 1- 2, 25. Explores Beattie’s spare style and considers her fiction as it represents a current stylistic trend in the American short story. Spends a considerable amount of space describing the origins of the contemporary minimalist movement in American short fiction. Sees this form as a nonverbal statement about theme: the spareness of life in America. Places Beattie’s work among that of other minimalists, including Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, James Robison, Mary Robison, and Tobias Wolff. Discusses Edgar Allan Poe as an early proponent of minimalism. Says that Beattie’s fiction is clearly shaped by the events surrounding the Vietnam War. A helpful essay for gaining an understanding of Beattie as a minimalist. Beattie, Ann. “An Interview with Ann Beattie.” Interview by Steven R. Centola. Contemporary Literature 31 (Winter, 1990): 405-422. Contains a photograph of Beattie. This article is useful to the general reader, providing information about Beattie’s biography. Beattie discusses herself as a feminist writer and talks about how she goes about creating credible male protagonists. Asserts that most of her fiction centers on exploring human relationships. McKinstry, Susan Jaret. “The Speaking Silence of Ann Beattie’s Voice.” Studies in Short Fiction 24 (Spring, 1987): 111-117. Asserts that Beattie’s female speakers puzzle readers because they tell two stories at once: an open story of the objective, detailed present juxtaposed against a closed story of the subjective past, which the speaker tries hard not to tell. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these ten short stories by Beattie: “The Big-Breasted Pilgrim” and “The Burning House” (vol. 1); “The Cinderella Waltz” (vol. 2); “Imagined Scenes,” “In the White Night,” “Jacklighting,” and “Janus” (vol. 4); “Shifting” (vol. 6); “Snow” (vol. 7); and “Winter: 1978” (vol. 8). Montresor, Jaye Berman, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Beattie. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Includes contemporary reaction to Beattie’s novels and collections of short stories, as well as scholarly and academic analyses of her work by various critics. Stein, Lorin. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 85, no. 4 (1997): 156-165. After an excellent summary of Beattie’s early fiction, the writer proceeds to analyze My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, which he thinks has been underrated by critics. Wyatt, David. “Ann Beattie.” The Southern Review 28, no. 1 (1992): 145-159. Presents evidence that in the mid-1980’s there was a marked alteration in Beattie’s fiction. Instead of withdrawing from life and its dangers, her characters chose to care about other people and to commit themselves to creativity. A perceptive and convincing analysis.

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Saul Bellow Born: Lachine, Quebec, Canada; June 10, 1915 Died: Brookline, Massachusetts; April 5, 2005 Principal short fiction • Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories, 1968; Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories, 1984; Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales, 1991; Collected Stories, 2001. Other literary forms • Saul Bellow is known primarily for his novels, which include The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Ravelstein (2000). He also published plays, a book of nonfiction prose about a trip to Jerusalem, and a number of essays. Achievements • Few would deny Saul Bellow’s place in contemporary American literature. Any assessment of his contributions would have to account for his realistic yet inventive style, the rich Jewish heritage upon which he draws, the centrality of Chicago in his fictional world, the role of the intellectual, and a fundamental wit, rare in contemporary American fiction. In 1976, Bellow’s achievement was internationally recognized when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also won the 1988 National Medal of Arts and four National Book Awards—for The Adventures of Augie March in 1954, for Herzog in 1965, for Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) in 1971, and for The Bellarosa Connection (1989) in 1990. In 1997, The Actual (1997) won the National Jewish Book Award, given by the Jewish Book Council. Biography • Saul Bellow was born in Canada. After spending his first nine years in the Montreal area, he moved with his family to Chicago and graduated from high school there. He spent his first two years of college at the University of Chicago and the last two at Northwestern University, graduating in 1937. That same year he began a brief interlude of graduate work in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. A few years later he started his writing career. He also taught at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1993, moving to Boston University thereafter. Married five times, Bellow had three sons by his first three wives. At the age of 84, he had a daughter by his fifth wife. After a long residence in Chicago, he relocated to Massachusetts in 1994. There he became a professor of literature at Boston University and became coeditor of a new literary journal, The Republic of Letters. His last novel, Ravelstein, published in 2000, may be seen as his literary farewell, as it voices his concern about the survival of the human spirit amid the luxurious entanglements of contemporary life. He died at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home in April, 2005, at the age of eighty-nine. Analysis • Saul Bellow’s stature in large measure owes something to the depths to which he plumbed the modern condition. He addressed the disorder of the modern age, with all its horror and darkness as well as its great hope. Though intensely identified with the United States, his heroes are preoccupied with dilemmas arising out of European intellectual and cultural history. Bellow’s fictional world is at once cerebral

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and sensual. His concern is with the interconnections between art, politics, business, personal sexual proclivities and passions, the intellectual, and the making of culture in modern times. He is heady, like German writer Thomas Mann, revealing the limitations and powers of the self. Few contemporary American writers deal with such weighty issues as masterfully as did Bellow. Bellow’s honors and reputation document but do not explain his importance, although it will be more clearly seen in the future when some of the main tendencies of American fiction of his era have been fully developed. He is important because he both preserved and enhanced qualities that are present in the great fictional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet he fully participated in the tumult and uncertainty of the modern era. Though he often opposed the © The Nobel Foundation political left and espoused “traditional” cultural positions, Bellow was not primarily a polemical writer. His main concern was not with maintaining social or cultural order but was more spiritual and philosophical in nature. In this, he differed from the group of “New York intellectuals” that centered in the 1940’s and 1950’s on the journal Partisan Review. Although Bellow was for a time friendly with members of this group he took pains to distance himself from it and to stress his essential independence of any creed or ideology, as his paramount concern was for the individual. This theme is especially prominent in his short fiction, whose smaller canvas gives heightened emphasis to Bellow’s stress on the struggle of the individual for self-definition and development against the background of the sundry obstacles the world has in store. Bellow’s characters have selves and interact with a society and a culture that Bellow created in detail after careful observation. In some of his works, especially Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s attitude toward that society and that culture borders on scorn, but his attitude has been earned, not merely stated in response to limitations on his own sensibility. The interaction between self and society in his work occurs against the backdrop of moral ideas. This is not to say that Bellow was didactic; rather, his work is infused with his sophisticated understanding of moral, social, and intellectual issues. In addition to preserving a rich but increasingly neglected tradition, Bellow enriched that tradition. After the exuberant opening words of The Adventures of Augie March, he also added new possibilities to the prose style of American fiction. In short, his work offers some of the benefits that readers in previous centu-

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ries sought in fiction—most notably, some ideas about how to be a person in the world—yet it also offers a technical brilliance that Bellow keeps in rein instead of letting it control his work. Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories • The stories collected in Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories explore characteristic Bellow themes and clearly demonstrate the writer’s moral and aesthetic vision. “Looking for Mr. Green” is set in Chicago during the Depression and recounts the efforts of a civil servant, George Grebe, to deliver relief checks to black residents of the south side. This is the stuff of social protest literature, and Bellow’s story does dramatize the suffering that was endemic at that time, but it is much more than didactic. Bellow avoids a single-minded attack on economic injustice and the resulting inartistic story by, among other things, using a number of contrasts and ironies. For example, two scenes set on the streets and in the tenements of Chicago are separated by a scene at Grebe’s office, and in that scene a philosophical discussion between Grebe and his boss, Raynor, is interrupted by a welfare mother’s tirade. The basic situation of the story is ironic, because it seems odd that anyone would have trouble delivering checks to persons who desperately need them. These persons, however, are difficult to ferret out, and their neighbors will not reveal their whereabouts because they fear that Grebe is a bill collector, process-server, or other source of trouble, and because he is white. This irony vividly illustrates the degree to which the Depression exaggerated the instinct of selfpreservation and widened the gulf between blacks and whites. Grebe’s name points out several of the contrasts in “Looking for Mr. Green.” Grebes are birds known for their elaborate courtship dances, but George Grebe is a bachelor. More important for the story, grebes live in pairs rather than in flocks and remain in their own territories, but George, because of his job, is forced into society and into territory where he is an alien, not only because he is white but also because he is the son of the last English butler in Chicago and was a professor of classics. This is not to say that he is a stranger to trouble: He “had had more than an average seasoning in hardship.” Despite his troubles, Grebe is shocked by suffering, distrust, and decrepit physical settings. Oddly enough, these conditions are for him not only a moral problem but also an epistemological one. Raynor, his supervisor, brings up this problem by asserting that “nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing.” In contrast, Grebe later concludes that objects “stood for themselves by agreement, . . . and when the things collapsed the agreement became visible.” The physical setting and the social and economic structure in this story are rapidly deteriorating, if not collapsing. Grebe complicates his analysis by asking “but what about need?,” thereby suggesting that because of the Depression the agreement itself is collapsing and perhaps with it reality. Some of the persons he meets want to hasten that collapse. The welfare mother “expressed the war of flesh and blood, perhaps turned a little crazy and certainly ugly, on the place and condition,” and another person advocates an alternate agreement, a plan whereby blacks would contribute a dollar apiece every month to produce black millionaires. Grebe’s finding Mr. Green indicates that he can do something about this obscure world in which appearance and reality are mixed. Near the end of the story he asserts that it “was important that there was a real Mr. Green whom they could not keep him from reaching because he seemed to come as an emissary from hostile appearances.”

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“The Gonzaga Manuscripts” • “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” is a subtle story that traces changes in a young man, Clarence Feiler, and puts those changes in the context of important issues pertinent to the proper functions of literature and to its relation to everyday reality. Bellow carefully delineates the psychological state of Feiler, to whom literature makes an enormous difference, and shows the impingement upon him of Spanish society, which also was the environment of the writer about whom he cares passionately, Manuel Gonzaga. These themes are developed in the context of Feiler’s search in Madrid and Seville for the unpublished manuscripts of poems written by Gonzaga. Feiler learns finally that the poems are lost forever, buried with Gonzaga’s patron. When Feiler arrives in Spain he is a confirmed Gonzagan, and while searching for the manuscripts he immerses himself in Spanish society and even in Gonzaga’s former milieu. Bellow meticulously paints in the Spanish background by describing the cities, religious processions, political climate, and a representative group of Spaniards. As a result of his immersion Feiler begins virtually to relive Gonzaga’s poems. For example, early in the story Feiler quotes part of a poem: I used to welcome all And now I fear all. If it rained it was comforting And if it shone, comforting, But now my very weight is dreadful. The story ends thus: as “the train left the mountains, the heavens seemed to split. Rain began to fall, heavy and sudden, boiling on the wide plain. He knew what to expect from the redheaded Miss Walsh at dinner.” That is, the rain is not comforting, and he fears that Miss Walsh will continue to torment him. Feiler maintains his allegiance to Gonzaga, but there is considerable evidence in the story indicating that his allegiance is misplaced. For example, Gonzaga’s friends are unimpressive. His best friend, del Nido, is a babbling mediocrity who sees little need for more poetry, and Gonzaga’s patron has had the poems buried with her, thus denying them to the world. Another acquaintance misunderstands Feiler’s search, thinking that he is after mining stock. One of Gonzaga’s main beliefs is that one needs to take a dim view of human potential; he advocates being little more than a creature and avoiding the loss of everything by not trying to become everything. Even though Feiler himself has few aspirations besides finding the lost poems, he ends in despair. In fact, Gonzaga resembles the writers whom Bellow castigates in “Some Notes on Recent American Fiction” because of their minimal conception of human potential and their concomitant solicitousness for their own sensibility. Bellow’s essay is a defense of a view of literature that Feiler unflatteringly contrasts to Gonzaga’s. “Mosby’s Memoirs” • “Mosby’s Memoirs” was published in 1968, two years before Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and, like that novel, is a study in world weariness. Mosby is writing his memoirs in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the fecund land and the earthy existence of the people contrast to his own dryness. His mind ranges back through his life, particularly to recall two friends: Ruskin, a poet who has a theoretical bent of mind, and Lustgarden, who alternates between endlessly elaborated Marxism and piratical capitalism. At the end of the story Mosby is in a tomb that, along with his inability to get

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enough air to breathe, suggests that he is moribund. Although Mr. Sammler’s Planet depicts a sympathetic character fending off as best he can the horrors of contemporary life, “Mosby’s Memoirs” shows the danger of rejecting one’s era. Mosby’s critique is conservative: He had worked for Hearst, had shaken Franco’s hand, had agreed with Burnham’s emphasis on managing, even to the point of admiring Nazi Germany’s skill at it. Partly because Lustgarden’s Marxism is not made to appear attractive either, Mosby’s politics are not as unattractive as his attitude toward other persons. He is intolerant and is characterized by “acid elegance, logical tightness, factual punctiliousness, and merciless laceration in debate.” Even more damaging to him is a scene at a concert in which he is described as “stone-hearted Mosby, making fun of flesh and blood, of those little humanities with their short inventories of bad and good.” His attitude is also obvious in his treatment of Lustgarden in his memoirs. Rather than using his friend’s disastrous attempts to make money as a political parable or as an occasion to demonstrate pity, Mosby plans to use them for comic relief, in the process eschewing his “factual punctiliousness” in order to make Lustgarden more laughable. Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories • The stories brought together in Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories can be divided into two types: The title story and What Kind of Day Did You Have? (both novella-length pieces) feature powerful, aging Jewish intellectuals trying to come to grips with the course their lives have taken and bridge the world of ideas with the sensate, real world around them. The other three stories in the volume—“Zetland: By a Character Witness,” “A Silver Dish,” and “Cousins”—are cut from the same fabric as “Looking for Mr. Green.” They vividly, almost nostalgically, evoke a past, between the wars and after, and portray the assimilation of Jews in the United States. What is impressive in all of these stories is the wide historical swath they cut; Bellow’s concern here, as elsewhere, is no less than the human condition in the twentieth century. Herschel Shawmut, the narrator of Him with His Foot in His Mouth, a man in his sixties, is a successful Jewish musicologist. His story, a sort of confession, is addressed to a “Miss Rose” whom he evidently mortally offended with an inadvertent verbal barb years ago. Shawmut confesses to other slips of the tongue as well. As he writes about all the incidents, revealing a certain pattern of personality, he attributes them simply to fate. His confession also reveals that he has been swindled by his own brother Philip, a materialist living a sumptuous bourgeois life in Texas. Philip persuades his naïve brother to hand over all of his hard-earned money (made from his musicological ventures) and form a partnership in a company rife with fraud and other illegal activities. After Philip’s untimely death, Shawmut, hounded by creditors, seeks exile. He is, in the end, living a lonely life in Canada. Through his confessions, Shawmut seems to find some kind of order and the satisfaction of having articulated the nature of his fate, for better or worse. Victor Wulpy, the older Jewish intellectual in What Kind of Day Did You Have? is a charismatic figure who sweeps a much younger Katrina Goliger, mother of two, off her feet. On the day in question, Wulpy calls Katrina to ask her to come to Buffalo and fly back to Chicago with him for a speaking engagement. Not daring to question this cultural giant, she takes off immediately, cancelling an appointment with a psychiatrist for an evaluation of her psychiatric condition in a fierce battle with her former husband for custody of her children. In the climactic scene of the story, the small Cessna plane they are in seems, in the thick of a winter storm, to be in a fatal

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dive toward Lake Michigan. In the face of possible death Katrina wants him to say he loves her, but he refuses. “If we don’t love each other,” she then wonders aloud, “What are we doing? How did we get here?” In the end, Wulpy makes his speaking engagement and Trina makes it home, to find her children gone. Soon they return, escorted by Krieggstein, a police officer and a suitor waiting for the passing of the Wulpy phase. “A Silver Dish” and “Cousins” • Bellow’s Jewish wit, evident in all these stories, sparkles in “A Silver Dish” and “Cousins,” both cleverly conceived. In “A Silver Dish,” a sixty-year-old Woody Selbst mourns his father’s death and recalls an incident in his youth. Woody’s mother and father had split up, leaving Woody’s upbringing in the hands of his mother and a Protestant evangelical minister. Woody’s father, “Pop,” returns one day to ask his son a favor. Would he introduce his father to a certain wealthy Protestant, Mrs. Skoglund, who had made money in the dairy business? Woody reluctantly agrees and takes his father to the woman’s home. While she and her suspicious maid leave the room to pray and decide whether or not to comply with Pop’s request for money, Pop steals a silver dish from a locked cabinet. Woody and his father get into a scuffle, and his father promises to put the dish back if Mrs. Skoglund coughs up the money. She does, but Pop, unbeknownst to his son, keeps the dish. When the dish is missed, Woody gets the blame and falls from grace in the eyes of the evangelical crowd—which is exactly the effect his father desired. In “Cousins,” the narrator, Ijah Brodsky, an international banker, tells the story of his contact with three cousins. The first, Tanky Metzger, is connected to mobs and wants Ijah to use his influence with a certain judge and gain a lighter sentence. The second cousin is Mordecai, or “Cousin Motty,” whom Ijah goes to visit in the hospital after he has been hurt in an automobile crash. Cousin Motty has letters to deliver to Ijah from another cousin, Scholem Stavis. The intellectual in the family, Stavis has ended up, however, driving a cab. All through the narrative are reminiscences, a calling up of the past, a restitching of old relationships. Ijah’s existence seems somehow to be tied to, and defined by, his connection to these cousins. The Actual • The Actual, a short, self-contained novella, has many of the traits and characteristics associated with Bellow’s earlier work. In fact, for these reasons it is an excellent introduction to Bellow’s fictional world. Yet, strikingly for a work published in its author’s eighty-second year, it also breaks new ground for Bellow. The hero of The Actual is a man named Harry Trellman, who is at the time of the action semiretired and living in Chicago. Trellman has always been perceived by those he encounters as a bit different from everybody else, standing out from the rest of the crowd. Trellman worked as a businessman in Asia and later served as an adviser to Siggy Adletsky, a tycoon and racketeer who controls a huge financial empire and who is now ninety-two years old. Adletsky finds Trellman valuable because of his wide-ranging knowledge. This is a situation often found in Bellow’s work: the alliance between the shady millionaire and the intellectual. As a teenager, Trellman had been in love with Amy Wustrin, who had eventually chosen as her second husband Trellman’s best friend in high school, Jay Wustrin. Throughout the years, Harry Trellman had kept firm to the inner image of Amy in his mind even as he went through his varied career and activities. After Jay Wustrin dies prematurely, he is buried in the cemetery plot originally reserved for Amy’s father, who had sold it to him years earlier. Now Amy wants to remove Jay’s body to the

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burial plot of his own family so that her father, who is still alive at an advanced age, can eventually be buried there. In a limousine provided by Adletsky, Amy and Trellman disinter and rebury the body. Moved by this scene of death and renewal, Trellman confesses to Amy that he has always loved her, that he has what he terms an “actual affinity” for her (hence the title of the story). He then asks her to marry him. This declaration of love is striking as Trellman, for most of his life, has remained uncommitted and rather inscrutable, not exposing his inner secrets to others. Harry’s privacy is contrasted with the willful self-exposure of men such as Jay Wustrin, who love making a spectacle of themselves. This dichotomy between the public and private man is mirrored by the tensions in Trellman’s relationship with Adletsky, who is concerned only with money and profit-making, yet needs the intellectual-minded, knowledgeable Trellman in order to succeed; equally, Trellman becomes dependent on the financial largesse of Adletsky. Trellman stands slightly outside the world’s network of relationships yet cannot do entirely without them. In most of his fictions, Bellow’s male protagonists tend to have troubled relationships with women and are often suffering in the aftermath of divorce. The serenity of Trellman’s love for Amy stands in vivid contrast especially to earlier short fictions of Bellow’s such as What Kind of Day Did You Have? and sounds a note of romantic celebration that is basically unprecedented in Bellow’s work. John Stark With updates by Allen Hibbard, Nicholas Birns, and the Editors Other major works plays: The Wrecker, pb. 1954; The Last Analysis, pr. 1964; Under the Weather, pr. 1966 (also known as The Bellow Plays; includes Out from Under, A Wen, and Orange Soufflé). anthology: Great Jewish Short Stories, 1963 novels: Dangling Man, 1944; The Victim, 1947; The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Seize the Day, 1956; Henderson the Rain King, 1959; Herzog, 1964; Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 1970; Humboldt’s Gift, 1975; The Dean’s December, 1982; More Die of Heartbreak, 1987; A Theft, 1989; The Bellarosa Connection, 1989; The Actual, 1997 (novella); Ravelstein, 2000; Novels, 1944-1953, 2003 (includes Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March). nonfiction: To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, 1976; Conversations with Saul Bellow, 1994 (Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, editors); It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, 1994. Bibliography American Studies International 35 (February, 1997). A special issue on Bellow, in which a number of distinguished contributors discuss the importance of Bellow’s work as a symbol of the civilization of the United States. The issue contains tributes, critiques, and analyses of Bellow’s thought and art. Atlas, James. Bellow. New York: Random House, 2000. Full and accessible biography, written with the cooperation of its subject. Bibliography. Bellow, Saul. “Moving Quickly: An Interview with Saul Bellow.” Salmagundi (Spring/ Summer, 1995): 32-53. In this special section, Bellow discusses the relationship between authors and characters, John Updike, intellectuals, gender differences, Sigmund Freud, and kitsch versus avant-garde art.

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Saul Bellow. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. This volume, with an introduction by Bloom, is an omnibus of reviews and essays on Bellow. Collected here are comments on Bellow by writers such as Robert Penn Warren, Malcolm Bradbury, Tony Tanner, Richard Chase, and Cynthia Ozick. Gives the reader a good sense of early critical responses to Bellow. Boyers, Robert. “Captains of Intellect.” Salmagundi (Spring/Summer, 1995): 100108. Part of a special section on Bellow. A discussion of characters in stories from the collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories as captains of intellect who pronounce authoritatively on issues of the modern. Discusses Bellow as an intellectual leader with a multifaceted perspective. Cronin, Gloria L., and L. H. Goldman, eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980’s: A Collection of Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989. This anthology brings together a sampling of a wave of criticism that focuses variously on Bellow’s women, his debts to Judaism, connections to theories of history, and modernism. Freedman, William. “Hanging for Pleasure and Profit: Truth as Necessary Illusion in Bellow’s Fiction.” Papers on Language and Literature 35 (Winter, 1999): 3-27. Argues that Bellow’s realism is a search for truth, not the discovery of it. Discusses how Bellow deals with the question of whether a man is isolated or a member of a human community. Contends that for Bellow the value of literature is the ceaseless search for truth in a world that promises truth but seldom provides it. The Georgia Review 49 (Spring, 1995). A special issue on Bellow in which a number of contributors discuss his life and art, his contribution to American thought and culture, and the wide range of his works. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these six short stories by Bellow: “A Father-to-Be” and “The Gonzaga Manuscripts” (vol. 3), “Leaving the Yellow House” (vol. 4), “Looking for Mr. Green” and “Mosby’s Memoirs” (vol. 5), and “A Silver Dish” (vol. 7). Pifer, Ellen. Saul Bellow Against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. In a study that deals comprehensively with the writings, Pifer’s central observation is that Bellow’s heroes are divided against themselves and conduct an inner strife that dooms and paralyzes them. Their struggle, like Bellow’s, is a search for language to articulate the modern condition.

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Ambrose Bierce Born: Horse Cave Creek, Ohio; June 24, 1842 Died: Mexico(?); January, 1914(?) Principal short fiction • Cobwebs: Being the Fables of Zambri the Parse, 1884; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891 (also known as In the Midst of Life, 1898); Can Such Things Be?, 1893; Fantastic Fables, 1899; The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906; My Favourite Murder, 1916; Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, 1964; The Collected Fables of Ambrose Bierce, 2000 (S. T. Joshi, editor). Other literary forms • As a lifelong journalist and commentator, Ambrose Bierce wrote prodigiously. He was fond of vitriolic epigrams and sketches, together with miscellaneous works of literary criticism, epigrams, and both prose and verse aphorisms. His most famous work is almost certainly The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), a collection of typically ironic and cynical definitions, such as that for a bore: “A person who talks when you wish him to listen.” Many of Bierce’s nonfiction writings have been published posthumously. These include Shadows of Blue and Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (2002) and The Fall of the Republic, and Other Political Satires (2000). Bierce also published several volumes of verse during his lifetime, and a collected edition of his poetry was published in 1995. Achievements • For many years, Ambrose Bierce was labeled a misanthrope or pessimist, and his dark short stories of murder and violence were understood as the work of a man who, obsessed with the idea of death, showed himself incapable of compassion. A less moralistic and biographical reevaluation of Bierce’s work, however, reveals his intellectual fascination with the effect of the supernatural on the human imagination. Many of his morally outrageous stories are tall tales, which certainly cannot be taken at face value. Their black humor, combined with the coolly understated voices of their criminal or psychopathic narrators, reflects a society gone to seed and pokes fun at the murderous dangers of American life in the West during the Gilded Age. Biography • Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was brought up on the farm in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, where he was born in 1842. Although information about his early life is sparse, the evidence of his stories and the fact that he quarreled with and repudiated his large family with the exception of one brother indicate an unhappy childhood and an abnormal hatred of parental figures. His only formal education consisted of one year at a military academy. He fought with the Indiana infantry in the American Civil War (1861-1865), was wounded at the battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and ended the conflict as a brevet major. After the war, he settled in California, where, following a brief stint as a watchman at the San Francisco mint, he drifted into literary work. He wrote for the San Francisco Argonaut and News Letter and published his first story, “The Haunted Valley” (1871), in the Overland Monthly. He married and, on money received as a gift from his father-in-law, traveled abroad to England in 1872, returning to California in 1876 because of bad health. Upon his return he again became associated with the Argonaut. From 1879 to 1881 he took part in the Black Hills gold rush, return-

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ing in 1881 to San Francisco, having found no success as a miner. There he began, in association with the San Francisco Wap, his famous column “The Prattler,” transferred to William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner upon the Wap’s failure, and continued at the Examiner until 1896, when Hearst sent him to Washington as a correspondent for the New York American. Much of Bierce’s subsequently collected work appeared first in “The Prattler.” Divorced in 1904, Bierce resigned from the Hearst organization in 1909 and, in a final quixotic gesture, disappeared into Mexico in the thick of the Mexican Revolution. He was never heard from again. Analysis • Perhaps the most rewarding way to approach Ambrose Bierce’s writing is to note that it was in many respects the product of two intertwined biographical factors, inseparable for purposes of analysis. The first of these reflects Bierce’s thorny and irascible personality which made him, on the one hand, quarrel with practically everyone he ever knew, and on the other, follow romantic and often impossible causes, the last of which led to his death. The second reflects his lifelong employment as a journalist, more specifically as a writer of short columns, generally aphoristic in nature, for various newspapers. The interaction of these two often contradictory strands explains, as well as any single factor can, both the strengths and weaknesses of Bierce’s writing. Philosophically, Bierce’s work is almost completely uncompromising in its iconoclasm; his view of existence is despairing, revealing only the bitterness of life within a totally fallen world promising neither present happiness nor future redemption. This “bitterness,” which almost every critic has remarked in Bierce’s work, is not completely fortunate. It can, and in Bierce’s case often does, lead to that kind of adolescent cynicism which delights in discovering clouds in every silver lining. Too many of the insights which once seemed sterling are now fairly obviously only tinfoil. The definition of “economy” in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) is a case in point: “Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford”—an arresting idea, certainly, succinctly expressed, but by no means a profound one. In fact, it is precisely the kind of item one would expect to find on the editorial page of the morning newspaper and perhaps remember long enough to repeat at the office. Indeed, this particular aphorism did first appear in a newspaper, with most of the other contents of The Devil’s Dictionary and, predictably, did not really survive the transformation into book form. The Devil’s Dictionary, like much of Bierce’s work, is now much more generally read about than actually read. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” • At its best, however, Bierce’s cynicism is transformed into often-passionate statements of the tragedy of existence in a world in which present joys are unreal and future hopes vain, as a glance at one of Bierce’s best-known stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” will show. This story, for all its apparent simplicity, has attracted uniform critical admiration and has been complimented not only by being extensively anthologized but also by having been made into an award-winning film. Purporting to be an incident from the American Civil War, the story opens with the execution by hanging of a Confederate civilian. His name, Peyton Farquhar, is revealed later, as is his apparent crime: He was apprehended by Union soldiers in an attempt to destroy the railroad bridge at Owl Creek, from which he is about to be hanged. The hangman’s rope breaks, however, sending Farquhar into the current below. He frees his bound hands and, by swimming, manages to escape both the fire of the Union riflemen who have been assem-

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bled to witness the execution and, more miraculously, the fire of their cannon. Reaching shore, Farquhar sets out for home along an unfamiliar road, and after a night-long journey in a semidelirious condition arrives at his plantation some thirty miles away. His wife greets him at the entrance, but as he reaches to clasp her in his arms he suffers what is apparently a stroke and loses his senses. He has not, it develops, suffered a stroke; the last sentence of the story tells us what has really happened. The rope had not broken at all: “Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” sounds, in summary, contrived. What is it, after all, more than a tired descant on the familiar theme of the dying man whose life passes before his eyes, coupled with the familiar trick of the unexpected happy ending put in negative terms? The answer, from the perspective of one who has read the story rather than its summary, is that it is much more. For one thing, the careful reader is not left totally unprepared for the final revelation; he has been alerted to the fact that something may be amiss by Bierce’s remark that Farquhar had, before his apparent death, fixed “his last thoughts upon his wife and children.” Moreover, Farquhar’s journey home is described in terms which become constantly less real. The unreality of the details of his homeward journey not only expresses Farquhar’s growing estrangement from the world of reality, his “doom,” perhaps, or—for those more at home in modern Freudianism—his “death wish,” but also subtly indicates that what seems to be happening in the story may not in fact actually be happening, at least in the real world. In any event, Bierce’s point is clear and reinforced within the story by a consistent movement in grammatical usage from the actual, “he was still sinking” (speaking of Farquhar’s fall from the bridge into the water), toward the hypothetical, such as “doubtless,” the word Bierce uses to describe Farquhar’s apparent return to his plantation. What, then, makes this story more than the predictable reverse of the typical tricky story with the illogical happy ending? The difference is to be found simply in Bierce’s uncompromisingly negative view of the world. The reader begins in a world where everyone is symbolically sentenced to death, from which his or her reprieve is only temporary, and the reader wanders with him through a field of illusions which become more attractive as they escape the confines of reality. The reader ends, reaching for a beauty and love which was sought but which was unobtainable, dead under Owl Creek Bridge. The symbolism of Owl Creek is not gratuitous: Wise old owls discover that every road leads only to death. “Chickamauga” • The master image of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” of a delusory journey leading to an ultimately horrible and horrifying revelation is central to many of Bierce’s stories, one more of which is worth brief mention here. “Chickamauga,” not as well known as the former story, is equally chilling and equally cunning in its artistry. It tells of a nameless young boy, “aged about six years,” who with toy sword in hand wanders away from his home one day into the adjacent woods, where he successfully plays soldier until, unexpectedly frightened by a rabbit, he runs away and becomes lost. He falls asleep, and when he awakens it is nearly dusk. Still lost, his directionless night journey through the forest brings him upon a column of retreating soldiers, all horribly wounded and unable to walk, who are trying to withdraw from a battle (presumably the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga in the American Civil War, although this is never specifically stated) which has been fought in the neighborhood and of which the child, whom we later discover to be both deaf and

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mute, has been unaware. In a ghastly parody of military splendor, the child takes command of these horribly wounded soldiers and leads them on, waving his wooden sword. As the ghastly cavalcade limps forward, the wood mysteriously begins to brighten. The brightness is not the sun, however, but the light from a burning house, and when the little boy sees the blazing dwelling he deserts his troops and, fascinated by the flames, approaches the conflagration. Suddenly he recognizes the house as his own, and at its doorway he finds the corpse of his mother. Again, the magic of this story vanishes in paraphrase, in which the masterfully controlled feeling of horror almost inevitably sounds contrived, the revelation slick rather than profound. The compelling quality of “Chickamauga” is largely a function of Bierce’s style, which at once conceals and reveals what is going on. The story of a small boy who wanders off into the woods with a toy sword and who is frightened by a rabbit scarcely seems to be the kind of fictional world in which such uncompromising horrors should logically take place. Yet on a symbolic level, the story has a curiously compelling logic. The first reading of the tale leaves one with a slightly false impression of its meaning. The story does not tell us, as it seems to, and as so many fairy tales do, that it is better not to leave home and venture into the wild wood; the story’s meaning is darker than this. In the world of “Chickamauga,” safety is to be found neither at home nor abroad. By wandering away into the woods the boy perhaps escaped the fate of those who remained at home, and yet his symbolic journey has only brought him back to a world where death is everywhere supreme. To emphasize this point more strongly, in 1898 Bierce retitled the book of short stories in which both the above tales appeared In the Midst of Life. Readers are expected to complete the quotation themselves: “ . . . we are in death.” Although most of Bierce’s stories which are widely remembered today deal with military themes, many of his other stories are quite frankly supernatural. By and large these supernatural stories seem less likely to survive than his military ones, if only because Bierce has less sense for the implicit thematic structure of supernatural tales than he does for macabre stories about the military. His ghost stories are avowedly “shockers,” without the psychological depth to be found in the works of true masters of the supernatural. They do not have the profundity, for example, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Nevertheless, the best of them do have a certain compelling quality simply because of the bizarre nature of the revelation of what lies at the heart of the supernatural event which Bierce relates. “The Damned Thing” • “The Damned Thing” offers a convenient case in point. This is, quite simply, the story of a man who is hunted down and finally killed by some kind of animal, apparently a wildcat. The reader never knows precisely what kind of animal it is, however, since it has one peculiar quality: It is invisible. The story is told with the last scene first. This last scene, entitled “One Does Not Always Eat What Is on the Table,” takes place at the coroner’s inquest over the body of one Hugh Morgan, who has met a violent death. His friend, William Harker, explains how Morgan had acted inexplicably on a hunting trip, apparently falling into a fit. The coroner’s jury agrees, at least to an extent. Their ungrammatical verdict is “We, the jury, do find that the remains come to their death at the hands of a mountain lion, but some of us thinks, all the same, they had fits.” In the closing scene of the story, Morgan’s diary is introduced as explanation, and in it we read of his growing awareness that he is being stalked by some kind of invisible animal. A pseudoscientific rationale is given for this invisibility. The animal is “actinic,” at least according to Morgan. “Actinic” colors, we

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are informed, are colors that exist at either end of the spectrum and that cannot be perceived by the human eye. We have, in other words, either an infrared or an ultraviolet mountain lion. Neither choice is particularly satisfactory, and the difficulty with our willing suspension of disbelief in the tale is indicated by precisely this: The science is bad, and yet it pretends not to be. The notion of an ultraviolet mountain lion is basically more silly than chilling, and since the story has no fiber to it other than the revelation of what the mountain lion actually consists of, we cannot take it seriously. In fact, the reader feels vaguely victimized and resentful, as though having been set up as the butt of some kind of pointless joke. Yet even in this story, relatively unsuccessful as it is, we see at work the underlying preoccupations which make some of Bierce’s other stories unforgettable. The attempt in a Bierce story is always to shock someone by removing him from a commonplace world and placing him—like the little boy in “Chickamauga”—in another world whose laws are recognizable, though strange. The logic of a Bierce story is often very like the logic of a nightmare, in which the reader is placed in the position of the dreamer. When trapped in a nightmare, the reader feels the presence of a certain inexorable logic, even though one may not, at the moment, be able to define exactly how that logic operates or of what precisely it consists. It is the feeling for the presence of this hostile and malevolent order which gives the best of Bierce’s stories their perennial fascination. James K. Folsom With updates by R. C. Lutz Other major works miscellaneous: The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, 1909-1912; Shadows of Blue and Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, 2002 (Brian M. Thomsen, editor). nonfiction: Nuggets and Dust Panned in California, 1873; The Fiend’s Delight, 1873; Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 1874; The Dance of Death, 1877; The Dance of Life: An Answer to the Dance of Death, 1877 (with Mrs. J. Milton Bowers); The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906; The Shadow on the Dial, and Other Essays, 1909; Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, 1909; The Letters of Ambrose Bierce, 1922; Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce, 1922; Selections from Prattle, 1936; Ambrose Bierce on Richard Realf by Wm. McDevitt, 1948; A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography, 1998 (S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, editors); The Fall of the Republic, and Other Political Satires, 2000 (Joshi and Schultz, editors); A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce, 2003 (Joshi and Schultz, editors). poetry: Vision of Doom, 1890; Black Beetles in Amber, 1892; How Blind Is He?, 1896; Shapes of Clay, 1903; Poems of Ambrose Bierce, 1995. translation: The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter, 1892 (with Gustav Adolph Danziger; of Richard Voss’s novel). Bibliography Butterfield, Herbie. “‘Our Bedfellow Death’: The Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce.” In The Nineteenth Century American Short Story, edited by A. Robert Lee. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985. Brief, general introduction to the themes and techniques of some of Bierce’s most representative short stories. Conlogue, William. “A Haunting Memory: Ambrose Bierce and the Ravine of the Dead.” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Winter, 1991): 21-29. Discusses Bierce’s symbolic use of the topographical feature of the ravine as a major symbol of death in five

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stories, including “Killed at Resaca,” “Coulter’s Notch,” and “The Coup de Grâce.” Shows how the ravine symbolizes the grave, the underworld, and lost love for Bierce, all derived from his Civil War memories and the death of his first love. Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Discusses how Bierce intentionally blurs distinctions between such categories as knowledge, emotion, language, and behavior. Examines how Bierce blurs distinctions between external reality and imaginative reality in many of his most important short stories. ____________, ed. Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Comprehensive compilation of thirty essays and reviews of Bierce’s work, this collection is an essential tool for any serious study of Bierce. Davidson’s introduction locates the essays in relation to the ongoing process of reevaluating Bierce’s work, and her thoroughly researched bibliography contains more than eighty further critical references. Fatout, Paul. Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Lexicographer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. Fatout’s impressive collation of painstakingly researched biographical data represents an important landmark in the scholarly study of Bierce’s life. Supplemented by illustrations and a bibliography. Gale, Robert L. An Ambrose Bierce Companion. New York: Greenwood Press, 2001. Comprehensive guide to the life and writings of the American satirist. Grenander, Mary Elizabeth. Ambrose Bierce. New York: Twayne, 1971. This volume is well researched, balanced, and readable, and it is perhaps the single most accessible study of Bierce’s work and life. Contains a valuable, annotated bibliography and a list of primary sources. Hoppenstand, Gary. “Ambrose Bierce and the Transformation of the Gothic Tale in the Nineteenth-Century American Periodical.” In Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Examines Bierce’s relationship to the San Francisco periodicals, focusing on the influence he had in bringing the gothic tale into the twentieth century; discusses themes and conventions in “The Damned Thing” and “Moxon’s Master.” May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Bierce: “Chickamauga” (vol. 1), “The Coup de Grâce” (vol. 2), “Killed at Resaca” (vol. 4), and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “One of the Missing” (vol. 5). Morris, Roy, Jr. Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. New York: Crown, 1996. Compelling, if somewhat slight, biography of one of American’s most eccentric yet quotable authors.

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Giovanni Boccaccio Born: Florence or Certaldo (now in Italy); June or July, 1313 Died: Certaldo (now in Italy); December 21, 1375 Principal short fiction • Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto, 1349-1351 (The Decameron, 1620). Other literary forms • Although Giovanni Boccaccio’s greatest work is the masterfully framed collection of one hundred Italian short stories known as The Decameron, he also left a large and significant corpus of poetry. His earliest poetry, written in Naples, is in Italian and includes the Rime (c. 1330-1340; poems), which comprises more than one hundred lyrics, mostly sonnets and not all of sure attribution. These short poems are largely dedicated to the poet’s beloved Fiammetta, who is identified in some of Boccaccio’s pseudoautobiographical writings as Maria d’Aquino; supposedly, she was the illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Naples, but more probably she was the invention of the poet. Similarly, the longer poem La caccia di Diana (c. 1334; Diana’s hunt), Il filostrato (c. 1335; The Filostrato, 1873), Il filocolo (c. 1336; Labor of Love, 1566), and Teseida (1340-1341; The Book of Theseus, 1974) are all poems ostensibly inspired by Boccaccio’s ardor for Fiammetta, whose name means “little flame.” Other poems that were composed in the 1340’s also treat the formidable power of love and include the Commedia delle ninfe, entitled Il ninfale d’Ameto by fifteenth century copyists (1341-1342; the comedy of the nymphs of Florence), L’amorosa visione (1342-1343; English translation, 1986), Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343-1344; Amorous Fiammetta, 1587), and Il ninfale fiesolano (1344-1346; The Nymph of Fiesole, 1597). Achievements • Giovanni Boccaccio created many literary firsts in Italian letters. He is often credited, for example, with the first Italian hunting poem (La caccia di Diana), the first Italian verse romance by a nonminstrel (The Filostrato), the first Italian prose romance (Labor of Love), and the first Italian idyll (The Nymph of Fiesole). Many scholars also regard Boccaccio as the greatest narrator Europe has produced. Such high esteem for the Tuscan author assuredly arises from his masterpiece, The Decameron, which has provided a model or source material for many notable European and English authors, from Marguerite de Navarre and Lope de Vega Carpio to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Even if Boccaccio had never composed his magnum opus, however, he would still enjoy significant acclaim in European literary history for his presumedly minor writings. For example, many consider his Amorous Fiammetta to be the first modern (that is, postclassical) psychological novel. Certainly his Il ninfale d’Ameto anticipates Renaissance bucolic literature. Contemporary medieval authors also looked to Boccaccio for inspiration. In The Filostrato, Geoffrey Chaucer found ample material for his Troilus and Criseyde (1382), and in The Book of Theseus Chaucer discovered the source for “The Knight’s Tale.” Boccaccio’s encyclopedic works in Latin resulted in his being regarded as one of the most prominent Trecento humanists. Indeed, it was as a Latin humanist, rather than as a raconteur of vernacular tales, that Boccaccio was primarily remembered during the first century following his demise.

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Biography • The exact place and date of the birth of Giovanni Boccaccio are not known. Until the first half of the twentieth century, it was believed that he was born in Paris of a noble Frenchwoman; scholars now regard that story as another one of the author’s fictional tales. Most likely, he was born in Florence or Certaldo, Italy, in June or July, 1313, the natural son of Boccaccio di Chellino and an unidentified Tuscan woman. His father, an agent for a powerful Florentine banking family (the Bardi), recognized Giovanni early as his son; the boy, as a result, passed both his infancy and his childhood in his father’s house. Boccaccio’s teacher in his youth was Giovanni Mazzuoli da Strada, undoubtedly an admirer Dante Alighieri, whose La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) greatly influenced Boccaccio’s own writings. In his early teens, sometime between 1325 and 1328, Boccaccio was sent to Naples to learn the merchant trade and banking business as an apprentice to the Neapolitan branch of the Bardi Company. The Bardi family, as the financiers of King Robert of Anjou, exerted a powerful influence at the Angevin court in Naples. The experiences Boccaccio enjoyed with the Neapolitan aristocracy and with the breathtaking countryside and beautiful sea are reflected in many of his early poems. During his sojourn in Naples, Boccaccio also studied canon law, between 1330 or 1331 and 1334. While studying business and law, however, he anxiously sought cultural experiences to broaden his awareness of belles lettres. Largely self-taught in literary matters, he soon began to study the writings of his somewhat older contemporary, Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch. Later, the two men became friends and met on a number of occasions (1350 in Florence, 1351 in Padua, 1359 in Milano, 1363 in Venice, and 1368 in Padua again). Boccaccio left Naples and returned to Florence between 1340 and 1341 because of a financial crisis in the Bardi empire. Although Boccaccio rued having to leave Naples, so often associated in his imagination and writings with love and adventure and poetry, his highly bourgeois Florentine experience added an important and desirable dimension of realism to his work. Little is documented about Boccaccio’s life between 1340 and 1348, although it is known (from one of Petrarch’s letters) that he was in Ravenna between 1345 and 1346 and that he sent a letter from Forlì in 1347. He was back in Florence in 1348, where he witnessed at first hand the horrible ravages of the Black Death, or bubonic plague. Between 1349 and 1351, he gave final form to The Decameron, which takes as it mise en scène Florence and the Tuscan countryside during the plague of 1348. After his father’s death in 1349, Boccaccio assumed many more familial responsibilities and financial burdens. As his fame as an author and scholar burgeoned, his fellow Florentines began to honor him with various ambassadorial duties, starting with his 1350 assignment as ambassador to the lords of Romagna. Such posts, however, did little to alleviate the financial difficulties caused by the collapse of the Bardi Company. Boccaccio longed to return to the pleasant life he had known in Naples, but visits there in 1355 and again in 1362 and 1370 to 1371 were extremely disappointing. Between 1360 and 1362, he studied Greek, the first among the literati of his time to do so seriously; from that time until his death, his home became the center for Italian humanism. Sometime around 1361 or 1362, he left Florence to take up residence in the family home in Certaldo, where he died, on December 21, 1375, the year after the death of his friend and fellow humanist, Petrarch. Analysis • Giovanni Boccaccio’s short fiction, one hundred novelle, or tales, is collectively and contemporaneously his longest work of fiction, known as The Decameron.

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That fact must be kept foremost in mind in any serious analysis of the tales. In other words, Boccaccio’s individual short stories are best understood when examined as part of a much larger work of fiction which has an elaborate cornice, or frame, striking symmetry, and selective and oft-repeated themes. The word decameron, Greek for “ten days,” refers to the number of days Boccaccio’s fictional characters (three young men and seven young women) dedicate to swapping tales with one another in the tranquil Tuscan countryside away from the plague-infested city of Florence. The work’s subtitle, “Prencipe Galeotto” (Prince Galahalt), refers to the panderer Galahalt, who brought Guinevere and Lancelot together, and emphasizes that Boccaccio’s book—dedicated to women—is written, not unlike many of his early poems, in the service of love. As the narration of the first day begins, three men—Panfilo (“all love”), Filostrato (“overcome by love”), and Dioneo (“the lascivious”), alluding to the love goddess Venus, daughter of Dione—come by chance one Tuesday upon seven women, who are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. The year is 1348, and the Black Death is the macabre background for what happens in the course of the telling of the tales. The seven women—Pampinea (“the vigorous”), Fiammetta (whose name echoes that of Boccaccio’s beloved), Filomena (“lover of song”), Emilia (“the flatterer”), Lauretta (in homage to Petrarch’s beloved Laura), Neifile (“new in love”), and Elissa (another name for Vergil’s tragic heroine Dido)—anxiously wish to remove themselves from the diseased and strife-torn city and repair to the healthful and peaceful countryside. The young men agree to accompany the ladies, and the following day (a Wednesday) the group leaves for a villa in nearby and idyllic Fiesole. Better to enjoy what is essentially a fortnight’s holiday, Pampinea suggests that they tell stories in the late afternoon when it is too hot to play or go on walks. It is decided that one of them will be chosen as king or queen for each day, and the chosen person will select a theme for the stories to be told on that day. Only Dioneo, who tells the last tale each day, has the liberty of ignoring the general theme if he so desires. They then proceed to tell ten stories per day over a two-week period, refraining from tale-telling on Fridays and Saturdays out of reverence for Christ’s crucifixion and in order to prepare properly for the Sabbath. On a Wednesday, the day following the last day of telling tales and exactly two weeks from the day the group left Florence, they return to their respective homes. The emphasis on order Library of Congress

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and propriety, the presentation of the countryside as a locus amoenus, the repetition of the number ten (considered a symbol of perfection in the Middle Ages), and even the total number of tales (one hundred, equal to the number of cantos in Dante’s The Divine Comedy) are all aspects of the work which contrast sharply with the disorder, impropriety, and lack of harmony which characterized Florence during the 1348 plague. The author graphically depicts, in the opening pages of the book, examples of the social chaos caused by the plethora of plague-induced deaths. The pleasant pastime of telling tales in the shade of trees and the skillful ordering of the stories serve, in other words, as an obvious antidote or salutary response to the breakdown of society which resulted from the deadly pestilence which swept Italy and much of Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Further supporting the notion that The Decameron presents an ordered universe as an alternative to the chaos and anarchy created by the plague is Boccaccio’s insistence that his storytellers, though they may occasionally tell ribald tales, are uniformly chaste and proper in their behavior toward one another. Boccaccio’s Themes • The stories told on each of the ten days that make up The Decameron explore a predetermined subject or theme. On the first day, everyone is free to choose a topic—one is the character “Abraam giudeo” (“Abraham the Jew”). On the second day, the stories treat those, such as the subject of “Andreuccio da Perugia” (“Andreuccio of Perugia”), who realize unexpected happiness after serious misfortune. Then, on the third day, the stories discuss people who have accomplished difficult goals or who have repossessed something once lost, among which is the tale “Alibech” (“Alibech and Rustico”). The next day, the narrators tell love stories which end unhappily (see “Tancredi, Prenze di Salerno” and its English translation). On the fifth day, they tell love stories which depict misfortune but end felicitously (see “Nastagio degli Onesti” and the English translation). The stories told on the sixth day deal with the role of intelligence in helping one avoid problems—one of the most famous among these is “Cisti fornaio” (“Cisti the Baker”). On the seventh day, the stories relate tricks which wives play on husbands (see “Petronella mette un so amante in un doglio,” or “Petronella and the Barrel”), and on the eighth day, the stories recount tricks men and women play on each other, as in “Calandrino” (“Calandrino and the Heliotrope”). On the ninth day, once again everyone is free to choose a topic (one is described in “Le vasi una badessa in fretta ed al buio per trovare una sua monaca a lei accusata” and its translation, “The Abbess and the Nun”). Finally, on the tenth day, the narrators tell of men and women who have performed magnanimous deeds and acquired renown in so doing (see “Il Marchese di Saluzzo,” or “The Marchese di Saluzzo and Griselda”). In addition to the pronounced framing technique created by the introductions to the various days and by the themes themselves, there seems to be a degree of subtle thematic framing within the stories themselves from first to last. The first story of the first day, “Ser Cepparello,” tells how a most wicked man—clearly a figura diaboli, or type of the devil—deceived a friar with a false confession and came to be reputed a saint. On one hand, the tale ridicules gullible priests and credulous common folk, but on the other hand, it presents the undeniable power of human cunning. The tenth story of the tenth day recounts the story of how the Marquis of Saluzzo marries the peasant Griselda and subjects her to inhuman trials to ascertain her devotion; for example, he pretends to have their two children killed. His cruelty is ostensibly designed to test her love or respect for him; her extraordinary patience in responding

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to his bestiality assuredly makes of her a figura Christi, or type of Christ. From the comedic devil figure of Cepparello to the tragic Christ figure of Griselda there appears to be in The Decameron a revelation of the breadth of the human condition and the wide-ranging possibilities of human experience. Nevertheless, Boccaccio explores a variation on at least one of two themes in almost all of his stories: the power of human intelligence (for good or bad) and the effect of love or human passion (for the wellbeing or detriment of those involved). At times, these themes are intermingled, as in so many of the stories of the seventh day having to do with the ingenious tricks wives play on their (usually cuckolded) spouses. Boccaccio’s Settings • Often when treating the advantages of human wit, Boccaccio provides a Florentine or Tuscan setting to his story. For example, in the sixth day, “Cisti the Baker” is set in Florence and illustrates the rise and power of the hardworking and hard-thinking merchant class Boccaccio knew so well in his hometown. Similarly, “Guido Cavalcanti,” told on the same day, has Florence as its setting and reveals the barbed wit of one of the city’s native sons. There are also tales told of Florentines who are dull-witted; examples would include the various eighth- and ninth-day stories about the simple-minded painter Calandrino, who is constantly being tricked by his supposed friends Bruno and Buffalmacco. Those who outsmart him, however, are fellow Florentines. By contrast, many of the highly adventurous tales are set in cities far away from Florence, often in exotic locations. Not surprisingly, Naples figures prominently in perhaps the most notable of the adventure tales—that is, “Andreuccio of Perugia,” the story of a provincial young man who goes to a big city (Naples) to buy horses and ends up suffering a series of misfortunes only to return home with a ruby of great value. In the tale, Naples symbolizes adventure and daring and is undoubtedly meant to recall the city of the author’s youth. Boccaccio’s Love Tales • Boccaccio’s love tales repeatedly, though not exclusively, present realistic women in place of the idealized and angelic women Dante was wont to exalt. In stories scattered throughout The Decameron, but especially in those of the third and fifth day, the physical and pleasurable union of man and woman is portrayed as the healthy and correct goal of human love. Although some interpret such unabashed celebration of humankind’s sexuality as a sure indication that The Decameron is a Renaissance work, it should be remembered that approximately 90 percent of Boccaccio’s tales derive from medieval sources. G. H. McWilliam, in the introduction to his excellent English translation of The Decameron, reviews with insight the problem of how to classify the book with regard to historical period. He points out that the harsh judgment leveled against friars and monks, whether they are philanderers or simoniacs, has numerous precedents in the literature of the Middle Ages, including Dante’s thoroughly medieval The Divine Comedy. This is not to say, however, that The Decameron does not look to the future, for it most certainly does. For one thing, when Boccaccio attacks the superstitious religious beliefs and corrupt ecclesiastical practices of his times, he does so with more severity than did his predecessors; for another, he presents the centrality of sexuality to the human condition without recourse to sermons or condemnations of the same. In both ways, he draws closer to the spirit of a new age and distances himself from the Middle Ages. His overriding purpose in the tales, however, is to illuminate the spectrum of humankind’s experiences and to point, in a world accustomed to pain and disease, a way to happiness and health. Boccaccio’s medium is always the

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well-worded and exquisitely framed story; his best medicine, more often than not, is laughter or the praise of life. Madison V. Sowell With updates by Victor A. Santi Other major works nonfiction: Genealogia deorum gentilium, c. 1350-1375; Trattatello in laude di Dante, 1351, 1360, 1373 (Life of Dante, 1898); Corbaccio, c. 1355 (The Corbaccio, 1975); De casibus virorum illustrium, 1355-1374 (The Fall of Princes, 1431-1438); De montibus, silvis, fontibus lacubus, fluminubus, stagnis seu paludibus, et de nominbus maris, c. 1355-1374; De mulieribus claris, c. 1361-1375 (Concerning Famous Women, 1943); Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante, 1373-1374. poetry: Rime, c. 1330-1340; La caccia di Diana, c. 1334; Il filostrato, c. 1335 (The Filostrato, 1873); Il filocolo, c. 1336 (Labor of Love, 1566); Teseida, 1340-1341 (The Book of Theseus, 1974); Il ninfale d’Ameto, 1341-1342 (also known as Commedia delle ninfe); L’amorosa visione, 1342-1343 (English translation, 1986); Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, 1343-1344 (Amorous Fiammetta, 1587, better known as The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta); Il ninfale fiesolano, 1344-1346 (The Nymph of Fiesole, 1597); Buccolicum carmen, c. 13511366 (Boccaccio’s Olympia, 1913). Bibliography Bergin, Thomas G. Boccaccio. New York: Viking Press, 1981. Excellent general introduction to Boccaccio. It begins with a historical background to Florentine life in the fourteenth century and proceeds to delineate the life of the author with emphasis on the major influences on his work. The early works are analyzed individually for their own merit and for their relationship to The Decameron. Contains lengthy but lucid discussion of The Decameron followed by notes and a useful list of works. Branca, Vittore. Boccaccio: The Man and His Works. Translated by Richard Monges. New York: New York University Press, 1976. The definitive biography of Boccaccio by an eminent scholar in the field of medieval literature. Caporello-Szykman, C. The Boccaccian Novella: The Creation and Waning of a Genre. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Defines the novella as a form that existed only between Boccaccio and Cervantes. Discusses generic characteristics of the Decameron, Boccacio’s narrative theory, and the novella’s place within the oral tradition. Edwards, Robert R. Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Examines the influence of Boccaccio on Chaucer. Forni, Pier Massimo. Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Examines Boccaccio’s style in his seminal work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Hollander, Robert. Boccaccio’s Two Venuses. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Thorough analysis of all Boccaccio’s works except The Decameron. The author contrasts classical and Christian influences in Boccaccio’s work and concludes that, although the latter predominates in the later works, even in the earlier prose the classical Venus is tempered by the use of irony. Moe, Nelson. “Not a Love Story: Sexual Aggression, Law and Order in Decameron X 4.” Romanic Review 86 (November, 1995): 623-638. Discusses the fourth tale of

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the tenth day as a reworking of an earlier Boccaccio treatment; examines his reformulation of the social significance of sexual transgression that is at the center of both versions of the tale. Stierle, Karlheinz. “Three Moments in the Crisis of Exemplarity: Boccaccio-Petrarch, Montaigne, and Cervantes.” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (October, 1998): 581595. Discusses Boccaccio’s response to the exemplum as a form of narration that presumes more similarity in human behavior than diversity; analyzes Boccaccio’s turn from exemplum to novella as a shift that indicates a crisis of exemplarity. Wright, Herbert G. Boccaccio in England, from Chaucer to Tennyson. London: Athlone Press, 1957. Analysis of the influence of Boccaccio on well-known authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, with an especially lengthy and perspicacious discussion of the presence of Boccaccio in The Canterbury Tales.

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Jorge Luis Borges Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; August 24, 1899 Died: Geneva, Switzerland; June 14, 1986 Principal short fiction • Historia universal de la infamia, 1935 (A Universal History of Infamy, 1972); El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941; Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, 1942 (with Adolfo Bioy Casares, under joint pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq; Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981); Ficciones, 1935-1944, 1944 (English translation, 1962); Dos fantasías memorables, 1946 (with Bioy Casares, under joint pseudonym Domecq); El Aleph, 1949, 1952 (translated in The Aleph, and Other Stories, 1933-1969, 1970); La muerte y la brújula, 1951; La hermana de Eloísa, 1955 (with Luisa Mercedes Levinson); Cuentos, 1958; Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, 1967 (with Bioy Casares; Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1976); El informe de Brodie, 1970 (Doctor Brodie’s Report, 1972); El matrero, 1970; El congreso, 1971 (The Congress, 1974); El libro de arena, 1975 (The Book of Sand, 1977); Narraciones, 1980. Other literary forms • Though most famous for his work in short fiction, Jorge Luis Borges also holds a significant place in Latino literature for his work in poetry and the essay. In fact, Borges would be considered a major writer in Latino letters for his work in these two genres (the vast majority of which was produced before the Argentine writer branched into short fiction) even had he never written a single short story. Borges’s early poetry (that for which he earned his reputation as a poet) is of the ultraist school, an avant-grade brand of poetry influenced by expressionism and Dadaism and intended by its Latino practitioners as a reaction to Latino modernism. Borges’s essays, as readers familiar with his fiction might expect, are imaginative and witty and usually deal with topics in literature or philosophy. Interestingly, because of the writer’s playful imagination, many of his essays read more like fiction than essay, while, because of his propensity both for toying with philosophical concepts and for fusing the fictitious and the real, much of his fiction reads more like essay than fiction. It seems only fitting, however, that for a writer for whom the line between fiction and reality is almost nonexistent the line between fiction and essay should be almost nonexistent as well. Achievements • It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of Jorge Luis Borges within the context of Latino fiction, for he is, quite simply, the single most important writer of short fiction in the history of Latino literature. This is true not only because of his stories themselves, and chiefly those published in Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, but also, just as important, because of how his stories contributed to the evolution of Latino fiction, both short and long, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Borges was the founder of Latino literature’s “new narrative,” the type of narrative practiced by the likes of Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others. Latino fiction prior to Borges was chiefly concerned with painting a realistic and detailed picture of external Latino reality. His imaginative ficciones (or fictions) almost single-handedly changed this, teaching Latino writ-

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ers to be creative, to use their imagination, to treat fiction as fiction, to allow the fictional world to be just that: fictional. Borges’s works also taught Latino writers to deal with universal themes and to write for an intellectual reader. Without Borges, not only would the literary world be without some superb stories, but also Latino narrative in the second half of the twentieth century would have been radically different from what it evolved to be. Biography • Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the first of two children born to Jorge Guillermo Borges and Leonor Acevedo de Borges. (His sister, Norah, was born in 1901.) Borges’s ancestors included prominent Argentine military and historical figures on both sides of his family and an English grandmother on his father’s. “Georgie,” as Borges’s family called him, began reading very early, first in English, then in Spanish. Tutored first by his English grandmother and later by a private governess, and with access to his father’s library (which contained numerous volumes in English), young Borges devoured a wide range of writings, among them those of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain, as well as works of mythology, novels of chivalry, The Thousand and One Nights (c. 1450), and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615). Borges finally entered school at the age of nine, and at the age of thirteen he published his first story, a dramatic sketch entitled “El rey de la selva” (the king of the jungle), about his favorite animal, the tiger. Borges and his family traveled to Europe in 1914. World War I broke out while they were visiting Geneva, Switzerland, and they remained there until 1918. During his time in Geneva, Borges began to take an interest in French poetry, particularly that of Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, as well as the poetry of Heinrich Heine and the German expressionists. He also began to read the works of Walt Whitman, Arthur Schopenhauer, and G. K. Chesterton, and he maintained his literary connection to his native Argentina by reading gauchesca (gaucho) poetry. In 1919 Borges and his family moved to Spain, living for various lengths of time in Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. While in Spain, Borges associated with a group of ultraist poets and published some poetry in an ultraist magazine. In 1921, Borges and his family returned to Buenos Aires. His return to his native city after a seven-year absence inspired him to write his first volume of poetry, entitled Fervor de Buenos Aires (fervor of Buenos Aires) and published in 1923. During this same period (in 1922), he collaborated on a “billboard review” entitled Prisma (prism) and edited the manifesto “Ultraísmo” (ultraism), published in the magazine Nosotros (us). He also helped found a short-lived magazine entitled Proa (prow). Following a second trip with his family to Europe (1923-1924), Borges continued to write poetry during the 1920’s, but he began to branch out into the essay genre as well, publishing three collections of essays during this period: Inquisiciones (inquisitions) in 1925, El tamaño de mi esperanza (the size of my hope) in 1926, and El idioma de los argentinos (the language of the Argentines) in 1928. One of his collections of poetry, Cuaderno San Martín (San Martín notebook), won for him second prize in the Municipal Literature Competition in 1929. The prize carried an award of three thousand pesos, which Borges used to buy an edition of the Encyclopœdia Britannica. Borges continued writing both poetry and essays in the 1930’s, but this decade would also bring his first (though unconventional) steps into fiction. He began contributing to the magazine Sur (south) in 1931 (through which he met his friend and

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future literary collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares); later, in 1933, he became the director of Crítica (criticism), a Saturday literary supplement for a Buenos Aires newspaper. As a contributor to the supplement, Borges began to rewrite stories that he took from various sources, adding his own personal TO VIEW IMAGE, touches and reworking them as he PLEASE SEE saw fit. He finally wrote, under a PRINT EDITION pen name, a wholly original piece OF THIS BOOK. entitled “Hombres de las orillas” (men from the outskirts), which appeared on September 16, 1933, in the supplement. This story and his other Crítica pieces were well received and published together in 1935 in a volume entitled Historia universal de la infamia. Borges’s foray into fiction writing continued to follow an unconventional path when in 1936 he © Washington Post, reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library began writing a book-review page for the magazine El Hogar (the home). Each entry carried a brief biography of the author whose work was being reviewed. Once again, Borges could not leave well enough alone. To the author’s true biographical facts, Borges began to add his own “facts,” even including apocryphal anecdotes from the author’s life and supplementing the author’s bibliography with false titles. This mix of fact and fiction, with no regard or concern for which was which, would come to be one of the trademarks of Borges’s fiction. Borges took a job as an assistant librarian in a suburban Buenos Aires library in 1937, a position whose work load and setting afforded the writer ample time and resources to read and write. In December of 1938, however, the Argentine writer suffered a near-fatal accident, slipping on a staircase and striking his head while returning to his apartment. The resulting head injury developed into septicemia, and Borges was hospitalized for more than two weeks. While still recovering in early 1939, Borges decided that he would abandon poetry and the essay (though he would later return to these genres) and dedicate his literary efforts to short fiction. Though it is somewhat unclear as to precisely why he made this decision (there are various accounts), it is speculated by some (and Borges’s own comments have supported such speculation) that he did so because after his head injury he was not sure that he could write poetry and essays of the quality for which he had been known before the accident. Short stories, for which he was virtually unknown at this point, would not allow anyone to compare an old Borges with a new, and potentially inferior, Borges. Again, this is only one suggestion as to why the Argentine writer made the decision he did; what is most important, however, is that he made it, and this decision, and the accident that seems to have caused it, would change the face of Latino fiction of the twentieth century.

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Almost immediately, Borges began to produce a series of short stories that would make him the most important writer in Latino fiction and that would eventually make him famous. The first of these stories was “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”), which appeared in Sur in May of 1939. This story was followed in 1940 by “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”) and the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (the garden of forking paths) in 1941. Six stories were added to the eight collected in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, and a new collection, entitled Ficciones, 1935-1944, one of the most important collections of short fiction in Latino literature, appeared in 1944. Another landmark collection, El Aleph, followed in 1949. During this time, the height of his literary career up to this point, Borges, who was anti-Peronist, fell into disfavor with the government of Argentine president Juan Perón. He was dismissed from his position at the library in 1944 and appointed inspector of poultry and eggs in the municipal market. He resigned, but he did return to public service in 1955 when, following the fall of Perón, he was named the director of the National Library. Ironically, in the same year, he lost his sight, which had been declining for several years. Despite the loss of his sight, Borges continued to write (through dictation), though less than before. At the same time, his two collections of stories from the 1940’s had made him a household name among Latino literati. Worldwide recognition came in 1961, when he shared the Formentor Prize (worth ten thousand dollars) with Samuel Beckett. The fame that this award brought Borges changed his life. That fall, he traveled to the United States to lecture at the University of Texas, and between 1961 and his death in 1986, he would make numerous trips to the United States and elsewhere teaching and speaking at colleges and universities, attending literary conferences on his works, collecting literary awards, and otherwise serving as an international ambassador for Latino literature. Borges married for the first time (at the age of sixty-eight) in 1967, the same year that he accepted an invitation to teach at Harvard University as a Charles Eliot Norton lecturer. The marriage dissolved in 1970, with Borges, according to one popular anecdote, leaving the home he shared with his wife and taking only his prized Encyclopœdia Britannica with him. Perón returned to the Argentine presidency in 1973, and Borges resigned as director of the National Library. His mother died at the age of ninety-nine in 1975. Borges continued to write during the 1970’s and until his death, working in short fiction, poetry, and the essay (having returned to these last two genres in the 1950’s). The bulk of his fame, however, and particularly that specifically related to short fiction, had come from his two collections of stories from the 1940’s. He was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never won it. In 1986, he married his companion María Kodama and shortly thereafter died of cancer of the liver on June 14, 1986, in Geneva, Switzerland. Analysis • Jorge Luis Borges may be, quite simply, the single most important writer of short fiction in the history of Latino literature. The stories he published in his collections Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, particularly the former, not only gave Latino (and world) literature a body of remarkable stories but also opened the door to a whole new type of fiction that would be practiced by the likes of the above-mentioned Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and that, in the hands of these writers and others like them,

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would put Latino fiction on the world literary map in the 1960’s. Prior to Borges, and particularly between 1920 and 1940, Latino fiction, as stated previously, was concerned chiefly with painting a realistic and detailed picture of external Latino reality. Description frequently ruled over action, environment over character, and types over individuals. Social message, also, was often more important to the writer than was narrative artistry. Latino fiction after Borges (that is, after his landmark collections of stories of the 1940’s) was decidedly different in that it was no longer documentary in nature, turned its focus toward the inner workings of its fully individualized human characters, presented various interpretations of reality, expressed universal as well as regional and national themes, invited reader participation, and emphasized the importance of artistic—and frequently unconventional—presentation of the story, particularly with respect to narrative voice, language, structure (and the closely related element of time), and characterization. This “new narrative,” as it came to be called, would have been impossible without Borges’s tradition-breaking fiction. This is not to say that Borges’s stories fully embody each of the characteristics of the Latino “new narrative” listed above. Ironically, they do not. For example, Borges’s characters are often far more archetypal than individual, his presentation tends to be for the most part quite traditional, and reader participation (at least as compared to that required in the works of other “new narrativists”) is frequently not a factor. The major contributions that Borges made to Latino narrative through his stories lie, first, in his use of imagination, second, in his focus on universal themes common to all human beings, and third, in the intellectual aspect of his works. During the 1940’s, Borges, unlike most who were writing so-called Latino fiction, treated fiction as fiction. Rather than use fiction to document everyday reality, Borges used it to invent new realities, to toy with philosophical concepts, and in the process to create truly fictional worlds, governed by their own rules. He also chose to write chiefly about universal human beings rather than exclusively about Latinos. His characters are, for example, European, or Chinese, frequently of no discernible nationality, and only occasionally Latino. In most cases, even when a character’s nationality is revealed, it is of no real importance, particularly with respect to theme. Almost all Borges’s characters are important not because of the country from which they come but because they are human beings, faced not with situations and conflicts particular to their nationality but with situations and conflicts common to all human beings. Finally, unlike his predecessors and many of his contemporaries, Borges did not aim his fiction at the masses. He wrote instead, it seems, more for himself, and, by extension, for the intellectual reader. These three aspects of his fiction—treating fiction as fiction, placing universal characters in universal conflicts, and writing for a more intellectual audience—stand as the Argentine writer’s three most important contributions to Latino fiction in the latter half of the twentieth century, and to one degree or another, virtually every one of the Latino “new narrativists,” from Cortázar to García Márquez, followed Borges’s lead in these areas. Borges’s stories are more aptly called “fictions” than “stories,” for while all fit emphatically into the first category, since they contain fictitious elements, many do not fit nearly so well into a traditional definition of the second, since they read more like essays than stories. His fictions are sophisticated, compact, even mathematically precise narratives that range in type from what might be called the “traditional” short story (a rarity) to fictionalized essay (neither pure story nor pure essay but instead a

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unique mix of the two, complete, oddly enough, with both fictitious characters and footnotes, both fictitious and factual) to detective story or spy thriller (though always with an unmistakably Borgesian touch) to fictional illustration of a philosophical concept (this last type being, perhaps, most common). Regardless of the specific category into which each story might fall, almost all, to one degree or another, touch on either what Borges viewed as the labyrinthine nature of the universe, irony (particularly with respect to human destiny), the concept of time, the hubris of those who believe they know all there is to know, or any combination of these elements. Most of Borges’s fame as a writer of fiction and virtually all of his considerable influence on Latino “new narrative” are derived from his two masterpiece collections, Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph. Of these two, the first stands out as the more important and may be the single most important collection of short fiction in the history of Latino literature. Ficciones, 1935-1944 contains fourteen stories (seventeen for editions published after 1956). Seven of the fourteen were written between 1939 and 1941 and, along with an eighth story, were originally collected in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (the garden of forking paths). The other six stories were added in 1944. Virtually every story in this collection has become a Latino classic, and together they reveal the variety of Borges’s themes and story types. “Death and the Compass” • “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) is one of the most popular of the stories found in Ficciones, 1935-1944. In it, detective Erik Lönnrot is faced with the task of solving three apparent murders that have taken place exactly one month apart at locations that form a geographical equilateral triangle. The overly rational Lönnrot, through elaborate reasoning, divines when and where the next murder is to take place. He goes there to prevent the murder and to capture the murderer, only to find himself captured, having been lured to the scene by his archenemy, Red Scharlach, so that he, Lönnrot, can be killed. This story is a perfect example of Borges’s ability to take a standard subgenre, in this case the detective story, and give it his own personal signature, as the story is replete with Borgesian trademarks. The most prominent of these concerns irony and hubris. Following the first murder and published reports of Lönnrot’s line of investigation, Scharlach, who has sworn to kill Lönnrot, constructs the remainder of the murder scenario, knowing that Lönnrot will not rest until he deciphers the apparent patterns and then—believing he knows, by virtue of his reasoning, all there is to know—will blindly show up at the right spot at the right time for Scharlach to capture and kill him. Ironically, Lönnrot’s intelligence and his reliance (or over-reliance) on reasoning, accompanied in no small measure by his self-assurance and intellectual vanity, which blind him to any potential danger, bring him to his death. Other trademark Borgesian elements in the story include the totally non-Latino content (from characters to setting), numerous references to Jews and things Jewish (a talmudic congress, rabbis, and Cabalistic studies, to name only a few), and an intellectual content and ambience throughout not typical of the traditional detective story. (Lönnrot figures out, for example, that the four points that indicate the four apparent murders—there are really only three—correspond to the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that make up “the ineffable name of God.”) “The Garden of Forking Paths” • “The Garden of Forking Paths” is another story from Ficciones, 1935-1944 which in the most general sense (but only in the most gen-

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eral sense) fits comfortably into a traditional category, that of spy thriller, but like “Death and the Compass,” in Borges’s hands it is anything but a story typical of its particular subgenre. In this story, Dr. Yu Tsun (once again, a non-Latino character), a Chinese professor of English, working in England (a non-Latino setting as well) as a spy for the Germans during World War I, has been captured and now dictates his story. Yu tells of how he had needed to transmit vital information to the Germans concerning the name of the town in which the British were massing artillery in preparation for an attack. Yu’s superior, however, had been captured, thus severing Yu’s normal lines of communication. Identified as a spy and pursued by the British, Yu tells how he had selected, from the phone directory, the only man he believed could help him communicate his message, one Stephen Albert (though the reader at this point is not aware of exactly how Albert could be of help to Yu). Yu tells of how he traveled to Albert’s house, hotly pursued by a British agent. Yu had never met Albert, but Albert mistook him for someone else and invited Yu into the house. The two talked for a hour about Chinese astrologer and writer Ts’ui Pêen (who happened to be one of Yu’s ancestors) and Ts’ui’s labyrinthine book The Garden of Forking Paths (which, given its content, gives Borges’s story a story-within-a-story element) as Yu stalled for time for the British agent to catch up with him. Yu says that as the agent approached the house, Yu killed Albert and then allowed himself to be captured by the agent. The final paragraph of the story reveals that Yu had chosen to kill Albert and then be arrested so that news of the incident would appear in the newspaper. He knew that his German colleagues would read the small news item and would divine Yu’s intended message: that the British had been massing artillery near the French town of Albert—thus Yu’s reason for having chosen Stephen Albert. “The Circular Ruins” • “Las ruinas circulares” (“The Circular Ruins”) is one of a number of examples in Ficciones, 1935-1944 of Borges’s frequent practice of using a story to illustrate (or at least toy with) philosophical concepts, in this particular case, most notably, the Gnostic concept of one creator behind another creator. In this story, a mysterious man travels to an equally mysterious place with the intention of creating another person by dreaming him. The man experiences great difficulty in this at first, but eventually he is successful. The man instructs his creation and then sends him off. Before he does, however, the man erases his creation’s knowledge of how he came to be, for the man does not wish him to know that he exists only as the dream of another. Soon after the man’s creation has left, fire breaks out and surrounds the man. He prepares for death, but as the flames begin to engulf him, he cannot feel them. He realizes then that he, too, ironically, is but an illusion, not real at all but simply the dream of another. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” • “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijot” (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”), also from Ficciones, 1935-1944, is one of Borges’s most famous stories that may be classified as a fictionalized essay, for it is clearly not a story: a fiction, yes, but a story (at least by any traditional definition of the term), no. In it, a pompous first-person narrator, a literary critic, in what is presented as an essay of literary criticism, tells of the writer Pierre Menard (fictional in the real world but completely real in Borges’s fictive universe). After considerable discussion of Menard’s bibliography (complete with titles and publication dates, all fictional but with titles of real literary journals—once again, an example of Borges’s practice of fusing the

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fictive and the real), as well as other facts about the author, the critic discusses Menard’s attempt to compose a contemporary version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha. Menard accomplishes this not by writing a new Don Quixote de la Mancha but simply by copying Cervantes’ original text word for word. The critic even examines identical passages from the two versions and declares that Menard’s version, though identical to Cervantes’, is actually richer. The critic pursues the reasons and ramifications of this fact further. The result is, among other things, a tongue-in-cheek sendup of scholars and literary critics and the snobbish and often ridiculous criticism that they publish. “The South” • Finally, “El Sur” (“The South”), from Ficciones, 1935-1944 as well, is a classic Borges story that demonstrates the author’s ability to mix reality (at best a relative term in Borges’s world and in Latino “new narrative” as a whole) with fantasy and, more important, to show that the line between the two is not only very subtle but also of no real importance, for fantasy is just as much a part of the universe as socalled reality. This story, which Borges once said he considered his best, concerns Johannes Dahlmann, a librarian in Buenos Aires. Dahlmann, the reader is told, has several heroic, military ancestors, and though he himself is a city-dwelling intellectual, he prefers to identify himself with his more romantic ancestors. In that spirit, Dahlmann even maintains a family ranch in the “South” (capitalized here and roughly the Argentine equivalent, in history and image, to North America’s “Old West”). He is, however, an absentee landowner, spending all of his time in Buenos Aires, keeping the ranch only to maintain a connection, although a chiefly symbolic one, with his family’s more exciting past. Entering his apartment one night, Dahlmann accidentally runs into a doorway (an accident very similar to that which Borges suffered in 1938). The resulting head injury develops into septicemia (as was the case with Borges as well), and he is sent off to a sanatorium. Finally, he recovers well enough to travel, at his doctor’s suggestion, to his ranch in the South to convalesce. His train trip to the South is vague to him at best, as he slips in and out of sleep. Unfamiliar with the region, he disembarks one stop too early and waits in a general store for transportation. While there, he is harassed by a group of ruffians. He accepts the challenge of one among them, and as the story ends, he is about to step outside for a knife fight he knows he cannot win. If that were all there were to “The South,” the story would be interesting, perhaps, but certainly nothing spectacular, and it would probably fit fairly comfortably into the type of Latino narrative popular before Borges. There is more, however, and it is this “more” that places the story firmly within the parameters of Latino “new narrative.” The story is, in fact, the literary equivalent of an optical illusion. For those who can perceive only one angle, the story is essentially that described above. For those who can make out the other angle, however, the story is completely different. There are numerous subtle though undeniably present hints throughout the second half of the story, after Dahlmann supposedly leaves the sanatorium, that suggest that the protagonist does not step out to fight at the end of the story. In fact, he never even leaves the sanatorium at all but instead dies there. His trip to the South, his encounter with the ruffians, and his acceptance of their challenge, which will lead to certain death, are all nothing but a dream, dreamt, it seems, in the sanatorium, for death in a knife fight is the death that he, Dahlmann—the librarian who likes to identify himself with his heroic and romantic ancestors—would have preferred compared to that of the sanatorium. This added dimension as well as the rather subtle manner in

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which it is suggested (an attentive reader is required) separates both the story and its author from the type of fiction and fiction writer that characterized Latino fiction before Borges. It is this type of added dimension that makes Borges’s fiction “new” and makes him a truly fascinating writer to read. Borges continued to write short fiction after Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, but the stories produced during this period never approached the popularity among readers nor the acclaim among critics associated with the two earlier collections. This is attributable in part to the fact that most of the stories the Argentine writer published in the 1960’s, as well as the 1970’s and 1980’s, lack much of what makes Borges Borges. Most are decidedly more realistic, often more Argentine in focus, and in general less complex—all in all, less Borgesian and, according to critics, less impressive. Some of this, particularly the change in complexity, has been explained as attributable to the fact that because of his loss of sight, Borges turned to dictation, which made reediting and polishing more difficult. Regardless of the reason, most of Borges’s fiction after his two landmark collections of the 1940’s has been largely ignored. Keith H. Brower Other major works novel: Un modelo para la muerte, 1946 (with Adolfo Bioy Casares, under joint pseudonym B. Suárez Lynch). screenplays: “Los orilleros” y “El paraíso de los creyentes,” 1955 (with Bioy Casares); Les Autres, 1974 (with Bioy Casares and Hugo Santiago). poetry: Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923, 1969; Luna de enfrente, 1925; Cuaderno San Martín, 1929; Poemas, 1923-1943, 1943; Poemas, 1923-1953, 1954; Obra poética, 19231958, 1958; Obra poética, 1923-1964, 1964; Seis poemas escandinavos, 1966; Siete poemas, 1967; El otro, el mismo, 1969; Elogio de la sombra, 1969 (In Praise of Darkness, 1974); El oro de los tigres, 1972 (translated in The Gold of Tigers: Selected Later Poems, 1977); La rosa profunda, 1975 (translated in The Gold of Tigers); La moneda de hierro, 1976; Historia de la noche, 1977; La cifra, 1981; Los conjurados, 1985; Selected Poems, 1999. nonfiction: Inquisiciones, 1925; El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926; El idioma de los argentinos, 1928; Evaristo Carriego, 1930 (English translation, 1984); Figari, 1930; Discusión, 1932; Las Kennigar, 1933; Historia de la eternidad, 1936; Nueva refutación del tiempo, 1947; Aspectos de la literatura gauchesca, 1950; Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951 (with Delia Ingenieros; revised as Literaturas germánicas medievales, 1966, with Maria Esther Vásquez); Otras Inquisiciones, 1952 (Other Inquisitions, 1964); El “Martin Fierro,” 1953 (with Margarita Guerrero); Leopoldo Lugones, 1955 (with Betina Edelberg); Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957 (with Guerrero; The Imaginary Zoo, 1969; revised as El libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967, The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1969); La poesía gauchesca, 1960; Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, 1967 (with Esther Zemborain de Torres; An Introduction to American Literature, 1971); Prólogos, 1975; Cosmogonías, 1976; Libro de sueños, 1976; Qué es el budismo?, 1976 (with Alicia Jurado); Siete noches, 1980 (Seven Nights, 1984); Nueve ensayos dantescos, 1982; The Total Library: Non-fiction, 1922-1986, 2001 (Eliot Weinberger, editor); This Craft of Verse, 2000. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1953-1967 (10 volumes); Antología personal, 1961 (A Personal Anthology, 1967); Labyrinths: Selected Stories, and Other Writings, 1962, 1964;

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Nueva antología personal, 1968; Selected Poems, 1923-1967, 1972 (also includes prose); Adrogue, 1977; Obras completas en colaboración, 1979 (with others); Borges: A Reader, 1981; Atlas, 1984 (with María Kodama; English translation, 1985). translations: Orlando, 1937 (of Virginia Woolf’s novel); La metamórfosis, 1938 (of Franz Kafka’s novel Die Verwandlung); Un bárbaro en Asia, 1941 (of Henri Michaux’s travel notes); Bartleby, el escribiente, 1943 (of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener); Los mejores cuentos policiales, 1943 (with Bioy Casares; of detective stories by various authors); Los mejores cuentos policiales, segunda serie, 1951 (with Bioy Casares; of detective stories by various authors); Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, 1955, 1973 (with Bioy Casares; of short stories by various authors; Extraordinary Tales, 1973); Las palmeras salvajes, 1956 (of William Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms); Hojas de hierba, 1969 (of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass). anthologies: Antología clásica de la literatura argentina, 1937; Antología de la literatura fantástica, 1940 (with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvia Ocampo); Antología poética argentina, 1941 (with Bioy Casares and Ocampo); El compadrito: Su destino, sus barrios, su música, 1945, 1968 (with Silvina Bullrich); Poesía gauchesca, 1955 (with Bioy Casares; 2 volumes); Libro del cielo y del infierno, 1960, 1975 (with Bioy Casares); Versos, 1972 (by Evaristo Carriego); Antología poética, 1982 (by Leopoldo Lugones); Antología poética, 1982 (by Franciso de Quevedo); El amigo de la muerte, 1984 (by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón). Bibliography Aizenberg, Edna, ed. Borges and His Successors. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Collection of essays by various critics on Borges’s relationship to such writers as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, his influence on such writers as Peter Carey and Salvador Elizondo, and his similarity to such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Excellent introduction to Borges and his works for North American readers. In lengthy sections entitled “Borges’s Worlds,” “Borges’s Fiction,” and “Borges’s Place in Literature,” Bell-Villada provides detailed and very readable commentary concerning Borges’s background, his many stories, and his career, all the while downplaying the Argentine writer’s role as a philosopher and intellectual and emphasizing his role as a storyteller. A superb study. McMurray, George R. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Intended by the author as “an attempt to decipher the formal and thematic aspects of a synthetic universe that rivals reality in its almost overwhelming complexity,” namely Borges’s universe. A very good and well-organized study of Borges’s dominant themes and narrative devices, with many specific references to the Argentine author’s stories. Includes an informative introduction on Borges’s life and a conclusion that coherently brings together the diverse elements discussed in the book. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these thirteen short stories by Borges: “The Aleph” (vol. 1); “The Circular Ruins” (vol. 2); “Funes, the Memorious,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and “The Gospel According to Mark” (vol. 3); “The Library of Babel” (vol. 4); “The Lottery in Babylon” (vol. 5); “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “The Secret Miracle,” and “The Shape of

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the Sword” (vol. 6); and “The South,” “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (vol. 7). Nuñez-Faraco, Humberto. “In Search of The Aleph: Memory, Truth, and Falsehood in Borges’s Poetics.” The Modern Language Review 92 (July, 1997): 613-629. Discusses autobiographical allusions, literary references to Dante, and cultural reality in the story “El Aleph.” Argues that Borges’s story uses cunning and deception to bring about its psychological and intellectual effect. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. This nearly definitive biography of Borges was written by one of the Argentine writer’s (and contemporary Latin American literature’s) most prominent critics. Particularly interesting for its constant blending of facts about Borges’s life and literary text by him concerning or related to the events or personalities discussed. Detailed, lengthy, and highly informative. Very useful for anyone seeking a better understanding of Borges the writer. Soud, Stephen E. “Borges the Golem-Maker: Intimations of ‘Presence’ in ‘The Circular Ruins.’” MLN 110 (September, 1995): 739-754. Argues that Borges uses the legend of the golem to establish authorial presence in the story. Argues that Borges did not seek to deconstruct literature but to re-sacralize it and to salvage the power of the logos, the Divine Word. Stabb, Martin S. Borges Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Update of Stabb’s Jorge Luis Borges, published in 1970. Though Borges’s early works, including those from the 1940’s and 1950’s, are discussed and analyzed here, emphasis is on Borges’s post1970 writings, how the “canonical” (to use Stabb’s term) Borges compares to the later Borges, and “a fresh assessment of the Argentine master’s position as a major Western literary presence.” An excellent study, particularly used in tandem with Stabb’s earlier book on Borges. Williamson, Edwin. Borges: A Life. New York: Viking Press, 2004. Drawing on interviews and extensive research, the most comprehensive and well-reviewed Borges biography. Wreen, Michael J. “Don Quixote Rides Again.” Romanic Review 86 (January, 1995): 141-163. Argues that Pierre Menard is not the new Cervantes in Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” but rather the new Quixote. Asserts that in the story Borges pokes fun at himself and that a proper interpretation of the story requires readers to understand that Menard’s Quixote is simply Cervantes’ Quixote, although Menard thinks it is a new and important work. Zubizarreta, Armando F. “‘Borges and I,’ a Narrative Sleight of Hand.” Studies in 20th Century Literature 22 (Summer, 1998): 371-381. Argues that the two characters in the sketch are involved in the implementation of vengeance. Argues that the character Borges, driven by a compulsive pattern of stealing, unsuspectingly takes over the “I” character’s grievances against him through his own writing.

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Elizabeth Bowen Born: Dublin, Ireland; June 7, 1899 Died: London, England; February 22, 1973 Principal short fiction • Encounters, 1923; Ann Lee’s, and Other Stories, 1926; Joining Charles, 1929; The Cat Jumps, and Other Stories, 1934; Look at All Those Roses, 1941; The Demon Lover, 1945 (pb. in U.S. as Ivy Gripped the Steps, and Other Stories, 1946); The Early Stories, 1951; Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, 1959; A Day in the Dark, and Other Stories, 1965; Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories, 1978; The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, 1980. Other literary forms • Elizabeth Bowen is as well known for her ten novels as she is for her short-story collections. She also wrote books of history, travel, literary essays, personal impressions, a play, and a children’s book. Achievements • Elizabeth Bowen’s career is distinguished by achievements on two separate, though related, fronts. On the one hand, she was among the best-known and accomplished British women novelists of her generation, a generation which, in the period between the wars, did much to consolidate the distinctive existence of women’s fiction. Bowen’s work in this area is noteworthy for its psychological acuity, sense of atmosphere, and impassioned fastidiousness of style. As an Anglo-Irish writer, on the other hand, she maintained more self-consciously than most of her predecessors an understanding of her class’s destiny. Themes that are prevalent throughout her work—loss of innocence, decline of fortune, impoverishment of the will—gain an additional haunting quality from her sensitivity to the Irish context. Her awareness of the apparent historical irrelevance of the Anglo-Irish also gives her short stories in particular an important cultural resonance. Biography • Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen received her formal education at Downe House in Kent and at the London County Council School of Art. In 1923 she married Alan Charles Cameron and lived with him in Northampton and Old Headington, Oxford. In 1935 she and her husband moved to Regent’s Park, London, where Bowen became a member of the Bloomsbury group. During World War II she stayed in London, where she worked for the Ministry of Information and as an air-raid warden. In 1948 she was made a Commander of the British Empire. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949. After the death of her husband in 1952, Bowen returned to live at Bowen’s Court in Ireland, her family estate. In 1957 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Oxford. In 1960 she sold Bowen’s Court and returned to Old Headington, Oxford. After a final trip to Ireland, Elizabeth Bowen died in London on February 22, 1973. Analysis • Elizabeth Bowen’s stories are set in the first half of the twentieth century in England and Ireland. Often the action takes place against a background of war. Taken together, her stories provide a chronicle of the social, political, and psychic life of England from the beginning of the century through World War II. Her characters are mainly drawn from the middle class, although upper- and lower-class characters

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appear as well. Although Bowen’s protagonist is usually a woman, men also play important roles. By selecting significant detail and by utilizing mythic parallels, Bowen constructs stories whose settings, actions, and characters are simultaneously realistic and symbolic. Bowen’s characters exist in a world which has lost contact with meaning; traditional forms and ideas have lost meaning and vitality. Both identity and a sense of belonging are lost; “Who am I?” and “Where am I?” are typical questions asked by Bowen protagonists. Some characters merely go through the motions and rituals of daily life, experiencing pattern without meaning. Others have a vague consciousness that something is wrong; unfulfilled, they suffer from boredom, apathy, and confusion. Sometimes, such characters are driven to seek alternatives in their lives. “Summer Night” • In “Summer Night,” while the Major, an example of the first type of character, goes about his evening routine, shutting up the house for the night, his wife, Emma, pretending to visit friends, leaves her traditional family for an assignation with Robinson, a man she hardly knows. He represents another type: the man who adapts to meaninglessness by utilizing power amorally to manipulate and control. Emma is disillusioned in her search for vitality and love when she discovers that Robinson wants sex and nothing else. Other characters, such as Justin, are fully conscious of the situation; they know that they “don’t live” and conceive the need for a “new form” but are impotent to break through to achieve one. Although Bowen’s stories focus on those characters who seek meaning or who are in the process of breaking through, they also represent a final type—one whose thinking and feeling are unified and in harmony with existence. An example from “Summer Night” is Justin’s deaf sister, Queenie. While Robinson is left alone in his house, while Emma leans drunk and crying against a telegraph pole, and while Justin goes to mail an angry letter to Robinson, Queenie lies in bed remembering a time when she sat with a young man beside the lake below the ruin of the castle now on Robinson’s land: “While her hand brushed the ferns in the cracks of the stone seat emanations of kindness passed from him to her. The subtle deaf girl had made the transposition of this nothing or everything into an everything.” Queenie imagines: “Tonight it was Robinson who, guided by Queenie down leaf tunnels, took the place on the stone seat by the lake.” It is Queenie’s memory and imagiLibrary of Congress nation that creates, at least for

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herself, a world of love, unrealized, but realizable, by the others. Memory recalls the lost estate of human beings, represented here by the castle, its grounds, and its garden, as well as man’s lost identity. Queenie is a queen. All human beings are rightfully queens and kings in Bowen’s fiction. Queenie’s memory reaches back to the archetypal roots of being, in harmony with life; her imagination projects this condition in the here and now and as a possibility for the future. Queenie’s thinking is the true thinking Justin calls for, thinking that breaks through to a “new form,” which is composed of archetypal truth transformed to suit the conditions of modern life. Throughout Bowen’s fiction this kind of thought takes the form of fantasy, hallucination, and dream. Bowen’s fiction itself, the expression of her imagination, also exemplifies this thinking. “Her Table Spread” • Toward the end of “Summer Night” it occurs to Justin that possibly Emma should have come to him rather than Robinson. In “Her Table Spread” Bowen brings together two characters much like Emma and Justin. Valeria Cuff, heir and owner of a castle in Ireland, situated on an estuary where English ships are allowed to anchor, invites Mr. Alban, a cynical and disillusioned young man from London, to a dinner party. These characters represent opposites which concern Bowen throughout her fiction: male and female, darkness and light, thought and feeling, physical and spiritual, rational and irrational. The separation or conflict of these opposites creates a world of war; their unification creates a world of love. Valeria’s orientation is romantic, “irrational,” and optimistic: “Her mind was made up: she was a princess.” She invites Alban to her castle, “excited” at the thought of marrying him. Alban is realistic, rational, and pessimistic: “He had failed to love. . . . He knew some spring had dried up at the root of the world.” Alban is disconcerted by Valeria’s erratic, impulsive behavior and by her apparent vulgarity. He has heard “she was abnormal—at twenty-five, of statuesque development, still detained in childhood.” Ironically, as Alban realizes “his presence must constitute an occasion,” he is “put out of” Valeria’s mind when a destroyer anchors in the estuary. Valeria believes it is the same destroyer that had anchored there the previous spring at Easter when two officers, Mr. Graves and Mr. Garrett, came ashore and were entertained by friends. Valeria’s expectation that the officers will come to dinner initially separates her from Alban. When the officers fail to arrive, she runs outside to signal them with a lantern. Old Mr. Rossiter, uncle to Mrs. Treye, Valeria’s aunt, leads Alban to the boathouse to prevent Valeria from rowing out to the destroyer. When a bat flies against Alban’s ear, he flees, and, ascending the steps back toward the castle, he hears Valeria sobbing in the dark. When he calls to her, expressing concern and sympathy, she mistakes him for Mr. Garrett. Her fantasy of love is realized as she and Alban stand together, unified in a field of light shining from the castle. Symbolic details and analogies with pagan and Christian myth universalize the meaning of the story. Alban is associated with the destroyer, with Graves and Garrett, and with their emblems, statues of Mars and Mercury. Like the destroyer, Alban is “fixed in the dark rain, by an indifferent shore.” The officers represent aspects of Alban. The name Graves suggests death; and the statue associated with Graves is Mars, god of war. Garrett is a pun on garret, which derives from a word meaning to defend or protect. Garrett’s statue is Mercury, a god associated by the Romans with peace. Alban’s link with the destroyer, with death and war, threatens the destruction of Valeria’s dreams of love and peace. The Garrett aspect of Alban, however, linked with protection and peace, offers the possibility of the realization of Valeria’s dreams.

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Valeria is associated with two symbolic items. Among the gifts she has to offer is a leopard skin, suggesting the animal and the sensual, and a statue of Venus, goddess of love. Valeria thus offers love in both its physical and spiritual aspects. Contained in her fantasies is the expectation that love will put an end to war. She thinks: “Invasions from the water would henceforth be social, perhaps amorous,” and she imagines marrying Garrett and inviting “all the Navy up the estuary” for tea: “The Navy would be unable to tear itself away.” As Valeria attempts to signal the destroyer with the lantern, she thinks that Graves and Garrett will have to fight for her; instead, the battle takes place within Alban. The pagan symbolism in “Her Table Spread” is overlain and transformed by Christian symbolism. Valeria’s castle and its grounds, like the ruins of the castle in “Summer Night,” represent a lost Eden. Valeria is an heir and a princess; she is an incarnation of Eve seeking her rightful role and place in a paradise of love and peace. Symbolically, she calls to Adam (Alban) to reclaim his inheritance—to join her in recreating the garden. The way is expressed in Bowen’s use of the second major Christian myth. Alban must undergo the experience of Christ, the second Adam, to redeem his “fallen” self; he must reject temptation and undergo crucifixion—sacrifice his ego. The trip to the boathouse is Alban’s descent into hell. There he is tempted by Old Mr. Rossiter, the Devil. Rossiter offers Alban whiskey, which he refuses, and tempts him with Valeria: “She’s a girl you could shape. She’s got a nice income.” Alban’s rejection of this temptation, his refusal to listen to the Devil, is signified by his flight from the boathouse when a bat flies against his ear. As Alban ascends the steps, he recognizes where he is: “Hell.” This recognition is the precondition for discovering where he belongs. At this point he undergoes a symbolic crucifixion. Hearing Valeria “sobbing” in “absolute desperation,” Alban clings “to a creaking tree.” The sympathy Alban feels for Valeria signifies the death of Graves within him and the resurrection of Garrett. Valeria has also experienced crucifixion. Graves and Garrett have not arrived, and her lantern has gone out; she, too, is in hell. Humbled and in darkness, the two meet. Alban speaks with tenderness: “Quietly, my dear girl.” Valeria speaks with concern. “Don’t you remember the way?” The year before the destroyer had anchored “at Easter.” Now Valeria is present at and participates in resurrection: “Mr. Garrett has landed.” She laughs “like a princess, and magnificently justified.” Standing with Valeria in the glow of light from the castle, observed by the two female guests, Alban experiences love: “Such a strong tenderness reached him that, standing there in full manhood, he was for a moment not exiled. For the moment, without moving or speaking, he stood, in the dark, in a flame, as though all three said: ‘My darling.’” “The Demon Lover” • A world of love is achieved, if only momentarily, in “Her Table Spread.” In “The Demon Lover” Bowen creates a story of love denied or repressed, and its power transformed into the demonic. The stories complement each other. The first takes place at a castle in Ireland in the spring and recalls the previous Easter; the second is set in an abandoned London flat in autumn during the bombing of London in World War II and recalls a previous autumn during World War I. The action of “Her Table Spread” concludes with the coming of night. The protagonists of the first story are a young woman in search of love and a young man associated with war; those of the second are a forty-year-old married woman who has denied love and her fiancé of twenty years before, a solider lost in action during World War I. Both female characters are “abnormal”: Valeria of “Her Table Spread” caught

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up in fantasy, Kathleen of “The Demon Lover” subject to hallucination. Bowen utilizes elements of the Eden myth to universalize the meaning of both stories. In “The Demon Lover” Mrs. Kathleen Drover returns to her abandoned London flat to pick up some things she had left behind when her family moved to the country to escape the bombing. In the dark flat where everything is covered with a dustlike film, she opens a door, and reflected light reveals an unstamped letter recently placed on a hall table. Since the caretaker is away and the house has been locked, there is no logical explanation for the appearance of the letter. Unnerved, Mrs. Drover takes it upstairs to her bedroom, where she reads it. The letter reminds her that today is the anniversary of the day years before when she made a promise of fidelity to a young soldier on leave from France during World War I—and that they had agreed to meet on this day “at an hour arranged.” Although her “fiancé was reported missing, presumed killed,” he has apparently survived and awaits the meeting. When Kathleen hears the church clock strike six, she becomes terrified but maintains enough control to gather the items she came for and to formulate a plan to leave the house, hire a taxi, and bring the driver back with her to pick up the bundles. Meanwhile, in the basement “a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house.” This statement provides a realistic solution to the problem of the letter’s appearance, but a psychological interpretation offers an alternative conclusion. The London flat symbolizes Kathleen’s life as Mrs. Drover, and the shock of finding the letter reveals to Kathleen the meaninglessness of this life and the falseness of her identity as Mrs. Drover. By marrying Drover, Kathleen has been “unfaithful” not only to the soldier but also to herself. It is this self which emerges as a result of the “crisis”—actually the crisis of World War II—and which has unconsciously motivated Mrs. Drover’s return to the house. The fact that the letter is signed K., Kathleen’s initial, suggests that she wrote the letter, which is a sign of the reemergence of her lost self. The house represents not only Kathleen’s life as Mrs. Drover but also the repressed-Kathleen aspect of her identity. The person in the basement who leaves the house at the same moment Mrs. Drover lets herself out the front door is a projection of this repressed self, the self Mrs. Drover now unknowingly goes to face. Overlying the psychological meaning of the story are two additional levels of meaning, one allegorical, the other archetypal. The young Kathleen represents England, defended and protected by the soldier, who represents the generation of those who fought for the country during the first war. Kathleen’s loveless and meaningless marriage to Drover represents England’s betrayal of the values the war was fought to defend—a betrayal which has contributed to the creation of World War II. The letter writer asserts: “In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise.” Because Kathleen and England have betrayed themselves, because love has failed, war continues, and both the individual and the country must suffer destructive consequences. On the archetypal level, Kathleen and the soldier are incarnations of Eve and Adam, although the soldier is an Adam transformed by war into a devil who coerces Eve to “fall,” forces her to make the “sinister truth.” The soldier’s uniform is the sign of his transformation. His true nature, his Adamic self, is covered and denied by the clothes of war. Kathleen is unable to touch the true self of the soldier, and he is unable to reach out to her. The scene takes place at night in a garden beneath a tree. Intimidated by not being kissed, Kathleen imagines “spectral glitters in the place” of the soldier’s eyes. To “verify his presence,” she puts out a hand, which he takes and

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presses “painfully, onto one of the breast buttons of his uniform.” In this way he forces her to make a vow of fidelity—a pact with the Devil. He says, “I shall be with you . . . sooner or later. You won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait.” Kathleen suffers the fate of Eve, feels that unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all humankind. When the soldier, her “fiancé,” is reported “missing, presumed killed,” she experiences “a complete dislocation from everything.” Compelled now to confront her fate, she gets into a taxi, which seems to be awaiting her. When the driver turns in the direction of her house without being told where to drive, Kathleen leans “forward to scratch at the glass panel that divided the driver’s head from her own . . . driver and passenger, not six inches between them, remained for an eternity eye to eye.” Reunited with her demon lover, Kathleen screams “freely” as the taxi accelerates “without mercy” into the “hinterland of deserted streets.” The failure of love condemns Kathleen—and by implication humankind—to insanity and damnation in the modern wasteland. In spite of the pessimistic conclusion of “The Demon Lover,” Bowen’s short fiction is ultimately affirmative. In a 1970 McCall’s essay she lamented that many people, especially the young, are “adrift, psychologically . . . homeless, lost in a void.” She expresses her desire to “do something that would arrest the drift, fill up the vacuum, convey the sense that there is, after all, SOMETHING. . . . (For I know that there is.)” Bowen’s fiction conveys the existence of this something, which some would call God, others simply the source of being. Whatever it is called, it exists within each individual and in the natural world. Its primary nature is love, expressed in acts of kindness, sympathy, understanding, and tolerance. It is the potential for unity among people and harmony with the world. This potential is mirrored in the unity and harmony of Bowen’s stories. The lyric descriptive passages, the coherence of matter and form, the intense visual images, and the emotional force of her stories demonstrate Bowen’s mastery of the short-story form. Her stories deserve to be recognized as among the best written in the twentieth century. James L. Green With updates by George O’Brien Other major works children’s literature: The Good Tiger, 1965. play: Castle Anna, pr. 1948 (with John Perry). novels: The Hotel, 1927; The Last September, 1929; Friends and Relations, 1931; To the North, 1932; The House in Paris, 1935; The Death of the Heart, 1938; The Heat of the Day, 1949; A World of Love, 1955; The Little Girls, 1964; Eva Trout, 1968. nonfiction: Bowen’s Court, 1942; Seven Winters, 1942; English Novelists, 1946; Collected Impressions, 1950; The Shelbourne: A Center of Dublin Life for More than a Century, 1951; A Time in Rome, 1960; Afterthought: Pieces About Writing, 1962; Pictures and Conversations, 1975; The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, 1986. Bibliography Austin, Allan E. Elizabeth Bowen. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1989. Austin contends Bowen’s better stories investigate psychological states that are more unusual than those in her novels. He calls “The Demon Lover” a ghost story that builds up and culminates like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bowen: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Collection of eleven essays, surveying the range of Bowen criticism. Excerpts from the main book-length critical works on Bowen are included. The volume also contains some comparatively inaccessible articles on Bowen’s short fiction, and essays on her work by the poets Mona Van Duyn and Alfred Corn. Supplemented by an extensive bibliography. Craig, Patricia. Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1986. Short biographical study. Indebted to Victoria Glendinning’s work, though drawing on later research, particularly on Bowen’s Irish connections. The work also contains perceptive readings of Bowen’s stories and novels. Includes a useful chronology. Hoogland, Renée C. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Another good source. From the series The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature. Jarrett, Mary. “Ambiguous Ghosts: The Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 8 (Spring, 1987): 71-79. A discussion of the themes of alienation, imprisonment, loss of identity, and the conflict of fiction and reality in Bowen’s stories, focusing primarily on the so-called ghost stories. Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991. Introduction to Bowen’s short fiction focusing on its unique characteristics. Deals with the basic conflicts in the stories between the present and the past, often embodied in female ghosts and ancestral homes. Interprets many of her stories in terms of women’s struggle with a patriarchal society that stands in the way of their pursuit of a creative life. Includes essays on short fiction by Bowen and discussions of her stories by William Trevor and Eudora Welty. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Bowen: “The Demon Lover” (vol. 2); “The Happy Autumn Fields” and “Her Table Spread” (vol. 3); “Ivy Gripped the Steps” (vol. 4); “Mysterious Kôr” (vol. 5); “A Queer Heart” (vol. 6); and “Summer Night” and “Tears, Idle Tears” (vol. 7). Partridge, A. C. “Language and Identity in the Shorter Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.” In Irish Writers and Society at Large, edited by Masaru Sekine. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985. Overview of Bowen’s short stories that focuses on her impressionism, her economy, and her Jamesian approach to narrative. Illustrates that style is Bowen’s overriding preoccupation. Rubens, Robert. “Elizabeth Bowen: A Woman of Wisdom.” Contemporary Review 268 (June, 1996): 304-307. Examines the complex style of Bowen’s work as a reflection of her personality and background; discusses her romanticism and her rejection of the dehumanization of the twentieth century. Walshe, Eibhear, ed. Elizabeth Bowen Remembered. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998. Brief biography that includes helpful bibliographical references.

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Kay Boyle Born: St. Paul, Minnesota; February 19, 1902 Died: Mill Valley, California; December 27, 1992 Principal short fiction • Short Stories, 1929; Wedding Day, and Other Stories, 1930; The First Lover, and Other Stories, 1933; The White Horses of Vienna, and Other Stories, 1936; The Crazy Hunter, and Other Stories, 1940; Thirty Stories, 1946; The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany, 1951; Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart, 1966; Fifty Stories, 1980; Life Being the Best, and Other Stories, 1988. Other literary forms • In addition to her short stories, Kay Boyle published several novels, volumes of poetry, children’s books, essay collections, and a book of memoirs. Breaking the Silence: Why a Mother Tells Her Son About the Nazi Era (1962) is her personal account, written for adolescents, of Europe during the Nazi regime. Boyle also ghostwrote, translated, and edited many other books. Hundreds of her stories, poems, and articles have appeared in periodicals ranging from the “little magazines” published in Paris in the 1920’s to The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker, for which she was a correspondent from 1946 to 1953. Achievements • Both prolific and versatile, Kay Boyle has been respected during her long career for her exquisite technical style and her ardent political activism. She was very much a part of the expatriate group of writers living in Paris in the 1920’s, and her work appeared in the avant-garde magazines alongside that of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and others. Her work is in many ways typical of the period, stylistically terse, carefully crafted, displaying keen psychological insight through the use of stream of consciousness and complex interior monologues. That her work was highly regarded is evidenced by her many awards: two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships; O. Henry Awards in both 1935 and 1961; an honorary doctorate from Columbia College, Chicago; and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She taught at San Francisco State University and Eastern Washington University. Biography • Born into an affluent family in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1902, Kay Boyle moved and traveled frequently and extensively with her family during her childhood. After studying architecture for two years in Cincinnati, Boyle married Robert Brault, whose family never accepted her or the marriage. What was to have been a summer trip to France in 1923 became an eighteen-year expatriation, during which Boyle continued to write poetry and fiction. Boyle left her husband to live with editor Ernest Walsh until his death from tuberculosis in 1926. Boyle later returned to Brault with Walsh’s child. They divorced in 1932, when she married Laurence Vail, a fellow American expatriate. After her marriage to Vail also ended in divorce, Boyle married Joseph von Franckenstein, an Austrian baron who had been forced out of his homeland during the Nazi invasion. She lived much of the time in Europe and was a correspondent for The New Yorker. She returned to the United States in 1953; Franckenstein died in 1963. Boyle taught at San Francisco State University from 1963 to 1979 and

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Short Story Writers at Eastern Washington University in 1982. Her arrest and imprisonment following an anti-Vietnam War demonstration is the basis of her novel The Underground Woman (1975). She would remain actively involved in movements protesting social injustices and violations of human rights.

Analysis • In a 1963 article Kay Boyle defines what she saw as the role of the serious writer: to be “the spokesman for those who remain inarticulate . . . an aeolian harp whose sensitive strings respond to the whispers of the concerned people of his time.” The short-story writer, she believed, is “a moralist in the highest sense of the word”; the role of the shortstory writer has always been “to speak briefly and clearly of the Library of Congress dignity and integrity of [the] individual.” Perhaps it is through this definition that the reader may distinguish the central threads that run through the variegated fabric of Boyle’s fiction and bind it into a single piece. During the 1920’s, when the young expatriate artists she knew in Paris were struggling to cast off the yokes of literary convention, Boyle championed the bold and experimental in language, and her own early stories are intensely individual explorations of private experiences. Yet when the pressures of the social world came to bear so heavily on private lives in the twentieth century that they could not be ignored, Boyle began to expand the scope of her vision and vibrate to the note of the new times to affirm on a broader scale the same basic values—the “dignity and integrity” of the individual. Beginning in the 1930’s, her subject matter encompassed the rise of Nazism, the French resistance, the Allied occupation of postwar Germany, and the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the United States, yet she never lost sight of the individual dramas acted out against these panoramic backdrops. In the same article Boyle also quotes Albert Camus’s statement that “a man’s work is nothing but a long journey to recover through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart.” In Boyle’s journey of more than fifty years, a few central themes remained constant: a belief in the absolute essentiality of love to human well-being—whether on a personal or a global level; an awareness of the many obstacles to its attainment; and a tragic sense of loss when it fails and the gulfs between human beings stand unbridged. “Wedding Day” • “Wedding Day,” the title story of her first widely circulated volume of short stories, published in 1930, is typical of her early works. It is an intense explo-

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ration of a unique private experience written in an experimental style. The action is primarily psychological, and outward events are described as they reflect states of consciousness. Yet it is representative of Boyle’s best work for decades to come, both in its central concern with the failure of love and in its bold use of language. “The red carpet that was to spurt like a hemorrhage from pillar to post was stacked in the corner,” the story begins. From the first sentence the reader senses that things are out of joint. The wedding cake is ignored as it is carried into the pantry “with its beard lying white as hoarfrost on its bosom.” “This was the last lunch,” Boyle writes, and the brother and sister “came in with their buttonholes drooping with violets and sat sadly down, sat down to eat.” To the funereal atmosphere of this wedding day, Boyle injects tension and bitterness. The son and mother argue as to whether the daughter will be given the family’s prized copper saucepans, and he mocks the decorum his mother cherishes when he commands her not to cry, pointing his finger directly at her nose “so that when she looked at him with dignity her eyes wavered and crossed” and “she sat looking proudly at him, erect as a needle staring through its one open eye.” As the mother and son bicker over who wanted the wedding in the first place, the bride-to-be is conspicuously silent. Finally, as the son snatches away each slice of roast beef his mother carves until she whimpers her fear of getting none herself, he and his sister burst into laughter. He tosses his napkin over the chandelier, and she follows him out of the room, leaving their mother alone “praying that this occasion at least pass off with dignity, with her heart not in her mouth but beating away in peace in its own bosom.” With the tension between children and mother clearly delineated and the exclusive camaraderie between brother and sister suggested, Boyle shifts both mood and scene and describes in almost incantatory prose the pair’s idyllic jaunt through the spring afternoon in the hours remaining before the wedding: The sun was an imposition, an imposition, for they were another race stamping an easy trail through the wilderness of Paris, possessed of the same people, but of themselves like another race. No one else could by lifting of the head only be starting life over again, and it was a wonder the whole city of Paris did not hold its breath for them, for if anyone could have begun a new race, it was these two. The incestuous overtones are strong. “It isn’t too late yet, you know,” the brother repeatedly insists as they stride through the streets, take a train into the bois, and row to the middle of a pond. “Over them was the sky set like a tomb,” and as tears flow down their cheeks, the slow rain begins to fall. There is perfect correspondence between landscape and emotion, external objects mirroring the characters’ internal states. The rain underscores the pair’s frustration and despair as they realize the intensity of their love and the impossibility of its fulfillment: Everywhere, everywhere there were other countries to go to. And how were they to get from the boat with the chains that were on them, how uproot the willowing trees from their hearts, how strike the irons of spring that shackled them? What shame and shame that scorched a burning pathway to their dressing rooms! Their hearts were mourning for every Paris night and its half-hours before lunch when two straws crossed on the round table top on the marble anywhere meant I had a drink here and went on. The inevitable wedding itself forms the final segment of the story, and the lyrical spell binding the pair is broken the instant they set foot in the house again to find

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their mother “tying white satin bows under the chins of the potted plants.” The boy kicks down the hall the silver tray that will collect the guests’ calling cards, and his mother is wearily certain “that this outburst presaged a thousand mishaps that were yet to come.” The irony of the story lies not only in the reversal of expectations the title may have aroused in the reader but also in the discrepancy between different characters’ perceptions of the same situation. The self-pitying matron worries only about the thousand little mishaps possible when a major disaster—the wedding itself—is imminent; but the guests arrive “in peace” and the brother delivers his sister to the altar. Boyle captures magnificently the enormous gulf between the placid surface appearance and the tumultuous inner reality of the situation as she takes the reader inside the bride’s consciousness: This was the end, the end, they thought. She turned her face to her brother and suddenly their hearts fled together and sobbed like ringdoves in their bosoms. This was the end, the end, the end, this was the end. Down the room their feet fled in various ways, seeking an escape. To the edge of the carpet fled her feet, returned and followed reluctantly upon her brother’s heels. Every piped note of the organ insisted that she go on. It isn’t too late, he said. Too late, too late. The ring was given, the book was closed. The desolate, the barren sky continued to fling down dripping handfuls of fresh rain. The mindless repetition of the phrase “the end” and the blind panic of the bride’s imaginary flight have an intense psychological authenticity, and the recurrence of the brother’s phrase “It isn’t too late” and its perversion in “Too late, too late,” along with the continuing rain, are evidence of the skill with which Boyle has woven motifs into the fabric of her story. “Wedding Day” ends with dancing, but in an ironic counterpoint to the flight she had imagined at the altar, the bride’s feet “were fleeing in a hundred ways throughout the rooms, fluttering from the punch bowl to her bedroom and back again.” Through repetition and transformation of the image, Boyle underscores the fact that her path is now circumscribed. While the brother, limbered by the punch, dances about scattering calling cards, the mother, “in triumph on the arm of the General, danced lightly by” rejoicing that “no glass had yet been broken.” “What a real success, what a real success,” is her only thought as her feet float “over the oriental prayer rugs, through the Persian forests of hemp, away and away” in another absurdly circumscribed “escape” that is yet another mockery of the escape to “other countries” that the pair had dreamed of that afternoon on the lake. Ironies and incongruities are hallmarks of Kay Boyle’s fiction. For Boyle, reality depends on perception, and the fact that different perceptions of the same situation result in disparate and often conflicting “realities” creates a disturbing world in which individuals badly in need of contact and connection collide and bounce off one another like atoms. In “Wedding Day” Boyle juxtaposes a real loss of love with the surface gaiety of a wedding that celebrates no love at all, but which the mother terms “a real success.” She exposes the painful isolation of each individual and the tragedy that the only remedy—a bonding through love—is so often thwarted or destroyed. The barriers to love are many, both natural and man-made. In some of Boyle’s stories those who would love are severed by death. Sometimes, as in the case of the brother and sister in “Wedding Day,” love’s fulfillment is simply made impossible by the facts of life in this imperfect world, and although readers can mourn for what has

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been lost, they can hardly argue about the obstacle itself—the incest taboo is nearly universal. Yet in many of her works Boyle presents a more assailable villain. In “Wedding Day” she treats unsympathetically the mother, who stands for all the petty proprieties that so often separate people. Boyle finds many barriers to human contact to be as arbitrary and immoral as the social conventions which cause Huck Finn’s “conscience” to torment him as he helps his friend Jim to escape slavery, and in her fiction she quietly unleashes her fury against them. An obstacle she attacks repeatedly is a narrow-mindedness which blinds individuals to the inherent dignity and integrity of others, an egotism which in the plural becomes bigotry and chauvinism. “The White Horses of Vienna” • While Boyle and her family were living in Austria in the 1930’s, she was an eyewitness as the social world began to impose itself on private lives, and she began to widen the scope of her artistic vision; yet her “political” stories have as their central concern the ways in which external events affect the individual. In one of her best-known stories, “The White Horses of Vienna,” which won the O. Henry Award for best story of 1935, Boyle exposes the artificial barricades to human understanding and connection. The story explores the relationship between a Tyrolean doctor, who has injured his leg coming down the mountain after lighting a swastika fire in rebellion against the current government, and Dr. Heine, the young assistant sent from Vienna to take over his patients while he recovers. The Tyrolean doctor and his wife see immediately that Dr. Heine is a Jew. The Tyrolean doctor is a clean-living, respected man. He had been a prisoner of war in Siberia and had studied abroad, but the many places in which he had been “had never left an evil mark.” Boyle writes: “His face was as strong as rock, but it had seen so much of suffering that it had the look of being scarred, it seemed to be split in two, with one side of it given to resolve and the other to compassion.” In his personal dealings it is the compassionate side that dominates. When his wife asks in a desperate whisper what they will do with “him,” the Tyrolean doctor replies simply that they will send for his bag at the station and give him some Apfelsaft if he is thirsty. “It’s harder on him than us,” he tells her. Neither has the wife’s own humanity been extinguished entirely by institutionalized bigotry, for when Dr. Heine’s coat catches fire from a sterilizing lamp on the table, she wraps a piece of rug around him immediately and holds him tightly to smother the flames. Almost instinctively, she offers to try patching the burned-out place, but then she suddenly bites her lip and stands back “as if she had remembered the evil thing that stood between them.” The situation of the Tyrolean doctor, described as a “great, golden, wounded bird,” is counterpointed in a story Dr. Heine tells at dinner one evening about the famous Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, still royal, “without any royalty left to bow their heads to, still shouldering into the arena with spirits a man would give his soul for, bending their knees in homage to the empty, canopied loge where royalty no longer sat.” He tells of a particular horse that the government, badly in need of money, had sold to an Indian maharaja. When the time had come for the horse to be taken away, a wound was discovered cut in his leg. After it had healed and it was again time for the horse to leave, another wound was found on its other leg. Finally the horse’s blood was so poisoned that it had to be destroyed. No one knew who had caused the wounds until the horse’s devoted little groom committed suicide that same day. When the after-dinner conversation is interrupted by the knocking of Heimwehr troops at the door, “men brought in from other parts of the country, billeted there to subdue the native people,” the identification between the

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doctor and the steed is underscored. He cannot guide the troops up the mountain in search of those who have lit that evening’s swastika fires because of his wounded leg. Dr. Heine is relieved that the rest of the evening will be spent with family and friends watching one of the Tyrolean doctor’s locally renowned marionette shows. After staring out the window at the burning swastikas, the “marvelously living flowers of fire springing out of the arid darkness,” the “inexplicable signals given from one mountain to another in some secret gathering of power that cast him and his people out, forever out upon the waters of despair,” Dr. Heine turns back, suddenly angry, and proclaims that the whole country is being ruined by politics, that it is impossible to have friends or even casual conversations on any other basis these days. “You’re much wiser to make your puppets, Herr Doktor,” he says. Even the marionette show is political. The characters are a clown who explains he is carrying artificial flowers because he is on his way to his own funeral and wants them to be fresh when he gets there, and a handsome grasshopper, “a great, gleaming beauty” who prances about the stage with delicacy and wit to the music of Mozart. “It’s really marvellous! He’s as graceful as the white horses at Vienna, Herr Doktor,” Dr. Heine calls out in delight. As the conversation continues between the clown, called “Chancellor,” and the grasshopper addressed as “The Leader,” Dr. Heine is not laughing so loudly. The Chancellor has a “ludicrous faith in the power of the Church” to support him; the Leader proclaims that the cities are full of churches, but “the country is full of God.” The Leader speaks with “a wild and stirring power that sent the cold of wonder up and down one’s spine,” and he seems “ready to waltz away at any moment with the power of stallion life that was leaping in his limbs.” As the Chancellor proclaims, “I believe in the independence of the individual,” he promptly trips over his own sword and falls flat among the daisies. At the story’s conclusion, Dr. Heine is standing alone on the cold mountainside, longing to be “indoors, with the warmth of his own people, and the intellect speaking.” When he sees “a small necklace of men coming to him” up the mountain, the lights they bear “coming like little beacons of hope carried to him,” Dr. Heine thinks, Come to me . . . come to me. I am a young man alone on a mountain. I am a young man alone, as my race is alone, lost here amongst them all. Yet ironically, what Dr. Heine views as “beacons of hope” are carried by the Heimwehr troops, the Tyrolean doctor’s enemies. As in “Wedding Day,” Boyle presents a single situation and plays off the characters’ reactions to it against one another to illustrate the gaps between individuals and the relativity of truth and reality in the world. Because his personal loyalties transcend his politics, Dr. Heine rushes to warn the family of the Heimwehr’s approach. When the troops arrive they announce that the Austrian chancellor, Dollfuss, had been assassinated in Vienna that afternoon. They have come to arrest the doctor, whose rebel sympathies are known. “Ah, politics, politics again!” cries Dr. Heine, wringing his hands “like a woman about to cry.” He runs outdoors and takes the doctor’s hand as he is being carried away on a stretcher, asking what he can do to help. “You can throw me peaches and chocolate from the street,” replies the Tyrolean doctor, smiling, “his cheeks scarred with the marks of laughter in the light from the hurricane lamps that the men were carrying down.” His wife is not a good shot, he adds, and he missed all the oranges she had thrown him after the February slaughter. At this image of the Tyrolean doctor caged like an animal but still noble, with his spirit still unbroken, Dr. Heine is left “thinking in anguish of the snow-white horses, the Lipizzaners, the relics of pride, the still unbroken

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vestiges of beauty bending their knees to the empty loge of royalty where there was no royalty any more.” In “The White Horses of Vienna,” Boyle expresses hope, if not faith, that even in the face of divisive social forces, the basic connections of compassion between individuals might survive. In a work that is a testament to her humanity, she presents the Tyrolean doctor’s plight with such sensitivity that readers, like the Jewish assistant, are forced to view with understanding and empathy this proud man’s search for a cause that will redeem the dignity and honor of his wounded people while at the same time abhorring the cause itself. Boyle sees and presents in all its human complexity what at first glance seems a black-and-white political issue. Boyle, however, was no Pollyanna. As the social conflict that motivates this story snowballed into world war and mass genocide, she saw with a cold, realistic eye how little survived of the goodwill among human beings she had hoped for. In many of her stories written in the 1940’s and up to her death, she examined unflinchingly and sometimes bitterly the individual tragedies played out in the shadow of the global one. “Winter Night” • In “Winter Night,” published in 1946, she draws a delicate portrait of a little girl named Felicia and a woman sent by a “sitting parent” agency to spend the evening with her in a New York apartment. The woman, in her strange accent, tells Felicia that today is an anniversary, that three years ago that night she had begun to care for another little girl who also studied ballet and whose mother, like Felicia’s, had had to go away. The difference was that the other girl’s mother had been sent away on a train car in which there were no seats, and she never came back, but she was able to write a short letter on a smuggled scrap of paper and slip it through the cracks on the floor of the moving train in the hope that some kind stranger would send it to its destination. The woman can only comfort herself with the thought that “They must be quietly asleep somewhere, and not crying all night because they are hungry and because they are cold.” “There is a time of apprehension which begins with the beginning of darkness, and to which only the speech of love can lend security,” the story begins, as Boyle describes the dying light of a January afternoon in New York City. Felicia and the “sitting parent,” both left alone, have found that security in each other. When, after midnight, Felicia’s mother tiptoes in the front door, slipping the three blue foxskins from her shoulder and dropping the velvet bag on a chair, she hears only the sound of breathing in the dark living room, and no one speaks to her in greeting as she crosses to the bedroom: “And then, as startling as a slap across her delicately tinted face, she saw the woman lying sleeping on the divan, and Felicia, in her school dress still, asleep within the woman’s arms.” The story is not baldly didactic, but Boyle is moralizing. By juxtaposing the cases of the two little girls left alone by their mothers and cared for by a stranger, she shows that the failure of love is a tragic loss on an individual as well as on a global scale. Again, personal concerns merge with political and social ones, and readers find the failure of love on any level to be the fundamental tragedy of life. Some of the stories Boyle wrote about the war and its aftermath were less subtle, “artistic” explorations of individual struggles than they were frankly moralistic adventure stories written for commercial magazines, and they were more popular with the public than with the critics. Yet one of her finest works was also a product of her war experiences. The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951) consists of eleven stories, several originally published by The New Yorker, which had employed

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Boyle as a correspondent for the express purpose of sending “fiction out of Germany.” It is prefaced by a seventy-seven-page nonfiction account of a de-Nazification trial Boyle witnessed in Frankfurt in 1948, which reveals her immense skill as a reporter as well. The book presents a painful vision. Any hope that a renewed understanding among peoples might result from the catastrophic “lesson” of the war is dashed, for the point of many of the stories and certainly of the introduction is how little difference the war has made in the fundamental attitudes of the defeated but silently defiant Germans who can still say of 1943 and 1944—“the years when the gas chambers burned the brightest. . . .Those were the good years for everyone.” In 1929, Boyle, with poet Hart Crane, Vail, and others, signed Eugene Jolas’s manifesto, “Revolution of the Word,” condemning literary pretentiousness and outdated literary conventions. The goal, then, was to make literature at once fresh and experimental and at the same time accessible to the reader. Boyle would remain politically involved and productive as a writer, publishing collections of poetry, short stories, and essays in the 1980’s. She would continue in her work to test the individual against events of historical significance, such as the threat of Nazism or the war in Vietnam. Although critics have accused her later works of selling out to popular taste, and her style of losing its innovative edge, Boyle remained steadfast in defining her artistic purpose as a moral responsibility to defend the integrity of the individual and human rights. To do so, Boyle argued, she must be accessible to the public. Sandra Whipple Spanier With updates by Lou Thompson Other major works children’s literature: The Youngest Camel, 1939, 1959; Pinky, the Cat Who Liked to Sleep, 1966; Pinky in Persia, 1968. anthologies: 365 Days, 1936 (with others); The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali, 1967; Enough of Dying! An Anthology of Peace Writings, 1972 (with Justine van Gundy). novels: Process, wr. c. 1925, pb. 2001 (Sandra Spanier, editor); Plagued by the Nightingale, 1931; Year Before Last, 1932; Gentlemen, I Address You Privately, 1933; My Next Bride, 1934; Death of a Man, 1936; Monday Night, 1938; Primer for Combat, 1942; Avalanche, 1944; A Frenchman Must Die, 1946; 1939, 1948; His Human Majesty, 1949; The Seagull on the Step, 1955; Three Short Novels, 1958; Generation Without Farewell, 1960; The Underground Woman, 1975. nonfiction: Breaking the Silence: Why a Mother Tells Her Son About the Nazi Era, 1962; Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930, 1968 (with Robert McAlmon); The Long Walk at San Francisco State, and Other Essays, 1970; Words That Must Somehow Be Said: The Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1927-1984, 1985. poetry: A Glad Day, 1938; American Citizen Naturalized in Leadville, Colorado, 1944; Collected Poems, 1962; Testament for My Students, and Other Poems, 1970; This Is Not a Letter, and Other Poems, 1985; Collected Poems of Kay Boyle, 1991. Bibliography Bell, Elizabeth S. Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Excellent introduction to Boyle’s short stories. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Carpenter, Richard C. “Kay Boyle.” English Journal 42 (November, 1953): 425-430.

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This essay provides a helpful and general look at Boyle’s early novels and short fiction. ____________. “Kay Boyle: The Figure in the Carpet.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 7 (Winter, 1964-1965): 65-78. Carpenter rejects the common complaint that Boyle is a mere “stylist,” discussing her thematic depth, particularly in “The Bridegroom’s Body” and “The Crazy Hunter.” Elkins, Marilyn, ed. Critical Essays on Kay Boyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Collection of reviews and critical essays on Boyle’s work by various critics, reviewers, and commentators. Hollenberg, Donna. “Abortion, Identity Formation, and the Expatriate Woman Writer: H. D. and Kay Boyle in the Twenties.” Twentieth Century Literature 40 (Winter, 1994): 499-517. Discusses the theme of self-loss through the roles of marriage and motherhood in Boyle’s early works. Shows how expatriation allowed some psychic space to explore the effect of gender roles on her aspirations. Discusses the effect of inadequate maternal role models her identity as an artist. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Boyle: “Astronomer’s Wife” (vol. 1), “Summer Evening” (vol. 7), and “The White Horses of Vienna” and “Winter Night” (vol. 8). Mellen, Joan. Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Drawing on personal conversations with Boyle and her family, Mellen discusses the autobiographical nature of Boyle’s writing and lays bare much of Boyle’s own mythologizing of her life in her autobiographical writing. Porter, Katherine Anne. “Kay Boyle: Example to the Young.” In The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books, 1920-1970, edited by Gilbert A. Harrison. New York: Liveright, 1972. This essay examines Boyle as she fits in the literary movement of her time. Focuses on some of her stories, as well as on the novel Plagued by the Nightingale. Spanier, Sandra Whipple. Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Heavily annotated, thorough, and the first critical biography and major work on Boyle. Supplemented by select but extensive primary and secondary bibliographies. Illustrated. Twentieth-Century Literature 34 (Fall, 1988). A special issue on Kay Boyle, with personal reminiscences by Malcolm Cowley, Jessica Mitford, Howard Nemerov, and Studs Terkel, among others. Also contains several critical essays on Boyle’s work.

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T. Coraghessan Boyle Born: Peekskill, New York; December 2, 1948 Principal short fiction • Descent of Man, 1979; Greasy Lake, and Other Stories, 1985; If the River Was Whiskey, 1989; Without a Hero, 1994; T. C. Boyle Stories: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1998; After the Plague: Stories, 2001; Tooth and Claw, 2005; The Human Fly, and Other Stories, 2005. Other literary forms • T. Coraghessan Boyle is primarily a writer of prose fiction who has divided his energy roughly equally between short stories and novels. His novels explore many of the same subjects and themes as his short fiction and have received both popular attention and critical praise. He published his first novel, Water Music, in 1981, followed by two more during the 1980’s, four during the 1990’s, and three during the first years of the twenty-first century: Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), and Talk Talke (2006). His 1993 novel, The Road to Wellville, was made into a motion picture in 1994. Achievements • T. Coraghessan Boyle received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1977. Descent of Man, his first collection of stories, won the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction. His novel Water Music (1981) received the Aga Khan Award, and another novel, World’s End (1987), was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Boyle also received O. Henry Awards for “Sinking House” (1988), “The Ape Lady in Retirement” (1989), “The Underground Gardens” (1999), “The Love of My Life” (2001), and “Swept Away” (2003). T. C. Boyle Stories: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle (1998) won the Bernard Malamud Prize in Short Fiction from the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. In 2003, he was a National Book Award finalist for Drop City. In 2004, “Tooth and Claw” was a Best American Stories selection. Biography • Born into a lower-middle-class family in Peekskill, New York, in 1948, Thomas John Boyle was a rebellious youth who performed in a rock-and-roll band, committed acts of vandalism, and drank heavily. He did not get along with his father, a school-bus driver who died of alcoholism at the age of fifty-four, in 1972. Boyle’s mother, a secretary, was also an alcoholic and died of liver failure. Assuming the name T. Coraghessan Boyle at the State University of New York at Potsdam, he studied saxophone and clarinet until he realized that he lacked the necessary discipline for music. He then drifted into literature. After college, to avoid military service during the Vietnam War, he taught English for two years at his alma mater, Lakeland High School, in Shrub Oak, New York, while indulging in heroin on weekends. In 1972, Boyle entered the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, where he studied under Vance Bourjaily, John Cheever, and John Irving, earning a doctorate in 1977, with a short-story collection, later published as Descent of Man, serving as his dissertation. Such academic achievement is ironic for someone placed in a class for slow learners in the second grade. Boyle became a teacher at the University of Southern California, where he founded an undergraduate creative writing program, and settled in Woodland Hills with his wife, Karen Kvashay, and their chil-

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dren, Kerrie, Milo, and Spencer. One of the most public and flamboyant writers of his time, Boyle delighted in performing public and recorded readings. Analysis • During a time when the majority of serious American writers have been concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, T. Coraghessan Boyle has stood out by exploring a wide range of subjects, locales, periods, and strata of society. Distinctive as a stylist, storyteller, and satirist, Boyle enthusiastically encompasses numerous literary conventions into his fiction, turning them into something fresh and often humorous. He examines both the detritus and the silliness of the world, exulting in its absurdities. Boyle’s short fiction is most notaCourtesy, Allen and Unwin ble for its extraordinary range of subjects, which include a chimpanzee who has translated works by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and Noam Chomsky into Yerkish; the final performance of blues musician Robert Johnson; the importation of starlings into the United States; an attempt to improve the public image of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; and a statue of the Virgin Mary that re-creates a man’s sins for all the world to see. Boyle’s stories delve into such topics as violence, sexuality, paranoia, guilt, and the clichés of popular culture. Although some of his stories are realistic, most exaggerate the world’s absurdities for comic effect. His tone is predominantly satirical but rarely angry. “Bloodfall” • “Bloodfall” depicts the effects of an apparently endless rainfall of blood on seven young adults who live together. Although they smoke marijuana, burn incense, and listen to thunderously loud rock and roll, they are not hippies but well-to-do materialists who use electric toothbrushes and drive BMWs. They sleep together in a bed that they appropriately think of as “the nest,” since they have attempted to withdraw from the often disconcerting realities of the outside world, seeking comfortable refuge in their home. The inexplicable rain of blood cuts them off completely from the rest of the world by knocking out their telephone and television. They cannot drive to get food since they cannot see through a blood-smeared windshield. Their response to this terrifying situation is to ignore it: “Isabelle said it would be better if we all went to bed. She expressed a hope that after a long nap things would somehow come to their senses.” The blood begins to stain everything about their antiseptic existence: their white clothing when they venture outside, their white carpet when the flood begins to seep under their door. They are confident that the bloodfall will stop, since logic demands that it will, and it does. Since such an event is illogical to begin with, however,

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“Bloodfall” ends with the start of a new downpour, this time consisting of “heavy, feculent, and wet” fecal matter. Boyle often satirizes modern human beings’ feeble efforts to protect themselves from outside forces, as in “Peace of Mind,” an attack on home security systems, but the image of the blood invading the white world of these smug materialists is his strongest statement on this theme. Boyle’s vividly contrasting images of red and white and his telling accumulation of the trite details of the lives of contemporary American consumers contribute to the story’s effectiveness. As throughout his fiction, Boyle borrows from the conventions of popular culture, in this case horror fiction and films, to create a compelling vision of modern alienation. “The Big Garage” • “The Big Garage” is a frightening but comic horror story. When the Audi belonging to B. breaks down, a tow truck mysteriously appears and takes it to Tegeler’s Big Garage, an enormous service center in the middle of nowhere. Because it is late at night and no mechanics are available, B. is forced to sleep on a cot in a storage closet where other customers are also waiting for their vehicles to be repaired. B. discovers that he must go through a complicated maze to the appointment office and fill out a seven-page application for an appointment to have his car serviced. Fed up with this nonsense, B. confronts a team of German mechanics who taunt him and throw him down a chute into the car wash, where he is washed and waxed. After trying and failing to escape by hitchhiking, B. gives in and goes across the street to Tegeler’s Big Lot, where the owner of the Big Garage sells his broken customers Tegelers, his own inferior make. B. is caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare out of a Franz Kafka novel, such as Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937). Boyle takes a familiar situation and exaggerates it to show how everyday life can become an impersonal, nerve-racking, humiliating experience. He makes a serious statement about alienation and the often vicious insensitivity of a consumer culture while also having fun through slapstick and literary parody. “The Overcoat II” • Boyle combines homage to a favorite work of literature with political satire in “The Overcoat II,” an updating of Nikolai Gogol’s “Shinel” (1839; in The Overcoat, and Other Stories, 1923) to the Moscow of the 1980’s. Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a devoted clerk in the Soviet bureaucracy, has no interests outside his work, no time for anything but waiting in endless queues for scarce goods. Yet the only blemish on his party-line life is the cheap, tattered overcoat he has bought because a central department store clerk, attacking the quality of Soviet-made products, tried to sell him a black-market overcoat. Akaky is ridiculed by his unpatriotic coworkers because he appears to use the coat to give himself the aura of a Marxist saint. Old Studniuk, one of the fourteen residents who share his apartment, tells Akaky he must use the black market to get everything he can: “There ain’t no comrade commissioner going to come round and give it to you.” Akaky sells his television set and exhausts his savings to spend three months’ salary on a camel’s hair overcoat with a fox collar. His fellow clerks are impressed, and one, Mishkin, invites Akaky to his home. After leaving Mishkin’s house, where he had one of the best times of his life, he is beaten and his coat stolen. The police recover the coat but keep it and fine Akaky for receiving stolen goods. Feeling betrayed by all he has believed in, Akaky develops pneumonia, dies, and is soon forgotten. The police inspector who has interrogated him wears the coat proudly.

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Like “Ike and Nina,” in which President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s wife have an affair in 1959, “The Overcoat II” satirizes Soviet life. Gogol’s Akaky dies from the despair of losing his beloved coat, Boyle’s from losing his belief in the Soviet system, something even more irreplaceable. Gogol ends his story with Akaky’s ghost seeking revenge against those who have wronged him, Boyle’s with an enemy profiting from the clerk’s naïve belief in a system that exploits him. The happiness that Akaky experiences at Mishkin’s party must be short-lived, for in Boyle’s paranoid universe, some unexpected, uncontrollable force is out to get the individual. Only those as cynical as the society in which they live can survive. “Two Ships” • The uncontrollable force confronting the protagonist of “Two Ships” is his childhood best friend. The teenage Jack and Casper are rebels together, assaulting symbols of wealth and religion. They run away from home, but Jack gives up two weeks before Casper. During this experience, Jack recognizes the streak of madness in his friend and is both repelled by and attracted to it: “He was serious, he was committed, his was the rapture of saints and martyrs, both feet over the line.” Casper’s passion leads him to convert fervently to Marxism. When he is drafted during the Vietnam War, he deserts the Army. Jack does not see Casper for several years after he goes into the Army, but he receives several packages containing lengthy, incoherent poems expressing Casper’s political views. Jack then goes to law school, marries, and settles down. After he receives a telephone call from Casper asking him to stick up for his friend, Jack tells an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that Casper is “seriously impaired.” Following eleven months in a mental institution, Casper returns to his hometown, and Jack is frightened. Casper finally visits him but terrifies Jack even further by saying little. Jack begins packing. More than guilt about betraying his friend to the FBI, Jack experiences shame over how their lives have diverged: “I’d become what we’d reacted against together, what he’d devoted his mad, misguided life to subverting.” Jack is disturbed by Casper’s reminding him how he has failed himself through his willingness to play society’s game by its rules, his becoming a corporate attorney who defends polluters, his lack of passion for and commitment to anything but his family, and his failure to accept any responsibility for the state of the world. “Two Ships” effectively blends such major Boyle subjects as paranoia, friendship, and betrayal. His characters are constantly betraying one another and themselves. “The Hector Quesadilla Story” • Although generally satirical and often condemnatory, Boyle’s fiction is not always cynical and unforgiving. “The Hector Quesadilla Story,” one of the best baseball stories ever written, demonstrates the possibility of getting a chance to overcome failure. The title character plays for the Los Angeles Dodgers but only pinch-hits, because he is too old, too fat, and too slow to perform well in the field. (Boyle has loosely based this character on Manny Mota, the legendary pinch hitter for the Dodgers in the 1970’s.) A grandfather whose official baseball age is several years short of actuality, Hector lives only to eat the spicy Mexican food that he passionately loves and to play the game that he loves even more. He keeps telling his wife he will play one more season but secretly has no intention of quitting. Meanwhile, he waits patiently at the end of the bench to prove himself again, to come alive in the only way he knows how. Hector is convinced that something special will happen during a game with the

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Atlanta Braves, whom the Dodgers are battling for first place, because it falls on his birthday. With the score tied in the ninth inning, he is denied his “moment of catharsis,” his chance to win the game. As the contest drags on into extra innings, the manager refuses to let him bat because the Dodgers have run out of players and Hector would have to play in the field if the score remained tied. With his team trailing by one run in the bottom of the thirty-first inning in the longest game in major league history, Hector finally gets his chance but is foolishly thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple. When the next batter hits a home run, Hector is forced to pitch for the first time because no one else is available. All seems lost when the Braves score four runs off him in the next inning, but Hector redeems himself with a bases-loaded home run to tie the score once again. The game then “goes on forever.” “The Hector Quesadilla Story” works on two levels. On one, it is about the most magical quality of baseball: “How can he get old?” Hector asks himself. “The grass is always green, the lights always shining, no clocks or periods or halves or quarters, no punch-in and punch-out: this is the game that never ends.” Without the restraints of time seen in such games as football and basketball, a baseball game could theoretically last forever. On the second level, the story deals with how the individual feels the limitations that time imposes upon him and how he fights against them. Hector tries to ignore what his body, his family, and common sense tell him. Because a baseball game can go on forever, so can he. He appropriates the magic of the game for himself: “it’s a game of infinite surprises.” Boyle makes baseball a metaphor for life itself. “Sorry Fugu” • The tone of most of Boyle’s stories is primarily comic, and in one of the best, “Sorry Fugu,” he also displays the gentler side of his satire. Albert D’Angelo, owner and chef of D’Angelo’s, wants his new restaurant to be both good and successful. He wants it to meet the challenge of Willa Frank, the restaurant critic who always gives negative reviews, even to those places that Albert reveres. He fears and longs for the day when she and her companion, known only as “the Palate,” will enter his establishment. Luckily, Albert knows when the great moment has arrived, since one of his employees knows Willa and her boyfriend, Jock McNamee. Unfortunately, she has come on one of those nights when all goes wrong, and Albert knows he has failed on the first of her three visits. They arrive the second time with an older couple. Albert is prepared this time, only to see each of them pass the dishes to Jock, who is not interested in any of them. Albert understands what to do on the third visit after his employee tells him that what Jock really likes is the “shanty Irish” food his mother used to make. Albert then ignores what the couple orders and serves the Palate peas, boiled potatoes, a slab of cheap, overcooked meat, and catsup. When the outraged Willa charges into the kitchen, Albert seduces her with squid rings in aioli sauce, lobster tortellini, taglierini alla pizzaiola, Russian coulibiac of salmon, and fugu, a Japanese blowfish. Willa confesses that she relies on Jock’s crude judgment, since at least he is consistent in disliking everything, and that she is afraid to risk a positive review. Although other American writers of Boyle’s generation fill their fiction with brand names and trendy antiques as a means of delineating their characters, Boyle uses food to explore their social status and individuality. What is most important about “Sorry Fugu,” however, is its depiction of the roles of the critic and the artist. Boyle satirizes the superficiality of many critics through Willa’s uncertainty about her tastes and dishonesty in relying on Jock’s lack of taste. Albert is an artist in the

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care he takes in creating his dishes: “Albert put his soul into each dish, arranged and garnished the plates with all the patient care and shimmering inspiration of a Toulouse-Lautrec bent over a canvas.” Boyle takes the same care as a stylist, as when Albert contemplates Willa’s name: “It was a bony name, scant and lean, stripped of sensuality, the antithesis of the round, full-bodied Leonora. It spoke of a knotty Puritan toughness, a denying of the flesh, no compromise in the face of temptation.” Since Boyle has said in interviews that he wants to be both popular and critically praised, Albert appears to be a self-portrait of an artist who needs to be judged by the highest standards. Without a Hero • Boyle continued his eclectic exploration of the absurdities of the world in his short-story collection Without a Hero. “Filthy with Things” tells the humorous yet oddly disturbing story of a married couple suffocating in a world of suburban materialism that has advanced so far beyond their control that they must hire an organizing specialist to kick them out of their own house and take possession of their belongings. As the narrator watches the workers sort through and catalog everything he owns, he feels “as if he doesn’t exist, as if he’s already become an irrelevance in the face of the terrible weight of his possessions,” or, more broadly, of a late twentieth century American culture in which materiality often defines the person. One of the most prominent of Boyle’s many recurring obsessions is his interest in the influence that animals have on human behavior, and vice versa. The narrator of “Carnal Knowledge” gets involved with a group of animal-rights activists when he falls in love with Alena, a militant vegetarian whose crippled dog urinates on him at the beach. After quitting his job to take part in antifur demonstrations in Beverly Hills, the narrator is coerced into taking part in a plot to “liberate” thousands of turkeys from a poultry farm a few weeks before Thanksgiving. The raid does more harm than good, however, when large numbers of turkeys wander onto a fog-enshrouded freeway and cause a truck to jackknife. After being spurned by Alena, who travels north with another man to defend grizzly bears, the protagonist drives by the accident scene, where the road is “coated in feathers, turkey feathers” and where there is “a red pulp ground into the surface of road.” He promptly returns to eating the Big Macs that he has been subconsciously craving for days. Beneath the humor of such stories lies a message to which Boyle often returns: The universe is an ambiguous, unpredictable place, and each person must find his or her own solitary way to negotiate its absurdities. T. C. Boyle Stories • T. C. Boyle Stories: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle is a 691-page volume which includes all the tales from the author’s previous short-story collections, plus four stories previously unpublished in book form and three previously unpublished anywhere, an impressive sixty-eight over a twenty-five-year period. Although reading a complete collection of an author’s work often means plowing through the mediocre to get to the good (and this book is no exception), one benefit is the opportunity to see the development of the writer over time. In Boyle’s case, there is a clear tendency for early stories to be driven more by premise than by character. In stories such as “Bloodfall,” characterization tends to be subordinate to the idea. In subsequent stories, Boyle began demonstrating a willingness to invest more time and effort into exploring the multiple dimensions of his characters, and by the 1980’s, a clear preference for dwelling on the subtleties of the human condition had emerged.

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In the midst of this development, several common threads tie most, if not all, of Boyle’s stories together, most notably his use of humor of all types—parody, slapstick, satire, wit, and irony—and his dedication to keen observation rendered through bold, colorful language. This latter quality, which seems to be missing from a large portion of contemporary American fiction, is a clear reflection of Boyle’s belief that it is possible for fiction to possess the same vitality as rock-and-roll music. Michael Adams With updates by Douglas Long and the Editors Other major works anthology: Doubletakes: Pairs of Contemporary Short Stories, 2003. novels: Water Music, 1981; Budding Prospects: A Pastoral, 1984; World’s End, 1987; East Is East, 1990; The Road to Wellville, 1993; The Tortilla Curtain, 1995; Riven Rock, 1998; A Friend of the Earth, 2000; Drop City, 2003; The Inner Circle, 2004; Talk Talke, 2006. Bibliography Boyle, T. Coraghessan. “A Punk’s Past Recaptured.” Interview by Anthony DeCurtis. Rolling Stone, January 14, 1988, 54-57. In his most revealing interview, Boyle talks about his drug use, the importance of understanding history, and the autobiographical element in his fiction. He expresses the desire to be like Kurt Vonnegut, in showing that literature can be both serious and entertaining, and like John Updike, in constantly changing his approach to fiction and improving as an artist. ____________. “Rolling Boyle.” Interview by Tad Friend. The New York Times Magazine, December 9, 1990, 50, 64, 66, 68. Boyle portrays himself as a missionary for literature who promotes himself to ensure that he is read. He comments on the new maturity and reality in some of his fiction but admits that the absurd and bizarre are more natural for him. Boyle also expresses pessimism about the future of the human race. Chase, Brennan. “Like, Chill!” Los Angeles 38 (April, 1993): 80-82. A biographical sketch, focusing on Boyle’s successful literary career and celebrity status in Hollywood. Boyle maintains that he is an academic whose purpose is to write. Hume, Kathryn. American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Boyle’s work is discussed in an extensive study of the tension between utopian and dystopian tendencies in late twentieth century American fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Boyle: “Greasy Lake” and “The Hector Quesadilla Story” (vol. 3), “If the River Was Whiskey” (vol. 4), and “The Overcoat II” (vol. 6). Pope, Dan. “A Different Kind of Post-Modernism.” Gettysburg Review 3 (Autumn, 1990): 658-669. A discussion of Boyle’s collection If the River Was Whiskey, along with a collection of short fiction by Rick DeMarinis and Paul West, as typifying the work of a new generation of writers who look beyond “the age of innocent realism.” Shelden, Michael. “T. Coraghessan Boyle: The Art of Fiction CLXI.” Paris Review 155 (Summer, 2000): 100-126. General appreciation of Boyle’s writings.

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Spencer, Russ. “The Jester Who Hath No King.” Book, December, 1998-January, 1999, 38-43. Day-in-the-life type feature based on a visit to Boyle’s home, with Boyle— described as “the Bacchus of American letters”—assessing his career and personal philosophies following the publication of Riven Rock and T. C. Boyle Stories. Vaid, Krishna Baldev. “Franz Kafka Writes to T. Coraghessan Boyle.” Michigan Quarterly Review 35 (Summer, 1996): 533-549. As if writing a letter from Franz Kafka, Vaid discusses the work of Boyle, investigates the similarity between the two writers, and argues that the reader could grow as tired of Kafka’s logic as of Boyle’s broad panoramas.

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Ray Bradbur y Born: Waukegan, Illinois; August 22, 1920 Principal short fiction • Dark Carnival, 1947; The Martian Chronicles, 1950; The Illustrated Man, 1951; The Golden Apples of the Sun, 1953; The October Country, 1955; A Medicine for Melancholy, 1959; Twice Twenty-two, 1959; The Machineries of Joy, 1964; Autumn People, 1965; Vintage Bradbury, 1965; Tomorrow Midnight, 1966; I Sing the Body Electric!, 1969; Long After Midnight, 1976; “The Last Circus,” and “The Electrocution,” 1980; The Stories of Ray Bradbury, 1980; Dinosaur Tales, 1983; A Memory of Murder, 1984; The Toynbee Convector, 1988; Quicker than the Eye, 1996; Driving Blind, 1997; One More for the Road: A New Short Story Collection, 2002; Bradbury Stories: One Hundred of His Most Celebrated Tales, 2003; The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel, 2003; The Cat’s Pajamas, 2004. Other literary forms • Although Ray Bradbury has described himself as essentially a short-story writer, his contributions to a wide variety of other genres have been substantial. Indeed, he has intentionally sought to compose successfully in virtually every literary form. His best-known novels are Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Dandelion Wine (1957), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), the last being his personal favorite from among all his works. After publishing Green Shadows, White Whale in 1992, Bradbury concentrated mostly on shorter forms. However, after reaching the age of eighty, he returned to the longer form with From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance in 2001, Let’s All Kill Constance in 2003, and Farewell Summer in 2006. Among Bradbury’s screenplays, the most successful have been Moby Dick (1956), written in collaboration with filmmaker John Huston, and Icarus Montgolfier Wright (1961) with George C. Johnson, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Bradbury had his stage plays produced in Los Angeles and New York City, and several of them have been published, representative samples of which are The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics (1963) and The Pedestrian (1966). He also wrote many plays for radio and television. Some of the most important of the several volumes of poetry that he published were collected in The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury (1982). Five more volumes of poems followed later, including I Live By the Invisible: New and Selected Poems (2002). Bradbury has also written books for children and adolescents, including Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable (1998); compiled anthologies of fantasy and science-fiction stories, such as The Circus of Dr. Lao, and Other Improbable Stories (1956); and published nonfiction works dealing with his interests in creativity and the future, such as Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures (1991) and Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars (2005). Achievements • Despite the fact that Bradbury was once named the best-known American science-fiction writer in a poll, his actual literary accomplishments are based on work whose vast variety and deeply humanistic themes transcend science fiction as it is commonly understood. His many stories, from gothic horror to social criticism, from playful fantasies to nostalgic accounts of midwestern American life, have been anthologized in several hundred collections, in English as well as many

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foreign languages, and several of the stories that he published early in his career now occupy a distinguished niche in twentieth century American literature. Some of his early tales were recognized with O. Henry Prizes in 1947 and 1948, and in 1949 he TO VIEW IMAGE, was voted Best Author by the National Fantasy Fan Federation. PLEASE SEE Bradbury’s “Sun and Shadow” PRINT EDITION won the Benjamin Franklin MagOF THIS BOOK. azine Award as the best story of 1953-1954, and in 1954 he received a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His novel Fahrenheit 451 won a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and his book Switch on the Night (1955) was honored with a Boy’s Club of America Junior Book Award in 1956. He received the Mrs. Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Thomas Victor Dracula Society in 1965 and 1971, the Writers’ Guild of America West Valentine Davies Award in 1974, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1977. Whittier College gave him an honorary doctor of literature degree in 1979. PEN, an international writers’ organization of poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists, gave Bradbury its Body of Work Award in 1985. In 1988 Bradbury won the Nebula Award, and in 1995 he was named Los Angeles Citizen of the Year. In 2002, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2004, he received the National Medal of the Arts. Biography • Ray Douglas Bradbury often makes use of his own life in his writings, and he insisted that he had total recall of the myriad experiences of his life through his photographic—some would say eidetic—memory: He stated that he always had vivid recollections of the day of his birth, August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, his father, was a lineman with the Bureau of Power and Light (his distant ancestor Mary Bradbury was among those tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts); Esther Marie (née Moberg) Bradbury, his mother, had emigrated from Sweden to the United States when she was very young. A child with an exceptionally lively imagination, Ray Bradbury amused himself with his fantasies but experienced anguish from his nightmares. His mother took him to his first film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), when he was three years old, and he was both frightened and entranced by Lon Chaney’s performance. This experience originated his lifelong love affair with motion pictures, and he wrote that he could remember the scenes and plots of all the films that he ever saw. As he grew up, Bradbury passed through a series of passions that included cir-

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cuses, dinosaurs, and Mars (the latter via the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs). Neva Bradbury, an aunt, assisted his maturation as a person and writer by introducing him to the joys of fairy tales, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, live theater, and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In Bradbury’s own view, the most important event in his childhood occurred in 1932 when a carnival came to town. He attended the performance of a magician, Mr. Electrico, whose spellbinding act involved electrifying himself to such an extent that sparks jumped between his teeth and every white hair on his head stood erect. Bradbury and the magician became friends, and their walks and talks along the Lake Michigan shore behind the carnival so energized his imagination that he began to compose stories for several hours a day. One of his first efforts was a sequel to a Martian novel of Burroughs. During the Depression, Bradbury’s father had difficulty finding work, and in 1932 the family moved to Arizona, where they had previously spent some time in the mid1920’s. Still in search of steady work, his father moved the family to Los Angeles, which was where Ray Bradbury attended high school and which became his permanent home. His formal education ended with his graduation from Los Angeles High School, but his education as a writer continued through his extensive reading and his participation in theater groups (one of which was sponsored by the actor Laraine Day). To support his writing, he worked as a newsboy in downtown Los Angeles for several years. During World War II, Bradbury’s poor eyesight prevented him from serving in the Army, but this disappointment gave him the freedom to pursue his career as a writer, and he began to publish his stories in such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. The high quality of Bradbury’s stories was quickly recognized, and he was able to get his new stories published in such mass-circulation magazines as Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Magazine, and Mademoiselle. Because of his success as a writer, he had the financial security to marry Marguerite Susan McClure in 1947 (they had met when she, a book clerk, had waited on him). The marriage produced four daughters. By the early 1950’s, Bradbury, now recognized as an accomplished science-fiction and fantasy writer, began his involvement with Hollywood through an original screenplay that would eventually be released as It Came from Outer Space (1952). During the mid-1950’s, he traveled to Ireland in connection with a screenplay of Moby Dick that he wrote with John Huston (he later drew on his experiences with the Irish for several stories and plays that took his work in a new direction). Upon his return to the United States, Bradbury composed a large number of television scripts for such shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspense, and The Twilight Zone. During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Bradbury moved away from science fiction, and his stories and novels increasingly focused on humanistic themes and his midwestern childhood. During the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Bradbury’s output of short and long fiction decreased, and his ideas found outlets in such literary forms as poems, plays, and essays. He also participated in a number of projects, such as “A Journey Through United States History,” the exhibit that occupied the upper floor of the United States Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Because of this display’s success, the Walt Disney organization hired him to help develop the exhibit Spaceship Earth for the Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida. He continued to diversify his activities during the 1980’s by collaborating on projects to turn his novel Fahrenheit 451 into an opera and his novel Dandelion Wine into a musical. During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, he returned to some of the

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subjects and themes that had earlier established his reputation with the publication of short-story collections The Toynbee Convector, Quicker than the Eye, and Driving Blind, and the novels A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990) and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). Analysis • Ray Bradbury once said that he had not so much thought his way through life as he had done things and discovered what those things meant and who he was after the doing. This metamorphosis of experience under the aegis of memory also characterizes many of his stories, which are often transmogrifications of his personal experiences. He therefore used his stories as ways of hiding and finding himself, a self whose constant changes interested, amused, and sometimes frightened him. He believed that human beings are composed of time, and in many of his science-fiction stories, a frequent theme is the dialectic between the past and the future. For example, in several of his Martian stories, the invaders of the Red Planet have to come to terms with their transformation into Martians, since survival in an alien world necessitates the invader’s union with the invaded. Aggression and submission might represent the initial dialectic, but survival or death becomes the most determinative. Even in stories where Bradbur y’s characters and settings seem ordinar y, this theme of metamorphosis is nevertheless present, because these stories often show ordinar y people being transformed by extraordinar y, sometimes bizarre situations. Sometimes Bradbur y’s purpose is to point out the enlightening power of the abnormal; sometimes he wants to reveal the limitations of the ever yday and ordinar y. His best works are often wrenching indictments of the dangers of unrestrained scientific and technical progress, though his work also encourages the hope that humanity will deal creatively with the new worlds it seems driven to make. His characters are changed by their experiences, particularly when they encounter great evil beneath the surface of seemingly normal life, but in other stories Bradbur y gives the reader a window through which to see the positive meaning of life (these stories, usually sentimental, are life-affirming, permitting readers to believe that human dreams can be fulfilled). By helping readers to imagine the unimaginable, he helps them to think about the unthinkable. He speaks of his tales as “idea fiction,” and he prefers to call himself a Magical Realist. He casts magic spells through his poetic words and highly imaginative visions, and because of this aura of enchantment, some critics have seen his chief subject as childhood or the child hidden in the adult unconscious. A danger exists, however, in treating Bradbury as a writer of fantasy suitable only for adolescents. This may be true for some of his works, but many of his stories exhibit emotional depths and logical complexities that call for a sophisticated dialectic between the adult and his buried childhood. The difference between fantasy and reality is not strongly developed in the child, whose experience of the world is minimal. Bradbury often plays with this tension between fantasy and reality in dealing with his principal themes—the power of the past, the freedom of the present, and the temptations and traps of the future. In the world of Bradbury’s stories, fantasy becomes essential for a person existing in an increasingly technological era or with experiences that, like an iceberg, are nine-tenths buried below the surface. In these cases, the abilities to fantasize various alternatives or futures, and to choose the best among them, become necessary for survival. Because of Bradbury’s woefully inadequate knowledge of science and the lack of verisimilitude in the technological gadgetry of his science-fiction stories, many afi-

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cionados of the genre do not consider him a genuine science-fiction writer. He agrees. His science-fiction settings are backgrounds for characters with social, religious, and moral dilemmas. Like fellow science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, Bradbury believes that science fiction’s value lies in helping human beings to visualize and solve future problems before they actually occur, but unlike Asimov, he has a deep suspicion of the machine and a great faith in the human heart’s capacity to perceive, do good, and create beauty. Because of this attitude, many critics view Bradbury as essentially a romantic. Since F. L. Lucas once counted 11,396 definitions of “romanticism,” however, perhaps Bradbury’s brand of romanticism should be more fully articulated. He has expressed an attraction for spontaneity of thought and action, and he actively cultivates his own unconscious. He believes deeply in the power of the imagination, and he accepts Blaise Pascal’s sentiment that the heart has reasons about which the reason knows nothing. In making an assessment of Bradbury’s contribution to modern American literature, one must come to terms with the role he played in popularizing science fiction and making it critically respectable. Bradbury himself once stated that, for him, science fiction is “the most important literature in the history of the world,” since it tells the story of “civilization birthing itself.” He has also said that he considers himself not a science-fiction writer but an “idea writer,” someone who loves ideas and enjoys playing with them. Many of his science-fiction critics would concur in this characterization, since they have had problems categorizing this man who knows so little about science as a traditional science-fiction writer. When asked whether the Mariner mission’s revelations about the inhospitability of Mars to humankind had invalidated his stories about the planet, Bradbury responded that these discoveries in no way affected them, because he had been composing poetic myths, not scientific forecasts. In addition to their lack of scientific verisimilitude, his stories have other weaknesses. Few of his characters are memorable, and most are simply vehicles for his ideas. He has said frankly that he devises characters to personify his ideas and that all of his characters—youths, astronauts, and grotesques—are, in some way, variations on himself. Other critics have noticed failures in Bradbury’s imaginative powers, particularly in his later stories. The settings and images that seemed fresh when first used in the early stories became stale as they continued to be used in the later ones. Thomas M. Disch complained that Bradbury’s sentimental attachments to his past themes “have made him nearly oblivious to new data from any source.” Despite these criticisms, Bradbury’s stories possess great strengths. If his characters are made negligible by the burden of the ideas that they are forced to carry, these same ideas can open readers to his enchanting sense of wonder. These readers can be inspired by his enthusiasm for new experiences and new worlds. They may also be uplifted by the underlying optimism present even in his most pessimistic work and come to share his belief that human beings will overcome materialism, avarice, and obsession with power to achieve the expansion of what is best in the human spirit that has been his principal theme. Dark Carnival • Many of these characteristics, along with Bradbury’s penchant for the grotesque and macabre, can be seen in his first collection of stories, Dark Carnival. August Derleth, a Wisconsin writer who had established Arkham House to publish stories of fantasy and horror for a limited audience, had read Bradbury’s stories in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, recognized their quality, and suggested that

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Bradbury collect them in a book. Dark Carnival was very successful with its specialized market, and its three thousand copies were quickly sold and soon become collectors’ items. The book’s title was aptly chosen, since the stories often deal with the dark and strange. Several stories make use, although in highly altered forms, of emotions and events in Bradbury’s own life. For example, “The Small Assassin” depicts an infant, terrified at finding himself in a hostile world, taking revenge on his parents. Bradbury uses this metamorphosis of a supposedly innocent newborn into an assassin to explore some of the feelings he had as a very young child. Death is a motif that appears often in these tales, but unlike Poe, whom he admired, Bradbury uses the morbid not for its macabre fascination, as Poe did, but to shift readers onto a different level from which they can see reality in a new and enlightening way. In most of these tales, more happens in the imaginations of Bradbury’s characters than happens in their lives. He has the ability to reach down into the labyrinthine unconscious of his characters and pull out odd desires, strange dreams, and horrendous fears. For example, in “The Next in Line,” a story that grew out of his own experience on a trip to Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City, a young American wife is simultaneously frightened and fascinated by the rows of propped-up mummified bodies in a Guanajuato catacomb. After her traumatic ordeal, she finds herself increasingly immobilized by her alienation from the death-haunted Mexican society and by her fear that her own body is a potential mummy. Another stor y, “Skeleton,” has a similar theme. A man is obsessed by the horrible bones that he carries within him, but when a strange creature crawls down his throat and consumes the bones that were the source of his obsession, he is transformed into a human jellyfish. These and other fantasies and horrors ser ve as exorcisms through which the devils of one’s unconscious are expelled. The best of these stories leave the reader cleansed and transformed, with an expanded consciousness and control of the fears that can make people prisoners of their own hidden emotions. The Martian Chronicles • Some critics see the twenty-six stories collected in The Martian Chronicles as the beginning of the most prolific and productive phase of Bradbury’s career. Like Dark Carnival, this collection resulted from the suggestion of an editor, but in this case Bradbury added passages to link together his stories about Mars. These bridge passages help to interrelate the stories, but they do not make them into a unified novel. This places The Martian Chronicles into a peculiar literary category—less than a novel but more than a collection of short stories. Despite difficulties in categorizing this book, it is commonly recognized as Bradbury’s most outstanding work. When it was first published, it was widely reviewed and read by people who did not ordinarily read science fiction. The poet Christopher Isherwood, for example, praised the book for its poetic language and its penetrating analysis of human beings forced to function on the frontier of an alien world. Within twenty years of its publication, The Martian Chronicles sold more than three million copies and was translated into more than thirty languages. The Martian Chronicles is not totally unrelated to Dark Carnival, since Bradbury’s Mars is a fantasy world, a creation not of a highly trained scientific imagination but of a mythmaker and an explorer of the unconscious. Within the time frame of 1999 to 2026, Bradbury orders his stories to give the reader a sense of the coherent evolution of the settling of Mars by Earthlings. The early stories deal with the difficulties the

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emigrants from Earth have in establishing successful colonies on Mars. The fifteen stories of the middle section explore the rise and fall of these colonies. The stories in the final section are concerned with the possible renovation of the human race on Mars after an annihilative nuclear war on Earth. In several of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury is once again fascinated by the subject of death. Earthlings who make the mistake of trying to duplicate Earth’s culture on Mars meet difficulties and death. This theme is particularly clear in “The Third Expedition,” a story that was originally titled “Mars Is Heaven” and that deeply impressed the critic and writer Jorge Luis Borges. In “The Third Expedition,” Captain John Black and his crew constitute a third attempt by Earthlings to create a successful settlement on Mars, this time in a town that bears a striking resemblance to traditional midwestern American towns of the 1920’s. It turns out that the Martians have deceived the Earthlings by using telepathic powers to manufacture this counterfeit town in their receptive imaginations. Captain Black and his crew have such a deep desire to believe in what they think they see that they delude themselves into seeing what the Martians want them to see. This mass hypnosis produced by the Martians capitalizes on the crew’s self-delusion and on its members’ need to re-create their past. When each Earthling is securely locked within what he believes is his home, he is murdered by the Martians. Trapped by their past and unable to resist, they are destroyed. Illusion and reality, time and identity, change and stability are the themes that intertwine in Bradbury’s treatment of this story (one can understand why Borges liked it so much, since his own work dwells on the theme of the Other as an inextricable element in one’s own identity). The Illustrated Man • Soon after The Martian Chronicles appeared, Bradbury published another book of interlinked stories, The Illustrated Man. Most of its eighteen stories had been published in various magazines between 1947 and 1951, but some had been written specifically for this book. The framing device, which is neither as consistent nor as unifying as the bridge passages in The Martian Chronicles, derives from tattoos that completely cover the skin of a running character. The tattoos, however, do not grow out of the personality of this character, as would be expected for a real tattooed man whose likes and dislikes would be represented in the permanent images he chooses to decorate his body. Instead, each tattoo embodies a Bradburian idea that comes alive in a particular story. The otherwise unrelated stories fall into several categories—tales of robots and space travel as well as stories of Mexicans and Martians. Four of the stories are set on Bradbury’s Mars, and two of these are closely related to The Martian Chronicles. Some of the stories have themes related to those initially developed in Dark Carnival. For example, like “The Small Assassin,” “The Veldt” concerns the revenge of children against their parents, this time in a futuristic setting. The children, who are obsessed with a room-filling television device that can depict scenes with three-dimensional realism, choose to watch an African veldt inhabited by lions gorging themselves on carcasses. The parents, who try to get their children to control their television addiction, end up as food for the lions. In this story, Bradbury makes use of a favorite theme—the blurred distinction between illusion and reality. Other stories in The Illustrated Man are animated by such social concerns as racism and with ethical and religious dilemmas derived from modern science and technology. For example, “The Fire Balloons” focuses on a religious missionary’s discovery that the only surviving Martians have metamorphosed from human forms to floating balls of blue flame

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(reminiscent of the fire balloons in Earth’s Fourth of July celebrations). After undergoing this transformation, these Martian flames are no longer capable of sin. Bradbury implies that a new planet means a new theology, the Fall is reversible, and a state of innocence can be regained. The Golden Apples of the Sun • Bradbury’s fourth collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun, used neither linking passages nor a frame narrative to interrelate the twenty-two stories. Instead, this book initiated the Bradburian potpourri of stories that would characterize most of his later collections: nostalgic, satiric, and humorous stories whose settings could be Mars, Mexico, or the Midwest and whose genre could be fantasy, science fiction, crime, or horror. He would use this variety of approach, setting, and genre to cast a revelatory light on aspects of modern life that conventional fiction was avoiding. Although the critical reception of The Golden Apples of the Sun was largely favorable, some critics found several of the stories disappointing and noted a falling-off from the high level of quality of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Despite the divided opinions, general agreement existed on the success of several of the stories, for example, “Sun and Shadow,” which was set in Mexico and which won both praise and awards. Another story, “The Fog Horn,” became the basis of a film, The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms (1953). It is about a lonely dinosaur which is attracted by the sound of a foghorn, interpreting it as the mating call of a potential companion (he dies of a broken heart when he swims to shore and discovers his error). The story “A Sound of Thunder” develops a favorite Bradburian theme of the profound effect of the past on the future. It depicts what happens when a time traveler steps on a butterfly in the past and inadvertently changes the future (this will remind modern readers of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, in which the beating of a butterfly’s wings in a Brazilian rain forest may cause a tornado in Kansas via a long chain of cause and effect). The October Country • The October Country, a collection that has as its core the stories of Dark Carnival along with four new stories, appeared appropriately in October of 1955. Bradbury described the country of the title as a place “whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts” and whose steps “at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” In the light of the earlier success of Dark Carnival, it is surprising that several critics were not as kind to this collection as they had been to Bradbury’s earlier ones. For example, Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway’s biographer, predicted in his review that the only route that Bradbury’s writings could follow if he continued in the direction that he had chosen was down. Some critics did see him trying, in this and later collections, to develop new subjects, themes, and approaches. For them, his imagination was still nimble, his mind adventurous, and his heart sensitive. They also noticed his increased emphasis on social issues and his desire to treat the joyous side of human nature. For most critics, however, Bradbury’s later collections of stories were repetitive mixes of ideas, themes, and treatments that he had used many times before. A Medicine for Melancholy • The problems sensed by Bradbury’s critics can be seen in the collection of twenty-two stories titled A Medicine for Melancholy. In addition to the expected stories of fantasy and science fiction, A Medicine for Melancholy includes tales from the lives of the Irish, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. The title story explores the awakening womanhood of an eighteenth century London girl who is

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cured of melancholia by the visit of what she interprets as Saint Bosco but who is in reality a dustman. Two of the stories in this collection, “Icarus Montgolfier Wright” and “In a Season of Calm Weather,” led to films, and others, “A Fever Dream” for example, are reminiscent of films. In “A Fever Dream,” aliens invade Earth not externally but by taking over the minds and hearts of their Earth victims (the film analogue is the 1956 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Derivative, too, seems the story “All Summer in a Day,” about a group of children on cloud-enshrouded Venus who get to see the sun only once every seven years (the analogue here is Isaac Asimov’s classic story “Nightfall”). The Machineries of Joy • During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Bradbury’s career entered a new phase characterized by a decreasing output of short stories and novels and an increasing output of plays and poetry. When he did bring out short-story collections, the majority of critics saw little suggesting artistic growth, though a minority actually preferred his new stories, interpreting them as examples of a mature writer whose stories had acquired humanity, depth, and polish. These latter critics are also the ones who were not attracted to his tales about corpses, vampires, and cemeteries and who preferred his new optimism and his emphasis on civil rights, religion, and morality. Many of the stories in The Machineries of Joy provide good examples of these new tendencies. There are still stories characteristic of the old Bradbury—a sciencefiction tale in which the explorers of a new planet find themselves possessed by a resident intelligence, and a horror story in which raising giant mushrooms gets out of hand. Many of the stories, however, contain the epiphanic appearance of human warmth in unexpected situations. For example, in “Almost the End of the World,” when sunspots destroy television reception, a world addicted to this opiate of the mind and heart is forced to rediscover the forgotten joys of interpersonal communication. I Sing the Body Electric! • Bradbury’s next collection, I Sing the Body Electric! also met with a mixed critical response. Academic critics and readers who had formed their taste for Bradbury on his early works found this potpourri of seventeen stories pretentious and a decline from his best science-fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. Some stories are slight—indeed, little more than anecdotes: In “The Women,” for example, a man experiences the sea as a woman and his wife as her rival. On the other hand, some critics found Bradbury’s new stories enthralling and insightful, with the unexpected—a robot Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway’s spirit, and an automated Martian city—confronting the reader at every turn of the page. The stories of I Sing the Body Electric! certainly contain some of Bradbury’s favorite themes—the dialectic between past and future, reality and illusion. For example, the title story concerns a robot grandmother ideally programmed to meet the needs of the children of a recently motherless family. This electrical grandmother embodies the past (she has all the sentiment humans conventionally associate with this figure) and the future (she is a rechargeable AC-DC Mark V model and can never die). Another story that deals with the presentness of the past is “Night Call, Collect.” In this tale, an old man alone on a deserted Mars receives a telephone call from himself when he was much younger (he has forgotten that he devised this plan many years earlier in order to assuage the loneliness of his old age). His young self battles with his old self, and as the old man dies, past, present, and future commingle in an odd but somehow enlightening amalgam.

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Long After Midnight • Long After Midnight contains twenty-two stories, several of which had been written in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s but never previously anthologized. Some critics found the new stories aimless, uninspired, and selfindulgent, but others thought that many of them were poignant, sensitive, and touching. These latter critics thought that several of these stories represented Bradbury’s new grasp of the power of love to overcome evil and to make permanent valued moments from the past. A few of the stories broke new ground in terms of subject matter: “The Better Part of Wisdom” is a compassionate and restrained treatment of homosexuality, and “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!” deals gracefully with a relationship between a priest and a penitent. The Stories of Ray Bradbury • In 1980, Bradbury selected one hundred stories from three decades of his work in The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Many reviewers treated this book’s publication as an opportunity to analyze Bradbury’s lifetime achievement as a short-story writer. Some found much to praise, comparing his body of work to Edgar Allan Poe’s, O. Henry’s, and Guy de Maupassant’s. Thomas M. Disch, however, in an influential essay in The New York Times Book Review, denigrated Bradbury’s stories as “schmaltzy” and “more often meretricious than not.” Unlike those critics who praised Bradbury’s early work and saw a decline in the quality of his later stories, Disch stated that early and late are “meaningless distinctions” in Bradbury’s output. He criticized Bradbury condescendingly as a child manqué, attributing his success to the fact that “like Peter Pan, he won’t grow up.” The Toynbee Convector • To those who thought that Bradbury was using The Stories of Ray Bradbury to bid farewell to the form that had been his home for most of his life as a writer, another collection, The Toynbee Convector, showed that they were mistaken. As with his other late collections, this, too, contained the familiar blend of science fiction and gothic horror as well as sentimental tales of Ireland and Middle America, but it broke little new ground. Quicker than the Eye • Most of the twenty-one stories in Quicker than the Eye are loaded with symbols and metaphors about look-alikes, death, doors that open to the unknown, revelations from the unconscious mind, and psychic connections to the past and future. Magicians always fascinated Bradbury. They pretend to do something, the audience blinks, and “quicker than the eye, silks fall out of a hat.” Bradbury performs magic with words, and stories “fall out” of his imagination. In “Quicker than the Eye,” the narrator and his wife watch a magician saw a woman in half and make her disappear. Men in the audience laugh. Then, Miss Quick, a pickpocket, nimbly removes wallets and other personal items from ten unsuspecting male volunteers. Miss Quick particularly humiliates one volunteer, who looks exactly like the narrator, by stripping him “quicker than the eye.” The angry narrator identifies with his “double’s” vulnerability, but his wife laughs. Several stories have themes of revenge and death. In “The Electrocution,” carnival worker Johnny straps Electra in the Death Chair, blindfolds her, and pulls the switch. Blue flames shoot from her body, and, with a sword, she touches and “connects” with a fascinated youth in the crowd. After Electra and her lover meet secretly, Johnny, in a jealous rage, beats him up. The next time he “electrocutes” Electra, he turns up the voltage and says, “You’re dead!” She replies, “Yes, I am.” Some doors that open to the unknown are better left closed. The title “Dorian in

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Excelsus” is wordplay on the liturgical phrase Gloria in excelsis and refers to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 serial, 1891 expanded). A handsome youth invites the aging, dissipated narrator to become a Friend of Dorian at a spa. Behind golden doors, the narrator discovers how Friends of Dorian shed age and become physically beautiful. To regain youth, he must wrestle in Dorian’s gym with hundreds of lustful men. Dorian is a “gelatinous, undulant jellyfish, the sponge of men’s depravity and guilt, a pustule, bacteria, priapic jelly.” He lives by breathing the sweaty stench of human passion and sin. The horrified narrator refuses Dorian’s offer and scratches him with a fingernail. Dorian screams as noxious gases escape, and he and his Friends die. Psychic connections to the past and future are recurring themes in Quicker than the Eye. The title character in “That Woman on the Lawn” awakens a teenage boy with her crying. Her picture is in his family album. He directs her to an address down the street, and they agree to meet in three years; he is her future baby. Robert J. Paradowski With updates by Martha E. Rhynes Other major works children’s literature: Switch on the Night, 1955; R Is for Rocket, 1962; S Is for Space, 1966; The Halloween Tree, 1972; Fever Dream, 1987; Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable, 1998. plays: The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics, pb. 1963; The World of Ray Bradbury: Three Fables of the Future, pr. 1964; The Day It Rained Forever, pb. 1966; The Pedestrian, pb. 1966; Dandelion Wine, pr. 1967 (adaptation of his novel); Madrigals for the Space Age, pb. 1972; The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and Other Plays, pb. 1972; Pillar of Fire, and Other Plays for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond Tomorrow, pb. 1975; That Ghost, That Bride of Time: Excerpts from a Play-in-Progress, pb. 1976; The Martian Chronicles, pr. 1977; Fahrenheit 451, pr. 1979 (musical); A Device Out of Time, pb. 1986; On Stage: A Chrestomathy of His Plays, pb. 1991. anthologies: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, 1952; The Circus of Dr. Lao, and Other Improbable Stories, 1956. novels: Fahrenheit 451, 1953; Dandelion Wine, 1957; Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962; Death Is a Lonely Business, 1985; A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities, 1990; Green Shadows, White Whale, 1992; From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance, 2001; Let’s All Kill Constance, 2003; Farewell Summer, 2006. nonfiction: Teacher’s Guide to Science Fiction, 1968 (with Lewy Olfson); “Zen and the Art of Writing” and “The Joy of Writing”: Two Essays, 1973; Mars and the Mind of Man, 1973; The Mummies of Guanajuato, 1978; The Art of the Playboy, 1985; Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, 1989; Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures, 1991; Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars, 2005. poetry: Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece: A Celebration, 1971; When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed: Celebrations for Almost Any Day in the Year, 1973; Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns: New Poems, Both Light and Dark, 1977; The Bike Repairman, 1978; Twin Hieroglyphs That Swim the River Dust, 1978; The Aqueduct, 1979; The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope, 1981; The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury, 1982; Forever and the Earth, 1984; Death Has Lost Its Charm for Me, 1987; Dogs Think That Every Day Is Christmas, 1997; With Cat for Comforter, 1997 (with Loise Max); I Live By the Invisible: New and Selected Poems, 2002.

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screenplays: It Came from Outer Space, 1952 (with David Schwartz); Moby Dick, 1956 (with John Huston); Icarus Montgolfier Wright, 1961 (with George C. Johnson); The Picasso Summer, 1969 (with Ed Weinberger). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Ray Bradbury. New York: Chelsea House, 2001. Critical essays cover the major themes in Bradbury’s works, looking at, among other topics, his Martian stories, his participation in the gothic tradition, the role of children in his work, and his use of myth. Badbury, Ray. “The Ray Bradbury Chronicles.” Interview by J. Stephen Bolhafner. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 1, 1996. Interview with Bradbury on the occasion of the publication of his collection of short stories Quicker than the Eye. Bradbury reminisces about the beginnings of his career, talks about getting over his fear of flying, and discusses The Martian Chronicles as fantasy, mythology, and Magical Realism. ____________. “Sci-fi for Your D: Drive.” Newsweek 126 (November 13, 1995): 89. In this interview-story, Bradbury discusses why he is putting his most widely acclaimed short-story collection, The Martian Chronicles, on CD-ROM. Bradbury also discusses the role of imagination in technology, the space program, and his favorite literary figures. Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. First full biography of Bradbury. Greenberg, Martin Henry, and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger, 1980. This anthology of Bradbury criticism is part of the Writers of the Twenty-first Century series. Some of the articles defend Bradbury against the charge that he is not really a science-fiction writer but an opponent of science and technology; other articles defend him against the charge that he is mawkish. Includes an extensive Bradbury bibliography compiled by Marshall B. Tymn and an index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Bradbury: “The April Witch” (vol. 1), “I See You Never” (vol. 4), “There Will Come Soft Rains” (vol. 7), and “The Veldt” (vol. 8). Mogen, David. Ray Bradbury. Boston: Twayne, 1986. This brief introduction to Bradbury’s career centers on analyses of the literary influences that shaped the development of his style and the themes whose successful embodiment in his short stories and novels shaped his reputation. The detailed notes at the end of the book contain many useful references. Bibliography and index. Reid, Robin Ann. Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Part of the publisher’s series of reference books on popular contemporary writers for students, this volume provides detailed plot summaries and analyses of Bradbury’s fictional works, along with character portraits, a biography of Bradbury and an extensive bibliography. Touponce, William F. Naming the Unnameable: Ray Bradbury and the Fantastic After Freud. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1997. Touponce finds the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung helpful in plumbing the effectiveness of much of Bradbury’s work (though in a letter to the author, Bradbury himself denies any direct influence, since he has “read little Freud or Jung”).

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Nevertheless, Touponce believes that Bradbury has written stories of a modern consciousness that often forgets its debt to the unconscious. Weist, Jerry, and Donn Albright. Bradbury, an Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor. New York: William Morrow, 2002. “Visual biography” of Bradbury made up mostly of images from pulps, films, television, and other mass media that both influenced Bradbury and have been influenced by him. An innovative approach to understanding a writer who transcends the printed page. Weller, Sam. The Bradbury Chronicles. New York: William Morrow, 2005. This authorized biography, was written with access to Bradbury and his personal papers and correspondence. Not a critical work, but rather an admiring portrait of the writer.

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Morley Callaghan Born: Toronto, Ontario, Canada; February 22, 1903 Died: Toronto, Ontario, Canada; August 25, 1990 Principal short fiction • A Native Argosy, 1929; Now That April’s Here, and Other Stories, 1936; Morley Callaghan’s Stories, 1959; The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan, 1985. Other literary forms • Although Morley Callaghan was a masterful short-story writer, he also won recognition for his many novels, the most highly regarded being Such Is My Beloved (1934), More Joy in Heaven (1937), The Loved and the Lost (1951), and Close to the Sun Again (1977). He is also the author of a novella (No Man’s Meat), a children’s book (Luke Baldwin’s Vow, 1948), and three plays (To Tell the Truth, pr. 1949; Turn Home Again, pr. 1940; and Season of the Witch, pb. 1976). He recorded some of his stories for children, and others, such as Luke Baldwin’s Vow, have been filmed. Starting his career as a journalist, Callaghan contributed articles and essays to newspapers and journals throughout his life. His nonfiction works include the text for a book of John de Visser’s photographs, entitled Winter (1974), and That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others (1963), an entertaining account of the heady days in Paris in 1929, when he socialized with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and other writers. Throughout his life, Callaghan continued to make significant contributions to Canadian cultural life as a book reviewer and essayist as well as a novelist. Achievements • During the 1920’s, Morley Callaghan’s stories impressed Ernest Hemingway, who introduced them to Ezra Pound. Pound subsequently printed them in his magazine, The Exile. The stories also impressed F. Scott Fitzgerald, who presented them to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s. Perkins later published Callaghan’s stories as well as some of his novels. Although considered a highly promising writer in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Callaghan neither developed a large audience nor achieved the type of reputation that his works warrant. Edmund Wilson commented that Callaghan was “perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the Englishspeaking world.” Even so, Callaghan was the recipient of several awards: Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award (1951), the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Canada (1958), the Lorne Pierce Medal (1960), the Canada Council Molson Prize (1970), the Royal Bank of Canada Award (1970), and the Companion of the Order of Canada (1982). He was also nominated for a Nobel Prize. His fiction is praised for its direct, unornamented prose, though later criticism has suggested that hiswriting is wooden, with technical weaknesses. His fiction is also valued for its sympathetic portrayal of ordinary people and for its honest treatment of the problems of contemporary life. Callaghan’s lifelong exploration of the conflict between spirituality and human weakness and alienation has illuminated the best of his writing. Callaghan held a doctorate in literature from the University of Western Ontario (1965), a law degree from the University of Toronto (1966), and a doctorate in litera-

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Biography • Born in Toronto, Canada, on September 22, 1903, Edward TO VIEW IMAGE, Morley Callaghan was reared by Roman Catholic parents of Irish descent. PLEASE SEE He grew up interested in sports, espePRINT EDITION cially boxing and baseball, but at a OF THIS BOOK. young age he also displayed a talent for writing, selling at the age of seventeen his first article, a description of Yonge and Alberta streets in Toronto, to the Star Weekly for twelve dollars. In 1921, he entered St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, and during the summers and part-time during the school year, he was a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star, the same newspaper that employed Ernest Hemingway, who encouraged John Martin him in his attempts at fiction writing. Callaghan received his bachelor’s degree in 1925, and enrolled in Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He continued to write short stories, mailing them to Hemingway, who was then in Paris. Some of these stories, through Hemingway’s assistance, appeared in various magazines, such as This Quarter, Transition, and The Exile. In 1928, the year that Callaghan finished law school and was admitted to the Ontario bar, Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s, published several of his stories in Scribner’s Magazine and agreed to print his first novel, Strange Fugitive (1928), as well as a collection of short stories, A Native Argosy. Forsaking law, Callaghan decided to be a writer. After marrying Loretto Florence Dee in 1929, he traveled to Paris, where he met with Hemingway and became acquainted with F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. He later recorded this volatile period in That Summer in Paris. Leaving Paris in the autumn, Callaghan returned to Toronto, which became his home except for occasional stays in Pennsylvania and New York, where he socialized with Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell, Sinclair Lewis, and other writers. During this early period, from 1928 to 1937, he published a novel or a collection of short stories almost yearly. From 1937 to 1948, he neglected his fiction and devoted his time to radio programming and writing essays. It has been suggested that the events of that time—the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the purges of Joseph Stalin, and World War II—contributed to his lack of interest in fiction. In 1948, he resumed writing novels and short stories, which appeared regularly in leading magazines. In his later years he devoted his energy to novels and nonfiction works. He also gained public recognition and respect in Canada as a radio broadcast personality and commentator on Canadian cultural life. Callaghan died on August 25, 1990, in Toronto.

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Analysis • Over his long career, Morley Callaghan published more than one hundred short stories, in such magazines as The New Yorker, Scribner’s Magazine, and numerous other magazines. Many of these have been collected in his four volumes of short stories. Although there are variations and exceptions, Callaghan’s stories generally have recognizable characteristics. Foremost of these is the style: Most noticeably in the early works, Callaghan employs short declarative sentences, colloquial dialogue, and plain, unadorned language. As he remarked in That Summer in Paris, he attempts to “tell the truth cleanly.” This sparse, economical, straightforward style has been compared with Hemingway’s. Perhaps Callaghan was influenced by Hemingway (he admired and respected the older author), but it is likely that Callaghan’s work on a newspaper shaped his writing, just as Hemingway’s style was honed by his years of reporting. Like a journalist, Callaghan presented the events in his stories objectively, neither condemning nor praising his character. By precisely recording his observations, Callaghan allows his readers to form their own judgments. He strives “to strip the language, and make the style, the method, all the psychological ramifications, the ambience of the relationships, all the one thing, so the reader couldn’t make separations. Cézanne’s apples. The appleness of the apples. Yet just apples.” In other words, he endeavored to capture the essence of the moment. Although Callaghan’s stories are often set in Canada, he should not be classified as a regional writer. His appeal ranges beyond the borders of his country. The themes he treats are universal and are not limited to Canadian issues; in fact, he has been criticized for not addressing Canadian problems more forcefully. Many of his stories examine human relationships, and they therefore revolve around psychological issues rather than physical actions. They depict the ordinary person and his or her desire for happiness. This desire is often frustrated by environmental forces such as unemployment and injustice and by internal drives such as fear and sex. In the early stories, the characters, inarticulate and of less than normal intelligence, are on the edge of society: the poor, the disabled, the criminal, and the insane. The characters in Callaghan’s later stories are more likely to be educated, but they still struggle in their quest for a better life. All Callaghan’s characters reflect his concerns as a Roman Catholic, and a certain pessimism underlies their portrayals. Rarely in Callaghan’s characters are innate spirituality and nobility of character allowed to triumph over the more ignoble of human instincts and behavior. In 1928, Scribner’s published Callaghan’s first novel, Strange Fugitive, and followed this a year later with A Native Argosy, a collection of short fiction containing fourteen stories and two novellas. These stories are some of the most naturalistic produced by Callaghan, and the characters, themes, and style resemble that found in work by other naturalistic writers, such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris. Influenced by Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, these authors applied the principles of scientific determinism to their fiction. Humans are viewed as animals trapped in a constant struggle to survive. They are limited by forces that are beyond their control and even beyond their understanding. Callaghan, like the other naturalistic writers, presents the material in an objective and documentary manner, eschewing moral judgments and optimistic endings. “A Country Passion” • “A Country Passion,” originally printed in Transition, portrays an inarticulate character who is ultimately destroyed by a combination of his in-

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stincts and society’s strictures. Jim Cline loves Ettie Corley, a mentally disabled girl twenty-nine years his junior, who will soon be sent to an asylum. He wants to marry the sixteen-year-old girl, but the minister forbids it because Jim has been in jail, as the reader learns later, for stealing chickens and for fighting. Although unable to marry, Jim nevertheless “had come to an agreement with her any way,” and now he faces a charge of seduction which carries a life sentence. Jim’s interest in Ettie is more than sexual. Out of concern for her, Jim has bought coal and food for Ettie’s family in the winter and clothes for her. She needs him; as the minister comments, “she’s had the worst home in town and something should have been done about it long ago.” Nevertheless, the culture will not accept their union. After being arrested, Jim escapes from jail, harboring the vague notion that “if he could get out he could explain his idea to everybody and get people behind him,” his problem would be solved. Unable to concentrate, he cannot formulate his idea. He is caught and will presumably spend the rest of his life in jail, while Ettie will spend hers in an institution. Though Jim and Ettie struggle to attain happiness, they cannot overcome the forces that oppose them. The depressing outcome is relieved partly by their achieving, even for a brief moment, a sharing of their affection. “Amuck in the Bush” • The naturalistic tone is found throughout the collection. In “Amuck in the Bush,” Gus Rapp is portrayed as an animal, controlled by his instincts. Fired from his lumberyard job, he seeks revenge by attacking the boss’s wife and fiveyear-old daughter. The attack is savage, and only because of his own awkwardness does he not kill them. After the attack, he appears as a mute and uncomprehending animal as he crashes through the forest. Eventually, he is drawn back to the town, where he is captured and roped to a lamppost. “A Wedding Dress” and “An Escapade” • Many of the characters in A Native Argosy are dissatisfied and troubled by vague, unarticulated desires. In “A Wedding Dress,” Lena Schwartz has waited fifteen years to marry. Finally, when her fiancé has a good job, the wedding is scheduled. She longs for a dress that will show her to her advantage and make her desirable to her future husband. Unaware of her own actions, she steals an expensive dress from a store. Regretting the deed, she nevertheless tries on the fancy but ill-fitting dress. Still wearing it, she is arrested. Her fiancé bails her out and takes her into his custody. In “An Escapade,” a middle-aged woman is lonely and repressed. Because of the titillating gossip of her bridge-club friends, Rose Carew misses the service at her Catholic church in order to attend another service being held in a theater. During the service, she is sexually attracted to the man next to her. She does not, however, recognize the emotion; she only knows that she is uncomfortable. She hurriedly leaves, goes to her Catholic church, and prays until she recovers her equanimity. Both of these characters yearn for a change in their lives, but they cannot articulate their desires and are unable to initiate actions that might bring about the desired results. “A Predicament” • Throughout Callaghan’s work appear stories that contain characters, settings, and conflicts that are familiar to Catholics. In “A Predicament,” a young priest hearing confessions must deal with a drunk who has wandered into the confessional booth. The man, thinking that he is on a streetcar, waits for his stop. The priest, ignoring him, hears confessions from the other booth, but it soon becomes apparent that the man will not go away and will probably cause a disturbance. The

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priest, young and somewhat insecure, is afraid of any embarrassment. To resolve the issue, the priest slips into the role of a streetcar conductor and announces to the man, “Step lively there; this is King and Young. Do you want to go past your stop?” The drunk quietly leaves. The priest is at first satisfied with his solution, but then his dishonesty bothers him. Earlier, he had chided a woman for telling lies, instructing her that lies lead to worse sins. Unsure of his position, he thinks that he should seek the bishop’s advice but then decides to wait until he can consider his actions more closely. Thus, he postpones what might be a soul-searching encounter. Callaghan, gently and with humor, has shown that priests are no strangers to human weaknesses. In His Own Country • In A Native Argosy, Callaghan included two novellas. One of these, In His Own Country, presents a man who attempts to find a synthesis between religion and science. Although Bill Lawson dreams of becoming a latter-day St. Thomas Aquinas, he is unsuited for the project because of his overwhelming ignorance. Indeed, the task throws him into a catatonic state. Flora, his wife, is concerned first with the income that the project might generate, then with his neglect of her, and finally with his well-being: He does not eat, shave, or take care of his clothes. She longs for the days when they would enjoy the evenings together. Eventually, he quits his job because the small hypocrisies associated with newspaper work taint him, or so he reasons, and render him unsuitable for his grand task. He grows increasingly bewildered as he tries to summarize what is known about geology, chemistry, and the other sciences. At one point, he argues that he can reduce all life to a simple chemical formula. He even converts to Catholicism in order to understand religion better. Finally, returning from a long walk, he discovers his wife with an old beau and dashes out of the house. Flora searches for him, but failing to find him, she retreats to her father’s farm, a three-hour walk from town. Later, Bill is found incoherent on a bench. At first not expected to live, he is force-fed by his mother, and eventually Flora returns to care for him. The town treats Bill as a marvel and admires him for the philosophical thoughts they assume that he is thinking. The ending is ambiguous. Is Bill a prophet, a saint, or a madman? Flora as the point-of-view character is well chosen. Limited in intelligence, she makes no attempt to comprehend Bill’s thoughts, which ultimately drive him to insanity. The sparse, economical prose style matches the limited perceptions of Flora. Bill and Flora belong to the roster of marginal characters in A Native Argosy who lack control over their own lives. Now That April’s Here, and Other Stories • Callaghan’s second collection of short stories, Now That April’s Here, and Other Stories, contains thirty-five stories that were published in magazines from 1929 to 1935. This later work shows the influence of Christian humanism, a belief in a Christian interpretation of the world coupled with a focus on humans’ happiness and an emphasis on the realization of their potential. In 1933, Callaghan spent many hours with Jacques Maritain, the French theologican and philosopher, who was then a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. Maritain is credited with developing Christian existential thought as a response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s essentially atheistic existentialism. His influence led Callaghan to moderate the strongly pessimistic tone of his fiction. Less naturalistic in tone than the earlier tales, these stories present characters who, while they still cannot greatly alter the courses of their lives, can occasionally achieve a measure of peace, contentment, and dignity. Unlike the inarticulate char-

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acters of the previous volume, these later characters are more intelligent. Matching this change in the characterization, Callaghan’s style is more complex; the sentences are longer and of greater variety as opposed to the pared-down style of the earlier volume. Yet while the style is more mature and the stories more optimistic, there is less variety than in the earlier volume. The stories presented in this collection for the most part follow a set pattern. The equilibrium of the opening is interrupted by a crisis; after the crisis is met, an equilibrium is again established, but some insight is achieved, all within the span of a few hours. “The Blue Kimono” • Many of the selections in Now That April’s Here, and Other Stories depict the struggles of young lovers to overcome the effects of the Depression. In “The Blue Kimono,” George and his wife, Marthe, had come to the city for better opportunities, but since they have arrived in the city, their situation has worsened. Frustrated, George blames his wife for his unemployment. One night, he awakens and discovers Marthe tending their son. The woman is frightened, but George is too frustrated to notice his wife’s concern; all he sees is her tattered blue kimono. He had bought it when they were first married, and now it seems to mock his attempts to secure a job. Gradually, his wife communicates her fears to him; the boy’s symptoms resemble those of infantile paralysis. Immediately, the husband forgets his problems and tries to entertain the little boy. When the boy finally responds to the aspirin, the couple, who have weathered the crisis, are drawn closer. The wife thinks that she can mend the kimono so that it would not appear so ragged. Through their love for each other and for their son, the two have, for a moment, eliminated the tension caused by their poverty. In “The Blue Kimono” as in “A Wedding Dress,” Callaghan uses clothing symbolically. These items suggest a happier moment and reveal the discrepancy between the characters’ dreams and the reality that makes those dreams unattainable. “A Sick Call” • In this story Callaghan utilizes a situation that is familiar to Catholics. In “A Sick Call,” Father Macdowell, an elderly priest, who is often chosen to hear confessions because nothing shocks him, is called to the bedside of a sick woman. Even though she has left the Church, she, afraid of dying, wants to be absolved of her sins. Her husband, John, however, who rejects all religion, opposes the priest’s visit. John is afraid that she will draw close to the Church and thereby reject him, thus destroying the love they share. Yet the priest’s advanced age, his gentleness, and his selective deafness secure for him a place at the side of the woman’s bed. In order to hear her confession, Father Macdowell requests that John leave, but John refuses. Father Macdowell seemingly accepts defeat and in preparation for departing asks the husband for a glass of water. As John complies, the priest quickly hears the woman’s confession and grants absolution. John, returning as the priest is making the sign of the Cross, knows that he has been tricked. The priest leaves with a sense of satisfaction, yet gradually he grows concerned that he came between the wife and her husband. The priest recognizes John’s love for her and remarks on the beauty of such strong love, but then he dismisses it, calling it pagan. He begins to doubt his convictions, however, and allows that perhaps the pagan love is valid. In “A Sick Call,” Callaghan has again presented a priest with human failings; Father Macdowell relies on subterfuge in order to hear a confession. Yet the story is more than a character study of a priest; it is a discussion of what is sacred, and the answer is left ambiguous. Callaghan implies that sacredness is not the sole property of religion.

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Morley Callaghan’s Stories • After a ten-year hiatus in writing fiction, Callaghan resumed writing novels and short stories in the late 1940’s. In 1959, he published his third collection of short stories, Morley Callaghan’s Stories. For this, he selected his favorite stories from 1926 to 1953. Twelve had appeared earlier in A Native Argosy, thirty-two in Now That April’s Here, and Other Stories; the remaining thirteen, previously uncollected, had been written between 1936 and 1953. Callaghan in the prologue writes of the stories, “These are the ones that touch times and moods and people I like to remember now. Looking back on them I can see that I have been concerned with the problems of many kinds of people but I have neglected the very, very rich.” These stories, as well as those in the other collections, show a sympathy for beleaguered ordinary human beings and an understanding of their problems. “The Cheat’s Remorse” • In “The Cheat’s Remorse” (reprinted in the 1938 edition of Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories), Callaghan focuses on people who have been adversely affected by the Depression. Phil, out of work, is drinking coffee in a diner. Although he has a possibility of a job, he needs a clean shirt before he can go for the interview. Yet his shirts are at the laundry, and he lacks the money to get them. At the diner, he notices a wealthy drunk drop a dollar when he pays the bill for a sandwich he did not even eat. Phil waits until the man leaves. As he stoops to pick up the money, however, a young woman places her foot on it. She, too, has been waiting for the drunk to leave, and she, too, needs the money. Phil offers to flip a coin to resolve the issue. The woman loses. Having used his trick coin, Phil cheated her. Yet immediately he regrets it, tries to give her the dollar, and even confesses his guilt, but she refuses. She argues perceptively that a single dollar could not begin to alleviate her problems but it might make some difference to him. He feels so bad that at the conclusion he is eyeing a tavern, planning to assuage his guilt with alcohol. The characters are affected by economic forces over which they have little or no control. Thus the story has some affinities with the earlier naturalistic tales from A Native Argosy. In “The Cheat’s Remorse,” both the best and the worst are depicted. Phil, selfishly, willingly cheats the woman, but the woman, ignoring her need, offers to help Phil. So even though she is affected by the same forces, she maintains her humanity and dignity. “A Cap for Steve” • Callaghan effectively wrote stories from the point of view of characters who are limited in intelligence, and he was just as effectively able to employ a child’s point of view. In “A Cap for Steve,” Steve, a painfully shy young boy, is obsessed with baseball. His father belittles the sport, however, not realizing that baseball is Steve’s only pleasure. Grudgingly, his father takes him to a baseball game during which Steve acquires the cap of one of the star players. The cap changes Steve into a leader. Yet he loses the cap and becomes despondent. Later he discovers another boy, a lawyer’s son, wearing his cap, and he and his father call on the boy’s father. The difference between the two families is apparent immediately. Steve’s family is barely surviving, while the other boy’s is wealthy. Since the lawyer’s son bought the cap from another, the lawyer offers to sell it to Steve for the price he paid, five dollars. Even though five dollars represents a sacrifice for Steve and his father, they agree. Then the lawyer offers to buy back the cap because his son values it. At twenty dollars, Steve’s father agrees. Stunned, Steve will not walk with his father on the return home. Steve’s father realizes that he does not know his son and resolves to be more of a father. The boy accepts his father’s apology and is willing to forget the cap as “the price

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[he] was willing to pay to be able to count on his father’s admiration and approval.” Although the story is set in the Depression and illustrates class differences, the focus is on the father-and-son relationship. The father does not accept his son until he comes close to losing his love, but the boy is willing to forgive his father’s indifference for the chance at a closer relationship. The emphasis is on the love that can survive under adverse conditions. The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan • In 1985, Callaghan published a fourth volume of collected stories, The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan. The twenty-six stories in this volume were originally published in leading magazines in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s. During the preparation of Morley Callaghan’s Stories, they had been overlooked, and in 1984, they were “found.” The stories are similar in tone, style, and theme to the work that appears in the other collections. In Callaghan, the inarticulate and the forgotten—the rural and urban poor, the insane, and the mentally weak—have found a voice. Throughout his career, in a straightforward narrative style, he told their story. Although Callaghan might not have received the recognition he deserves, he nevertheless should be studied. As one reviewer has written, Callaghan “sits across the path of Canadian literature like an old Labrador, you’re not sure how to approach him, but you can’t ignore him.” Barbara Wiedemann With updates by Jill Rollins Other major works children’s literature: Luke Baldwin’s Vow, 1948. plays: Turn Home Again, pr. 1940 (also known as Going Home); To Tell the Truth, pr. 1949; Season of the Witch, pb. 1976. novels: Strange Fugitive, 1928; It’s Never Over, 1930; No Man’s Meat, 1931 (novella); A Broken Journey, 1932; Such Is My Beloved, 1934; They Shall Inherit the Earth, 1935; More Joy in Heaven, 1937; The Varsity Story, 1948; The Loved and the Lost, 1951; The Many Coloured Coat, 1960; A Passion in Rome, 1961; A Fine and Private Place, 1975; Season of the Witch, 1976; Close to the Sun Again, 1977; “No Man’s Meat,” and “The Enchanted Pimp,” 1978; A Time for Judas, 1983; Our Lady of the Snows, 1985; A Wild Old Man on the Road, 1988. nonfiction: That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others, 1963; Winter, 1974. Bibliography Boire, Gary A. Morley Callaghan: Literary Anarchist. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. Very good biography of Callaghan. Includes bibliographical references. Cude, Wilfred. “Morley Callaghan’s Practical Monsters: Downhill from Where and When?” In Modern Times. Vol. 3 in The Canadian Novel, edited by John Moss. Toronto: NC Press, 1982. This florid essay treats the darker side of Callaghan’s vision through a discussion of characterization in several of his short stories and in some of his novels. Gadpaille, Michelle. The Canadian Short Story. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. Includes a brief discussion of Callaghan’s short-story writing career, commenting on his working-class characters, the simplicity of his style, and his contribution to the development of the modern Canadian short story.

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Kendle, Judith. “Morley Callaghan: An Annotated Bibliography.” In The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David. Vol. 5. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984. Contains the most exhaustive listing of primary sources and secondary sources for Callaghan’s work up to 1984 that a student is likely to need. The categories cover the spectrum from books and articles to interviews to audiovisual material. A helpful “Index to Critics Listed in the Bibliography” is also included. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Callaghan: “All the Years of Her Life” and “A Cap for Steve” (vol. 1), “The Faithful Wife” (vol. 3), “Now That April’s Here” (vol. 5), and “A Sick Call” (vol. 7). Morley, Patricia. Morley Callaghan. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. This study considers Callaghan’s fiction to the mid-1970’s, including thorough, useful analysis of his short fiction. Stuewe, Paul. “The Case of Morley Callaghan.” In Clearing the Ground: English-Canadian Fiction After “Survival.” Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1984. In this chapter, Stuewe takes Callaghan to task for sloppy writing and his critics to task for concentrating on Callaghan’s thematic concerns to the exclusion of his technical flaws. Stuewe’s own writing and tone are lively and incisive. Tracey, Grant. “One Great Way to Read Short Stories: Studying Character Deflection in Morley Callaghan’s ‘All the Years of Her Life.’” In Short Stories in the Classroom, edited by Carole L. Hamilton and Peter Kratzke. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. Analysis of the story through the perspective of how events affect and change a single character. Woodcock, George. “Possessing the Land: Notes on Canadian Fiction.” In The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, edited by David Staines. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. Callaghan’s fiction is discussed in the context of Canadian fiction and its development and direction since the nineteenth century. The student is provided with a valuable overview that underscores the significance of Callaghan’s contribution to Canadian literature.

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Truman Capote Born: New Orleans, Louisiana; September 30, 1924 Died: Los Angeles, California; August 25, 1984 Principal short fiction • A Tree of Night, and Other Stories, 1949; Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories, 1958; One Christmas, 1983; I Remember Grandpa: A Story, 1986; The Complete Collected Stories of Truman Capote, 2004. Other literary forms • In addition to stories and short novels, Truman Capote wrote travel sketches and various kinds of nonfiction, much of which has been collected, along with some of Capote’s short stories and novellas, in A Capote Reader (1987). The volume Local Color (1950), on the other hand, is a collection solely of travel essays. Capote also did some screenwriting, including critically well-received scripts for Beat the Devil (1954) and The Innocents (1961), an adaptation of the Henry James story The Turn of the Screw (1898), and an adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which became a well-known film in 1961. In Cold Blood (1966), probably his most famous work, is a “nonfiction novel,” a documented re-creation of the murder of a family in Kansas. The novel was both a critical and a popular success, and the television film version won an Emmy Award in 1967. Capote’s last work, another nonfiction novel, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (1986), set off a social scandal with its gossipy revelations. Capote finished his writing career in ignominy. In 2004, the handwritten manuscript of a novel that Capote had composed when he was only nineteen turned up in a Sotheby’s auction. The following year, that book was published as Summer Crossing. The brief story is about a young woman left on her own in a Manhattan penthouse, as the rest of her family are traveling abroad. Though immature and often confused, the book shows many signs of Capote’s later strengths as a writer. Achievements • The best of Truman Capote’s writing is regarded as elegant prose, noted for its lucidity, although at its worst it became an example of vain excess and gossip. Yet Capote was one of the United States’ leading post-World War II writers. He pioneered the genre of the “nonfiction novel” with In Cold Blood and gained renown for his short stories and novellas. His story “Miriam” won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1943, and “Shut a Final Door” won the same prize in 1946. Although much of his work has been both critically and popularly praised, Capote was rarely formally recognized during his writing career. Biography • Because his parents were divorced when he was four years old, Truman Capote was reared by aunts and cousins in a small town in Alabama. At the age of seventeen, he moved to New York City and worked his way up from mailroom clerk to feature writer for The New Yorker. Capote’s early promise seemed fulfilled with the success of In Cold Blood, and he spent many years traveling around the world as a celebrated author. He became the pet celebrity for a number of high-society women, most notably Barbara “Babe” Paley and Lee Bouvier Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy

Capote, Truman Onassis. His charmed life seemed to fade, however, under the pressure of trying to produce another successful novel. During the 1970’s and early 1980’s, Capote’s health was ruined by alcoholism and drug dependency. The downslide began in 1975, however, when Esquire magazine published Capote’s story “La Côte Basque: 1965.” The story was a thinly veiled exposé of the scandals of the rich and famous, and its targets did not appreciate the publicity. Capote’s friends immediately ostracized him, and he became persona non grata in many of the places he had previously frequented. Depressed by the reaction that his story generated, Capote became reclusive. His work deteriorated even more, and he did not produce anything to rival his earlier writing before he died at the home of his longtime friend Joanne Carson in 1984.

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Analysis • Truman Capote’s stories are best known for their mysterious, dreamlike occurrences. As his protagonists try to go about their ordinary business, they meet with unexpected obstacles—usually in the form of haunting, enigmatic strangers. Corresponding to some childhood memory or to someone the protagonist once knew, these people take on huge proportions and cause major changes in the character’s life. The central figures of these stories are usually people who have left their hometowns, who travel, or who live alone, for they seem most vulnerable to chance encounters. Their isolation gives them the time, and their loneliness gives them the motivation to see these experiences through to their conclusions—and often with great risk. Capote was a careful craftsman. His words are meticulously chosen for their evocative power, and, at their best, they create highly charged images and symbols. His descriptions of the seasons or weather further heighten the effects he wants to create. Snow, rain, dusk, and sunlight serve to separate the particular setting from a larger landscape, thus reinforcing the self-reflexive nature of his stories. Attics, kitchens, one-room walk-ups, and isolated apartments are typical settings that also provide sequestered settings. The atmosphere, location, characters, and events present a touching but often chilling and ominous beauty. The combination of reality and dream also produces an eerie beauty. “A Tree of Night” • In “A Tree of Night,” one of his finest stories, Kay is a young, attractive student returning to college after the funeral of an uncle. It is late on a winter night, bare and icy, when she boards the train from the deserted platform. Taking the only available seat, she sits opposite an odd-looking couple. The woman is in her

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fifties, with a huge head and a dwarfish body, while the man is mute, with marblelike eyes and an expressionless face. Although Kay is initially polite, she hopes to be left alone, but the woman wants company and conversation. Kay tries to remain distant, but the woman and man are persistent and aggressive. Without any warning, the man reaches toward Kay and strokes her cheek. Her reaction is immediate but confused: She is repelled by the boldness of the gesture while, at the same time, she is touched by the delicacy. From this point on, Kay seems to view the man and woman as harbingers of danger. Capote’s style remains realistic and his tone objective, but the couple behave as though they are part of Kay’s nightmare. The woman talks endlessly, always wanting a response from her listener. She forces Kay to drink liquor with her and even grabs her wrist. As in a nightmare, Kay wants to scream and awaken the other passengers, but no sounds come out. Trying to escape from the woman’s irritating voice, Kay has a reverie as she stares into the void face of the man, and suddenly his face and her uncle’s dead face blend. She sees, or imagines that she sees, a shared secret and a stillness. This association of the stranger with someone from her past is deadly, preparing the reader for the end of the story. By degrees, the man assumes control over Kay. He takes from his pocket a peach seed and fondles it gently. The woman insists that he only wants Kay to purchase it as a good-luck charm, but Kay is frightened, interpreting his action as some kind of warning. Trying to avoid the man, she leaves her seat for the observation platform and fresh air, but soon she senses someone beside her and knows that it must be the man. Now, without the distracting annoyance of the woman, Kay understands why she finds him so threatening. Unable to speak or to hear, he is like her uncle, dead, and the dead can haunt. She further recognizes him as a figure from her childhood dreams, the boogeyman, the “wizard-man,” the mysterious personage that could bring alive “terrors that once, long ago, had hovered above her like haunted limbs on a tree of night.” Kay’s submission is unquestionable, but precisely what she submits to is left ambiguous. Together, she and the man return to their seats, and she gives him money for the peach seed. Then the woman takes possession of Kay’s whole purse and, although Kay wants to shout, she does not. Finally the woman takes Kay’s raincoat and pulls it “like a shroud” over her head. No longer struggling, Kay sinks into a strange passivity. “A Tree of Night” raises many questions but provides few answers. The characters are realistically presented, but eccentric, to say the least. Kay is not wholly convincing, yet is still three-dimensional. It is rather the events themselves that appear unlikely and nightmarish, but since Capote delights in paradox, his story cannot be classified as either pure dream or simple reality. Why does Kay not protest? To what extent do she and the mute actually communicate? Is the submission of the young girl carefully planned by the couple? Are the two travelers real passengers who want to do her harm, or can they be projections from Kay’s psyche? Or are they merely two unique strangers to whom Kay attributes much more power than they really have? These ambiguities are the source of both the story’s weaknesses and its strengths; they enrich the encounter and abstract it, but they also leave the reader feeling baffled. Nevertheless, Capote seems to imply that human beings are extremely vulnerable to destructive instincts. Perhaps beginning with a memory or fear from deep within the psyche, one projects it and expands it until it acquires a frightening degree of reality. In fact, it may become a deadly kind of reality. Kay essentially wills herself first into isolation from other passengers and finally into submission. She returns

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from the observation platform accompanied by the stranger. She chooses neither to change her seat nor to scream. Eventually, she chooses not to struggle. Human beings are delicate creatures, and the power of the “wizard-man” is enough to cause Kay to sink into nightmarish and unnecessary helplessness. “Master Misery” • The mysterious realm of dream can invade the workaday world and then consume it. This is precisely what happens in “Master Misery” when Sylvia leaves her hometown of Easton to stay with married friends who live in New York City. Soon she becomes frustrated with her daily routine and her “namby-pamby, bootsytotsy” friends. Hoping to earn money to find her own apartment, Sylvia overhears a conversation in the Automat. As unlikely as it sounds, a certain Mr. Revercomb purchases dreams. Intrigued, Sylvia visits his Fifth Avenue brownstone and discovers that Mr. Revercomb does indeed purchase dreams for cash. As she continues to visit his office, events take an unfortunate turn. The more Sylvia sees him, the more he seems eccentric, even unnatural. One time as she whispers her dream, Mr. Revercomb bends forward to brush her ear with his lips, apparently in a sexual approach. Sylvia becomes so obsessed with selling her dreams that everything else in her life loses significance. She cuts off communication with her married friends, quits her office job, and rents a dingy studio apartment. Her only friend is Oreilly, a former clown whom she meets in Mr. Revercomb’s waiting room. They have much in common, for Oreilly used to sell his dreams also, but now Mr. Revercomb has no use for them. Although he spends most of his time drunk, Oreilly has the foresight to warn his new companion against the man he calls the Master of Misery, who is so adept at convincing people that parting with a dream is worth five dollars. He explains to Sylvia that she must not lose her independence or her private world of memory and dream, and he compares Mr. Revercomb with the demon of childhood nightmare, the ominous figure who haunted the trees, chimneys, attics, and graveyards of makebelieve. Like the mute in “A Tree of Night,” Revercomb is “a thief and a threat,” for after he appropriates one’s dreams, it is a short passage to one’s subconscious and one’s soul. Sylvia’s life contracts to unhappy proportions. She moves from Revercomb’s waiting room back to Oreilly, her waiting companion, who commiserates with her shrinking self before consuming the liquor she buys with her dream-money. He does, however, advise her to ask Revercomb for her dreams back, provided that she gradually returns the money over a period of time. Sylvia agrees, for her life has become miserable and isolated, but this is a Faustian story, and what was spent cannot be retrieved. Revercomb informs Sylvia that under no circumstances would he return what she has sold and, besides, he has already used them up. Walking home in the falling snow, Sylvia acknowledges that she is no longer her own master and has no individuality; soon she will not have even Oreilly, who will go his own way. Thinking she used Revercomb, it turns out that he has used her, and now they are inseparable—until he discards her as he did Oreilly. The story concludes as Sylvia overhears footsteps following behind. There are two boys, who have followed her from the park and continue to do so. Sylvia is frightened, but like Kay in “A Tree of Night,” she becomes passive and submissive, for there is “nothing left to steal.” As in much of Capote’s short fiction, the individual tacitly gives a stranger enormous power. Once Sylvia abdicates full responsibility for herself and enters Revercomb’s world, she becomes vulnerable and he becomes omniscient. Gradually

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she is emptied of friends, an orderly routine, ambition, desire, and, finally, of selfpossession. The reader can never be sure who Revercomb is or what he does with dreams, but Sylvia, not the Master of Misery, is the focus of interest. She allows him to create her misery, leaving her with no one, not even her former self. Capote’s early work especially makes use of the gothic tradition, but because the details remain realistic and controlled, the mysterious elements are subtle and therefore even more insidious. The “wizard-man” is Capote’s archetype—the mute in “A Tree of Night,” Mr. Revercomb in “Master Misery,” the young girl in “Miriam,” Mr. Destronelli in “The Headless Hawk.” This figure transforms the actual world of the protagonist, usually in undesirable and irreversible ways. Whether the encounter with this stranger is a final retreat into narcissism or a submission to a purely external presence may not be clarified, but the fragility of the human psyche is all too clear. Miriam Fuchs With updates by Jo-Ellen Lipman Boon and the Editors Other major works plays: The Grass Harp: A Play, pr., pb. 1952 (adaptation of his novel); House of Flowers, pr. 1954 (with Harold Arlen). novels: Summer Crossing, wr. 1943, pb. 2005; Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948; The Grass Harp, 1951; A Christmas Memory, 1956 (serial); In Cold Blood, 1966; The Thanksgiving Visitor, 1967 (serial); Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, 1986. miscellaneous: Selected Writings, 1963; Trilogy: An Experiment in Multimedia, 1969 (with Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry); Music for Chameleons, 1980; A Capote Reader, 1987; Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, 2004 (edited by Gerald Clarke). nonfiction: Local Color, 1950; The Muses Are Heard, 1956; Observations, 1959 (with Richard Avedon); The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places, 1973. screenplays: Beat the Devil, 1954 (with John Huston); The Innocents, 1961. Bibliography Brinnin, John Malcolm. Truman Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy. Rev. ed. New York: Delacorte Press, 1986. Chronicles Capote’s life from before the success of In Cold Blood to his ruin from alcoholism and drugs. Most useful is the insight into the literary circles in which Capote moved. Includes an index. Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Arguably the definitive biographical work on Capote, this lengthy text covers all the ups and downs of his career. Contains copious references and an index. Garson, Helen S. Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Divided into three sections: a critical analysis of the short fiction, an exploration of Capote’s biography and his “inventing a self,” and a selection of essays by Capote’s most important critics. Also includes a chronology and bibliography. Grobel, Lawrence. Conversations with Capote. New York: New American Library, 1985. This biography uses interview material to flesh out its information. Grobel covers Capote’s life from childhood to his fall from society’s grace and his subsequent death. In chapter 4, entitled “Writing,” Capote discusses his writing career and the authors who he believed had the greatest influence on him. Includes a brief primary bibliography that lists films that Capote scripted and an index. Hardwick, Elizabeth. “Tru Confessions.” The New York Review of Books 45 (January 15, 1998): 4-5. Discusses George Plimpton’s recording the remarks of those who came

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into contact with Capote’s journey to literary fame; notes that Plimpton arranges these voices to produce the effect of the unrehearsed, companionable exchange at a cocktail party; argues that the method and result suit their subject, given that Capote, when not writing, was partying, forever receiving and producing banter. Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Truman Capote: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. This book is a collection of interviews with Capote done by interviewers who range from Gloria Steinem to George Plimpton to Capote himself, in a section called “Self-Portrait.” The index allows the reader to find specific references to individual short stories. Long, Robert Emmet. “Truman Capote.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 2. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Capote’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these six short stories by Capote: “Children on Their Birthdays” and “A Christmas Memory” (vol. 2); “The Headless Hawk” (vol. 3); “Miriam” and “My Side of the Matter” (vol. 5); and “A Tree of Night” (vol. 7). Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Doubleday, 1997. This biography based on interviews provides dramatic, primary information, but it also must be checked against the more reliable biography by Gerald Clarke. Includes biographies of contributors and a chronology. Windham, Donald. Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others. New York: William Morrow, 1987. A friend of the major literary lights of the 1950’s and 1960’s, as well as a novelist himself, Windham dedicates the first half of Lost Friendships to his relationship with Capote and its subsequent decline. No reference material is included.

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Raymond Car ver Born: Clatskanie, Oregon; May 25, 1938 Died: Port Angeles, Washington; August 2, 1988 Principal short fiction • Put Yourself in My Shoes, 1974; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1976; Furious Seasons, and Other Stories, 1977; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 1981; Cathedral, 1983; Elephant, and Other Stories, 1988; Where I’m Calling From, 1988; Short Cuts: Selected Stories, 1993. Other literary forms • Raymond Carver distinguished himself as a short-story writer and poet, and he wrote in both forms until his death. His poetry has been published in the following collections: Near Klamath (1968), Winter Insomnia (1970), At Night the Salmon Move (1976), Two Poems (1982), Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983), If It Please You (1984), This Water (1985), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985), Ultramarine (1986), and A New Path to the Waterfall (1989). Achievements • Raymond Carver’s greatest achievement was overcoming his economically and culturally disadvantaged background to become an author of world renown. He made the short story a workable literary form; since Carver, short-story collections have again become a marketable commodity in the book trade. Both as a model and as a teacher, he had such an influence on younger fiction writers that author Jay McInerney could truthfully say (alluding to a famous statement that Fyodor Dostoevski made about Nikolai Gogol) that there is hardly a single American shortstory writer younger than Carver who did not “come out of Carver’s overcoat.” With only a bachelor’s degree and mediocre grades, Carver was invited to teach at distinguished universities and became a professor of English at Syracuse University in 1980. He received many honors during his lifetime, including a Strauss Living Award, which guaranteed him an annual stipend of thirty-five thousand dollars and enabled him to devote all his time to writing during the last years of his life. Just before his death, he received a doctorate of letters from the University of Hartford. Biography • Raymond Carver grew up in a sparsely populated corner of the Pacific Northwest. This rustic environment had an indelible effect upon his character and writing. Like Ernest Hemingway, one of the writers who influenced him, he loved the purity and freedom of the American wilderness, and he also respected the simplicity, honesty, and directness of the men and women who earned meager and precarious livelihoods in that primitive setting. He married young and had two children to support by the time he was twenty. He had wanted to be a writer from the time he was in the third grade, but the responsibilities of parenthood made it extremely difficult for him to find time to write. His limited education forced him to take menial jobs for which he was temperamentally unsuited. He was unable to consider tackling anything as ambitious as a full-length novel, so he spent his odd free hours writing short stories and poetry. He managed to get some of his work published in little magazines, but these publications paid little or nothing for his work, so he was haunted by financial problems for much of his life.

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One of the most important influences in Carver’s life was John Gardner (1933-1982), who taught creative writing at California State University at Chico and said, “You cannot be a great writer unless you feel greatly.” The idealistic Gardner introduced his students to the literary magazines TO VIEW IMAGE, that represented the cutting edge in contemporary American fiction and PLEASE SEE poetry, and he urged them to write PRINT EDITION honestly about what they knew, as OF THIS BOOK. opposed to turning out formula fiction in an attempt to make money. This is exactly what Carver did, and, ironically, he found that the hardships and distractions that were preventing him from writing were the very things that provided him with material to write about. This may account for the characteristic stoical humor to be found in many of his sto© Marion Ettlinger ries. Another profound influence in his life was alcohol. One of Carver’s distinguishing traits as a writer is his astonishing candor, and anyone who reads a dozen of his short stories will get a good idea of what his life was like for nearly two decades. His drinking caused serious domestic and financial problems, which led to feelings of guilt and more drinking. Amazingly, his strong constitution and unwavering motivation enabled him to continue producing stories and poems. With the publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981, Carver achieved critical and popular fame. His financial problems were ameliorated because he was receiving valuable grants and teaching assignments and was also selling his work to high-paying, slick magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Playgirl, and The New Yorker. Collections of his short stories sold well. He was earning money teaching creative writing courses and appearing as a featured attraction at many workshops and seminars. By the late 1970’s, Carver had separated from his first wife and was living with the poet and teacher Tess Gallagher. She helped him cope with his drinking problem and provided a much-needed stabilizing influence. Carver, always a heavy cigarette smoker, died of lung cancer in 1988. By that time, his works had been published all over the world in more than twenty languages. Analysis • Nearly everything written about Raymond Carver begins with two observations: He is a minimalist, and he writes about working-class people. Even when the critic is sympathetic, this dual categorization tends to stigmatize Carver as a minor artist writing little stories about little people. Although it is true that most of Carver’s characters belong to the working class, their problems are universal. Carver writes about divorce, infidelity, spiritual alienation, alcoholism, bankruptcy, rootlessness,

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and existential dread; none of these afflictions is peculiar to the working class, and in fact, all were once more common to members of the higher social classes. Carver was a minimalist by preference and by necessity. His lifelong experience had been with working-class people. It would have been inappropriate to write about simple people in an ornate style, and, furthermore, his limited education would have made it impossible for him to do so effectively. The spare, objective style that he admired in some of Hemingway’s short stories, such as “The Killers” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” was perfectly suited to Carver’s needs. The advantage and appeal of minimalism in literature is that it draws readers into the story by forcing them to conceptualize missing details. One drawback is that it allows insecure writers to imply that they know more than they know and mean more than they are actually saying. This was true of the early stories that Carver collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? A good example of Carver’s strengths and weaknesses is a short story in that volume titled “Fat.” “Fat” • As the title suggests, “Fat” is about a fat man. It is little more than a character sketch; nothing happens in the story. Throughout his career, Carver based stories and poems on people or incidents that he observed or scraps of conversation that he overheard; these things seemed to serve as living metaphors or symbols with broader implications. Carver frames his story by setting it in a restaurant and by describing the fat man from the point of view of a waitress. She says that she has never seen such a fat person in her life and is somewhat awestruck by his appearance, by his gracious manners, and by the amount of food that he can consume at one sitting. After she goes home at night, she is still thinking about him. She says that she herself feels “terrifically fat”; she feels depressed, and finally ends by saying, “My life is going to change. I feel it.” The reader can feel it too but might be hard pressed to say what “it” is. The story leaves a strong impression but an ambiguous one. No two readers would agree on what the story means, if anything. It demonstrates Carver’s talent for characterization through dialogue and action, which was his greatest asset. Both the waitress and her fat customer come alive as people, partially through the deliberate contrast between them. His treatment of the humble, kindly waitress demonstrates his sensitivity to the feelings of women. His former wife, Maryann Carver, said of him, “Ray loved and understood women, and women loved him.” “Fat” also shows Carver’s unique sense of humor, which was another trait that set him apart from other writers. Carver was so constituted that he could not help seeing the humorous side of the tragic or the grotesque. His early, experimental short stories most closely resemble the early short stories of William Saroyan reprinted in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories (1934) and subsequent collections of his stories that appeared in the 1930’s. Saroyan is perhaps best remembered for his novel The Human Comedy (1943), and it might be said that the human comedy was Carver’s theme and thesis throughout his career. Like the early stories of Saroyan, Carver’s stories are the tentative vignettes of a novice who knows very well that he wants to be a writer but still does not know exactly what he wants to say. “Neighbors” • Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? includes the tragicomic “Neighbors,” the first of Carver’s stories to appear in a slick magazine with a large circulation. Gordon Lish, editor of the men’s magazine Esquire, recognized Carver’s talent early but did not immediately accept any of his submissions. Lish’s welcome encourage-

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ment, painful rejections, and eventual acceptance represented major influences in Carver’s career. “Neighbors” deals with ordinary people but has a surrealistic humor, which was to become a Carver trademark. Bill and Arlene Miller, a couple in their thirties, have agreed to feed their neighbors’ cat and water the plants while they are away. The Stones’ apartment holds a mysterious fascination, and they both find excuses to enter it more often than necessary. Bill helps himself to the Chivas Regal, eats food out of their refrigerator, and goes through their closets and dresser drawers. He tries on some of Jim Stone’s clothes and lies on their bed masturbating. Then he goes so far as to try on Harriet Stone’s brassiere and panties and then a skirt and blouse. Bill’s wife also disappears into the neighbors’ apartment on her own mysterious errands. They fantasize that they have assumed the identities of their neighbors, whom they regard as happier people leading fuller lives. The shared guilty adventure arouses both Bill and Arlene sexually, and they have better lovemaking than they have experienced in a long while. Then disaster strikes: Arlene discovers that she has inadvertently locked the Stones’ key inside the apartment. The cat may starve; the plants may wither; the Stones may find evidence that they have been rummaging through their possessions. The story ends with the frightened Millers clinging to each other outside their lost garden of Eden. This early story displays some of Carver’s strengths: his sense of humor, his powers of description, and his ability to characterize people through what they do and say. It also has the two main qualities that editors look for: timeliness and universality. It is therefore easy to understand why Lish bought this piece after rejecting so many others. “Neighbors” portrays the alienated condition of many contemporary Americans of all social classes. “Neighbors,” however, has certain characteristics that have allowed hostile critics to damn Carver’s stories as “vignettes,” “anecdotes,” “sketches,” and “slices-of-life.” For one thing, readers realize that the terror they briefly share with the Millers is unnecessary: They can go to the building manager for a passkey or call a locksmith. It is hard to understand how two people who are so bold about violating their neighbors’ apartment should suddenly feel so helpless in the face of an everyday mishap. The point of the story is blunted by the unsatisfactory ending. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love • The publication of the collection titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love made Carver famous. These short, rather ambiguous stories also got him permanently saddled with the term “minimalist.” Carver never accepted that label and claimed that he did not even understand what it meant. He had a healthy mistrust of critics who attempted to categorize writers with such epithets: It was as if he sensed their antagonism and felt that they themselves were trying to “minimize” him as an author. A friend of Carver said that he thought a minimalist was a “taker-out” rather than a “putter-in.” In that sense, Carver was a minimalist. It was his practice to go over and over his stories trying to delete all superfluous words and even superfluous punctuation marks. He said that he knew he was finished with a story when he found himself putting back punctuation marks that he had previously deleted. It would be more accurate to call Carver a perfectionist than a minimalist. “Why Don’t You Dance?” • One of the best short stories reprinted in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is “Why Don’t You Dance?” It is one of the most repre-

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sentative, the most “Carveresque” of all Carver’s short stories. A man who is never given a name has placed all of his furniture and personal possessions outside on the front lawn and has whimsically arranged them as if they were still indoors. He has run an extension cord from the house and hooked up lamps, a television, and a record player. He is sitting outside drinking whiskey, totally indifferent to the amazement and curiosity of his neighbors. One feels as if the worst is over for him: He is the survivor of some great catastrophe, like a marooned sailor who has managed to salvage some flotsam and jetsam. A young couple, referred to throughout the story as “the boy” and “the girl,” drive by and assume that the man is holding a yard sale. They stop and inquire about prices. The man offers them drinks. The boy and girl get into a party spirit. They put old records on the turntable and start dancing in the driveway. The man is eager to get rid of his possessions and accepts whatever they are willing to offer. He even makes them presents of things that they do not really want. Weeks later, the girl is still talking about the man, but she cannot find the words to express what she really feels about the incident. Perhaps she and her young friends will understand the incident much better after they have worked and worried and bickered and moved from one place to another for ten or twenty years. “Why Don’t You Dance?” is a humorous treatment of a serious subject, in characteristic Carver fashion. The man’s tragedy is never spelled out, but the reader can piece the story together quite easily from the clues. Evidently there has been a divorce or separation. Evidently there were financial problems, which are so often associated with divorce, and the man has been evicted. Judging from the fact that he is doing so much drinking, alcoholism is either the cause or the effect of his other problems. The man has given up all hope and now sees hope only in other people, represented by this young couple just starting out in life and trying to collect a few pieces of furniture for their rented apartment. Divorce, infidelity, domestic strife, financial worry, bankruptcy, alcoholism, rootlessness, consumerism as a substitute for intimacy, and disillusionment with the American Dream are common themes throughout Carver’s stories. The symbol of a man sitting outside on his front lawn drinking whiskey, with all of his worldly possessions placed around him but soon to be scattered to the four winds, is a striking symbol of modern human beings. It is easy to acquire possessions but nearly impossible to keep a real home. Carver did not actually witness such an event but had a similar episode described to him by a friend and eventually used it in this story. A glance at the titles of some of Carver’s stories shows his penchant for finding in his mundane environment external symbols of subjective states: “Fat,” “Gazebo,” “Vitamins,” “Feathers,” “Cathedral,” “Boxes,” “Menudo.” The same tendency is even more striking in the titles of his poems, for example, “The Car,” “Jean’s TV,” “NyQuil,” “My Dad’s Wallet,” “The Phone Booth,” “Heels.” In his famous essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote that he wanted an image that would be “emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance,” so he created his famous raven perched on the bust of Pallas Athena and croaking the refrain “nevermore.” To highlight the difference in Carver’s method, Carver might have seen a real raven perched on a real statue, and it would have suggested mournful and never-ending remembrance. This kind of “reverse symbolism” seems characteristic of modern American minimalists in general, and Carver’s influence on their movement is paramount.

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Poe states that he originally thought of using a parrot in his famous poem but rejected that notion because it did not seem sufficiently poetic and might have produced a comical effect; if Carver had been faced with such a choice, he probably would have chosen the parrot. What distinguishes Carver from most minimalists is a sense of humor that is impervious to catastrophe: Like the man on the front lawn, Carver had been so far down that everyplace else looked better. He would have concurred heartily with William Shakespeare’s often-quoted lines in As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600): Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like a toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head On a different level, “Why Don’t You Dance?” reflects Carver’s maturation as a person and an author. The responsibilities of parenthood as well as the experience of teaching young students were bringing home to him the fact that his personal problems could hold instructional utility for others. As a teacher of creative writing, placed more and more in the limelight, interacting with writers, editors, professors, and interviewers, he was being forced to formulate his own artistic credo. The older man in the story sees himself in his young yard-sale customers and wants to help them along in life; this is evidently a reflection of the author’s own attitude. Consequently, the story itself is not merely an autobiographical protest or lament like some of Carver’s earlier works but is designed to deliver a message—perhaps a warning—for the profit of others. The melancholy wisdom of Carver’s protagonist reflects Carver’s own mellowing as he began to appreciate the universally tragic nature of human existence. “Where I’m Calling From” • “Where I’m Calling From” is a great American short story. It originally appeared in the prestigious The New Yorker, was reprinted in the collection titled Cathedral, and appears once again as the title story in the best and most comprehensive collection of Carver’s stories, Where I’m Calling From. The story is narrated by an alcoholic staying at a “drying-out facility,” an unpretentious boardinghouse where plain meals are served family style and there is nothing to do but read, watch television, or talk. The bucolic atmosphere is strongly reminiscent of the training-camp scenes in one of Hemingway’s most brilliant short stories, “Fifty Grand.” The narrator in Carver’s story tells about his drinking problems and interweaves his own biography with that of a friend he has made at the drying-out facility, a man he refers to as J. P. The only thing unusual about their stories is that J. P. is a chimney sweep and is married to a chimney sweep. Both J. P. and the narrator ruined their marriages through their compulsive drinking and are now terrified that they will be unable to control their craving once they get out of the facility. They have made vows of abstinence often enough before and have not kept them. They have dried out before and gone right back to the bottle. Carver manages to convey all the feelings of guilt, remorse, terror, and helplessness experienced by people who are in the ultimate stages of alcoholism. It is noteworthy that, whereas his alcoholic protagonists of earlier stories were often isolated individuals, the protagonist-narrator of “Where I’m Calling From” not only is actively seeking help but also is surrounded by others with the same problem. This feature indicates that Carver had come to realize that the way to give his stories the point or

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meaning that they had previously often lacked was to suggest the existence of largescale social problems of which his characters are victims. He had made what author Joan Didion called “the quantum leap” of realizing that his personal problems were actually social problems. The curse of alcoholism affects all social classes; even people who never touch a drop of alcohol can have their lives ruined by it. “The Bridle” • “The Bridle” first appeared in The New Yorker and was reprinted in Cathedral. It is an example of Carver’s mature period, a highly artistic story fraught with social significance. The story is told from the point of view of one of Carver’s faux-naïf narrators. Readers immediately feel that they know this good-natured soul, a woman named Marge who manages an apartment building in Arizona and “does hair” as a sideline. She tells about one of the many families who stayed a short while and then moved on as tumbleweeds being blown across the desert. Although Car ver typically writes about Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, this part of Arizona is also “Car ver Countr y,” a world of freeways, fast-food restaurants, Laundromats, mindless television entertainment, and transient living accommodations, a homogenized world of strangers with minimum-wage jobs and tabloid mentalities. Mr. Holits pays the rent in cash every month, suggesting that he recently went bankrupt and has neither a bank account nor credit cards. Carver, like minimalists in general, loves such subtle clues. Mrs. Holits confides to Marge that they had owned a farm in Minnesota. Her husband, who “knows everything there is about horses,” still keeps one of his bridles, evidently symbolizing his hope that he may escape from “Carver Country.” Mrs. Holits proves more adaptable: She gets a job as a waitress, a favorite occupation among Carver characters. Her husband, however, cannot adjust to the service industry jobs, which are all that are available to a man his age with his limited experience. He handles the money, the two boys are his sons by a former marriage, and he has been accustomed to making the decisions, yet he finds that his wife is taking over the family leadership in this brave new postindustrial world. Like many other Carver male characters, Holits becomes a heavy drinker. He eventually injures himself while trying to show off his strength at the swimming pool. One day the Holitses, with their young sons, pack and drive off down the long, straight highway without a word of explanation. When Marge trudges upstairs to clean the empty apartment, she finds that Holits has left his bridle behind. The naïve narrator does not understand the significance of the bridle, but the reader feels its poignancy as a symbol. The bridle is one of those useless objects that everyone carts around and is reluctant to part with because it represents a memory, a hope, or a dream. It is an especially appropriate symbol because it is so utterly out of place in one of those two-story, frame-stucco, look-alike apartment buildings that disfigure the landscape and are the dominant features of “Carver Country.” Gigantic economic forces beyond the comprehension of the narrator have driven this farm family from their home and turned them into the modern equivalent of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). There is, however, a big difference between Carver and Steinbeck. Steinbeck believed in and prescribed the panacea of socialism; Carver has no prescriptions to offer. He seems to have no faith either in politicians or in preachers. His characters are more likely to go to church to play bingo than to say prayers or sing hymns. Like many of his contemporary minimalists, he seems to have gone beyond alienation, beyond existentialism, beyond despair. God is dead; so what else is new?

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Carver’s working-class characters are far more complicated than Steinbeck’s Joad family. Americans have become more sophisticated as a result of the influence of radio, motion pictures, television, the Internet, more abundant educational opportunities, improved automobiles and highways, cheap air transportation, alcohol and drugs, more leisure time, and the fact that their work is less enervating because of the proliferation of labor-saving machinery. Many Americans have also lost their religious faith, their work ethic, their class consciousness, their family loyalty, their integrity, and their dreams. Steinbeck saw it happening and showed how the Joad family was splitting apart after being uprooted from the soil; Carver’s people are the Joad family a half-century down the road. Oddly enough, Carver’s mature stories do not seem nihilistic or despairing because they contain the redeeming qualities of humor, compassion, and honesty. “Boxes” • Where I’m Calling From is the most useful volume of Carver’s short stories because it contains some of the best stories that had been printed in earlier books plus a generous selection of his later and best efforts. One of the new stories reprinted in Where I’m Calling From is “Boxes,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. When Carver’s stories began to be regularly accepted by The New Yorker, it was an indication that he had found the style of self-expression that he had been searching for since the beginning of his career. It was also a sign that his themes were evoking sympathetic chords in the hearts and minds of The New Yorkers’ middle and upper-class readership, the people at whom that magazine’s sophisticated advertisements for diamonds, furs, highrise condominiums, and luxury vacation cruises are aimed. “Boxes” is written in Carver’s characteristic tragicomic tone. It is a story in which the faux-naïf narrator, a favorite with Carver, complains about the eccentric behavior of his widowed mother who, for one specious reason or another, is always changing her place of residence. She moves so frequently that she usually seems to have the bulk of her worldly possessions packed in boxes scattered about on the floor. One of her complaints is about the attitude of her landlord, whom she calls “King Larry.” Larry Hadlock is a widower and a relatively affluent property owner. It is evident through Carver’s unerring dialogue that what she is really bitter about is Larry’s indifference to her own fading charms. In the end, she returns to California but telephones to complain about the traffic, the faulty air-conditioning unit in her apartment, and the indifference of management. Her son vaguely understands that what his mother really wants, though she may not realize it herself, is love and a real home and that she can never have these things again in her lifetime no matter where she moves. What makes the story significant is its universality: It reflects the macrocosm in a microcosm. In “Boxes,” the problem touched on is not only the rootlessness and anonymity of modern life but also the plight of millions of aging people, who are considered by some to be useless in their old age and a burden to their children. It was typical of Carver to find a metaphor for this important social phenomenon in a bunch of cardboard boxes. Carver uses working-class people as his models, but he is not writing solely about the working class. It is simply the fact that all Americans can see themselves in his little, inarticulate, bewildered characters that makes Carver an important writer in the dominant tradition of American realism, a worthy successor to Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, all of whom wrote about humble people. Someday it may be gener-

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ally appreciated that, despite the odds against him and despite the antipathy of certain mandarins, Raymond Carver managed to become the most important American fiction writer in the second half of the twentieth century. Bill Delaney Other major works anthology: American Short Story Masterpieces, 1987 (with Tom Jenks). miscellaneous: Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, 1983; No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings, 1991 (revised and expanded as Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, 2001). poetry: Near Klamath, 1968; Winter Insomnia, 1970; At Night the Salmon Move, 1976; Two Poems, 1982; If It Please You, 1984; This Water, 1985; Where Water Comes Together with Other Water, 1985; Ultramarine, 1986; A New Path to the Waterfall, 1989; All of Us: The Collected Poems, 1996. screenplay: Dostoevsky, 1985. Bibliography Bugeja, Michael. “Tarnish and Silver: An Analysis of Carver’s Cathedral.” South Dakota Review 24, no. 3 (1986): 73-87. Discusses the revision of an early Carver story, “The Bath,” which was reprinted in Cathedral as “A Small Good Thing.” The changes made throughout the story, and especially the somewhat more positive resolution, reflect Carver’s evolution as a writer. Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Introduction to Carver’s stories that focuses on such issues as myth and archetype, otherness, and the grotesque. Discusses the difference between “early” and “late” versions of the same story, such as “So Much Water Close to Home” and “The Bath” and “A Small Good Thing.” Includes Carver’s own comments on his writing as well as articles by other critics who challenge the label of minimalist for Carver. Carver, Raymond. “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk.” The New York Times Book Review, February 15, 1981, 9. In this interesting article, Carver describes his artistic credo, evaluates the work of some of his contemporaries, and offers excellent advice to aspiring young writers. The article reveals his perfectionism and dedication to his craft. Gentry, Marshall Bruce, and William L. Stull, eds. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Wide-ranging collection of interviews covering Carver’s career from the early 1980’s until just before his death. Halpert, Sam. Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Expanded edition of a collection of conversations originally published in 1991 as When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Includes contributions from Carver’s first wife, his daughter, an early writing instructor, and some of his lifetime friends. ____________, ed. When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991. Collection of transcripts of interviews with ten writers who knew Carver on a personal basis, including a fascinating interview with Carver’s first wife, Maryann, who provides a fresh perspective on the incidents on which many of Carver’s stories were based. Kesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Intelligent discussion of Carver’s stories, focusing on Carver’s development of his own moral center.

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May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these nine short stories by Carver: “Careful” and “Cathedral” (vol. 1); “Errand” (vol. 2); “Neighbors” (vol. 5); “A Small, Good Thing” and “So Much Water So Close to Home” (vol. 7); and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Why Don’t You Dance?,” and “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” (vol. 8). Nesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. The first book-length study of Carver’s work, Nesset calls the book “a preliminary exploration.” Includes an extensive bibliography. Powell, Jon. “The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of Perpetual Uncertainty.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Fall, 1994): 647-656. Discusses the sense of menace Carver creates by leaving out or only providing clues to central aspects of his stories. Argues that this technique forces both the characters and the readers to try to understand the clues. Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Analyzes Carver’s stories as “intratextual” and argues that they should be read in relationship to one another. Claims that in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and Cathedral each story is linked to the immediately preceding story and the one after it. Scofield, Martin. “Story and History in Raymond Carver.” Critique 40 (Spring, 1999): 266-280. Shows how three late Carver stories—“Intimacy,” “Blackbird Pie,” and “Elephant”—embody a new experimental technique for integrating fiction and autobiographical or historical events.

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Willa Cather Born: Back Creek Valley, near Gore, Virginia; December 7, 1873 Died: New York, New York; April 24, 1947 Principal short fiction • The Troll Garden, 1905; “Paul’s Case,” 1905; Youth and the Bright Medusa, 1920; Obscure Destinies, 1932; The Old Beauty and Others, 1948; Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction: 1892-1912, 1965; Uncle Valentine, and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1915-1929, 1973. Other literary forms • Willa Cather is best known as a novelist, but she wrote prolifically in other forms, especially as a young woman; she had been publishing short stories for more than twenty years before she published her first novel. Although her fame rests largely on her twelve novels and a few short stories, she has a collection of poetry, several collections of essays, and hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine pieces to her credit. Only one of her books, A Lost Lady (1923), was filmed in Hollywood; after that one experience, Cather would not allow any of her work to be filmed again. Achievements • Willa Cather was one of America’s first modern writers to make the prairie immigrant experience an important and continuing subject for high-quality fiction. Although her setting is often the American western frontier, she masterfully locates the universal through the specific, and her literary reputation transcends the limitations of regional or gender affiliation. In her exploration of the human spirit, Cather characteristically defends artistic values in an increasingly materialistic world, and she is known for her graceful rendering of place and character. Praised in the 1920’s as one of the most successful novelists of her time, Cather was sometimes criticized in the next decade for neglecting contemporary social issues. Later, however, and especially since her death, she was recognized as a great artist and one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours (1922). She also received the Howells Medal for fiction from the Academy of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1930, the Prix Fémina Américain for Shadows on the Rock (1931) in 1933, and the gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944. With time, interest in Cather’s fiction continued to increase, rather than diminish, and she enjoys appreciative audiences abroad as well as in her own country. Biography • Willa Sibert Cather moved with her family from Virginia to Nebraska when she was only nine years old, a move that was to influence her mind and art throughout her life. As a student at the University of Nebraska, she wrote for various college magazines; she also became a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal, publishing book, theater, and concert reviews, as well as commentary on the passing scene. Even after she moved to Pittsburgh to take an editorial job, she continued to send columns home to the Nebraska State Journal. Later she also began contributing to the Lincoln Courier. She taught English in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (an experience that became the source for one of her most famous short stories, “Paul’s Case”), and

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then moved to New York to take a position with McClure’s Magazine. After the publication of her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912, she left McClure’s Magazine, financially able to devote her full time to her creative work. Over the next three decades, she published successfully and to critical acclaim. Analysis • Willa Cather was always conscious of a double urge in herself, toward art and toward the land. As long as her parents were living, she found herself torn between the western prairie and the cultural centers of the East and Europe. That basic polarity appears again and again in her stories, some of which deal with the artist’s struggle against debilitating influences, and some with both the pleasant and the difficult aspects of the prairie experience. Perhaps only in her work did Cather achieve a comfortable reconciliation of these polarities, by making the prairie experience the subject of her art. All of Cather’s work is consistently value-centered. She believed in characters who are good, artists who are true to their callings, people who can appreciate and use what is valuable from the past, and individuals who have a special relationship with the land. Her chief agony lay in what she saw as a general sellout to materialism—in the realm of art, in the prairie and desert, in the small town, in the city. The struggle of the artist to maintain integrity against an unsympathetic environment and the forces of an exploitative materialism is explored in three stories that are particularly important in the Cather canon. Two of them, “The Sculptor’s Funeral” and “Paul’s Case,” have been widely anthologized and are well known. The third, “Uncle Valentine,” is an important later story. “The Sculptor’s Funeral” • “The Sculptor’s Funeral” is about the return in death of a world-renowned sculptor to the pinched little prairie town from which he somehow miraculously sprang. Harvey Merrick’s body arrives by train in the dead of winter, accompanied by one of his former students. There to meet the coffin are several prominent townsmen, among them a brusque, red-bearded lawyer named Jim Laird. Only he can appreciate the magnitude of Harvey Merrick’s achievement. The watchers around the body chuckle and snort over poor Harvey’s uselessness as a farmhand, over his inability to “make it” in the only things that count for them—money-making ventures in Sand City. Jim Laird, in a storm of self-hatred for having become the scheming lawyer these harpies wanted him to be, enters the room and blasts them mercilessly. He reminds the town elders of the young men they have ruined by drumming “nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers.” They hated Harvey, Laird says, because he left them and rose above them, achieving in a world they were not fit to enter. He reminds them that Harvey “wouldn’t have given one sunset over your marshes” for all of their material properties and possessions. Laird is too drunk the next day to attend the funeral, and it is learned that he dies some years later from a cold he caught while “driving across the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps’s sons who had got into trouble there by cutting government timber.” Harvey Merrick is not the tragic figure of the story, for he, thanks to a timid father who sensed something special about this one son, managed to escape destruction. He became the artist he was destined to be, in spite of his unlikely beginnings. The money-grubbing first citizens of Sand City can wag their tongues feebly over his corpse, but they cannot touch him or detract from his accomplishment. If there is a tragic element in the story, it is the life of Jim Laird. Like Harvey, he went away

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“Paul’s Case” • “Paul’s Case” presents a somewhat different view of that conflict. Paul, a high school youngster, is not a practicing artist, but he has an artistic temperament. He loves to hang around art Edward Steichen/Courtesy, George Bush galleries and concert halls and thePresidential Library and Museum aters, talking with the performers and basking in their reflected glory. It is glitter, excitement, and escape from the dripping taps in his home on Pittsburgh’s Cordelia Street that Paul craves. A hopeless “case,” Paul is finally taken out of high school by his widowed father because his mind is never on his studies. Forced from his usher’s job at the concert hall and forbidden to associate with the actors at the theater, he loses the only things he had lived for and cared about. When he is denied those vital outlets for his aesthetic needs and sent to do dull work for a dull company, he carries out a desperate plan. One evening, instead of depositing his firm’s receipts in the bank, he catches a train for New York. With swift determination, he buys elegant clothes and installs himself in a luxurious hotel suite, there to live for a few brief days the life he had always felt himself suited for. Those days are lovely and perfect, but the inevitable reckoning draws near: He learns from a newspaper that his father is en route to New York to retrieve him. Very deliberately Paul plots his course, even buying carnations for his buttonhole. Traveling to the outskirts of town, he walks to an embankment above the Pennsylvania tracks. There he carefully buries the carnations in the snow, and when the appropriate moment comes, he leaps into the path of an oncoming train. A sensitive youngster with limited opportunity, Paul is not an artist in the usual sense. His distinction is that he responds to art, almost any art, with an unusual fervor. To him, anything associated with the world of art is beautiful and inspiring, while anything associated with lower-middle-class America is ugly and common. He is wrong about both worlds. With eyes only for the artificial surface glitter that spangles the world of art, he never sees the realities of hard work and struggle that define the

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life of every artist. Clearly, Cordelia Street is not as bad as Paul imagines it to be; it is, in fact, a moderately nice neighborhood where working people live and rear their families. Cordelia Street, however, has inadvertently taught him that money is the answer to all desires, that it can buy all the trappings that grace the world of art. Cordelia Street’s legendary heroes are the Kings of Wall Street. In spite of his blindness, Paul captures the reader’s sympathies because he feels trapped in an aesthetic wasteland to which he cannot and will not return; the reader realizes at the end that perhaps Paul’s only escape lies in his final choice. The Waldorf, after all, provided temporary breathing space at best. His only real home is, as Cather tells us, in the “immense design of things.” “Uncle Valentine” • Valentine Ramsay, the title character in “Uncle Valentine,” is like Paul in many ways: He is sensitive, charming, flighty, unpredictable, temperamental, and intolerant of commonness. Unlike Paul, however, Valentine is a true artist, a gifted composer; it is not the artificial shell of art that he values, but the very heart of it. After several years abroad, he decides to return to Greenacre, his family home in the lush Pennsylvania countryside. He feels that perhaps at Greenacre he can shut out the world and find the peace he needs to write music. Ramsay and the neighbors next door, with whom he shares a special affection, both artistic and social, have a magnificent year together, a “golden year.” They roam the fields and woods, they share music, and they increase in aesthetic understanding. Casting a tragic shadow over this happy group, however, is the figure of Valentine’s uncle, who haunts the premises like a grieving ghost. A child prodigy, he had left home to pursue his art, but for reasons never disclosed, he gave up his music and returned, burying himself in the ashes of his ruined life. As a young man, Valentine had made a bad marriage to a rich woman whose materialistic coarseness became a constant affront to him; her very presence beside him in a concert hall was enough to shatter his nerves and obliterate the music he came to hear. Valentine has escaped from her, but she is destined to destroy his peace once again. He and his neighbors discover that she has purchased the large piece of property next to theirs, the property they had loved and tramped through for endless days. She intends to move in soon, bringing her fortune, her brash assertiveness, and Valentine’s only son. She, along with the encroaching factory smoke downriver, spells the end of the blessed life the little group of art fanciers has known at Greenacre. Valentine is forced to flee again, and the reader learns that he is killed while crossing a street in France. Cather’s message is clear. The important things in life—art and the sharing of its pleasures, friendships, a feeling for land and place, a reverence for the past—are too often destroyed in the name of progress. When economic concerns are given top priority, whether on the prairie or in Pennsylvania, the human spirit suffers. Happily, in a much-loved story called “Neighbor Rosicky,” Cather affirms that material temptations can be successfully resisted. Valentine is defeated, but Rosicky and his values prevail. “Neighbor Rosicky” • Anton Rosicky, recognizable as another rendering of Ántonia’s husband in Cather’s best-known novel, My Ántonia (1918), has instinctively established a value system that puts life and the land above every narrow-minded material concern. For example, when his entire corn crop is destroyed in the searing heat one July day, he organizes a little picnic so that the family can enjoy the few things they

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have left. Instead of despairing with his neighbors, Rosicky plays with his children. It is no surprise that he and his wife, Mary, agree without discussion as to what things they can let go. They refuse to skim the cream off their milk and sell it for butter because Mary would “rather put some colour into my children’s faces than put money into the bank.” Doctor Ed, who detects serious heart trouble in Rosicky, observes that “people as generous and warm-hearted and affectionate as the Rosickys never got ahead much; maybe you couldn’t enjoy your life and put it into the bank, too.” “Neighbor Rosicky” is one of Cather’s finest tributes to life on the Nebraska prairie, to a value system that grows out of human caring and love for the land. Rosicky had lived in cities for many years, had known hard times and good times there, but it occurred to him one lonely day in the city that he had to get to the land. He realized that “the trouble with big cities” was that “they built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground,” so he made his decision and went West. The only thing that disturbs his sleep now is the discontentment of his oldest son. Rudolph is married to a town girl, Polly, and he wants to leave the farm and seek work in the city. Rosicky understands Rudolph’s restlessness and Polly’s lonesomeness and looks for every opportunity to help the young couple find some recreation time in town. In spite of his efforts, however, Polly continues to dislike farm life and to find the Rosickys strange and “foreign.” Then one day Rosicky suffers a heart attack near Rudolph’s place. No one is there to care for him but Polly, and that day something lovely happens between the two of them: She has a revelation of his goodness that is “like an awakening to her.” His warm brown hand somehow brings “her to herself,” teaches her more about life than she has ever known before, offers her “some direct and untranslatable message.” With this revelation comes the assurance that at last all will be well with Rudolph and Polly. They will remain on the land and Rosicky’s spirit will abide with them, for Polly has caught the old man’s vision. It is fitting that Rosicky’s death a few months later is calmly accepted as a natural thing, and that he is buried in the earth he loved. That way there will be no strangeness, no jarring separation. Rosicky is Cather’s embodiment of all that is finest in the human character. He had been a city man, a lover of opera and the other cultural advantages of city life, but he found his peace in the simple life of a Nebraska farm. By contrast, Harvey Merrick, the sculptor, had been a country boy, a lover of the prairie landscape, but he found his peace in the art capitals of the world. Nevertheless, Merrick and Rosicky would have understood each other perfectly. One’s talent lay in molding clay, the other’s in molding lives. Cather is sometimes accused of nostalgia, of denying the present and yearning for the past. What seems clear in her work, however, is not that she wants to live in the past but that she deplores a total rejection of the values of the past. She fears a materialistic takeover of the human heart, or a shriveled view of human life. She is convinced that the desire for money and the things money can buy corrupts character, cheapens life, destroys the landscape, and enervates art. In her exploration of the conflicts engendered by a destructive materialism, in her celebration of art and the land, Willa Cather’s devotion to an enduring system that spans time and space to embrace the good, the beautiful, and the true is made evident. Marilyn Arnold With updates by Jean C. Fulton

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Other major works novels: Alexander’s Bridge, 1912; O Pioneers!, 1913; The Song of the Lark, 1915; My Ántonia, 1918; One of Ours, 1922; A Lost Lady, 1923; The Professor’s House, 1925; My Mortal Enemy, 1926; Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927; Shadows on the Rock, 1931; Lucy Gayheart, 1935; Sapphira and the Slave Girl, 1940. miscellaneous: Writings from Willa Cather’s Campus Years, 1950. nonfiction: Not Under Forty, 1936; Willa Cather on Writing, 1949; Willa Cather in Europe, 1956; The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 18931896, 1966; The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, 1970 (2 volumes). poetry: April Twilights, 1903. Bibliography Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather’s Short Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. In this indexed volume, Arnold discusses all Cather’s known short fiction chronologically. The detailed investigations will be helpful both for readers new to Cather’s stories and those who are more familiar with them. Discussions of stories which have received little critical attention are especially useful. Includes a selected bibliography. Gerber, Philip L. Willa Cather. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1995. In this revised edition, Gerber focuses more on Cather’s short fiction than in the first edition, as well as on the resurgence of criticism of her work. Discusses the major themes of the experience of the artist and life in rural Nebraska in major Cather short stories. Harris, Jeane. “Aspects of Athene in Willa Cather’s Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Spring, 1991): 177-182. Discusses Cather’s conflict between her gender and her inherited male aesthetic principles and how this is reflected in some of her early short stories by “manly” female characters modeled after the Greek goddess Athene. Maintains that Cather’s androgynous female characters represent her dissatisfaction with traditional notions of femininity and masculinity. Lindermann, Marilee. The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Thirteen essays examining Cather’s most noted novels and short stories. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Cather: “Coming, Aphrodite” (vol. 2); “Neighbor Rosicky” (vol. 5); “Paul’s Case” (vol. 6); and “The Sculptor’s Funeral” (vol. 6). Meyering, Sheryl L. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Discusses individual Cather stories, focusing on publishing history, circumstances of composition, sources, influence, relationship to other Cather works, and interpretations and criticism. Deals with her debt to Henry James, the influence of her sexual orientation on her fiction, and the influence of Sarah Orne Jewett. Murphy, John J., ed. Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Among the thirty-five essays in this substantial collection are reprinted reviews and articles by Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Leon Edel, Blanche H. Gelfant, and Bernice Slote. It also includes original essays by David Stouck, James Leslie Woodress, Paul Cameau, and John J. Murphy. The introduction offers a history of Cather scholarship.

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Robinson, Phyllis C. Willa: The Life of Willa Cather. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983. Popular biography, with good material on Cather’s family and friends. It contains some biographical analyses of Cather’s major works. Skaggs, Merrill Maguire, ed. Willa Cather’s New York: New Essays on Cather in the City. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Collection of twenty essays focusing on Cather’s urban fiction and her work for McClure’s. Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Focuses on selected short stories that the author feels are the most challenging and lend themselves to different critical approaches. Includes interviews with Cather, one of Cather’s essays on the craft of writing, samples of current criticism, a chronology, and a select bibliography.

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Geoffrey Chaucer Born: London(?), England; c. 1343 Died: London, England; October 25(?), 1400 Principal short fiction • Book of the Duchess, c. 1370; Romaunt of the Rose, c. 1370 (translation, possibly not by Chaucer); House of Fame, 1372-1380; The Legend of St. Cecilia, 1372-1380 (later used as “The Second Nun’s Tale”); Tragedies of Fortune, 1372-1380 (later used as “The Monk’s Tale”); Anelida and Arcite, c. 1380; Palamon and Ersyte, 13801386 (later used as “The Knight’s Tale”); Parlement of Foules, 1380; The Legend of Good Women, 1380-1386; Troilus and Criseyde, 1382; The Canterbury Tales, 1387-1400. Other literary forms • In addition to the works listed above, Geoffrey Chaucer composed Boece (c. 1380), a translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy (523), which Boethius wrote while in prison. Chaucer also wrote an astrological study, A Treatise on the Astrolabe (1387-1392), and a miscellaneous volume entitled Works (1957). Achievements • Geoffrey Chaucer is generally agreed to be the most important writer in English literature before William Shakespeare. Recognized internationally in his own time as the greatest of English poets and dubbed “the father of English poetry” by John Dryden as early as 1700, his central position in the development of English literature and even of the English language is perhaps more secure today than it has ever been. One of the keys to Chaucer’s continued critical success is the scope and diversity of his work, which extends from romance to tragedy, from sermon to dream vision, from pious saints’ lives to bawdy fabliaux. Readers from every century have found something new in Chaucer and learned something about themselves. Biography • Household records seem to indicate that as a boy, Geoffrey Chaucer served as a page for the countess of Ulster, wife of Edward III’s son Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Chaucer undoubtedly learned French and Latin as a youth, to which languages he later added Italian. Well versed in both science and pseudoscience, Chaucer was familiar with physics, medicine, astronomy, and alchemy. Spending most of his life in government service, he made many trips abroad on diplomatic missions and served at home in such important capacities as comptroller of customs for the Port of London, justice of the peace for the county of Kent, and clerk of the King’s Works, a position that made him responsible for the maintenance of certain public structures. He married Philippa de Roet, probably in 1367, and he may have had two daughters and two sons, although there is speculation concerning the paternity of some of those children believed to have been Chaucer’s. Since Chaucer’s career was his service to the monarchy, his poetry was evidently an avocation which did not afford him a living. Analysis • Geoffrey Chaucer’s best-known works are Troilus and Criseyde and the unfinished The Canterbury Tales, with the Book of the Duchess, the Hous of Fame, the Parlement of Foules, and The Legend of Good Women positioned in the second rank. In addition to these works and to Boece (c. 1380; translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of

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Philosophy, c. 523-524) and the Romaunt of the Rose, there exist a number of shorter and lesser-known poems, some of which merit brief attention. These lesser-known poems demonstrate Chaucer’s abilities in diverse but typically medieval forms. Perhaps the earliest extant example of Chaucer’s work is “An ABC to the Virgin”; this poem, primarily a translation from a thirteenth century French source, is a traditional series of prayers in praise of Mary, the stanzas of which are arranged in alphabetical order according to the first letter of each stanza. Another traditional form Chaucer used is the “complaint,” or formal lament. “A Complaint to His Lady” is significant in literary history as the first appearance in English of Dante’s terza rima, and “The Complaint unto Pity” is one of the earliest examples of rime royal; this latter poem contains an unusual analogy which represents the personified Pity as being buried in a heart. “The Complaint of Mars” illustrates Chaucer’s individuality in treating traditional themes and conventions; although the poem purports to be a Valentine poem, and akin to an aubade, its ironic examination of love’s intrinsic variability seems to make it an anti-Valentine poem. Chaucer similarly plays with theme and form in To Rosemounde, a ballade in which the conventions of courtly love are exaggerated to the point of grotesquerie; the narrator says, for example, that he is as immersed in love as a fish smothered in pickle sauce. Finally, Chaucer’s poem “Gentilesse” is worthy of note for its presentation of a theme, developed in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and in “The Clerk’s Tale,” which posits that “gentilesse” depends not on inheritance or social position but on character. In sum, these poems, for most of which dates of composition cannot be assigned, represent a variety of themes and forms with which Chaucer may have been experimenting; they indicate not only his solid grounding in poetic conventions but also his innovative spirit in using new forms and ideas and in treating old forms and ideas in new ways. Book of the Duchess • Of those poems in the second rank, the Book of the Duchess was probably the earliest written and is believed to have been composed as a consolation or commemoration of the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster and wife of John of Gaunt, with whom Chaucer was associated. The poem uses the technique of the dream vision and the device of the fictional narrator as two means of objectifying the subject matter, of presenting the consolation at a remove from the narrator and in the person of the bereaved knight himself. The poem thus seems to imply that true consolation can come only from within; the narrator’s human sympathy and nature’s reassurance can assist in the necessary process of acceptance of and recovery from the loss of a loved one, but that movement from the stasis of deprivation to the action of catharsis and healing can occur only within the mourner’s own breast. The poem is told by a lovesick narrator who battles his insomnia by reading the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. Finally falling asleep, he dreams that he awakens in the morning to the sounds of the hunt and, following a dog, comes upon a distinguished young knight dressed in black who laments his lost love. In response to the dreamer’s naïve and persistent questions, the knight is eventually prodded into telling of his loss; he describes his lady in love-filled superlatives, reveals that her outer beauty was symbolic of her inner nobility, and acknowledges the great happiness they enjoyed in their mutual love. At the end of this lengthy discourse, when the narrator inquires as to the lady’s whereabouts, the knight states simply that she is dead, to which the narrator replies, “Be God, hyt ys routhe!” The poem thus blends the mythological world, the natural world, and the realm of human sympathy to create a context within which the mourner can come to accept

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his loss. The dreamer’s lovesickness causes him to have a natural affinity with the knight, and, by posing as stupid, naïve, and slowwitted, the dreamer obliges the knight to speak and to admit his loss, a reality he must acknowledge if he is to move beyond the paralysis caused by his grief to a position where he is accessible to the consolation that can restore him. This restoration is in part accomplished by the dreamer’s “naïve” questions, which encourage the knight to remember the joys he experienced with his lady and the love that they shared. The knight is then able to be consoled and comforted by the corrective and curative powers of his own memories. The poem thus offers a psychoLibrary of Congress logically realistic and sophisticated presentation of the grief process, a process in which the dreamer-narrator plays a crucial role, since it is the dreamer who, through his seemingly obtuse questioning, propels the knight out of the stasis to which his grief has made him succumb; the cathartic act of speaking to the dreamer about his lost love renders the knight open to the healing powers available in human sympathy and the natural world. The poem, even as it is elegiac in its tribute to the lost lover, is in the genre of the consolatio as it records the knight’s conversion from unconsolable grief to quiet acceptance and assuagement. In establishing the persona of the apparently naïve and bumbling narrator, Chaucer initiates a tradition which not only has come to be recognized as typical of his works but also has been used repeatedly throughout literature. Probably the earliest English writer to use such a narrative device, Chaucer thereby discovered the rich possibilities for structural irony implicit in the distance between the author and his naïve narrator. Hous of Fame • In contrast to the well-executed whole that is the Book of the Duchess, the Hous of Fame, believed to have been composed between 1372 and 1380, is an unfinished work; its true nature and Chaucer’s intent in the poem continue to elude critics. Beyond the problems posed by any unfinished work is the question of this particular poem’s unity, since the connections between the three parts of the poem which Chaucer actually finished are tenuous. In the first book of the poem, the narrator dreams of the Temple of Venus, where he learns of Dido and Aeneas. The second book, detailing the narrator’s journey, in the talons of a golden eagle, to the House of Fame, and the contrast between the eagle’s chatty friendliness and volubility and the obviously terrified narrator’s monosyllabic responses as they swoop through the air, provides much amusement. The third book, describing the House of Fame and its presiding goddess, demonstrates the total irrationality of fame, which

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the goddess awards according to caprice rather than merit. After visiting the House of Rumor, the narrator notices everyone running to see a man of great authority, at which point the poem breaks off. Critical opinion differs considerably as to the poem’s meaning. Some believe it attempts to assess the worth of fame or perhaps even the life of the poet, in view of the mutability of human existence; others believe the poem intends to consider the validity of recorded history as opposed to true experience; yet other critics believe the poem attempts to ascertain the nature of poetry and its relationship to love. Although scholars have certainly not as yet settled on the poem’s meaning, there is agreement that the flight of the eagle and the narrator in book 2 is one of literature’s most finely comic passages. Beyond this, it is perhaps wisest to view the poem as an experiment with various themes which even Chaucer himself was apparently disinterested in unifying. Parlement of Foules • In contrast to the Hous of Fame, the Parlement of Foules, composed around 1380, is a finely crafted and complete work in which Chaucer combines several popular conventions, such as the dream vision, the parliament of beasts, and the demande d’amour to demonstrate three particular manifestations of love: divine love, erotic love, and procreative love, or natural love. The fictional narrator is here a person who lacks love, who knows of it only through books, and whose very dreams even prove emotionally unsatisfying. The narrator recounts his reading of Scipio Africanus the Younger, who dreamed that his ancestor came to him, told him of divine justice and the life hereafter, and urged him to work to the common profit. Having learned of the nature of divine love, the narrator dreams that Scipio comes to him as he sleeps to take him to a park where there are two gardens, one the garden of Venus and the other the garden of Nature. The garden of Venus is clearly the place of erotic or carnal love; it is located away from the sun and consequently is dark, and it has an illicit and corrupt atmosphere. In addition to such figures as Cupid, Lust, Courtesy, and Jealousy, the narrator sees Venus herself, reclining half-naked in an atmosphere that is close and oppressive. In contrast, the garden of Nature is in sunlight; it is Valentine’s Day, and the birds have congregated to choose their mates. In addition to the natural surroundings, the presence of Nature herself, presiding over the debate, helps to create an atmosphere of fertility and creativity. The choice of mates is, however, impeded by a quarrel among three male eagles who love a formel. Each eagle has a different claim to press: The first asserts that he has loved her long in silence, the second stresses the length of his devotion, and the third emphasizes his devotion’s intensity, pointing out that it is the quality rather than the length of love that matters. Since the lower orders of birds cannot choose mates until the eagles have settled their quarrel, the lesser birds enter the debate, aligning themselves variously either for or against the issues of courtly love which are involved. When the various birds’ contributions deteriorate into invective without any positive result, Nature intervenes to settle the matter, but the formel insists upon making her own choice in her own time, that is, at the end of a year. The other birds, their mates chosen, sing a joyful song which ends the dream vision. When the narrator awakes he continues to read, hoping to dream better. The poem, then, presents love in its divine, erotic, and procreative forms. Although the narrator sees these various manifestations of love, he is unable to experience them since all are unavailable to him. He is, in some ways, thus akin to the eagles and in contrast to the lower orders of birds who obviously fare well, since at the end

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of the parliament they are paired with their mates and blissfully depart. The eagles and the formel, however, because of the formel’s need to deliberate upon and choose among her courtly lovers, are in a kind of emotional limbo for a year; in effect, they are all denied for a relatively long period love’s natural expression. Thus, even as the system of courtliness raises and ennobles love, the system also provides an impediment to the ultimate realization of love in mating. Although there seems to be a movement in the debate from the artificiality of courtly love to the naturalness of pairing off, this movement does not affect the eagles, who remain constrained, in large part because of their commitment to the courtly code. The poem examines, then, not merely the various faces of love but the nature of courtly love in particular and its seemingly undesirable effects upon its adherents. The Legend of Good Women • Like the Hous of Fame, the The Legend of Good Women is unfinished; although the poem was intended to contain a prologue and a series of nineteen or twenty stories telling of true women and false men, the extant material consists of two versions of the prologue and only nine legends. The poem purports to be a penance for the poet’s offenses against the God of Love in writing of the false Criseyde and in translating the antifeminine Romaunt of the Rose. In the prologues, Chaucer uses the techniques of the dream vision and the court of love to establish a context for his series of tales, which are much akin to saints’ lives. In fact, the poem seems to parody the idea of a religion of love; the poet, although he worships the daisy as the God of Love’s symbol, commits by his work heresy against the deity and must therefore repent and do penance by writing of women who were saints and martyrs in love’s service. The two prologues differ in the degree to which they use Christian conventions to describe the conduct of love; the “G” prologue, believed to be later than the “F” prologue, has lessened the strength of the analogy to Christian worship. The legends, however, are very much in the hagiographic tradition, even to the extent of canonizing women not customarily regarded as “good,” such as Cleopatra and Medea. Evidently wearying of his task, however, Chaucer did not complete the poem, perhaps because of the boredom inherent in the limited perspective. Troilus and Criseyde • Of Chaucer’s completed work, Troilus and Criseyde is without question his supreme accomplishment. Justly considered by many to be the first psychological novel, the poem places against the epic background of the Trojan War the tragedy and the romance of Troilus, son of Priam, and Criseyde, daughter of Calchas the soothsayer. Entwined with their lives is that of Pandarus, friend of Troilus and uncle of Criseyde, who brings the lovers together and who, in consequence, earns lasting disapprobation as the first panderer. In analyzing the conjunction of these three characters’ lives, the poem considers the relationship of the individual to the society in which the individual lives and examines the extent to which events in one’s life are influenced by external circumstances and by internal character. At a deeper level, the poem assesses the ultimate worth of human life, human love, and human values. Yet the poem does not permit reductive or simplistic interpretation; its many thematic strands and its ambiguities of characterization and narrative voice combine to present a multidimensional poem which defies definitive analysis. The poem’s thematic complexity depends upon a relatively simple plot. When callow Troilus is stricken with love for Criseyde, he follows all the courtly rules: He suffers physically, loves her from a distance, and rises to great heights of heroism on the

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battlefield so as to be worthy of her. When Troilus admits to Pandarus that his misery can only be cured by Criseyde’s love, Pandarus is only too happy to exercise his influence over his niece. By means of a subtle mix of avuncular affection, psychological manipulation, and veiled threats, Pandarus leads Criseyde to fall in love with Troilus. The climax of Pandarus’s machinations occurs when he arranges for Troilus and Criseyde to consummate their love affair, ostensibly against the stated will of Criseyde and in spite of Troilus’s extremely enfeebled condition. Until this point the poem, reflecting largely the conventions of fabliau, has been in the control of Pandarus; he generates the action and manipulates the characters much as a rather bawdy and perhaps slightly prurient stage manager. With the love scene, however, the poem’s form shifts from that of fabliau to that of romance; Pandarus becomes a minor figure, and the love between Troilus and Criseyde achieves much greater spiritual significance than either had anticipated. Although the tenets of courtly love demand that the lovers keep their affair secret, they enjoy for three years a satisfying and enriching relationship which serves greatly to ennoble Troilus; the poem’s shape then shifts again, this time from romance to tragedy. Calchas, having foreseen the Trojan defeat and having therefore defected to the Greeks, requests that a captured Trojan be exchanged for his daughter. The distraught lovers discover that the constraints placed upon them by their commitments to various standards and codes of behavior combine with the constraints imposed upon them by society to preclude their preventing the exchange, but Criseyde promises within ten days to steal away from the Greek camp and return to Troilus. Once in the Greek camp, however, Criseyde finds it difficult to escape; moreover, believing that the Greek Diomede has fallen in love with her, she decides to remain in the Greek encampment until the grief-stricken Troilus eventually has to admit that she has, indeed, betrayed him. At the end of the poem, having been killed by Achilles, Troilus gazes from the eighth sphere upon the fullness of the universe and laughs at those mortals who indulge in earthly endeavor. In his bitter wisdom he condemns all things of the earth, particularly earthly love, which is so inadequate in comparison with heavenly love. This section of the poem, erroneously called by some “the epilogue,” has been viewed as Chaucer’s retraction of his poem and a nullification of what has gone before. Chaucer’s poetic vision, however, is much more complex than this interpretation supposes; throughout the poem he has been preparing the reader to accept several paradoxes. One is that even as human beings must celebrate and strive for secular love, which is the nearest thing they have to divine love, they must nevertheless and simultaneously concentrate on the hereafter, since secular love and human connections are, indeed, vastly inferior to divine love. A second paradox is that humans should affirm the worth of human life and human values while at the same time recognizing their mutability and their inferiority to Christian values. The poem also presents courtly love as a paradox since, on one hand, it is the system that inspires Troilus to strive for and achieve a vastly ennobled character even though, on the other, the system is proven unworthy of his devotion. Criseyde is similarly paradoxical in that the narrator portrays her as deserving of Troilus’s love, even though she proves faithless to him. These paradoxes are presented against a classical background which contributes to the poet’s juxtaposition of several oppositions. The world of the classical epic provides the setting for a medieval courtly romance so that, although the characters exist in a pagan environment, they are viewed from the Christian medieval perspective

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which informs the poem. The poem’s epic setting and its romance form, then, like its pagan plot and its Christian point of view, seem thus to be temporally misaligned; this misalignment does not, however, lead to dissonance but instead contributes to the poem’s thematic ambiguity. The characters also contribute significantly to the poem’s ambiguity. Criseyde, particularly, resists classification and categorization. The ambivalent narrator encourages the reader to see Criseyde in a variety of contradictory postures: as a victim, but also as a survivor, one who takes the main chance; as a weak and socially vulnerable person, but also as a woman who is self-confident and strong; as an idealistic and romantic lover, but also as a careful pragmatist; as a greatly self-deceived character, but also as a self-aware character who at times admits painful truths about herself. Also ambiguous, but to a lesser degree, is Pandarus, whose characterization vacillates between that of the icily unsentimental cynic and that of the sensitive human being who bemoans his failures to achieve happiness in love and who worries about what history will do to his reputation. He seems to see courtly love as a game and to disbelieve in the total melding of two lives, but he betrays his own sentimentality when he indicates that he longs to find such love for himself. Although his mentor seems not to take courtly love seriously, to Troilus it is the center of his life, his very reality. His virtue lies in large part in his absolute commitment to courtly ideals and to Criseyde. The solidity of that commitment, however, prevents Troilus from taking any active steps to stop the exchange, since such action would reveal their love affair, soil Criseyde’s reputation, and violate the courtly love code. In this sense, Troilus is trapped by his own nobility and by his idealism, so that his course of action is restrained not only by external forces but also by his own character. In fact, the poem seems to show that both Troilus and Criseyde are ultimately responsible for what happens to them; the role of fate in their lives is relatively insignificant because their very characters are their fate. As Troilus is governed by his dedication to heroic and courtly ideals, Criseyde is governed by the fact that she is “slydynge of corage.” It is her nature to take the easiest way, and because of her nature she is untrue to Troilus. From the poet’s point of view, however, Criseyde’s faithlessness does not invalidate for Troilus the experience of her love. Because of his own limited perspective, Troilus is himself unable to assess the worth of his life, his love affair, and the values to which he subscribed; the parameters of his vision permit him to see only the inadequacy and imperfection of earthly experience in comparison with the experience of the divine. The poet’s perspective, however, is the one that informs the poem, and that perspective is broader, clearer, and more complex, capable of encompassing the poem’s various paradoxes and oppositions. In consequence, even though Troilus at the end discounts his earthly experience, the poem has proven its worth to an incontrovertible degree; human life, even though inferior to the afterlife, nevertheless affords the opportunity for experiences which, paradoxically, can transcend their earthly limitations. Ultimately, then, the poem affirms the worth of human life, human love, and human idealism. The Canterbury Tales • Although Chaucer never completed The Canterbury Tales, it is his most important work and the one for which he is best known. In its conceptual richness, in its grace and precision of execution, and in its broad presentation of humanity, The Canterbury Tales is unequaled. The poem occupied Chaucer for the last

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one and a half decades of his life, although several of the stories date from an earlier period; it was not until sometime in the middle 1380’s, when he conceived the idea of using a framing device within which his stories could be placed, that the work began to assume shape. That shape is the form of a springtime pilgrimage to Canterbury to see the shrine of Thomas à Becket. The fictional party consists of some thirty pilgrims, along with the narrator and the host from the Tabard Inn; each pilgrim was to tell two stories en route to Canterbury and two on the return trip, making an approximate total of 120 tales. There are extant, however, only the prologue and twenty-four tales, not all of which are completed; moreover, the sources of these extant tales (more than eighty manuscript fragments) contain considerable textual variations and arrange the tales in many differing orders. Thus, it is impossible for critics to determine the order which Chaucer envisioned for the tales. The notion of using the pilgrimage as a framing device was a stroke of narrative brilliance, since the device provides infinite possibilities for dramatic action while it simultaneously unifies a collection of widely disparate stories. In response to the host’s request for stories of “mirth” or “doctryne,” the pilgrims present an eclectic collection of tales, including romances, fabliaux, beast-fables, saints’ lives, tragedies, sermons, and exempla. The frame of the pilgrimage also permits the poet to represent a cross section of society, since the members of the party range across the social spectrum from the aristocratic knight to the bourgeois guild members to the honest plowman. Moreover, since the tales are connected by passages of dialogue among the pilgrims as they ride along on their journey, the pilgrimage frame also permits the characters of the storytellers to be developed and additional dramatic action to occur from the pilgrims’ interaction. These “links” between the tales thus serve to define a constant fictional world, the pilgrimage, which is in juxtaposition to and seemingly in control of the multiple fictional worlds created in the tales themselves; the fictional world of the pilgrims on their pilgrimage thereby acquires a heightened degree of verisimilitude, especially because the pilgrims’ interchanges with one another often help to place them at various recognizable points on the road to Canterbury. The pilgrimage frame also permits the creation of an exquisitely ironic tension between the fictional narrator and the poet himself. The narrator is Chaucer’s usual persona, naïve, rather thick-witted, and easily and wrongly impressed by outward show. This narrator’s gullible responses to the various pilgrims are contrasted to the attitude of the poet himself; such use of the fictional narrator permits the poet not only to present two points of view on any and all action but also to play upon the tension deriving from the collision of those two perspectives. The device of the pilgrimage frame, in sum, allows the poet virtually unlimited freedom in regard to form, content, and tone. The context of the pilgrimage is established in the poem’s prologue, which begins by indicating that concerns both sacred and secular prompt people to go on pilgrimage. Those people are described in a formal series of portraits which reveals that the group is truly composed of “sondry folk” and is a veritable cross section of medieval society. Yet the skill of the poet is evident in the fact that even as the pilgrims are “types”—that is, they are representative of a body of others like themselves—they are also individuals who are distinguished not simply by the realistic details describing their external appearances but more crucially by the sharply searching analysis that penetrates their external façades to expose the actualities of character that lie beneath.

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“The Knight’s Tale” • The tales begin with a group that has come to be seen as Chaucer’s variations on the theme of the love-triangle and which consists of “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” and “The Reeve’s Tale.” Like Troilus and Criseyde, “The Knight’s Tale” superimposes a romance against the background of the classical world as it tells of Palamon and Arcite, knights of Thebes who are captured by Theseus during his battle with Creon and sentenced to life imprisonment in Athens. While imprisoned they fall in love with Emily, over whom they quarrel; since Palamon, who saw and loved her first, thought she was a goddess, Arcite, who saw her second but who loved her as a woman, insists that his is the better claim. Several years later, Arcite having been freed and Palamon having escaped from prison, the knights meet and again quarrel, agreeing to settle the matter with a duel. When Theseus comes upon them he stops the duel and decrees that they must instead meet a year later with their troops to decide the matter in a tournament. For this tournament Theseus erects a magnificent stadium with temples to Venus, Mars, and Diana. When the stadium is completed and the time for the tournament has arrived, the three members of the love-triangle pray for the assistance of their particular gods: Palamon asks Venus for Emily or for death; Arcite asks Mars for victory; and Emily asks Diana to permit her to remain a virgin or, failing that, to be wedded to the one who most loves her. These various petitions cause a quarrel between Venus and Mars which Saturn resolves by announcing that Palamon shall have his lady even though Mars assists Arcite to victory. Arcite, in consequence, wins the tournament, but in the midst of his victory parade, his horse rears, and he is mortally injured. From his deathbed Arcite summons both Palamon and Emily and commends them to each other, but they continue to grieve during the next several years. Finally, Theseus summons Palamon and Emily to him and tells them that since grief should end and life go on, they are to marry and thus make joy from sorrows. The poem’s plot, then, concerns the resolution of the love-triangle typical of romance. This plot, however, is in the service of a more serious conflict, that between order and chaos. Theseus serves as the civilizing instrument, the means by which order is imposed on the anarchy of human passion. In actuality, by assuming control over the hostility between Palamon and Arcite, Theseus reshapes their primitive emotional conflict into a clearly defined ritual; by distancing it as well in time and space, Theseus forces that conflict into a shape and an expression that is socially acceptable and which poses no threat to the culture’s peaceful continuance. Theseus thus makes order and art out of raw emotion and violent instincts. “The Miller’s Tale” • The love conflict which in “The Knight’s Tale” serves to develop this cosmic theme is in “The Miller’s Tale” acted out on the smaller scale and in the more limited space of the sheerly natural world and thus serves no such serious or noble end. Again there is a triangle, but the romantic discord among the aristocratic Palamon, Arcite, and Emily becomes in “The Miller’s Tale” the bawdy comedy of the fabliau as it arises from the interaction of the young clerk Nicholas and the effeminate dandy Absolon, both of whom desire Alison, the young wife of John, an old and jealous carpenter. At the same time that the amorous Absolon serenades her nightly and sends her gifts in an effort to win her, Alison agrees to give her love to Nicholas as soon as he can create the opportunity. In fact, however, no elaborate stratagem is needed to make possible the encounter Alison and Nicholas both desire. Since Alison’s husband is away all day working, and since Nicholas, as a student who boards with the couple, is at home with Alison all day, there really are no obstacles pre-

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venting the lovers from acting on their passions immediately. Alison’s insistence, then, that Nicholas devise a plan whereby they can give rein to their passions, reflects an important stylistic and thematic connection between the tale and “The Knight’s Tale.” In “The Knight’s Tale,” Theseus controls the passions of Palamon and Arcite by postponing their encounter and dictating its arena; the distancing in time and space results in a civilized, restrained expression of their passions. In “The Miller’s Tale,” by contrast, the distancing Alison demands parodies the conventions of romance and courtly love. This distance in actuality simply ennobles base instincts, for Alison and Nicholas inhabit not a courtly world but a natural one, and their intellectual, spiritual, and romantic pretensions constitute only a thin veneer covering their healthy animalism. By using distance as a means of ennobling base instincts, “The Miller’s Tale” parodies not only the world and the theme of “The Knight’s Tale” but also its poetic treatment. Nicholas’s seduction plan plays upon both the strengths and the weaknesses of the carpenter’s character. Telling John that another flood is coming, Nicholas convinces the carpenter that he must hang three barrels from the rafters in which Nicholas, John, and Alison can remain until the waters rise; then they will cut themselves free to float away. The carpenter’s pretensions to spiritual and theological superiority cause him to accept this prophecy unquestioningly, but at the same time his genuine love for his wife causes his first reaction to be fear for her life. When all three on the appointed night have ostensibly entered their barrels, Nicholas and Alison sneak down to spend a night in amorous play. At this point the plot is entered by Absolon, who comes to Alison’s window to serenade her; pleading for a kiss, he finds himself presented with Alison’s backside. Bent then on avenging his misdirected kiss, he brings a hot colter and asks for another kiss; presented this time with the backside of Nicholas, Absolon smacks it smartly with the red-hot colter, causing Nicholas to cry out “Water!” which in turn causes the carpenter to cut the rope on his barrel and crash to the ground, injuring both his person and his dignity. Whereas in “The Knight’s Tale” the three major characters ultimately obtain what they desire most—Arcite, victory; Palamon, Emily; and Emily, the man who loves her most—“The Miller’s Tale” reverses this idea; John, the jealous carpenter, is cuckolded and humiliated in front of the entire town, the fastidious Absolon has kissed Alison’s “nether ye,” and Nicholas has lost a hand’s-breadth of skin from his backside. Only Alison remains unscathed, but then, she must spend her life being married to John. The poem thus parodies the romance tradition, the idealistic notion that civilized or courtly processes can elevate and ennoble fundamental human passions. Even as it transfers various themes, mechanisms, and perspectives from “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale” transforms these and reflects them negatively. The generic differences between the two poems, however, demand that content and tone differ. “The Knight’s Tale,” combining epic and romance, deals seriously with serious considerations, whereas “The Miller’s Tale,” by virtue of its being a fabliau, has as one of its purposes the humorous depiction of human shortcomings. “The Reeve’s Tale” • “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” are different tales that have structural similarities; “The Reeve’s Tale,” which completes the poem’s first thematic grouping, shares with “The Miller’s Tale” the fabliau form, but the two differ considerably in tone. The Reeve’s story results from his outrage at the Miller’s story, which has belittled carpenters; in angry retaliation the Reeve relates the popu-

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lar fabliau concerning the two students who, cheated by a dishonest miller, exact revenge by sleeping with both his wife and his daughter. The plot, which hangs in part upon the device of the misplaced cradle, has as its end the unsophisticated students’ triumph over the social-climbing miller. The tone of “The Reeve’s Tale,” therefore, is bitter and vindictive, told, the Reeve acknowledges, solely to repay the Miller. Chaucer uses the romance and the fabliau, the two forms with which he begins his series of tales, again and again in the course of the poem. Other romances are the unfinished “The Squire’s Tale,” which has an Asian setting; “The Man of Law’s Tale,” which blends romance and a saint’s life in the story of the unfortunate Constance; and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Clerk’s Tale,” and “The Franklin’s Tale,” which will be discussed together as “the marriage group.” The genre of the fabliau is also further represented in “The Shipman’s Tale” of the debt repaid by the adulterous monk to his lender’s wife, and in “The Friar’s Tale” and “The Summoner’s Tale,” stories that are attacks on each other’s professions and which are told to be mutually insulting. Chaucer’s Use of Saints’ Lives • Another popular genre Chaucer employs in his collection is that of the saints’ lives, a type used in “The Second Nun’s Tale” of St. Cecilia and in “The Prioress’s Tale” of the martyred Christian boy slain by Jews. Although both tales conventionally concern “miracles of the Virgin,” the tale of the Prioress is of particular interest because of the nature of the storyteller. Although she is supposed to be a spiritual being, a guardian of other spiritual beings, she is described in the same manner as the heroine of a courtly romance; moreover, although her description points to sensitivity and charity, her moral sensibility is clearly faulty. She worries over a little mouse but tells a violent tale of religious intolerance. Moreover, the ironies implicit in the engraving on her brooch—“Amor vincit omnia”—are extensive, as are the ironies deriving from the conflicting perspectives of the narrator, who naïvely admires her for all the wrong reasons, and the poet, who clearly sees her as possessed of many shortcomings. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” • Another popular genre in the Middle Ages was the beast-fable, a form that Chaucer uses brilliantly in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” The story concerns Chauntecleer and Pertelote, a cock and hen owned by a poor widow. When Chauntecleer one night dreams of a fox, he and Pertelote have an extended discussion on the validity of dreams. Believing that dreams are caused by bile or overeating, Pertelote advises the use of a laxative; Chauntecleer, however, holding a different opinion, tells a story wherein a dream is proven prophetic. At this point the fox appears, whom the Nun’s Priest likens to such other traitors as Simon and Judas Iscariot. Even as he insists that his antifeminine statements are not his own but the cock’s, the Nun’s Priest clearly believes that woman’s counsel often brings misfortune and points with relish to the fox’s sudden appearance as proof of this belief. The encounter between the fox and the cock reveals the weaknesses of both. Relying hugely on flattery, the fox persuades Chauntecleer to relax his guard, close his eyes, and stretch his neck, providing the perfect opportunity to seize Chauntecleer and race off. As the widow and her household set chase, Chauntecleer advises the fox to tell the pursuers to turn back because he will soon be eating Chauntecleer in spite of them; when the fox opens his mouth to do this, Chauntecleer escapes. Although the fox tries to persuade Chauntecleer to come down out of the tree, Chauntecleer wisely declares that he will not again be fooled by flattery

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and that no one should prosper who closes his eyes when he should watch. The fox, as one might expect, disagrees, declaring that no one should prosper who talks when he should hold his peace. The poem thus uses the beast-fable’s technique of personifying animals to the end of revealing human truths; it also uses the conventions and the rhetoric of epic and courtly romance to talk about the lives of chickens, thus creating a parody of the epic form and a burlesque of the courtly attitude. The poem is also, to a degree, homiletic in treating the dangers inherent in succumbing to flattery; each character suffers as a result of this weakness, the cock by having foolishly permitted himself to be captured, and the fox by having gullibly permitted himself to be hoodwinked by one pretending affinity. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” • Having begun the discussion of The Canterbury Tales with an analysis of the group of tales concerned with the love-triangle, it seems fitting to end the discussion with an analysis of those tales referred to as “the marriage group.” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” and “The Franklin’s Tale” bring to that group several perspectives on women and the relation between the sexes. The Wife of Bath, in complete opposition to the traditional view of women, presents one extreme point of view that advocates sensuality and female authority. An excellent example of what she advocates, the wife is strong and lusty and insists on dominance in her marriages. In her lengthy prologue to her story she takes issue with patristic doctrine concerning chastity and female inferiority and uses scriptural allusions to buttress her opinions. Her prologue thus provides a defense of women and of sensuality. The Wife of Bath’s tale, an exemplum illustrating the argument contained in her prologue, concerns a knight who must, in order to save his life, find out what women desire most. Despairing over his inability to get a consensus of opinion, he one day comes upon a “loathly lady” who offers to give him the answer if he in turn will do what she requests. Gratefully agreeing, he learns that women most want “sovereynetee” and “maistrie” over their husbands; he is less pleased, however, to learn that her request is that he marry her. Having kept his promise, the knight on their wedding night is understandably distant from his new wife; when pressed for an explanation, he notes that she is ugly, old, and lowly born. She in turn explains that nobility comes not from wealth or birth, that poverty is virtuous, and that her age and ugliness ensure her chastity. She gives the knight a choice: He can have her ugly and old but faithful, or young and pretty but untrue. The knight chooses, however, to transfer this decision and consequently the control of the marriage to her, whereupon she announces that she will be not only young and pretty but also faithful, thus illustrating the good that comes when women are in control. “The Clerk’s Tale” • The Wife’s tale, and the wife herself, with her heretical opinions concerning marriage and sexual relations, outrage the Clerk, who tells a tale to counter the Wife’s; his tale reinforces the doctrine that male dominance on earth conforms to the order of the divine hierarchy. His story treats the patient Griselda, who promises her husband, Walter, to do everything he wishes and never to complain or in any way indicate disagreement. When a daughter is born to them, Walter, who is an Italian marquis, tells Griselda that since the people are complaining about her low birth, he must have the child killed, to which Griselda meekly agrees; Walter, however, sends the child secretly to a relative to be reared. When a son is born, Walter

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again does the same thing, again to test her obedience, and again Griselda is perfectly submissive. Twelve years later Walter secretly sends for the two children and tells Griselda that since he is divorcing her in order to marry someone else, she must return to her father. Moreover, he insists that she return to her father just as she had left him, that is, naked, since Walter had provided her with clothes. Griselda, with great dignity, requests at least a shift as recompense for the virginity which she had brought to him but which she cannot take away with her. When asked later to come and make arrangements for Walter’s new bride, Griselda cheerfully complies, although she does, at this point, give some indication of the great price she has paid for her obedience and her faithfulness to her vow; she asks Walter not to torment his new wife as he tormented her, the bride-to-be having been tenderly reared and therefore not so well able to withstand such adversity. Walter, finally satisfied as to Griselda’s steadfastness, restores her as his wife and reunites her with her children. The Clerk concludes by noting that it is hard to find women like Griselda nowadays. The tale is one with which critics have long grappled, since it presents seemingly insurmountable interpretive problems. The story can hardly be taken as realistic, even though the Clerk, through his efforts to give Walter psychological motivation, attempts to provide verisimilitude. Although the poem may be intended as allegory, to illustrate that one must be content in adversity, it seems also to have a tropological level of meaning, to illustrate the proper attitude for wives. The narrator’s own uncertainty as to whether he tells a tale of real people, a saint’s life, or an allegory, contributes to the difficulty one has in assessing the poem’s nature and purpose. It is obvious, though, that the Clerk’s intended corrective to “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is perfectly accomplished through his tale of the impossibly patient Griselda. “The Merchant’s Tale” • At the end of his tale the Clerk appears to switch directions; he advises that no husband should try what Walter did, and that furthermore wives should be fierce to their husbands, should provoke their jealousy, and should make them weep and wail. The Merchant picks up this notion and echoes the line in the first sentence of his own remarks, which are intended to counter the Clerk’s presentation of the saintly wife. The Merchant’s own unhappy marriage experience adds a painfully personal coloration to his tale of the old husband and the young wife. The Merchant’s story of May, Januarie, and the pear tree is well known in the history of the fabliau. Immediately after wedding the sixty-year-old Januarie, whose lovemaking she considers not “worth a bene,” May meets and falls in love with Damian, who loves her in return. When Januarie becomes temporarily blind, the lovers plot to consummate their love in the pear tree above Januarie’s head. Pluto and Proserpina, debating how men and women betray each other, decide to restore Januarie’s sight but to give May a facile tongue. Consequently, when Januarie’s sight returns and he sees May and Damian making love in the pear tree, May explains that her struggling in a tree with a man was an effort to restore his sight, which is obviously as yet imperfect. Placated, Januarie accepts her explanation, and they are reconciled. The three tales thus present varying views of woman as lascivious termagant, as obedient saint, and as clever deceiver; marriage, accordingly, is seen as a struggle for power and freedom between combatants who are natural adversaries. It remains for Chaucer in “The Franklin’s Tale” to attempt a more balanced view, to try to achieve a reconciliation of the oppositions posed in the tales of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, and the Merchant.

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“The Franklin’s Tale” • “The Franklin’s Tale” is a particular kind of romance called a Breton lai, which conventionally is concentrated, imaginative, and exaggeratedly romantic. Although the tale is interesting in its depiction of an integrity which rests upon absolute commitment to the pledged word, the intricacies of the poem’s moral issues are ultimately resolved, in a rather disappointing fashion, by something akin to a deus ex machina. The tale, nevertheless, has been seen traditionally to function as the reconciliation of the marriage group because of the more balanced relationship portrayed between Arveragus, a knight, and Dorigen, his wife. The couple agree that he will show no sovereignty except for that semblance of it which may be necessary for his dignity, and that their effort will be for freedom, harmony, and mutual respect in marriage, rather than for mastery. In this regard, they represent an ideal example of marriage which is totally antithetical to those of the preceding marriage tales; in Dorigen and Arveragus, Chaucer seems to be exploring the possibility that chivalric ideals and middle-class virtues can be compatible in marriage. Whether the poet really believes this is possible, however, is placed in question by the tale’s romance form and by its contrived ending. While Arveragus is away on knightly endeavors, Dorigen mourns and grieves, worrying particularly about the black rocks that make the coastline hazardous. When Aurelius, who has loved her long, pleads for her attentions, she explains that she will never be unfaithful to her husband but adds, in jest, that if he will remove the rocks she will love him. Two years after Arveragus has come home, Aurelius, made ill by his long-frustrated passion, finds a magician who, for a large fee, creates the illusion that the rocks have vanished. Asked then to fulfill her end of the bargain, the horrified Dorigen contemplates suicide to avoid this dishonor, but her miserably unhappy husband, declaring that “Trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe,” sends Dorigen to fulfill her promise. Pitying them, Aurelius releases her from her promise and is in turn released from his debt by the magician; the tale ends by asking who was the most generous. Although Dorigen and Arveragus have a marriage based on respect, honesty, and love, and although they share a moral sensibility and agree on the importance of honor to them individually and to their marriage, the artificial resolution of the plot by totally unexpected elements—the decisions of both Aurelius and the magician not to press their just claims—would seem to suggest that the poet himself dared not treat in a realistic fashion the unpleasant and probably disastrous results of the plot which he had created. In effect, he established an ideal marriage situation, set up a test of that marriage’s strength, but then decided not to go through with the test. In placing his attempted solution of the marriage problem in the form of a Breton lai, in failing to pursue to the end the ver y questions he himself raises, and in providing a typical romance ending, the poet seems to indicate that any real solution to the problems pertaining to women and to marriage are not going to be so easily attained. The Canterbur y Tales, then, represents one of the earliest collections of short stories of almost ever y conceivable type. In addition to being a generic compendium, the poem is also a compendium of characters, since the pilgrims who tell the stories and the people who inhabit the stories together constitute the widest possible representation of character types. In framing his collection of tales with the pilgrimage, Chaucer permitted himself an eclecticism in form, content, and treatment which was unprecedented in English literature. There are those who would eagerly affirm that the grace of vision which permeates The Canterbur y

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Tales makes the work not only one which was unprecedented but also one which has not since been equaled. Evelyn Newlyn With updates by William Nelles Other major works miscellaneous: Works, 1957 (second edition; F. N. Robinson, editor). nonfiction: Boece, c. 1380 (translation of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy); A Treatise on the Astrolabe, 1387-1392. Bibliography Borroff, Marie. Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Beyond. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Collection of essays that provide a fresh and different analysis of Chaucer’s work. Brewer, Derek. A New Introduction to Chaucer. New York: Longman, 1998. Written by an expert in the field, this volume provides ample biographical and historical material for anyone who is unfamiliar with Chaucer’s life and work. Includes a thorough bibliography and index. Brown, Peter, ed. A Companion to Chaucer. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series, offers broad and detailed essays by scholars of Chaucer and his era. Condren, Edward I. Chaucer and the Energy of Creation: The Design and the Organization of “The Canterbury Tales.” Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Examines the motives behind Chaucer’s layout of the stories. Gittes, Katherine S. Framing the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative Tradition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Analyzes the influence of the Asian frame narrative tradition on The Canterbury Tales; argues that what was once taken for incompleteness is the result of the influence of Eastern modes of narrative structure. Narkiss, Doron. “The Fox, the Cock, and the Priest: Chaucer’s Escape from Fable.” The Chaucer Review 32 (1997): 46-63. Examines Chaucer’s reworking of Aesop’s fable in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Argues that Chaucer moves the fable away from the realm of learning and wisdom to mockery and a way of reading that in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” fable is extended by characterization and action. Claims that Chaucer’s use of the fable suggests doubling, repetition, and substitutions. Percival, Florence. Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Suitable for introductory students yet containing challenging insights for scholars. Percival attempts to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the puzzling Legend of Good Women without ignoring any of the contradictory views that it contains about women. Rossignol, Rosalyn. Chaucer A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Works. New York: Facts on File, 1999. Indispensable guide for the student of Chaucer. West, Richard. Chaucer 1340-1400: The Life and Times of the First English Poet. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. Discussion of the history surrounding Chaucer’s achievements and the events of his life. Chapters take up such matters as the Black Death’s impact on the anti-Semitism evident in “The Prioress’s Tale” and the impact of the great English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 on Chaucer’s worldview.

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John Cheever Born: Quincy, Massachusetts; May 27, 1912 Died: Ossining, New York; June 18, 1982 Principal short fiction • The Way Some People Live, 1943; The Enormous Radio, and Other Stories, 1953; “The Country Husband,” 1954; The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, and Other Stories, 1958; Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, 1961; The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, 1964; The World of Apples, 1973; The Stories of John Cheever, 1978; Thirteen Uncollected Stories, 1994. Other literary forms • Believing that “fiction is our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death,” John Cheever devoted himself to the writing of stories and novels. Although he kept voluminous journals, he wrote only a handful of essays and even fewer reviews, and only one television screenplay, The Shady Hill Kidnapping, which aired January 12, 1982, on the Public Broadcasting Service. A number of Cheever’s works have also been adapted by other writers, including several early short stories such as “The Town House” (play, 1948), “The Swimmer” (film, 1968), “Goodbye, My Brother” as Children (play, 1976), and “O Youth and Beauty,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and “The Sorrows of Gin” (teleplays, 1979). Benjamin Cheever has edited selections of his father’s correspondence, The Letters of John Cheever (1988), and journals, The Journals of John Cheever (1991). Achievements • A major twentieth century novelist, John Cheever has achieved even greater fame as a short-story writer. He published his first story, “Expelled,” in The New Republic when he was only eighteen. Reviewers of his first collection, The Way Some People Live, judged Cheever to be a promising young writer. Numerous awards and honors followed: two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grants (1951, 1961), a Benjamin Franklin award for “The Five-Forty-Eight” (1955), an O. Henry Award for “The Country Husband” (1956), election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, elevation to the American Academy in 1973, a National Book Award in 1958 for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), the Howells Medal in 1965 for The Wapshot Scandal (1964), cover stories in Time (1964) and Newsweek (1977), the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1979, a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle award (both in 1978), an American Book Award (1979) for The Stories of John Cheever, and the National Medal for Literature (1982). Cheever’s achievements, however, cannot be measured only in terms of the awards and honors that he has received (including the honorary doctorate bestowed on this high school dropout), for his most significant accomplishment was to create, with the publication of The Stories of John Cheever, a resurgence of interest in, and a new respect for, the short story on the part of public and publishers alike. Biography • The loss of his father’s job in 1930, followed by the loss of the family home and the strained marital situation caused, John Cheever believed, by his mother’s growing financial and emotional dependence, all had a lifelong effect on

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Cheever. When he was expelled from Thayer Academy at the age of seventeen, Cheever was already committed to a writing career. His career, however, would do little to assuage his sense of emotional and economic insecurity. Although he liked to claim that “fiction is not crypto-autobiography,” from the beginning, his stories were drawn from his personal experiences. They have even followed him geographically: from New England, to New York City, through his military service, to the suburbs (first Scarborough, then Ossining), with side trips to Italy (1956-1957), the Soviet Union (on three government-sponsored trips), and Sing Sing prison, where he taught writing (1971-1972). The stories have, more importantly, followed Cheever over hazardous emotional terrain, transforming personal obsessions into published fictions: alcoholism, bisexuality, self-doubts, strained marital relations, and the sense of “otherness.” The stories also evidence the longing for stability and home that manifested itself in three of the most enduring relationships of his fifty-year career: with the Yaddo writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York (beginning in 1934); with The New Yorker (which began publishing his work in 1935); and with his wife Mary Winternitz Cheever (whom he met in 1939 and married two years later, and with whom he bickered over the next forty years). Cheever did not become free of his various fears and dependencies—including his nearly suicidal addiction to alcohol—until the mid-1970’s. After undergoing treatment for alcoholism at Smithers Rehabilitation Center, he transformed what might well have become his darkest novel into his most affirmative. Falconer (1977) was both a critical and a commercial success. Like its main character, Cheever seemed for the first time in his life free, willing at least to begin talking about the private life that he had so successfully guarded, even mythified before, when he had played the part of country squire. The triumph was, however, short-lived. After two neurological seizures in 1980, a kidney operation and the discovery of cancer in 1981, and, shortly after the publication of his fifth novel, the aptly and perhaps whimsically titled Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), he died on June 18, 1982. Analysis • John Cheever has been called both “the Chekhov of the exurbs” and “Ovid in Ossining”—which suggests both the variety and the complexity of the man and his fiction. Accused by some of being a literary lightweight—a writer merely of short stories and an apologist for middle-class life—he has been more often, and more justly, praised as a master chronicler of a way of life that he both celebrates and satirizes in stories that seem at once conventional and innovative, realistic and fantastic. His stories read effortlessly, yet their seeming simplicity masks a complexity that deserves and repays close attention. The line “The light from the cottage, shining into the fog, gave the illusion of substance, and it seems as if I might stumble on a beam of light,” for example, only appears simple and straightforward. It begins with a conventional image, light penetrating darkness, thus illuminating the way to truth, but the next five words undermine the “illusion” first by calling attention to it, then by paradoxically literalizing the metaphor, making this substantive light a stumbling block rather than a source of spiritual or philosophical truth. “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel” • Nothing in Cheever’s fiction of stark contrasts—light and dark, male and female, city and country—ever exists independent of its opposite. His stories proceed incrementally and contrapuntally, at times in curiously indirect ways. In “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel,” for example, Cheever’s narrator

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banishes seven kinds of characters and situations from his fiction, including alcoholics, homosexuals, and “scornful descriptions of American landscapes.” However, not only did his next novel, as well as much of the rest of his fiction, include all three, but also the very act of listing them in this “miscellany” confirms their power, giving TO VIEW IMAGE, them a prominence that far outPLEASE SEE weighs their hypothetical banishPRINT EDITION ment from any later work. This play of voices and positions within OF THIS BOOK. individual works also exists between stories. The same narrative situations will appear in various Cheever stories, handled comically in some, tragically in others. In effect, the stories offer a series of brilliant variations on a number of basic, almost obsessive themes, of which the most general and the most re© Nancy Crampton current as well as the most important is the essential conflict between his characters’ spiritual longings and social and psychological (especially sexual) nature. “What I wanted to do,” one of his narrator-protagonists says, is “to grant my dreams, in so incoherent a world, their legitimacy,” “to celebrate,” as another claims, “a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.” Their longings are tempered not only by the incoherence of their world but also by a doubt concerning whether what they long for actually exists or is rather only an illusion conjured out of nothing more substantial than their own ardent hopes for something or some place or someone other than who, what, and where they currently are. Even when expressed in the most ludicrous terms possible, the characters’ longings seem just as profound as they are ridiculous, as in the case of “Artemis the Honest Well Digger” searching “for a girl as pure and fresh as the girl on the oleomargarine package.” The line seems both to affirm and to qualify the yearning of a character who may confuse kitsch with Kant, advertising copy with lyrical longings, but who nevertheless seems as much a holy fool as a deluded consumer. Whether treated comically or tragically, Cheever’s characters share a number of traits. Most are male, married, and white-collar workers. All—despite their Sutton Place apartments or, more often, comfortable homes in affluent Westchester communities—feel confused, dispossessed, lost; they all seem to be what the characters in Cheever’s Italian stories actually are: expatriates and exiles. Physical ailments are rare, emotional ones epidemic. Instead of disease, there is the “dis-ease” of “spiritual nomadism.” They are as restless as any of Cheever’s most wayward plots and in need of “building a bridge” between the events of their lives as well as between those lives and their longings.

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Trapped in routines as restricting as any prison cell and often in marriages that seem little more than sexual battlefields, where even the hair curlers appear “bellicose,” Cheever’s characters appear poised between escaping into the past in a futile effort to repeat what they believe they have lost and aspiring to a lyrical future that can be affirmed, even “sung,” though never quite attained. Even the latter can be dangerous. “Dominated by anticipation” (a number of Cheever’s characters hope excessively), they are locked in a state of perpetual adolescence, unwilling to grow up, take responsibility, and face death in any form. Although their world may lie spread out like a bewildering and stupendous dream, they find it nevertheless confining, inhospitable, even haunted by fears of emotional and economic insecurity and a sense of personal inadequacy and inconsequentiality, their sole inheritance, it seems, from the many fathers who figure so prominently in the stories, often by virtue of their absence from the lives of their now-middle-aged sons. Adrift in an incoherent world and alone in the midst of suburbs zoned for felicity, they suffer frequent blows to their already fragile sense of self-esteem, seeing through yet wanting the protection of the veneer of social decorum and ceremoniousness that is the outward and visible sign of American middle-class aspiration and which Cheever’s characters do not so much court as covet. “The Enormous Radio” • The thinness of the veneer of social decorum is especially apparent in “The Enormous Radio,” a work that shows little trace of the Ernest Hemingway style that marks many of Cheever’s earlier stories. The story begins realistically enough. Jim and Irene Westcott, in their mid-thirties, are an average couple in all respects but one: their above-average interest in classical music (and, one assumes, in the harmony and decorum that such music represents). When their old radio breaks down, Jim generously buys an expensive new one to which Irene takes an instant dislike. Like their interest in music, which they indulge as if a secret but harmless vice, this small disruption in their harmonious married life seems a minor affair, at least at first. The radio, however, appearing “like an aggressive intruder,” shedding a “malevolent green light,” and possessing a “mistaken sensitivity to discord,” soon becomes a divisive, even diabolical presence, but the evil in this story, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” to which it has often been compared, comes from within the characters, not from without (the radio). When the radio begins to broadcast the Westcotts’ neighbors’ quarrels, lusts, fears, and crimes, Irene becomes dismayed, perversely entertained, and finally apprehensive; if she can eavesdrop on her neighbors’ most intimate conversations, she thinks that perhaps they can listen in on hers. Hearing their tales of woe, she demands that her husband affirm their happiness. Far from easing her apprehensiveness, his words only exacerbate it as he first voices his own previously well-guarded frustrations over money, job prospects, and growing old, and as he eventually exposes his wife’s own evil nature. As frustration explodes into accusation, the illusion of marital happiness that the Westcotts had so carefully cultivated shatters. As with so many Cheever stories, “The Enormous Radio” has its origin in biographical fact: While writing in the basement of a Sutton Place apartment house, Cheever would hear the elevator going up and down and would imagine that the wires could carry his neighbors’ conversations down to him. “Goodbye, My Brother” • “Goodbye, My Brother” derives from another and far more pervasive biographical fact, Cheever’s relationship with his elder brother, Fred, the father figure to whom he developed too close an attachment. Fred turned

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to business and for a time supported Cheever’s writing but, like Cheever, eventually became an alcoholic. Beginning with “The Brothers” and culminating in the fratricide in Falconer, relations between brothers figure nearly as prominently in Cheever’s fiction as those between spouses. Just as stories such as “The Enormous Radio” are not simply about marital spats, “Goodbye, My Brother” is not just about sibling rivalry. Just as the relationship between Irene and the malevolent radio is actually about a condition within the marriage and more especially within Irene herself, the external relationship between the story’s narrator and his brother Lawrence is actually about the narrator’s own Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality—in psychological terms, a matter of split personality and projection. Lawrence’s narrator objectifies Lawrence’s own frustrations, self-loathing, and fears. Lawrence and the narrator are two of the Pommeroys who have gathered on Laud’s Head in August for their annual family vacation. Like his sister, just back after her divorce, and their widowed mother, who drinks too much while trying to keep up the family’s upper-crust pretensions, the narrator needs these few weeks of respite from the grind of his dead-end teaching job. Together they swim, play cards and tennis, drink, and go to costume dances, where in an almost Jungian freak of chance, all the men come dressed as football players and all the women as brides, as eloquent a statement of the sadness of their blighted but still aspiring lives as one can imagine. Lawrence partakes in none of it. A lawyer moving from one city and job to another, he is the only family member with prospects and the only one unable to enjoy or even tolerate the illusion of happiness that the family seeks to maintain. He is also the only one willing, indeed eager, to detect the flaws and fakery in the Pommeroys’ summer home, its protective sea wall, and its equally protective forms of play. Gloomy and morose as well as critical, Lawrence is, to borrow the title of another Cheever story, the worm in the Pommeroy apple. He is the messenger bearing the bad news, whom the narrator nearly kills with a blow to the head as the two walk along the beach. He strikes not only to free himself from his brother’s morbid presence but also to extirpate the Lawrence side of his own divided self: Cain and Abel, murderer and good Samaritan. Once Lawrence and his sickly looking wife and daughter leave, the narrator turns to the purifying water and the triumphant vision of his mythically named wife and sister, Helen and Diana, rising naked from the sea. The story closes on a lyrically charged note that seems both to affirm all that the Pommeroys have sought and, by virtue of the degree of lyrical intensity, to accentuate the gap between that vision and Lawrence’s more factual and pessimistic point of view. “O Youth and Beauty” • “O Youth and Beauty” makes explicit what virtually all Cheever’s stories imply, the end of youth’s promise, of that hopeful vision that the ending of “Goodbye, My Brother” sought to affirm. Thus it seems ironically apt that “O Youth and Beauty” should begin with a long (two-hundred-word) Whitmanesque sentence, which, in addition to setting the scene and establishing the narrative situation, subtly evokes that Transcendental vision that Walt Whitman both espoused and, in his distinctive poetic style, sought to embody. Beginning “At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday night party in the suburb of Shady Hill,” it proceeds through a series of long anaphoric subordinate clauses beginning with the word “when” and ending with “then Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair.” The reader is thus introduced to what, for the partygoers, has already become something of a suburban ritual: the perfectly named

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Cash Bentley’s hurdling of the furniture as a way of warding off death and reliving the athletic triumphs of the youth that he refuses to relinquish. When Cash, now forty, breaks his leg, the intimations of mortality begin to multiply in his morbid mind. Although he may run his race alone, and although the Lawrentian gloominess that comes in the wake of the accident may make him increasingly isolated from his neighbors and friends, Cash is not at all unique, and his fears are extreme but nevertheless representative of a fear that pervades the entire community and that evidences itself in his wife’s trying to appear younger and slimmer than she is and her “cutting out of the current copy of Life those scenes of mayhem, disaster, and violent death that she felt might corrupt her children.” It is rather ironic that a moment later she should accidentally kill her husband in their own living room with the starter’s pistol, as he attempts to recapture the past glories of all those other late Saturday night races against time and self in an attempt always, already doomed, to recapture the past glories of his days as a young track star. The track is in fact an apt symbol for Cash’s circular life, in which, instead of progress, one finds only the horror of Nietzschean eternal recurrence. “The Five-Forty-Eight” • Upon first reading, “The Five-Forty-Eight” seems to have little in common with the blackly humorous “O Youth and Beauty.” A disturbed woman, Miss Dent, follows Blake, whose secretary she had been for three weeks and whose lover she was for one night, some six months earlier. She trails him from his office building to his commuter train. Threatening to shoot him, she gets off at his stop and forces him to kneel and rub his face in the dirt for having seduced and abandoned her. One of Cheever’s least likable characters, Blake gets what he deserves. Having chosen Miss Dent as he has chosen his other women (including, it seems, his wife) “for their lack of self-esteem,” he not only had her fired the day after they made love but also took the afternoon off. Miss Dent fares considerably better, for in choosing not to kill Blake she discovers “some kindness, some saneness” in herself that she believes she can put to use. Blake too undergoes a change insofar as he experiences regret for the first time and comes to understand his own vulnerability, which he has heretofore managed to safeguard by means of his “protective” routines and scrupulous observance of Shady Hill’s sumptuary laws. Whether these changes will be lasting remains unclear; he is last seen picking himself up, cleaning himself off, and walking home, alone. “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” • “The Five-Forty-Eight” is quite literally one of Cheever’s darkest stories; only the dimmest of lights and the faintest of hopes shine at its end. Although it too ends at night, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” is one of Cheever’s brightest and most cheerful works, full of the spiritual phototropism so important in Falconer, the novel that Newsweek hailed as “Cheever’s Triumph.” The housebreaker is thirty-six-year-old Johnny Hake, kindly and comical, who suddenly finds himself out of work, at risk of losing his house, his circle of friends, and the last shreds of his self-esteem. Desperate for cash, he steals nine hundred dollars from a neighbor, a theft that transforms his vision of the world. Suddenly, he begins to see evil everywhere and evidence that everyone can see him for what he now is. The “moral bottom” drops out of his world but in decidedly comic fashion: Even a birthday gift from his children—an extension ladder—becomes an acknowledgment of his wrongdoing (and nearly cause for divorce). Chance, however, saves Johnny. Walking to his next victim’s house, he feels a few drops of rain fall on his head and

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awakens from his ludicrous nightmare, his vision of the world restored. Opting for life’s simple pleasures (he is after all still unemployed), he returns home and has a pleasant dream in which he is seventeen years old. Johnny cannot get his youth back, but he does get his job back (and he does return the money he has stolen). The happy endings proliferate as the story slips the yoke of realism and romps in the magical realm of pure fairy tale, where, as Cheever puts it far more sardonically in his third novel, Bullet Park (1969), everything is “wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful.” “The Country Husband” • Comic exaggeration and hyperbolically happy endings characterize many of the stories of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. In “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” it is losing his job that starts Johnny Hake on his comical crime spree; in “The Country Husband,” it is nearly losing his life that sends Francis Weed on an ever more absurdly comical quest for love and understanding. Weed has his brush with death when his plane is forced to make an emergency landing in a field outside Philadelphia. The danger over, his vulnerability (like Blake’s) and mortality (like Cash Bentley’s) established, the real damage begins when Weed can find no one to lend a sympathetic ear—not his friend, Trace Bearden, on the commuter train, not even his wife, Julia (too busy putting dinner on the table), or his children (the youngest are fighting and the oldest is reading True Romance). With his very own True Adventure still untold, Weed goes outside, where he hears a neighbor playing “Moonlight Sonata,” rubato, “like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity—of everything it was Beethoven’s greatness not to know,” and everything it will now be Weed’s comic misfortune to experience as he embarks upon his own True Romance with the rather unromantically named Anne Murchison, his children’s new teenage babysitter. Playing the part of a lovesick adolescent, the middle-aged Weed acts out his midlife crisis and in doing so jeopardizes his family’s social standing and his marriage. The consequences are potentially serious, as are the various characters’ fears and troubles (Anne’s alcoholic father, Julia’s “natural fear of chaos and loneliness,” which leads to her obsessive partygoing). What is humorous is Cheever’s handling of these fears in a story in which solecisms are slapstick, downfalls are pratfalls, and pariahs turn out to be weeds in Cheever’s suburban Garden of Eden. When Francis finally decides to overcome his Emersonian self-reliance, to confide in and seek the help of a psychiatrist (who will do what neither friends nor family have thus far been willing to do—that is, listen), the first words Weed tearfully blurts out are, “I’m in love, Dr. Harzog.” Since “The Country Husband” is a comedy, Weed is cured of his “dis-ease” and able to channel his desires into more socially acceptable ways (conjugal love and, humorously enough, woodworking). The story ends with a typically Cheeveresque affirmation of Fitzgerald-like romantic possibilities, no less apparent in Shady Hill than in The Great Gatsby’s (1925) West Egg. It is an affirmation, however, tempered once again by the tenuousness of the characters’ situation in a “village that hangs, morally and economically, from a thread.” “The Death of Justina” • The thread will break—although still comically—in “The Death of Justina.” Here, the focus is double, on the parallel plights of the authorial narrator, a fiction writer, and the protagonist-narrator of the story that he writes (like “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” in oral style), also a writer (of advertising copy). Briefly stated, their shared predicament is this: how (for the one) to write about and

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(for the other) to live in a world that seems to grow increasingly chaotic and preposterous. As the authorial narrator explains, “Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.” The authorial narrator then offers a man named Moses’ account of the death of his wife’s cousin Justina as “one example of chaos.” Ordered by his doctor to stop smoking and drinking and by his boss to write copy for a product called Elixircol (something of a cross between Geritol and the Fountain of Youth), Moses suddenly finds himself at a complete loss when he tries to arrange for Justina’s funeral, for Justina has died in his house, and his house is an area of Proxmire Manor not zoned for death. No doctor will issue a death certificate, and the mayor refuses to sign an exemption until a quorum of the village council is available, but when Moses threatens to bury Justina in his yard, the mayor relents. Victorious but still shaken, Moses that night has a strange dream set in a vast supermarket where the shoppers stock their carts with unlabeled, shapeless packages, which are then, much to their shame, torn open at the checkout counters by brutish men who first ridicule the selections and then push the shoppers out the doors into what sounds much like Dante’s inferno. The scene is amusing but, like the ludicrously comical scenes in Franz Kafka’s works, also unsettling. The story does not affirm the shoppers any more than it does the village council that drew up the zoning laws, but it does understand what compels them even as it sympathetically satirizes the inadequacy of their means. As Moses points out, “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?” “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow” • “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow” makes a similar point in a similar way. Here too, the authorial narrator is perplexed, wondering what the nineteenth century writers Charles Dickens, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, and William Makepeace Thackeray would have made of a fallout shelter (bizarrely decorated and disguised with gnomes, plaster ducks, and a birdbath). He also understands, however, that fallout shelters are as much a part of his midtwentieth century landscape as are trees and shrubbery. The shelter in question belongs to Charlie Pastern, the country club general who spends his time calling loudly for nuclear attacks on any and all of his nation’s enemies. His world begins to unravel when, by chance, he begins an affair with a neighbor whose own fears and insecurity lead her first to promiscuity and then to demanding the key to the Pasterns’ shelter (a key that the local bishop also covets). Apparently the last words of “The Death of Justina,” taken verbatim from the Twenty-third Psalm, about walking through the shadow of the valley of death and fearing no evil, no longer apply. For all the good cheer, hearty advice, biblical quotations, comical predicaments, and lyrical affirmations, there lies at the center of Cheever’s fiction the fear of insufficiency and inadequacy—of shelters that will not protect, marriages that will not endure, jobs that will be lost, threads that will not hold. “The Swimmer” • The fact that the thread does not hold in “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s most painstakingly crafted and horrific work, is especially odd, for the story begins as comedy, a lighthearted satire, involving a group of suburban couples sitting around the Westerhazys’ pool on a beautiful midsummer Sunday afternoon

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talking about what and how much they drank the night before. Suddenly Neddy Merrill, yet another of Cheever’s middle-aged but youthfully named protagonists, decides to swim home pool to pool. More than a prank, it is for him a celebration of the fineness of the day, a voyage of discovery, a testament to life’s romantic possibilities. Neddy’s swim will cover eight miles, sixteen pools, in only ten pages (as printed in The Stories of John Cheever). Although he encounters some delays and obstacles—drinks graciously offered and politely, even ceremoniously, drunk, a thorny hedge to be gotten over, gravel underfoot—Neddy completes nearly half the journey in only two pages (pages 3-4; pages 1-2 are purely preparatory). The story and its reader move as confidently and rapidly as Neddy, but then there are a few interruptions: a brief rain shower that forces Neddy to seek shelter, a dry pool at one house, and a for-sale sign inexplicably posted at another. Midway through both journey and story, the point of view suddenly and briefly veers away from Neddy, who now looks pitifully exposed and foolishly stranded as he attempts to cross a divided highway. His strength and confidence ebbing, he seems unprepared for whatever lies ahead yet unable to turn back. Like the reader, he is unsure when his little joke turned so deadly serious. At the one public pool on his itinerary, he is assaulted by crowds, shrill sounds, and harsh odors. After being very nearly stalled for two pages, the pace quickens ever so slightly but only to leave Neddy still weaker and more disoriented. Each “breach in the succession” exposes Neddy’s inability to bridge the widening gap between his vision of the world and his actual place in it. He is painfully rebuffed by those he had previously been powerful enough to mistreat—a former mistress, a socially inferior couple whose invitations he and his wife routinely discarded. The apparent cause of Neddy’s downfall begins to become clear to the reader only as it begins to become clear to Neddy—a sudden and major financial reversal—but Neddy’s situation cannot be attributed to merely economic factors, nor is it susceptible to purely rational analysis. Somewhere along Neddy’s and the reader’s way, everything has changed: The passing of hours becomes the passage of whole seasons, perhaps even years, as realism gives way to fantasy, humor to horror as the swimmer sees his whole life pass before him in a sea of repressed memories. Somehow Neddy has woken into his own worst dream. Looking into his empty house, he comes face to face with the insecurity that nearly all Cheever’s characters fear and the inadequacy that they all feel. The stories (and novels) that Cheever wrote during the last two decades of his life grew increasingly and innovatively disparate in structure. “The Jewels of the Cabots,” for example, or “The President of the Argentine” matches the intensifying disunity of the author’s personal life. Against this narrative waywardness, however, Cheever continued to offer and even to extend an affirmation of the world and his protagonists’ place in it in a lyrically charged prose at once serene and expansive (“The World of Apples,” Falconer). In other words, he continued to do during these last two decades what he had been doing so well for the previous three: writing a fiction of celebration and incoherence. Robert A. Morace Other major works novels: The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957; The Wapshot Scandal, 1964; Bullet Park, 1969; Falconer, 1977; Oh, What a Paradise It Seems, 1982.

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nonfiction: The Letters of John Cheever, 1988 (Benjamin Cheever, editor); The Journals of John Cheever, 1991; Glad Tidings, a Friendship in Letters: The Correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945-1982, 1993. teleplay: The Shady Hill Kidnapping, 1982. Bibliography Bosha, Francis J., ed. The Critical Response to John Cheever. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Collection of reviews and critical essays on Cheever’s novels and shortstory collections by various commentators and critics. Cheever, Susan. Home Before Dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. This memoir by Cheever’s daughter is especially important for fleshing out his troubled early years and providing an insider’s look at his marital and other personal difficulties (alcoholism, illnesses, sexual desires). Suffers from lack of documentation and indexing. More valuable as a synthesis of previously published material than as a daughter’s intimate revelations. Collins, Robert G., ed. Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Reprints an excellent sampling of reviews, interviews, and early criticism (including many dubbed “new” that are in fact only slightly reworked older pieces). Of the truly new items, three deserve special mention: Collins’s biocritical introduction, Dennis Coale’s bibliographical supplement, and particularly Samuel Coale’s “Cheever and Hawthorne: The American Romancer’s Art,” arguably one of the most important critical essays on Cheever. Dessner, Lawrence Jay. “Gender and Structure in John Cheever’s ‘The Country Husband.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Winter, 1994): 57-68. Argues that the story is structured as a comedy with a farcical narrow escape and a tension between the domestic and the wild; contends the plot pattern dissolves pain into laughter. Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1988. Scrupulously researched, interestingly written, and judiciously argued, Donaldson’s biography presents Cheever as both author and private man. Donaldson fleshes out most of the previously unknown areas in Cheever’s biography and dispels many of the biographical myths that Cheever himself encouraged. The account is sympathetic yet objective. Hipkiss, Robert. “‘The Country Husband’: A Model Cheever Achievement.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall, 1990): 577-585. Analyzes the story as a prose poem filled with imagery of war, myth, music, and nature. Argues that the elaborate image pattern makes one realize how rooted in the American value system the protagonist’s final fate really is. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these ten short stories by Cheever: “The Angel of the Bridge” and “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow” (vol. 1); “The Country Husband” and “The Enormous Radio” (vol. 2); “The FiveForty-Eight” and “Goodbye, My Brother” (vol. 3); “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (vol. 4); “Metamorphoses” (vol. 5); “The Swimmer” (vol. 7); and “The World of Apples” (vol. 8). Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995. The first book-length study of Cheever to make use of his journals and letters published in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Focuses on how Cheever created a mythopoeic world in his novels and stories. Includes two chapters on his short stories, with detailed

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analyses of stories in The Enormous Radio, and Other Stories and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. O’Hara, James E. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. In addition to reprinting five important reviews and critical essays and providing a detailed chronology and annotated selected bibliography, this volume offers a 120page analysis of Cheever as a writer of short stories that goes well beyond the introductory level. O’Hara’s discussion of the early unanthologized stories is especially noteworthy. Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne, 1979. This volume in Twayne’s United States Authors series is introductory in nature. Although it lacks the thematic coherence of other works, it has great breadth and evidences an awareness of previous critical commentary.

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Anton Chekhov Born: Taganrog, Russia; January 29, 1860 Died: Badenweiler, Germany; July 15, 1904 Principal short fiction • Skazki Melpomeny, 1884; Pystrye rasskazy, 1886; Nevinnye rechi, 1887; V sumerkakh, 1887; Rasskazy, 1888; The Tales of Tchehov, 1916-1922 (13 volumes); The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-three New Stories, 1999 (revised and expanded, 2001). Other literary forms • Anton Chekhov’s literary reputation rests as much on his drama as on his stories and sketches, despite the fact that he was a far more prolific writer of fiction, having written only seventeen plays but almost six hundred stories. Chayka (1896, rev. 1898; The Seagull, 1909), Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya, 1914), Tri sestry (1901; The Three Sisters, 1920), and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908), Chekhov’s chief dramatic works, are universally considered classics of modern theater. Chekhov was also an indefatigable correspondent, and his letters, along with his diaries and notebooks, form an important segment of his writing. He also wrote numerous journal articles and one long work, Ostrov Sakhalin (serialized in 1893 and 1894), a scholarly exposé of an island penal colony that Chekhov visited in 1890. Achievements • In his lifetime, Anton Chekhov gained considerable critical acclaim. In 1888, he won the Pushkin Prize for his fiction, and in 1900, he was selected to honorary membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences for both his fiction and his drama. Chekhov’s fiction departs from the formulaic, heavily plotted story to mirror Russian life authentically, concentrating on characters in very ordinary circumstances that often seem devoid of conflict. A realist, Chekhov treads a fine line between detachment and a whimsical but sympathetic concern for his subjects. In his mature work, he is perhaps the most genial of Russian masters, compassionate and forgiving, seldom strident or doctrinaire. Equally important, that mature work reflects very careful artistry, worthy of study for its technique alone. Biography • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the third of six Chekhov children, was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, a provincial city in southern Russia. His father, Pavel Egorovich Chekhov, son of a serf, ran a meager grocery store, which young Anton often tended in his neglectful father’s absence. A religious fanatic and stern disciplinarian, Pavel gave his children frequent beatings and forced them to spend long hours in various devotional activities. For Anton, who did not share his father’s zeal, it was a depressing, gloomy childhood. Although the family was poor and Pavel’s marginal business was slowly failing, Anton was able to get some schooling, first at a Greek parochial school, then at the boys’ gymnasium, or high school. In 1875, after a bout with acute peritonitis, young Chekhov decided to become a physician. His future brightened when, in 1876, his father, trying to evade his creditors, secretly moved the family to Moscow, leaving Anton to finish school. In 1879, Anton moved to Moscow, entered the medical school of the University of

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Moscow, and almost immediately began publishing stories in various magazines and newspapers. A very prolific apprentice, by 1884, when he graduated from medical school, he had published his first collection of short fiction. By 1886, Chekhov had begun his long association and friendship with A. S. Suvorin, the owner of an influential conservative newspaper to which Chekhov contributed dozens of pieces. Recognized as a significant new author, Chekhov devoted more time to writing and less and less to his medical practice, which, in time, he would abandon altogether. Chekhov’s greatly improved finances allowed him to buy a better Moscow house and gave him time to travel, which he freLibrary of Congress quently did, despite ill health. In 1887, he journeyed to the Don Steppe, and two years later crossed Asia to visit the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island. The next year he traveled to Europe with Suvorin. In 1892, Chekhov purchased Melikhovo, an estate outside Moscow. It became a gathering place for family, relatives, and associates. There, too, Chekhov practiced medicine, more as a human service to poor villagers than as a necessary source of income. In 1896, Chekhov had his first theatrical success with The Seagull, although the reaction of the opening-night audience greatly distressed the author. Suffering from tuberculosis, by the mid-1890’s he began coughing up blood, and in 1897 he had to be hospitalized. In 1898, Chekhov began his propitious association with the newly formed Moscow Art Theater and its great director, Konstantin Stanislavski. He also met Olga Leonardovna Knipper, a young actor. Despite his ill health and his frequent sojourns to Yalta, they carried on a love affair and were married in 1901. The last six years of Chekhov’s life, from 1898 to 1904, brought him as much recognition as a dramatist as his earlier career had brought him as a writer of fiction. Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, his last significant work, were all major successes. In 1904, in one last attempt to stay the course of his disease, Chekhov and his wife went to Germany, where, at Badenweiler, he died on July 15. Analysis • Anton Chekhov published his earliest stories and sketches in various popular magazines under pseudonyms, the most often used being “Antosha Chekhonte.” As that pen name hints, he was at first an unassuming and relatively compliant “hack,” willing to dash off careless pieces fashioned for the popular reader. Most are light, topical studies of social types, often running fewer than a thousand words. Many are mere sketches or extended jokes, often banal or cynical. Some are farces, built on car-

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icatures. Others are brief parodies of popular genres, including the romantic novel. Few display much originality in subject. Still, in their technique, economy of expression, and themes, the early pieces prefigure some of Chekhov’s most mature work. In them, Chekhov experimented with point of view and most particularly the use of irony as a fictional device. He also established his preference for an almost scientific objectivity in his depiction of character and events, an insistence that, in the course of his career, he would have to defend against his detractors. Chekhov’s penchant for irony is exemplified in his very first published story, “Pis’mo k uchenomu sosedu” (“A Letter to a Learned Neighbor”), which appeared in 1880. The letter writer, Vladimirovich, is a pompous, officious oaf who makes pretentious statements about science and knowledge with inane blunders in syntax, spelling, and diction, inadvertently revealing his boorish stupidity while trying to ingratiate himself with his erudite neighbor. As does this sketch, many of Chekhov’s first pieces lampoon types found in Russian society, favorite satirical targets being functionaries in the czarist bureaucracy and their obsequious regard for their superiors. One sketch, “Smert’ chinovnika” (“The Death of a Government Clerk”), deals with a civil servant named Chervyakov who accidentally sneezes on a general and is mortified because he is unable to obtain the man’s pardon. After repeated rebukes, he resigns himself to defeat, lies down, and dies. His sense of self-worth is so intricately bound up in his subservient role that, unpardoned, he has no reason to continue living. In another story, “Khameleon” (“The Chameleon”), Ochumelov, a police officer, vacillates between placing blame on a dog or the man whom the dog has bitten until it can be confirmed that the dog does or does not belong to a certain General Zhigalov. When it turns out that the dog belongs to the general’s brother, the officer swears that he will get even with the dog’s victim. Like so many other characters in Chekhov’s fiction, Ochumelov is a bully to his subordinates but an officious toady to his betters. Other stories, not built on irony or a momentous event in the central character’s life, are virtually plotless fragments. Some chronicle the numbing effects of living by social codes and mores rather than from authentic inner convictions, while others record human expectations frustrated by a sobering and often grim reality. In several stories, Chekhov deals with childhood innocence encountering or narrowly evading an adult world that is sordid, deceitful, or perverse. For example, in “V more” (“At Sea”), a man decides to provide a sex education for his son by having him observe a newly married couple and a third man through a bulkhead peephole. Presumably to satisfy his own puerile interest, the father peeps first and is so mortified by what he sees that he does not allow his son to look at all. Sometimes severely restricted by magazine requirements, Chekhov learned to be direct and sparse in statement. Many of his early stories have little or no exposition at all. The main character’s lineage, elaborate details of setting, authorial incursions—all disappear for economy’s sake. In his precipitous openings, Chekhov often identifies a character by name, identifies his class or profession, and states his emotional condition, all in a single sentence. Others open with a snippet of conversation that has presumably been in progress for some time. When he does set a scene with description, Chekhov does so with quick, deft, impressionistic strokes, with only the barest of details. Chekhov also learned the value of symbols as guides to inner character. In “Melyuzga,” a pathetic clerk named Nevyrazimov is trying to write a flattering Easter

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letter to his superior, whom, in reality, he despises. Hoping for a raise, this miserable underling must grovel, which contributes to his self-loathing and self-pity. As he tries to form the ingratiating words, he spies a cockroach and takes pity on the insect because he deems its miserable existence worse than his own. After considering his own options, however, and growing more despondent, when he again spies the roach he squashes it with his palm, then burns it, an act which, as the last line divulges, makes him feel better. The destruction of the roach is a symbolic act. It seems gratuitous and pointless, but it reveals the dehumanizing effect that chinopochitanie, or “rank reverence,” has on the clerk. In destroying the roach, Nevyrazimov is able to displace some of the self-loathing that accompanies his self-pity. His misery abates because he is able, for a moment, to play the bully. Despite the limitations that popular writing imposed, between 1880 and 1885 there is an advance in Chekhov’s work, born, perhaps, from a growing tolerance and sympathy for his fellow human beings. He gradually turned away from short, acrid farces toward more relaxed, psychologically probing studies of his characters and their ubiquitous misery and infrequent joy. In “Unter Prishibeev” (“Sergeant Prishibeev”), Chekhov again develops a character who is unable to adjust to change because his role in life has been too rigid and narrow. A subservient army bully, he is unable to mend his ways when returned to civilian life and torments his fellow townspeople through spying, intimidation, and physical abuse. His harsh discipline, sanctioned in the military, only lands him in jail, to his total astonishment. By 1886, Chekhov had begun to receive encouragement from the Russian literati, notably Dmitrí Grigorovich, who, in an important unsolicited letter, warned Chekhov not to waste his talents on potboilers. The impact on Chekhov was momentous, for he had received the recognition that he desired. Thereafter, he worked to perfect his craft, to master the literature nastroenija, or “literature of mood,” works in which a single, dominant mood is evoked and action is relatively insignificant. This does not mean that all Chekhov’s stories are plotless or lack conflict. “Khoristka” (“The Chorus Girl”), for example, is a dramatic piece in method akin to the author’s curtain-raising farces based on confrontation and ironic turns. The singer, confronted by the wife of one of her admirers, an embezzler, gives the wife all of her valuables to redeem the philanderer’s reputation. His wife’s willingness to humble herself before a chorus girl regenerates the man’s love and admiration for his spouse. He cruelly snubs the chorus girl and, in rank ingratitude, leaves her alone in abject misery. Other stories using an ironic twist leave the principal character’s fate to the reader’s imagination. “Noch’ pered sudom” (“The Night Before the Trial”) is an example. The protagonist, who narrates the story, makes a ludicrous blunder. On the eve of his trial for bigamy, he poses as a doctor and writes a bogus prescription for a woman. He also accepts payment from her husband, only to discover at the start of his trial that the husband is his prosecutor. The story goes no further than the man’s brief speculation on his approaching fate. In yet another, more involved story, “Nishchii” (“The Beggar”), a lawyer, Skvortsov, is approached by a drunken and deceitful but resourceful beggar, Lushkov, whom he unmercifully scolds as a liar and a wastrel. He then sets Lushkov to work chopping wood, challenging him to earn his way through honest, hard work. Before long, Skvortsov persuades himself that he has the role of Lushkov’s redeemer and manages to find him enough work doing odd jobs to earn a meager livelihood. Eventually, growing respectable and independent, Lushkov obtains decent work in a no-

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tary’s office. Two years later, encountering Skvortsov outside a theater, Lushkov confides that it was indeed at Skvortsov’s house that he was saved—not, however, by Skvortsov’s scolding but by Skvortsov’s cook, Olga, who took pity on Lushkov and always chopped the wood for him. It was Olga’s nobility that prompted the beggar’s reformation, not the pompous moral rectitude of the lawyer. In 1887, when Chekhov took the time to visit the Don Steppe, he was established as one of Russia’s premier writers of fiction. With the accolades, there almost inevitably came some negative criticism. A few of his contemporaries argued that Chekhov seemed to lack a social conscience, that he remained too detached and indifferent to humanity in a time of great unrest and need for reform. Chekhov never believed that his art should serve a bald polemical purpose, but he was sensitive to the unjust critical opinion that he lacked strong personal convictions. In much of his mature writing, Chekhov worked to dispel that misguided accusation. For a time Chekhov came under the spell of Leo Tolstoy, his great contemporary, not so much for that moralist’s religious fervor but for his doctrine of nonresistance to evil. That idea is fundamental to “The Meeting.” In this tale, which in tone is similar to the didactic Russian folktales, a thief steals money from a peasant, who had collected it for refurbishing a church. The thief, baffled by the peasant’s failure to resist, gradually repents and returns the money. “The Steppe” • In 1888, Chekhov wrote and published “Step’” (“The Steppe”), inspired by his journey across the Don Steppe. The story, consisting of eight chapters, approaches the novella in scope and reflects the author’s interest in trying a longer work, which Grigorovich had advised him to do. In method, the piece is similar to picaresque tales, in which episodes are like beads, linked only by a common string—the voyage or quest. The main characters are a merchant, Kuznichov, his nine-year-old nephew, Egorushka, and a priest, Father Christopher, who set out to cross the steppe in a cart. The adults travel on business, to market wool, while Egorushka is off to school. The monotony of their journey is relieved by tidbits of conversation and brief encounters with secondary characters in unrelated episodes. Diversion for young Egorushka is provided by various denizens of the steppe. These minor characters, though delineated but briefly, are both picturesque and lifelike. Some of the characters spin a particular tale of woe. For example, there is Solomon, brother to Moses, the Jewish owner of a posting house. Solomon, disgusted with human greed, has burned his patrimony and now wallows in self-destructive misery. Another miserable figure is Pantelei, an old peasant whose life has offered nothing but arduous work. He has nearly frozen to death several times on the beautiful but desolate steppe. Dymov, the cunning, mean-spirited peasant, is another wretch devoid of either grace or hope. The story involves a realistic counterpart to the romantic quest, for the merchant and the priest, joined by the charming Countess Dranitskaya, seek the almost legendary figure, Varlamov. Thus, in a quiet, subdued way, the work has an epic cast to it. Its unity depends on imagery and thematic centrality of the impressions of Egorushka, whose youthful illusions play off against the sordid reality of the adult world. The journey to the school becomes for Egorushka a rite of passage, a familiar Chekhovian motif. At the end of the story, about to enter a strange house, the boy finally breaks into tears, feeling cut off from his past and apprehensive about his future. “The Steppe” marks a tremendous advance over Chekhov’s earliest works. Its im-

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pressionistic description of the landscape is often poetic, and though, like most of Chekhov’s fiction, the work is open plotted, it is structurally tight and very compelling. The work’s hypnotic attraction comes from its sparse, lyrical simplicity and timeless theme. It is the first of the author’s flawless pieces. “A Boring Story” • Another long work, “Skuchnaia istoriia” (“A Boring Story”), shifts Chekhov’s character focus away from a youth first encountering misery in the world to an old man, Nikolai Stepanovich, who, near the end of life, finally begins to realize its stupefying emptiness. The professor is the narrator, although, when the story starts, it is presented in the third rather than the first person. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the voice is the professor’s own. The story is actually a diary, unfolding in the present tense. The reader learns that although Stepanovich enjoys an illustrious reputation in public, of which he is extremely proud, in private he is dull and emotionally handicapped. Having devoted his life to teaching medicine, the value of which he never questions, the professor has sacrificed love, compassion, and friendship. He has gradually alienated himself from family, colleagues, and students, as is shown by his repeated failures to relate to them in other than superficial, mechanical ways. He admits his inability to communicate to his wife or daughter, and although he claims to love his ward, Katya, whom his wife and daughter hate, even she finally realizes that he is an emotional cripple and deserts him to run off with another professor who has aroused some jealousy in Nikolai. The professor, his life dedicated to academe, has become insensitive to such things as his daughter Liza’s chagrin over her shabby coat or her feelings for Gnekker, her suitor, who, the professor suspects, is a fraud. Unable to understand his family’s blindness to Gnekker, whom he perceives as a scavenging crab, Nikolai sets out to prove his assumption. He goes to Kharkov to investigate Gnekker’s background and confirms his suspicions, only to discover that he is too late. In his absence, Liza and Gnekker have married. Bordering on the tragic, “A Boring Story” presents a character who is unable to express what he feels. He confesses his dull nature, but, though honest with himself, he can confide in no one. Detached, he is able to penetrate the illusions of others, but his approach to life is so abstract and general as to hinder meaningful interpersonal relationships. Near the end of life, he is wiser but spiritually paralyzed by his conviction that he knows very little of human worth. One notes in “A Boring Story” Chekhov’s fascination with the fact that conversation may not ensure communication, and his treatment of that reality becomes a signatory motif in Chekhov’s later works, including his plays. Characters talk but do not listen, remaining in their own illusory worlds, which mere words will not let them share with others. “The Duel” • “Duel” (“The Duel”), a long story, is representative of Chekhov’s most mature work. Its focal concern is with self-deception and rationalization for one’s failures. It pits two men against each other. The one, Laevsky, is a spineless, listless, and disillusioned intellectual who has miserably failed in life. The other, Von Koren, is an active, self-righteous zoologist who comes to despise the other man as a parasite. In his early conversations with his friend Dr. Samoilenko, Laevsky reveals his tendency to place blame on civilization for human failings, a notion espoused by JeanJacques Rousseau and a host of other romantic thinkers. The doctor, whose mundane, pragmatic values simply deflect Laevsky’s lament, cannot understand his

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friend’s ennui and disenchantment with his mistress, Nadezhda Feydorovna. Laevsky perceives himself as a Hamlet figure, one who has been betrayed by Nadezhda, for whom he feels an increasing revulsion, which he masks with hypocritical sweetness. He envisions himself as being caught without purpose, vaguely believing that an escape to St. Petersburg without Nadezhda would provide a panacea for all of his ills. Laevsky’s antagonist, Von Koren, is next introduced. Von Koren is a brash, outspoken, vain man who believes that Laevsky is worthy only of drowning. He finds Laevsky depraved and genetically dangerous because he has remarkable success with women and might father more of his parasitical type. During their encounters, Von Koren is aggressive and takes every chance to bait Laevsky, who is afraid of him. Laevsky’s situation deteriorates when Nadezhda’s husband dies, and she, guilt ridden, looks to him to save her. Laevsky wants only to escape, however, and he runs off to Samoilenko, begging the doctor for a loan so he might flee to St. Petersburg. After confessing his depravity, he swears that he will send for Nadezhda after he arrives in St. Petersburg, but in reality he has no intention of doing so. Caught up in his own web of lies and half-truths, Laevsky must deal with those of Nadezhda, who is carrying on affairs with two other men and who has her own deceitful plans of escape. Convinced that Samoilenko has betrayed him through gossiping about him, Laevsky starts an argument with him in the presence of Von Koren, who supports the doctor. The heated exchange ends with a challenge to a duel, gleefully accepted by Von Koren. The night before the duel, Laevsky is extremely frightened. He is petrified by the prospect of imminent death, and his lies and deceit weigh upon him heavily. He passes through a spiritual crisis paralleled by a storm that finally subsides at dawn, just as Laevsky sets out for the dueling grounds. The duel turns into a comic incident. The duelists are not sure of protocol, and before they even start they seem inept. As it turns out, Laevsky nobly discharges his pistol into the air, and Von Koren, intent on killing his opponent, only manages to graze his neck. The duel has a propitious effect on both men. Laevsky and Nadezhda are reconciled, and he gives up his foolish romantic illusions and begins to live a responsible life. He is also reconciled to Von Koren, who, in a departing confession, admits that a scientific view of things cannot account for all life’s uncertainties. There is, at the end, a momentary meeting of the two men’s minds. “The Duel” is representative of a group of quasi-polemical pieces that Chekhov wrote between 1889 and 1896, including “Gusev” (“Gusev”), “Palata No. 6” (“Ward Number Six”), and “Moia zhizn” (“My Life”). All have parallel conflicts in which antagonists are spokespersons for opposing ideologies, neither of which is capable of providing humankind with a definitive epistemology or sufficient guide to living. “Rothschild’s Fiddle” • Other mature stories from the same period deal with the eroding effect of materialism on the human spirit. “Skripka Rotshil’da” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle”) is a prime example. In this work, Yakov Ivanov, nicknamed Bronze, a poor undertaker, is the protagonist. Yakov, who takes pride in his work, also plays the fiddle and thereby supplements his income from coffin-making. For a time, Yakov plays at weddings with a Jewish orchestra, whose members, inexplicably, he comes to hate, especially Rothschild, a flutist who seems determined to play even the lightest of pieces plaintively. Because of his belligerent behavior, after a time the Jews hire Yakov only in emergencies. Never in a good temper, Yakov is obsessed with his financial losses and his bad luck. Tormented by these matters at night, he can find some respite only by striking a solitary string on his fiddle.

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When his wife, Marfa, becomes ill, Yakov’s main concern is what her death will cost him. She, in contrast, dies untroubled, finding in death a welcome release from the wretchedness that has been her lot married to Yakov. In her delirium, she does recall their child, who had died fifty years earlier, and a brief period of joy under a willow tree by the river, but Yakov can remember none of these things. Only when she is buried does Yakov experience depression, realizing that their marriage had been loveless. Sometime later Yakov accidentally comes upon and recognizes the willow tree of which Marfa had spoken. He rests there, beset by visions and a sense of a wasted past, regretting his indifference to his wife and his cruelty to the Jew, Rothschild. Shortly after this epiphany, he grows sick and prepares to die. Waiting, he plays his fiddle mournfully, growing troubled by not being able to take his fiddle with him to the grave. At his final confession, he tells the priest to give the fiddle to Rothschild, in his first and only generous act. Ironically, the fiddle for Rothschild becomes a means of improving his material well-being. As “Rothschild’s Fiddle” illustrates, Chekhov continued his efforts to fathom the impoverished spirit of his fellow man, often with a sympathetic, kindly regard. Most of his last stories are written in that vein. Near the end of the 1890’s, Chekhov gave increasing attention to his plays, which, combined with his ill health, reduced his fictional output. Still, between 1895 and his last fictional piece, “Nevesta” (“The Bride”), published in 1902, he wrote some pieces that rank among his masterpieces. As in “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” Chekhov’s concern with conflicting ideologies gives way to more fundamental questions about human beings’ ability to transcend their own nature. He examines characters who suffer desperate unhappiness, anxiety, isolation, and despair, experienced mainly through the characters’ inability either to give or to accept love. He also, however, concerns himself with its antithesis, the suffocating potential of too much love, which is the thematic focus of “Dushechka” (“The Darling”). “The Darling” • In this story, Olenka, the protagonist, is a woman who seems to have no character apart from her marital and maternal roles. She is otherwise a cipher who, between husbands, can only mourn, expressing her grief in folk laments. She has no important opinions of her own, only banal concerns with petty annoyances such as insects and hot weather. She comes to life only when she fulfills her role as wife and companion to her husband, whose opinions and business jargon she adopts as her own, which, to her third husband, is a source of great annoyance. Ironically, alive and radiant in love, Olenka seems to suck the life out of those whom she adores. For example, her love seems to cause the demise of her first husband, Kukin, a wretched, self-pitying theater manager. Only in the case of her last love, that for her foster son, Sasha, in her maternal role, does Olenka develop opinions of her own. Her love, however, ever suffocating, instills rebellion in the boy and will clearly lead to Olenka’s downfall. “The Bride” • By implication, the comic, almost sardonic depiction of Olenka argues a case for the emancipation of women, a concern to which Chekhov returns in “Nevesta” (“The Bride”). This story deals with a young woman, Nadya, who attempts to find an identity independent of roles prescribed by traditional mores and the oppressive influence of her mother, Nina, and her grandmother. Nadya, at the age of twenty-three, is something of a dreamer. As the story begins,

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she is vaguely discontent with her impending marriage to Andrew, son to a local canon of the same name. Her rebellion against her growing unhappiness is encouraged by Sasha, a distant relative who becomes her sympathetic confidant. He constantly advises Nadya to flee, to get an education and free herself from the dull, idle, and stultifying existence that the provincial town promises. When Andrew takes Nadya on a tour of their future house, she is repulsed by his vision of their life together, finding him stupid and unimaginative. She confides in her mother, who offers no help at all, claiming that it is ordinary for young ladies to get cold feet as weddings draw near. Nadya then asks Sasha for help, which, with a ruse, he provides. He takes Nadya with him to Moscow and sends her on to St. Petersburg, where she begins her studies. After some months, Nadya, very homesick, visits Sasha in Moscow. It is clear to her that Sasha, ill with tuberculosis, is now dying. She returns to her home to deal with her past but finds the atmosphere no less oppressive than before, except that her mother and grandmother now seem more pathetic than domineering. After a telegram comes announcing Sasha’s death, she leaves again for St. Petersburg, resolved to find a new life severed completely from her old. As well as any story, “The Bride” illustrates why Chekhov is seen as the chronicler of twilight Russia, a period of stagnation when the intelligentsia seemed powerless to effect reform and the leviathan bureaucracy and outmoded traditions benumbed the people and robbed the more sensitive of spirit and hope. Although the contemporary reader of Chekhov’s fiction might find that pervasive, heavy atmosphere difficult to fathom, particularly in a comic perspective, no one can doubt Chekhov’s mastery of mood. With Guy de Maupassant in France, Chekhov is rightly credited with mastering the form, mood, and style of the type of short fiction that would be favored by serious English-language writers from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce onward. His impact on modern fiction is pervasive. John W. Fiero Other major works plays: Platonov, wr. 1878-1881, pb. 1923 (English translation, 1930); Ivanov, pr., pb. 1887 (revised, pr. 1889; English translation, 1912); Medved, pr., pb. 1888 (A Bear, 1909); Leshy, pr. 1889 (The Wood Demon, 1925); Predlozheniye, pb. 1889, pr. 1890 (A Marriage Proposal, 1914); Svadba, pb. 1889, pr. 1890 (The Wedding, 1916); Yubiley, pb. 1892 (The Jubilee, 1916); Chayka, pr. 1896 (revised pr. 1898, pb. 1904; The Seagull, 1909); Dyadya Vanya, pb. 1897, pr. 1899 (based on his play The Wood Demon; Uncle Vanya, 1914); Tri sestry, pr., pb. 1901 (revised pb. 1904; The Three Sisters, 1920); Vishnyovy sad, pr., pb. 1904 (The Cherry Orchard, 1908); The Plays of Chekhov, pb. 19231924 (2 volumes); Nine Plays, pb. 1959; The Complete Plays, pb. 2006 (Laurence Senelick, editor). miscellaneous: The Works of Anton Chekhov, 1929; Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem A. P. Chekhova, 1944-1951 (20 volumes); The Portable Chekhov, 1947; The Oxford Chekhov, 1964-1980 (9 volumes). nonfiction: Ostrov Sakhalin, 1893-1894; Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics, 1924; The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1955.

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Bibliography Bartlett, Rosamund Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. This biography takes a look not only at Chekhov’s life but also at the geography and history of the Russian empire. Bloom, Harold, ed. Anton Chekhov. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. Volume in the series Modern Critical Views. Includes bibliographical references, an index, and an introduction by Bloom. Clyman, Toby, ed. A Chekhov Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Collection of critical essays, especially commissioned for this volume, on all aspects of Chekhov’s life, art, and career. Some of the most important critics of Chekhov’s work are represented here in essays on his major themes, his dramatic technique, his narrative technique, and his influence on modern drama and on the modern short story. Flath, Carol A. “The Limits to the Flesh: Searching for the Soul in Chekhov’s ‘A Boring Story.’” Slavic and East European Journal 41 (Summer, 1997): 271-286. Argues that “A Boring Story” affirms the value of art and offers comfort against the harshness of the truth about ordinary life and death. Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Guide to the life and works of Chekhov. Johnson, Ronald J. Anton Chekhov: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Introduction to Chekhov’s short stories, from his earliest journalistic sketches and ephemera to his influential stories “Gooseberries” and “Lady with a Dog.” Discusses Chekhov’s objective narrative stance, his social conscience, and his belief in the freedom of the individual. Includes excerpts from Chekhov’s letters in which he talks about his fiction, as well as comments by other critics who discuss Chekhov’s attitude toward religion and sexuality. Lantz, K. A. Anton Chekhov: A Reference Guide to Literature. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Lantz offers an indispensable tool for the researcher. The work provides a brief biography, a checklist of Chekhov’s published works with both English and Russian titles, chronologically arranged, and a very useful annotated bibliography of criticism through 1983. Malcolm, Janet. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. New York: Random House, 2001. With Cheklov as a guide, Malcolm draws on her observations as a tourist/journalist to compose a melancholy portrait of post-Soviet Russia. Malcolm weaves her encounters with contemporary Russians with biographical and critical analyses of Chekhov and his writings. Martin, David W. “Chekhov and the Modern Short Story in English.” Neophilologus 71 (1987): 129-143. Martin surveys Chekhov’s influence on various English-language writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Frank O’Connor. He compares selected works by Chekhov with pieces by those he has influenced and discusses those Chekhovian traits and practices revealed therein. He credits Chekhov with showing how effete or banal characters or circumstances can be enlivened with the dynamics of style. The article is a good departure point for further comparative study. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eighteen short stories by Chekhov: “The Bet,” “The Bishop,” and “The Chemist’s Wife” (vol. 1); “The Darling,” “The Duel,” “Easter Eve,” and “Enemies” (vol. 2); “Gooseberries”

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and “Gusev” (vol. 3); “The Kiss” and “The Lady with the Dog” (vol. 4); “The Man in a Case” and “Misery” (vol. 5); “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (vol. 6); “The Steppe: The Story of a Journey” and “A Trifling Occurrence” (vol. 7); and “Vanka” and “Ward No. 6” (vol. 8). Prose, Francine. “Learning from Chekhov.” Western Humanities Review 41 (1987): 114. Prose’s article is an appreciative eulogy on the staying power of Chekhov’s stories as models for writers. She notes that while Chekhov broke many established rules, his stress on objectivity and writing without judgment is of fundamental importance. The piece would be of most help to creative writers.

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Charles Waddell Chesnutt Born: Cleveland, Ohio; June 20, 1858 Died: Cleveland, Ohio; November 15, 1932 Principal short fiction • The Conjure Woman, 1899; The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, 1899. Other literary forms • Charles Waddell Chesnutt achieved his literary reputation and stature as a short-story writer. His scholarly bent and indelible concern for human conditions in American society, however, occasionally moved him to experiment in other literary forms. Based on his study of race relations in the American South, he wrote the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). The Colonel’s Dream followed in 1905. As a result of the critical acclaim for these novels and for his first, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt became known not only as a short-story writer but also as a first-rate novelist. However, most of his novels were not published until long after he died. These include Mandy Oxendine, written in 1897 and first publishied in 1997; A Business Career, written in 1898 and published in 2005; Evelyn’s Husband, written in 1903 and published in 2005; and The Quarry, written in 1928 and published in 1999. In 1885, Chesnutt published several poems in The Cleveland Voice. The acceptance of his essay “What Is a White Man?” by the Independent in May of 1889 began his career as an essayist. Illustrating his diverse talent still further and becoming an impassioned voice for human justice, he wrote essays for a major portion of his life. Collections of his essays were published in 1999 and 2001, and a volume of his letters appeared in 2002. Chesnutt also demonstrated his skill as a biographer when he prepared The Life of Frederick Douglass (1899) for the Beacon biography series. Achievements • One of Chesnutt’s most significant achievements was his own education. Self-taught in the higher principles of algebra, the intricate details of history, the linguistic dicta of Latin, and the tenets of natural philosophy, he crowned this series of intellectual achievements by passing the Ohio bar examination after teaching himself law for two years. A man of outstanding social reputation, Chesnutt received an invitation to Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday party, an invitation “extended to about one hundred and fifty of America’s most distinguished writers of imaginative literature.” The party was held on December 5, 1905, at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City. Chesnutt’s greatest public honor was being chosen as the recipient of the Joel E. Springarn Medal, an award annually bestowed on an American citizen of African descent for distinguished service. Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20, 1858. He attended Cleveland public schools and the Howard School in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Having distinguished himself academically early in his schooling, Chesnutt was taken into the tutelage of two established educators, Robert Harris of the Howard School and his brother, Cicero Harris, of Charlotte, North Carolina. He later succeeded Cicero Harris as principal of the school in Charlotte in 1877 and

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followed this venture with an appointment to the Normal School in Fayetteville to train teachers for colored schools. On June 6, 1878, Chesnutt married Susan Perry. Shortly after his marriage, he began his training as a stenographer. Even at this time, however, his interest in writing competed for his energies. He spent his spare time writing essays, poems, short stories, and sketches. His public writing career began in December of 1885 with the printing of the story “Uncle Peter’s House” in the Cleveland News and Herald. After several years passed “The Goophered Grapevine” was accepted by The Atlantic Monthly and published in 1888. Continuing his dual career as a man of letters and a businessman/attorney for more than a decade after his reception as a literary artist, Chesnutt decided, on September 30, 1899, to devote himself full-time to his literary career. From Cleveland Public Library that moment on he enjoyed a full and productive career as a man of letters. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chesnutt became more politically active as a spokesman for racial justice. He toured the South and its educational institutions such as Tuskegee Institute and Atlanta University. He joined forces with black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. In May of 1909, he became a member of the National Negro Committee, which later became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The last two decades of Chesnutt’s life were less active because his health began to fail him in 1919. He was, however, elected to the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce in 1912. Chesnutt continued to write until his death on November 15, 1932. Analysis • The short fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt embraces traditions characteristic of both formal and folk art. Indeed, the elements of Chesnutt’s narrative technique evolved in a fashion that conspicuously parallels the historical shaping of the formal short story itself. The typical Chesnutt narrative, like the classic short story, assumes its heritage from a rich oral tradition immersed in folkways, mannerisms, and beliefs. Holding true to the historical development of the short story as an artistic form, his early imaginative narratives were episodic in nature. The next stage of development in Chesnutt’s short fiction was a parody of the fable form with a folkloric variation. Having become proficient at telling a story with a unified effect, Chesnutt achieved the symbolic resonance characteristic of the Romantic tale, yet his awareness of the plight of his people urged him toward an increasingly realistic depiction of

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social conditions. As a mature writer, Chesnutt achieved depth of characterization, distinguishable thematic features, and a rare skillfulness in creation of mood, while a shrewdly moralizing tone allowed him to achieve his dual goal as artist and social activist. “The Goophered Grapevine” • Chesnutt’s journal stories constituted the first phase of his writing career, but when The Atlantic Monthly published “The Goophered Grapevine” in 1888, the serious aspects of his artistic skill became apparent. “The Goophered Grapevine” belongs to a tradition in Chesnutt’s writings which captures the fable form with a folkloric variation. These stories also unfold with a didactic strain which matures significantly in Chesnutt’s later writings. To understand clearly the series of stories in The Conjure Woman, of which “The Goophered Grapevine” is one, the reader must comprehend the allegorical features in the principal narrative situation and the thematic intent of the mythic incidents from African American lore. The Conjure Woman contains narratives revealed through the accounts of a northern white person’s rendition of the tales of Uncle Julius, a former slave. This storytelling device lays the foundation for Chesnutt’s sociological commentary. The real and perceived voices represent the perspectives he wishes to expose, those of the white capitalist and the impoverished, disadvantaged African American. The primary persona is that of the capitalist, while the perceived voice is that of the struggling poor. Chesnutt skillfully melds the two perspectives. Chesnutt’s two volumes of short stories contain pieces that are unified in theme, tone, and mood. Each volume also contains a piece that might be considered the lead story. In The Conjure Woman, the preeminent story is “The Goophered Grapevine.” This story embodies the overriding thematic intent of the narratives in this collection. Chesnutt points out the foibles of the capitalistic quest in the post-Civil War South, a venture pursued at the expense of the newly freed African American slave. He illustrates this point in “The Goophered Grapevine” by skillfully intertwining Aunt Peggy’s gains as a result of her conjurations and Henry’s destruction as a result of man’s inhumanity to man. Chesnutt discloses his ultimate point when the plantation owner, McAdoo, is deceived by a Yankee horticulturist and his grape vineyard becomes totally unproductive. Running episodes, such as Aunt Peggy’s conjurations to keep the field hands from consuming the grape crop and the seasonal benefit McAdoo gains from selling Henry, serve to illustrate the interplay between a monied white capitalist and his less privileged black human resources. McAdoo used Aunt Peggy to deny his field laborers any benefit from the land they worked, and he sold Henry every spring to increase his cash flow and prepare for the next gardening season. The central metaphor in “The Goophered Grapevine” is the bewitched vineyard. To illustrate and condemn man’s inhumanity to man, Chesnutt contrasts the black conjure woman’s protection of the grape vineyard with the white Yankee’s destruction of it. McAdoo’s exploitation of Henry serves to justify McAdoo’s ultimate ruin. Through allegory, Chesnutt is able to draw attention to the immorality of capitalistic gain through a sacrifice of basic humanity to other people. “Po’ Sandy” • Following the theme of inhumanity established in “The Goophered Grapevine,” “Po’ Sandy” highlights the abuse of a former slave laborer. Accordingly, a situation with a folkloric variation is used to convey this message. Sandy, Master

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Marabo’s field hand, is shifted from relative to relative at various points during the year to perform various duties. During the course of these transactions, he is separated from his second common-law wife, Tenie. (His first wife has been sent to work at a distant plantation.) Tenie is a conjurer. She transforms Sandy into a tree, and she changes him back to his original state periodically so that they can be together. With Sandy’s apparent disappearance, Master Marabo decides to send Tenie away to nurse his ailing daughter-in-law. There is therefore no one left to watch Sandy, the tree. The dehumanizing effects of industrialization creep into the story line at this point. The “tree” is to be used as lumber for a kitchen at the Marabo home. Tenie returns just in time to try to stop this transformation at the lumber mill, but she is deemed “mad.” Sandy’s spirit thereafter haunts the Marabo kitchen, and no one wants to work there. The complaints are so extensive that the kitchen is dismantled and the lumber donated toward the building of a school. This structure is then haunted, too. The point is that industrialization and economic gain diminish essential human concerns and can lead to destruction. The destruction of Sandy’s marital relationships in order to increase his usefulness as a field worker justifies this defiant spirit. In his depiction of Sandy as a tree, Chesnutt illustrates an enslaved spirit desperately seeking freedom. “The Conjurer’s Revenge” • “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” also contained in The Conjure Woman, illustrates Chesnutt’s mastery of the exemplum. The allegory in this work conveys a strong message, and Chesnutt’s evolving skill in characterization becomes apparent. The characters’ actions, rather than the situation, contain the didactic message of the story. Some qualities of the fable unfold as the various dimensions of characters are portrayed. Consequently, “The Conjurer’s Revenge” is a good example of Chesnutt’s short imaginative sketch. These qualities are also most characteristic of Chesnutt’s early short fiction. “The Conjurer’s Revenge” begins when Primus, a field hand, discovers the conjure man’s hog alone in a bush one evening. Concerned for the hog and not knowing to whom the animal belongs, Primus carries it to the plantation where he works. Unfortunately, the conjurer identifies Primus as a thief and transforms Primus into a mule. Chesnutt uses this transformation to reveal Primus’s personality. As a mule, Primus displays jealousy when other men show attraction to his woman, Sally. The mule’s reaction is one of shocking violence in instances when Sally is approached by other men. The mule has a tremendous appetite for food and drink, an apparent compensation for his unhappiness. Laying the foundation for his exemplum, Chesnutt brings these human foibles to the forefront and illustrates the consequences of even the mildest appearance of dishonesty. The conjurer’s character is also developed more fully as the story progresses. After attending a religious revival, he becomes ill, confesses his act of vengeance, and repents. During the conjurer’s metamorphosis, Chesnutt captures the remorse, grief, and forgiveness in this character. He also reveals the benefits of human compassion and concern for other human beings. A hardened heart undergoes reform and develops an ability to demonstrate sensitivity. Nevertheless, the conjurer suffers the consequences of his evil deed: He is mistakenly given poison by a companion, and he dies before he completely restores Primus’s human features, a deed he undertakes after repenting. The conjurer dies prematurely, and Primus lives with a clubfoot for the rest of his life.

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Features of Chesnutt’s more mature writing emerge in the series of narratives that make up The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. The stories in this collection center on the identity crisis experienced by African Americans, portraying their true human qualities in the face of the grotesque distortions wrought by racism. In order to achieve his goal, Chesnutt abandons his earlier imaginative posture and embraces realism as a means to unfold his message. The dimensions of his characters are therefore appropriately self-revealing. The characters respond to the stresses and pressures in their external environment with genuine emotion; Mr. Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth” is no exception. “The Wife of His Youth” • “The Wife of His Youth” follows the structural pattern that appears to typify the narratives in the collection. This pattern evolves in three phases: crisis, character response, and resolution. The crisis in “The Wife of His Youth” is Mr. Ryder’s attempt to reconcile his new and old ways of life. He has moved North from a southern plantation and entered black middle-class society. Adapting to the customs, traditions, and mores of this stratum of society is a stressful challenge for Mr. Ryder. Tensions exist between his old life and his new life. He fears being unable to appear as if he belongs to this “blue vein” society and exposing his lowly background. This probable eventuality is his constant preoccupation. The “blue veins” were primarily lighter-skinned blacks who were better educated and more advantaged than their darker counterparts. Relishing their perceived superiority, they segregated themselves from their brothers and sisters. It is within this web of social clamoring and essential self-denial that Mr. Ryder finds himself. The inherent contradictions of this lifestyle present a crisis for him, although a resolution is attained during the course of the narrative. Mr. Ryder’s efforts to fit into this society are thwarted when his slave wife appears at his doorstep on the day before a major social event that he has planned. He is about to introduce the Blue Vein Society to a widow, Mrs. Dixon, upon whom he has set his affections. The appearance of Liza Jane, his slave wife, forces Mr. Ryder to confront his new life. This situation also allows Chesnutt to assume his typically moralizing tone. Mr. Ryder moves from self-denial to self-pride as he decides to present Liza Jane to his society friends instead of Mrs. Dixon. The narrative ends on a note of personal triumph for Mr. Ryder as he proudly introduces the wife of his youth to society. “The Passing of Grandison” • Chesnutt does not totally relinquish his allegiance to the use of myth in The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. The myth of the ascent journey, or the quest for freedom, is evident in several stories in the collection, among them “The Passing of Grandison” and “Wellington’s Wives.” Following the structured pattern of crisis, character response, and resolution, “The Passing of Grandison” is a commentary on the newly emerging moral values of the postbellum South. Colonel Owens, a plantation owner, has a son, Dick, who is in love with a belle named Charity Lomax. Charity’s human values reflect the principles of human equality and freedom, and the challenge that she presents to Dick Owens becomes the crisis of the narrative. Dick is scheduled to take a trip North, and his father insists on his being escorted by one of the servants. Grandison is selected to accompany his young master. Charity Lomax challenges Dick to find a way to entice Grandison to remain in the North and receive his well-deserved liberation. Charity’s request conflicts with the values held by Dick and Grandison. Dick believes that slave/master relationships are essential to

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the survival of the South. Grandison holds that servants should be unequivocally loyal to their masters. In spite of Dick’s attempts to connect Grandison unobtrusively with the abolitionist movement in the North, the former slave remains loyal to Dick. Grandison’s steadfastness perplexes Dick because his proposed marriage to Charity is at risk if he does not succeed in freeing Grandison. After a series of faulty attempts, Dick succeeds in losing Grandison. Dick then returns home alone and triumphant. Grandison ultimately returns to the plantation. He had previously proven himself so trustworthy that goodwill toward him is restored. To make the characterization of Grandison realistic, however, Chesnutt must have him pursue his freedom. In a surprise ending typical of Chesnutt, Grandison plans the escape of all of his relatives who remain on the plantation. They succeed, and in the last scene of the narrative, Colonel Owens spots them from a distance on a boat journeying to a new destination. “The Passing of Grandison” successfully achieves the social and artistic goals of The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt creates characters with convincing human qualities and captures their responses to the stresses and pressures of their environment. While so doing, he advocates the quest for human freedom. “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” • “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” contains several of the thematic dimensions mentioned above. The story concerns the self-identity of the African American and the freedom quest. Wellington Braboy, a light-skinned “mulatto” is determined to move North and seek his freedom. His crisis is the result of a lack of resources, primarily financial, to achieve his goal. Braboy is portrayed as having a distorted view of loyalty and commitment. He justifies stealing money from his slave wife’s life savings by saying that, as her husband, he is entitled to the money. On the other hand, he denies his responsibility to his slave wife once he reaches the North. In order to marry a white woman he denies the legality of a slave marriage. Chesnutt takes Braboy on a journey of purgation and catharsis as he moves toward resolution. After being subjected to much ridicule and humiliation as a result of his mixed marriage, Braboy must honestly confront himself and come to terms with his true identity. Abandoned by his wife for her former white husband, Braboy returns to the South. This journey is also a symbolic return to himself; his temporary escape from himself has failed. Milly, Braboy’s first wife, does not deny her love for him, in spite of his previous actions. Milly receives and accepts him with a forgiving spirit. Chesnutt capitalizes on the contrast between Braboy’s African and Anglo wives. The African wife loves him unconditionally because she has the capacity to know and understand him, regardless of his foibles. Braboy’s Anglo wife was frustrated by what she considered to be irreparable inadequacies in his character and abandoned him. “Cicely’s Dream” • In his character development, Chesnutt repeatedly sought to dispel some of the stereotypical thinking about African Americans. An example of his success in this effort is found in “Cicely’s Dream,” set in the period of Reconstruction. Cicely Green is depicted as a young woman of considerable ambition. Like most African Americans, she has had very little education and is apparently limited in her capacity to achieve. She does have, however, many dreams. Cicely’s crisis begins when she discovers a wounded man on her way home one

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day. The man is delirious and has no recollection of who he is. Cicely and her grandmother care for the man until his physical health is restored, but he is still mentally distraught. The tenderness and sensitivity displayed by Cicely keep the stranger reasonably content. Over a period of time, they become close and eventually pledge their love to each other. Chesnutt portrays a caring, giving relationship between the two lovers, one which is not complicated by any caste system which would destroy love through separation of the lovers. This relationship, therefore, provides a poignant contrast to the relationships among blacks during the days of slavery, and Chesnutt thereby exposes an unexplored dimension of the African American. Typically, however, there is a surprise ending: Martha Chandler, an African American teacher, enters the picture. She teaches Cicely and other black youths for one school term. During the final program of the term, the teacher reveals her story of lost love. Her lover had been killed in the Civil War. Cicely’s lover’s memory is jolted by the teacher’s story, and he proves to be the teacher’s long-lost love. The happy reunion is a celebration of purely committed love. Again, Chesnutt examines qualities in African Americans which had largely been ignored. He emphasizes the innate humanity of the African American in a natural and realistic way, combining great artistic skill with a forceful moral vision. Patricia A. R. Williams With updates by Earl Paulus Murphy Other major works novels: Mandy Oxendine, wr. 1897, pb. 1997; A Business Career, wr. 1898, pb. 2005 (Matthew Wilson and Marjan van Schaik, editors); The House Behind the Cedars, 1900; The Marrow of Tradition, 1901; Evelyn’s Husband, wr. 1903, pb. 2005 (Matthew Wilson and Marjan van Schaik, editors); The Colonel’s Dream, 1905; Paul Marchand, F.M.C., wr. 1921, pb. 1998; The Quarry, wr. 1928, pb. 1999. nonfiction: The Life of Frederick Douglass, 1899; The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1993; “To Be an Author”: The Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, 1997; Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, 1999; Selected Writings, 2001 (SallyAnn H. Ferguson, editor); An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932, 2002. Bibliography Delma, P. Jay. “The Mask as Theme and Structure: Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Sheriff’s Children’ and ‘The Passing of Grandison.’” American Literature 51 (1979): 364375. Argues that the story exploits the theme of the mask: the need to hide one’s true personality and racial identity from self and others. Delma argues that because Chesnutt uses the mask theme, the story is not a run-of-the-mill treatment of the long-lost-son plot. Duncan, Charles. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. This informative volume includes bibliographical references and an index. Filetti, Jean. “The Goophered Grapevine.” Explicator 48 (Spring, 1990): 201-203. Discusses the use of master-slave relationships within the context of storytelling and explains how Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” relates to this tradition. Indicates that one of Chesnutt’s concerns was inhumanity among people, but the story is told from a humorous perspective with the newly freed slave outwitting the white capitalist.

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McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., ed. Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. Includes bibliographical references and an index. McFatter, Susan. “From Revenge to Resolution: The (R)evolution of Female Characters in Chesnutt’s Fiction.” CLA Journal 42(December, 1998): 194-211. Discusses female revenge in Chesnutt’s fiction. Argues that his women use intelligence and instinct for survival to manipulate their repressive environments. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Chesnutt: “The Goophered Grapevine” (vol. 3), “The Passing of Grandison” and “The Sheriff’s Children” (vol. 6), and “The Wife of His Youth” (vol. 8). Render, Sylvia. The Short Fiction of Charles Chesnutt. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Discusses the collected short fiction of Chesnutt and indicates that it came out of the storytelling tradition of African Americans and was written within the conventions of local humor that were popular at the time. Sollers, Werner. “Thematics Today.” In Thematics Reconsidered: Essays in Honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, edited by Frank Trommler. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. Detailed discussion of the themes in “The Wife of His Youth.” Argues that contemporary thematic readings that stress race and gender are less likely to identify other themes such as marriage, fidelity, and age difference. Suggests that Chesnutt’s special way of treating the race and age themes needs more attention. Wonham, Henry B. Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

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G. K. Chesterton Born: London, England; May 29, 1874 Died: Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England; June 14, 1936 Principal short fiction • The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown, 1903; The Club of Queer Trades, 1905; The Perishing of the Pendragons, 1914; The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Other Stories, 1922; Tales of the Long Bow, 1925; Stories, 1928; The Sword of Wood, 1928; The Moderate Murder and the Honest Quack, 1929; The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale, 1929; Four Faultless Felons, 1930; The Ecstatic Thief, 1930; The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, 1936; The Vampire of the Village, 1947. Other literary forms • One of the most prolific and versatile writers of his time, G. K. Chesterton published books in almost every genre. From 1901 until his death in 1936, he worked as a journalist in London. He was a prolific essayist and literary critic, and his 1909 book on his close friend George Bernard Shaw is still held in the highest esteem. He wrote several volumes of poetry, foremost of which was his 1911 The Ballad of the White Horse. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922, he became a fervent but tactful apologist for his new faith. His 1925 book The Everlasting Man and his 1933 study on Saint Thomas Aquinas reveal the depth of his insights into the essential beliefs of Catholicism. His Autobiography was published posthumously in late 1936. Chesterton published more than a dozen novels during his lifetime, ranging from The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904 to The Scandal of Father Brown in 1935. His The Vampire of the Village was published eleven years after his death, in 1947. In 2001, Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love, a novel he had written in 1894, when he was only twenty, was published for the first time. Achievements • Chesterton was a man of letters in the finest sense of the term. He expressed effectively and eloquently his ideas on a wide variety of literary, social, and religious topics. He was a master of paradox and always encouraged his readers to reflect on the subtle differences between appearance and reality. Reading his wellcrafted short stories is a stimulating aesthetic experience because he makes readers think about the moral implications of what they are reading. Although his critical writings on literature and religion reveal the depth of his intellect, Chesterton’s major achievement was in the field of detective fiction. Between 1911 and 1935, he published five volumes of short stories in which his amateur sleuth is a Catholic priest named Father Brown. Unlike such famous fictional detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, Father Brown relied not on deductive reasoning but rather on intuition in order to solve perplexing crimes. Father Brown made judicious use of his theological training in order to recognize the specious reasoning of criminals and to lead them to confess their guilt. His Father Brown stories explored moral and theological topics not previously treated in detective fiction. Biography • Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874, in London. He was the second of three children born to Edward and Marie Louise Chesterton. Edward

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Chesterton was a real estate agent. Gilbert’s older sister, Beatrice, died at the age of eight, in 1877, and two years later his brother, Cecil, was born. Everything seems to indicate that Edward and Marie Louise were loving parents. In 1982, Gilbert graduated from St. Paul’s School in London. For the next three years, he studied at London’s Slade Art School, but he finally realized that he would never develop into a truly creative artist. From 1895 until 1900, he worked for a publishing firm. From 1901 until his death, in 1936, he served as a journalist and editor for various London newspapers and magazines. In 1901, he married Frances Blogg. Gilbert and Frances had no children. Theirs was a good marriage, each helping the other. Frances survived her husband by two years. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Chesterton met the writers Hilaire Belloc and Shaw, who became his lifelong friends. Although Belloc and Shaw seemed to have little in common because Belloc was an apologist for Catholicism and Shaw was an agnostic, Chesterton liked them both very much. Several times, Belloc organized lively but good-natured debates in which Shaw and Chesterton discussed religion and politics. Throughout his adult life, Chesterton supported the Liberal Party in Great Britain, but gradually he became disillusioned with the leadership of the Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George. After the coalition government run by Lloyd George fell apart in 1922, Chesterton lost much interest in politics. During the last fourteen years of his life, his major interests were literature and religion. Before World War I began, Chesterton was already a well-known English writer, but he had not yet explored profound philosophical and religious themes. Two unexpected events forced Chesterton to think about his mortality and the reasons for his existence. In late 1914, he fell into a coma, which lasted four months. The cause of this coma was never fully explained to the public. After his recovery, he was a changed man. His view of the world became very serious. Then, less than one month after the end of World War I, Chesterton suffered a terrible personal loss when his only brother, Cecil, died from nephritis in a military hospital in France. After’s Cecil’s death, Chesterton felt a void in his life. His friend Father John O’Connor, who was the apparent inspiration for Father Brown, spoke to him at length about Catholicism, and Chesterton became a Catholic on July 30, 1922. Four years later, his wife, Frances, joined him in the Catholic Church. The last decade of his life was a very productive period. He continued to write his Father Brown stories, but he also found much pleasure in writing and giving speeches on religious topics. Although firmly convinced that Catholicism was essential for his own spiritual growth and salvation, he was always tolerant and respectful of friends such as H. G. Wells and Shaw, who did not share his religious beliefs. Soon after he had completed his Autobiography in early 1936, he developed serious heart problems. He died at his home in Beaconsfield, England, on June 14, 1936, at the age of sixty-two. Analysis • Before he began writing his Father Brown stories, G. K. Chesterton had already published one book of detective fiction. In The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton created a detective named Gabriel Syme, who infiltrates an anarchist group in which each of the seven members is named for a different day of the week. Syme replaces the man who had been Thursday. At first, this group seems strange to Syme because he does not understand what the anarchists wish to accomplish. This paradox is resolved when Chesterton explains that all seven “anarchists” are, in fact, detectives assigned separately to investigate this nonexistent threat to society. Although The Man Who Was Thursday does demonstrate Chesterton’s ability to think

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clearly in order to resolve a problem, the solution to this paradox is so preposterous that many readers have wondered why Chesterton wrote this book, whose ending is so odd. It is hardly credible that all seven members of a secret organization could be police officers. Critics have not been sure how they should interpret this work. Chesterton’s own brother, Cecil, thought that it expressed an excessively optimistic view of the world, but other reviewers criticized The Man Who Was Thursday for its pessimism. In his Father Brown stories, this problem of perspective does not exist because it is the levelheaded Father Library of Congress Brown who always explains the true significance of scenes and events that had mystified readers and other characters as well. The other characters, be they detectives, criminals, suspects, or acquaintances of the victim, always come to the conclusion that Father Brown has correctly solved the case. “The Secret of Father Brown” • In his 1927 short story “The Secret of Father Brown,” Chesterton describes the two basic premises of his detective. First, Father Brown is very suspicious of any suspect who ues specious reasoning or expresses insincere religious beliefs. Father Brown senses intuitively that a character who reasons incorrectly might well be a criminal. Second, Father Brown strives to “get inside” the mind of “the murderer” so completely that he is “thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions.” Father Brown needs to understand what drives the guilty party to commit a specific crime before he can determine who the criminal is and how the crime was committed. Most critics believe that the best Father Brown stories are those that were published in Chesterton’s 1911 volume The Innocence of Father Brown. Although his later Father Brown stories should not be neglected, his very early stories are ingenious and have remained popular with generations of readers. Several stories in The Innocence of Father Brown illustrate nicely how Father Brown intuitively and correctly solves crimes. “The Blue Cross” • In “The Blue Cross,” Aristide Valentin (the head of the Paris police) is sent to London to arrest a notorious thief named Flambeau, who is a master of disguises. Valentin knows that Flambeau is well over six feet tall, but he does not know how Flambeau is dressed. As Valentin is walking through London, his attraction is suddenly drawn to two Catholic priests. One is short and the other is tall. The short priest acts strangely so that he would attract attention. He deliberately throws soup on a wall in a restaurant, upsets the apples outside of a grocery store, and breaks a window in another restaurant. This odd behavior disturbs the merchants, who consequently ask police officers to follow the priests, who are walking toward the Hamp-

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stead Heath. Readers soon learn that the short priest wants to be followed for his own protection. Just as the tall priest, who is, in fact, Flambeau, orders Father Brown, the short priest, to turn over a sapphire cross that he was carrying to a church in Hampstead, Father Brown tells him that “two strong policemen” and Valentin are waiting behind a tree in order to arrest Flambeau. The astonished Flambeau asks Father Brown how he knew that he was not a real priest. Readers learn that Father Brown’s suspicion began when, earlier in the story, the tall priest affirmed that only “modern infidels appeal to reason,” whereas true Catholics have no use for it. Father Brown tells Flambeau: “You attacked reason. It’s bad theology.” His intuition told him that his tall companion could not have been a priest, and he was right. Father Brown is not merely an amateur detective. He is above all a priest whose primary responsibility is to serve as a spiritual guide to upright people and sinners alike. Although he brought about Flambeau’s arrest, Flambeau soon turned away from a life of crime. After his release from prison, he became a private detective, and his closest friend became Father Brown. This transformation can be attributed only to the religious teaching that Flambeau received from his spiritual mentor, Father Brown. “The Eye of Apollo” • The tenth story in The Innocence of Father Brown is entitled “The Eye of Apollo.” At the beginning of this short story, Flambeau has just opened his detective agency in a new building located near Westminster Abbey. The other tenants in the building are a religious charlatan named Kalon, who claims to be “the New Priest of Apollo,” and two sisters, who are typists. Flambeau and Father Brown instinctively distrust Kalon, who has installed a huge eye of Apollo outside his office. Pauline Stacey, the elder of the two sisters, is attracted to Kalon, whom Joan Stacey dislikes intensely. One afternoon, Pauline falls down an elevator shaft and dies. Flambeau concludes hastily that this was an accident, but Father Brown wants to examine her death more thoroughly. He and Flambeau decide to talk with Kalon before the police officers arrive. Kalon presents the preposterous argument that his “religion” favors life, whereas Christianity is concerned only with death. Father Brown becomes more and more convinced that Kalon is a murderer. To the astonishment of Flambeau, Father Brown proves that Pauline “was murdered while she was alone.” Pauline was blind, and Kalon knew it. As Kalon was waiting in the elevator, he called Pauline, but suddenly he moved the elevator, and the blind Pauline fell into the open shaft. Flambeau wonders, however, why Kalon killed her. Readers learn that Pauline had told Kalon that she was going to change her will and leave her fortune of five hundred thousand pounds to him. Kalon did not realize, however, that her pen had run out of ink before she could finish writing her will. When he first hears Kalon speak, Father Brown knows instantly that this hypocrite is a criminal. At the end of the story, he tells Flambeau: “I tell you I knew he [Kalon] had done it even before I knew what he had done.” Once again Father Brown’s intuition is perfectly correct. “The Secret Garden” • Father Brown has the special ability to recognize the true meaning of seemingly insignificant clues, which other characters see but overlook. In The Innocence of Father Brown, there are two other stories, “The Secret Garden” and “The Hammer of God,” that illustrate the effectiveness of Father Brown’s powers of intuition and that also contain rather unexpected endings. Just as they are in “The Blue Cross,” Valentin and Father Brown are major characters in “The Secret Garden.” As the head of the Paris police, Valentin has been so successful in arresting

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criminals that many men whom he sent to prison have threatened to kill him as soon as they regain their freedom. For his own protection, Valentin has very high walls built around his garden, with the only access to it being through his house. His servants guard the entrance to his house at all times. One evening, Valentin holds a reception, which is attended by Father Brown, a medical doctor, an American philanthropist named Julius Brayne, Commandant O’Brien from the French Foreign Legion, Lord and Lady Galloway, and their adult daughter Lady Margaret. Father Brown learns that Valentin is especially suspicious of all organized religions, especially Catholicism, and Julius Brayne likes to contribute huge sums of money to various religions. During the party, a body with a severed head is found in the garden. All the guests are mystified because the head found next to the body does not belong to any of Valentin’s servants or to any of the guests. After much reflection on this apparent paradox, Father Brown proves that the head and the body belong to different men. The body was that of Julius Brayne, and the head belonged to a murderer named Louis Becker, whom the French police had guillotined earlier that day in the presence of Valentin, who had obtained permission to bring Becker’s head back to his house. Valentin killed Brayne because of a rumor that Brayne was about to become a Catholic and donate millions to his new church. His hatred for Christianity drove Valentin mad. Father Brown explains calmly that Valentin “would do anything, anything, to break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it.” Valentin’s butler Ivan could not accept this explanation, but as they all went to question Valentin in his study, they found him “dead in his chair.” He had committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills. The ending of this short story is surprising because readers of detective fiction do not suspect that a police commissioner can also be a murderer. “The Hammer of God” • In “The Hammer of God,” readers are surprised to learn from Father Brown that the murderer is not a violent madman but rather a very respected member of the community. The Reverend Wilfred Bohun could no longer stand the scandalous behavior of his alcoholic brother Norman, who blasphemed God and humiliated the Reverend Bohun in the eyes of his parishioners. Chesterton states that Wilfred and Norman Bohun belong to an old noble family whose descendants are now mostly “drunkards and dandy degenerates.” Rumor has it that there has been “a whisper of insanity” in the Bohun family. Although Father Brown empathizes with the Reverend Bohun, he nevertheless believes that he should express Christian charity toward his brother. When the body of Norman Bohun is found outside his brother’s church, Father Brown begins to examine the case. Father Brown finally comes to the conclusion that the Reverend Bohun killed his brother by dropping a hammer on him from the church tower. The murderer tried to frame the village idiot because he knew that the courts would never hold an idiot responsible for murder. At the end of this story, the Reverend Bohun and Father Brown have a long conversation, and Father Brown dissuades the Reverend Bohun from committing suicide because “that door leads to hell.” He persuades him instead to confess his sin to God and admit his guilt to the police. In prison, the Reverend Bohun, like Flambeau, may find salvation. In both “The Blue Cross” and “The Hammer of God,” Father Brown hates the crime but loves the sinner. Readers are left with the definite impression that Father Brown is absolutely essential for the spiritual growth and eventual salvation of Flambeau and the Reverend Bohun.

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Several critics have remarked that the character of Father Brown did not change much in the four volumes of detective fiction that Chesterton wrote after The Innocence of Father Brown. This stability represents, however, strength and not weakness. It would have been inappropriate for a member of the clergy to have stopped caring about the spiritual life of others. Father Brown knows that evil exists in the world, but he also believes that even sinners and murderers can be reformed in this life and saved in the next. Father Brown is a fascinating fictional detective who uses his own religious beliefs in order to solve crimes and express profound insights into the dignity of every person. Edmund J. Campion With updates by the Editors Other major works plays: Magic: A Fantastic Comedy, pr. 1913; The Judgment of Dr. Johnson, pb. 1927; The Surprise, pb. 1952. anthologies: Thackeray, 1909; Samuel Johnson, 1911 (with Alice Meynell); Essays by Divers Hands, 1926. novels: Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love, wr. 1894, pb. 2001; The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904; The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, 1908; The Ball and the Cross, 1909; The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911; Manalive, 1912; The Flying Inn, 1914; The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914; The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926; The Return of Don Quixote, 1926; The Secret of Father Brown, 1927; The Floating Admiral, 1931 (with others); The Scandal of Father Brown, 1935; The Vampire of the Village, 1947. miscellaneous: Stories, Essays, and Poems, 1935; The Coloured Lands, 1938; The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, 1986-1999 (35 volumes); The Truest Fairy Tale: An Anthology of the Religious Writings of G. K. Chesteron, 2007 (Kevin L. Morris, editor). nonfiction: The Defendant, 1901; Robert Louis Stevenson, 1902 (with W. Robertson Nicoll); Thomas Carlyle, 1902; Twelve Types, 1902 (revised as Varied Types, 1903, and also known as Simplicity and Tolstoy); Charles Dickens, 1903 (with F. G. Kitton); Leo Tolstoy, 1903 (with G. H. Perris and Edward Garnett); Robert Browning, 1903; Tennyson, 1903 (with Richard Garnett); Thackeray, 1903 (with Lewis Melville); G. F. Watts, 1904; Heretics, 1905; Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1906; All Things Considered, 1908; Orthodoxy, 1908; George Bernard Shaw, 1909 (revised edition, 1935); Tremendous Trifles, 1909; Alarms and Discursions, 1910; The Ultimate Lie, 1910; What’s Wrong with the World, 1910; William Blake, 1910; A Defence of Nonsense, and Other Essays, 1911; Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, 1911; The Future of Religion: Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s Reply to Mr. Bernard Shaw, 1911; A Miscellany of Men, 1912; The Conversion of an Anarchist, 1912; The Victorian Age in Literature, 1913; Thoughts from Chesterton, 1913; London, 1914 (with Alvin Langdon Coburn); Prussian Versus Belgian Culture, 1914; The Barbarism of Berlin, 1914; Letters to an Old Garibaldian, 1915; The Crimes of England, 1915; The SoCalled Belgian Bargain, 1915; A Shilling for My Thoughts, 1916; Divorce Versus Democracy, 1916; Temperance and the Great Alliance, 1916; A Short History of England, 1917; Lord Kitchener, 1917; Utopia of Usurers, and Other Essays, 1917; How to Help Annexation, 1918; Charles Dickens Fifty Years After, 1920; Irish Impressions, 1920; The New Jerusalem, 1920; The Superstition of Divorce, 1920; The Uses of Diversity, 1920; Eugenics and Other Evils, 1922; What I Saw in America, 1922; Fancies Versus Fads, 1923; St. Francis of Assisi, 1923; The End of the Roman Road: A Pageant of Wayfarers, 1924; The Superstitions of the Sceptic, 1924; The Everlasting Man, 1925; William Cobbett, 1925; A Gleaming Cohort, Being from

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the Words of G. K. Chesterton, 1926; The Catholic Church and Conversion, 1926; The Outline of Sanity, 1926; Culture and the Coming Peril, 1927; Robert Louis Stevenson, 1927; Social Reform Versus Birth Control, 1927; Do We Agree? A Debate, 1928 (with George Bernard Shaw); Generally Speaking, 1928 (essays); G. K. C. as M. C., Being a Collection of Thirtyseven Introductions, 1929; The Thing, 1929; At the Sign of the World’s End, 1930; Come to Think of It, 1930; The Resurrection of Rome, 1930; The Turkey and the Turk, 1930; All Is Grist, 1931; Is There a Return to Religion?, 1931 (with E. Haldeman-Julius); Chaucer, 1932; Christendom in Dublin, 1932; Sidelights on New London and Newer York, and Other Essays, 1932; All I Survey, 1933; G. K. Chesterton, 1933 (also known as Running After One’s Hat, and Other Whimsies); St. Thomas Aquinas, 1933; Avowals and Denials, 1934; Explaining the English, 1935; The Well and the Shallows, 1935; As I Was Saying, 1936; Autobiography, 1936; The Man Who Was Chesterton, 1937; The End of the Armistice, 1940; The Common Man, 1950; The Glass Walking-Stick, and Other Essays from the “Illustrated London News,” 1905-1936, 1955; Lunacy and Letters, 1958; Where All Roads Lead, 1961; The Man Who Was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings of G. K. Chesterton, 1963; The Spice of Life, and Other Essays, 1964; Chesterton on Shakespeare, 1971. poetry: Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen—Rhymes and Sketches, 1900; The Wild Knight, and Other Poems, 1900 (revised, 1914); The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911; A Poem, 1915; Poems, 1915; Wine, Water, and Song, 1915; Old King Cole, 1920; The Ballad of St. Barbara, and Other Verses, 1922; Poems, 1925; The Queen of Seven Swords, 1926; Gloria in Profundis, 1927; Ubi Ecclesia, 1929; The Grave of Arthur, 1930. Bibliography Clipper, Lawrence J. G. K. Chesterton. New York: Twayne, 1974. In this useful introduction to the works of Chesterton, Clipper does a fine job of describing the recurring themes in Chesterton’s fictional and nonfictional writings. He analyzes very well Chesterton’s poetry and literary criticism. Contains an excellent annotated bibliography. Conlon, D. J., ed. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Contains numerous short essays on Chesterton published during the first fifty years after his death. The wide diversity of positive critical reactions shows that not only his popular fiction but also his writings on literature and religion continue to fascinate readers. Crowe, Marian E. “G. K. Chesterton and the Orthodox Romance of Pride and Prejudice.” Renascence 49 (Spring, 1997): 209-221. Argues that Chesterton used the word “romance” to refer to three different concepts: erotic love, adventure stories, and orthodox faith. Fagerberg, David W. The Size of Chesterton’s Catholicism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Analyzes Chesterton’s apologetic works for the Catholic Church. Horst, Mark. “Sin, Psychopathology, and Father Brown.” The Christian Century 104 (January 21, 1987): 46-47. Compares Chesterton’s detective Father Brown to Will Graham, a character in Michael Mann’s film Manhunt. Argues that although both sleuths use introspection to pursue criminals, when Father Brown looks within himself, he sees sin, a universal reality, whereas when Will Graham looks within, he sees psychopathology, an aberration. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by

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Chesterton: “The Blue Cross” (vol. 1), “The Hammer of God” (vol. 3), and “The Invisible Man” (vol. 4). Pearce, Joseph. Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996. Scholarly and well-written biography of Chesterton. Contains many quotes from his works and good analysis of them, as well as useful data on his family and friends. Schwartz, Adam. “G. K. C.’s Methodical Madness: Sanity and Social Control in Chesterton.” Renascence 49 (Fall, 1996): 23-40. Part of a special issue on G. K. Chesterton. Argues that his view shifts from focus on mental condition of an individual to the way societies define sanity and make “insanity” a means of bourgeois class control. Tadie, Andrew A., and Michael H. Macdonald, eds. Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1995. This volume includes a fairly thorough discussion of Chesterton’s writing, along with works of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, looking primarily at its ethical and religious components. Wills, Garry. Chesterton. New York: Doubleday, 2001. This biography is a revised edition of Chesterton, Man and Mask (1961).

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Kate Chopin Born: St. Louis, Missouri; February 8, 1851 Died: St. Louis, Missouri; August 22, 1904 Principal short fiction • Bayou Folk, 1894; A Night in Acadie, 1897. Other literary forms • In addition to the short stories which brought her some fame as a writer during her own lifetime, Kate Chopin published two novels, At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), the latter of which was either ignored or condemned because of its theme of adultery and frank depiction of a woman’s sexual urges. Chopin also wrote a few reviews and casual essays and a number of undistinguished poems. Achievements • Kate Chopin’s short stories, published in contemporary popular magazines, won her fame as a local colorist with a good ear for dialect and as a writer concerned with women’s issues (sexuality, equality, independence). After the publication of The Awakening in 1899, however, her popularity waned, in part because of the furor over the open treatment of adultery and sex in the novel. She wrote few stories after 1900, and her work was largely neglected until the rediscovery of The Awakening by feminist critics. Criticism of that novel and new biographies have spurred a new interest in her Creole short stories, which have been analyzed in detail in terms of their regionalism and their treatment of gender. Influenced by Guy de Maupassant, she herself did not exert any literary influence on later short-story writers, at least not until after the rediscovery of The Awakening. Biography • Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1851. Her mother’s family was Creole, descended from French settlers, and her father, a successful merchant, was an Irish immigrant. She was educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis beginning in 1860, five years after her father’s accidental death, and graduated in 1868. In 1870, she married Oscar Chopin, who took her to live in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and later in Natchitoches Parish, the setting for many of her stories. In 1882, Oscar died of swamp fever; Kate Chopin managed her husband’s properties for a year and in 1884 returned to St. Louis. The next year her mother died, and in 1888 Chopin began writing out of a need for personal expression and to help support her family financially. Her stories appeared regularly in popular periodicals, and she published a novel, At Fault, in 1890. Bayou Folk, a collection of stories and sketches, appeared in 1894, the year her widely anthologized “The Story of an Hour” was written. A Night in Acadie followed, and she was identified as one of four outstanding literary figures in St. Louis by the Star-Times. Her celebrated novel, The Awakening, received hostile reviews that upset her, though reports about the book being banned were greatly exaggerated. She did, however, write relatively little after this controversy and died five years later in St. Louis, where she was attending the world’s fair. Analysis • Until the 1970’s, Kate Chopin was known best literarily, if at all, as a “local colorist,” primarily for her tales of life in New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Chopin

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manages in these stories (about twothirds of her total output) to bring to life subtly the settings and personalities of her characters, usually Creoles (descendants of the original French settlers of Louisiana) or Cajuns (or Acadians, the French colonists who were exiled to Louisiana following the British conquest of Nova Scotia). What makes Chopin especially important for modern readers, however, is her insight into human characters and relationships in the context of their societies whether Creole, Cajun, or Anglo-Saxon—and into the social, emotional, and sexual roles of women within those societies. Chopin’s desire and hope for female independence can be seen in two of her earliest stories, “Wiser Than a God” and “A Point at Issue!” (both 1889). In the first story, the heroine Paula Von Stoltz Missouri Historical Society rejects an offer of marriage in order to begin a successful career as a concert pianist because music is the true sole passion of her life; it is an act that anticipates the actions of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. In the second story, Eleanor Gail and Charles Faraday enter into a marriage based on reason and equality and pursue their individual careers in separate places. This arrangement works very well for some time, but finally each of the two succumbs to jealousy; in spite of this blemish in their relationship, Chopin’s humorous tone manages to poke fun at traditional attitudes toward marriage as well. “The Story of an Hour” • This questioning though humorous attitude is strongly evident in one of Chopin’s most anthologized and best-known tales, “The Story of an Hour” (1894). Mrs. Mallard, a woman suffering from a heart condition, is told that her husband has been killed in a train accident. She is at first deeply sorrowful but soon realizes that even though she had loved and will mourn her husband, his death has set her free: “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” As Mrs. Mallard descends the stairs, however, the front door is opened by her husband, who had never been on the train. This time her heart gives out, and the cause ironically is given by the doctors as “the joy that kills.” “La Belle Zoraïde” • It is in her Louisiana stories, however, that Chopin’s sympathy for female and indeed human longings emerges most fully, subtly blended with a distinct and evocative sense of locale and folkways. “La Belle Zoraïde” (1893) is presented in the form of a folktale being told by a black servant, Manna-Loulou, to her mistress, Madame Delisle (these two characters also are central to the story “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” 1893). The tale itself is the story of a black slave, Zoraïde, who is forbidden by her mistress to marry another slave with whom she has fallen in love because his skin is too black and her mistress intends her for another, more “gentle-

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manly” servant. In spite of this, and although the slave she loves is sold away, she bears his child and refuses marriage to the other slave. Her mistress falsely tells Zoraïde that her child has been born dead, and the slave descends into madness. Even when her real daughter is finally brought back to her, Zoraïde rejects her, preferring to cling to the bundle of rags that she has fashioned as a surrogate baby. From then on, She was never known again as la belle Zoraïde, but ever after as Zoraïde la folle, whom no one ever wanted to marry. . . . She lived to be an old woman, whom some people pitied and others laughed at—always clasping her bundle of rags—her ‘piti.’ The indirect narration of this story prevents it from slipping into the melodramatic or the maudlin. Chopin’s ending, presenting the conversation of Manna-Loulou and Madame Delisle in the Creole dialect, pointedly avoids a concluding moral judgment, an avoidance typical of Chopin’s stories. Instead, readers are brought back to the frame for the tale and concentrated upon the charm of the Creole dialect even while they retain pity and sympathy for Zoraïde. “Désirée’s Baby” • In spite of their southern locale, Chopin’s stories rarely deal with racial relations between whites and blacks. One important exception is “Désirée’s Baby” (1892). Désirée Valmondé, who was originally a foundling, marries Armand Aubigny, a plantation owner who is proud of his aristocratic heritage but very much in love with Désirée. He is at first delighted when she bears him a son, but soon begins to grow cold and distant. Désirée, puzzled at first, soon realizes with horror that her child has Negro blood. Armand, whose love for Désirée has been killed by “the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name,” turns her out of the house, and she disappears with her child into the bayou, never to be seen again. Later, in a surprise ending reminiscent of Maupassant, Armand is having all reminders of Désirée burned when he discovers a letter from his mother to his father which reveals that his mother had had Negro blood. In this story one sees the continuation of Chopin’s most central theme, the evil that follows when one human being gains power over another and attempts to make that person conform to preset standards or expectations. As suggested earlier, Chopin finds that power of one person over another is often manifested in the institution of marriage. Yet, as even her earliest stories suggest, she does not always find that marriage necessarily requires that a wife be dominated by her husband, and she demonstrates that both men and women are capable of emotional and spiritual growth. “Athénaïse” • The possibility for growth is perhaps best seen in the story “Athénaïse” (1895). Athénaïse, an emotionally immature young woman, has married the planter Cazeau, but has found that she is not ready for marriage. She runs back to her family, explaining that she does not hate Cazeau himself: It’s jus’ being married that I detes’ an’ despise. . . . I can’t stan’ to live with a man; to have him always there; his coats and pantaloons hanging in my room; his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub, befo’ my very eyes, ugh! When Cazeau arrives to bring her back, however, she finds that she has to go with him. As the couple rides home, they pass an oak tree which Cazeau recalls was where

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his father had once apprehended a runaway slave: “The whole impression was for some reason hideous, and to dispel it Cazeau spurred his horse to a swift gallop.” Despite Cazeau’s attempt to make up and live with Athénaïse at least as friends, she remains bitter and unhappy and finally runs away again, aided by her romantic and rather foolish brother Montéclin. Cazeau, a sensitive and proud man, refuses to go after her again as though she too were a runaway slave: “For the companionship of no woman on earth would he again undergo the humiliating sensation of baseness that had overtaken him in passing the old oak-tree in the fallow meadow.” Athénaïse takes refuge in a boarding house in New Orleans where she becomes friendly with Mr. Gouvernail, a newspaper editor. Gouvernail hopes to make Athénaïse his lover, but he refrains from forcing himself on her: “When the time came that she wanted him . . . he felt he would have a right to her. So long as she did not want him, he had no right to her,—no more than her husband had.” Gouvernail, though, never gets his chance; Athénaïse has previously been described as someone who does not yet know her own mind, and such knowledge will not come through rational analysis but “as the song to the bird, the perfume and color to the flower.” This knowledge does come to her when she discovers that she is pregnant. As she thinks of Cazeau, “the first purely sensuous tremor of her life swept over her. . . . Her whole passionate nature was aroused as if by a miracle.” Thus, Athénaïse returns to reconciliation and happiness with her husband. Chopin’s story illustrates that happiness in a relationship can come only with maturity and with mutual respect. Cazeau realizes that he cannot force his wife to love him, and Athénaïse finally knows what she wants when she awakens to an awareness of her own sexuality. If Cazeau has to learn to restrain himself, though, Mr. Gouvernail learns the need to take more initiative as well; not having declared his love for Athénaïse, he suffers when she goes back home. The tone of the entire story is subtly balanced between poignancy and humor, allowing one to see the characters’ flaws while remaining sympathetic with each of them. The importance of physical passion and of sexual self-awareness which can be found in “Athénaïse” can also be found in many of Chopin’s stories and is one of the characteristics that make her writing so far ahead of its time. It is this theme that, as the title suggests, is central to her novel The Awakening and which was partly responsible for the scandal which that novel provoked. Chopin’s insistence not merely on the fact of women’s sexual desires but also on the propriety and healthiness of those desires in some ways anticipates the writings of D. H. Lawrence, but without Lawrence’s insistence on the importance of male dominance. “The Storm” • Sexual fulfillment outside of marriage without moral judgments can be found in “The Storm,” written in 1898, just before The Awakening, but not published until 1969. The story concerns four characters from an earlier tale, “At the ’Cadian Ball” (1892). In that earlier story, a young woman, Clarisse, rides out in the night to the ’Cadian Ball to declare her love for the planter Alcée Laballière. Alcée is at the ball with an old girlfriend of his, Calixta, a woman of Spanish descent. Clarisse claims Alcée, and Calixta agrees to marry Bobinôt, a man who has been in love with her for some time. “The Storm” is set several years later. Calixta and Bobinôt have had a child, and Alcée and Clarisse have been happily married. One day, while Bobinôt and his son are out on an errand, a huge storm breaks out. Alcée takes refuge at Calixta’s house, and the old passion between the two is rekindled; as the storm breaks about them in

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mounting intensity, the two make love, Calixta’s body “knowing for the first time its birthright.” Although the storm mirrors the physical passion of the couple, neither it nor the passion itself is destructive. Where one would expect some retribution for this infidelity in a story, the results are only beneficial: Calixta, physically fulfilled, happily welcomes back her returning husband and son; Alcée writes to Clarisse, off visiting relatives, that he does not need her back right away; and Clarisse, enjoying “the first free breath since her marriage,” is content to stay where she is for the time. Chopin’s ending seems audacious: “So the storm passed and every one was happy.” Although written about a century ago, Chopin’s stories seem very modern in many ways. Her concern with women’s place in society and in marriage, her refusal to mix guilt with sexuality, and her narrative stance of sympathetic detachment make her as relevant to modern readers as her marked ability to convey character and setting simply yet completely. In the little more than a decade in which she produced most of her work, her command of her art grew ever stronger, as did her willingness to deal with controversial subjects. It is unfortunate that this career was cut so short by the reaction to The Awakening and her early death; but it is fortunate that Chopin left the writing that she did and that it has been preserved. Donald F. Larsson With updates by Thomas L. Erskine Other major works novels: At Fault, 1890; The Awakening, 1899. miscellaneous: The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 1969 (2 volumes; Per Seyersted, editor). nonfiction: Kate Chopin’s Private Papers, 1998. Bibliography Bonner, Thomas, Jr. The Kate Chopin Companion. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Guide, arranged alphabetically, to the more than nine hundred characters and over two hundred places that affected the course of Chopin’s stories. Also includes a selection of her translations of pieces by Guy de Maupassant and one by Adrien Vely. Contains interesting period maps and a useful bibliographical essay. Boren, Lynda S., and Sara de Saussure Davis, eds. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Although most of these essays focus on The Awakening, several discuss such stories as “Charlie,” “After the Winter,” and “At Cheniere Caminada.” Other essays compare Chopin with playwright Henrik Ibsen in terms of domestic confinement and discuss her work from a Marxist point of view. Brown, Pearl L. “Awakened Men in Kate Chopin’s Creole Stories.” ATQ, n.s. 13, no. 1 (March, 1999). Argues that in Chopin’s Creole stories, in intimate moments women discover inner selves buried beneath socially imposed ones and men discover subjective selves buried beneath public personas. Erickson, Jon. “Fairytale Features in Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’: A Case Study in Genre Cross-Reference.” In Modes of Narrative, edited by Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1990. Shows how Chopin’s story conflicts with the expectations set up by the fairy-tale genre on which it is based; for example, the prince turns out to be the villain. Argues that the ending

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of the story is justified, for in the fairy tale the mystery of origin must be solved and the villain must be punished. Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. Discusses Chopin’s short stories in the context of her bilingual and bicultural imagination; provides readings of her most important stories, examines her three volumes of stories, and comments on her children’s stories. Also includes excerpts from Chopin’s literary criticism and brief discussions by other critics of her most familiar stories. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Chopin: “La Belle Zoraïde” (vol. 1), “Désirée’s Baby” (vol. 2), “Madame Célestin’s Divorce” (vol. 5), and “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” (vol. 7). Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Comprehensive collection of essays on Chopin. This volume reprints early evaluations of the author’s life and works as well as more modern scholarly analyses. In addition to a substantial introduction by the editor, it also includes seven original essays by such notable scholars as Linda Wagner-Martin and Heather Kirk Thomas. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Seyersted’s biography, besides providing invaluable information about the New Orleans of the 1870’s, examines Chopin’s life, views, and work. Provides lengthy discussions not only of The Awakening but also of her many short stories. Seyersted sees her as a transitional literary figure, a link between George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Toth’s thoroughly documented, exhaustive work is the definitive Chopin biography. She covers not only Chopin’s life but also her literary works and discusses many of the short stories in considerable detail. Toth updates Per Seyersted’s bibliography of Chopin’s work, supplies a helpful chronology of her life, and discusses the alleged banning of The Awakening. The starting point for Chopin research. ____________. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Using newly discovered manuscripts, letters, and diaries of Chopin, Toth examines the source of Chopin’s ambition and passion for her art, arguing that she worked much harder at her craft than previously thought.

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Sandra Cisneros Born: Chicago, Illinois; December 20, 1954 Principal short fiction • The House on Mango Street, 1984; Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories, 1991. Other literary forms • Sandra Cisneros is known for her poetry as well as her short fiction. She has published several collections of poems, including Bad Boys (1980), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman (1994); much of her poetry remains uncollected and unpublished, according to the author’s wishes. She has also published a series of essays explaining her own creative processes as a writer in The Americas Review. In addition, she published Hairs = Pelitos (1984), a children’s book illustrated by Terry Ybanez which expands on the chapter “Hairs” in The House on Mango Street. In 2002, Cisneros published her second novel, Caramelo, which is about a multigeneration Mexican American family making a pilgrimage from Chicago to Mexico City. Achievements • Together with authors such as Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, and Alma Villanueva, Sandra Cisneros is one of the literary voices that emerged in the 1980’s and was responsible for securing for Chicana fiction a place in mainstream American literature. Her collection of short stories Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories was the first work by and about Chicanas—Mexican American women—to receive a contract with a major publishing house (Random House). Cisneros was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award and the PEN Center West Award for her first collection of short fiction, The House on Mango Street. She is a twotime recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Creative Writers for her poetry and fiction. In 1985, Cisneros received a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship. She was granted a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Biography • Sandra Cisneros was born in 1954 into a working-class family in Chicago, Illinois. With a Mexican American mother, a Mexican father, and six brothers, she described her circumstances as being similar to having seven fathers. Because of close familial and cultural ties with Mexico, the Cisneros family moved back and forth between a series of cramped apartments in Chicago and the paternal grandmother’s home in Mexico City. The concept of home or the lack of one would later weigh heavily in Cisneros’s writing. The combination of an uprooted lifestyle and an everchanging circle of friends, schools, and neighborhoods, as well as the isolation that resulted from her brothers’ unwillingness to let a girl join in their play, led Cisneros to turn inward to a life of books. That time spent alone allowed an observant, creative voice to take root in the author. Cisneros considered her career as a professional writer to have begun in 1974— the year in which she enrolled in a writing class as a junior at Loyola University of Chicago, where she would later receive her bachelor of arts degree in English. It was her tenure at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, from which she took a master of fine arts degree, however, that proved an invaluable aid in the formation of her own

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literary voice. During a discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s La Bétique de l’espace (1957; The Poetics of Space, 1964), in which her classmates spoke of the house as a literary symbol complete with attics, stairways, and cellars of imagination and childhood, Cisneros realized that her experience was different from that of her college classmates. Her background was that of a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood complete with drunken bums, families sleeping on crowded floors, and rats. She ceased trying to make her style fit that of the perfect, white, and mostly male image that was foreign to her and, instead, undertook writing about that to which her classmates could not relate but was familiar to her. Cisneros has used her education to foster change within the Chicano community. She taught high school dropouts for three years in a Chicano barrio. She has also worked as an administrative assistant at Loyola University, where she was involved in the recruitment of minority and disadvantaged students. In 1984, she was the literature director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center of San Antonio, the city which she made her home. Cisneros served as writer-in-residence at the Michael Karolyi Artists Foundation in Vence, France, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Analysis • Sandra Cisneros said that she writes about the memories that will not let her sleep at night—about the stories that are waiting to be told. Drawing on the memories of her childhood and her cultural identity—the run-down, crowded apartment, the double-edged sword of being American yet not being considered American, the sight of women in her community closed in behind apartment windows—Cisneros’s fiction avoids any romantic clichés of life in the barrio. Despite the sobering themes upon which Cisneros touches—poverty, sexism, and racism—she tells her stories with a voice that is at the same time strong, playful, and deceptively simple. Cisneros’s distinctive style is marked by the grace with which Spanish words and phrases are woven into her stories. Central to her stories is a preoccupation with the house, the community, and the condition of women. Her images are vivid and lyrical. She acknowledges that she was influenced in style by the mix of poetry and fiction in Jorge Luis Borges’s El hacedor (1960; Dreamtigers, 1964). Indeed, while Cisneros herself classifies her fiction as stories that read like poems, critics have not reached an agreement, labeling her works The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories alternatively as novels, short-story collections, series of vignettes, and prose poems. The House on Mango Street • The series of sketches in The House on Mango Street offers a bittersweet view of life in a Chicago barrio. Readers follow the young adolescent narrator Esperanza—whose name (as explained in the story “My Name”) means “hope” in Spanish and also implies too many letters, sadness, and waiting—as she makes the discoveries associated with maturing. She introduces the reader to her neighbors and her neighborhood, making them as familiar to the reader as they are to her. In the title story, Esperanza explains how her family came to live on Mango Street. The family had hoped that the house on Mango Street would be like the ones they had always dreamed of—with real stairs and several bathrooms and a great big yard with trees and grass. Esperanza sadly explains, however, that their house does not fulfill this wish at all. She is ashamed of her red brick house, as she has been of all of her family’s previous dwellings. She succinctly describes the embarrassment that she experienced when the family was living on Loomis and she had to show her apartment to a nun from

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her school. She pointed to the family’s third-floor flat, located above a boarded-up laundry, and suffered the blow of the nun’s disbelieving response, “there?” From that moment, Esperanza knew that she had to have a house—one that she could show with pride to people as if it were a reflection of herself. She was sure the family would have such a house soon. Yet the house on Mango Street is not that house.

“Bums in the Attic” • Because Esperanza remarks that she wants a house “all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories,” Cisneros has been read as creating a grasping and selfish protagonist. Yet the section titled “Bums in the Attic” dispels this notion of untoward individualism. In this sketch—which resembles one of Cisneros’s favorite children’s stories, Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House (1978), in which the owners of a © Rubén Guzmán house on a country hill promise the house never to sell it—Esperanza speculates about the grand home on a hill that she will have someday. As much as she wants to leave Mango Street, however, she stresses that even in her country home she will not forget from where she came. She will not make her house a secured palace that locks out the world; she will instead offer her attic to the homeless so that they too will have a home. “Those Who Don’t” • In “Those Who Don’t,” the young Esperanza discusses in a matter-of-fact tone the concept of being the “other” in society. She knows that people who happen into her neighborhood think that her community is dangerous, but she knows her neighbors by name and knows their backgrounds. Among her Latino friends she feels safe. Yet Esperanza can understand the stranger’s apprehension, for when she and her family venture out of the security of their neighborhood, their bodies get tense and their eyes look straight ahead. “Alicia Who Sees Mice” • Cisneros’s concern for the place women hold in Latino society is evident in the powerful story “Alicia Who Sees Mice.” Alicia, Esperanza’s friend, must rise early every morning “with the tortilla star” and the mice in the kitchen to make her father’s lunch-box tortillas. Alicia’s mother has died, and, Esperanza remarks, young Alicia has inherited her mother’s duty as the family caregiver along with her “rolling pin and sleepiness.” Alicia has dreams of escaping this life of confinement and sacrifice, however, with a university education. She studies

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hard all night with the mice that her father says do not exist. With its precise imagery, “Alicia Who Sees Mice” is at once a criticism of patriarchal oppression of women and a beacon for those women who would struggle to break away from that oppression. “Minerva Writes Poems” • The theme of education and writing as a means whereby women can escape from the barrio is also found in “Minerva Writes Poems.” Minerva is only a bit older than Esperanza, “but already she has two kids and a husband who left . . . and keeps leaving.” Minerva’s husband reappears sporadically, but their reunion usually ends in violence and abuse. Minerva cries every day over her bad situation and writes poems at night. In an act of artistic and sisterly solidarity, she and Esperanza read their poems to each other, yet at this point, Esperanza feels helpless, unable to stop the beatings. In her reply, “There is nothing I can do,” there is a sense that Esperanza is inciting Minerva to take action for herself as well as implying that society itself must change its attitudes. “Edna’s Ruthie” • This sisterly support for fulfillment through learning is echoed in “Edna’s Ruthie.” The title character is a talented but damaged woman who returns to her mother’s home when she can no longer care for herself. Her own fondness for books—for hearing and telling a good story—inspires Esperanza in her own creative endeavors. Ruthie is moved to tears by Esperanza’s recitation of children’s stories, a response that conveys to the young girl the power of the word. “Red Clowns” • Esperanza’s passage into adulthood is not without setbacks. In “Red Clowns,” she goes to the amusement park with her friend Sally. When the sexually precocious Sally abandons Esperanza to slip away with a boy, Esperanza is molested and possibly raped by an older boy who tells her, “I love you Spanish girl, I love you.” She is angry and sad and confused over the loss of her innocence. She cannot understand why everyone told her that sex would be so wonderful when, in fact, she found nothing pleasant about the perpetrator’s dirty fingernails and sour breath. She wants to forget that degrading experience; she does not want to speak its horror. She yells at her friend Sally for leaving her, but she also directs her anger at a society that is partner to such an awful lie. “The Three Sisters” • The fundamental conflict that besets Esperanza is resolved in “The Three Sisters.” Although Esperanza has repeatedly voiced her desire to escape the barrio and its double bind of racism and sexism which snares many women, she nevertheless loves her community and cannot come to terms with deserting it. Then three wise, eccentric, and decidedly feminist sisters settle the issue. Young Esperanza is strong, talented, and destined to “go very far,” they tell her. Their encouraging words sanction her flight, yet the sisters remind her as well of the need for loyalty: When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are. Young Esperanza can finally look to a life beyond the confines of her repressive environment. Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories • Likewise, Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories offers a glimpse into the lives of Chicanas who must confront daily the triple

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bind of not being considered Mexican, not being considered American, and not being male. Cisneros said that while the pieces of Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories function individually, there is a single, unifying thread of vision and experience that runs throughout the collection of twenty-two narratives. Although the names of the narrators change with each work, each narrator retains a strong, determined, rebellious voice. “Eleven” • In “Eleven,” eleven-year-old Rachel’s birthday prompts her to consider what it means to grow older. The wisdom of her eleven years has taught her that the years “underneath” the birthday, like the rings inside a tree trunk, make one a certain age. When people want to cry, she reasons, it is the part of them that is three that brings on tears; when they are scared, it is the part in them that is five that registers fear. For this reason, Rachel explains, she was not able to act eleven years old today in school when her teacher wrongly accused her of forgetting an ugly red sweater that had been in the coatroom for a month. All the years were welling up inside her, preventing Rachel from telling everyone that it was not her sweater. Instead, she was silent. She tries to be happy and remember that today she is eleven and that her mother will have a cake for her when she goes home. The part of Rachel that is three, however, comes out in front of the class instead. She wishes she were anything but eleven. “One Holy Night” • The narrator of the chilling “One Holy Night” is an adolescent girl who sells fruits and vegetables from her grandmother’s pushcart. She meets a wanderer named Chaq who tells her that he is a descendant of a long line of Mayan kings. Intrigued by his story, the young woman begins to follow Chaq to his little room behind an automobile garage after she has sold each day’s produce. Chaq spins mystic tales of the past and future greatness of his family’s lineage as he entices the girl into her first sexual experience. She returns home to her grandmother and uncle a changed woman, barely able to contain her excitement. The young woman’s secret, however, is soon discovered: She is pregnant. The family, in total disgrace, attempts to locate Chaq, who has since left town. Her uncle writes a letter in hope of finding the man who could correct his niece’s ruined life. A response arrives from Chaq’s sister. She explains that her brother’s name is actually Chato, which means “fat-face”; he is thirty-seven, not at all Mayan, and not at all royal. The girl’s family sends her to Mexico to give birth and to avoid disgrace. It is later learned that Chato has been captured and charged with the deaths of eleven women. The girl appears unfazed by the news, however, and continues to plan her dreams of children. She becomes indifferent to love. “Never Marry a Mexican” • The title “Never Marry a Mexican” sums up the advice that the protagonist Clemencia was told as a young girl by her Chicana mother who regretted marrying a Mexican. Her mother’s words ultimately consign Clemencia to cultural and social marginality. Clemencia scorns the working-class Latino men in her life and refuses to consider any of them as potential husbands. However, ironically, the white men whom she favors follow the same advice her mother has instilled in her: They will become sexually involved with a Chicana, but they will not marry outside of their own race. Caught uncomfortably between cultures, Clemencia attempts to make the most of her difficult status. She prides herself on remaining unattached, a seductress who beds white, married men while their wives are in the throes of childbirth. Yet her pain

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and loneliness are palpable. She nurses affection for one white married lover for eighteen years, eventually gaining revenge on him by entering into a sexual relationship with his son. For Clemencia, the unhealthy relationship yields and yet perverts what she ostensibly disavows: marriage and motherhood. Sexual intercourse with the young man, she believes, links her to his father and mother’s marital relations, of which he is the product, and her lover’s relative youth allows her to “mother” him. “Woman Hollering Creek” • The collection’s title story is one of its strongest. It is a story of Cleófilas, a woman reared in a small town in Mexico not far from the Texas border. Cleófilas dreams of the romance and passion of the soap operas that she watches at her girlfriend’s house. She believes her fantasy is realized when she meets Juan Pedro, a Texan who wants to marry her right away, “without a long engagement since he can’t take off too much time from work.” Cleófilas is whisked away across the border to Seguin, Texas, a town like so many others, with nothing of interest to walk to, “built so that you have to depend on husbands.” Life on “the other side” is, at first, a blessing for Cleófilas. Texas is the land of Laundromats and dream homes. Running behind their new house is a creek that all call Woman Hollering. Cleófilas wonders if the odd name is connected to tales of La Llorona, the tragic mythical figure known to wail after drowning her children. Her enthusiasm for her new life ends quickly, however, with a slap to her face by Juan Pedro. That slap will start a long line of abuse and cause Cleófilas to think flatly, “This is the man I have waited my whole life for.” Although she had always promised herself that she would not allow any man to hit her, Cleófilas, isolated at home, not allowed to correspond with her family, hindered by not knowing English, and afraid of Juan Pedro’s rage, stays with him. When she begins to suspect that Juan Pedro is unfaithful, she thinks about returning to her native town but fears disgrace and does not act. Cleófilas had always thought that her life would be like a soap opera, “only now the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief.” She becomes pregnant with their second child but is almost too afraid to ask Juan Pedro to take her to the clinic for prenatal care. Once at the clinic, Cleófilas breaks down and tells her plight to a sympathetic doctor who arranges a ride for her and her son to the bus station in San Antonio. The morning of their escape, Cleófilas is tense and frightened. As they pass over Woman Hollering Creek in a pickup truck, their spirited female driver lets out a Tarzan-like yell that startles her two passengers. On her way back to her father’s home, Cleófilas catches a glimpse of what it is to be an autonomous woman. Mary F. Yudin With updates by Theresa Kanoza and the Editors Other major works children’s literature: Hairs = Pelitos, 1984. novel: Caramelo, 2002. miscellaneous: Vintage Cisneros, 2004. poetry: Bad Boys, 1980; The Rodrigo Poems, 1985; My Wicked, Wicked Ways, 1987; Loose Woman, 1994. Bibliography Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek, and Other

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Stories.” American Literature 71 (March, 1999): 117-150. Shows how Cisneros’s narrative techniques challenge various spatial representations and lay bare hidden stories. Claims that Cisneros explores the various subtleties of violence of changing spatial relations. Cisneros, Sandra. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked, and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros.” Interview by Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda. The Americas Review 18, no. 1 (1990): 64-80. In an enlightening interview, Cisneros discusses her identity as a Chicana, her development as a writer, and her use of poetry and modern myth in her fiction. The interview focuses on the collections My Wicked, Wicked Ways and The House on Mango Street. ____________. “Sandra Cisneros: Conveying the Riches of the Latin American Culture Is the Author’s Literary Goal.” Interview by Jim Sagel. Publishers Weekly 238 (March 29, 1991): 74-75. In this informative interview, Cisneros speaks about the influence that her childhood had on her writing. The interview touches upon the personal side of the writer and includes a brief description of the genesis of the collection Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories. Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. Discusses the role that Mexican popular culture and traditional Mexican narratives play in limiting women’s sense of identity. Focuses primarily on the negative effects of popular romances in Mexico and televised soap operas. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Cisneros: “Geraldo No Last Name” (vol. 3), “One Holy Night” (vol. 5), and “Woman Hollering Creek” (vol. 8). Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 3-20. Argues that Spanish as a code comprehensible to an inside group and as a repressed language subordinate to English are central issues in Woman Hollering Creek. Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 116, no. 5 (2001): 1334-1348. Analyzes Cisneros’s use of a poem by Emily Dickinson in The House on Mango Street as a means of evoking the pleasures of withdrawal from faceto-face sociality. Thompson, Jeff. “’What Is Called Heaven?’ Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Summer, 1994): 415-424. States that the overall theme of the stories is the vulnerability of the female narrators. The vignettes should be read as symptomatic of a social structure that allows little cultural movement and little possibility for the creation of an identity outside the boundaries of the barrio. Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall, 1995): 243-271. Discusses how the stories describe the difficulties of living on the border between Anglo-American and Mexican cultures and how the female protagonists of the stories struggle with sexuality and motherhood as icons that limit their identity.

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Walter Van Tilburg Clark Born: East Orland, Maine; August 3, 1909 Died: Reno, Nevada; November 10, 1971 Principal short fiction • The Watchful Gods, and Other Stories, 1950. Other literary forms • In addition to his short stories, Walter Van Tilburg Clark wrote three novels—The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), and The Track of the Cat (1949). The first and last of these were made into motion pictures. Tim Hazard (1951) is the enlarged version of The City of Trembling Leaves. Clark also produced an early book of poems, Ten Women in Gale’s House and Shorter Poems (1932). Achievements • Although Walter Van Tilburg Clark is known primarily for his novels, his one volume of stories, as well as his uncollected short stories, have established him as a fine writer of short stories. In fact, his “The Wind and the Snow of Winter” received the O. Henry Award in 1945. In their Western settings, their ambiguous depiction of the American Dream, their concern about personal identity and oneness with nature, and their essentially tragic vision, the short stories are of a piece with his three novels. Unlike some “Western” writers, Clark used his landscape as both subject and backdrop for his own philosophical themes. Less concerned with characters—one story virtually omits them, concentrating instead on animals as “characters”—than with ideas, Clark used his characters, many of whom seem stereotypical, to embody and actualize his notions about the possibility of defining self and position in the cosmos. Biography • Walter Van Tilburg Clark was born on August 3, 1909, in East Orland, Maine, the first child of Walter Ernest and Euphemia Abrams Clark. In 1917, his father, a distinguished economics professor, became president of the University of Nevada at Reno. Therefore, the family had to move when Clark was only eight. In Reno, Clark attended public schools and later received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from the University of Nevada. Clark married Barbara Morse in 1933, and they became the parents of two children, Barbara Ann and Robert Morse. The couple settled in Cazenovia, New York, where Clark began a career in high school and college teaching as well as creative writing. In the next several years, Clark continued writing and taught at several schools, including the University of Montana, Reed College, and the University of Nevada, where he resigned after protesting the autocratic tendencies of the administration. He eventually returned there, however, to teach creative writing. Clark was also director of creative writing at San Francisco State College from 1956 to 1962. He died of cancer on November 10, 1971, at the age of sixty-two. Analysis • Walter Van Tilburg Clark once wrote that the primary impulse of the arts has been religious and ritualistic—with the central hope of “propitiating or enlisting Nature, the Gods, God, or whatever name one wishes to give the encompassing and still mysterious whole.” Certainly Clark’s fiction attests to such a view. In a world in which thought is often confused and fragmented, he advocates for humanity a stance of intellectual honesty, an acceptance of instinctive values, and a belief in love. The

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key is human experience. As Max Westbrook so aptly put it in his study of Clark, “Clark’s literary credo, then, is based on the capacity of the unconscious mind to discover and to give shape to objective knowledge about the human experience.” “The Buck in the Hills” • “The Buck in the Hills” may be Clark’s clearest reflection in his stories of the literary credo mentioned above. Writing more or less in the terse, almost brittle, style of Ernest Hemingway, Clark opens the story with vividly descriptive passages of mountain scenery. The narrator, whose name the reader never learns, has returned to this setting after five years. It is really more than a return for him; it is a pilgrimage to a sacred place. Like Hemingway’s heroes, he feels a deep need to replenish his spirit, to reattach himself to things solid and lasting. The clear sky, the strong mountains, and the cold wind all serve as a natural backdrop for the spiritual ritual of his pilgrimage. As he climbs toward the peak of a mountain, he recalls with pleasure an earlier climb with a dark girl “who knew all the flowers, and who, when I bet her she couldn’t find more than thirty kinds, found more than fifty.” On that day, as on this, the narrator felt a clear sense of the majesty of the mountains and the “big arch of the world we looked at,” and he recalls spending two hours another time watching a hawk, “feeling myself lift magnificently when he swooped up toward me on the current up the col, and then balanced and turned above.” When he returns to his campsite by a shallow snow-water lake, he swims, naked, and as he floats in this cleansing ritual, looking up at the first stars showing above the ridge, he sings out “an operatic sounding something.” At this point, just when his spiritual rejuvenation is nearly complete, the ritual is broken by the appearance of Tom Williams, one of the two men whom he had accompanied on this trip to the mountains. The plan had been for Williams and the other man, Chet McKenny, to spend a few days hunting, leaving the narrator alone. As he watches Williams approach, the narrator unhappily expects to see McKenny also, a man he dislikes not because of his stupidity but because of something deeper than that. Williams, however, is alone. After a while Williams tells the narrator of the experience he has just had with McKenny, whom he calls a “first-rate bastard.” During their hunt McKenny had purposely shot a deer in the leg so that he could herd it back to their camp rather than carry it. When they arrived at the camp, he slit the deer’s throat, saying, “I never take more than one shot.” Sickened by this brutal act, Williams drove off in his car, leaving McKenny to get out of the mountains as best he could. After Williams’s story, both men agree that McKenny deserves to be left behind for what he did. In another cleansing ritual, they both take a swim, becoming cheerful later as they sit by their fire drinking beer. The next morning, however, it is snowing, and as they silently head back down the mountain, the narrator feels that there is “something listening behind each tree and rock we passed, and something waiting among the taller trees down slope, blue through the falling snow. They wouldn’t stop us, but they didn’t like us either. The snow was their ally.” Thus there are two contrasting moods in “The Buck in the Hills”: that of harmony and that of dissonance. At the beginning of the story, the narrator has succeeded after five years in reestablishing a right relationship with nature and thus with himself, but at the end, this relationship has been destroyed by the cruel actions of McKenny. The narrator’s ritual of acceptance of the primordial in human beings has been overshadowed by McKenny’s ritual of acceptance that human beings are somehow above nature. Ernest Hemingway’s belief that morality is what one feels good after is in one

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sense reversed here to the idea that immorality is what one feels bad after; certainly the narrator and Williams, on their way down the mountain, feel bad. Human beings and nature in a right relationship is not a mere romantic notion to Clark. It is reality—indeed, perhaps humankinds only reality. “The Portable Phonograph” • In “The Portable Phonograph” Clark ventures, if not into science fiction, at least into a kind of speculative fiction as he sets his story in a world of the future, one marked by the “toothed impress of great tanks” and the “scars of gigantic bombs.” It seems a world devoid of human existence; the only visible life is a flock of wild geese flying south to escape the cold of winter. Above the frozen creek in a cave dug into the bank, however, there is human Library of Congress life: four men—survivors of some undescribed Armageddon—huddle before a smoldering peat fire in an image of primitive existence. Clark provides little background of these four almost grotesque men. One, the reader learns, is a doctor, probably of philosophy rather than of medicine. One is a young musician, quite ill with a cough. The other two are middle-aged. All are obviously intelligent. The cave belongs to the doctor, whose name is Jenkins, and he has invited the others to hear him read from one of his four books—the Bible, Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare. In selfish satisfaction he explains that when he saw what was happening to the world, “I told myself, ‘It is the end. I cannot take much; I will take these.’” His justification is his love for the books and his belief that they represent the “soul of what was good in us here.” When Jenkins finishes his reading from The Tempest, the others wait expectantly, and the former finally says grudgingly, “You wish to hear the phonograph.” This is obviously the moment for which they have been waiting. Jenkins tenderly and almost lovingly brings out his portable phonograph and places it on the dirt-packed floor where the firelight will fall on it. He comments that he has been using thorns as needles, but that in deference to the musician, he will use one of the three steel needles that he has left. Since Jenkins will play only one record a week, there is some discussion as to what they will hear. The musician selects a Claude Debussy nocturne, and as Jenkins places the record on the phonograph, the others all rise to their knees “in an attitude of worship.” As the piercing and singularly sweet sounds of the nocturne flood the cave, the men are captivated. In all but the musician there occur “sequences of tragically heightened recollection”; the musician, clenching the fingers of one hand over his teeth, hears only the music. At the conclusion of the piece, the three guests leave—the musician by himself, the other two together. Jenkins peers anxiously after

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them, waiting. When he hears the cough of the musician some distance off, he drops his canvas door and hurries to hide his phonograph in a deep hole in the cave wall. Sealing up the hole, he prays and then gets under the covers of his grass bed, feeling with his hand the “comfortable piece of lead pipe.” Structurally a very simple story, “The Portable Phonograph” is rich in its implications. In a devastated world four men represent what Jenkins refers to as “the doddering remnant of a race of mechanical fools.” The books that he has saved symbolize the beauty of humanity’s artistic creativity as opposed to the destructiveness of its mechanical creativity. Again, Clark portrays two sides of human nature, that which aspires to the heights of human spiritual and moral vision and that which drives humankind on to its own destruction. The cruel and bitter irony is that essentially humankind imagination is at once its glory and its undoing. As the men kneel in expectation before the mechanical wonder of the phonograph, they worship it as a symbol of human ingenuity. The music that comes from the record provides for at least three of the men a temporary escape from their grim reality. Thus, humanity’s drive for mechanical accomplishment—the same drive that has destroyed a world—now has also preserved the beauty of its musical accomplishment. This may well be what the musician understands as he lets his head “fall back in agony” while listening to the music. Human beings are forever blessed to create and doomed to destroy. That is why the piece of lead pipe is such a protective comfort to Jenkins as he closes “his smoke-smarting eyes.” In order to protect what is left of art, he must rely on the very methods that have brought about its demise. “The Indian Well” • In his excellent novel The Track of the Cat, Clark takes the reader into the realm of human unconscious as Curt Bridges, the protagonist, is driven to his own death while tracking both a real and an imagined cougar. In the short story “The Indian Well,” set in the desert in 1940, Jim Suttler also seeks to kill a cougar, and although the mythological and psychological implications are not developed as fully as they are in the novel, the story is still powerful in its total effect. In what must be one of the best word pictures of the desert and the creatures that inhabit it, Clark devotes a half-dozen pages to the stark drama of life and death that takes place around a desert well; rattlesnakes, road runners, jackrabbits, hawks, lizards, coyotes, and a cow and her calf all play parts. The story’s only character is Jim Suttler, a grizzled old prospector who, with his mule Jenny, still seeks gold in abandoned and long-forgotten mines. Suttler is a man well-attuned to life in the desert wilderness. Armed with a rifle, an old six-shooter, and primitive mining tools, he is not merely a stereotyped prospector; his red beard and shoulder-length red hair might lead some to see in him a resemblance to Christ, but Suttler is unlike Christ in several ways. Early in the story, Suttler and Jenny arrive at Indian Well. The history of Indian Well is recorded on the walls of the rundown cabin nearby; names and dates go back to the previous century. All had used the well, and all had given vent to some expression, ranging from “God guide us” to “Giv it back to the injuns” to a more familiar libel: “Fifty miles from water, a hundred miles from wood, a million miles from God, and three feet from hell.” Before Suttler leaves, he too will leave a message. Finding some traces of gold in an abandoned mine near the well, Suttler decides to stay for a while to see if he can make it pay off. It is a comfortable time, and both he and Jenny regain some of the weight lost during their recent travels. Two events, however, change the idyllic mood of their stay. The first occurs when Suttler kills a range

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calf that, along with its mother, has strayed close to the well. Although he has some qualms about killing the calf, Suttler, enjoying the sensation of Providence, soon puts them out of his mind. Next, a cougar kills Jenny. This event inflames Suttler with the desire for revenge—even if “it takes a year”—so throughout the winter he sits up nights waiting for the cat to return. When he eventually kills it, he skins it and, uncovering Jenny’s grave, places the skin over her carcass. His revenge complete, he cleanses himself at the well and leaves as a “starved but revived and volatile spirit.” Thus, one more passerby has contributed to the history of Indian Well, and the life around the well goes on. The basic element in “The Indian Well” is the ironic contrast between the beginning and the ending of the story, just as it is in “The Buck in the Hills.” When they come upon Indian Well, Suttler and Jenny enter into a natural world that has its own ordered life and death, and they blend easily into it. Suttler appears to be a man at one with nature, yet at the end of the story, the death that he has inflicted upon the cougar stands as something apart from the ordered world of the well. It is a death that was motivated by the desire for revenge, a very human emotion. The reader might be suspicious when Suttler kills the calf, but he justifies such a killing on the basis of the meat that the calf provides. Killing the cougar, on the other hand, cannot be justified in any external way. The deep satisfaction that it brings to Suttler stands in opposition to any right relationship between human beings and nature; it is solely a part of Suttler’s inner self. When the deed is done, Suttler can blend back into the natural world around him. For that one winter, however, as he lies in wait for the cougar, he exhibits humankind’s all-too-common flaw of putting itself above the natural world. Still, because he knows what he has done and, moreover, accepts it, he is able once more to establish his relationship with the cosmic forces. “Hook” • In a very real sense, this establishing of a relationship with the cosmic forces is the goal of many of Clark’s characters. Caught in the ambiguities of good and evil, of morality and immorality, they struggle to maintain a faith in humanity and to bring moral law into accordance with natural law, for only in that way can human beings be saved from their own destructive tendencies. Some critics, such as Chester Eisinger, see Clark as being rather pessimistic regarding the success of such a human attempt at unity and attribute to him a desire to retreat from other human beings. If this view is correct, then perhaps the story “Hook” is the best expression of what Clark wants to say. The main character in this story is a hawk which fulfills itself in flight, in battle, and in sex, until it is killed by a dog. The hawk’s life is a cycle of instinct, and it can easily enough be seen as an antihuman symbol. If Eisinger’s view is wrong however, then it is possible to see Clark as a writer who seeks not a retreat from other human beings but an explanation of humanity. For, like the hawks that appear so often in Clark’s stories, human beings are also a part of nature and because he is, it is possible to see his task as one of defining himself in the context of the natural order of things. Whatever the outcome, Clark’s characters do make the attempt. Wilton Eckley With updates by Thomas L. Erskine Other major works novels: The Ox-Bow Incident, 1940; The City of Trembling Leaves, 1945; The Track of the Cat, 1949; Tim Hazard, 1951.

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nonfiction: The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849-1903, 1973 (3 volumes). poetry: Ten Women in Gale’s House and Shorter Poems, 1932. Bibliography Court, Franklin E. “Clark’s ‘The Wind and the Snow of Winter’ and Celtic Oisin.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Spring, 1996): 219-228. Examines the mythic pattern of Clark’s most famous story against the background of the Celtic legend of wandering Oisin. Eisinger, Chester E. Fiction of the Forties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Eisinger regards Clark’s short stories as similar in theme (search for identity, desire to merge with nature, and rejection by nature) to the novels. Although several short stories are mentioned in passing, Eisinger includes lengthy analyses of “The Buck in the Hills,” “Hook,” and “The Watchful Gods.” Kich, Martin. Western American Novelists. Vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1995. After a brief account of Clark’s career, Kich provides an extensive, annotated bibliography, providing detailed commentary on reviews of virtually every significant prose fiction. Kich also annotates reference works with entries on Clark and books with chapters on his fiction. Laird, Charlton, ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1983. Collection of eighteen pieces, some by Clark himself, on Clark’s life, his major published work, and his literary craftsmanship. The book is most valuable for the essays on “The Watchful Gods” and “The Pretender,” essays that portray Clark as a reviser/craftsman, and for the autobiographical information and the detailed chronology provided by his son. Lee, L. L. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boise, Ida.: Boise State College Press, 1973. Lee devotes a separate chapter to the short stories, which he believes repeat the themes of the novels but with greater clarity and insight. “The Portable Phonograph” and “The Watchful Gods” are discussed in some detail. Supplemented by a helpful bibliography. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Clark: “Hook” (vol. 3), “The Portable Phonograph” (vol. 6), and “The Wind and the Snow of Winter” (vol. 8). Ronald, Ann. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Brave Bird, ‘Hook.’” Studies in Short Fiction 25 (Fall, 1988): 433-439. Discusses the complex irony of the story, arguing that critics have wrongfully ignored it as a simple fable or animal tale for children. Westbrook, Max. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. New York: Twayne, 1969. Westbrook’s book remains the best overall assessment of Clark’s literary work; in addition to a chronology of Clark’s life, a biographical chapter, and a select bibliography, Westbrook includes a chapter on Clark’s novella, The Watchful Gods, and Other Stories, and several paragraph-length discussions of Clark’s best short stories. ____________. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream.” In A Literary History of the American West, edited by J. Golden Taylor. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Westbrook blends biography with criticism as he analyzes Clark’s fiction and defines Clark’s place in literary history. Using characters from stories and novels, Westbrook depicts the Clark “hero” as an idealistic dreamer incapable of practical action. As a result, the American dream, or its nightmarish counterpart, becomes a real concern for Clark.

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Arthur C. Clarke Born: Minehead, Somerset, England; December 16, 1917 Principal short fiction • Expedition to Earth, 1953; Reach for Tomorrow, 1956; Tales from the White Hart, 1957; The Other Side of the Sky, 1958; Tales of Ten Worlds, 1962; The Nine Billion Names of God, 1967; Of Time and Stars: The Worlds of Arthur C. Clarke, 1972; The Wind from the Sun, 1972; The Best of Arthur C. Clarke, 1937-1971, 1973; The Sentinel: Masterworks of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1983; Dilemmas: The Secret, 1989; Tales from Planet Earth, 1989; More than One Universe: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, 1991; The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, 2000. Other literary forms • Arthur C. Clarke is best known for novels that chronicle nearfuture space and sea exploration or suggest transcendence of human form and limitations. He published an autobiographical novel based on his experience with radar in World War II, and he adapted several of his stories for film: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for Stanley Kubrick, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), and Cradle (1988). In 1997, he published 3001: The Final Odyssey. Among his most important and best-known novels are Against the Fall of Night, 1953 (revised as The City and the Stars, 1956), Childhood’s End (1953), Rendezvous with Rama (1973), Imperial Earth (1975), and The Fountains of Paradise (1979). Since the early 1990’s, he has written most of his novels in collaboration with other authors, most notably Gentry Lee and Stephen Baxter. These later novels include The Garden of Rama (1991), The Light of Other Days (2000), Time’s Eye (2004), and Sunstorm (2005). Throughout his career, Clarke contributed numerous articles on science and speculation, edited various scientific and science-fiction magazines, and wrote more than twenty books of nonfiction, including By Space Possessed (1993) and The Snows of Olympus: A Garden of Mars (1994). In 2003, Clarke published From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis. Clarke recorded some of his fictional works, lectured widely on science, the sea, and futuristic technology, and authored a television series, Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers. His writing has appeared in popular magazines under the pseudonyms E. G. O’Brien and Charles Willis. Achievements • Arthur C. Clarke has received numerous awards. The most representative include Hugo Awards for science fiction in 1956, 1974, and 1980; UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize in 1961, for science writing; the Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963, for originating the concept of communications satellites; an Academy Award nomination in 1969 for best screenplay; Nebula Awards for science fiction in 1972, 1973, and 1980; a GALAXY Award for science fiction in 1979; and the Centennial Medal in 1984, for scientific achievements. Other distinguished honors include the prestigious Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986, the Charles A. Lindbergh Award in 1987, and his election to the Society of Satellite Professions Hall of Fame in 1987 and to the Aerospace Hall of Fame in 1988. In 1989 Clarke became a Commander of the British Empire, and he received a knighthood for “services to literature” in 1998.

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Biography • Reared in the country, Arthur Charles Clarke worked as a government auditor (1936-1941) in London, where he became active in the British Interplanetary Society (eventually becoming chairman, 1946-1947, 1950-1952). A Royal Air Force instructor in the infant technology of radar during World TO VIEW IMAGE, War II, he published the first specuPLEASE SEE lations on “stationary” communications satellites in 1945. After earnPRINT EDITION ing his bachelor’s degree in physics OF THIS BOOK. and mathematics at King’s College, London (1948), he became assistant editor of Science Abstracts (19491951) before turning to full-time writing. Introduced in 1953 to scuba diving, he moved to what was then Ceylon in 1956 and remained there for many years. Clarke married Marilyn Mayfield in 1954, but they were divorced in 1964. Clarke has more than five hundred works attributed to him. He is © Washington Post, reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library known as one of the most influential writers in the science-fiction field, as well as a visionary seer on scientific speculation. Clarke was the first, for example, to propose the idea of communications satellites, in his article “Extraterrestrial Relays” in 1945. He is a mathematician and physicist as well as a novelist and commentator. His talent for peering into the future has involved him in advising governments on communication and on the human use of space. Clarke popularized his belief in the total exploration of space and the sea. He became chancellor of the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka and was founder of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Advanced Technology. Analysis • Exposed in his childhood to both the pulp magazines of Hugo Gernsback and the English literary tradition of fantasy and science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke sometimes forges an uneasy alliance between the two in his own stories. The matter-offact description of the marvelous of H. G. Wells, the poetic evocation of unknown places of Lord Dunsany, and the immense vistas of space and time of the philosopher Olaf Stapledon lie cheek-by-jowl with artificial suspense devices, awkward sentimentality, schoolboy silliness, and melodramatic manipulation of such hoary motifs as the “stranded astronaut” or the “end of the world” in his less distinguished fiction. At its best, however, Clarke’s work shows glimpses of humanity’s rise to interplanetary civilization or evokes the wonder, in suitably subdued tones, of confrontations with extraterrestrial intelligences. Clarke’s 1967 collection of his “favorites” represents many facets of his career, from the raconteur of tall tales and ghost stories to the fantasist, the sentimentalist,

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the realist, and the poet of wonder. Most of his best and best-known stories are included, from the haunting rite of passage of a young lunar exile getting his first glimpse of the unapproachably radioactive world of his ancestors (“‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth . . . ,’”) to such “alien fables” of technological complacency as “Superiority” and “Before Eden.” “Rescue Party” • Among them, “Rescue Party,” his second professionally published story, looks forward to other tales of human progress and alien contact, but it is unusual in its strong story line and alien viewpoint. Although it makes one of his rare claims for human superiority, a fetish of Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr., the story’s humor, style, and forecasts are vintage Clarke. “Who was to blame?,” it opens, setting the context of a paternalistic “Galactic Federation,” sending a ship to rescue a few hundred survivors from Earth before its sun turns into a nova. With a million years between visits, the federation had been taken by surprise by humankind’s rise to civilization in two-fifths of that time, signaled by radio waves detected two hundred light years away. With little more than four hours to go, the ship arrives at a deserted planet, sends out two search parties, and barely escapes the cataclysm, burning out its “main generators” in the effort. Directing its course to the receiving point of a communications array on Earth, the mile-long spaceship, now needing rescue itself, approaches rendezvous with an unexpected fleet of ships from the planet. Unprecedented in size, this fleet of “primitive” rockets demonstrates an acceleration of human technological development so astonishing that the captain, the tentacled Alveron, whose ancient people are “Lords of the Universe,” teasingly suggests the vast federation beware of these upstarts. This “little joke” is followed by the narrator’s quiet punch line: “Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.” Humor of situation is evident throughout the story, from the concept of “administering” a galaxy to the discovery of the humans’ “handicap” of bipedalism from an abandoned portrait of a city alderman. The incongruity of the rescuers’ need for rescue is mirrored by the precision that allows the aliens an unflappable split-second escape but brings them there in the first place too late and with too little to do anything useful, then finds them baffled by relatively primitive communications devices and an automatic subway. Although the story creaks in places—contemporary theory says the sun cannot become a nova, vacuum tubes are outmoded, helicopters never did become the wave of the future—those details can be sacrificed for the sake of the fable. The primary forecasts of space travel and posturban civilization should not be discounted, at the risk of being as naïve and complacent as the aliens, without even their limited security in their own superiority. More commonly, Clarke sees alien technology as older and better than humans’, as in two stories in which 2001: A Space Odyssey is rooted. In “Encounter at Dawn,” ancient astronauts “in the last days of the Empire” give tools to primitives a hundred thousand years before Babylon. “The Sentinel” • Even more understated, “The Sentinel” is allegedly told by an eyewitness who begins by directing the reader to locate on the Moon the Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises), where the discovery took place. Part of a large 1996 expedition, he recalls fixing breakfast when a glint of light in the mountains caught his eye; staring through a telescope so fascinated him that he burned the sausages. From such homey touches, he led the climb to “Wilson’s Folly,” a plateau artificially leveled for a

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twelve-foot crystal pyramid “machine.” Its force field gave way, after twenty years of frustrated investigation, to an atomic assault which reduced the mystery to fragments. The rest of the story is speculation, successive stages of Wilson’s inferences. Not a relic of lunar civilization, the artifact, half the age of Earth, was left by visitors: Wilson imagines it saying “I’m a stranger here myself.” After its destruction, he “guesses” it must have been a beacon; interrupting its signal has triggered a “fire alarm.” Lacking explicit alien intent, the pyramid emblemizes the unknown. Although such a potentially multivalent symbol invites other interpretations, Wilson’s is supported by 2001, in which a rectangular slab under the lunar surface signals after being exposed to sunlight. The final savage attack on the pyramid also seems significant to the narrator, although the pyramid might have been programmed to selfdestruct. The quasi-religious awe, tinged with fear as well as positive expectation, with which Wilson awaits the aliens’ return has echoes elsewhere in Clarke. This story, moreover, with its judgment of space travel as a first step toward an incalculable destiny, many readers see as an article of faith in a grand design of a creator god. Such a pattern may lie beneath some of his work, but Clarke has also taken pains to discourage conventional religious interpretations. “The Nine Billion Names of God” • Clarke’s work is dotted with attacks on religious or “mystical” belief and behavior, with one exception: the Scottish-born head of worldwide Buddhism in The Deep Range (1957), whose opposition to butchering whales is based partly on the conviction that aliens may judge humankind on its behavior toward its fellow creatures. Certainly the surprise ending of “The Nine Billion Names of God” is no proof of Clarke’s sharing the faith of his Tibetan lamas. Although the story attacks the complacency of Western computer technicians whose efficiency speeds up the counting of all of God’s names, the ending (“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out”) is that of a joke or a ghost story. “The Star” • Rather than simply trivializing God, Clarke’s award-winning short story “The Star” makes God destructive and merciless. A Jesuit astrophysicist, slightly defensive about being both a cleric and a scientist, the narrator is at the point of quiet desperation. Beginning “It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican,” he finds no solace in the crucifix near his computer or the engraving of Loyola, whose order is not all that will end when an expedition makes public its findings. In a retrospective narration that distances the action, the narrator recounts a ship’s approach to the inappropriately named “Phoenix” Nebula, the debris of a supernova that destroyed an interplanetary civilization. Different from Wells’s story of the same name, this cataclysm did not spare a people and let them find a sense of community. From their remains in a vault on the star’s most distant planet, the crew finds evidence that this “disturbingly human” civilization was at its peak when it died. The narrator’s colleagues see no room in nature for God’s wrath or mercy, and the narrator denies his own right to judge God. He is troubled, however, by the date of the disruption; given its direction and distance, this must have been the “Star of Bethlehem,” hanging low in the East before sunrise. Explicitly rejecting keeping the information secret or tampering with the data, he is troubled in his faith because he cannot refuse (or refute) the findings of science. A masterpiece of compression, poetic in style, somber in tone, and totally devoid of action and dialogue (not even the two lines of “The Sentinel”), “The Star” does

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not even state its conclusion. The narrator must either conclude that his colleagues are right or accept a God who would destroy this culture to impress a few humans. “A Meeting with Medusa” • Considerably at variance with these and most of Clarke’s short fiction is “A Meeting with Medusa.” Appearing four years after his retrospective collection, it is one of his longest stories not given book length, and a sharp improvement over most of his work in the 1960’s. Allusive and subtly patterned, both a character study and a tale of adventure, it continues Clarke’s interest in “first contact” and alien landscapes, but it also fictionalizes J. D. Bernal’s suggestion in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1929) that space exploration is the proper province of a human mind in a posthuman body. All but destroyed when a mismanaged robot camera platform sent his dirigible, the Queen Elizabeth IV, down in flames, Howard Falcon is restored to life as a cyborg, the physical form of which is not revealed until the last of eight chapters. Seven years later, stronger and more durable, he argues successfully to be sent on an expedition into the atmosphere of Jupiter. After an additional three years, the actual adventure takes place. Almost a part of the “raft,” Kon-Tiki, supported by a hot hydrogen balloon (with emergency ram-jet and rocket motors), the wingless Falcon is nevertheless at a disadvantage when it comes to making contact with native life forms. Expecting at most a kind of plankton, he comes upon creatures whose nearest Earth analogues, in miniature, are varieties of sea life. Manta rays a hundred yards across seem docile browsers of floating wax mountains until their natural enemies appear. Radio-sensitive jellyfish over a mile wide, they repel attacking mantas with electrical discharges that also function for communications. A dirigible pilot once again, Falcon has neither their maneuverability nor their familiarity with local conditions. Wryly amused at his ambassadorial role, he is understandably reluctant to obey the “Prime Directive” requiring him to avoid attacking intelligent creatures, at the cost of his own life if need be. When tentacles descend around the Kon-Tiki, he descends still lower; when the “Medusa” begins to “pat” his craft tentatively with a single tentacle, he cuts loose with his auxiliary engines. The Great Red Spot, blizzards of wax, atmospheric maelstroms, and various other features of the “world of the gods” can wait until another time. A hero who has reignited humankind’s imagination, Falcon is slipping away from identity with the human race, one now discovers, along with the reader’s first glimpse of his undercarriage, hydraulic lifts, balloon tires, and seven foot height, if not of his “leathery mask” (now seen in a different light). Like the panicky “superchimp” on the Queen Elizabeth whose face he used to see in dreams, he is “between two worlds,” the biological and the mechanical. He represents at its extreme the “cosmic loneliness” of Clarke’s heroes. Falcon is at the center of the story, although the predominant interest may be more in what he sees than in what he does. Jupiter is the “hero,” at least of the middle sections of the story, in which Clarke combines his undersea experience and astrophysical theory to draw plausible inferences about an unlikely place for “life as we know it.” Although he is not an adequate “ambassador” to the Jovians—who could be?—because he is not quite human, Falcon is the best possible explorer. A “new breed,” he is for some purposes “more than human,” although one’s bias toward the “handicap” of bipedalism may blind one to it. He is also one more piece of evidence that the “transcendence” of human limitations widespread in Clarke’s fiction may be

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at best a mixed blessing. Suspenseful yet satiric, adventuresome yet calmly paced, “A Meeting with Medusa,” in its poetic evocation of first contact and its sophisticated variations on transcendence and the “stranded astronaut,” is a culmination of the shorter fiction that came before it. “The Hammer of God” • Several years elapsed before Clarke agreed to write another short story, “The Hammer of God,” for Time magazine’s special issue Beyond the Year 2000, published in the fall of 1992. In this tale, Clarke wryly combines paradoxes to shape his whimsical yet ironic version of efforts to deflect an asteroid’s possible collision with Earth. Clarke combines extreme religious polarities; ancient mythological deities; futuristic technological, political, and economic achievements; and a cast characterized by their opposing actions and reactions: an eccentric politician, a sentimental captain, a very logical computer, an asteroid, and religious saboteurs. Facts about two previous asteroids serve to punctuate and divide the story into three parts. The first cataclysm sixty-five million years ago brought destruction to dinosaurs, plants, and other animals. In contrast, the second, in 1972, cut through Earth’s atmosphere for two minutes, causing no damage. The third asteroid enters the solar system in 2212. Named Kali after the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, this traveler is the menace facing Captain Robert Singh, commander of the ship Goliath; his central computer, David; and his one-hundred-person team, Operation ATLAS. The captain’s team wants to move a small chunk of the asteroid into a new path away from Earth. Clarke envisions sophisticated technological and scientific advances. A neuralinput cap, the “portable Brainman,” fitting directly over a bald skull, allows the century-old Captain Singh to relive an experience from twenty years ago with his young son, Toby. The oil age ends with the advent of successful cold fusion. With lens-corrective laser shaping, eyeglasses are abolished, choices of skin coloring allow individuals to vary skin color as frequently as they change clothing, and scientific data from a radio beacon/measuring rod anchored within Kali supply David with facts to report on what the actual probability of impact would be. Logical thinking is not characteristic for the captain of the Goliath. He focuses on whether his future friendships will be on Mars or the moon and speculates about how he can arrange that all the many decades of his life will be on Mars. His mind is not on ship business. Conversely, David’s logical thoughts provide an alternative solution to the loss of hydrogen the ship experiences. With the remainder of the ship’s own propellant, originally reserved to rendezvous with Titan, Goliath itself can push Kali into a new course that will bypass Earth. Unfortunately, no one explores Kali further before accepting David’s maneuver. This asteroid has a fatal hidden feature, a weak outer crust. When Goliath pushes with all its force against Kali, it breaks through this crust and is stuck. Despite all attempts to reverse and pull free, the effort is useless. Using the remainder of its fuel, the ship makes one final push on Kali, strong enough to slightly alter the asteroid’s path and to permanently lock them into the asteroid’s surface. Contrary to the ancient Hindu goddess Kali’s almost endless blood sacrifices, this Kali’s destructive sacrifices as she cuts through Earth’s atmosphere for two minutes are trivial—only the ship’s crew, ten thousand lives, and one trillion dollars in damages. With skilled understatement, numerous paradoxes, and wry humor, Clarke again demonstrates in “The Hammer of God” his ability to craft an entertaining tale about Earth’s potential

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collision with a stray asteroid from outer space. As a poet of the infinite, whose fables judge humanity from an “alien” point of view, Clarke stands alone. David N. Samuelson With updates by Terry Theodore and the Editors Other major works children’s literature: Islands in the Sky, 1952; Dolphin Island, 1963. novels: Prelude to Space, 1951; The Sands of Mars, 1951; Against the Fall of Night, 1953 (revised as The City and the Stars, 1956); Childhood’s End, 1953; Earthlight, 1955; The Deep Range, 1957; Across the Sea of Stars, 1959; A Fall of Moondust, 1961; From the Ocean, from the Stars, 1962; Glide Path, 1963; Prelude to Mars, 1965; “The Lion of Comarre,” and “Against the Fall of Night,” 1968; 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968; Rendezvous with Rama, 1973; Imperial Earth, 1975; The Fountains of Paradise, 1979; 2010: Odyssey Two, 1982; The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986; 2061: Odyssey Three, 1987; Cradle, 1988 (with Gentry Lee); Rama II, 1989 (with Lee); Beyond the Fall of Night, 1990 (with Gregory Benford); The Ghost from the Grand Banks, 1990; The Garden of Rama, 1991 (with Lee); Rama Revealed, 1993 (with Lee); The Hammer of God, 1993; Richter 10, 1996 (with Mike McQuay); 3001: The Final Odyssey, 1997; The Trigger, 1999 (with Michael Kube-McDowell); The Light of Other Days, 2000 (with Stephen Baxter); Time’s Eye, 2004 (with Baxter); Sunstorm, 2005 (with Baxter). nonfiction: Interplanetary Flight, 1950; The Exploration of Space, 1951 (revised, 1959); Going into Space, 1954; The Exploration of the Moon, 1954; The Coast of Coral, 1956; The Making of a Moon, 1957; The Reefs of Taprobane, 1957; Voice Across the Sea, 1958; The Challenge of the Spaceship, 1959; The Challenge of the Sea, 1960; The First Five Fathoms, 1960; Indian Ocean Adventure, 1961 (with Mike Wilson); Profiles of the Future, 1962; Indian Ocean Treasure, 1964 (with Wilson); Man and Space, 1964 (with others); The Treasure of the Great Reef, 1964; Voices from the Sky, 1965; The Promise of Space, 1968; First on the Moon, 1970 (with others); Into Space, 1971 (with Robert Silverberg); Beyond Jupiter, 1972 (with Chesley Bonestall); Report on Planet Three, 1972; The Lost Worlds of 2001, 1972; The View from Serendip, 1977 (autobiographical); 1984: Spring, a Choice of Futures, 1984; The Odyssey File, 1985 (with Peter Hyams); Arthur C. Clarke’s July 20, 2019: Life in the Twenty-first Century, 1986; Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography, 1989; How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, 1992; By Space Possessed, 1993; The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars, 1994; Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998, 1999; From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis, 2003 (Ryder W. Miller, editor). poetry: The Fantastic Muse, 1992. Bibliography Clarke, Arthur C. Astounding Days: A Science-Fictional Autobiography. New York: Bantam Books, 1989. Although this volume is not really an autobiography, Clarke offers a brief memoir of his youth. He explains how writers and editors of Astounding magazine (later named Analog) first aroused his interest in science fiction and discusses his work on rocketry and radar. ____________. “An Odyssey of Sorts.” Interview by Frederick V. Guterl. Discover 18 (May, 1997): 68-69. In this interview, Clarke discusses, among other subjects, the cold-fusion energy revolution and the evidence for life on Mars.

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Dauer, Susan Jaye “The Star.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “The Star” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. McAleer, Neil. Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1992. Definitive account of Clarke’s career, written with Clarke’s cooperation. Meisenheimer, Donald K., Jr. “Machining the Man: From Neurasthenia to Psychasthenia in SF and the Genre Western.” Science-Fiction Studies 24 (November, 1997): 441-458. Argues that although Clarke works within the tradition of Wellsian science fiction, he also makes heavy use of the genre-Western established by Owen Wister and Frederic Remington. Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Taplinger, 1977. This collection of nine essays on Clarke examines his individual works and his science-fiction writings in general. The editors state that Clarke is a hard science-fiction author whose commitment is to the universe. Provides a good source of textual criticism. Supplemented by a select bibliography and a biographical note. Rabkin, Eric S. Arthur C. Clarke. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1980. Good short introduction to Clarke’s important science-fiction work, with brief descriptions. Robkin has high praise for Clarke and considers him one of the best in the science-fiction genre. Complemented by a bio-critical introduction, an annotated bibliography, and a chronology. Reid, Robin Anne. Arthur C. Clarke. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. General introduction to Clarke’s life and work, with a chapter on each of his nine novels. Slusser, George Edgar. The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1978. Brief but provocative commentary on Clarke’s fiction. Virginia, Mary E. “The Sentinel.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “The Sentinel” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis.

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Joseph Conrad Born: Near Berdyczów, Podolia, Poland (now Berdychiv, Ukraine); December 3, 1857 Died: Oswalds, Bishopsbourne, England; August 3, 1924 Principal short fiction • Tales of Unrest, 1898; Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 1902; Typhoon, and Other Stories, 1903; A Set of Six, 1908; ’Twixt Land and Sea, Tales, 1912; Within the Tides, 1915; Tales of Hearsay, 1925; The Sisters, 1928; The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad, 1933. Other literary forms • Joseph Conrad is best known for his powerful and psychologically penetrating novels, which, like his shorter fiction, are often set in exotic locales, frequently the Far East, at sea, or a combination of the two, as with his most famous novel, Lord Jim: A Tale (1900). Even when using a more conventional setting, such as London in The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907), or Geneva, Switzerland, in Under Western Eyes (1911), Conrad maintains a sense of otherness because his characters live in a moral shadow world of revolutionaries and adventures. In addition to three plays based on his stories, Conrad produced three volumes of autobiographical writings, which, however, often conceal more than they explain about his varied and often dramatic personal life. Following his death, several edited collections of Conrad’s correspondence were published, and these letters offer some insight into his fiction. Achievements • Joseph Conrad is one of the outstanding writers in English literature and, because of his background and achievements, occupies a unique position. To a great degree, Conrad was the creator of the psychological story and modern spy novel. Because of his genius and insight, Conrad transformed the typical setting of the adventure romance—the mysterious Far East, the shadowy underworld of the secret agent—into an acceptable setting for the serious writer and greatly expanded the range of English literature. Conrad avoided direct narrative, presenting his plots as a tale told by someone who either recounted the events from memory or passed along a story heard from someone else. The narrator in a Conrad story also gives events obliquely, partially revealing them, speculating on their cause and possible meaning, and then adding new and often essential information, so that the reader must participate in interpreting the unfolding story. Conrad used this method because he believed that it accurately reflected the manner in which people understand actions in real life but also employed it because of his characters, who cannot be understood quickly, for they are not simple persons. Complicated and often contradictory figures, their actions, like their personalities, must be apprehended gradually and from different angles. A writer who did not learn English until his twenties, Conrad brought a sense of newness and scrupulous care to the language. He uses an extensive vocabulary, particularly in his descriptive passages of settings, internal as well as external. His style produces in the reader the moral and psychological equivalent to the emotions and inner

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Biography • Joseph Conrad had one of the most unusual lives of any major writer in English literature. He was born in Berdyczów, Poland, on December 3, 1857, and was christened Jósef Teodor Konrad Nat-cz Korzeniowski. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish intellectual and writer whose works included original verse and translations of William Shakespeare. Apollo Korzeniowski was also a fervent Polish patriot, and his activities against Russian repression (Poland was at that time part of the Russian EmLibrary of Congress pire) caused his arrest and exile in 1861. Apollo Korzeniowski, along with his wife, Ewelina Bobrowska, and his young son, Jósef, was sent to Vologda, a dismal town northeast of Moscow. The climate was severe, and living conditions were harsh. Ewelina died in April, 1865, when young Jósef was only seven years old. A few years later, after Apollo had been released from exile because of ill health, he too died, and at the age of eleven, Jósef was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, a kindly man who provided for his education and supported him with funds for many years. Because of these memories and his own intense patriotism, Jósef found life in occupied Poland unbearable, and, when doctors recommended a seaside environment for his own frail health, he left for Marseilles, France, in October, 1874. In Marseilles, he lived on funds from his uncle and engaged in a shadowy enterprise to smuggle weapons to royalist rebels in Spain. In 1877, Jósef and some companions bought a ship for that purpose, but their plot was betrayed, and their vessel, the Tremolino, was deliberately run aground to avoid capture. In the spring of the following year, having lost all of his money gambling at Monte Carlo, Jósef attempted suicide. The wound was minor, and within a month he was able to sign aboard his first English ship, the Mavis. On April 24, 1878, Jósef Korzeniowski, soon known as Joseph Conrad, became an English sailor; he would remain one for the next seventeen years, serving on eighteen different vessels but commanding only one, the Otago, in 1888. During his voyages, Conrad traveled to the settings for his stories. In 1883, he was second mate onboard the Palestine, which caught fire and later sank, leaving the crew

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to survive in open boats until they reached land. In 1890, Conrad was in the Belgian Congo as part of a trading company, but within a year he left, his health seriously weakened by malaria and his psychological and moral sense severely shaken by the ruthless, amoral exploitation of the natives by Europeans who were avid for ivory. By this time, Conrad had concluded that his seafaring career was unsuccessful, and he had already started work, in 1889, on his first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), and achieved English citizenship in 1886. In January, 1894, Conrad ended his naval career, determined to become a writer. Almayer’s Folly gained favorable critical notice, primarily for its exotic setting and characters. Conrad’s next work, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), seemed to mark him as a talented but perhaps limited author of exotic romances. With the appearance of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1898), however, the literary world was forced to take note of a new and strikingly original talent. Having dedicated himself to writing, Conrad settled at Pent Farm, in Kent, with his wife, Jessie George, whom he married on March 24, 1896. The Conrads had two sons, Alfred Borys, born in 1898, and John Alexander, born in 1906. As an author, Conrad was critically acknowledged but was not very popular for many years. Even such powerful novels as Lord Jim: A Tale or Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904) or Under Western Eyes, which have since been recognized as classics, had relatively modest sales. To supplement his income, Conrad wrote shorter fiction for popular magazines; these stories were collected in eight volumes during Conrad’s lifetime. In 1913 came his first truly popular work, Chance. Having achieved financial stability, Conrad moved in 1919 to Oswalds, near Canterbury, where he spent the remaining years of his life. He was offered, but declined, a knighthood in 1924. That same year, after long bouts of frequent bad health, he died of a heart attack on August 3. He was buried at Canterbury. Analysis • Throughout his career, Joseph Conrad returned to a constellation of central themes that were expressed through the actions of his characters and, more important, through those characters’ reactions to events around them. These themes can best be considered when they are grouped into two generally opposing categories. A sense of personal, moral heroism and honor is contrasted to betrayal and guilt. Typically, a Conradian character will discover, in the crucible of a dangerous situation, that he does or does not live up to the inner standards he has hoped to maintain. This realization may not come immediately, and often the true meanings of a character’s actions are revealed only long afterward, through a retelling of his story. The second grouping contrasts illusion with reality. Illusion is often a belief in “progress” or some grand political scheme. It is unmasked by reality, which, in Conrad, almost inevitably assumes the form and tone of pessimistic irony. Through the device of a narrator recounting the story, the truth gradually emerges, revealing the tragic difference between what characters believe themselves and the world to be, and what they actually are. “An Outpost of Progress” • The division between these two groupings is present even in Conrad’s early story “An Outpost of Progress.” Like many of his fictions, it is set in the tropics, specifically a desolate ivory trading station in the isolated reaches of the Congo. Two hapless Europeans, Kayerts and Carlier, arrive at the station, filled with dreams of riches and slogans of civilization. They quickly disintegrate, their original illusions giving way to true madness. Kayerts shoots his companion, then hangs himself from a cross in the station’s unkempt graveyard. The out-

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post of progress has been overrun by the forces of savagery. The story is fiercely ironic. Kayerts and Carlier are caricatures, the first fat, the second thin, both incredibly stupid. “Incapable of independent thought,” as Conrad describes them, they are lost without society to dictate their thoughts and actions. Although they loudly repeat the hollow slogans of progress, the two white men are obviously greatly inferior to their native helper, who watches their decay with dark satisfaction. Using simple, unsympathetic characters and a violent, even melodramatic plot, Conrad presents his themes in the starkest possible fashion. “The Lagoon” • In the story “The Lagoon,” written at almost the same time as “An Outpost of Progress,” Conrad handles the conflict between betrayal and guilt, on one hand, and guilt versus honor and heroism, on the other, with more subtlety. An unnamed white man spends the night in the house of Arsat, a young Malay, who is tending his dying wife. During the long tropical night, Arsat tells his friend the story of how he and his brother had fled with the woman from their local chief. The three had been pursued and, at the moment of their escape, Arsat’s brother had fallen behind and cried out for help. Arsat had not responded, however, fleeing instead to safety with his lover. Now, when she is dead, he speaks of returning for revenge. In a moment of crisis Arsat made a decision, and for years he has suffered the moral consequences of that action. Although Conrad refrains from judging his character, Arsat clearly believes that he has failed; his only hope is to perform some heroic action, such as seeking vengeance, that will restore his earlier sense of himself as an honorable, loyal person and brother. Implicit in the story, however, is the sense that Arsat cannot undo the past and that his hopes are only illusions. This sense is reinforced powerfully by Conrad’s extensive descriptions of the Malaysian jungle, which seems to overwhelm the characters, rendering them incapable of action while mocking their vain hopes. “Youth” • “Youth,” Conrad’s first indisputable masterpiece among his shorter fictions, introduces his famous narrator Marlow. In the story, Marlow, forty-two when he tells his tale, recounts events that happened twenty years before when he sailed on the Judea, laden with a cargo of coal for Bangkok. An ill-fated ship, the Judea is beset by an endless, almost comical series of calamities that climaxes when the coal catches fire and explodes, leaving the crew to reach land in open boats. The events are drawn largely from Conrad’s own experiences as mate on the Palestine in 1881. The contrasts between heroism and cowardice, between reality and illusion run throughout the story, but Conrad blends them in a fashion that reveals that the distinctions between them are not as simple as might be supposed. As Marlow recognizes, his earlier self was full of the illusions of youth, yet it was those very illusions that sustained him and allowed him to achieve the standards by which he wished to live and act. In that sense, illusion made heroism possible. Such a situation is obviously ironic, and throughout his story Marlow comments frequently on the tangled relationship between romanticism and practicality, illusion and reality. Unlike other Conrad tales, however, “Youth” does not treat this division with pessimism but with optimism, no doubt because it is a story of youth and because Marlow, for whatever reason, did uphold his personal standards of integrity and moral courage. Heart of Darkness • Heart of Darkness, perhaps Conrad’s most famous work, is a novella based on his experience as mate on the riverboat Roi des Belges in the Congo dur-

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ing 1890. In this story, Conrad once again uses Marlow as his main character and narrator, and the events are a literal and symbolic journey by Marlow into that “immense heart of darkness” that is both the African jungle and the human soul. A powerful, searing work, Heart of Darkness is one of the first masterpieces of symbolism in English literature and Conrad’s most acutely penetrating psychological study. The story itself is relatively simple. Marlow signs on with a Belgian company that exports ivory from the Congo; employed as a mate on the company’s steamboat, he sails upriver to meet the renowned Kurtz, a trader who has become legendary for the success of his efforts and the force of his character. Marlow has heard, however, that Kurtz is more than an ivory trader and that he has evolved into a powerful force of civilization and progress. When Marlow arrives at Kurtz’s station, he finds instead that the man has reverted to savagery, becoming a dreaded, almost supernatural figure to the natives. The site is ringed with posts decorated with human skulls, and Kurtz’s presence casts an evil shadow over the African jungle. Marlow carries the sick, delirious Kurtz back down the river, but the man dies during the journey as the riverboat narrowly escapes an ambush by the terrified and outraged natives. The impact of Heart of Darkness comes from the nearly devastating effects of what Marlow sees and experiences. A naïve young man in the earlier “Youth,” Marlow is still relatively innocent at the start of Heart of Darkness. By the end of the story, that innocence has been forever shattered, a loss shared by the attentive reader. The world of the story grows increasingly corrupted and corrupting. The adventures Marlow undergoes become stranger, and the characters whom he meets are increasingly odd, starting with the greedy traders whom Marlow ironically describes as “pilgrims,” to an eccentric Russian who wanders in dress clothes through the jungle, to Kurtz himself, that figure of ultimate madness. The native Africans, whether cruelly abused workers, actually slaves, of the trading company or savages in awe of Kurtz, retain a sort of primeval dignity, but they, too, are beyond Marlow’s experience and initial comprehension. The Congo of Heart of Darkness is a strange and terrifying world, a place where the normal order of civilized life has become not only inverted but also perverted. To render this complex and disturbing moral vision, Conrad uses an intricate framing structure for his narrative. The story opens with Marlow and four friends talking about their experiences. One of the listeners, who is never named, in turn conveys to the reader the story told by Marlow. This story-within-a-story shuttles back and forth, as Marlow recounts part of his tale, then comments upon it, and then often makes an additional reflection upon his own observations. In a sense, by retelling the events, Marlow comes to understand them, a process that is shared by the reader. Instead of interrupting the flow of the story, Marlow’s remarks become an essential part of the plot, and often the reader does not fully understand what has happened until Marlow’s explanations reveal the extent and significance of the action. Heart of Darkness gains immensely through Conrad’s use of symbolism, because much of the meaning of the story is too terrifying and bleak to be expressed in plain prose; the inhumanity and savagery of the European exploiters, Kurtz in particular, are expressed more powerfully through a symbolic, rather than overt, presentation. Throughout the narrative, clusters of images occur at significant points to underscore the meaning of events as Marlow comes to understand them. Opposites are frequent: Brightness is contrasted with gloom, the lush growth of the jungle is juxtaposed to the sterility of the white traders, and the luxuriant, even alarming life of the wild is always connected with death and decomposition. Running throughout the

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story are images and metaphors of madness, especially the insanity caused by isolation. The dominant symbol for the entire work is found in its title and final words: All creation is a vast “heart of darkness.” Since its publication, Heart of Darkness has been recognized as a masterpiece of English literature, and readers have responded to the work on several different levels. An attack on imperialism, a parable of moral and ethical growth and decline, a psychological study—Heart of Darkness is all these things and something more. “Typhoon” • With the writing of “Typhoon,” Conrad suspended his customary moral and psychological complexities to present a fairly straightforward sea story. The Nan-Shan, a vessel filled with Chinese workers returning home from Malaysia, runs headlong into a ferocious typhoon. As the crew struggles above decks to save the ship, an equally dangerous furor erupts below, as the sea’s violent motions scatter the passengers’ baggage, mixing their hard-earned silver coins in total confusion. The Chinese begin a desperate combat among themselves, each man intent upon regaining his own money. Captain MacWhirr and his first mate, Jukes, must battle these two storms, either of which could wreck the ship. Captain MacWhirr and Jukes are total opposites. MacWhirr is a stolid, perhaps stupid man, so devoid of imagination that he experiences little self-doubt and few terrors. Even the looming typhoon does not frighten him, since he has never experienced such a storm and cannot comprehend its dangers. Jukes, on the other hand, is a more typical Conradian character, sensitive, anxious to prove worthy of his own inner moral code, and acutely conscious of the dangers that the sea can pose. As with so many other figures in Conrad’s fictions, Jukes seems to believe in a sense that these dangers are somehow meant for him personally, as a trial of his own character. MacWhirr suffers from no such beliefs, since they are beyond his comprehension. With the onset of the typhoon, the seeming limitations of Captain MacWhirr become strengths, while Jukes’s supposedly higher qualities might, if left unchecked, paralyze him at the critical moment. Ironically, MacWhirr is Jukes’s salvation. Since the Captain lacks the imagination to realize that he should be afraid, he is therefore not afraid and continues in his plodding but effective fashion. Jukes, in order to live up to his moral code, has no choice but to follow, acting more bravely and coolly than his inner doubts might otherwise allow. Together, the two men lead the crew in heroic efforts that save the Nan-Shan. The only complexity that Conrad employs in “Typhoon” is in his narrative structure. The story shifts from third person to passages of letters from Captain MacWhirr, Jukes, and the ship’s engineer to their families. This second layer is overlain by a third, in which the letters are read, sometimes with commentary, by the families in England. Through this method, Conrad allows the major characters to present the story as they experience and perceive it and adds a further contrast between the men who actually endure the storm and those who only read about it, and so cannot fully grasp its strength and danger. “The Duel” • “The Duel,” sometimes titled “The Duellists,” is the story of two officers in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, who wage their own private war for sixteen years, while about them all Europe is plunged into a larger, much more deadly combat. Conrad was an avid student of the Napoleonic period, and he based his story on an actual rivalry. More than the story of two men, “The Duel” is Conrad’s reflections upon the Napoleonic age.

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The two progatonists are Feraud from Gascony in southern France—a region noted for its hot-blooded, impetuous natives—and D’Hubert, a Picard, with the reserved nature characteristic of that northern region. Through an accidental incident, the two become engaged in an affair of honor that can be settled only by a duel. Once begun, the duel is protracted to farcical lengths, extending from Paris to Moscow, from the time of Napoleon’s greatest triumphs to his final defeat at Waterloo. Finally, D’Hubert falls in love and marries, finding life more worthwhile than this questionable affair of honor. In the final encounter, he emerges victorious and spares Feraud’s life on the promise that the combat will now, finally, end. The tale is briskly and even comically rendered, with Conrad’s typical ironies in this case turned positive. The darker aspects of his vision are reserved for his wider view of the Napoleonic age: What might be seen as humorous when only two men are involved becomes tragic almost beyond comprehension when entire nations are the duelists. Feraud and D’Hubert fight only each other in their affair, while Napoleon engaged all the countries of Europe. At the end of that wider struggle, Conrad implies, there was no happy resolution, only the desolation that follows the exhausted silence of the battlefield. This bleaker vision, however, is not allowed to overwhelm the essentially humorous basis of the story. The title of the work may contain a clue to one of its themes, the typical Conrad subject of the “double,” the other person who is so like the hero yet somehow different. During the interminable encounters, D’Hubert comes to believe that he is linked, in some mysterious and unbreakable fashion, to Feraud. They are “secret sharers,” in one sense literally so, because they cannot reveal that their duel began over a trivial misunderstanding and was prolonged out of fear of embarrassment. They are also “secret sharers” in a wider sense, because their lives have fullest meaning only when joined together. In this way, the “duellists” are indeed “dual,” and their relationship is not only one of combat but also, in fact, one of union. “Gaspar Ruiz” • “Gaspar Ruiz” was based upon actual events in the Chilean revolution against Spain of the 1830’s. The title character, an immensely strong but rather simpleminded peasant, joins the army of the rebels. Captured during battle, he is forced to join the Loyalist army and is then once again made a prisoner, this time by his former comrades. Condemned as a traitor, Gaspar Ruiz escapes and is sheltered by a Loyalist family whose daughter, Erminia, he later marries. A series of misadventures leads Gaspar to become a general in the Loyalist army, although his political sense is almost nonexistent and he wishes, as much as he can comprehend the matter, to be a Chilean patriot. When Erminia and her daughter are captured by the rebels and held in a mountain fort, Gaspar has a cannon strapped to his huge back so it can batter open the gate and free them. The desperate tactic works, but Gaspar is mortally wounded, and Erminia kills herself, dying with her husband. The story is told in typical Conrad fashion—that is, long after the events have occurred and by two different narrators. One of them is General Santierra, who, as a lieutenant in the rebel army, knew Gaspar Ruiz and is now the guardian of Gaspar’s grown daughter. The second narrator, who opens the story in the third person but who is revealed, at the close, to be a guest of General Santierra, answers questions that Santierra raises. This narrator explains that revolutions are a distillation of human experience and that they bring some human beings to fame who otherwise would be resigned to oblivion. In revolutions, genuine social ideals, such as freedom or equality, may be passionately held in the abstract but are ferociously violated in ac-

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tuality, just as Gaspar Ruiz, a true if bewildered patriot, was condemned and made a traitor by circumstances and false accusations. In a sense, the unnamed guest is reinforcing a constant Conrad theme, the difference between reality and illusion. “The Secret Sharer” • Probably Conrad’s most famous short story, “The Secret Sharer” is a deceptively simple tale that carries such deep, perhaps unfathomable moral and psychological undertones that since its publication readers and critics have remained puzzled and fascinated by its elusive, evocative power. In the story, a young captain, new to his first command, is startled to discover a naked man swimming by his ship’s side. Once aboard, the swimmer, named Leggatt, confesses that he is fleeing from his own ship, the Sephora, because he murdered a fellow sailor. The act was justified, as the young captain quickly realizes, for the Sephora was in danger of foundering during a violent storm, and the murdered man, by failing to obey Leggatt’s orders, had placed the ship and its crew in immediate danger. Now, however, Leggatt is a hunted man. The captain hides Leggatt in his own cabin, keeping him safely out of sight until he can sail his ship close enough to an island to allow Leggatt to escape. By pledging and then keeping his word to the mysterious Leggatt, the young captain upholds his own moral code, even though it runs counter to conventional law and morality. In doing so, he proves that he is capable of living up to that “ideal conception of one’s personality every man sets up for himself secretly.” The fact that morality is established and maintained secretly—in this case, literally so—is a Conradian irony and a central paradox of this tale. Adding to the reader’s bewilderment is the fact that the young captain’s “ideal conception” is nowhere presented explicitly. The reader is able to see the captain’s code in action and perhaps assess its consequences but must deduce from these tantalizing clues what must constitute the standards that the young officer so earnestly desires to uphold. The captain’s code is indeed a puzzling one, for not only does it require him to be faithful to a murderer, but also it causes him to risk his own ship. To give Leggatt the best possible chance to swim to safety, the captain steers dangerously close to shore, risking running aground or perhaps breaking up on the shoals. Naturally, he cannot tell his crew why he orders this difficult, dangerous maneuver, so another secret is layered upon those already present. When the captain is successful in his plan, for the first time he feels a sense of unity and closeness with his vessel, a mystical—and again, secret—bond. The meanings of “The Secret Sharer” are hidden in its deceptively straightforward narrative. The work is full of ambiguity and possible double meanings, all presented in brisk, even prosaic fashion. Even the title is multiple: Since Leggatt is unknown to anyone but the captain, his presence is indeed a secret, but he and the young commander also share common secrets, both Leggatt’s presence and the “ideal conception of one’s personality,” which seems to be their joint moral code. Since these meanings are complementary, rather than contradictory, they add to the resonance of the story. Other touches add to the story’s depth. The young captain and Leggatt are so similar that they seem to be doubles, and Conrad obviously intends this identification to be as much moral as physical. Both men feel themselves to be outcasts, Leggatt actually so, because of his crime; the captain, psychologically, because of his newness to the ship and its crew. In one sense, Leggatt can be seen as an alter ego of the narrator, perhaps even a projection of his darker, maybe criminal, side. It may even be possi-

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ble, as some critics have suggested, that Leggatt does not actually exist but is only a figment of the young captain’s imagination. Such an unusual, even implausible interpretation indicates the perplexity that “The Secret Sharer” elicits in readers and underscores why this story, so famous in itself, is also emblematic of all Conrad’s fiction. Under the guise of a simple sea tale, he has gathered the themes that constantly flowed through his works: the ideal sense of self that must be tested and proved under difficult situations; the conflict between loyalty and betrayal, reality and illusion; and, above all, the innate need for human beings to preserve, even in trying circumstances and against conventional pressures, a moral code whose only reward is a secret that may, perhaps, never be shared. Michael Witkoski Other major works plays: One Day More: A Play in One Act, pr. 1905; The Secret Agent: A Drama in Four Acts, pb. 1921; Laughing Anne: A Play, pb. 1923. novels: Almayer’s Folly, 1895; An Outcast of the Islands, 1896; The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, 1897 (republished as The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea, 1898); Heart of Darkness, 1899 (serial), 1902 (book); Lord Jim, 1900; The Inheritors, 1901 (with Ford Madox Ford); Romance, 1903 (with Ford); Nostromo, 1904; The Secret Agent, 1907; The Nature of a Crime, 1909 (serial), 1924 (book; with Ford); Under Western Eyes, 1911; Chance, 1913; Victory, 1915; The Shadow-Line, 1917; The Arrow of Gold, 1919; The Rescue, 1920; The Rover, 1923; Suspense, 1925 (incomplete). nonfiction: The Mirror of the Sea, 1906; Some Reminiscences, 1912 (pb. in U.S. as A Personal Record); Notes on Life and Letters, 1921; Joseph Conrad’s Diary of His Journey Up the Valley of the Congo in 1890, 1926; Last Essays, 1926; Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, 1927 (Gérard Jean-Aubry, editor); Joseph Conrad’s Letters to His Wife, 1927; Conrad to a Friend, 1928 (Richard Curle, editor); Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, 1928 (Edward Garnett, editor); Lettres françaises de Joseph Conrad, 1929 (Jean-Aubry, editor); Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Doradowska, 1940 (John A. Gee and Paul J. Sturm, editors); The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 1983-2005 (7 volumes; Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, editors). Bibliography Billy, Ted. A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad’s Short Fiction. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1997. In this study of Conrad’s linguistic skepticism, Billy emphasizes endings in Conrad’s short fiction and how they either harmonize or clash with other narrative elements in nineteen of Conrad’s short novels and tales. Argues that Conrad presents knowledge of the world as fundamentally illusory. Graver, Lawrence. Conrad’s Short Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. This study of Conrad’s stories is grouped chronologically and displays the linkages between the shorter fictions and individual stories, and between them as a group and the novels. Since it covers the lesser-known stories as well as the more famous ones, it is essential for placing Conrad’s development of themes and styles within a larger artistic context. Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. This book is, and will remain, the definitive Conrad biography, elucidating as it does Conrad’s life in Poland, on the seas, and in England. The well-

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documented study is also replete with generously thorough analyses of Conrad’s major works, as well as of his artistic development and political orientation. Karl tends at times to be stiltedly (and quite needlessly) insistent upon where and how his views differ from those of other interpreters of Conrad’s life and work. ____________. A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad. Rev. ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Good handbook for students. Provides bibliographical references and an index. Lewis, Pericles. “‘His Sympathies Were in the Right Place’: Heart of Darkness and the Discourse of National Character.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53 (September, 1998): 211-244. Shows how Conrad contributed to modernist literary technique by structuring conflict between the “ethical” and the “sociological” in Marlow’s decision to align himself with Kurtz over the Company. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Conrad: “Amy Foster” (vol. 1), “Il Conde” and “The Lagoon” (vol. 4), “An Outpost of Progress” and “The Secret Sharer” (vol. 6), “The Tale” (vol. 7), and “Typhoon” and “Youth” (vol. 8). Meyers, Jeffrey. Joseph Conrad: A Bibliography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Briskly moving, no-nonsense biography that surveys the key points and themes of the major works. Very good at placing Conrad within the social and intellectual milieu of his day and offering good insights from other literary figures, such as Ford Madox Ford, who significantly influenced Conrad’s literary career. Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Translated by Halina Carroll-Najder. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Thorough and sympathetic biography of Conrad written by a countryman. The volume stresses the influence of Conrad’s Polish heritage on his personality and art. Najder draws many telling and intriguing parallels between Conrad’s life and his writing. Orr, Leonard, and Ted Billy, eds. A Joseph Conrad Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Good manual, complete with bibliographical references and an index. Stape, J. H. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. In this collection of essays on most of Conrad’s major work by different critics, the most helpful for a study of his short fiction are the essays “Conradian Narrative” by Jakob Lothe, which surveys Conrad’s narrative techniques and conventions, and “The Short Fiction” by Gail Fraser, which discusses Conrad’s experimentation with short narrative. Swisher, Clarice, ed. Readings on Joseph Conrad. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Contains essays by J. B. Priestley, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Adams about many of Conrad’s works.

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Robert Coover Born: Charles City, Iowa; February 4, 1932 Principal short fiction • Pricksongs and Descants, 1969; The Water Pourer, 1972 (a deleted chapter from The Origin of the Brunists); Charlie in the House of Rue, 1980; The Convention, 1981; In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters, 1983; Aesop’s Forest, 1986; A Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This, 1987; The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), 2002 (vignettes); A Child Again, 2005. Other literary forms • Besides the above-mentioned collections of short fiction and novellas and many uncollected short stories, Robert Coover’s production includes the novels The Origin of the Brunists (1966), The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), The Public Burning (1977), Gerald’s Party (1985), Pinocchio in Venice (1991), John’s Wife (1996), Ghost Town (1998), and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (2002); a collection of plays entitled A Theological Position (1972), which contains The Kid, Love Scene, Rip Awake, and the title play; the screenplay After Lazarus (1980); a play, Bridge Hound (1981); several poems, reviews, and translations published in journals; a screenplay/novella Hair o’ the Chine ; the film On a Confrontation in Iowa City (1969); and theater adaptations of “The Babysitter” and Spanking the Maid. Coover has also published a few essays on authors he admires, such as Samuel Beckett (“The Last Quixote,” in New American Review, 1970) and Gabriel García Márquez (“The Master’s Voice,” in New American Review, 1977). Achievements • Robert Coover is one of the authors regularly mentioned in relation to that slippery term “postmodernism.” As a result of the iconoclastic and experimental nature of his fiction, Coover’s work does not enjoy a widespread audience; his reputation among academics, however, is well established, and the reviews of his works have been consistently positive. Although in the beginning of his career he had to resort to teaching in order to support his family, he soon began to gain recognition, receiving several prizes and fellowships: a William Faulkner Award for Best First Novel (1966), a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1969), two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships (1971, 1974), an Academy of Arts and Letters award (1975), a National Book Award nomination for The Public Burning, a National Endowment for the Humanities Award (1985), a Rea Award (1987) for A Night at the Movies, a Rhode Island Governor’s Arts Award (1988), and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship (1990). The publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s rejection of The Public Burning after initial acceptance brought some fame to Coover. Since the novel deals with the trials of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and presents former president Richard M. Nixon as its central narrator, the publisher thought it would be too controversial. Eventually, The Public Burning was published by Viking Press and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Critical studies about Coover started in the late 1970’s. Still, in spite of the critical acclaim and the considerable amount of scholarship about his work, Coover’s work remains relatively unknown to the public, and some of his early novels are now out of print.

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Biography • Robert Lowell Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. His family soon moved to Indiana and then to Herrin, Illinois. His father managed the local newspaper, the Herrin Daily Journal, which prompted Coover’s interest in journalism. His college education began at Southern Illinois University (1949-1951), but he transferred to Indiana University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Slavic studies in 1953. After graduation, Coover was drafted and joined the United States Naval Reserve. While in Spain, he met Maria del Pilar Sans-Mallafré, who became his wife on June 13, 1959. During these years, his interest in fiction began. His first published story, “Blackdamp,” was the seed of his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists. He received a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1965. During the following years, Coover and his family alternated stays in Europe with periods in the United States. The several awards he received during the 1970’s made him financially secure and allowed him to continue writing. Coover has held appointments at Bard College, the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Virginia Military Institute, and he has been a distinguished professor at Brown University since 1979. He has also been writer-inresidence at Wisconsin State University. In spite of a large amount of time spent abroad (in Europe and in South America) and his outspoken need to take distance from his own country, Coover’s production is very “American,” since he often bases his fiction on American events, persons, and national myths. Coover often manipulates historical events for artistic purposes, but he has a solid knowledge of the facts. During the late 1980’s, Coover began teaching writing on computers. With the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990’s, he made significant progress in the use of hyperfiction. Hyperfiction, also referred to as hypertext fiction, tree fiction, nonlinear fiction, or electronic fiction, is fiction written with the capabilities of hypertext. Hyperfiction is truly nonlinear since it cannot be represented on a printed page. The reader takes an active role in hyperfiction, choosing which links to click on and which paths to follow. Thus, the narrative may be very different from one reading to the next, depending on the choices made by the reader. Readers can follow different characters, or points of view, or skip back and forth between different time zones. By clicking on an interesting name, place, event, or idea, the reader can be taken to a new page connected to that name, place, event, or idea. Coover reads, writes, and reviews hyperfiction. He teaches hyperfiction workshops at Brown University. The Hypertext Hotel is a collaborative hyperfiction that grew out of Coover’s workshops. During the 1990’s, students, authors, and scholars have added to the fictional hotel text. Coover developed a course at Brown that introduces students to the possibilities of hyperfiction. He also been known to encourage the use of hyperfiction and the software that makes it possible. Coover is the author of the now classic “The End of the Book,” an article in which he explains hyperfiction and his general optimism that it will someday replace books. Analysis • Robert Coover’s central concern is the human being’s need for fiction. Because of the complexity of human existence, people are constantly inventing patterns that give them an illusion of order in a chaotic world. For Coover, any effort to explain the world involves some kind of fiction-making process. History, religion, culture, and scientific explanations are fictional at their core; they are invented narratives through which human beings try to explain the world to themselves. The prob-

Coover, Robert lem, Coover would say, is that people tend to forget the fictional nature of the fictional systems they create and become trapped by them, making dogmas out of the fictions. The artist’s function, then, is to reexamine these fictions, tear them down, and offer new perspectives on the same material, in order to make the reader aware of the arbitrariness of the construct. Coover’s fiction often has been labeled “metafiction”—that is, fiction about fiction—and indeed most of his works are comments on previously existing fictional constructs. If in his longer works he examines the bigger metaphoric narratives such as religion, history, or politics (that one of the theorists of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, has called “metanarratives”), in his shorter works Coover turns to smaller constructs, usually literary fictions. In the prologue to the “Seven Exemplary Fictions” contained in Pricksongs and Descants, Coover addresses Miguel de Cervantes as follows:

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But, don Miguel, the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again. Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another. Just as Cervantes stood at the end of a tradition and managed to open a door for a new type of fiction, modern authors confront a changing world in need of new fictional forms that can reflect this world’s nature better. Just as Cervantes tried to stress the difference between romance and the real world through the mishaps of Don Quixote, Coover wants to stress the fictionality and arbitrariness of some fictions that hold a tight grip on the reader’s consciousness. Like Cervantes, Coover wants to free readers from an uncritical acceptance of untrue or oversimplified ideas that limit and falsify their outlook on life. Fictions, Coover and Cervantes would say, are not there to provide an escape by creating fantasies for the reader. When they do so, Coover continues writing in his prologue, the artist “must conduct the reader to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelations.” This quotation, coming from an author whose work is usually considered “difficult,” might seem somehow odd. How does Coover’s fiction clarify, or what does it reveal? His work often presents constantly metamorphosing worlds, which mimic the state of constant change in the real world. Just as the world is continuously changing, Coover’s fictions also refuse to present stable, easily describable characters or scenarios. Coover also calls attention to the fictionality of fiction by focusing on the process

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and the means of creation rather than on the product. As he states in the prologue, the novelist turns to the familiar material and “defamiliarizes” it in order to liberate readers’ imagination from arbitrary constraints and in order to make them reevaluate their reactions to those constraints. These are the main strategies of Coover’s two collections of stories, Pricksongs and Descants and A Night at the Movies. Pricksongs and Descants • The title of the first collection refers to musical terms, variations played against a basic line (the basic line of the familiar narrative). As one character in one of the stories says, however, they are also “death-c— and prick-songs,” which prepares the reader for the sometimes shocking motifs of death and sex scattered throughout the stories. In Pricksongs and Descants, Coover turns to the familiar material of folktales and biblical stories. Using this material offers him the possibility of manipulating the reader’s expectations. One of the ways in which Coover forces the reader to look at familiar stories from new perspectives is by retelling them from an unfamiliar point of view. For example, the story “The Brother” is Coover’s version of the biblical flood told from the point of view of Noah’s brother, who, after helping Noah to build the ark, is left to drown. “J’s Marriage” describes how Joseph tries to come to terms with his marriage to the Virgin Mary and his alternating moods of amazement, frustration, and desperation. Some of the stories of the same collection are based on traditional folktales: “The Door” evokes “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Gingerbread House,” reminds one of “Hanzel and Gretel,” “The Milkmaid of Samaniego” is based on the Spanish folktale of the same title; and Hair o’ the Chine, a novella, mocks the tale of the “Three Little Pigs and the Wolf.” Coover subverts, however, the original narratives by stressing the cruelty and the motifs of sex, violence, and death underlying most folktales. Revealing the darker side of familiar stories is in fact one of Coover’s recurrent techniques. In other stories of Pricksongs and Descants, Coover experiments with the formal aspects of fiction-making. He reminds the reader of the artificiality of fiction by presenting stories that are repertoires of narrative possibilities. Often, Coover juxtaposes several different beginnings, or potential stories, but leaves them undeveloped. He interweaves the different story lines, some of which are complementary and some of which might be contradictory, as is the case in “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl” and in “The Magic Poker.” In the “Sentient Lens” section and in “Klee’s Dead,” Coover explores the possibilities and the limitations of the narrational voice: In the first set of stories, Coover denies the possibility of an objective narrative voice by portraying a camera that constantly interferes with the events of the story; in “Klee’s Dead,” the supposedly “omniscient” narrator is unable to explain the reasons for Paul Klee’s suicide. In most of the stories of Pricksongs and Descants, the figures are types described with a flaunted lack of depth of characterization, which prevents the reader from identifying with them in any possible way. This contributes to the critical distance that Coover thinks it is necessary to maintain toward fiction. As critic Cristina Bacchilega says in her article about Coover’s use of the Märchen (folktales) in this collection, while “the Märchen is symbolic of development, of a passage from immaturity to maturity, Coover’s fictions present rather static characters . . . the only dynamic process allowed is in the reader’s new awareness of the world as a construct of fictions.” The function of the artist in contemporary society is one of Coover’s recurring concerns, which surfaces in “Panel Game,” “Romance of Thin Man and Fat Lady,” and “The Hat Act,” all of which portray cruel and insatiable audiences who, in

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their thirst for entertainment, do not hesitate to exterminate the artists if their performance does not stand up to their expectations. A Night at the Movies • In A Night at the Movies, Coover probes the nature of filmic fictions, which present a greater danger of being taken for “real” because of the immediacy of filmic images. Coover approaches film from three perspectives. In the stories “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction,” “Charlie in the House of Rue,” “Gilda’s Dream,” and “You Must Remember This,” Coover demythologizes specific films and offers his own version of the story, usually baring the ideology of the original version. In “After Lazarus” and “Inside the Frame,” he explores the conventions through which these fictions create an illusion of an independent world on the screen. In “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” and “Intermission,” he challenges the ontological status of reality and film by making the characters cross the boundaries that separate these two realms. “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” is a parody of the ideology and of the form of the Western film High Noon (1952). Coover parodies the narrative line and the easy identification of good and evil typical of most Westerns. The film celebrates the code of honor and personal integrity typical of the Western hero; abandoned by everybody, the sheriff of the film, played by Gary Cooper, has to fight alone with the villain and his gang. In the story, however, the protagonist is a fastidious, neurotic sheriff who is obsessed with fulfilling the role imposed on him. The villain is Don Pedro, the Mexican bandit, whose major talent is expressing himself by expelling intestinal gas. As in the film, the narrative progresses toward the confrontation of the villain and the sheriff. The tight structure of the film, however, is disrupted in the story by giving both characters a different kind of discourse. The sheriff’s discourse has a traditional narrative line. It is narrated in the past tense and refers to formulas taken directly from the visual tradition of the Western. The Mexican’s discourse is in the present tense and in broken English, influenced by Spanish. Furthermore, Coover makes the Mexican ubiquitous. Readers never really know where he is—he seems everywhere at the same time, raping the schoolmarm at the local school, cheating at cards in the saloon, and burning papers at the sheriff’s office. After shooting the sheriff, the Mexican sets the town on fire and rides into the sunset. The irreverence of Coover’s version of Casablanca (1942) is even greater. Casablanca has become the epitome of the romantic melodrama, drawing like the Western upon codes of honor and heroic behavior. In “You Must Remember This,” Coover gives his version of what might have happened between frames. Quite literally, Rick and Ilsa fall between frames and make furious love several times. The love story becomes a pornographic movie. The disruption of the moral code of the film creates an avalanche of disruptions in other categories: Rick and Ilsa begin to sense that their senses of time and place are fading, and their identities become increasingly diffused. At the end of the story, the characters melt into nothingness after several desperate attempts to return to the mythic movie. Other stories in the collection A Night at the Movies aim at exposing the artificiality of the technical conventions of film. Written in the form of a screenplay, “After Lazarus” parodies the notion of the camera as the ultimately objective narrator. In the story, the camera “hesitates,” “pauses,” “follows back at a discreet distance,” and rapidly moves back when frightened. “Inside the Frame” refers in its very title to filmrelated terms. If films construct a narrative through the sum of frames that all have a reason and a function in the global construct of the story, this story presents several

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possible beginnings of stories in one single frame. In “Inside the Frame,” the reader gets glimpses of what could be potential stories: a woman stepping off a bus, an Indian with a knife between his teeth, a man praying at a grave, a singing couple, a sleepwalker. There is no development, no explanation of the images. “Lap Dissolves” is a literary imitation of the film technique. The story fades from one film-related situation to the next, with the words giving the cues to the transformation of the scenario. Coover disrupts the ontological boundaries between “reality” and fiction by making the protagonists of “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” and “Intermission” move between them. The mad projectionist of the first story lives in an abandoned movie palace and plays with the reels of film, constructing films by cutting and pasting images of other films. Somehow, his experiments go awry, and he becomes trapped in the fictions he has been creating. The girl of “Intermission” enters a film-related fantasy when the film in the story ends and she steps into the lobby of the movie theater to buy a snack. Outside the theater, she is thrown into a series of situations directly drawn from Hollywood films: She moves from a car race with gangsters, to a tent with Rudolph Valentino, to the sea surrounded by sharks. In what is supposed to be “reality,” she becomes a dynamic individual, but back in the cinema she returns to the passivity that Hollywood fictions seem to invite. Briar Rose • In Briar Rose, a novella and a retelling of the fable of Sleeping Beauty, Coover travels deeply into the dreams of the sleeping princess and into the forest of briars and brambles that plague the prince as he tries to rescue her. The story centers on the powers of the human imagination and escalates to an erotic pace as sex and storytelling fuse together. As the prince fights his way to the princess’s bed chamber to awaken her from a deathly enchanted sleep, Coover involves the reader by dangling numerous interpretative possibilities just below the surface of this brief narrative. Coover’s genius is displayed in his use of words, drifting back and forth between reality and dreams. His speculations about what makes a prince forge through the briars and what a princess dreams about while magically asleep for one hundred years are thought-provoking, mysterious, compelling, and at times hilarious. As the tale unwinds, Coover exposes the masculine desire to prey on female beauty. In addition, he leads the reader to contemplate the necessity that women resist male yearnings that are projected onto them. The tale is a bit dull in places and lacks a definite ending with some culminating metaphor, but Coover constructs an intriguing story that is well known, turned in on itself, and explored to reveal different levels of human consciousness. In his major collections of stories, Coover elaborates on his fundamental concern, namely the necessity for the individual to distinguish between reality and fiction and to be liberated from dogmatic thinking. In order to do so, Coover emphasizes the self-reflexive, antirealistic elements of his fiction. The result is original, highly engaging, and energetic stories that probe human beings’ relationships to the myths that shape their lives. Carlota Larrea With updates by Alvin K. Benson

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Other major works plays: A Theological Position, pb. 1972; Love Scene, pb. 1972; Rip Awake, pr. 1972; The Kid, pr., pb. 1972; Bridge Hound, pr. 1981. novels: The Origin of the Brunists, 1966; The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., 1968; Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, 1975 (expanded, 1987); The Public Burning, 1977; Hair o’ the Chine, 1979 (novella/screenplay); A Political Fable, 1980 (novella); Spanking the Maid, 1981 (novella); Gerald’s Party, 1985; Pinocchio in Venice, 1991; Briar Rose, 1996 (novella); John’s Wife, 1996; Ghost Town, 1998; The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut, 2002. screenplays: On a Confrontation in Iowa City, 1969; After Lazarus, 1980. Bibliography Coover, Robert. “Interview.” Short Story, n.s. 1 (Fall, 1993): 89-94. Coover comments on the difference between the short story and the novel, the writing of Pricksongs and Descants, his use of sexuality in his fiction, his iconoclastic streak, postmodernism, and his use of the short story to test narrative forms. ____________. Interview by Amanda Smith. Publishers Weekly 230 (December 26, 1986): 44-45. Coover discusses the motivations that lie behind his experimental fiction; states he believes that the artist finds his metaphors for the world in the most vulnerable areas of human outreach; he insists that he is in pursuit of the mainstream. What many people consider experimental, Coover argues, is actually traditional in the sense that it has gone back to old forms to find its new form. Evenson, Brian K. Understanding Robert Coover. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Evenson explains the particularly dense style of Coover’s metafiction (his writing about writing) in a comprehensive survey that is part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series. Evenson guides readers through Coover’s postmodern fiction, which deals with myth- and storymaking and their power to shape collective, community action, which often turns violent. Gordon, Lois. Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Like Richard Andersen’s book, this volume provides a friendly introduction and overview of Coover’s work, placing him in the context of metafictional or postmodernist literature. Notes, select bibliography, and index. Kennedy, Thomas E. Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Kennedy’s study shows Coover’s use of myth, fantasy, love, soap opera, slapstick comedy, parable, and daydream on the level of the short story, which he displays with extraordinary effect in his novels as well. Contains interviews with Coover and glosses on many of his critics. Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Comparative look at these three writers and their fictions. Includes a bibliography and an index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Coover: “The Babysitter” and “The Brother” (vol. 1), and “A Pedestrian Accident” (vol. 6).

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“The Pleasures of the (Hyper)text.” The New Yorker 70 (June/July, 1994): 43-44. Discusses Coover’s Hypertext Hotel, the United States’ first online writing space dedicated to the computer-generated mode of literature known as hypertext; describes Coover’s writing class at Brown University and its use of hypertext. Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1994. Analyzes the humor in the writers’ books. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Scholes, Robert. “Metafiction.” The Iowa Review 1, no. 3 (Fall, 1970): 100-115. Initially theoretical, then descriptive, this article discusses four major metafictional writers: Coover, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth. Scholes categorizes the different types of metafictional writing and classifies Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants as “structural” metafiction, since it is concerned with the order of fiction rather than with the conditions of being.

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A. E. Coppard Born: Folkestone, Kent, England; January 4, 1878 Died: London, England; January 13, 1957 Principal short fiction • Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, 1921; Clorinda Walks in Heaven, 1922; The Black Dog, 1923; Fishmonger’s Fiddle, 1925; The Field of Mustard, 1926; Count Stephan, 1928; Silver Circus, 1928; The Gollan, 1929; The Higgler, 1930; The Man from Kilsheelan, 1930; Easter Day, 1931; Nixey’s Harlequin, 1931; The Hundredth Story of A. E. Coppard, 1931; Crotty Shinkwin, and the Beauty Spot, 1932; Dunky Fitlow, 1933; Ring the Bells of Heaven, 1933; Emergency Exit, 1934; Polly Oliver, 1935; Ninepenny Flute, 1937; These Hopes of Heaven, 1937; Tapster’s Tapestry, 1938; You Never Know, Do You?, 1939; Ugly Anna, and Other Tales, 1944; Fearful Pleasures, 1946; Selected Tales from His Twelve Volumes Published Between the Wars, 1946; The Dark-Eyed Lady: Fourteen Tales, 1947; The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard, 1948; Lucy in Her Pink Jacket, 1954; Simple Day, 1978. Other literary forms • A. E. Coppard published three slender volumes of poetry, Hips and Haws (1922), Pelagea, and Other Poems (1926), and Cherry Ripe (1935), and two collections, Yokohama Garland (1926) and Collected Poems (1928). In 1957, he published his autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord! Achievements • Though not widely known among general readers, Coppard has experienced a resurgence of popularity as a result of the adaptation of several of his stories for Masterpiece Theatre on public television. For both his mastery of the short-story form and his sensitive portrayal of English rural life, Coppard is an important figure in the development of the short story as a serious literary form. From a background of poverty and with no formal education, Coppard advanced through a number of clerical and accounting jobs in Oxford, reading and associating with the students there. Becoming increasingly active in political activities and writing for journals, Coppard eventually decided to write professionally. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, he was considered one of the foremost short-story writers in England. Coppard’s stories are frequently compared to those of Anton Chekhov and Thomas Hardy, whose influence Coppard acknowledged, and also to those of his contemporaries H. E. Bates and D. H. Lawrence. Although his poetry has not generated much acclaim, Coppard’s prose is eloquently lyrical, its evocation of mood and emotion particularly noteworthy. Biography • Alfred Edgar Coppard’s remarkable life contributed to his early success. To such an influential editor-writer as Ford Madox Ford, he was a rustic wise man or gypsy, a character out of one of his own dark country stories. Coppard was born into poverty and attended only four years of elementary school in Brighton. His father was a tailor, his mother a housemaid; when his father died young, Coppard had to help the family survive by taking a series of menial jobs. At the age of twenty-one, he became a clerk in an engineering firm in Brighton, where he remained for seven years, advancing to cashier. As a teenager and young man he walked the English countryside, absorbing its landscapes and the language of country folk he met in roadside taverns, a favorite setting for many of his later tales. He was a fine athlete and even supplemented his income as a successful professional sprinter. He married in 1906

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and a year later took a better position as an accountant for an ironworks in Oxford, a position he held for twelve years. During his years in Oxford Coppard read, often in the Bodleian, associated with students, heard and sometimes met such luminaries as Vachel Lindsay, Aldous Huxley, and William Butler Yeats, and, finally, began to write. He also became involved in Socialist politics and joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. Finally, in 1919, having published seven or eight tales in journals such as the Manchester Guardian and a few poems in journals such as The Egoist (edited by T. S. Eliot), he decided to leave his position at the foundry and become a professional writer. On April 1, 1919, at the age of forty-one, he moved to a small cottage outside Oxford at Shepherd’s Pit, where he lived alone in the woods, becoming aware of “the ignoring docility of the earth” and, finally, publishing his first collection of tales on the second anniversary (Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, 1921) of his new career. His first book was well received and thrust him into prominence as one of the leading English short-story writers. Over the next thirty years his production of tales, poems, and reviews was steady and of high quality. A second marriage, to Winifred May de Kok in 1931, endured, but his reputation as a short-story writer began to wane in the mid1930’s; his last collection of tales (1954) was not even reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement. The Collected Tales, however, was a clear success, and the autobiography he completed on the eve of his fatal illness in 1957 is a delight. Analysis • The unique quality of A. E. Coppard’s short fiction derives from his powers as a lyrical writer, his sympathetic understanding of the rural, lower-class folk who organically inhabit the English countryside so memorably evoked in his tales, and his “uncanny perception,” as Frank O’Connor remarked, “of a woman’s secretiveness and mystery.” Coppard’s earliest reviewers and critics emphasized the poetic quality of his tales. The title story from The Field of Mustard is one of the great stories in English, and it suggests the full range of Coppard’s creative genius, including his lyric portrayal of the English countryside and its folk, especially its women, whose language and life-consciousness seem wedded to the landscape. “The Field of Mustard” • Like other lyric short stories, “The Field of Mustard” is nearly plotless. It opens with the suggestion that everything has already happened to the main characters, “three sere disvirgined women from Pollock’s Cross.” What remains for Coppard is to evoke the quality of these lives and the countryside of which they are a part; the tale proceeds as a kind of lyric meditation on life and death in nature. The women have come to “the Black Wood” in order to gather “dead branches” from the living trees, and on their way home, two of them, Dinah Lock and Rose Olliver, become involved in an intimate conversation that reveals the hopelessness of their lives. Rose, wishing she had children but knowing she never will, cannot understand why Dinah is not happy with her four children. Dinah complains that “a family’s a torment. I never wanted mine.” Dinah’s “corpulence dispossessed her of tragedy,” and perhaps because she has had the burden as well as the fulfillment of motherhood, she expressed the bitterness of life in what serves almost as a refrain: “Oh God, cradle and grave is all for we.” They are old but their hearts are young, and the truth of Dinah’s complaint, “that’s the cussedness of nature, it makes a mock of you,” is reflected in the world around them: The depleted women are associated with the mustard field and the “sour scent rising faintly from its yellow blooms.” Against this natural order, Dinah and Rose wish that “this world was all a garden”; but “the

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wind blew strongly athwart the yellow field, and the odour of mustard rushed upon the brooding women.” As Dinah and Rose continue their conversation, they complain of their feeble husbands and discover a mutual loss: Each had been a lover of Rufus Blackthorn, a local gamekeeper. He was “a pretty man,” “handsome,” “black as coal and bold as a fox”; and although “he was good to women,” he was “a perfect devil,” “deep as the sea.” Gradually Coppard’s pattern of imagery reveals the source of these women’s loss to be the very wellspring of life—their love and sexual vitality. The suggestion is explicit in their lover’s name, “Blackthorn,” who had brought them most in life yet left them now with “old grief or new rancour.” This grim reality is suggested earlier when the women meet an old man in the Black Wood; he shows them a timepiece given him by “a noble Christian man,” but is met only with Dinah’s profane taunt, “Ah! I suppose he slept wid Jesus?” Outraged, the old man calls Dinah “a great fat thing,” shouts an obscenity, and leaving them, puts “his fingers to his nose.” Dinah’s bitter mockery of Christian love gradually merges with the sour scent of mustard and surfaces transformed in Rose’s recollection of how Blackthorn once joked of having slept with a dead man. These women, gathered in “the Black Wood” to collect dead wood from the living trees, have in effect slept with death. The yellow mustard blooms quiver in the wind, yet they are sour. The same “wind hustled the two women close together,” and they touch; but, bereft of their sexual vitality, they are left only with Dinah’s earlier observation that “it’s such a mercy to have a friend at all” and her repeated appeal, “I like you, Rose, I wish you was a man.” The tale ends with the women “quiet and voiceless,” in fading light they came to their homes. But how windy, dispossessed, and ravaged roved the darkening world! Clouds were borne frantically across the heavens, as if in a rout of battle, and the lovely earth seemed to sigh in grief at some calamity all unknown to men. Coppard’s lyric tales celebrate the oral tradition. His stories are often tales of tales being told, perhaps in a country tavern (as in “Alas, Poor Bollington!”). In some tales an oral narrator addresses the reader directly, and in others the rural settings, the characters, and the events—often of love ending in violence—draw obviously upon the materials of traditional folk ballads. Coppard himself loved to sing ballads and Elizabethan folk songs, and the main characters in these stories are sometimes singers, or their tales are “balladed about.” In many tales, Coppard used rhythmic language, poetically inverted constructions, and repeated expressions that function as refrains in ballads. The most explicit example of a tale intended to resound with balladic qualities is “A Broadsheet Ballad,” a tale of two laborers waiting in a tavern for the rain to pass. They begin to talk of a local murder trial, and one is moved by the thought of a hanging: “Hanging’s a dreadful thing,” he exclaims; and at length, with “almost a sigh,” he repeats. “Hanging’s a dreadful thing.” His sigh serves as the tale’s refrain and causes his fellow to tell within the tale a longer tale of a love triangle that ended in a murder and an unjust hanging. Finally, the sigh-refrain and the strange narration coalesce in the laborer’s language: Ah, when things make a turn against you it’s as certain as twelve o’clock, when they take a turn; you get no more chance than a rabbit from a weasel. It’s like dropping your matches into a stream, you needn’t waste the bending of your back to pick them out—they’re no good on, they’ll never strike again.

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Coppard’s lyric mode is perfectly suited to his grand theme: the darkness of love, its fleeting loveliness and almost inevitable entanglements and treacheries. He writes of triangles, entrapping circumstances, and betrayals in which, as often as not, a lover betrays himself or herself out of foolishness, timidity, or blind adherence to custom. Some of his best tales, like “Dusky Ruth” and “The Higgler,” dwell on the mysterious elusiveness of love, often as this involves an alluring but ungraspable woman. Men and women are drawn together by circumstances and deep undercurrents of unarticulated feeling but are separated before they consummate their love. “The Higgler” • Because of its portrayal of unconsummated love, its treatment of the rural poor, and its poetic atmosphere that arises from the countryside itself, “The Higgler” (the first story in The Collected Tales) is fully characteristic of Coppard’s best work. It is not simply a tale of unconsummated love, for its main character comes to absorb and reflect the eternal forces of conflict in nature. For Coppard this involves more than man’s economic struggle to wrest his living from nature; it involves man’s conflict with man in war, his conflict with his lover, his conflict with himself, and ultimately, with his own life source, the mother. Harvey Witlow is the higgler, a man whose business it is to travel the countryside in a horse-drawn wagon, buying produce from small farms. The story opens with the higgler making his way across Shag Moor, a desolate place where “solitude . . . now . . . shivered and looked sinister.” Witlow is shrewd and crafty, “but the season was backward, eggs were scarce, trade was bad”; and he stands to lose the meager business he has struggled to establish for himself since returning from the war, as well as his opportunity to marry. “That’s what war does for you,” he says. “I was better off working for farmers; much; but it’s no good chattering about it, it’s the trick of life; when you get so far, then you can go and order your funeral.” After this dismal beginning, Witlow is presented with an unexpected opportunity to improve his life in every way; but he is destined to outwit himself, as his name suggests, and to know more fully the “trick of life.” As the tale develops, then, the reader watches him miss his opportunity and resume his descent into general desolation. Witlow’s chance comes when he stops at the farm of a Mrs. Sadgrove. Here the higgler finds plenty of produce as well as the intriguing possibility of a relationship with Mrs. Sadgrove’s daughter, Mary, another of Coppard’s alluring, secretive women. Mary’s quiet beauty attracts Witlow, but he imagines her to be too “well-up” and “highly cultivated” for him. She shows no interest in him, so he is unprepared when, after several trips to the farm and an invitation to dinner, Mrs. Sadgrove tells him of her poor health and her desire that he should wed Mary and take over the farm. The higgler leaves bewildered. Here is his life’s opportunity: The farm is prosperous, and he is far more attracted to Mary than to Sophy, the poor girl he eventually marries; besides, Mary will inherit five hundred pounds on her twenty-fifth birthday. It is simply too good to believe, and after consulting with his mother about his opportunity, Witlow grows increasingly suspicious. The reader has already been told that “mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always”; and Witlow is confused by his mother’s enthusiasm over his opportunity. Even the natural world somehow conspires to frighten him: “Autumn was advancing, and the apples were down, the bracken dying, the furze out of bloom, and the farm on the moor looked more and more lonely. . . .” So Witlow begins to avoid the Sadgrove farm and suddenly marries Sophy. Within months, his “affairs had again taken a rude turn. Marriage, alas, was not all it might

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be; his wife and his mother quarrelled unendingly,” and his business fails badly. His only chance seems to be to return to the Sadgrove farm, where he might obtain a loan; but he does so reluctantly, for he knows Mrs. Sadgrove to be a hard woman. She exploits her help and “was reputed to be a ‘grinder’”; and he has betrayed her confidence. In an increasingly dark atmosphere of loss, Witlow returns across Shag Moor to the Sadgrove farm, where Mary meets him with the news of her mother’s death that day. Now a prolonged, eerie, and utterly powerful scene develops as the higgler agrees to help Mary prepare her mother’s body, which lies alone upstairs in a state of rigor mortis. He sends Mary away and confronts the dead mother, whose stiff outstretched arm had been impossible for Mary to manage. Moments later, in their intimacy near the dead mother, Witlow blurts out, “Did you know as she once asked me to marry you?” Finally Mary reveals that her mother actually opposed the marriage: “The girl bowed her head, lovely in her grief and modesty. ‘She was against it, but I made her ask you. . . . I was fond of you—then.’” To his distress and confusion, Mary insists that he leave at once, and he drives “away in deep darkness, the wind howling, his thoughts strange and bitter.” “Arabesque: The Mouse” • Coppard’s vision of life caught in a struggle against itself, of the violence in nature and its mockery of morality, of the deceit among humans and of humans’ denial of their true nature—all this is marvelously represented in one of his first and finest tales, “Arabesque: The Mouse.” It is a psychological horror story of a middle-aged man who sits alone one night reading Russian novels until he thinks he is mad. He is an idealist who was obsessed by the incompatibilities of property and virtue, justice and sin. He looks at a “print by Utamaro of a suckling child caressing its mother’s breasts” and his mind drifts to recall his own mother and then a brief experience with a lover. These recollections merge in a compelling pattern of images that unite finally, and horribly, with an actual experience this night with a mouse. As a child horrified by the sight of some dead larks that had been intended for supper, he sought comfort from his mother and found her sitting by the fire with her bodice open, “squeezing her breasts; long thin streams of milk spurted into the fire with a little plunging noise.” Telling him that she was weaning his little sister, she draws him to her breast and presses his face “against the delicate warmth of her bosom.” She allows him to do it; “so he discovered the throb of the heart in his mother’s breast. Wonderful it was for him to experience it, although she could not explain it to him.” They feel his own beat, and his mother assures him his heart is “good if it beats truly. Let it always beat truly, Filip.” The child kisses “her bosom in his ecstasy and whisper[s] soothingly: ‘Little mother! little mother.’” The boy forgets the horror of the dead larks bundled by their feet, but the next day his mother is run over by a heavy cart, and before she dies her mutilated hands are amputated. For years the image of his mother’s bleeding stumps of arms had haunted his dreams. Into his mind, however, now floats the recollection of an experience with a lovely country girl he had met and accompanied home. It was “dark, dark . . . , the night an obsidian net”; finally in their intimacy she had unbuttoned his coat, and with her hands on his breast asked, “Oh, how your heart beats! Does it beat truly?” In a “little fury of love” he cried “Little mother, little mother!” and confused the girl. At that moment footsteps and the clack of a bolt cause them to part forever. The sound of the bolt hurls him into the present, where, frightened, he opens his cupboard to find a mouse sitting on its haunches before a snapped trap. “Its head was bowed, but its beadlike eyes were full of brightness, and it sat blinking, it did not

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flee.” Then to his horror he sees that the trap had caught only the feet, “and the thing crouched there holding out its two bleeding stumps humanly, too stricken to stir.” He throws the mouse from his window into the darkness, then sits stunned, “limp with pity too deep for tears” before running down into the street in a vain search for the “little philosopher.” Later he drops the tiny feet into the fire, resets the trap, and carefully replaces it. “Arabesque: The Mouse” is a masterwork of interwoven imagery whose unity is caught in such details as the mother’s heartbeat, the mother’s milk streaming with a plunging noise into the fire, the mouse’s eyes, and the “obsidian net” of night. Coppard’s characters are sometimes shattered by such thoughts and experiences, but the author never lost his own sense of the natural magnificence and fleeting loveliness in life. It is true that many of his late tales pursue in a more thoughtful and comic manner the natural and psychological forces in life that were simply, but organically and poetically, present in such earlier tales as “The Higgler”; that is, in some of his later stories the reader can too easily see him playing with thoughts about Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, and, repeatedly, Charles Darwin (whose prose he admired). Yet the last tale (the title story) of his final volume is one of his best. “Lucy in Her Pink Jacket” is almost a hymn to nature, a song of acceptance in which lovers meet accidentally in a magnificent mountain setting. Their lovemaking is beautiful, natural, and relaxed, and they accept the web of circumstances causing them to part. Coppard’s description of his last parting character might serve as his reader’s image of himself: “Stepping out into the bright eager morning it was not long before [he] was whistling softly as he went his way, a sort of thoughtful, plaintive, museful air.” Bert Bender With updates by Lou Thompson Other major works children’s literature: Pink Furniture, 1930. nonfiction: Rummy: That Noble Game Expounded, 1933; It’s Me, O Lord!, 1957. poetry: Hips and Haws, 1922; Pelagea, and Other Poems, 1926; Yokohama Garland, 1926; Collected Poems, 1928; Cherry Ripe, 1935. Bibliography Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Includes a brief analysis of Coppard’s “The Higgler,” suggesting that the story is as unpredictable as life itself, with nothing seemingly arranged or contrived by Coppard. Bates, H. E. “Katherine Mansfield and A. E. Coppard.” In The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. London: Evensford Productions, 1972. Coppard’s contemporary and fellow author of short stories discusses Coppard’s role in the development of the modern English short story. Bates discerns an unfortunate influence of Henry James on Coppard’s work, which is remarkable in its Elizabethan lyricism and its homage to the oral tradition. Includes an index. Beachcroft, T. O. The Modest Art: A Survey of the Short Story in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Discusses Coppard’s two basic generic veins—the highly fantastic in such stories as “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” and the naturalistic in stories such as “The Higgler” and “The Water Cress Girl.” Cowley, Malcolm. “Book Reviews: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me.” The Dial 71, no. 1 (July,

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1921): 93-95. Describes Coppard’s careful workmanship, his skillful narration, and his artful blend of fantasy and realism. Cowley notes Coppard’s emotional unity, his insight into characters, his animated landscapes, and his role in keeping the short-story form vital. Ginden, James. “A. E. Coppard and H. E. Bates.” In The English Short Story, 1880-1945: A Critical History, edited by Joseph M. Flora. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Compares Coppard’s and H. E. Bates’s treatment of rural life as well as their dedication to the short story as distinguished from other literary forms. Although both authors employed the techniques of the modern short story, Ginden does not consider them “modernists,” arguing that their work lacks the reliance on symbol or metaphor and instead stresses anecdote and description. Kalasky, Drew, ed. Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Vol. 21. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Thoughtful collection of criticism of works by Coppard, Jean Rhys, William Sansom, William Saroyan, Giovanni Verga, and others. Lessing, Doris. Introduction to Selected Stories by A. E. Coppard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Lessing attributes the general appeal of Coppard’s fiction to his exceptional talent for storytelling. Coppard was an expert craftsman, but it is the authentic growth of characters and events that involves the reader. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Coppard: “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me” and “Arabesque—The Mouse” (vol. 1), “The Field of Mustard” and “The Higgler” (vol. 3), and “The Third Prize” (vol. 7). O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. New York: World, 1962. O’Connor examines Coppard’s themes of poverty, personal freedom, and women in the context of other modern short fiction by Irish, English, American, and Russian writers. The two great English storytellers, according to O’Connor, are Coppard and D. H. Lawrence. Though both authors had working-class backgrounds, Coppard is a more deliberate, self-conscious artist, and he betrays feelings of social inadequacy. Schwartz, Jacob. The Writings of Alfred Edward Coppard: A Bibliography. 1931. Reprint. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975. Features a biography by Schwartz and a foreword and notes by Coppard.

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Julio Cortázar Born: Brussels, Belgium; August 26, 1914 Died: Paris, France; February 12, 1984 Principal short fiction • Bestiario, 1951; Final del juego, 1956; Las armas secretas, 1959; Historias de cronopios y de famas, 1962 (Cronopios and Famas, 1969); End of the Game, and Other Stories, 1963 (also as Blow-Up, and Other Stories, 1967); Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966 (All Fires the Fire, and Other Stories, 1973); “Octaedro,” 1974 (included in A Change of Light, and Other Stories, 1980); “Alguien que anda por ahí y otros relatos,” 1977 (included in A Change of Light, and Other Stories, 1980); Un tal Lucas, 1979 (A Certain Lucas, 1984); Queremos tanto a Glenda y otros relatos, 1980 (We Love Glenda So Much, and Other Stories, 1983); Deshoras, 1982. Other literary forms • Julio Cortázar’s literary career, which lasted almost forty years, includes—besides his short stories—novels, plays, poetry, translations, and essays of literary criticism. In his essay on short fiction entitled “Algunos aspectos del cuento” (“Some Aspects of the Short Story”), Cortázar studies the varying role of the reader with regard to different literary forms. Cortázar’s first book, Presencia (1938), was a collection of poetry that he published under the pseudonym Julio Denís. He translated authors as diverse as Louisa May Alcott and Edgar Allan Poe into Spanish and considered French Symbolist poetry to be of enormous influence on his prose writing. He experimented with a form of collage in his later works of short fiction. Achievements • An antirealist, Cortázar is often grouped with Gabriel García Márquez as one of the foremost proponents of the Magical Realism movement and, during his lifetime, one of the most articulate spokespersons on the subject of Latin American fiction. Although Cortázar is most admired for his short stories (his short story “Las babas del diablo” was made into a classic film in 1966 called Blow-Up by director Michelangelo Antonioni), it was the publication of the novel Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966) that placed the author among the twentieth century’s greatest writers. The Times Literary Supplement called Hopscotch the “first great novel of Spanish America.” Biography • Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1914, during the German occupation. His Argentine parents were stationed there while his father was on the staff of a commercial mission. Cortázar’s antecedents came from the Basque region of Spain, as well as France and Germany, and they had settled in Argentina. When Cortázar was four years old, his parents returned to Argentina, where he would grow up in Banfield, a suburb of Buenos Aires. His father abandoned the family, and he was reared by his mother and an aunt. Cortázar attended the Escuela Norman Mariano Acosta in Buenos Aires and earned a degree as a public-school teacher in 1932. In 1937, he accepted a high school teaching post and shortly thereafter published Presencia, a collection of poems, under the pseudonym Julio Denís. In 1940, he published an essay on Arthur Rimbaud, under the same pseudonym, and began to teach a class on the French Sym-

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bolist movement at the University of Cuyo in Mendoza. In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges, at that time the editor of the literary journal Anales de Buenos Aires, published “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”)—the first work that Julio Cortázar penned under his own name. A writer with outspoken political beliefs, Cortázar was defiantly anti-Peronist. He was arrested and as a result was forced to relinquish his academic career in Argentina. Instead, however, he became a translator and, in 1951, went to Paris, where he soon established permanent residency. Much of his best short fiction, including “Bestiary” and “End of the Game,” was published in the 1950’s and reveals his experience as an expatriate—a Latin American living in Paris. In Paris, Cortázar got a job as a translator for UNESCO, which he kept for the rest of his life despite his international success as an author. In 1953, he married Aurora Bernandez, with whom he translated Poe’s prose works into Spanish, while they lived briefly in Rome. In 1963, he published Hopscotch and, after a visit to Cuba, became a powerful figure on both the literary and the political scenes. His audience grew wider during the 1960’s and 1970’s with the translation of Rayuela into dozens of languages and the appearance of the film Blow-Up. He also traveled extensively to such diverse places as Chile, New York, and Oklahoma to attend conferences, receive awards, and participate in political tribunals. In 1981, he finally became a French citizen. He died in Paris in February, 1984, of leukemia and heart disease. He is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. Analysis • Influenced by the European movements of nineteenth century Symbolism and twentieth century Surrealism, Julio Cortázar combines symbols, dreams, and the fantastic with what seems to be an ordinary, realistic situation in order to expose a different kind of reality that exists in the innermost heart and mind of modern human beings. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Cortázar is fascinated by terror. He uses human beings’ worst nightmares to explore which fears control them and how phobias and dreams coexist with seemingly rational thought. Using symbols and metaphors for subconscious obsessions, Cortázar’s short fictions, unlike those of the Surrealists, are carefully constructed. His journey into the irrational is not a free-flowing adventure; rather, it is a study of a particular corner of the mind that is common to all people. “Bestiary” • “Bestiary,” an early story published in 1951, contains many of the elements of poesy and mystery that are characteristic of the nineteenth century Symbolists so admired by Cortázar. The story is told by a child whose scope of understanding and point of view are limited, thereby leaving certain details vague and confusing. Isabel is sent to the country for the summer to stay in a home inhabited by another child, Nino, and three adults: Luis, Nino’s father; Rema, who may or may not be Nino’s mother, Luis’ wife or sister, Nino’s sister, or the housekeeper; and the Kid, who is not a kid but Luis’ brother. The information given about the family is not specific in those terms, but it is quite specific in Isabel’s feelings about each person. The overwhelming oddity about this summer home is that a tiger is allowed to roam freely about the house and grounds. The people are advised as to the location of the tiger each day, and they go about their business as usual by simply avoiding the room or part of the fields in which the tiger happens to be. Life seems to be filled with very typical activities: Luis works in his study; the children gather an ant collection; and Rema supervises meals. Isabel is especially fond

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of Rema but not of the Kid. Events are relayed that expose Isabel’s true feelings about the Kid and the kind of person she believes him to be. He is surly at the dinner table. Once, after Nino has hit a ball through the window leading to the Kid’s room, the Kid hits Nino; the most disturbing moment, however, is a scene between Rema and the Kid during which Isabel acts as a voyeur, revealing some sort of sexual abuse on the part of the Kid toward Rema. Because of Isabel’s admiration for Rema, she decides to take revenge on the Kid. The culmination of the story is that Isabel lies to the family about the whereabouts of the tiger, sending the Kid into the room where the animal is. Screams are heard, and it is clear that the Kid has been mauled to death. Isabel notices that Rema squeezes her hand with what the child believes to be gratiLibrary of Congress tude. Many critics have speculated about the meaning of the tiger. Cortázar, in true Symbolist fashion, has himself said that the reader receives a richer experience if no specific symbol is attributed to the animal in this story. As in the works of Poe, constant tension and terror pervade the work, and the tiger’s meaning becomes a relative one—a personal nightmare for each character and each reader. “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” • “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” begins on a charming note. It is a letter from a young man to his girlfriend, who is visiting Paris. She has asked him to move into her apartment, and, through very delicate language, he tries to convince her that he would disrupt her very orderly and truly elegant apartment. He succumbs to her wishes, however, and moves his belongings, but on the way up in the elevator he begins to feel sick. Panic ensues when he vomits a bunny rabbit, and, while living in the apartment, each wave of anxiety produces another. Soon, he is sequestering ten bunny rabbits in an armoire. The rabbits sleep in the daytime and are awakened at night; he manages to keep his secret from his girlfriend’s nosy maid. The nocturnal insomnia and the constant production of bunny rabbits drive him to jump out the window along with the last one regurgitated. The charming letter is really a suicide note, and the seemingly eccentric but sweet story becomes a horrific account of phobia and insanity. “Axolotl” • Cortázar seems particularly fascinated with the unusual placement of animals in these stories. In “Bestiary” and “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris,” animals

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take over the lives of people. In another short story, “Axolotl,” the man who visits the aquarium every day to see the axolotl swim becomes the axolotl. The narrative point of view switches back and forth between the man and the sea creature, telling the story from both points of view, but since there is no regular pattern or warning when the point of view changes, it is often difficult to determine inside whose skin readers are. The nightmare of being trapped inside the body of a beast is the human’s experience, and the panic of being abandoned by the man is the axolotl’s final cry. The only hope, as noted by the axolotl, is the creation of art where the writer can become another and communicate on behalf of all creatures—expressing the feelings of all creatures so that none may feel the terror of isolation and imprisonment. “All Fires the Fire” • The shifting of narrative point of view as well as the alternation of time and place is a technique that Cortázar developed during his career as an author. A later story, “All Fires the Fire,” revolves around two unhappy love triangles. One takes place in modern times and one during a gladiator fight in an ancient coliseum. Again, Cortázar uses animals to provide a menacing tone to what seem to be ordinary failures in romance. In both cases, raging blazes burn the lovers to death. No clear delineation is made when the story shifts scenes. The reader begins to sense these changes as the story unfolds; the scenes are different, but the tension never desists. The author creates deliberate ambiguity so that the reader, who is being intentionally confused by the author, nevertheless receives signals at the same time. Like the Symbolist writers whom he admired, Cortázar, in “All Fires the Fire,” understands the power of the suggestive image and insists that readers use their own senses to feel the intensity of hate, lust, and love in both triangles. Through smell, sound, and sight, the reader gets two complete and distinct pictures that have similar endings. Like the Surrealist writers who unraveled the varying layers of the mind, Cortázar here projects two events that occur at two different times in two different places yet at the same moment in the reader’s consciousness. “Blow-Up” • Through fractured narration, Cortázar is able to examine how the mind can appropriate different personalities and points of view in this story, which he first published as “Las babas del diablo.” The games of the mind are a constant theme in the works of Cortázar, and it is for that reason that a journey into his fictive world is an opportunity to explore the relationship between what seems to be real and what seems to be illogical. Cortázar confounds the reader’s system of beliefs with his manipulation of discourse. He begins the story “Blow-Up,” for example, by stating: “It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing.” He continues by telling readers how he writes—by typewriter—making them absolutely aware of the fact that they are going to enter the world of fiction. Although “Blow-Up” begins on this self-conscious trial, which seems to draw an obvious distinction between art and life, its actual theme is the interchangeability of the two. The narrator introduces the reader to the story’s hero, a French-Chilean photographer named Robert Michel, and then becomes him. The story is narrated alternatively in first-person “I” and third-person “he” and becomes a collage of identities. Out for a stroll on a pleasant November day, the photographer happens by chance upon a scene that disturbs him. Chance is an essential component of the world of

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magic, the fantastic and the illogical in Cortázar’s short fiction. Chance rearranges preexisting order and creates a new future, past, and present for Cortázar’s characters. The photographer/narrator witnesses a brief moment between a young man, a woman, and an older man sitting in a car—another love triangle with menacing undertones—and creates a history of what might have brought all three to the quai near the Seine. After the particular episode, he creates a future for them of what might happen to each of them afterward. Later, when he himself reflects on the episode, he studies his photographs as if the moments were frozen in time. Strangely, the more he studies his enlargements the more his memory alters. Because he creates a fiction about each of the people involved, the photo and his involvement in their little dramas become fiction as well, and he is not at all certain of what he has witnessed. The whole episode develops into a dream, a game of the mind. The photographs that he had taken, which were supposed to reproduce reality with exactitude, become a collage of suggestions. Magnified, the photographs reveal even less about what he thought had occurred. The photographer believes that his camera is empowered with precision and with accuracy; he discovers, however, that the artwork has a life of its own that is constantly re-creating itself. The search for truth in art is the pervading theme in Julio Cortázar’s short fiction. He attempts to break with realist attitudes to force the reader to look beyond that which is ordinary and comfortable in order to explore the realms that seem, on the surface, incomprehensible and fearful. Cortázar believes that as human beings, people must recognize the inexplicable as just that and must admit that they do not have control over everything. The characters in “Bestiary” do not have control over the tiger. The young man in “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” does not have control over the rabbits that he regurgitates. “All Fires the Fire” depicts the characters involved in passionate love triangles whose emotions are out of control. Finally, in “Blow-Up,” the artist’s work has a life of its own. It was the Symbolist movement that gave Cortázar his stylistic signature and the Surrealists who divulged the irrational to later artists. Cortázar combined his appreciation for both movements and consolidated them with his own voice to create exciting and challenging short fiction. Susan Nayel Other major works novels: Los premios, 1960 (The Winners, 1965); Rayuela, 1963 (Hopscotch, 1966); 62: Modelo para armar, 1968 (62: A Model Kit, 1972); Libro de Manuel, 1973 (A Manual for Manuel, 1978); El examen, wr. 1950, pb. 1986 (Final Exam., 2000) miscellaneous: La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, 1967 (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 1986); Último round, 1969; Divertimiento, 1986. nonfiction: Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, 1968 (English translation, 1968); Último round, 1969; Viaje alrededor de una mesa, 1970; Prosa del observatorio, 1972 (with Antonio Galvez); Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales: Una utopía realizable, 1975; Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura, 1976 (with Mario Vargas Llosa and Oscar Collazos); Paris: The Essence of Image, 1981; Los autonautas de la cosmopista, 1983; Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce, 1983 (Nicaraguan Sketches, 1989); Cartas, 2000 (3 volumes). poetry: Presencia, 1938 (as Julio Denís); Los reyes, 1949; Pameos y meopas, 1971; Salvo el crepúsculo, 1984.

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translations: Robinson Crusoe, 1945 (of Daniel Defoe’s novel); El inmoralista, 1947 (of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste); El hombre que sabía demasiado, c. 1948-1951 (of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much); Vida y Cartas de John Keats, c. 1948-1951 (of Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of John Keats); Filosofía de la risa y del llanto, 1950 (of Alfred Stern’s Philosophie du rire et des pleurs); La filosofía de Sartre y el psicoanálisis existentialista, 1951 (of Stern’s Sartre, His Philosophy and Psychoanalysis). Bibliography Alazraki, Jaime, and Ivan Ivask, eds. The Final Island. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Collection of essays, including two by Cortázar himself, about the role of magic or the marvelous as it works alongside what appears to be realism in Cortázar’s fiction. Contains a chronology and an extensive bibliography that offers data on Cortázar’s publications in several languages. Alonso, Carlos J., ed. Julio Cortázar: New Readings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature series. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Garfield, Evelyn Picon. Julio Cortázar. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. Garfield begins and ends her study with personal interviews that she obtained with Cortázar at his home in Provence, France. She studies the neurotic obsession of the characters in Cortázar’s fiction and offers firsthand commentary by Cortázar on his methods of writing and his own experiences that helped create his work. Cortázar’s philosophies, his preferences, and even his own personal nightmares are expounded upon, illuminating much of the symbolism found in his work. Chronology, analysis, complete bibliography, and index. Guibert, Rita. Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. Includes an important interview with Cortázar, who discusses both his politics (his strenuous objection to U.S. interference in Latin America) and many of his fictional works. Hernandez del Castillo, Ana. Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopoesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981. Studies the influence of John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe on the work of Cortázar. The author states that of these two poets, whose works Cortázar translated, Poe had the greater influence on Cortázar. Studies the role of the archetypes in mythology and psychology and how they have been used in the works of all three writers. Contains an excellent index, which includes references that had an enormous impact on trends in the twentieth century. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these seven short stories by Cortázar: “Apocalypse at Solentiname,” “Axolotl,” and “Blow-Up” (vol. 1); “End of the Game” (vol. 2); “Instructions for John Howell” and “The Island at Noon” (vol. 4); and “The Southern Thruway” (vol. 7). Peavler, Terry J. Julio Cortázar. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Peavler divides Cortázar’s short fiction into four categories—the fantastic, the mysterious, the psychological, and the realistic—in order to show how Cortázar used these genres as games to study discourse. Includes a chronology and a through bibliography. Stavans, Ilan. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. See especially the chapters on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Cortázar’s fiction, his use of the fantastic, and his reliance on popular culture. Stavans also has a sec-

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tion on Cortázar’s role as writer and his interpretation of developments in Latin American literature. Includes chronology and bibliography. Sugano, Marian Zwerling. “Beyond What Meets the Eye: The Photographic Analogy in Cortázar’s Short Stories.” Style 27 (Fall, 1993): 332-351. Summarizes and critiques Cortazar’s analogy between the short story and photography in his essays, “Some Aspects of the Short Story” and “On the Short Story and Its Environs”; explains how Cortázar dramatizes the analogy in “Blow-Up” and “Apocalypse at Solentiname.” Yovanovich, Gordana. Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic: Reading the Longer Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Three chapters focus on Cortázar’s four major novels and his fluctuating presentations of character as narrators, symbols, and other figures of language. Includes notes and bibliography.

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Stephen Crane Born: Newark, New Jersey; November 1, 1871 Died: Badenweiler, Germany; June 5, 1900 Principal short fiction • The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, 1896; The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure, 1898; The Monster, and Other Stories, 1899; Whilomville Stories, 1900; Wounds in the Rain: War Stories, 1900; Last Words, 1902. Other literary forms • Stephen Crane began his brief writing life as a journalist, and he continued writing for newspapers, notably as a war correspondent, throughout his career, sometimes basing his short stories on events that he had first narrated in press reports. He also wrote raw-edged, realistic novels in which he employed journalistic techniques, most significantly in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895). By contrast, he composed wry, evocative, often cryptic poems, published in The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), that seemed to reveal the philosophy behind the world created in his fiction. Achievements • Stephen Crane’s fiction has proved hard to classify—not, however, because he defies categorization but because he worked in two nearly incompatible literary styles at once, while being a groundbreaker in both. On one hand, he founded the American branch of literary naturalism (this style had originated in France) in his early novels. These works emphasized the sordid aspects of modern life, noted the overpowering shaping influence of environment on human destiny, and scandalously discounted the importance of morality as an effective factor touching on his characters’ behavior. In this style, he was followed by writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. On the other hand, in these same early novels he developed a descriptive style that made him a founder of American impressionism. Although the naturalist component of his writing stressed how subjectivity was dominated by social forces, the impressionist component, through coloristic effects and vivid metaphors, stressed the heightened perceptions of individual characters from whose perspectives the story was presented. The man closest to Crane in his own time in developing this impressionist style was Joseph Conrad, though, it will be recognized, this method of drawing from a character’s viewpoint became a central tool of twentieth century literature and was prominently employed by authors such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Crane took the unusual tack of both playing up his characters’ points of view in presenting the world and downplaying the characters’ abilities to influence that world. Although this combination of strategies could be made to work satisfactorily, later authors who have taken Crane’s path have tended to develop only one of these strands. Moreover, many critics have found Crane’s dual emphases to be jarring and incompletely thought through, particularly in his novels. In fact, many have believed that it is only in his short stories that he seemed thoroughly to blend the two manners.

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Biography • To some degree, Stephen Crane’s life followed a perverse pattern. He was acclaimed for the authenticity of his writings about events that he had never experienced and then spent the remainder of his few years experiencing the events that he had described in prose—often with disastrous consequences. Born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, Crane was the last child in the large family of a Methodist minister, Jonathan Townley Crane. The family moved frequently from parish to parish and, in 1878, came to Port Jervis, New York, in forested Sullivan County, where Crane would set most of his early stories. Two years later, his father died, and his mother had to begin struggling to support the family, doing church work and writing for religious publications. Crane determined to be a writer early in his life, and though he attended a few semesters at Lafayette College and then Syracuse University, his real interest in his college years was in soaking up the atmosphere of New York City lowlife and writing freelance articles for newspapers. In 1892, he completed his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the story of a young girl driven into streetwalking by a Bowery Romeo. This first novel was so shocking in tone and full of obscenity (in those days, this meant that it contained words such as “hell”) that it was rejected by respectable publishers. Borrowing money, Crane printed the book himself, and though it went unread and unsold, it garnered the appreciation of two of the outstanding literary figures of the day, Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. Crane’s next book, The Red Badge of Courage, a novel about the Civil War (18611865), brought him universal acclaim and celebrity status. In the year of the book’s publication, however, as if living out his fiction, he defended an unjustly accused prostitute against the corrupt New York City police, just as he had defended the poor prostitute Maggie in prose, and found undeserved blight attached to his name. From then on, life would be made difficult for him in New York City by the angered police force. Crane more or less abandoned New York at this point, easily enough since the authority of his army novel had placed him in much demand as a war correspondent. Going to Florida to wait for a ship to Cuba, where a rebellion against the Spanish colonialists was taking place, Crane met Cora Taylor, the madame of a house of ill repute who was to become his common-law wife. The ill-fated ship that he eventually boarded sank, and Crane barely escaped with his life, though, on the positive side, he produced from the experience what many consider his greatest short story, “The Open Boat.” As if to show that he could describe real wars as well as he could imagine them, he began shuttling from battle to battle as a reporter, first going to the Greco-Turkish War and then back to view the Spanish-American War, ruining his health in the process. Between wars, he stayed in the manorial Brede Place in England, where he became acquainted with a number of other expatriates who lived in the area, including Joseph Conrad, Harold Frederic, and Henry James. Crane’s problems with the police and the irregularity of his liaison with Cora Taylor—she could not get a divorce from her long-estranged husband—would have made it difficult for Crane to live in his homeland, so in 1899, he settled at the manor for good. Sick and beset with financial woes brought on by extravagant living and an openhanded generosity to visitors, he wrote feverishly but unavailingly to clear his debts. He died the next year from tuberculosis, after having traveled to the Continent to seek a cure.

Crane, Stephen Analysis • Perhaps because his writing career was so short, critics have devoted much space to Stephen Crane’s slight, decidedly apprentice series of sketches collectively entitled The Sullivan County Tales. One trait that the sketches do have in their favor is that they contain all the facets of style and theme that Crane was to utilize as his writing developed. The reader finds the overbearing power of the environment, the vivid descriptions, the premise that these descriptions reflect the heightened consciousness of a character or characters, and the idea that this very heightening involves a distortion of perception that needs to be overcome for the characters’ adequate adjustment to, and comprehension of, reality. Also of significance is that these stories are generally concerned with the actions of four campers and hence reflect not only on individual psychology but also on the psychology of group dynamics. This was also to become a focus of Crane’s writing.

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“Four Men in a Cave” • In one of the better pieces from this series, “Four Men in a Cave,” a quartet of campers decides to explore a cave in order to have something to brag about when they return to the city. Their scarcely concealed fears about the expedition are rendered by Crane’s enlivening of stalactites that jab down at them and stalagmites that shoot up at them from crevices. At the end of their path, they find a hermit who invites them to a game of poker, but their fear-stoked imaginations visualize the gamester as a ghoul or Aztec priest. Only later after escaping the cave, in a comic denouement, do they learn of the cave dweller’s true identity, that of a mad farmer who took to solitude when he lost his land and wife through gambling. By this time, there seems to be little to brag about, since what has happened has exposed their cowardice and credulity. The story provides an early example of the rough-and-ready combination of impressionist subjectivity, in how the descriptions in the piece are tinged by the campers’ fears, and naturalist objectivity, in how the overwhelming environment of the cave, for part of the story, controls the men’s action while dwarfing them. Further, the piece indicates the way, as Crane sees it, emotions can be constructed collectively, as when each camper tells the others how he has misidentified the hermit, adding to the growing hysteria. “An Experiment in Misery” • In 1894, Crane published a maturer story, “An Experiment in Misery,” in which he transposed the narrative of a cave journey into a serious study of urban social conditions. In the originally printed version of the piece, two

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middle-class men observe tramps and speculate about their motives and feelings. On impulse, the younger man decides to dress as a tramp in order to penetrate their secrets. (Such a tactic, of disguising oneself to uncover hidden areas of society, was a common practice of crusading reporters at that time.) In the later, revised version of this story, the one that is more commonly known, Crane removed the beginning and ending that reveal the protagonist to be slumming; yet, though his social origins are obscured, the story still concerns a neophyte who knows nothing of the life of the underclass and who is being initiated into the ways of the Bowery slums. The high point of the tale, corresponding to the cave exploration, is the hero’s entrance into an evil-smelling flophouse. He has trouble sleeping in the noisome room, for his keyed-up fancy sees morbid, highly romanticized symbols everywhere. He understands the shriek of a nightmare-tossed sleeper as a metaphoric protest of the downtrodden. Awakening the next morning, the protagonist barely remarks on the stench, and this seems to indicate that, merely through familiarity, some of the falsely romantic pictures that he has entertained about the life of the city’s poorest have begun to rub off. Exactly what positive things he has learned and of what value such learning will be to him are never clear and, indeed, as Crane grew, while his stories still turned on the loss of illusions, they began to lose the dogmatic assurance that such a change is necessarily for the good. The last scene of the sketch, though, does make a more definite point, this one about the nature of groups. The hero has begun to associate with a fellow tramp called the assassin and now, after his initiatory night, seems both adjusted to his new station and accepted by the tramp world, at least insofar as the assassin is willing to regale him with his life story. By abandoning his preconceptions about poverty, the protagonist has quite seamlessly fitted himself into the alien milieu, yet this joining of one community has a negative side effect of distancing him from another. The last tableau has the assassin and the hero lounging on park benches as the morning rushhour crowd streams by them. Here, soon after the hero has had the comfortable feeling of being accepted in one society, he has the poignant realization that, as a bum, he no longer belongs to the larger American working world. There is even a sly hint, given by the fact that the youth begins employing the same grandiose, romanticized terms in depicting his separation from the business world that he had earlier used to depict the flophouse, that he has embarked on a new course of building delusions. In other words, his loss of illusions about the reality of tramp life has been counteracted (as if a vacuum needed to be filled) by the imbibing of a new set of illusions about the vast gulf between the classes. Each community one may join seems to have its own supply of false perspectives. “The Open Boat” • In 1897, after his near death at sea, Crane produced what most name his greatest short story and what some even rank as his supreme achievement, placing it above his novels. This is “The Open Boat.” Again there are four men. They are in a small boat, a dinghy, escapees from a sunken vessel, desperately trying to row to shore in heavy seas. The famed first sentence establishes both the parameters of the fictional world and a new chastening of Crane’s style. It reads, “None of them knew the color of the sky.” Literally, they are too intent on staying afloat to notice the heavens; figuratively, in this godless universe the men cannot look to the sky for help but must rely on their own muscles and wits, which, against the elements, are little enough. Furthermore,

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the opening’s very dismissal of color descriptions, given that much of Crane’s earlier work, such as The Red Badge of Courage, depends heavily on color imagery, can be seen as the author’s pledge to restrain some of the flashiness of his style. This restraint is evident not only in a more tempered use of language here but also in the nature of the protagonists’ delusions. In works such as the slum experiment, the romanticized preconceptions that determine the protagonist’s viewpoint can be seen as trivial products of a shallow culture—that is, as marginal concerns—whereas in the sea story, the men’s illusions are necessities of life. The men in the boat want to believe that they must survive, since they have been fighting so hard. If they do not believe this, how can they continue rowing? The point is put wrenchingly at one moment when the men refuse to accept that they will drown, as it seems they will, in the breakers near the shore. Such illusions (about the meaningfulness of valor and effort) obviously have more universal relevance than others with which Crane has dealt, and that is why the story strikes so deep; the illusions also, ingeniously, tie in with readers’ expectations. As much as readers begin to identify with the four men (and they are sympathetically portrayed), they will want them to survive and thus will be on the verge of agreeing to their illusions. Thus, Crane engineers a remarkable and subtle interlocking of readers’ and characters’ beliefs. Furthermore, the functionality of the possibly delusive beliefs of the struggling men—that is, the fact that they need to believe that they will make it ashore to keep up the arduous fight for life—helps Crane to a fuller, more positive view of human community. The men in the cave were merely partners in error, but these toilers share a belief system that sustains them in their mutually supportive labor, which the characters themselves recognize as “a subtle brotherhood of men.” The men’s shared recognition of the supportive structure of human groups gives weight to the story’s last phrase, which says, of the three survivors who have reached land, “and they felt that they could then be interpreters.” The story, written in the third person, is given largely from the viewpoint of one of the four, a newspaper correspondent. This is not evident at once, however, since the narrative begins by simply objectively reporting the details of the men’s struggle to stay afloat and reproducing their laconic comments. In this way, the group is put first, and only later, when the correspondent’s thoughts are revealed, does the reader learn of his centrality as the story begins to be slightly colored by his position. What the focus on his consciousness reveals, aiding Crane in deepening his presentation, is how the subtle brotherhood is felt individually. After rowing near to the shore but not being able to attract anyone’s attention, the crew settle down for a night at sea. While whoever is rowing stays awake, the others sleep like the dead they may soon become, and at this point, the story dwells more intently on the correspondent’s outlook as he takes his turn at the oars. The newspaperman reconsiders the beliefs that have been keeping them afloat, seeing the weakness in them and accepting, now that he is alone, the possibility of an ironic death— that is, one coming in sight of shore after their courageous struggle. Yet his existential angst, an acknowledgment that there is no special heavenly providence, neither stops him from his muscle-torturing rowing nor diminishes his revived illusions on the morrow, when they again all breast the waves together. If this line of reasoning shows him mentally divorcing himself from the collective ideology, another night thought implies that, in another direction, he is gaining a deeper sense of solidarity. He remembers a verse that he had learned in school about a legionnaire dying far from home with only a comrade to share his last moments.

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The correspondent had thought little of the poem, both because he had never been in extremis (and so saw little to the pathos of the case) and, as Crane notes, had formerly looked cynically at his fellows (and so had found unpalatable or unbelievable the care of one soldier for another). A day’s experience in the dinghy has made him keenly aware of the two aspects of experience that he had overlooked or undervalued, and thus has given him a clear understanding of the networks (those of democratic brotherhood) and circumstances (a no-holds-barred fight against an indifferent universe) that underlie the human social world. This understanding can be applied in many ways, not only toward a grasp of group interaction but also toward an interpretation of honest art. Still, the most telling incident of his lonely watch is not so much any of his thoughts as an action. The boat, the correspondent finds, has become the magnet to a huge shark. Achingly, he wishes that one of his fellow sailors were awake to share his fidgety vigil; yet, he resists any impulse he has to rouse them or even to question aloud whether any of them is conscious for fear that he should waken a sleeper. Even if alone he cannot continue with the group illusion, he can, though alone, effortlessly maintain the group’s implicit morality, which holds that each should uncomplainingly shoulder as much of the burden as possible, while never revealing irritation or fear. Much later, the newspaperman learns that another of the four, the captain, was awake and aware of the predator’s presence during what had been taken to be the correspondent’s moment of isolated anguish. The hidden coexistent alertness of the captain suggests the ongoing mutuality of the group that undergirds even seemingly isolated times of subjectivity. To bring this story in line with the last one mentioned, it is worth noting that the small group in the boat is contrasted to a group on shore just as, in “An Experiment in Misery,” the hoboes were contrasted to the society of the gainfully employed. When the rowers are near the coast on the first day, they vainly hope to attract the ministering attentions of people on land. They do attract their attention, but the people, tourists from a hotel, merrily wave at them, thinking that the men in the dinghy are fishermen. The heedlessness, inanity, and seeming stupidity of the group on shore compare unfavorably with the hard-won, brave alertness of the boatmen, pointing to the fact that the small group’s ethical solidarity is not of a type with the weaker unity found in the larger society. The men’s deep harmony rather—beautiful as it is—is something that can be found only in pockets. The depicting of the community on the land foreshadows elements of Crane’s later, darker pictures of community, as in “The Blue Hotel,” where what sustains a group is not a life-enhancing though flimsy hope but a tacitly accepted lie. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” • In the year that he wrote “The Open Boat” and the next year, Crane was to compose three other brilliant stories, two of which dealt with myths of the Old West. Both these Western tales were written in his mature, unadorned style, and both continued his focus on the belief systems of communities. What is new to them is a greater flexibility in the handling of plot. Previously, he had simply followed his characters through a continuous chronological sequence from start to finish; now, however, he began shifting between differently located character groups and jumping around in time. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the action begins on a train moving through Texas, carrying Yellow Sky’s sheriff, Jack Potter, and his new wife back to town. Potter is apprehensive about his reception, since he has married out of town in a whirlwind

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courtship and none of the townspeople knows of his new status. The scene shifts to the interior of a Yellow Sky saloon, where the gathered, barricaded patrons have other things to be apprehensive about than Potter’s marriage. Scratchy Wilson, the local ruffian, has gotten drunk and is shooting in the main street, while, as the bar’s occupants admit, the only man able to cow him is the absent sheriff. Scratchy Wilson himself, as the reader learns in another scene shift, not aware of Potter’s trip, is truculently looking for the sheriff so that they can engage in a showdown. In truth, the reader, knowing of Potter’s imminence, will probably share Wilson’s expectation of a gun battle, which is not an unreasonable forecast of the plot’s unfolding. Yet, this expectation is founded on a deeper belief, that the West will always be an uncivilized place of outlaws and pistols. A chagrined Scratchy recognizes that this belief is invalid and that an era has passed when he finds that the sheriff has taken a wife. After meeting the couple, he holsters his guns and stalks off toward the horizon. “The Blue Hotel” • A tragic variation on similar themes of violence and community beliefs appears in “The Blue Hotel,” a story that a few critics rank in importance above “The Open Boat.” The tale concerns a fatalistic traveler, the Swede, who stops for the night in a hotel in Nebraska. (This protagonist’s name will be picked up by Ernest Hemingway, a Crane admirer, for an equally fatalistic character in his short-story masterpiece “The Killers.”) Through the Swede’s conversation with the hotel owner, Scully, and other stoppers, it appears that, based perhaps on an immersion in dime novels, the Swede thinks that this town—or, for that matter, any town in the West—is a hotbed of bloodshed and mayhem. After his fears seem to be allayed by the officious owner, who assures him that he is mistaken, the Swede overreacts by becoming boisterous and familiar. This mood of his eventually dissipates when, involved in a game of cards, he accuses the owner’s son of cheating. The upshot is that the pair engage in a fistfight, which the Swede wins. He is now triumphant but can no longer find any welcome at the hotel; so he wanders off to a nearby saloon, in which his even more high-strung and aggressive demonstrations lead to his death at the hands of an icy but violent gambler he had been prodding to drink with him. At this point, the story seems a grim meditation on the truth or falsity of myths. What seemed to be the manifestly absurd belief of the Swede has been proven partially true by his own death. Yet, it appears this truth would never have been exposed except for the Swede’s own pushy production of the proper circumstances for Western violence to emerge. There is, however, another turn of the cards. A final scene is described in which, months later, two of the hotel’s card players, witnesses of the dispute between the Swede and Scully’s son, discuss events of that fateful evening. One of them, the easterner, claims that the whole group collected at the hotel that night is responsible for what led to the death since they all knew that the owner’s son was cheating but did not back up the Swede when he accused the youth. In one way, this final episode indicates that perhaps the Swede’s suspicions were accurate in yet another sense; the whole town is made up, metaphorically, of killers in that the community is willing to sacrifice an outsider to maintain its own dubious harmony. From this angle, though, this Western town’s particular violence merely crystallizes and externalizes any hypocritical town’s underlying psychic economy. (Crane depicted this economy more explicitly in his novella The Monster.) In another way— and here the increasing complexity of Crane’s thought on community is evident— even after the final episode, it still appears that the Swede’s murder has some justification.

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There are two points to be made in this connection. For one, throughout the story, Crane represents the frailty of human existence as it is established on the prairies in the depths of winter. The story begins by underlining the presumptuousness of Scully’s hotel’s bright blue color, not so much as it may be an affront to the other, staider buildings in town, but in its assertiveness against the grimness of the white wastes of nature surrounding and swamping the little burg. The insignificance of human beings measured against the universe is explicitly stated by Crane in an oftquoted passage. He speaks of humans clinging to a “whirling, fire-smitten, icelocked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.” He goes on to say that the “conceit of man” in striving to prevail in such conditions is “the very engine of life.” It is true that they all killed the Swede in some sense, but the fragility of the human community, it may be surmised, demands that its members all practice respect and forbearance toward one another so that a common front can be presented against uncaring nature. If anyone consistently violates this unwritten code, as the Swede does, he must be eliminated for group self-preservation. It is significant in this light that the Swede, who demands a grudge match with the owner’s son, would take the men away from the large, redhot stove (symbol of the warmth of peaceful intercourse and home comfort) outside to fight in subzero weather. To restate this, for his own egotistical purposes, the Swede would drag everyone into a much greater exposure to a harsh environment than life in the community, were it running harmoniously, would ever make necessary. The second point to be made is that Crane’s portrait of the gambler, which interrupts the narrative at a high point and which, thus, seems at first sight a cumbersome miscalculation by the author, allows the reader a fuller understanding of the place of an outsider in this Western society. If readers were given only the Swede’s treatment to go by, they would be forced to conclude that, whatever the necessity of the visitor’s expulsion, this town has little tolerance for aberrant personalities. Yet, such a position has to be modified after Crane’s presentation of the gambler, whose disreputable calling excludes him from the city’s better social functions but whose behavior in other areas—he bows to the restrictions put on him with good grace and is a charitable family man who will not prey on the better citizens—conforms enough to standards to allow him to be generally accepted. Intervening at this point, Crane’s portrayal of this second (relative) outsider is used to indicate that the community will permit in its midst a character who has not followed all of its rules, provided such a character does not, as the Swede does, insistently and continuously breach the accepted norms. All this taken together does not, certainly, excuse a murder. What it does show is that Crane’s understanding of how a community sustains itself has expanded beyond the understanding that he had at the time of the sea story. He indicates that the guiding principle of mutual support found in the dinghy has remained operative, even in a far less threatened situation, while adding that violations of this principle can lead to less happy consequences than might have been foreseen in the earlier story. “Death and the Child” • Finally, in “Death and the Child,” Crane produced an excellent story about war, the topic which had been both the most consistent and the least successful subject of his short pieces. The intertwined themes of the effect of illusions and the ways that an individual can be integrated into, or excluded from, a community, the most important themes of Crane’s work, are again central. In this piece, the character who nurses illusions is Peza, a journalist who has decided to join the Greek side during the Greco-Turkish War, motivated by unrealistic ideas about

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the glories of classical Greece and the adventure of fighting. Once he reaches the battle lines, however, he finds it impossible to join the other combatants. He is displeased by the nonchalance of the troops, who refuse to strike heroic poses, but what actually ends up turning him away from solidarity is his realization that to become part of the group he must accept not only a largely humdrum life but also the possibility of a prosaic death. In other words, it is not coming down to earth with the common men that ultimately scares him but the understanding that he may have to come down under the earth (into a grave) with them. The story exhibits what had become the traits of Crane’s mature style. He writes with a terse, crisp, subdued prose that is occasionally shot through with startling or picturesque imagery, this imagery being the residue of his initial, more flowery style. Crane also exhibits a mastery of plotting. This is brought out by the careful joining of Peza’s emotional states to his gyrations around the battle camp as well as by the story’s final encounter, where Peza comes upon an abandoned child, who, too young to comprehend war, still has a clearer view of reality than the distraught journalist. This skill at plotting is not something that Crane possessed from the beginning, which brings up a last point. It might be said that there is a chronological distinction between Crane’s interests and his method of narration. Although his thematic concerns remained constant throughout his writing career, as he grew older his attention to how a community was created and sustained grew in weight. His ability to construct complex plots is one that he picked up during the course of his creative life. There are authors who advance little after their first books, but in Crane’s case, it can definitely be said that there was a promise for the future that his short life never redeemed. James Feast Other major works plays: The Blood of the Martyr, wr. 1898?, pb. 1940; The Ghost, pr. 1899 (with Henry James; fragment). novels: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 1893; The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, 1895; George’s Mother, 1896; The Third Violet, 1897; The Monster, 1898 (serial), 1899 (novella; pb. in The Monster, and Other Stories); Active Service, 1899; The O’Ruddy: A Romance, 1903 (with Robert Barr). nonfiction: The Great Battles of the World, 1901; The War Dispatches of Stephen Crane, 1964. poetry: The Black Riders and Other Lines, 1895; A Souvenir and a Medley, 1896; War Is Kind, 1899; The University Press of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, 1970 (volume 10). Bibliography Benfey, Christopher E. G. The Double Life of Stephen Crane. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Narrative of Crane’s life and literary work that argues that the writer attempted to live the life his works portrayed. Includes bibliography and index. Berryman, John. Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography. Cooper Square Press, 2001. Reissue of the first major biography of the author, first published in 1950. Still valuable for its detail and insight. Colvert, James B. Stephen Crane. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. This biography, aimed specifically at the nonspecialist, is highly readable and is en-

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hanced by numerous illustrations. Its bibliography is limited but well selected. The author’s research is impeccable. ____________. “Stephen Crane and Postmodern Theory.” American Literary Realism 28 (Fall, 1995): 4-22. A survey of postmodern approaches to Crane’s fiction. Summarizes the basic premises of postmodern interpretation, examining how these premises have been applied to such Crane stories as “The Open Boat,” “The Upturned Face,” and “Maggie”; balances such interpretive strategies against critics who affirm more traditional, humanistic approaches. Halliburton, David. The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Though somewhat thematically disorganized, the author’s philosophical grounding and ability to look at Crane’s works from unusual angles make for many provocative readings. In his discussion of “The Blue Hotel,” for example, he finds much more aggression directed against the Swede than may at first appear, coming not only from seemingly benign characters but also from the layout of the town. Notes, index. Knapp, Bettina L. Stephen Crane. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1987. Succinct introduction to Crane’s life and career, with a separate chapter on his biography, several chapters on his fiction, and an extensive discussion of two poetry collections, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is Kind. Includes a detailed chronology, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and an index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Crane: “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (vol. 1), “Death and the Child” and “An Episode of War” (vol. 2), “An Experiment in Misery” (vol. 3), “The Monster” and “The Open Boat” (vol. 5), and “The Upturned Face” (vol. 8). Metress, Christopher. “From Indifference to Anxiety: Knowledge and the Reader in ‘The Open Boat.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Winter, 1991): 47-53. Shows how the structure of “The Open Boat” (made up of four key moments) creates an epistemological dilemma for readers, moving them from a position of indifference to a state of epistemological anxiety. By suggesting that the survivors have become interpreters, Crane implies that one must get rid of indifference to the difficulty of gaining knowledge and embrace the inevitable anxiety of that failure. Robertson, Michael. Stephen Crane: Journalism and the Making of Modern American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Argues that Crane’s success inspired later journalists to think of their work as preparatory for writing fiction; claims the blurring of fact and fiction in newspapers during Crane’s life suited his own narrative experiments. Wertheim, Stanley. A Stephen Crane Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Very thorough volume of Crane information. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Wolford, Chester L., Jr. Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This overly brief but useful look at Crane’s short fiction provides Wolford’s sensitive readings as well as commentary on the major points that have been raised in critical discussions of the Crane pieces. In describing “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” for example, Wolford explains his view of how the story fits into the archetypical patterns of the passing of the West narratives, while also exploring why other critics have seen Crane’s story as a simple parody.

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Walter de la Mare Born: Charlton, Kent, England; April 25, 1873 Died: Twickenham, Middlesex, England; June 22, 1956 Principal short fiction • Story and Rhyme: A Selection, 1921; The Riddle, and Other Stories, 1923; Ding Dong Bell, 1924; Broomsticks, and Other Tales, 1925; Miss Jemima, 1925; Readings, 1925-1926 (2 volumes); The Connoisseur, and Other Tales, 1926; Old Joe, 1927; Told Again: Traditional Tales, 1927; On the Edge, 1930; Seven Short Stories, 1931; The Lord Fish, 1933; The Nap, and Other Stories, 1936; The Wind Blows Over, 1936; Animal Stories, 1939; The Picnic, 1941; The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare, 1942; The Old Lion, and Other Stories, 1942; The Magic Jacket, and Other Stories, 1943; The Scarecrow, and Other Stories, 1945; The Dutch Cheese, and Other Stories, 1946; Collected Stories for Children, 1947; A Beginning, and Other Stories, 1955; Ghost Stories, 1956; Short Stories, 1927-1956, 2001 (Giles de la Mare, editor). Other literary forms • In addition to his numerous volumes of short fiction, Walter de la Mare published poetry, novels, anthologies of various kinds, collections of essays, one play, and scores of essays, reviews, and articles published separately. In the United States, de la Mare is better known as a children’s writer than he is for the other genres in which he worked. Achievements • Walter de la Mare’s remarkable literary career spans more than five decades. The English novelist, poet, dramatist, short-story writer, critic, essayist, and anthropologist is best known today as a writer infused with a Romantic imagination. He has often been compared to William Blake and Thomas Hardy because of similarities in thematic development of mortality and visionary illumination. Often labeled as an escapist because of his retreat from reality, de la Mare touches on dreams, fantasy worlds, emotional states, and transcendent pursuits. Best known in the United States for his children’s literature, he has produced numerous volumes of prose and verse in the genre. All his work is suffused by a childlike quality of imagination. De la Mare’s writings have still not received the attention they deserve. He lived a quiet, uneventful life, always reluctant to impart information about himself. Throughout his life de la Mare wrote poetry. It is this work that represents his truest and most lasting literary achievement. In 1948, de la Mare received the Companion of Honour and in 1953, the Order of Merit. During the next three years he also received honorary degrees from five colleges, including Oxford and Cambridge. Biography • Walter de la Mare was born on April 25, 1873, in Charlton, Kent, the son of well-to-do parents, James Edward de la Mare and Lucy Sophia Browning de la Mare. In her book Walter de la Mare (1966), Doris Ross McCrosson said that de la Mare’s life “was singularly and refreshingly uneventful.” De la Mare was educated at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School in London, where he was the founder and editor of the school magazine, The Choristers’ Journal. In 1890, at the age of seventeen, de la Mare began working as a bookkeeper at the Anglo-American Oil Company in London, a position he held for almost twenty years. While working as a bookkeeper, de la Mare began

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Analysis • Walter de la Mare’s stories take the form both of wish fulfillment and nightmare projections. Believing that the everyday world of mundane experience is a veil hiding a “real” world, de la Mare used dream forms as a means of piercing the veil as well as a means of suggesting that between dream and reality looms, as de la Mare said, “no impassable Library of Congress abyss.” Because of their hallucinatory character, dreams merge with states of madness, travel to mysterious realms, childhood visions. The surfaces of de la Mare’s stories belie an underlying reality; rendering the texture of everyday experience with exquisite detail, he built his surfaces with such lucidity that a reader is often surprised to find a horror beneath that which is apparently placid or a joy beneath that which is apparently mundane. “The Riddle” • “The Riddle” starts like a fairy tale with such lightness and grace that one might expect a “happy ever after” ending. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that the quavering voice of the grandmother betokens something more than age, and the gifts she presents to her seven grandchildren become something more than sugar plums. Although it is never made explicit, one may assume that the grandchildren have come to live with their grandmother because of the death of their parents. The aged woman says to the children,“bring me smiling faces that call back to my mind my own son Harry.” The children are told they may come in the presence of their grandmother twice a day—in the morning and in the evening. The rest of the time they have the run of the house with the exception of the large spare bedroom where there stands in a corner an old oak chest, older than the aged woman’s own grandmother. The chest represents death. It is later revealed to be decorated as a coffin, and it attracts the children one by one. Harry is first. Opening the chest, he finds something strangely seductive that reminds him of his mother, so he climbs in and the lid miraculously closes. When the other children tell their grandmother of Harry’s dis-

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appearance, she responds, “Then he must be gone away for a time. . . . But remember, all of you, do not meddle with the oak chest.” Now it becomes apparent that the grandmother, herself so close to death that she seems more feeble every day, is also to be identified with the oak chest and that rather than a good fairy dispensing sugarplums she is a wicked witch seducing the children to their death. Ann is the last child to be called to the chest, and she walks as if in a dream and as if she were being guided by the hand. One paragraph more ends the story. With the children all gone, the grandmother enters the spare room, but her eyesight is too dim for her to see, and her mind is a tangled skein of memories which include memories of little children. “The Orgy” • “The Orgy: An Idyll” seems an entirely different kind of story. Rather than being set in a house with myriad rooms suggesting something of the gothic, “The Orgy” is set mainly in a large and elegant department store in London; rather than beginning with a “once upon a time” element, it opens on a bright May morning, crisp, brisk, scintillating. Details of the great packed street down which Philip walks leave readers no doubt that here is the world of their own experience. Before the action is ended, however, it becomes clear that the story is an extravaganza. Philip is engaged in a buying orgy, charging everything that strikes his fancy to the account of his uncle who has just disinherited him, and the orgy is a fanciful idyll of the wish fulfillment variety. Philip’s desire for revenge projected into bright, hallucinatory images is carried into action in exactly the way the uncle will understand—to the tune of “a couple of hundred thousand pounds,” a considerable amount of money in 1931, the year the story was published. “In the Forest” • “In the Forest” is a brilliant exercise in point of view restricted to the mind of a small boy in such a way that the childlike behavior and lack of perception characteristic of the very young take on the aura of nightmare. At no time does de la Mare vary the focus; no words are used that a child could not know; no insight is offered that a child could not understand. Although the child occasionally feels a twinge of guilt because he has not obeyed his mother, he is completely impervious to the horror of the action going on around him. The story opens when the boy’s father is leaving to go to war. The boy is half asleep and is moving in and out of consciousness. It is the advent of the fall of the year, and a storm has brought down leaves that are still green from the trees. Although the leaves are still green, it is getting cold. The boy asks his father to bring him a gun back from the war and notices without comment that his father, instead of leaving immediately, keeps coming back to say good-bye. Unaware of the anguish being suffered by his father and mother, the boy asks his mother if she is glad his father is going to the war. The mother does not answer, but the boy’s simple statement makes the point. “But she was crying over the baby, so I went out into the forest till dinner.” Later the boy chops wood, an activity that causes him to be hot and excited, and then he brings the logs into the house. The wind is roaring as if it is angry, more leaves are falling, and the weather is cold and misty. The boy finds his mother asleep with the baby in her arms, and the baby, too, is asleep, although, as the boy notices, the baby scarcely seems to be breathing. The boy falls asleep by the warm hearth and stays there all night. In the morning he rushes out, glad that his father is gone, because now he can do just as he pleases. Visiting the snares, he finds a young rabbit caught by one leg and, imitating his father, kills the hare with a crack on the neck and

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carries it to the house by the hind legs. Later he wonders how “they would carry back” his father’s body “if he was killed in the war.” Because the baby is crying, the boy chooses to spend his days in the forest until one day when he tells his mother he is going to “bring her some fish for dinner!” The dialogue that follows is the first that occurs in the story. The mother tells the boy that the baby is very ill and tries to get him to touch and hold his baby brother, asking: “Do you love it?” The boy shakes his head and persists: “I think I should like to go fishing mother . . . and I promise you shall have the biggest I catch.” Then, denying the mother’s plea that he go for the doctor, the boy runs out saying, “It’s only crying.” The boy catches no fish and believes the fish would not bite because he has been wicked, so he goes home, and now for the first time he hears cannons on the other side of the forest. When he gets home, he finds his mother angry, calling him a coward, and the baby dead. The next day he consents to his mother’s request that he go for the sexton, but as he is on his way he hears a rifle sound and “a scream like a rabbit,” and he is frightened and runs home. Since his mother has already called him a coward, however, he lies to her, telling her the sexton was gone. Now the mother decides she must take the dead baby to the graveyard herself, and once again she addresses her son: “Won’t you kiss your little brother, Robbie?” Alone, the boy eats more than he should and builds the fire up so high that its noise drowns out any outside noises. Alone, he believes he is in a dream “that would never come to an end.” He does not cry, but he feels angry at being left alone, and he is afraid. He also feels guilty about the amount of food he has consumed. He fears his mother’s return and yet longs for her, feeling that he loves her and is sorry for his wickedness. The next thing he knows, it is broad daylight. His mother has still not returned, but he hears a groan at the doorway. It is his father with a “small hole” at the back of his shoulder; dark, thick blood covers the withered leaves on which he lies. The boy tries to give his father water and tells him about the baby, “but he didn’t show that he could hear anything.” Then the boy hears his mother coming back and runs out to tell her “that it was father.” The story ends as abruptly as it begins, but the point of view so neatly restricted and the image patterns masterfully arranged create the tenor and vehicle of an Everyman’s Freudian nightmare. The subtly stated but powerfully conveyed theme delineates an Oedipal pattern that raises the story from an isolated and factual experience to an overwhelming and communal dream having mythic proportions. “An Ideal Craftsman” • “An Ideal Craftsman” is just as powerful. Although the story makes use of a young boy as protagonist, point of view is different from that found in “In the Forest.” This time de la Mare allows an omniscient narrator to move in and out of the consciousness of the two major characters. Once again, however, a horror is present, foreshadowed from the beginning of the story; once again the aura of dream is cast over the entire story; and once again death, this time murder, is the focal point of the story. For a short-story writer of such consummate skill, de la Mare has attracted almost no critical attention, and what books have been written about him concentrate more on his other writings than on his pieces of short fiction. This lack of attention is a great pity. In her book Walter de la Mare, McCrosson devotes only one chapter of some twenty pages to de la Mare’s short-story craft, but her summary of his achievement is accurate:

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His preoccupation with good and evil puts him on a level with [Nathaniel] Hawthorne and [Joseph] Conrad; his mastery of suspense and terror is equal to [Edger Allen] Poe’s; the subtlety of his characterizations occasionally rivals [Henry] James’s. And the range of his portrayals is impressive: children, old maids, the demented, old idealists and young pessimists, artists, business men, dandys, young women in love—all of whom share in the mysterious and sometimes maddening business called living. Mary Rohrberger With updates by Terry Theodore Other major works play: Crossings: A Fairy Play, pr. 1919. anthologies: Come Hither, 1923; The Shakespeare Songs, 1929; Christina Rossetti’s Poems, 1930; Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe, 1930; Stories from the Bible, 1930; Early One Morning in the Spring, 1935; Animal Stories, 1939; Behold, This Dreamer!, 1939; Love, 1943. novels: Henry Brocken, 1904; The Return, 1910; The Three Mulla-Mulgars, 1910 (reprinted as The Three Royal Monkeys: Or, The Three Mulla-Mulgars, 1935); Memoirs of a Midget, 1921; At First Sight: A Novel, 1928. nonfiction: Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, 1919; The Printing of Poetry, 1931; Lewis Carroll, 1932; Poetry in Prose, 1936; Pleasures and Speculations, 1940; Chardin, J.B.S. 1699-1779, 1948; Private View, 1953. poetry: Songs of Childhood, 1902; Poems, 1906; A Child’s Day: A Book of Rhymes, 1912; The Listeners, and Other Poems, 1912; Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, 1913; The Sunken Garden, and Other Poems, 1917; Motley, and Other Poems, 1918; Flora: A Book of Drawings, 1919; Poems 1901 to 1918, 1920; Story and Rhyme, 1921; The Veil, and Other Poems, 1921; Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems, 1922; Thus Her Tale, 1923; A Ballad of Christmas, 1924; Stuff and Nonsense and So On, 1927; Self to Self, 1928; The Snowdrop, 1929; News, 1930; Poems for Children, 1930; Lucy, 1931; Old Rhymes and New, 1932; The Fleeting, and Other Poems, 1933; Poems, 1919 to 1934, 1935; This Year, Next Year, 1937; Memory, and Other Poems, 1938; Haunted, 1939; Bells and Grass, 1941; Collected Poems, 1941; Collected Rhymes and Verses, 1944; The Burning-Glass, and Other Poems, 1945; The Traveller, 1946; Rhymes and Verses: Collected Poems for Young People, 1947; Inward Companion, 1950; Winged Chariot, 1951; O Lovely England, and Other Poems, 1953; The Complete Poems, 1969. Bibliography Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Argues that, as a short-story writer, de la Mare closely resembles Henry James in his supernatural stories, for his stories are rooted in mundane reality. Beetz, Kirk H. “Walter de la Mare.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 2. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of de la Mare’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction. Benntinck, Anne. Romantic Imagery in the Works of Walter de la Mare. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Devotes one chapter apiece to each of seven major Romantic themes or leitmotifs in de la Mare’s poetry. Includes bibliography, index of works, general index. Manwaring, Randle. “Memories of Walter de la Mare.” Contemporary Review 264 (March, 1994): 148-152. A reminiscence of a longtime acquaintance of de la Mare

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that comments on his style and his influence. Reflects de la Mare’s childish delight in simple things that is so often reflected in his stories. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by de la Mare: “A Recluse,” “A Revenant,” and “Seaton’s Aunt” (vol. 6); and “The Trumpet” (vol. 7). Perkins, David. “Craftsmen of the Beautiful and the Agreeable.” In A History of Modern Poetry. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Perkins emphasizes de la Mare’s complicated relationship to the Romantics. Like them, he often wrote about the world as a dream. He was aware of the conventional nature of Romantic poetry, and often the poems are about conventions. Unlike certain Romantics, he does not portray evil as sublime. He is a master at interrogative conversation and anticipates the modernist stress on the accents of daily speech. Sisson, C. H. English Poetry, 1900-1950. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1981. Sisson mentions that de la Mare was the last of the Romantics. His poetry combines Romantic themes with the more personal themes of twentieth century verse. It is characterized by purity of language and hushed, intimate accents, and it succeeds in capturing the intimate rhythms of speech. De la Mare was at his best in a limited range of subjects. His finest work pictures life on the edge of a dream. Wagenknecht, Edward. Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. See the chapter on Walter de la Mare, which includes a brief biographical sketch and discusses his fiction in the context of the English literary tradition. Wagenknecht deals with both the short and the long fiction, providing a succinct overview of de la Mare’s body of work in prose. Whistler, Theresa. Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare. London: Duckworth, 1993. Good biography of de la Mare. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

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Isak Dinesen Born: Rungsted, Denmark; April 17, 1885 Died: Rungsted, Denmark; September 7, 1962 Principal short fiction • Seven Gothic Tales, 1934; Vinter-Eventyr, 1942 (Winter’s Tales, 1942); Sidste Fortœllinger, 1957 (Last Tales, 1957); Skœbne-Anekdoter, 1958 (Anecdotes of Destiny, 1958); Ehrengard, 1963; Efterladte Fortœllinger, 1975 (Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales, 1977). Other literary forms • In addition to her numerous tales and stories, Isak Dinesen wrote many letters and essays. She is particularly well known, however, for her narrative Den afrikanske Farm (1937; Out of Africa, 1937), which tells of her years in Kenya (a sequel was published in 1960). After her death, two volumes of letters, written while in Africa, were published, as were her essays. Achievements • Isak Dinesen has a special position in modern literature in that she is a major author in two languages. Although a native of Denmark, she wrote in both English and Danish, creating her tales as original works in both tongues. Popular with the critics as well as the general public, she was appointed an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1957 and was repeatedly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her initial success came in the English-speaking world. With time, however, she became successful also at home, where her magnetic personality and storytelling gifts gradually captivated the public. Aided by the medium of radio, she became a veritable cultural institution in Denmark. Since her death, her critical reputation has steadily grown both at home and abroad, and she has come to be considered a modern master of short fiction. Biography • Isak Dinesen’s life may be divided into three parts, namely her childhood and youth, her time in Africa, and her years as a recognized writer. Her parents came from very different social backgrounds. From her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, a landed proprietor, she inherited a love of adventure, nature, and storytelling. Her mother, in contrast, came from a bourgeois family of merchants and attempted to foster a sense of duty, obligation, and guilt in her three daughters. Karen Christenze (Isak is a pseudonym that she assumed at the beginning of her writing career) was her father’s favorite daughter and thereby was able to avoid some of her mother’s puritanical manacles. At the age of ten, however, her father’s suicide turned her youth into a period of mostly joyless desperation. Early she began writing stories and short plays, for which she had been prepared by an unsystematic private education. She also studied art and traveled abroad with her mother, sisters, and aunt. The second period in Dinesen’s life began in 1914, when she married her first cousin, the Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and with him settled down to manage a coffee plantation outside Nairobi, in British East Africa. Her husband infected her with syphilis and proved himself a poor manager of the plantation; the couple was separated in 1921 and divorced four years later. Living in Kenya as the manager of a different, and larger, coffee farm, Dinesen cultivated a friendship with Denys Finch

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Hatton, whom she had met in 1918. A confirmed bachelor, Finch Hatton had no desire to marry Dinesen, which grieved her. Dinesen’s African life came to an end in 1931, when the coffee farm had to be sold and Finch Hatton died in the crash of his private plane. Dinesen returned to Denmark in a state of abject poverty. Supported by her family and inspired by the success of a few stories, which years earlier had been published under the pen name Osceola, she set out to create a new life for herself as a writer. Other stories, written during her African sojourn, existed in draft form, and some of these gradually became perfected and included in Seven Gothic Tales, the Englishlanguage edition of which became both a critical and a popular success. Her autobiographical narrative Out of Africa established her as a major presence on the literary scene both in Denmark and in the English-language world, and subsequent books were also enthusiastically received. An indication of Dinesen’s popularity in the United States is the fact that five of her titles were chosen as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Living at her birthplace, Rungsted, north of Copenhagen, Denmark, she gathered her admirers around her and tended her literary reputation. During most of her adult life, Dinesen was plagued by illness, which was exacerbated by much strenuous travel abroad and the entertainment of numerous guests at home. After a particularly taxing summer, she died at her home on September 7, 1962. Analysis • Isak Dinesen reacted against the psychological and social realism of contemporary Danish literature and looked back to the Romantic storytellers for inspiration. Like them, she preferred the longer, drawn-out tale to the short story proper, and authorial narration, often with overtly present narrators, is a hallmark of her narratives. Her chosen form therefore often struck her contemporaries as old-fashioned. This was also the case with her thematic concerns, for her stories take place mostly in the century between 1770 and 1870 and express the ethos of a bygone age. She speaks in favor of such aristocratic values as duty, honor, and justice, but she also rejects the Christian dualistic worldview and questions the role of religion and the place of women in contemporary bourgeois society. Above all, however, the role of art in human life constitutes a central theme of her authorship. Through art, a unified vision is possible, and such a monistic perception of reality is, for Dinesen, a primary source of meaning in general and of comfort in difficult times. “The Monkey” • “Aben” (“The Monkey”), a long story from Seven Gothic Tales, is a good example of Dinesen’s “gothic” or fantastic narratives that also exhibits many of her thematic concerns. Its setting is a noble milieu in northern Germany in the 1830’s; its theme is the nature of love. Boris, a young lieutenant in the Prussian Royal Guards, has become involved in a homosexual scandal in the capital and is seeking the aid of his maiden aunt, Cathinka, the Prioress of Cloister Seven, a convent for spinsters of noble blood. In order to escape dishonor and almost certain death, Boris has resolved to marry, thus hoping to lay to rest the rumors of his homosexual involvement with other members of his regiment. His aunt, who is well acquainted with the various noble families of the land, is being asked to select a suitable mate for him. The fantastic element of the story is found in the relationship between the Prioress and her little gray monkey, to which she has a mysterious bond and with which she, from time to time and in accordance with traditional Scandinavian folk belief in shape-shifting, exchanges her identity. The monkey is connected with the idea of

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love through the love goddess of an ancient Baltic people, the Wends. The goddess looks like a beautiful woman from the front and like a monkey from the back. Through this image, Dinesen argues against the Judeo-Christian distinction between the heteroerotic, which is acceptable to society, and the homoerotic, which is not. Speaking in favor of a monistic outlook on human sexuality, Dinesen, through the similarity between the Wendish love-goddess and the Janus face, problematizes the distinction between normal and abnormal sexuality. The text actually foregrounds the question of how it can be determined which side is the front and which is the back of the goddess, and the implied answer is that no such determination can be made Library of Congress on objective grounds. There is, nevertheless, a recognition on Dinesen’s part that people have to live up to the expectations of their society if they are to get along in life. Boris has certain duties to his family, and, despite his sexual difference from the norm, he is obligated to repress his desires and to force himself to marry. The Prioress, who at this time and in a mysterious way is possessed by aspects of her monkey’s personality, chooses as his bride the only daughter of a neighbor, a tall and strong young woman named Athena, whom Boris has known since childhood. Her father welcomes Boris as a suitor and says that he would delight in seeing the young man’s features in the faces of his grandchildren. Athena rejects him, however, and states unequivocally that she will never marry; she will not, in other words, yield to her duty to her family. There is a strong implication in the text that Athena is as troubled by her gender role as Boris is by his. Athena’s rejection infuriates the Prioress, who arranges a supper of seduction during which Athena gets drunk. As the girl goes to her room, the Prioress gives Boris an aphrodisiac to help him complete his conquest, and he struggles with Athena, who knocks out two of his teeth. Boris interprets this as a symbolic castration and feels that he has been freed from his obligation to have a normal conjugal relationship with her, should they get married. She has won his battle with traditional sexuality for him, and he therefore triumphantly kisses her with his bloody mouth. The significance of this perverted and ironic image of defloration is not lost on Athena, who, in horror and disgust, loses consciousness. Boris does not touch her further. The next morning, Athena is told by the Prioress that she is now most likely pregnant and that her only hope of avoiding dishonor is to marry Boris. Together, they then watch as the Prioress, who all along has been in the grip of the personality of the monkey, reasserts her own true self through an intense struggle with the little ani-

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mal. This astonishing event affects Athena deeply, and she resigns herself to marrying Boris, with the proviso, however, that she is to have dominion in their relationship. Athena’s and Boris’s union is thus marked by the backside of the love goddess in several ways. Erotically, they are misfits in that they both look on heterosexuality with revulsion. Psychologically and emotionally, their union is a result of a power struggle, touched by the fantastic, rather than a consequence of the usual process of falling in love. Morally, their marriage represents a surrender to the expectations of their families, but it is unlikely that they will do their real duty and have children. Socially, their marriage will also be out of the ordinary, because, in opposition to the patriarchal norm of their time and place, the wife will rule the roost with the consent of her husband. Dinesen thus problematizes one of the fundamental oppositions of human life, namely that between male and female, and offers a critique of both sex roles and Christian dualism. “The Young Man with the Carnation” • Although the stories in Seven Gothic Tales touch on the fantastic and frequently present challenges to the readers those of Winter’s Tales are more traditional, and therefore also more accessible, narratives. Written during the German occupation of Denmark, they are tales for difficult times, in which the possibility of reconciliation and restoration is held dear. “Den unge mand med nelliken” (“The Young Man with the Carnation”), which introduces the English-language edition of the collection, is a powerful expression of Dinesen’s theory of art. Its protagonist, Charlie Despard, is a young English writer who, while born and reared in circumstances of great poverty, has transmuted the pain of his childhood experiences into his first novel, with which he has had tremendous success. Because of his newfound reputation as a writer, he has been able to marry a beautiful young woman from a family of means, and outwardly he has every reason to be happy, which indeed, for a time, he has been. As Dinesen indicates through his name, however, he is now in despair, for he has found that art has failed him. He has nothing more to say as a writer, while at the same time he feels that life holds no joys for him. His is not simply a bad case of writer’s block, though, but a case of someone who, because of his erstwhile happiness, has lost his ability to create. The story tells about how Charlie comes to terms with his situation and regains his creativity. While traveling on the Continent, Charlie and his wife have been separated for a few days but have planned to meet at a hotel in Amsterdam. Charlie arrives last and goes to his wife’s room, where he finds her asleep with her door unlocked. Shortly after his arrival, someone else tries to open the door, and, when Charlie gets out of bed to investigate, he finds a young man who, wearing a carnation, is obviously on his way to a rendezvous. Charlie’s first reaction is envy, for he believes the young man to have found the happiness which he, himself, is lacking. He then experiences a shock at his wife’s infidelity, feels sorry for himself, writes her a brief note, and leaves in search of that happiness which he sensed in the face of the young man with the carnation. During the next few hours, his mind is in turmoil, and he walks along the waterfront, contemplating his situation. He is then found by some sailors who believe him to be thinking of suicide and who therefore invite him to come with them to a tavern. The men spend the night telling one another stories, and Charlie’s tales indicate that he now suffers from no loss of creativity; the experience of the night has given him the pain which is needed by the artist. His regained creativity gives him the strength to face his wife, and he returns to the hotel only to find that he, the previous night,

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had entered the wrong room. Dinesen’s imagery shows that Charlie the fiction writer interprets his experience as a kind of resurrection, which is followed by a dialogue with God. Charlie is told by God that he had been created in order to write and that it is God who wants him to tell his stories and who therefore gave him the pain of the previous evening. He is promised, however, that God will not measure out any more distress to him than what is needed for his art. Charlie accepts the idea that pain is a necessary condition of creativity and realizes that it is the young man with the carnation who is to be pitied, rather than himself. Dinesen’s theory of art is thus basically a romantic one, in which the joys of life are viewed as inferior to art and therefore fundamentally incompatible with creative endeavor. The artist is required to sacrifice normal human happiness for the privilege of being able to commune with the divine, which is the essence of artistic creation. “Sorrow-Acre” • Another significant aspect of “The Young Man with the Carnation” is the concept of duty, which manifests itself as Charlie’s obligation to God to be a writer of stories. In “Sorg-agre” (“Sorrow-Acre”), the next story in Winter’s Tales, duty is a central motif that contributes much to the story’s theme. “Sorrow-Acre” tells about a young Dane named Adam who has spent several years in England, but who, at the beginning of the story, has just returned home to his ancestral estate only to find himself in conflict with his uncle, the ruler of the manor. Adam represents the beginnings of a new social order and serves as the embodiment of the ideas of the French Revolution (1789), while his uncle advocates a traditional, aristocratic view of life. The three intertwined plots of the story are played out against the backdrop of life on this semifeudal Danish country estate in the late eighteenth century. The first plot concerns the uncle’s dealings with Anne-Marie, the mother of a young man who has been accused of a crime. There is little proof in the case, and the uncle admits that he has no basis for making a judgment about the man’s guilt or innocence. When Anne-Marie begs for the freedom of her son, however, he offers her a bargain: If she can cut a certain rye field in the course of one day, her son will receive his freedom. The outward drama of the story concerns Anne-Marie’s superhuman attempt at harvesting the field, which is normally three days’ work for a man. She succeeds but at the end dies from exhaustion. The second plot line concerns the relationship between Adam and his uncle. Adam finds his uncle’s action barbarous and threatens to leave because of his sense of outrage. The uncle defends himself by referring to the divine principle of arbitrary power, saying that because he is essentially like a god in his relationship to his serflike farm workers, his actions should not be questioned. Although the drama in the rye field may seem like a tragedy to most mortals, the unresolved question of the young man’s innocence or guilt adds a divinely comic flavor to Anne-Marie’s attempt to buy his freedom. A nobleman may approach the divine by accepting and appreciating the comic aspects of human life. The uncle would himself, he says, like nothing better than to be in a position where he might be able to buy himself a son at the cost of his own life, thus ensuring the succession of the family line. He has lost his only son and has recently, in his rather advanced age, married the young lady who was intended to be his son’s bride. The third strand of the plot involves the relationship between Adam and his uncle’s young wife. It is very much against Adam’s interests that his uncle should receive an heir, for if the uncle were to die childless, Adam would inherit the estate. It has been prophesied by a gypsy, however, that Adam’s posterity is to possess the estate,

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and it is becoming clear to Adam that he has a duty to the family to give his uncle a legal heir. The young wife’s attitude toward Adam would clearly facilitate such an unspoken arrangement. All the main characters in this tale thus exemplify the principle of duty, particularly as it concerns the continuation of a family line. Adam recognizes that he has been brought back to Denmark by fate and that he must play his part in the drama of his family. He is reconciled to his uncle, who begs him to stay; the uncle surely knows that Adam is essential to the success of his project. The uncle’s young wife knows that she has been brought into the family expressly for the purpose of providing an heir. Anne-Marie, whose death is a powerful reminder of a person’s duty to his or her descendants, sets a powerful example of commitment to one’s family. “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale” • Dinesen sees a connection between duty and the concept of justice, for it is a paramount duty of human beings to strive to be just. Her idea of justice is clearly expressed in “Skibsdrængens fortælling” (“The Sailor-Boy’s Tale”), a rather simple story that is also found in Winter’s Tales. Like “The Monkey,” “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale” presupposes that the reader is familiar with folk beliefs related to shape-shifting, the idea that a human being may temporarily take on the form of an animal. The story tells about a young sailor boy named Simon, who, during a storm in the Mediterranean, climbs the mainmast of his ship to free a peregrine falcon that has become caught in the rigging. Before Simon sets it free, the falcon pecks his thumb sufficiently hard to draw blood, and Simon retaliates by hitting it on the head. This incident proves to be significant to Dinesen’s portrait of justice and its operation. Two years later, Simon’s ship has come to the herring markets in the town of Bodø in northern Norway, where Simon meets and falls in love with a young girl named Nora. One evening, when he is on his way to a meeting with the girl, he runs into an overly friendly Russian sailor, whose behavior has homosexual overtones. Simon, who does not want to be late for his meeting with the girl, stabs and kills the Russian, after which he is pursued by the dead man’s shipmates. While he is hiding in the crowd at a dance, an old pagan Lapp woman named Sunniva shows up, says that Simon is her son, and tells him to come home with her. Sunniva wipes off his bloody knife on her skirt and, while hiding Simon when the Russian sailors come looking for him, cuts her thumb to explain the presence of blood. She then arranges for safe passage for him back to his ship, at which point she reveals that she is the falcon that Simon released during the storm in the Mediterranean. She has rescued him both because she likes him and because of her sense of justice, for he deserves to be paid back for helping her. To completely settle her accounts with him, she then boxes his ear in return for his blow to her head while she was in the shape of the falcon. Sunniva also explains to Simon that she admires his devotion to the girl Nora and that the female residents of the earth hold together. Referring to men as their sons, she indicates that the world is really run by women, who are bound together with a matriarchal compact. Sunniva’s pagan matriarchy gestures at Dinesen’s questioning of both traditional sex roles and the Christian religion. “The Heroine” • Dinesen’s rather gentle critique of Christianity in “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale” becomes relentlessly satirical in “Heloise” (“The Heroine”), in which she casts a woman stripper in the role of the Christian savior. A young Englishman named Frederick Lamond, together with a company of French travelers, is caught in a Ger-

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man border town at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. A student of religious philosophy, Frederick is at the time writing a treatise on the doctrine of the Atonement. When the German army marches into town, he and the other stranded travelers are accused of espionage. A famous messianic prophecy from the Book of Isaiah, which is quoted in Frederick’s manuscript, is read as a code by the Germans and forms the main proof of their accusation. One of the travelers is a woman named Heloise, whose rare beauty greatly impresses one of the German officers. Realizing that the accusation of espionage may not have much merit, he offers the travelers a bargain: If Heloise will appear before him in the nude, they will be permitted to continue to France; otherwise, they will be shot. Heloise turns to the company and leaves the decision in their hands, and they all vote to refuse the German’s demand. The officer, who respects the courage of both Heloise and her companions, then decides to let them go after all, and he apologizes to Heloise, whom he terms a heroine, by sending her a big bouquet of roses. Six years later, Frederick is in Paris to attend some lectures in his field. Entertained by a friend, he is taken to a music hall, where the most beautiful woman in Paris is appearing nude in a show. It turns out that the woman is Heloise, whom Frederick still remembers well. They meet and reminisce after the show, and Heloise explains what in her opinion was at stake in the dramatic incident six years earlier. It was not only the lives of the travelers, she says, which hung in the balance but also their ability to live with their consciences. It would have cost her very little to comply with the German’s demand; for her, it would have been a professional matter, not one of conscience. The other travelers, however, would have never gotten over it if Heloise were to have bought their freedom at the cost of exposing her body. Frederick now understands that her heroism did not consist in standing up to the German officer’s demands but in looking after the welfare of her companions’ souls. Heloise, who through the imagery in the story has been carefully presented as a kind of Christ-figure, now appears, to both Frederick and the reader, as a full-blown savior. Portraying a stripper as someone who saves people from guilt constitutes a truly ironic comment on traditional Christian religion. Casting a woman in such a position undercuts the traditional conception of women’s roles as well. “The Heroine,” through its overt questioning of central religious and social norms, therefore becomes one of Dinesen’s most radical stories. “Babette’s Feast” • Heloise’s parting comment to Frederick is that she wishes that he might have seen her perform six years earlier, when her beauty was at its fullest. Heloise has the temperament of an artist in that art, in her case the beauty of her body, gives meaning to her life. A similar commitment is held by the title character in “Babettes gæstebud” (“Babette’s Feast”) from Anecdotes of Destiny, who, like Heloise, is French. Babette is a famous Parisian chef who had to flee her country at the time of the Paris Commune. She finds her way to a small Norwegian fishing village, where she, for the next fourteen years, lives as a maid in the home of two spinsters. These two sisters are the daughters of a minister who founded a pietistic religious society and who, because of his asceticism, rejected his daughters’ suitors. Years after his death, his daughters live solely for their father’s memory and religious ideals. Babette regularly plays the French lottery and chances to win ten thousand francs, which she wishes to spend on a French dinner at the centenary of the minister’s birth. The various foreign dishes are disconcerting to the guests, who are all members of the minister’s sect; only one of them, the former suitor of one of the daugh-

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ters, is able to appreciate Babette’s culinary artistry. When, at the end of the dinner, the two sisters learn that the utterly exhausted Babette has spent all her money on the project, they cannot understand her motivation, but Babette states that she has done it for her own sake: She is an artist who craves excellence in her field of endeavor. Like Babette, Dinesen placed high demands on herself. She felt a strong sense of duty and loyalty to the artist within her, thus her tales are exquisitely crafted but not numerous. She relentlessly pursued her unitary vision, subtly criticizing those aspects of life that went against the grain of her thought, such as the dualism of received religion and traditional sex roles. Through her authorship she prepared a literary feast that continues to be enjoyed by numerous readers. Jan Sjåvik Other major works novels: Gengœldelsens Veje, 1944 (as Pierre Andrézel; The Angelic Avengers, 1946). nonfiction: Den afrikanske Farm, 1937 (Out of Africa, 1937); Skygger paa Grœsset, 1960 (Shadows on the Grass, 1960); Essays, 1965; Breve fra Afrika, 1914-1931, 1978 (Letters from Africa, 1914-1931, 1981); Daguerreotypes, and Other Essays, 1979; Samlede Essays, 1985. Bibliography Aiken, Susan Hardy. Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Offers thoughtful critical interpretation of Dinesen’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Bassoff, Bruce. “Babette Can Cook: Life and Art in Three Stories by Isak Dinesen.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Summer, 1990): 385-389. Discusses the plot elements of desire for transcendence, a fall caused by confrontation with the real world, and new knowledge or resignation in “The Ring,” “The Diver,” and “Babette’s Feast.” Bjørnvig, Thorkild. The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen. Translated by Ingvar Schousboe and William Jay Smith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. This short book offers Bjørnvig’s account of his friendship with Dinesen, from their first meeting in 1948 to their definitive parting in 1954. Written by an accomplished poet, the volume is interesting in its own right as well as for the insight into Dinesen which it provides. Donelson, Linda. Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: The Untold Story. Iowa City, Iowa: Coulsong List, 1995. Good, updated biography of Dinesen. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Henriksen, Aage. “The Empty Space Between Art and Church.” In Out of Denmark, edited by Bodil Warmberg. Copenhagen: Danish Cultural Institute, 1985. Henriksen asserts that the underlying principle of all Dinesen’s tales is the discovery that reality is transformed into a dream. Contends that Dinesen’s stories are based on the complicated nature of human love. Juhl, Marianne, and Bo Hakon Jørgensen. Diana’s Revenge: Two Lines in Isak Dinesen’s Authorship. Translated from the Danish by Anne Born. Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1985. This volume contains two sophisticated scholarly and critical essays of considerable length. Juhl’s contribution, “Sex and Consciousness,” is informed by feminist theory. Jørgensen, in “The Ways of Art,” discusses the relationship between Dinesen’s sensuality and her art. Their book, which includes a

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good bibliography, is particularly strong in its discussion of Dinesen’s use of classical symbols. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Dinesen: “Babette’s Feast,” “The Blank Page,” and “The Cardinal’s First Tale” (vol. 1); “The Deluge at Norderney” (vol. 2); “The Monkey” (vol. 5); “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale” (vol. 6); and “Sorrow-Acre” and “The Supper at Elsinore” (vol. 7). Mullins, Maire. “Home, Community, and the Gift That Gives in Isak Dinesen’s ‘Babette’s Feast.’” Women’s Studies 23 (1994): 217-228. Argues that the meal Babette prepares is not a gift but a demonstration of her own aesthetic powers. Argues that Babette subverts the phallo-logocentric society in which she finds herself and transforms home and community through her presence. Rashkin, Esther. “A Recipe for Mourning: Isak Dinesen’s ‘Babette’s Feast.’” Style 29 (Fall, 1995): 356-374. Claims the story is a psychoanalytic reflection on the process involved in overcoming an inability to mourn, for which it writes a recipe for transcendence of that inability through the preparation and consumption of food. Stambaugh, Sara. The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988. Stambaugh offers a feministinspired examination of the portraits of women that are found in Dinesen’s texts. The strength of her brief study is the recognition of the centrality of gender for an understanding of Dinesen’s work; its weakness is its lack of theoretical sophistication. The book has a complete scholarly apparatus.

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Fyodor Dostoevski Born: Moscow, Russia; November 11, 1821 Died: St. Petersburg, Russia; February 9, 1881 Principal short fiction • Sochineniya, 1860 (2 volumes); Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 1865-1870 (4 volumes); Povesti i rasskazy, 1882; The Gambler, and Other Stories, 1914; A Christmas Tree and a Wedding, and an Honest Thief, 1917; White Nights, and Other Stories, 1918; An Honest Thief, and Other Stories, 1919; The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, 1945. Other literary forms • In addition to short fiction, Fyodor Dostoevski wrote novels, nonfiction, criticism, and Yevgeniya Grande (1844), a translation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet (1833). In his own time, Dostoevski was exceptionally influential, especially through Dnevnik pisatelya (1876-1877, 1800-1881; The Diary of a Writer, 1949), a series of miscellaneous writings that he published occasionally in St. Petersburg. Dostoevski also wrote a series of essays on Russian literature, some feuilletons, and the well-known travelogue “Zimniye zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh” (1863; “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” 1955). His most famous contribution in his own time was his speech in Alexander Pushkin’s honor, given on the occasion of the dedication of a monument to Pushkin in 1880. Achievements • In the world literature of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoevski has few rivals. Some of his characters have penetrated literary consciousness and produced a new generation in the works of prominent twentieth century authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jorge Luis Borges. He initiated psychological realism, inspiring both Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. His novels are read in translation in twenty-six languages. Dostoevski was originally suppressed in the Soviet Union, only to reemerge as even more influential in the second half of the twentieth century, finding a whole new generation of admirers in his transformed homeland. Even though his style is markedly nineteenth century, Dostoevski still seems quite modern even in the twenty-first century. Biography • Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on November 11, 1821, in a small Moscow public hospital, where his father, Dr. Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevski, worked. He was the second son to the doctor and Marya Fyodorovna (née Nechaeva). One year after his mother’s death, in 1837, Fyodor enrolled in the St. Petersburg Academy for Military Engineers. He completed his studies at the academy even after his father had died of a stroke in 1839, thanks to the inheritance of the Dostoevski estate. Like so many writers’ attempts, Dostoevski’s first foray into the literary world was through translation—in his case, of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, appearing in print in 1844. His first original work was a novel in letters, Bednye lyudi (1846; Poor Folk, 1887), which met with immediate success, creating quite a literary sensation even before its publication. The great critic Vissarion Belinsky hailed it with such enthusiasm that the novice writer was propelled into early fame. Dostoevski followed this initial success with Dvoynik (1846; The Double, 1917). It

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was met more coolly, was considered an artistic failure, and was generally unpopular. The failure of The Double, as seen in the twenty-first century, is quite ironic, since it contains many of the thematic occupations that eventually made Dostoevski famous. His next novel, Netochka Nezvanova (1849; English translation, 1920), was fated never to be completed. Most novels then appeared in journals and were serialized; this was the case with all Dostoevski’s novels. After the first three installments of Netochka Nezvanova appeared in 1849, Dostoevski was arrested for participating in a secret anticzarist society, the Petrashevsky Circle. He and thirty-two of his associates were arrested, imprisoned for eight months, and sentenced to death. At precisely the moment that his comrades were facing the firing squad, the sentence was commuted to hard labor. Dostoevski spent four years in hard labor at Omsk, followed by three years of exile from the capital. Dostoevski married Marya Isaeva in 1857, while still in Siberia. He was beginning to suffer from epilepsy, however, and she was also sickly. They returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, and shortly thereafter his works began again to appear in print. Life, however, did not return to normal. In 1864, his brother died, leaving him a second family to support. His wife, too, died the same year. Strapped financially, Dostoevski accepted an advance payment, agreeing to deliver a novel to a publisher that same year—or else forfeit the profits from all his subsequent works. He succeeded in completing Igrok (1866; The Gambler, 1887), satisfying this publisher thanks to his stenographer, Anna Snitkina, whom he married in 1867. They left Russia for a few years, returning in 1871. The novels that he wrote while abroad established him as an important writer but not as a popular or successful one. In fact, during his life, he met with very little recognition. The one shining exception to this neglect came at the dedication of a monument to Pushkin, in 1880. Thousands of people greeted his speech enthusiastically. He died only a few months later, in 1881, when an even larger crowd attended his funeral. Analysis • Fyodor Dostoevski’s works fall into two periods that coincide with the time before his imprisonment and following it. The seven-year hiatus in his creative output between 1849 and 1857 corresponds to the four years that he spent in prison and the three subsequent years during which he was banished in Siberia. The first period produced primarily shorter novels and short stories, many of which have never been translated into English; the latter period is represented more by the great novels, the epithet denoting both significance and size, as well as by Dnevnik pisatelya, 1876-1877, 1880-1881 (2 volumes, partial translation as Pages from the Journal of an Author, 1916; complete translation as The Diary of a Writer, 1949), which also contains several new short stories. In Dostoevski’s works, complex structures are created that introduce fundamentally antipodal constructs and that produce, among other effects, a mythologization of the antagonistic elements. Thus, the city, often the St. Petersburg of Dostoevski’s present, contrasts with the countryside. The squalor of poverty permeates St. Petersburg with sounds and smells in Dickensian realistic fashion, as opposed to the quaint, provincial quiet of the country. Usually, problems or actual troublemakers come from the city, or, if one leaves the provinces for the city, one may become “infected” with urban discontent and return to plague the countryside. In another prevalent dichotomy, the “man of the forties” (that is, the optimistic believer in the Enlightenment) often clashes with the “man of the sixties” (that is, the atheistic or nihilistic revolutionary). This conflict often is positioned generationally, and it is seldom clear

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whether the representative of either generation should prevail. Often throughout Dostoevski’s works, men of a higher social class, although not necessarily a very high class, interact most significantly with women who are socially inferior, usually powerless or “compromised.” The relationship takes on many different attitudes in the various works, but, in almost every case, the woman turns out to be of greater virtue or higher moral and spiritual constitution than the man who, nevertheless, from his privileged position in society, usually fares better than the woman. Perhaps most important of all the themes in his work is the belief in God versus atheism. If there is no God, many of Dostoevski’s characters Library of Congress realize, then either every human being is a God or every human being is nothing at all. This conflict can, and sometimes does, take place within a single person as well as between two characters. Atheism usually appears in its most extreme state—that is, in the belief that, since there is no God, the human being must be God. Although Dostoevski’s proponents of atheism are strong-willed, disciplined, and morbidly dedicated, in Dostoevski’s world they need to accept the existence of God as their only chance for peace or, in the final analysis, for existing in the world at all. Although free will is interpreted by these radical proponents as the ability to become gods, the submission to the will of the divine God is the only means toward happiness. Those who fail to redeem themselves through God either perish or are subject to enormous spiritual and psychological torment. Such conflict forms the crux of more than one novel in Dostoevski’s latter period, and it will be the treatment of this element in Dostoevski’s work that will earn for him recognition as the founder of existentialism in literature. Ironically from the point of view of Dostoevski’s beliefs, it is his existential writings rather than his metaphysical ones that constitute his most profound influence on world literature in the twentieth century. Most of Dostoevski’s short stories are simpler works than the novels, both in terms of the psychology of the characters and in terms of structure. “White Nights” • One of his best-known short stories, “Belye nochi” (“White Nights”), is subtitled “A Sentimental Story from the Diary of a Dreamer.” The unnamed protagonist of this work meets a young woman, Nastenka, by chance one evening along the embankment. When they have the opportunity to speak to each other, they find that they have much in common: Neither of them is able to enjoy a life of his or her own, and both of them, because of varying circumstances, are confined to their own abodes, occupied most of the time in daydreaming. Nastenka is physically restrained by her grandmother by being pinned to her skirt; the male protagonist is confined by his abject poverty and the inertia of unsociability to his quarters, with the

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green wallpaper and the spiderwebs. At the end of the story, Nastenka, nevertheless, is able to escape her fate thanks to the offices of the young boarder, who has taken pity on her, but she has had to wait an entire year; it is precisely at the end of this year that she meets the protagonist, whom, she claims, she would certainly love, and does in fact love, but as she truly still loves the other, she must relinquish. Nastenka leaves, imploring the protagonist not to blame her, knowing that he cannot blame her because he loves her. The protagonist feels that, somehow, this “moment” that they have shared is enough love to sustain him for a lifetime of dreaming. This story, unusual in the works of Dostoevski, does not involve the motif of the abused young woman, and the rejected young man seems quite content with his fate. Unlike most of Dostoevski’s women, Nastenka has succeeded in meeting an honorable man who seemingly keeps his word, making her a singular female in the works of Dostoevski. “A Christmas Tree and a Wedding” • More in keeping with Dostoevski’s image of the abused, victimized woman is the young girl in “Elka i svad’ba” (“A Christmas Tree and a Wedding”). The first-person narrator relates how he notices the indecent attention of a “great man” of society toward an eleven-year-old girl playing with dolls, who has been promised a huge dowry during one family’s Christmas party. The “great man” is interested only in the fabulous dowry and bides his time. Five years later, the narrator notices a wedding taking place in the church and focuses on the face of the very young bride, “pale and melancholy,” her eyes perhaps even red from “recent weeping” and her look of “childish innocence,” where could be detected “something indescribably naive . . . mutely begging for mercy.” He recognizes the young girl of a few years before and also the “great man,” who is now the groom. The narrator concludes that it was a “good stroke of business.” In this story, the theme of the helpless woman completely at the mercy of rapacious, evil men plays a major role, and the fate of the young girl in “A Christmas Tree and a Wedding,” for all her money, bodes much worse than that of the impoverished Nastenka. “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” • Perhaps Dostoevski’s best-known short story, “Son smeshnogo cheloveha” (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”) presents more of the most typical Dostoevskian philosophy of any short story. In it, a petty clerk who has realized that he has no reason to live believes that he should commit suicide to put an end to his ridiculous existence. Just when he decides to do so, a young girl accosts him and seemingly tries to engage his assistance. He pushes her aside, but his action causes him great shame, and he feels deep pity for the young girl. The experience of these two emotions causes him to postpone his suicide, if only for a few hours. Meanwhile, he falls asleep, and in his dream he shoots himself. Then, after he is dead and buried, he is transported to an Earth-like planet inhabited by people who only love. Unfortunately, he corrupts the entire population, causing wars, antipathies, and alienation. Upon awakening, the man feels that he has undergone a revelation and must preach his new religion, trying to convince people that it is possible to live in harmony together and to love sincerely people other than oneself. In “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” many themes from Dostoevski’s mature novels appear: whether one is a zero or a human, whether there is an afterlife, suffering as the only condition for the possibility of love, and suicide as a means of investing significance to human action, as well as many more. It is in the great novels that the complex world wherein the actions of all Dostoevski’s creations take place, including the short works. To read a short story without a fundamental background in

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other seminal works—for example Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground, 1918)—would very likely lead to a trap that could trivialize what are, by themselves, minor works such as the short stories. If, however, the short stories are contextualized within the entire works of Dostoevski over both his major periods, they form several interesting transitional points between many of his philosophical designs. The young girls, usually victimized by poverty and evil men, seem to be an outgrowth of an early novel, Poor Folk, and a continuing motif throughout the later period. Here, an orphan serf girl is pressured into a marriage that will doubtless cause her endless degradation and possibly physical harm. The paradoxical “spiteful man” of Notes from the Underground is the model of the “little clerk” who, nevertheless, has been influenced by German romantic philosophy and against logical positivism. His voice and “spite” reverberate almost palpably in the short stories as well as in the great novels. The theme of life as suffering and love or compassion as life’s greatest suffering is developed throughout the great novels, which, when used as a backdrop for the short works, provides a glimpse into the motivations of many of the protagonists. Dostoevski’s short stories clearly have a place of their own in Russian literature. Together, they form a miniature portrait of the most compelling people in Dostoevski’s world. Reading them, along with the longer works, gives the discriminating reader an insight into one of the most powerful and intricate minds of the nineteenth century. Christine Tomei Other major works novels: Bednye lyudi, 1846 (Poor Folk, 1887); Dvoynik, 1846 (The Double, 1917); Netochka Nezvanova, 1849 (English translation, 1920); Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye, 1861 (Injury and Insult, 1886; also known as The Insulted and Injured); Zapiski iz myortvogo doma, 1861-1862 (Buried Alive: Or, Ten Years of Penal Servitude in Siberia, 1881; better known as The House of the Dead); Zapiski iz podpolya, 1864 (Letters from the Underworld, 1913; better known as Notes from the Underground); Igrok, 1866 (The Gambler, 1887); Prestupleniye i nakazaniye, 1866 (Crime and Punishment, 1886); Idiot, 1868 (The Idiot, 1887); Vechny muzh, 1870 (The Permanent Husband, 1888; also known as The Eternal Husband); Besy, 1871-1872 (The Possessed, 1913; also known as The Devils); Podrostok, 1875 (A Raw Youth, 1916); Bratya Karamazovy, 1879-1880 (The Brothers Karamazov, 1912); The Novels, 1912 (12 volumes). miscellaneous: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 1972-1990 (30 volumes). nonfiction: “Zimniye zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh,” 1863 (“Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” 1955); Dnevnik pisatelya, 1876-1887, 1880-1881 (2 volumes; partial translation Pages from the Journal of an Author, 1916; complete translation The Diary of a Writer, 1949); Pisma, 1928-1959 (4 volumes); Iz arkhiva F. M. Dostoyevskogo: “Idiot,” 1931 (The Notebooks for “The Idiot,” 1967); Iz arkhiva F. M. Dostoyevskogo: “Prestupleniye i nakazaniye,” 1931 (The Notebooks for “Crime and Punishment,” 1967); F. M. Dostoyevsky: Materialy i issledovaniya, 1935 (The Notebooks for “The Brothers Karamazov,” 1971); Zapisnyye tetradi F. M. Dostoyevskogo, 1935 (The Notebooks for “The Possessed,” 1968); Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings, 1963; F. M. Dostoyevsky v rabote nad romanom “Podrostok,” 1965 (The Notebooks for “A Raw Youth,” 1969); Neizdannyy Dostoyevsky: Zapisnyye knizhki i tetradi 1860-1881, 1971 (3 volumes; The Unpublished Dostoevsky: Diaries and Notebooks, 1860-1881, 1973-1976); F. M. Dostoyevsky ob iskusstve, 1973; Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1987.

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translation: Yevgeniya Grande, 1844 (of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet). Bibliography Adelman, Gary. Retelling Dostoyesvky: Literary Responses and Other Observations. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Study of the possible influence of Dostoevski on a number of authors from Joseph Conrad to Frank Herbert. Bloom, Harold, ed. Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Essays on all of Dostoevski’s major novels as well as on his treatment of heroes and nihilism. Includes introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. The first volume of Frank’s monumental five-volume biography, the best available source on Dostoevski’s life and art in English. Includes an appendix on neurologist Sigmund Freud’s case history of Dostoevsky. ____________. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Reiterates Frank’s effort to subordinate the writer’s private life in favor of tracing his connection to the social-cultural history of his time. ____________. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Continues Frank’s study. ____________. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. The fourth volume in Frank’s series on the life and works of Dostoevksi. Includes an extended discussion of Dostoeski’s novella The Gambler from an ethnic-psychological perspective as a commentary on the Russian national character and an extended discussion of the classical construction of the novella The Eternal Husband, which Frank sees as Dostoeski’s most perfect shorter work. ____________. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Volume 5, concluding Frank’s biography. Jackson, Robert Louis, ed. Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993. Chapters on the writer’s relationships with Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Gogol, William Shakespeare, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Writer’s Life. Translated by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff. New York: Viking Press, 1987. Thorough and compelling work on Dostoevski’s life that seeks to shed light on the creation of Dostoevski’s fiction, citing letters and notes as artistic points of departure for Dostoevski. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these seven short stories by Dostoevski: “Bobok” (vol. 1), “The Crocodile” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (vol. 2), “An Honest Thief” (vol. 3), “A Nasty Story” (vol. 5), “The Peasant Marey” (vol. 6), and “White Nights” (vol. 8). Straus, Nina Pelikan. Dostoevsky and the Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Although, like most books on Dostoevski, this study centers on the novels, it is helpful in understanding his work generally; it argues that Dostoevski’s compulsion to depict men’s cruelties to women is a constitutive part of his vision and his metaphysics. Claims that Dostoevski attacks masculine notions of autonomy and that his works evolve toward “the death of the patriarchy.”

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; May 22, 1859 Died: Crowborough, East Sussex, England; July 7, 1930 Principal short fiction • Mysteries and Adventures, 1889 (also as The Gully of Bluemansdyke, and Other Stories); The Captain of Polestar, and Other Tales, 1890; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892; My Friend the Murderer, and Other Mysteries and Adventures, 1893; Round the Red Lamp: Being Fact and Fancies of Medical Life, 1894; The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and Other Stories, 1894; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894; The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, 1896; The Man from Archangel, and Other Stories, 1898; The Green Flag, and Other Stories of War and Sport, 1900; The Adventures of Gerard, 1903; The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905; Round the Fire Stories, 1908; One Crowded Hour, 1911; The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales, 1911; His Last Bow, 1917; Danger!, and Other Stories, 1918; Tales of Terror and Mystery, 1922 (also as The Black Doctor, and Other Tales of Terror and Mystery); Tales of the Ring and Camp, 1922 (also as The Croxley Master, and Other Tales of the Ring and Camp); Tales of Twilight and the Unseen, 1922 (also as The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen); Three of Them, 1923; Last of the Legions, and Other Tales of Long Ago, 1925; The Dealings of Captain Sharkey, and Other Tales of Pirates, 1925; The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927; The Maracot Deep, and Other Stories, 1929; The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1981 (revised and expanded 2001); Uncollected Stories: The Unknown Conan Doyle, 1982. Other literary forms • Arthur Conan Doyle’s more than one hundred published works include novels, autobiography, political treatises, plays adapted from his fiction, and works on spiritualism as well as his short stories, for which he is best known. His character Sherlock Holmes has been the subject of innumerable films, plays, and radio scripts and has become the archetype of the conventional detective hero. Achievements • Although Doyle was not the first to write short stories featuring a detective with great analytical powers, and while he acknowledged his debt to such writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Émile Gaboriau, who had written tales of intelligent amateur detectives solving crimes through logical deduction, in Sherlock Holmes, Doyle created a character who has entered the popular imagination like no other. Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most famous and popular character in detective fiction, if not in all modern fiction. Doyle’s stories were a strong influence on writers such as Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and the many others who create tightly constructed puzzles for their detectives to solve with clearly and closely reasoned analysis. Societies such as the Baker Street Irregulars have sprung up around the world to study Doyle’s stories, and the name of Sherlock Holmes has become synonymous with deduction, while “Elementary, my dear Watson” is a catchphrase even among those who have never read the stories. Biography • Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland of devout Irish Catholic parents and educated by the Jesuits in England and Austria. He graduated from the medical school at the University of Edinburgh and first went to sea as a ship’s surgeon on a

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whaler to the Arctic, later on a West African passenger liner. He opened an office in Southsea, England, and because of a dearth of patients, began writing to fill his leisure time and to supplement his income. He had previously published a few short stories anonymously, and in 1887 completed A Study in Scarlet, a novelette in which Sherlock Holmes, as the central character, appears for the first time. Urged on by his American editor, he wrote The Sign of Four (1890; also pb. as The Sign of the Four) and a series of Sherlock Holmes stories which appeared in the Strand Magazine. The popularity of Holmes enabled Doyle to give up the practice of medicine, but since the author desired to be known as a historical romancer, the character was “killed off” in a struggle with his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, in the story “The Final Problem.” Ten years later, yielding Courtesy, University of Texas at Austin to pressure from his publishers and the public, he resurrected Holmes, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902, serial; 1902, book) and later in another series of Holmes short stories. Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his political service and principally for his publications defending the conduct of the British in the South African (Boer) War. Having left Roman Catholicism, he turned to spiritualism and devoted the rest of his life to psychic research and propagandizing his beliefs. Analysis • In spite of his desire to be acknowledged as a writer of “serious” literature, Arthur Conan Doyle is destined to be remembered as the creator of a fictional character who has taken on a life separate from the literary works in which he appears. Sherlock Holmes, as the prototype of almost all fictional detectives, has become a legend not only to his devotees but also to those who have not even read the works in which he appears, the detective being immortalized by reputation and through the media of movies, television, and radio. Doyle claimed that the character of Sherlock Holmes was based on his memories of Dr. Joseph Bell, a teacher of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, whose diagnostic skills he had admired as a student of medicine. Bell, however, disclaimed the honor and suggested that Doyle himself possessed the analytical acumen that more closely resembled the skills of Sherlock Holmes. Regardless of the disclaimers and acknowledgments, there is little doubt that Doyle owed a large debt to Edgar Allan Poe and other predecessors in detective fiction, such as Émile Gaboriau and François-Eugène Vidocq. Doyle records that he was familiar with Mémoires (1828-1829; Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police, 1828-1829) and had read

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Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (1880). It is the influence of Poe, however, that is most in evidence in the character of Holmes and in many of his plots. Poe’s character of C. Auguste Dupin bears remarkable similarities to the Sherlock Holmes character. Both Holmes and Dupin, for example, are eccentrics; both are amateurs in the detective field; both have little regard for the official police; and both enter into investigations, not because of any overwhelming desire to bring a culprit to justice but out of the interest that the case generates and the challenge to their analytical minds. In addition, both have faithful companions who serve as the chroniclers of the exploits of their respective detective friends. Although Dupin’s companion remains anonymous and the reader is unable to draw any conclusions about his personality, Dr. Watson, in contrast, takes on an identity (although always in a secondary role) of his own. The reader shares with Watson his astonishment at Holmes’s abilities. In effect, Watson becomes a stand-in for the reader by asking the questions that need to be asked for a complete understanding of the situation. Generally, the Sherlock Holmes stories follow a similar pattern: There is usually a scene at the Baker Street residence, at which time a visitor appears and tells his or her story. After Holmes makes some preliminary observations and speculates upon a possible solution to the puzzle, Holmes and Watson visit the scene of the crime. Holmes then solves the mystery and explains to Watson how he arrived at the solution. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” follows this formula, and it is apparent that Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had a direct influence on this “locked room” mystery. The murder, the locked room, and the animal killer are all variations on the ingredients in the first case in which C. Auguste Dupin appears. Even the reference to the orangutan on the grounds of the Manor House would appear to be an allusion to the murderer in Poe’s story. The gothic romance influence is also apparent in this adventure of Sherlock Holmes: There is the mysterious atmosphere and the strange, looming manor house; and there is the endangered woman threatened by a male force. Changing the murderer from the ape of Poe’s story to a serpent in Doyle’s story suggests at least symbolically the metaphysical (or supernatural) struggle between the forces of good and evil. Typically, this story as well as all the Holmes stories ends with the solution to the mystery. Sherlock Holmes acknowledges that, by driving the snake back into the room where Dr. Roylott, the murderer, is waiting, he is indirectly responsible for his death; yet he matter-of-factly states that it is not likely to weigh heavily on his conscience. The mystery has been solved; that has been the detective’s only interest in the case. Because of this single-minded interest on the part of the detective, what happens to the criminal after discovery is no longer relevant. If the criminal is to stand trial, the story ends with the arrest and no more is heard of him. There are no trials, no dramatic courtroom scenes, and no reports of executions or prison sentences which had been popular in earlier detective stories and which were to regain immense popularity in the future. Although the solution to the “ingenious puzzle” is the prime concern for the detective and certainly of interest to the reader, it is Sherlock Holmes’s character with his multifaceted personality and his limitations which makes Doyle’s stories about the detective’s adventures so re-readable. Holmes, for example, is an accomplished musician, a composer as well as an instrumentalist; he is an expert in chemical research and has educated himself to be an authority on blood stains; he is the author of innumerable monographs on such esoteric subjects as different types of tobacco, bicycle tire impressions, and types of perfume; and he is an exceptional pugilist.

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Sherlock Holmes’s limitations, however, are what make him so attractive to the reader. He is sometimes frighteningly ignorant; for example, after Dr. Watson has explained the Copernican system to him, he responds: “Now that I know it. . . . I shall do my best to forget it”; he considers this information trivial, since it is not useful, and he feels that retaining it will crowd practical knowledge out of his mind. Holmes can also make erroneous judgments, and, perhaps most appealing of all, he can fail as a detective. It is this capacity for the detective to fail or to be outwitted that is perhaps Doyle’s most significant contribution to the detective-fiction genre. Whereas Holmes’s predecessors such as Lecoq and Dupin are presented as unerring in their conclusions and infallible in solving their cases, Doyle’s hero demonstrates his fallibility early in his career. “A Scandal in Bohemia” • It is in the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” without doubt Doyle’s version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” that this very human fallibility is revealed. Both stories deal with the need to recover items that are being used to blackmail a person of royal heritage. In both cases, attempts to find the items have failed and the detectives are called on for assistance; and, in both stories, a ruse is used to discover the whereabouts of the incriminating items. Although the debt to Poe is large in this story, “A Scandal in Bohemia” also displays some significant departures that establish the work as Doyle’s own, artistically. The scenes in the streets of London are conveyed with convincing detail to capture effectively “the spirit of the place” of Victorian England. The characters in Poe’s Dupin stories are lightly drawn, and the central interest for these tales is not in the people but in what happens to them. Although the characters in Poe’s stories talk about matters that are relevant only to the mystery at hand, the direct opposite is true in Doyle’s story. The people in the Holmes story are interesting and full of dramatic movement, and Holmes’s conversations with Watson and the others are filled with comments which are not related to the case. In addition, Doyle introduces the device of disguises in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The king of Bohemia, wearing a small face mask to hide his identity, visits Holmes in his lodgings; his disguise, however, is immediately penetrated by the detective. Sherlock Holmes also assumes a disguise in the story that is so convincing and successful that even his close friend Dr. Watson is unable to recognize him. It is the skill of Irene Adler, Holmes’s antagonist in the story, in assuming another identity that leads to the detective’s being foiled. Holmes’s failure in this story, however, in no way detracts from him. On the contrary, this failure and his others (such as in “The Yellow Face”) serve to make him only more convincing and more three-dimensional as a human being than the always successful C. Auguste Dupin. Holmes loses no status through his errors; instead, he gains in the light of his past and future successes. “The Red-Headed League” • Although there will always be disagreement among Sherlock Holmes aficionados about which of the many short stories is best, there is broad agreement that one of the best-constructed stories by Arthur Conan Doyle is the second short story in the first series, “The Red-Headed League.” Doyle himself ranked the story very high when he was queried, and the Victorian reading public’s response attested to its popularity. This story also introduces one of the recurring themes of the short stories: that of the doppelgänger, or double. The dual nature of the world and of personalities is developed in parallel manners throughout the un-

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raveling of the mystery of Jabez Wilson’s involvement with the Red-Headed League. The contemplative side of Holmes is repeatedly contrasted with his energized side, just as the orderliness of Victorian England is seen in stark relief against “the half that is evil.” Repeatedly, when there is a lull in the chase or a mystery has been solved, Sherlock Holmes retreats to his contemplative side to forget at least temporarily “the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.” “The Red-Headed League” follows the traditional formula of a Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes is visited at his flat by Jabez Wilson, who relates his problem. Wilson, the owner of a small pawnshop, has been working for the Red-Headed League for eight weeks, until abruptly and under mysterious circumstances, the league has been dissolved. He qualified for the position because of his red hair, and his only duties were to remain in a room and copy the Encyclopædia Britannica. He has been able to perform these chores because his assistant, Vincent Spaulding, was willing to work in the pawnshop for half-wages. He has come to Sherlock Holmes because he does not want to lose such a position without a struggle. Holmes and Watson visit the pawnshop, and Spaulding is recognized by the detective as being in reality John Clay, a master criminal and murderer. The detective is able to infer from the circumstances that the opposite of what is expected is true. He concludes that it is not the presence of Jabez Wilson in the room performing a meaningless “intellectual” task for the league that is important; rather, it is his absence from the pawnshop that gives his alter ego assistant the opportunity to perform the “physical” task of tunneling from the cellar into the nearby bank. Setting a trap, Holmes, Watson, and the police are able to capture Clay and his confederates in their criminal act. The double theme of the story is also reinforced in Jabez Wilson’s account of the applicants lining up to apply for the position with the Red-Headed League. He describes the crowd lining up on the stair; those in anticipation of employment ascending the stairs with hope; those who have been rejected descending in despair, forming a “double” stream. John Clay, Holmes’s antagonist in this story, is the first in a long line of adversaries of the detective who serve in effect as doppelgängers of the sleuth. Clay has an aristocratic background and possesses royal blood. Holmes also has illustrious ancestors, being descended from country squires, and his grandmother is described as being “the sister of Vernet, the French artist.” Clay is well educated and urbane, characteristics Holmes repeatedly shows throughout his adventures. Clay is described as being “cunning” in mind as well as skillful in his fingers, again a reflection of the detective’s characteristics. Clay is also gracious in his defeat and expresses admiration for the ingenuity displayed by the victorious Holmes. He is truly a worthy adversary for the detective and the direct mirror image of Holmes. “The Final Problem” • Other great master criminals and, in effect, doubles for the great detective are Colonel Sebastian Moran of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Van Bork of “His Last Bow,” and, the most famous of them all, Professor Moriarty, who is described in “The Final Problem” as the “Napoleon of crime” and the “organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” In essence, “The Final Problem” is a departure from the formula that characterizes the previous twenty-two Holmesian short stories, basically because Doyle intended that this would be the final work in which his detective would appear. Tiring of his creation and motivated by the desire to pursue his other literary interests, he has Watson record the demise of his friend. The story has no ingenious puzzle for the de-

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tective to unravel but instead is a detailed account of Sherlock Holmes’s confrontation with his nemesis. For years, Holmes, who could “see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart” and who could “leave his body at will and place himself into the mind and soul” of others, had been unable to penetrate the veil that shrouded the power “which for ever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrongdoer.” In this manner, Doyle almost casually proposes a conspiracy theme in this story which, in the hands of other writers, becomes one of the overriding characteristics of the detective fiction and thriller genres. It is the character of Professor Moriarty, however, which commands the interest of the reader, particularly when seen as a reflection of Holmes. Professor Moriarty’s career, like Holmes’s, “has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by Nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue.” When the Professor visits Holmes at his flat, his physical appearance is described as “extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean shaven, pale, and ascetic looking.” To Holmes, his appearance is quite familiar, even though he has never met the man before. It is entirely likely that Holmes’s immediate recognition is intended to suggest that the detective, for the first time in his life, is viewing in the flesh the side of his nature that his great intellect has refused to allow him to acknowledge. Even though Dr. Watson had made special efforts to characterize Holmes as being almost totally devoid of emotion in his previous chronicles of Holmes’s adventures, there are many instances in which there are outbursts of extreme feelings on the part of the detective. Holmes fluctuates between ennui and expressions of delight. He is often impulsive and compassionate. He is patient and deferential to his female clients. He is moved to indignation and intends to exact a form of revenge in “The Five Orange Pips.” In this story, “The Final Problem,” he shows a level of nervousness and caution which is almost akin to fear in response to the threat that the malevolent genius Moriarty poses toward his person. Professor Moriarty is too much like himself for the detective to remain scientifically detached. There is no doubt that Holmes is totally conscious of the significance of the parallels that exist between the two when the Professor states: It has been a duel between you and me, Mr. Holmes. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you. Holmes, with Watson, flees this enemy whom he acknowledges as “being quite on the same intellectual plane” as himself. Then, at Reichenbach Falls, he is almost inevitably forced to come face-to-face once again with his other self. Sidney Paget, the illustrator of many of the original publications in the Strand Magazine, depicts the struggle between Holmes and Moriarty just before their dual plunge into the chasm as being entwined together. Thus, the culmination of Holmes’s illustrious career, as originally intended by Doyle, was brought about in an entirely satisfactory symbolic and literary manner. Holmes, who could idly concede, “I have always had an idea that I could have made a highly efficient criminal,” and “Burglary was always an alternative profession had I

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cared to adopt it,” had resisted those impulses. In “The Final Problem” he could say: “In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side.” The detective, however, was keenly aware throughout this story that “if he could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.” With the death of Moriarty, he achieves that end. Although “London is the sweeter for [my] presence,” the destruction of the other side of his nature in Professor Moriarty makes it all the more so. The death of Sherlock Holmes along with his nemesis is comparable to self-destruction. “The Adventure of the Empty House” • When Doyle “killed off” his detective hero, he was in no way prepared for the public reaction that followed. He resisted almost continuous pressure from his publishers and the public until 1902, when he finally relented and resurrected Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles and later in the story “The Adventure of the Empty House.” In this story, a lieutenant of Professor Moriarty, Colonel Sebastian Moran, is the culprit and functions as the alter ego for Holmes. One of the more subtle acknowledgments of the double theme in this story is the use by Holmes of a wax model of himself to mislead his adversaries. Similar to “The Final Problem,” the story of the return of Sherlock Holmes does not follow the usual formula for the previous works, but the rest in the series adheres rather closely. When the stories are read in sequence, however, one can understand why the mere presence of the detective, however contrived his survival, would be cause for rejoicing by his followers. Even a lapse of more than ten years since his last appearance (three years within the stories) has in no way diminished his skill or intellectual capacity. Sherlock Holmes remains all that he was before his showdown with Professor Moriarty. The dialogue between the characters is as crisp as ever; the scenes are portrayed as vividly as before; the careful construction of the plots and the unraveling of the mysteries are as provocative as ever; and the imagination of the author is very much in evidence. There is evidence, however, of Doyle’s reluctance to take his hero as seriously as he had before. “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” • The story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” for example, is extremely contrived, almost totally dependent on cartoons as a cipher, and the reader is left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. The stories in the first series after the “death” of Sherlock Holmes are nevertheless of generally high quality and possess many memorable scenes which remain after the mysteries have been solved. Later Holmes Stories • There is agreement that the quality of the Sherlock Holmes stories published in the two collections His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is significantly diminished. Published in 1917 and 1927 respectively, the books demonstrate that Doyle was tired of his detective, as the works were written casually and almost impatiently. The onset of World War I in the title story of His Last Bow is pointed out by Jacques Barzun as being “perhaps symbolic of the end of a world of gaslight and order in which Holmes and Watson could function so predictably.” The stories in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published only a few years before Doyle’s death, possess some fine moments, but there is a singular failure on the part of the author to re-create the vividness of the Victorian world that had lifted the previous series of short stories out of the ordinary and enabled the reader to accept and admire so readily the reasoning powers of Sherlock Holmes.

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Despite the uneven quality of these works, it is a tribute to Doyle’s ability that Sherlock Holmes remains a memorable character. Although Watson informs the reader that Holmes’s knowledge of formal philosophy is nil, he is a philosopher in his own way. Holmes has probed the most abstract of understandings—ranging from the motivation of humans to the nature of the universe—from the study of the physical world. He possesses a peculiar morality akin to the John Stuart Mill variety: Evil is doing harm to others. When he seeks justice, he almost inevitably finds it; justice in the social and structured sense. Holmes has little regard for the laws of human beings; he recognizes that they do not always serve the purposes of justice, so at times he rises above them and often ignores them. For him, the distinction between right and wrong is absolute and beyond debate. It was Doyle’s skill in infusing such depth into his character that makes Holmes greater than Dupin and Lecoq. Robert W. Millett With updates by Karen M. Cleveland Marwick Other major works plays: Foreign Policy, pr. 1893; Jane Annie: Or, The Good Conduct Prize, pr., pb. 1893 (with J. M. Barrie); Waterloo, pr. 1894 (also as A Story of Waterloo); Halves, pr. 1899; Sherlock Holmes, pr. 1899 (with William Gillette); A Duet, pb. 1903; Brigadier Gerard, pr. 1906; The Fires of Fate, pr. 1909; The House of Temperley, pr. 1909; The Pot of Caviare, pr. 1910; The Speckled Band, pr. 1910; The Crown Diamond, pr. 1921; Exile: A Drama of Christmas Eve, pb. 1925; It’s Time Something Happened, pb. 1925. edited texts: Dreamland and Ghostland, 1886; D. D. Home: His Life and Mission, 1921 (by Mrs. Douglas Home); The Spiritualist’s Reader, 1924. novels: A Study in Scarlet, 1887 (serial; 1888, book); The Mystery of Cloomber, 1888; Micah Clarke, 1889; The Firm of Girdlestone, 1889; The Sign of Four, 1890 (first pb. as The Sign of the Four); Beyond the City, 1891; The Doings of Raffles Haw, 1891; The White Company, 1891; The Great Shadow, 1892; The Refugees, 1893; The Parasite, 1894; The Stark Munro Letters, 1895; The Surgeon of Gaster Fell, 1895; Rodney Stone, 1896; The Tragedy of the Koroska, 1897 (also as A Desert Drama); Uncle Bernac, 1897; A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, 1899 (revised 1910); The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901-1902 (serial), 1902 (book); Sir Nigel, 1905-1906 (serial), 1906 (book); The Lost World, 1912; The Poison Belt, 1913; The Valley of Fear, 1914-1915 (serial), 1915 (book); The Land of Mist, 1926. miscellaneous: The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader, 2002. nonfiction: The Great Boer War, 1900; The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, 1902; The Case of Mr. George Edalji, 1907; Through the Magic Door, 1907; The Crime of the Congo, 1909; The Case of Oscar Slater, 1912; Great Britain and the Next War, 1914; In Quest of Truth, Being a Correspondence Between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Captain H. Stansbury, 1914; To Arms!, 1914; The German War: Some Sidelights and Reflections, 1915; Western Wanderings, 1915; A Visit to Three Fronts, 1916; The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 1916-1919 (6 volumes); The Origin and Outbreak of the War, 1916; A Petition to the Prime Minister on Behalf of Roger Casement, 1916(?); The New Revelation, 1918; The Vital Message, 1919; A Debate on Spiritualism, 1920 (with Joseph McCabe); Our Reply to the Cleric, 1920; Spiritualism and Rationalism, 1920; Fairies Photographed, 1921; The Evidence for Fairies, 1921; The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, 1921; The Case for Spirit Photography, 1922 (with others); The Coming of the Fairies, 1922; Our American Adventure, 1923; Memories and Adventures, 1924; Our Second American Adventure, 1924; Psychic Experiences, 1925; The Early Christian Church and Modern Spiritualism, 1925; The History of

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Spiritualism, 1926 (2 volumes); Pheneas Speaks: Direct Spirit Communications, 1927; A Word of Warning, 1928; What Does Spiritualism Actually Teach and Stand For?, 1928; An Open Letter to Those of My Generation, 1929; Our African Winter, 1929; The Roman Catholic Church: A Rejoinder, 1929; The Edge of the Unknown, 1930; Arthur Conan Doyle on Sherlock Holmes, 1981; Essays on Photography, 1982; Letters to the Press, 1984. poetry: Songs of Action, 1898; Songs of the Road, 1911; The Guards Came Through, and Other Poems, 1919; The Poems: Collected Edition, 1922. translation: The Mystery of Joan of Arc, 1924 (Léon Denis). Bibliography Akinson, Michael. The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes and Other Eccentric Readings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Attempts to read Holmes’s stories in the manner in which Holmes himself might read them. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is read in terms of the philosophy of Kundalini yoga; “A Scandal in Bohemia” is read in terms of its use of traditional romance motifs and its debt to Edgar Allan Poe; Jungian psychology is used to read A Study in Scarlet; and Derridian deconstruction is used to read “The Adventure of the Copper Breeches.” Barsham, Diana. Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Discussion of masculinity according to Doyle, delving into all Doyle’s writings, including his war correspondence and travel writings. Green, Richard Lancelyn. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Provides a massive bibliography of all that Doyle wrote, including obscure short pieces. Illustrated and containing a seventy-five-page index, this book includes a list of more than one hundred books of biographical, bibliographical, and critical interest for the study of Doyle. Hall, Jasmine Yong. “Ordering the Sensational: Sherlock Holmes and the Female Gothic.” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Summer, 1991): 295-304. Examines how gothic elements and female clients in a number of stories, including the well-known “The Speckled Band,” establish the rational detective as a powerful, patriarchal hero. Argues that Holmes controls his female clients as much as the gothic villains in Doyle’s stories. Hodgson, John A., ed. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Includes nine essays on Holmes, from a variety of critical perspectives, including feminist, deconstruction, and discourse analysis approaches. Jaffee, Jacqueline A. Arthur Conan Doyle. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Jaffee’s solid work combines biography and a critical discussion of Doyle’s stories and novels. Contains three chapters on the Sherlock Holmes stories, which closely examine the tales. Supplemented by an index, a bibliography of Doyle’s work, and an annotated bibliography. Jann, Rosemary. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order. New York: Twayne, 1995. Part of Twayne’s Masterwork Series, this slim volume is divided into two parts, the first of which places the great detective in a literary and historical context, followed by Jann’s own reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlockian approach to detective fiction. In addition to a selected bibliography, Jann’s book includes a brief chronology of Doyle’s life and work. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by

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Doyle: “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (vol. 1), “The Greek Interpreter” (vol. 3), and “The Red-Headed League” and “A Scandal in and Bohemia” (vol. 6). Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Including both evaluations by Doyle’s contemporaries and later scholarship—some of it commissioned specifically for inclusion in this collection—Critical Essays is divided into three sections: “Sherlock Holmes,” “Other Writings,” and “Spiritualism.” Harold Orel opens the collections with a lengthy and comprehensive essay, which is followed by a clever and classic meditation by Dorothy L. Sayers on “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name.” Also included are pieces by such literary lights as George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, and Heywood Broun. Stashower, Daniel. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Excellent biography of Doyle. Focuses less on the Holmes novels and more on the historical novels, personal crusades, and spiritualism.

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Andre Dubus Born: Lake Charles, Louisiana; August 11, 1936 Died: Haverhill, Massachusetts; February 24, 1999 Principal short fiction • Separate Flights, 1975; Adultery and Other Choices, 1977; Finding a Girl in America, 1980; The Times Are Never So Bad, 1983; The Last Worthless Evening, 1986; Selected Stories, 1988; Dancing After Hours: Stories, 1996; In the Bedroom: Seven Stories, 2002. Other literary forms • Although Andre Dubus wrote an early novel, The Lieutenant (1967), which is highly regarded by some critics and readers, and a short novel, Voices from the Moon (1984), which has been printed separately, his most important contributions to literature are his shorter works. Besides his fiction, Dubus wrote two wellreceived books of autobiographical essays. Achievements • Andre Dubus’s literary career is notable in the way it stands outside the shifting fashions of the American literary scene. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, when the “postmodernism” of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon was creating a highly self-conscious, self-reflective literature that often used its own craft to explore itself, Dubus remained a committed realist, at his best when he used his craft to explore the lives of his characters. During the period when the so-called minimalist stories of writers such as Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lorrie Moore came into literary prominence, Dubus remained what might be called a “maximalist” writer, who seemed most at home in the form of the long story, or novella. In a period of shifting male and female definitions, Dubus wrote often about the waywardness of people who continue to define themselves by concepts of masculinity and femininity that the world around them no longer values. Not least of all, in an age of secular values, Dubus often looks to the Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church to find deep values. Biography • Andre Dubus was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on August 11, 1936, and attended the Christian Brothers Catholic School in Lafayette from 1944 until 1954, after which he enrolled in McNeese State University in Lake Charles. Upon graduating from college in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism, he married Patricia Lowe and entered the Marine Corps with a commission as lieutenant. Over the next five years, four of the couple’s children were born (Suzanne in 1958, Andre III in 1959, Jeb in 1960, and Nicole in 1963), and he was to rise to the rank of captain. In 1963, he published his first story, “The Intruder,” in The Sewanee Review and resigned his officer’s commission to enter the master of fine arts program at the University of Iowa, the much respected Writers’ Workshop program. Upon receiving his degree in 1965, he taught for one year as a lecturer at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, before accepting a position at Bradford College in Massachusetts in 1966, where he was to teach for the next fourteen years, until his retirement in 1984. Dubus was married and divorced three times, and the pain of these broken mar-

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riages provided a source for much of his fiction. His first marriage, to Lowe in 1958, ended in divorce in 1970. His second marriage, to Tommie Gail Cotter in 1975, ended in divorce in 1977. His third marriage, to Peggy Rambach, also a writer, in 1979, produced two daughters, Cadence, born in 1982, and Madeline, born in 1987, but ended when his wife left in November, 1987, in the midst of family strain stemming from a 1986 automobile accident, which also cost Dubus a leg. Many of Dubus’s stories have been selected for the annual The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards series. Among his national honors, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1985 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1986. Both of these honors came after his retirement from teaching in 1984. His plans to use the monetary freedom provided by these grants to spend more time writing were violently interrupted by an accident in which he had stopped to assist two distressed motorists, only to become the victim of another car. The pain of recovering from this accident, in which he saved a life but lost a leg, is chronicled in the title essay of his collection of essays Broken Vessels. On February 24, 1999, Dubus died in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Analysis • Among American story writers of the twentieth century, the one to whom Andre Dubus is most often compared is Flannery O’Connor. Although Dubus’s works are not generally marked by the wry, ironic wit that permeates O’Connor’s work, both writers are marked by what Thomas E. Kennedy, among others, has called an “existential Christian” sensibility. “If They Knew Yvonne” • An early Dubus story, “If They Knew Yvonne,” first published in The North American Review in 1969 and collected both in Separate Flights and Selected Stories, displays this sensibility clearly. This story traces the development of a teenager, Harry Dugal, growing into manhood and caught between two powerful forces: his emerging sexuality and his need for the absolution and Communion provided by the Roman Catholic Church. Taught by the fathers at the Christian Brothers School to regard masturbation as “self-abuse” and a mortal sin, Harry, as he discovers his own inability to resist the urge to masturbate, goes to confession at every opportunity to confess his sins. Disgusted at his own weakness and at the sexual weakness that he discovers in his family around him, including his parents, whose store of condoms he discovers, and his sister Janet, who gets married while two months pregnant, the young Harry even considers emasculating himself at one point. At the age of nineteen, however, he has his first sexual encounter with a woman his own age, Yvonne Millet, and discovers a type of sexuality that does not disgust him. When Yvonne implores him, “Love me, Harry, love me,” he begins to perceive that this type of love is not the squalid lust that he had been warned to guard against but something else, something he is not sure the Catholic fathers at his school knew anything about. The story ends shortly after he has drifted apart from Yvonne and goes to confession again. After Harry has confessed his sexual affair, the priest quotes a line from St. John, in which Christ prays, “I do not pray that You take them out of the world but that You keep them from evil,” a quote that delineates the story’s Christian existentialist theme. Harry begins to understand that the higher good depends not on remaining pure and safe from the world but on being a responsible, conscientious member of the world. In his full-length study, Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction, Thomas Kennedy points out that almost half of Dubus’s first fifty stories deal with violent themes or

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subjects, but he further points out that violence is only secondary to the central theme, a symptom of the greater condition of “human isolation and disconnection in . . . modern America.” This is not to say that Dubus in any way excuses violence, but rather that understanding how violence grows out of an acceptance of superficial values is an important source for his fiction. “The Pretty Girl” • Dubus’s novella “The Pretty Girl,” collected in both The Times Are Never So Bad and Selected Stories, is one of his best extended examinations of this type of violence. One of the two point-of-view characters is Raymond Yarborough, who is presented as a wildly exploding tinderbox of violence. When the reader meets him, he is divorced from the other main character, Polly Comeau, but still obsessed by her. The reader learns early that Raymond has already raped her, though he considers that he was only “taking back my wife for a while.” Before long, he beats up and severely injures a man whom he knows she has slept with and lights a fire around the house where Polly is staying, not to destroy anything but to terrorize her. If Raymond is in many ways the antagonist in the story, he is also the most interesting character, and his former wife Polly is not presented in particularly sympathetic terms. A waitress by trade, Polly is in many ways best described in the terms of the story’s title as a twenty-six-year-old “pretty girl” who has used her beauty to avoid fashioning an adult identity and instead has tended to drift from one sexual affair to another, even during the course of her marriage, without much sense of responsibility or consequences. Polly is a loner almost as much as Raymond is. She shares a house with a male acquaintance but has no close friends either male or female. Her relationships with women tend to be competitive, and her friendships with men tend to be brief, quickly sacrificed to her love affairs. She is significantly alone when Raymond breaks into her house at the end of the story to confront her about why she left him and what she really wants. Though he is unarmed, Polly, who has been ill and alone for several days, uses a gun she bought for protection to kill him when he begins to take off his clothes. Both main characters are carefully constructed to be unlikable, though only Raymond is presented as truly repugnant. The success of the story is that it compels the reader nevertheless to want to understand each of them and to appreciate each character’s struggle, while not inviting the reader to forget or overlook their immature self-obsession or moral rootlessness. “Finding a Girl in America” • A number of Dubus’s stories deal with recurring characters. Two stories of the three that deal with Hank Allison, a middle-aged, philandering college professor, show Dubus’s art at both its best and its worst. “Finding a Girl in America” shows both the character Hank Allison and the writer Andre Dubus at their worst. In it, Hank is presented as a divorced college professor who has been having affairs with his female students. As the story opens, he has learned that a former lover had an abortion and feels cheated because he believes that had the baby been born, it would have filled the void left in his life by his daughter growing up; the point of view of the woman who would have had a baby she did not want fathered by a man she did not love is not seriously considered. The attention to detail, which in other stories creates a convincing illusion of reality, in this story seems tedious and self-indulgent. Dubus’s insistence on finding moral frameworks to understand his characters, a tendency that in many stories uplifts his art, in this story misleads him.

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Hank’s life is so self-indulgent that it is hard for a reader to take him half as seriously as he takes himself. “Adultery” • The earlier story, “Adultery,” is by contrast one of the finest examples of Dubus’s art. To be sure, Hank Allison is the same self-centered, self-justifying man that the reader meets in the later story (as well as in “We Don’t Live Here Anymore”). “Adultery,” however, is carefully constructed to consider not only marital fidelity but also spiritual fidelity. The main characters are Hank Allison, his wife Edith, and Father Joe Ritchie, a Catholic priest dying of cancer who renounces his vows and has an affair with Edith. The story also investigates the lives of a number of other men and women whom Hank and Edith choose as lovers. It is Hank who initially brings adultery into his and Edith’s marriage, but when she discovers it, he immediately consents to her right to have extramarital affairs as well. The affairs they both have take their toll especially on Edith and make a sham of their marriage. The irony of the title—and the element that raises this story to the finest level of American fiction—is that Edith’s adultery with a dying Catholic priest is not viewed by her or Father Ritchie as true adultery; the true adultery for her is staying in a marriage based on hypocrisy. Similarly, although this affair compromises Joe Ritchie in more ways than one, he and Edith both understand that their relationship is spiritually as well as personally the right thing to do; what worries Joe Ritchie most is that Edith might remain married to Hank, and he is relieved when she comes to him while he is dying to say that she is divorcing Hank. By deciding to divorce Hank, Edith upholds at least the idea of marital fidelity. Moreover, she realizes that her affair with Joe Ritchie has provided her with a new center for her life and that she would be unfaithful to herself and the belief in marriage to remain with Hank any longer. “A Father’s Story” • “A Father’s Story,” which was chosen by John Updike for the annual The Best American Short Stories in 1984, is in some respects Dubus’s most important story. Smaller in scale than stories such as “The Fat Girl” or “Separate Flights,” which each compress the story of several years into a few pages, “A Father’s Story” focuses on a crucial incident in the life of Luke Ripley and his daughter Jennifer. Like many of Dubus’s characters, Luke seems in many ways to be a version of the author, but in this case, a version that has achieved a deceptive veneer of simplicity. The opening line of the story, “My name is Luke Ripley and here is what I call my life,” seems to present the voice of a direct, straightforward man. The life that Luke tells the reader about is one filled with a variety of contradictions: He is a devout Catholic but divorced; he attends Mass regularly but does not always listen; he enjoys talking to his priest but casually, preferably over a few beers, and what they discuss is mostly small talk; he is a self-described lazy man who dislikes waking up early but does so each morning to pray, not because he feels obligated to do so but because he knows he has the choice not to do so. Luke Ripley is a man who lives with contradictions and accepts them. As such, when his daughter comes to him, frantically telling him that she hit a man with a car, he reacts almost instinctively. Rather than call the police or an ambulance, he drives to the scene of the accident to verify that the young man is in fact dead. When he knows that there is nothing that can be done to help the young man, he drives home and puts his daughter to bed, then takes her car out and runs it into a tree in front of the church to cover up the dent she had already created. The story

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ends with Luke recalling to the reader how he justifies himself to his God each morning, saying, “You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion. . . . I love her more than I love truth.” God replies, “Then you love in weakness,” to which Luke responds, “As You love me.” The power of “A Father’s Story” is that it captures perfectly the opposites that Dubus’s fiction is constantly exploring. Luke Ripley’s love for his daughter is both his strength and his weakness. Similarly, his love for his daughter moves him to deceive, even as his religion demands confession; and when he finds himself unable to confess his sin of covering up his daughter’s crime, the story itself, it is clear, is his substitute for the confession that he cannot make to a priest. Like many of Dubus’s stories, “A Father’s Story” shows a person caught between the confusing, ambiguous demands of his human heart and the by-no-means-clear demands of a religion in which he believes but which speaks of an absolute he can only partially understand. Thomas Cassidy With updates by Charles E. May Other major works novels: The Lieutenant, 1967; Voices from the Moon, 1984; We Don’t Live Here Anymore, 1984. nonfiction: Broken Vessels, 1991; Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays, 1998. Bibliography Breslin, John B. “Playing Out of the Patterns of Sin and Grace: The Catholic Imagination of Andre Dubus.” Commonweal 115 (December 2, 1988): 652-656. An interesting analysis of the Catholic themes in Dubus’s literature, written for a lay audience. Breslin focuses particularly on Dubus’s trilogy of stories dealing with Hank Allison (“We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” “Adultery,” and “Finding a Girl in America”), and “A Father’s Story.” Cocchiarale, Michael. “The Complicated Catholicism of Andre Dubus.” In Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, edited by Suzanne D. Green and Lisa Abney. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Discusses Dubus’s writing in the context of Catholicism and its role in the complex morality of his characters. Dubus, Andre. “An Interview with Andre Dubus.” Interview by David Yandell Todd. Yale Review 86 (July, 1998): 89-110. Dubus candidly discusses his decision to become a writer and the relationship between his life, his stories, and the authors who have most influenced him. He also considers what motivates his characters, creates their conflicts, and provides them with spiritual and moral significance. Feeney, Joseph J. “Poised for Fame: Andre Dubus at Fifty.” America 155 (November 15, 1986): 296-299. Using the occasion of Dubus’s fiftieth birthday, the author provides a general introduction to the man, his writing, and his major themes. Written for an audience he assumes to be generally unfamiliar with Dubus’s fiction, this article presents the major themes of Dubus’s fiction without exploring them in depth. Ferriss, Lucy. “Andre Dubus: ‘Never Truly Members.’” In Southern Writers at Century’s End, edited by Jeffery J. Folks and James A. Perkins. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Discusses several short stories with a focus on Dubus’s concerns with Roman Catholic sexual politics, particularly in the context of his women characters and his connection with the literary tradition of the South.

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Kennedy, Thomas E. Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988. The first full-length study of Dubus’s fiction to be published, this volume is by far the most helpful work for someone interested in Dubus and his fiction. Kennedy groups Dubus’s stories together by their thematic content and analyzes them in separate chapters, which are each devoted to one theme. Also included are other critical evaluations, two interviews with Dubus, an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and a helpfully designed index. If there is a flaw, it is that Kennedy sometimes seems too devoted to Dubus’s work to accurately evaluate its occasional shortcomings. Lesser, Ellen. “True Confession: Andre Dubus Talks Straight.” Review of Selected Stories. Village Voice 37 (January 17, 1989): 56. Lesser claims that “Dubus writes stories like a pilot pushing the envelope—continually testing fiction’s effective limits.” She praises his fiction for its deliberate unfashionableness and for its unsimplified Catholic sensibility. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Dubus: “The Curse” and “Dancing After Hours” (vol. 2), “A Father’s Story” and “The Fat Girl” (vol. 3), and “Killings” (vol. 4). Miner, Madone. “Jumping from One Heart to Another: How Andre Dubus Writes About Women.” Critique 39 (Fall, 1997): 18-31. Discusses three stories—“Anna,” “Leslie in California,” and “Rose”—in terms of Dubus’s ability to write empathetically from a woman’s perspective, to speak with a woman’s voice about women’s experience, while still retaining his “maleness.” Rowe, Anne E. “Andre Dubus.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. General introduction to such Dubus themes as the passage from childhood to the adult world, failed friendships and marriages, and the individual’s search for a meaningful center. Also includes an analytical survey of criticism of Dubus’s fiction. Yarbrough, Steve. “Andre Dubus: From Detached Incident to Compressed Novel.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 28 (Fall, 1986); 19-27. Argues that Dubus’s short stories can be categorized in three different ways, of which the largest category is the compressed novel, which follows the course of characters’ lives for several years. This article focuses on a number of short stories, including “The Doctor,” “The Dark Men,” “Townies,” “In My Life,” “Separate Flights,” and “The Fat Girl.”

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Stuart Dybek Born: Chicago, Illinois; April 10, 1942 Principal short fiction • Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, 1980; The Coast of Chicago, 1990; The Story of Mist, 1993; I Sailed with Magellan, 2003 (novellas). Other literary forms • Stuart Dybek is known principally for his short fiction. He has also published three volumes of poetry: Brass Knuckles (1979), Kiddie Corner (1981), and Streets in Their Own Ink (2004). His only play, Orchids, was produced in 1990, and his short story “Death of a Right Fielder” was adapted to television in 1991. Achievements • Editors have chosen many of Stuart Dybek’s stories for inclusion in anthologies. He won a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation as well as awards from the Cliff Dwellers Arts Foundation, Friends of American Writers, the Whiting Foundation, and the Society of Midland Authors. In addition, he received a Nelson Algren Award, several O. Henry Awards, and the Church and the Artist Literary Competition Award. Dybek has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts grant. Biography • Stuart Dybek was born on April 10, 1942, in Chicago, the son of Stanley and Adeline Sala Dybek. He grew up in a working-class, ethnic neighborhood, a milieu that figures prominently in his writing. After graduating from a Roman Catholic high school, he enrolled at Loyola University, but he interrupted his education to work in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the early 1960’s. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola in 1964 and a master’s degree in 1968. He married Caren Bassett in 1966. After working as a case worker with the Cook County Department of Public Aid, teaching in a Chicago-area elementary school, and teaching high school on the island of St. Thomas as a VISTA volunteer, Dybek returned to school. He earned an master of fine arts degree from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1973. In 1974, he began teaching English and creative writing at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He served as a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1990 and began teaching in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program for writers in 1985. Dybek’s first book-length publication was his collection of poetry and prose poems, Brass Knuckles. His first collection of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, published in 1980, was well received by the critics. Likewise, his second collection, The Coast of Chicago (1990), received considerable critical praise. Beginning the mid-1970’s, Dybek published a steady stream of stories in such important journals as Ploughshares and TriQuarterly and such popular magazines as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Analysis • Chicago has a long tradition of producing fine writers who use the city as their literary landscape. Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and The-

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odore Dreiser, among others, belong to this tradition. Stuart Dybek, while drawing heavily on the city for his settings, characters, and images, departs from the tradition with his dreamlike portrayal of life in a postmodern world. Some critics have identified his work with Magical Realism and have suggested a connection with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Dybek himself reports that after he wrote some of the early stories included in Childhood and Other Neighborhoods he began to read the works of Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez. In addition to exploring the intersection between dreams and reality, Dybek has pioneered the genre sometimes known as “sudden” or “flash” fiction. These stories are sometimes also called “short short” stories; sudden fiction can be just a few paragraphs long, and such stories are never longer than three pages. Consequently, readers of sudden fiction often find themselves in the middle of a situation well under way, a situation that will end but not conclude. Some of the prose poems in Dybek’s poetry collection Brass Knuckles could fall into this category. The Coast of Chicago also includes several very short stories. Many of Dybek’s stories draw on his experiences growing up in a Polish-Latino neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. His characters often have Polish surnames, attend Catholic churches, and carry with them the culture and mythology of Eastern Europe. Even when his stories are not overtly about the immigrant experience, their settings are rich with ethnic sounds, aromas, and sights. Churches frequently appear in the center of the landscape. Dybek often places his characters in moments of transformation. Frequently this takes the form of a coming-of-age story, especially in Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. In a 1997 interview with Mike Nickel and Adrian Smith, Dybek says that he is always “looking for some door in the story that opens on another world.” For some characters, this can be the world of adulthood; for others, it can be an entry into the world of magic or death. The entry into a different world can be a transformative moment for his characters, as well as for his readers. Childhood and Other Neighborhoods • The eleven stories of the collection are about coming of age. With his title, Dybek deliberately suggests that there is both a time and a space to childhood; that is, he sees childhood in the same way one would see a neighborhood, as a place where interconnected people live out their lives, bounded by streets, houses, ethnicity, and religion. The main characters in this collection are generally young people, often second- or third-generation Poles making their homes in Chicago. Dybek himself identifies the subject of the collection as “perception,” reminding his readers that children perceive the world in ways that are different from the ways adults do. For many of the characters in this book, their moment of transformation comes when they leave the familiar streets of their own neighborhood and venture out into the world at large. Sometimes these adventures end tragically, sometimes humorously. Often the world outside the neighborhood is a world infused with magic or horror. The opening story of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, “The Palatski Man” is about a young girl, Mary, and her older brother John. The story opens on Palm Sunday and continues to use religious iconography and imagery throughout. At the center of the story stands the nameless Palatski Man, a vendor who dresses in white and sells taffy apples and palatski, a confection of wafers and honey. There is a strangeness to this treat; Mary has never seen palatski sold anywhere else. For Mary, eating the palatski reminds her of Holy Communion, an image that recurs later in the story.

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John and his friend Ray Cruz are fascinated by the Ragmen, who traverse their neighborhood collecting rags. John tells Mary about following a Ragman for a long way and discovering the place where all the Ragmen live. Ray and John are discovered by the Ragmen and become separated. Later, when John calls Ray’s home, Ray denies that the adventure ever happened, and John is unable to locate the Ragmen’s camp again. Later, John and Mary follow the Palatski Man and find themselves once again at the Ragmen’s camp. In a mystical, frightening ceremony, the young people partake of a kind of Eucharist consisting of taffy apple syrup and palatski, which tastes surprisingly bitter. That night, Mary discovers that John has not eaten his portion. The story closes strangely with a scene that could be a real event, a vision, or a dream. The Palatski Man comes for Mary, and she knows that she must go with him. Dybek reports that he wrote this story while listening to the music of Polish composer Zoltán Kodály. The music suggested the strange, Eastern European images. There are also undercurrents of the Persephone myth, and readers should remember that this myth was a subject of a poem in Dybek’s Brass Knuckles. In Greek mythology, Persephone eats pomegranate seeds offered her by Hades, the ruler of the underworld. As a result, she is bound to stay with him for six months of the year. Likewise, Mary’s ingestion of the minute wafer given to her by the Palatski Man makes possible the final scene. The Coast of Chicago • The Coast of Chicago contains both longer stories and very short stories, intertwined and interconnected by theme and image. Some reviewers suggest that the very short stories are lyrical in nature and may be autobiographical. Again, Chicago provides the setting for the stories, and again, Dybek has said that he listened to music, jazz this time, as he wrote the stories. Many of the stories in the collection have a dreamlike, legendary quality to them. Art and music figure in many of the stories. For example, “Nighthawks,” itself a minicollection of tales within the larger collection, uses Edward Hopper’s painting by the same name as its starting point. Likewise, “Chopin in Winter” draws on the music of the Polish composer. In all, the stories are often elegiac, somber, nearly hallucinatory. Again, Dybek seems most interested in showing the reader the way characters and settings change, often subtly, often before the reader’s very eyes. “Ant” • Appearing in the Winter, 1997-1998, issue of Ploughshares, “Ant” is a sample of Dybek’s very short fiction and an example of the blend of fantasy and realism characteristic of many of his stories. In addition, the story features entry into another world and then back into the ordinary one. The story opens with Martin lying on a blanket under a tree with his lover. When an ant begins to drag him by his toe, Martin remembers stories read to him when he was a boy by his Uncle Wayne. His uncle, a veteran of an unnamed war, acted out the stories after reading them to Martin. The most memorable for Martin was “Lonigan and the Ants.” His uncle, who had pretended that he was an ant and Martin was Lonigan, had begun to pursue him. All that saved the frightened Martin from the mad pursuit by his uncle was the reminder that Lonigan does not die, and the ants do not win; the “authority of the story” is enough to change his uncle’s actions. Dybek seems to be playing with the boundaries of storytelling here. In the larger story, he exerts authority over his own story and writes a version in which one ant does win. Eventually, an ant works its way up Martin’s back, grabs hold of his belt, lifts him off the ground, and carries him away. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

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Other major works play: Orchids, pr. 1990. poetry: Brass Knuckles, 1979; Kiddie Corner, 1981; Streets in Their Own Ink, 2004. Bibliography Cook, Bruce. “Walks on the Southwest Side.” Washington Post Book World (January 13, 1980): 1-2. Places Dybek in the tradition of the Chicago writers, including Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Saul Bellow, in a review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Dybek, Stuart. “An Interview with Stuart Dybek.” Interview by Mike Nickel and Adrian Smith. Chicago Review 43 (Winter, 1997): 87-101. A revealing interview in which Dybek reflects on what it means to be a “Chicago writer,” his ethnic background and how it influences his writing, and his ideas about form and writing. ____________. “Thread.” Harper’s 297 (September, 1998): 34-37. A brief memoir by Dybek recalling his Catholic upbringing and his first Holy Communion. Gladsky, Thomas S. “From Ethnicity to Multiculturalism: The Fiction of Stuart Dybek.” MELUS 20 (Summer, 1995): 105-118. Offers a brief history of Polish immigration to the United States followed by a consideration of Polish American writers before turning to an examination of Stuart Dybek in this context. Connects ethnicity and memory and discusses the role of Catholicism in Dybek’s prose. Kakutani, Michiko. “Lyrical Loss and Desolation of Misfits in Chicago.” The New York Times Book Review (April 20, 1990): C31. Draws a parallel between The Coast of Chicago and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), noting similarities in characters, lyricism, and “emotional forcefulness.” Lee, Don. “About Stuart Dybek.” Ploughshares 24 (Spring, 1998): 192-198. A profile of Dybek and his subject matter. Provides biographical information as well as considering Dybek’s contribution to the “short short” genre of short stories. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Dybek: “Bijou” and “Blight” (vol. 1), and “Pet Milk” (vol. 6). Shapard, Robert, and James Thomas, eds. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1986. The classic collection of the “short short” story. Includes Dybek’s short short “Sunday at the Zoo” as well as an afterword by Dybek on the genre. Ward, Robert. “A Review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.” Northwest Review 18 (Fall, 1980): 149-157. Weber, Katharine. “Windy City Dreaming.” The New York Times Book Review, May 20, 1990, 30. Reviews The Coast of Chicago, connecting memory, dreaming, and the dreamlike nature of Dybek’s stories.

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Ralph Ellison Born: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; March 1, 1914 Died: New York, New York; April 16, 1994 Principal short fiction • Flying Home, and Other Stories, 1996. Other literary forms • Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, is one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. Ellison also published two wellreceived collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which were combined into one volume in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995). In 1999, a posthumous edition of his long-awaited second novel was published as Juneteenth: A Novel. Achievements • Though he won a Rosenwald grant in 1945 on the strength of his short fiction, and though two of his short stories, “Flying Home” and “King of the Bingo Game,” are among the most commonly anthologized short stories in twentieth century American literature, Ralph Ellison is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award and the Russwurm Award. In 1975 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which in 1955 awarded him a Prix de Rome Fellowship. He received the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1970 and the National Medal of Arts in 1985. In 1984 he was awarded the Langston Hughes medallion by City College in New York for his contributions to arts and letters. Biography • Ralph Waldo Ellison was born March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City to Ida and Lewis Alfred Ellison, who had moved out of the South in search of a more progressive place to live. An ambitious student, he distinguished himself locally and was rewarded with a scholarship to attend the Tuskegee Institute, in part because the local white population did not want Ellison, an African American, to integrate the white colleges in Oklahoma. Unable to afford the fare to Alabama, he rode a freight train to Tuskegee, in which he enrolled in 1933. A voracious reader in college, he pursued interests in literature, history, and folklore. At the end of his junior year, Ellison, like the narrator of Invisible Man, was refused financial aid and so traveled to New York City, where he hoped to make enough money to finish his studies. While in New York, he met another African American author, Richard Wright, who encouraged Ellison’s literary ambitions, and instead of returning to Tuskegee, he began to contribute short stories and essays to various literary journals and anthologies. From 1938 to 1944, he worked with the Federal Writers Project, and in 1945, he was a awarded a Rosenwald grant to write a novel. The result was Invisible Man (1952), a landmark work in African American fiction that won for its author numerous honorary degrees, literary awards, and worldwide fame. Though Ellison would publish two well-received collections of essays, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, he would never follow up his first novel with a second in his lifetime. He began writing his next novel around 1958, and over the years he was to publish numerous excerpts from it as a work-in-progress. A fire at his Plainsfield,

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Massachusetts, summer home destroyed much of the manuscript in 1967, causing him to have to painstakingly reconstruct it. Though he was to work on this project for the rest of his life, he never found a final form for the novel with which he felt comfortable, and it remained unfinished when he died of a heart attack in 1994. His literary executor, John F. Callahan, published his short fiction in one volume as Flying Home, and Other Stories in 1996 and a selfcontained portion of his final novel as Juneteenth in 1999. Analysis • Because most of Ralph Ellison’s short fiction was written before his career as a novelist began, his short stories are often analyzed biographically, as the training ground for the novelist he was to become. This is not entirely unjustified beNational Archives cause a biographical overview of his literary output reveals that he tried out the voices, techniques, and ideas that he was to present so boldly in Invisible Man and almost completely abandoned the form after his success as a novelist, devoting himself to his essays and to his never-to-be-completed second novel. It is true that in his two most accomplished stories, “The King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home,” he develops themes of the chaos of the modern world and the affliction of racial conflict that would later be combined and expanded in his famous novel. On the other hand, his earlier stories show him working out many of the same ideas from different perspectives. Although the voice that informs his most accomplished work is a mature voice that is uniquely Ellison’s own, the voices in his other stories show more clearly the influences of Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Joyce. In relating his short fiction to his overall work, Edith Schor in Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison’s Fiction (1993) aptly observed that Ellison’s short stories provided experimental laboratories for testing the translation of the forms and experiences of African American life into literature. In evaluating the stories themselves, however, Robert Bone best summarized their lasting value when he observed in “Ralph Ellison and the Uses of Imagination” (1966) that Ellison’s short stories are about “adventurers” testing “the fixed boundaries of southern life.” Flying Home, and Other Stories • Flying Home, and Other Stories is a posthumous collection of stories edited by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, which brings together in one volume all of the principal short fiction Ellison wrote (excepting pieces that were published as excerpts of his novels). Callahan arranged the stories according to the age of the main characters, thereby highlighting the stories’

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thematic unity regarding the growth of young persons’ ideologies, which might not otherwise be evident. The collection opens with “A Party Down by the Square,” a story told in an intentionally flat style by a young man from Cincinnati who visits his uncle in Alabama and witnesses a lynching on a stormy night. Confused by the cyclone that moves through the town, an airplane pilot mistakes the fire of the lynching for an airport flare and flies too low through the town, knocking loose a wire and electrocuting a white woman. Undaunted, the crowd continues with the lynching and the anonymous narrator watches a nameless black man being burned, marveling at the victim’s resiliency but showing no moral awareness of the horror of the act. Four of the stories in the collection focus on two young friends, Buster and Riley, as they explore their world and their friendship. The first story, “Mister Toussan,” finds them making up imaginary exploits for Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture, a name they have heard but with which they have only vague associations and upon which they hang various fantasies. Similarly, “Afternoon” and “That I Had Wings” find the boys involved in imaginative games to stave off boredom. “A Coupla Scalped Indians” focuses on Riley, who has just been “scalped” (circumcised) at the age of eleven, having a sexually charged encounter with old Aunt Mack, an eccentric healer Riley sees naked in her shack as he is making his way home from a carnival. “All was real,” Riley tells the reader after leaving her shack, in wonderment about his discovery of the encroaching adult reality. “Hymie’s Bull” and “I Did Not Learn Their Names” are stories about riding freight trains, and together with “The Black Ball” and “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” they are about young men finding their way in a world that can be violent and harsh but that can also contain friendship and tenderness in unexpected places. The importance of learning to discern the tenderness amid the harshness of the world becomes the central theme of two of the most important stories in the collection, “In a Strange Land” and “Flying Home.” “King of the Bingo Game,” by contrast, is a story about a young man trying to make his way in a world that offers little in the way of tenderness and much in the way of danger. Though “Flying Home” and “King of the Bingo Game” are the most significant stories in this collection, the collection offers a startling group of works, each of which is a semiprecious jewel and which, when taken together, mark the growth of the author’s artistry. “King of the Bingo Game” • One of Ellison’s most durable statements about the harsh chaos of the modern world can be found in “King of the Bingo Game.” The main character is an unnamed black North Carolina man living in Harlem, who has wandered into a cinema in the hope of winning the door prize that might pay for a doctor for his wife. By playing his own and several discarded Bingo cards simultaneously, he manages to win the bingo portion of the game, which gives him the opportunity to spin the bingo wheel. While on stage, he spins the bingo wheel by pressing a button but is then unable to take the chance of letting the button go. Only double zero will win the jackpot of $36.90, and he realizes that so long as he keeps the wheel spinning, he has not lost, so he refuses to let the wheel stop. The wheel takes on the symbolic importance of a mandala, a wheel of life, something the main character realizes when he exclaims, “This is God!” Because he has taken much too long to let go of the button, security guards try to take it from him and knock him out in an altercation. The wheel stops at double zero, but as he fades into unconsciousness, he realizes that he will not get the prize he sought. Though this story is among Ellison’s

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harsher fictions, it is also one of his most poetic presentations of the unfeeling chaos of the modern world. “In a Strange Country” • Though not as artistically satisfying as the longer “Flying Home,” “In a Strange Country” tells a similar tale of self-discovery through the acceptance of a previously despised group identity. Parker is an intelligent black merchant seaman who lands in Wales during World War II only to be promptly attacked by a group of American soldiers simply for being a black man. A group of Welshmen, led by Mr. Catti, rescues him but not before his eye is injured and begins to swell. Over several drafts of ale, Catti learns that Parker is a music enthusiast and takes him to a singing club. There, Parker is swept up in the emotions of the songs about Welsh national pride but reminds himself that he is from Harlem, not Wales. He feels at first alienated and then deeply connected to the men around him, who, he believes, see his humanity much more clearly than do his fellow Americans who are white. As the evening is ending, the band begins to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” in his honor, and he finds himself singing along with deep feeling. On one hand, the “strange country” of the title is Wales, but on a deeper level, it is the part of himself that is opened up by the bonding of common humanity he shares with these Welshmen and which, for the first time in his life, disallows any easy cynicism. “Flying Home” • Ralph Ellison’s longest short story, “Flying Home,” is also his most richly satisfying accomplishment in the form. At the center of the story is Todd, a young black man whose lifelong dream of becoming a pilot crashes along with his plane when he flies into a buzzard on a training flight. Jefferson, an old black man who comes to Todd’s rescue after the crash, tells him the buzzards are called “jim crows” locally, setting up an important level of symbolism about what has really caused Todd’s crash. In fact, Todd has been training with the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black World War II pilots who trained at the famed Tuskegee Institute but were only reluctantly deployed for combat missions. For Todd, this crash landing on a routine flight almost certainly means he will never get another chance to fly and, in his mind, will become the common black man he considers Jefferson to be, the worst fate he can imagine for himself. Despite the younger man’s hostility, Jefferson distracts the injured Todd by telling him a story about dying, going to heaven, and flying around so fast as to cause “a storm and a couple of lynchings down here in Macon County.” In his storywithin-a-story, Jefferson is stripped of his wings for flying too fast and is sent down to earth with a parachute and a map of Alabama. Todd, seeing only that this story has been twisted to mirror his own situation, snaps, “Why are you making fun of me?”— which, in fact, the old man is not doing. A feverish dream into which Todd drifts reveals not only the depth of his lifelong desire to fly but also the power of his grandmother’s admonition: Young man, young man Yo arm’s too short To box with God. To Todd, becoming a pilot means taking a position higher than the majority white culture wants to allow black men of his time to occupy; it is the equivalent of box-

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ing with God in his mind. To have failed as a pilot means not only to have made a mistake but also to have let his entire race down, something he cannot allow to happen. So when Dabney Graves, the racist landowner on whose property Todd has crashed, arrives at the site, Todd snaps at the man and places his own life in danger. Jefferson, though, saves him by intervening and telling Graves that the Army told Todd never to abandon his ship. Graves’s temper is assuaged, and Jefferson and a young boy are allowed to take Todd to safety in a stretcher. The final image is of Todd watching a buzzard flying against the sun, glowing like a bird of flaming gold. This image suggests that though Todd will never fly again, his spirit will rise up like a phoenix from the ashes of his defeat, a victory made possible by the current of goodwill he can now allow himself to feel for Jefferson. Todd will begin to learn to love himself for who he is by loving others for who they are. Thomas Cassidy Other major works novels: Invisible Man, 1952; Juneteenth, 1999 (John F. Callahan, editor). nonfiction: Shadow and Act, 1964; The Writer’s Experience, 1964 (with Karl Shapiro); Going to the Territory, 1986; Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 1995 (Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, editors); The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 1995 (John F. Callahan, editor); Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, 2000; Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, 2001 (Robert O’Meally, editor). Bibliography Benston, Kimberly, ed. Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987. Useful resource of responses to Ellison’s fiction and essays. Also includes an extensive bibliography of his writings. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Ralph Ellison. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Though this widely available collection of essays focuses mainly on Invisible Man, it provides insights from which any reader of Ralph Ellison may profit, and Berndt Ostendor’s essay, “Anthropology, Modernism, and Jazz,” offers much to the reader of “Flying Home.” Bone, Robert. “Ralph Ellison and the Uses of Imagination.” Triquarterly 6 (1966): 3954. An important essay on the uses of transcendentalism and jazz in Ellison’s fiction and of his writing’s importance to the Civil Rights movement and black culture in general. Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Excellent introduction to Ellison’s life and work. Callahan, John F. Introduction to Flying Home, and Other Stories, by Ralph Ellison. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1996. Callahan’s introduction to this collection of fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in Ellison’s fiction, not only for the literary insights it provides but also for the basic editorial information about how these stories were selected and edited. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. The first book-length study of Ellison’s life. A good background source for the novelist’s early life and career. Jackson, however, ends his study in 1953, shortly after the publication of Invisible Man.

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May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Ellison: “Battle Royal” (vol. 1), “Flying Home” (vol. 3), and “King of the Bingo Game” (vol. 4). Schor, Edith. Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Published a year before Ellison’s death, this is an excellent fulllength study of the fiction that was generally available at the time, including his short fiction, which had not yet been collected in book form. This is probably the best place for the serious scholar of Ralph Ellison to begin. Skerret, Joseph. “Ralph Ellison and the Example of Richard Wright.” Studies in Short Fiction 15 (Spring, 1978): 145-153. An examination of the influence of Richard Wright on Ralph Ellison’s short fiction. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and AfroAmerican Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Chapters explore critic Harold Cruse’s influential interpretation of black intellectuals, the biographical background to Invisible Man, the relationship between the novel and black music, and the responsibilities of the black writer. Includes notes and a bibliography.

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Louise Erdrich Born: Little Falls, Minnesota; June 7, 1954 Principal short fiction • “The Red Convertible,” 1981; “Scales,” 1982; “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” 1982; “American Horse,” 1983; “Destiny,” 1985; “Saint Marie,” 1985; “Fleur,” 1987; “Snares,” 1987; “Matchimanito,” 1988; The Best American Short Stories 1993, 1993. Other literary forms • Louise Erdrich is probably best known for her novels, which include Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), The Antelope Wife (1998), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Four Souls (2004), and The Painted Drum (2005). She is also the author of several collections of poetry, including Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (2003), and a number of children’s books, including The Range Eternal (2002) and The Game of Silence (2004). In 1995, she published her first nonfiction book, a personal memoir of her daughter’s birth, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year (1995). Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country followed in 2003. Achievements • Several of Louise Erdrich’s stories have appeared in the annual The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards series. She received a Nelson Algren Fiction Award as well as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1982, the Pushcart Prize and the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1983, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1985, and a Western Literary Association Award in 1992. Her Love Medicine received the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times award for best novel, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and the American Book Award and was named one of the best eleven books of 1985 by The New York Times Book Review. Biography • Karen Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954, the first of seven children of a German father and Chippewa mother. A member of the first coeducational class at Dartmouth College in 1972, she received her bachelor’s degree in 1976. While teaching expository and creative writing on a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, she earned a master’s degree from The Johns Hopkins Writing Program in 1979. In 1980 she was a textbook writer for the Charles Merrill Company, and a year later, she became a visiting fellow at Dartmouth. On October 10, 1981, she married the writer Michael Dorris. In 1981, Erdrich published her first short story, “The Red Convertible,” in Mississippi Valley Review. Over the next two years, she published such award-winning stories as “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” and “Scales.” In 1984, she published her first collection of poetry, Jacklight, as well as her first novel, Love Medicine. In 1991, she coauthored The Crown of Columbus with her husband. In 1981, Erdrich became writer-in-residence at Dartmouth’s Native American Studies Program. She and Dorris later moved to Minneapolis and separated after fifteen years of marriage. During the divorce proceedings, Dorris committed suicide, on April 11, 1997. Although Erdrich has said that the success of her work was due in

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great part to the collaboration of her husband, she continued to be productive as a writer, especially in the long-fiction form. Between 1998 and 2005, she published five novels. Analysis • Just as fiction in general has opened up to a diverse ethnic spectrum of writers, so too has short fiction, and Louise Erdrich’s stories stand as excellent examples of contemporary Native American literature. Like Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, and Paula Gunn Allen, Erdrich has taken a place as one of the prominent female Native American authors of short fiction. Even among American Indian stories, Erdrich’s stand out for their multiethnic nature. Erdrich’s stories include not only Native American characters but also characters of German, Swedish, and other European descent. Likewise, many of the stories’ themes are not specifically Native American themes. Indeed, the themes of Erdrich’s stories range from the effects of war on families and personal identity to loss of heritage and family and personal relationships. Stylistically, Erdrich’s stories reveal many similarities to the stories of writers she has said had significant influence on her. The distinct sense of place, of character, and of history that colors the works of Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Italo Calvino is similarly prominent in Erdrich’s stories. She has said of Calvino that “the magic in his work is something that has been an influence,” which is clear especially in stories like “Fleur” and “Snares.” As Faulkner does with Yoknapatawpha County, Erdrich creates a world of the Chippewa reservation and the town of Argus, in which and around which nearly all of her stories occur. Many of her characters are employed repeatedly in her stories. Minor characters in one story may be the central characters in another or relatives of characters in one story are featured in later stories. Thus, most of Erdrich’s stories connect to create a fictional world, which appears as true as the real world. Erdrich has said that “the story starts to take over if it is good.” Her stories fulfill this criterion, capturing readers’ imagination and carrying them along on an intense mental ride. Her stories truly “touch some universals” that embrace readers of all ages, cultures, and beliefs. “The Red Convertible” • “The Red Convertible” is Erdrich’s first published story. Like many of her stories, this tale of two brothers later became a chapter in the novel Love Medicine. On the surface, the story appears to be merely a simple tale of two brothers and the car they share. Lyman Lamartine, a young Indian man with a “touch” for money, and his brother Henry save enough money to buy a used, red Oldsmobile convertible. Lyman tells the story, describing the early adventures he and his brother shared in the car. However, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that much more than the car is important in this story. Lyman describes how Henry changed when he returned home from the Vietnam War. While the family tries to help the deeply depressed Henry, Lyman tricks his brother into fixing up the car that he damaged. Although Henry does improve, even the car cannot save him, as he commits suicide in the end. In this story, the red convertible represents the freedom and innocence of youth, yet once those things are lost due to war in Henry’s case and due to the altered Henry in Lyman’s case, they cannot be regained; they must be let go. Although the story unfolds mainly on the reservation, part of its success is that the topic itself (the loss of innocence, the effects of war) is universal, which allows any reader to understand and be intrigued by the tale.

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“Saint Marie” • Like many of Erdrich’s stories, “Saint Marie” also became a chapter in Love Medicine. “Saint Marie” is the story of a young Indian girl, who goes to the Roman Catholic convent near the reservation so she might prove she is better than the other heathen Indians. MaTO VIEW IMAGE, rie tries very hard to keep Satan out PLEASE SEE of her life, yet one of the nuns, Sister Leopolda, believes Marie to be comPRINT EDITION pletely under the devil’s control. LeoOF THIS BOOK. polda proceeds to torture Marie to the point of stabbing her with a fork in order to expunge the evil. Yet to cover her madness, Leopolda lies to the other nuns, telling them that Marie must be touched by God as she has the signs of the stigmata on her hand; Marie must be a saint. However, Marie uses her knowledge of the truth of what happened to intimidate and humble Leopolda. Once Michael Dorris again, this is a story about loss of innocence, about the psychological effects of a traumatic event in a young person’s life. Similarly, Marie’s struggle with her beliefs and Leopolda’s madness are not necessarily specific to Native Americans, so many readers can access the story and enjoy it. “Destiny” • A story which later became part of The Beet Queen, “Destiny” describes Celestine Duval’s visit to see her granddaughter’s Christmas play. Wallacette, Celestine’s granddaughter, is a large, strong, impulsive girl, who intimidates the other children in her school and town. The destiny of the title is Wallacette’s destiny to be strong and independent, just like her grandmother. Celestine adores Wallacette, though she does not get along with Wallacette’s parents very well. In particular, there is bad blood between Celestine and her daughter-in-law, whose gelatin molds with vegetables in them are a source of great disgust for Celestine. The story turns comic when Wallacette hits a little boy she likes when he does not cooperate in the play, and it ends on a humorous note as Celestine reveals that the secret dish she had taken to the play with her daughter-in-law’s name on it was a gelatin mold with nuts and bolts in it. This story is very entertaining and universal in its depictions of family struggles and the pains of growing up. The psychological element still exists in this story, but some of the intense emotional pains are absent, which allows a humorous tone to come through. “Fleur” • “Fleur” presents the story of one woman’s multiple drowning experiences and her influence on the people around her. Told from the point of view of Pauline Puyat, this story later became a chapter in Tracks (1988). Pauline describes how Fleur Pillager drowned several times, and every man who rescued her ended up either

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crazy or dead. Pauline believes that Fleur has special magic powers, and she tells the story of the time Fleur left the reservation and went to the town of Argus. After beating a group of men at cards for a number of weeks, Fleur is attacked by the men in a smokehouse. Pauline stands by and watches the event, doing nothing to help Fleur. However, Fleur has her revenge when, in the midst of a storm that came from nowhere and touched nothing that Fleur valued, the men become locked in a meat freezer. Pauline believes that Fleur called up the storm. Although the story is about Fleur, it is also about Pauline. Pauline voices her own feelings and thoughts throughout the story, revealing the guilt she feels for not helping Fleur as well as the envy she feels toward this strong woman. Fleur is an enigma to Pauline, but she is also what Pauline seems to want to be in this story. “Matchimanito” • Though it was published after “Fleur,” “Matchimanito” is the story of how Fleur came to be the last living member of her family and what happened to her when she came back to the reservation from Argus. An old man, Nanapush, tells how he found Fleur amid her dead family and took her away to recover from the “spotted sickness.” This story reveals that Fleur is different from everyone else from the beginning. She is quiet yet powerful. Upon returning from Argus, she lives alone in a cabin next to Matchimanito, the lake, which fuels rumors about her relationship with the lake monster, Mishepeshu. However, Fleur soon attracts a young man, Eli Kashpaw, and they live as husband and wife by the lake. Fleur becomes pregnant, and her pregnancy sparks more rumors, as the child’s paternity is questioned. The birth of the child is difficult, and though many people believe that Fleur and her baby are dead, both live to prove them wrong. This is a powerful story because it demonstrates the strength of Fleur, the mixing of the old Indian ways with the new ones, the interaction of the community and individuals, and the history of both one person and a people. This story is particularly successful in its ability to show all of these things without force-feeding them to the reader. Keri L. Overall With updates by the Editors Other major works children’s literature: Grandmother’s Pigeon, 1996 (illustrated by Jim LaMarche); The Birchbark House, 1999; The Range Eternal, 2002; The Game of Silence, 2004. novels: Love Medicine, 1984 (revised and expanded, 1993); The Beet Queen, 1986; Tracks, 1988; The Crown of Columbus, 1991 (with Michael Dorris); The Bingo Palace, 1994; Tales of Burning Love, 1996; The Antelope Wife, 1998; The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, 2001; The Master Butchers Singing Club, 2003; Four Souls, 2004; The Painted Drum, 2005. nonfiction: The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year, 1995; Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, 2003. poetry: Jacklight, 1984; Baptism of Desire, 1989; Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, 2003. Bibliography Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Collects original essays focusing on Erdrich’s writings that

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are rooted in the Chippewa experience. Premier scholars of Native American literature investigate narrative structure, signs of ethnicity, the notions of luck and chance in Erdrich’s narrative cosmology, and her use of comedy in exploring American Indians’ tragic past. Davis, Rocío G. “Identity in Community in Ethnic Short Story Cycles: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julia Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. Discusses how Erdrich’s Love Medicine is in fact a cycle of short stories. Suggests that each chapter is a story with a different narrator, but the narrators’ voices combine to present a communal protagonist. An interesting concept and a useful way of understanding the stories as they stand on their own. Erdrich, Louise. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. This is a collection of twenty-five interviews with the couple and includes an interview with Joseph Bruchac. Ferguson, Suzanne. “The Short Stories of Louise Erdrich’s Novels.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 541-555. An excellent discussion of four short stories—“Saint Marie,” “Scales,” “Fleur,” and “Snares”—and how they were modified when they became chapters in the novels. Ferguson also argues that alone the short stories should be read differently than when they are presented as chapters in a novel. This is a good article for clarifying the differences between the short stories and their counterpart chapters in the novels. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Erdrich: “The Beet Queen” (vol. 1), “Fleur” (vol. 3), “The Leap” (vol. 4), and “The Red Convertible” and “Saint Marie” (vol. 6). Rebein, Robert. Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Study asserting that gritty realism has gained ascendancy over metafiction in American writing. Examines the works of Dorothy Allison, Annie Proux, Thomas McGuane, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and Louise Erdrich. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Thorough examination of ethnic trickster figures as they appear in the work of Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison. Chapter 3 explores the trickster characteristics of Old Nanapush, Gerry Nanapush, Lipsha Morrissey, Fleur Pillager, and others. Stookey, Lorena Laura. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Good study of Erdrich’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

Volume 2 William Faulkner — R. K. Narayan 379 – 758

edited by

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach

SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: Shawn Gearhart/©iStockphoto.com

Copyright © 1993, 1997, 2008, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Some essays in these volumes originally appeared in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition, 2001. New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Short story writers / edited by Charles E. May. — Rev. ed. v. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58765-389-6 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-390-2 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-391-9 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-392-6 (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Short story. 2. Short stories—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 3. Novelists—Biography—Dictionaries. I. May, Charles E. (Charles Edward), 1941PN3373.S398 2008 809.3’1—dc22 2007032789

First printing

printed in canada

Contents – Volume 2 Contents

Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv Faulkner, William . Fitzgerald, F. Scott Flaubert, Gustave . Forster, E. M. . . .

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Gallant, Mavis . . . . . . . García Márquez, Gabriel . Garland, Hamlin . . . . . Gogol, Nikolai . . . . . . Gordimer, Nadine . . . . Greene, Graham . . . . . Grimm Brothers . . . . .

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Harte, Bret . . . . . . Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hemingway, Ernest . . Hempel, Amy . . . . . Henry, O. . . . . . . . Hughes, Langston . . Hurston, Zora Neale .

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McCullers, Carson . . . Malamud, Bernard . . . Mann, Thomas . . . . . Mansfield, Katherine . . Mason, Bobbie Ann . . Maugham, W. Somerset Maupassant, Guy de . . Melville, Herman . . . . Mérimée, Prosper. . . . Mishima, Yukio . . . . . Mukherjee, Bharati . . . Munro, Alice . . . . . .

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Nabokov, Vladimir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 743 Narayan, R. K.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 752

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Complete List of Contents Complete List of Contents

Volume 1 Achebe, Chinua, 1 Adams, Alice, 7 Aiken, Conrad, 13 Alexie, Sherman, 20 Allende, Isabel, 24 Andersen, Hans Christian, 28 Anderson, Sherwood, 35 Angelou, Maya, 43 Atwood, Margaret, 48 Babel, Isaac, 58 Baldwin, James, 66 Bambara, Toni Cade, 73 Banks, Russell, 79 Barthelme, Donald, 86 Beattie, Ann, 96 Bellow, Saul, 104 Bierce, Ambrose, 112 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 118 Borges, Jorge Luis, 125 Bowen, Elizabeth, 136 Boyle, Kay, 143 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 152 Bradbury, Ray, 160 Callaghan, Morley, 173 Capote, Truman, 182

Carver, Raymond, 188 Cather, Willa, 198 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 205 Cheever, John, 220 Chekhov, Anton, 231 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 242 Chesterton, G. K., 250 Chopin, Kate, 258 Cisneros, Sandra, 264 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 271 Clarke, Arthur C., 277 Conrad, Joseph, 285 Coover, Robert, 295 Coppard, A. E., 303 Cortázar, Julio, 310 Crane, Stephen, 317 De la Mare, Walter, 327 Dinesen, Isak, 333 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 342 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 348 Dubus, Andre, 358 Dybek, Stuart, 364 Ellison, Ralph, 368 Erdrich, Louise, 374

Volume 2 Faulkner, William, 379 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 388 Flaubert, Gustave, 397 Forster, E. M., 407 Gallant, Mavis, 413 García Márquez, Gabriel, 420 Garland, Hamlin, 428 Gogol, Nikolai, 435 Gordimer, Nadine, 444 Greene, Graham, 453 Grimm Brothers, 461

Harte, Bret, 469 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 475 Hemingway, Ernest, 486 Hempel, Amy, 495 Henry, O., 499 Hughes, Langston, 505 Hurston, Zora Neale, 512 Irving, Washington, 519 Jackson, Shirley, 526 James, Henry, 533 xxv

Short Story Writers Jewett, Sarah Orne, 543 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 550 Joyce, James, 555 Kafka, Franz, 565 Kincaid, Jamaica, 576 Kingsolver, Barbara, 583 Kipling, Rudyard, 588 Lardner, Ring, 598 Lavin, Mary, 603 Lawrence, D. H., 611 Le Guin, Ursula K., 621 Lessing, Doris, 628 London, Jack, 636

McCullers, Carson, 641 Malamud, Bernard, 649 Mann, Thomas, 659 Mansfield, Katherine, 670 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 680 Maugham, W. Somerset, 687 Maupassant, Guy de, 695 Melville, Herman, 704 Mérimée, Prosper, 712 Mishima, Yukio, 717 Mukherjee, Bharati, 723 Munro, Alice, 734 Nabokov, Vladimir, 743 Narayan, R. K., 752

Volume 3 Oates, Joyce Carol, 759 O’Brien, Edna, 770 O’Connor, Flannery, 778 O’Connor, Frank, 788 O’Faoláin, Seán, 796 O’Flaherty, Liam, 803 Olsen, Tillie, 810 Ozick, Cynthia, 816 Paley, Grace, 823 Parker, Dorothy, 830 Perelman, S. J., 835 Petry, Ann, 841 Pirandello, Luigi, 850 Poe, Edgar Allan, 857 Porter, Katherine Anne, 867 Powers, J. F., 876 Pritchett, V. S., 881 Proulx, E. Annie, 891 Purdy, James, 896 Saki, 905 Salinger, J. D., 910 Saroyan, William, 919 Sillitoe, Alan, 925 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 931 Spark, Muriel, 941 Steinbeck, John, 948 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 954

Tan, Amy, 961 Taylor, Peter, 966 Thomas, Dylan, 973 Thurber, James, 981 Tolstoy, Leo, 987 Trevor, William, 998 Turgenev, Ivan, 1006 Twain, Mark, 1015 Tyler, Anne, 1022 Updike, John, 1029 Viramontes, Helena María, 1042 Vonnegut, Kurt, 1047 Walker, Alice, 1056 Warren, Robert Penn, 1066 Welty, Eudora, 1073 Wharton, Edith, 1083 Williams, Joy, 1090 Williams, Tennessee, 1095 Williams, William Carlos, 1103 Wolff, Tobias, 1109 Woolf, Virginia, 1116 Wright, Richard, 1123 Terms and Techniques, 1129 Time Line, 1140 Index, 1147 xxvi

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William Faulkner Born: New Albany, Mississippi; September 25, 1897 Died: Byhalia, Mississippi; July 6, 1962 Principal short fiction • These Thirteen, 1931; Doctor Martino, and Other Stories, 1934; The Portable Faulkner, 1946, 1967; Knight’s Gambit, 1949; Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner, 1950; Big Woods, 1955; Three Famous Short Novels, 1958; Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, 1979. Other literary forms • William Faulkner published nearly twenty novels, two collections of poetry, and a novel-drama, as well as essays, newspaper articles, and illustrated stories. His early work has been collected and his University of Virginia lectures transcribed. As a screenwriter in Hollywood, he was listed in the credits of such films as The Big Sleep (1946), To Have and Have Not (1944), and Land of the Pharaohs (1955). Achievements • William Faulkner is best known for his novels, particularly The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and As I Lay Dying (1930), all of which have been translated widely. A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962) won Pulitzer Prizes, and A Fable and the Collected Short Stories won National Book Awards. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949. Film versions have been made of several of his works: Sanctuary (1961), Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Sound and the Fury (1959), The Reivers (1969), and Pylon (1957; or Tarnished Angels). Others (Requiem for a Nun, 1951, and “Barn Burning”) have been filmed for television. Such attention attests to the fact that Faulkner has been one of the most influential writers in the twentieth century—both in the United States, where his work suggested to an enormous generation of southern writers the valuable literary materials that could be derived from their own region, and in Europe, particularly in France. He has had a later, but also profound, effect on Latin American fiction, most noticeably in the work of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, who seeks, as Faulkner did, to create a fictive history of a region and a people. Faulkner’s work has also been well received in Japan, which he visited as a cultural ambassador in 1955. Biography • William Faulkner spent most of his life in Mississippi, although as a young man he went briefly to Paris and lived for a time in New Orleans, where he knew Sherwood Anderson. He trained for the Royal Air Force in Canada during World War I, but the war was over before he saw action. He attended the University of Mississippi in Oxford for a year, where he published poems and reviews in a campus periodical; and after dropping out, he worked for a time in the university post office. He married Estelle Oldham, and they had a daughter, Jill. Except for periodic and often unhappy stays in Hollywood to work on screenplays—in order to support a large number of dependents—Faulkner lived and wrote in Oxford, where he had available to him in the town and surrounding countryside the prototypes for the characters that inhabit his major works. During the late 1950’s, he accepted a position as a writer-inresidence at the University of Virginia and traveled to Japan on behalf of the U.S.

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Department of State. Although his literary reputation waned in the 1940’s, when virtually all of his earlier works were out of print, Faulkner’s stature as a writer grew after 1946, when The Portable Faulkner was published by Malcom Cowley, and especially after 1950, when he accepted the Nobel Prize, when his collected stories were published, and when his novels began to be reprinted. Faulkner drove himself harder physically as he grew older, and he was troubled throughout his life with alcohol binges, into which he would often fall after completing a book. These factors contributed to his death in 1962. Analysis • William Faulkner has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in the process, suggesting to others how it might be used, he has also been credited with sparking the Southern Renaissance of literary achievement that produced much of the United States’ best literature in the twentieth century. In chronicling the tragedy of southern history, he delineated a vision tempered by his historical perspective that has freed the region from the popular conception of its character as possessing a universal gentility and a pervasive aristocracy, and he portrayed realistically a population often idealized and caricatured in songs, movies, and pulp fiction. In undercutting the false idealizations, Faulkner often distorted the stereotypes and rendered them somewhat grotesque in the interest of bringing them to three-dimensional life; and he attempted to show in the political and social presumptions of the South the portent of its almost inevitable destruction—first through war and then through an insidious new social order based on commercial pragmatism and shortsighted lust for progress. In this sense, the New South is shown to have much in common with mainstream America. Faulkner’s themes are often conveyed in an elaborate baroque style noted for its long, difficult sentences that challenge the reader to discern the speaker, the time, and even the subject of the narrative. Faulkner makes considerable use of stream-ofconsciousness interior monologues, and his frequent meshings of time reinforce his conviction that the past and present are intricately interwoven in the human psyche. “A Rose for Emily” • “A Rose for Emily,” frequently anthologized and analyzed, is probably Faulkner’s best-known story. Because of its elements of mystery, suspense, and the macabre, it has enjoyed a popular appeal. That Emily Grierson, an aging southern belle, murders the lover who spurned her and sleeps beside his decaying body for a number of years is only the most sensational aspect of the story. What is more interesting to the serious reader of Faulkner is the interplay between Emily Grierson and the two generations of townspeople who attempt to cope with her— one the old guard and the other a new generation with “modern ideas.” The opening paragraphs of the story inform the reader that when Miss Emily died, the whole town turned out for her funeral. She was a “fallen monument . . . a tradition, a duty and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” The townspeople, who are by the time of Emily’s death mostly of a generation younger than her own, have never been able to incorporate her into their community. For them, as well as for their fathers, she has stood as an embodiment of an older ideal of southern womanhood—even though in her later years she has grown obese, bloated, and pale as dough. The older generation, under the mayoralty of Colonel Sartoris (“who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without

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an apron”), has relieved Miss Emily of her taxes and has sent its children to take her china-painting classes “in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sunday with a twenty-fivecent piece for the collection plate.” The new generation, however, is not pleased with the accommodations its fathers made with Miss Emily; it tries to impose taxes upon her and it no longer sends its children to take her lessons. Miss Emily has been encouraged in her ways by the old guard, however; she refuses to pay the town’s taxes, telling the representatives of the new generation to “see Colonel Sartoris,” who has been dead for ten years. The town is unable to handle Emily; it labels her “insane” and likewise comes to see her as the ghost of a feminine ideal out of the past. She becomes a recluse, living alone in her house with her black servant; and in her claim to privilege and impunity, she stands as a re© The Nobel Foundation minder to the town of the values— and sins—of its fathers, which are visited upon the third generation. It is tempting to think of Miss Emily as merely a decadent and perverse relic of the South’s antebellum past; indeed, this is how the story has often been read. Such a neat interpretation, however, would seem to be defeated by the time element in the story. Emily lives in a house spiraled and cupolaed in the architectural style of the 1870’s, on a once-elegant street that has been altered by industry and commercial development. Although the rickety town fathers of the Civil War era (1861-1865) come to her funeral dressed in their dusty uniforms and even believe that she was of their own generation and that they had danced with her when she was a young woman, clearly Emily is not of that generation; she is of the postwar South. She has not lingered as a relic from a warped racist culture; she has instead been created by defeated members of that culture who have continued to yearn after a world they have lost, a world that might well have existed largely in their imaginations, but a concept so persistent that the newer generation, for all its modern ideas, is powerless to control it. The reader is told that the town had long thought of Emily and her dead father “as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the backflung front door.” It is clear that the newer generation of the twentieth century has adopted certain popular ideas about the Old South. This “tableau” could serve as the dust jacket for any number of romantic novels set in the plantation days. Thus, the two generations are complicit in ignoring the real Emily and creating

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and maintaining the myth of Emily as an exemplum of southern womanhood from a lost age, just as the town aldermen—“three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation“—have conspired to cover up Emily’s horrible crime. When the smell of the corpse of Emily’s decaying lover, Homer Barron, had become so strong that it could no longer be ignored by the town, the aldermen had scattered lime around Emily’s house secretly at night, although they knew she had recently purchased arsenic from the druggist and that Barron had disappeared; and when the smell went away, so did the town’s concern about the matter. The old guard cannot bear, and does not wish, to accept the grim essence of the dream it has spun; the new generation, under the influence of the old, grudgingly accepts its burden of the past, but then wrenches it into a romantic shape that obscures the “fat woman in black” (overindulgent, moribund) that is Emily Grierson. The story, then, is a comment on the postbellum South, which inherited the monstrous code of values, glossed over by fine words about honor and glory, that characterized the slave era; that postbellum South learns to ignore the unsavory elements of its past by ignoring Emily the recluse and murderess and by valorizing the romantic “tableau.” This is, however, a complex matter. The new generation—a generation excluded from the nominal code of honor, valor, and decorum that the old Confederates believed to have sustained them and excluded from the benefits that were to be gained from the slave system of the “glorious” Old South—sees the Griersons as “high and mighty,” as holding themselves “a little too high for what they really were.” The new generation, pragmatic and small-minded, for the most part, has inherited a landscape sullied by cotton gins and garages. Miss Emily Grierson, as a privileged person and as a reminder of what the older generation forfeited in its defeat, is a goad in the minds of the uncharitable newer generation, which, when she does not marry, is “vindicated.” When it hears the rumor that she has inherited nothing but the decaying house from her father, it is glad: “At last they could pity Miss Emily.” Miss Emily out of sight, destitute, “insane,” and deprived too of the lost legacy of the Old South can be re-created as a fictional heroine in white, part of the backdrop against which the popularized hero, her father, stands with his horsewhip—a faceless silhouette, cruel and powerful, an “ancestor” who can be claimed by the dispossessed generation as its own. The incestuous image of the father and daughter suggests the corrupt nature of the New South, which, along with the corrupt nature of the Old South, is a favorite Faulknerian concern. Granted, the “tableau” on the face of it appears to be the cover of a romantic novel, and in that sense it seems to be merely a popular rendering of history; but it is the townspeople who arrange father and daughter in the lurid scene. It is the men of the new generation who black out the distinguishing features of Emily’s dead father in their creation of the tableau, leaving a dark masculine space (more, one would guess, in the shape of foreman Homer Barron than of Mr. Grierson) into which they can dream themselves, as masters of a glorious age, as potent heroes for whom the wispy heroine wanes in the background. The newer generation has the “modern ideas” bred of the necessity of surviving in the defeated, industrialized South; but in its attitudes toward Emily Grierson, it reveals the extent to which the old decadent values of the fathers have been passed along. The narrator of the story, one of the townspeople himself, has proved unreliable. Although it is true that Emily seems to be “a tradition, a duty, a care, . . . an hereditary obligation,” a relic of the past miraculously sprung into being in spite of the disparity between her time and the historical time with which she is associated, the narrator only

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inadvertently reveals the truth of the matter: that both generations of the town are guilty of the desires and misplaced values that not only allow Miss Emily the murderess to come into being but also lead them to cover her crime and enshrine her in a tableau into which they, in their basest longings, can insert themselves. There is an incestuousness to all of this, an unhealthy interbreeding of values that allows each generation to perform despicable acts in the process of maintaining its ideas of what it would like to be. It is true that Emily is a “fallen monument”; but what the narrator fails to spell out explicitly is that the monument has been erected not only by the historical grandeur of her family, but also by the dispossessed generations that interpret her to their own ends. The monument is toppled by death, not by an ethical evolution in the town. The narrator is redeemed to some extent by “his” pity for Emily and by the recognition that the town, by driving her into mad isolation, has treated her badly. As for Emily herself, she would seem to represent the worst elements of her neighbors, carried to their extreme conclusions. As the antebellum masters of the slaves presumed an all-powerfulness that allowed them to believe that they could own people, so does Miss Emily presume. Alive, Homer Barron—the outsider, the Yankee, a curious vitality in the pallid town—is outside Miss Emily’s control. Dead, however, she can own him, can dress his corpse like a groom, can sleep beside him perhaps every night at least until her hair turns gray. As the new generation can blind itself to unpleasant truths about its history and itself, so can Emily become lost in delusion: Her father, dead for three days, is proclaimed not dead and she refuses to bury him; Homer’s corpse is a “groom” (and, perhaps in some further depraved vision, connected with the dead father). Emily represents not only the decadence of Colonel Sartoris’s racist era but also the decadence of the “modern” generation’s use of that era. Thus “A Rose for Emily,” often dismissed as Faulkner’s ghost story, proves to be a clear expression of a recurring motif in Faulkner’s works: the complexity of the connections between the present and the past. “The Bear” • These connections are explored in a less sensational manner in “The Bear.” This story, which Faulkner also made the centerpiece of his novel Go Down, Moses, is another of the most anthologized, most studied pieces of Faulkner’s short fiction. Composed of five sections (although often only four are printed in anthology versions, the long and complex fourth section being omitted), “The Bear” covers the history of Isaac (Ike) McCaslin, heir to the land and to the shame of his slave-owner grandfather, L. P. C. McCaslin, who committed incest with his illegitimate daughter, thereby driving her mother to suicide. After discovering this horrifying ghost in old plantation ledgers, Ike feels bound to repudiate the inheritance that has descended to him from his grandfather—even though the repudiation costs him his wife and any hope of progeny—in an attempt to expiate his inherited guilt and to gain a measure of freedom from the vicious materialism that brought the slavery system into being. Thus he allows his patrimony to pass to his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, who plays devil’s advocate in Ike’s attempt to understand the South and his own place in it, the tragedy of the blacks and of his own class, and the significance of what he possesses without inheriting: an instinctual knowledge of nature and an infallible sense of what is just. “The Bear” may be seen as a hunting story, part of the Big Woods collection that includes “The Bear Hunt” and “Race at Morning.” As a hunting story it is concerned with Ike’s maturing, with his pilgrimage year after year to the hunting grounds where he and a group of adult hunters stalk the ancient bear, Old Ben, an enduring symbol

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of nature. Ike’s guide and teacher is Sam Fathers, an aging Native American who still holds a sure instinct for the truths to be found in nature, and under whose tutelage Ike comes to form a system of values that later will lead him to renounce his inheritance. From Sam, Ike acquires a sense of nature’s terms and of humanity’s need to meet her on her own terms—of the necessity of according dignity to the force of nature and to all creatures through whom it courses. To meet the embodiment of that force in Old Ben, Ike must leave behind the instruments of civilization: the gun, the compass, the watch. Eventually Ike is able to track down Old Ben with regularity, but even when he encounters the bear and is armed, he refuses to shoot it. It would seem that the proof of nature’s endurance, represented in the bear, is of paramount concern to Ike. When Old Ben is finally killed and Sam Fathers dies, the ritual of the hunt is over for Ike. Yet two years later, he returns to the woods and sees in its organic and deathless elements, which have incorporated the remains of Old Ben and Sam Fathers, a proof of nature’s dualistic power to absorb death and bring forth new life from it. This force is at the same time awesome and terrifying, and it must be revered and confronted if humanity is to live meaningfully. Even as Ike makes this last pilgrimage, however, a lumber company hacks away at the forest and a train cuts through the wilderness, underscoring the idea of the damage a materialistic civilization can do to even the most powerful aspects of nature. Faulkner shows an era of United States history passing—an era of abundance and of human appreciation of what nature requires from humanity in their mutual interest. When “The Bear” is examined from the point of view of the intricate fourth section, it goes beyond being merely a hunting story to comment profoundly on the passing age and that which is replacing it. The scene shifts from the vast wilderness of nature to the intense confines of Ike McCaslin’s consciousness, which struggles to find a way to atone for the sins of his ancestors and of his class. The entanglement of past and present here is more complex than it is in “A Rose for Emily,” for Ike must face the knowledge that bloods mingled in the past—black and white, slave and owner—have flowed in grossly inequitable courses to the present, as reflected in the sufferings of his mixed-blood relatives. Therefore, he renounces his patrimony, he sets out to redress old wrongs with his black relatives, and he seeks to give full recognition to the brotherhood he shares with these relatives by recognizing the strengths they contribute to his family and to southern society—the virtues of “pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity and love of children.” In contrast to the self-serving generation of postbellum townspeople in “A Rose for Emily,” Ike—also of that era—is a man of conscience. This is not to suggest, however, that Ike is particularly “modern” in his ideas; rather he has modeled himself on older examples of integrity, not only Sam Fathers but also his father and his uncle, who had turned over their own inherited house to their slaves and built a humbler cabin for themselves. In Ike’s own case, the personal sacrifices to integrity and conscience have been enormous—his wife’s love; his hope of a son to carry on his mission; living alone and ultimately uncertain that his sacrifice will bear fruit beyond his limited scope to influence events. Nevertheless, Faulkner illustrates through his invention of Ike McCaslin the extent to which idealism can flourish, even when constantly challenged by the grimmest vestiges of past evils. “Barn Burning” • “Barn Burning” is an inversion of “The Bear” in that its protagonist, ten-year-old Sarty Snopes, is seeking the world that Ike McCaslin wishes to repudiate. Not of the landed class, but the son of a tenant farmer who is always on the

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move because arson is his means of creating justice, Sarty associates the landed gentry with a “peace and dignity” and a civilized justice that is the direct opposite of the “fear and terror, grief and despair” that characterizes his life with his father, Ab Snopes. Ab uses fire as a weapon against the ruling class that he sees as the shaper of his economic fate, and he exhorts Sarty to be true to the blood ties which Ab sees as the only protection for his kind against the forces of an exploitative aristocracy. Sarty, however, rejects the “old blood” that he has not chosen for what seems to him a higher concept of fairness, and he longs to be free of his family and the turmoil it generates in his life. For Sarty, Major DeSpain is the antithesis of Ab. DeSpain owns the farm on which Ab has most recently contracted to work. To Sarty, DeSpain and his columned house, as big as a courthouse, represent not what Ab sees, the sweat of black and white people to produce someone else’s wealth, but the peace and dignity for which Sarty yearns and a system of justice that operates on principles of law rather than on personal revenge. Sarty’s view is based on a naïve trust in civilization that blinds his inexperienced eyes to the inescapable connections between wealth and the mechanism of civilization. Ab provokes a confrontation with DeSpain by deliberately tracking horse manure on an expensive rug. A series of moves and countermoves by Ab and DeSpain brings the pair to the point where, although DeSpain cannot begin to recover his loss from Ab, the local court nevertheless rules that Ab must take responsibility, within his means, for his act. This is enough to satisfy Ab yet again that the social system only works in behalf of the rich, and he sets out that night to redress this wrong by burning DeSpain’s barn. Sarty cannot bear to allow this injustice, and so he is torn between real loyalty to his family and commitment to an ideal of justice. Specifically, he must decide whether to support his father’s crime through silence or to betray the familial bond and warn DeSpain. Sarty chooses the ideal, warns DeSpain even as the barn begins to burn, and then flees the scene, unsure whether the shots he hears wound any of his family. Having made his choice, Sarty must set out alone to forge his own life. “Barn Burning” offers a helpful picture of how Faulkner sees the economics of the postbellum South, where the poor whites remain the underclass rivals of black sharecroppers. Faulkner shows in other works how a new social order eventually evolved in which the descendants of Ab Snopes slip into the defeated, genteel society like silent bacteria and take over its commerce, coming finally to own the mansions that had previously belonged to the DeSpains and Compsons and Sartorises. Again and again Faulkner reiterates that it was the corrupt systems of slavery and of the plantation that ultimately ensured the fall of the Old South. Yet his view of Snopeses—violent, relentless, insidious men and inert, cowlike women, who by their numbers and crafty pragmatism will wrench the land and the wealth from the depleted gentility—is hardly positive. In fact, “Barn Burning” is singular in that it is perhaps the only example of Faulkner’s fiction in which the Snopeses are depicted sympathetically without first being made to appear ridiculous. As is often the case, Faulkner is extremely sensitive to the young boy caught in a painful rite of passage—as true for Sarty Snopes as it is for Ike McCaslin, Lucius Priest, Chick Mallison, and others not of the threatening Snopes clan. Moreover, “Barn Burning” makes an interesting case for Ab Snopes as the pitiable creation of the landed aristocracy, who seeks dignity and integrity for himself, although his only chance of achieving either would seem to lie in the democratic element of fire as the one defense available to all, regardless of social class. In this story,

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Ab is placed in the company of Wash Jones, Joe Christmas, and other members of the underclass that Faulkner views with sympathy and whose portrayals are in themselves indictments of the civilization that has forced them to desperate means. Although none of these examples quite suggests the very humorous ends to which Faulkner often turns his southern materials, it should be remembered that he was highly aware of the potential for comedy in all the situations described here and that even such delicate matters as the tensions between the races and the revolution in the social order are, in Faulkner’s hands, as frequently the catalysts of tall tales and satire as they are of his most somber and lyrical prose. It is true that “A Rose for Emily” hints at a typically Faulknerian humor in that a whole town is turned on its end by the bizarre behavior of one of its citizens; but the grotesque nature of Miss Emily’s secret smothers the promise of comedy in the story. Those seeking to experience Faulkner’s comic voice are better served by reading such stories as “Shingles for the Lord,” “Mule in the Yard,” and “Spotted Horses.” In any case, whatever the mode Faulkner adopted in creating his Yoknapatawpha County and thereby re-creating the South, he produced a stunning body of work, and in both matter and style, his works have had an equally stunning impact on modern letters. Constance Pierce With updates by Terry Heller Other major works novels: Soldiers’ Pay, 1926; Mosquitoes, 1927; Sartoris, 1929; The Sound and the Fury, 1929; As I Lay Dying, 1930; Sanctuary, 1931; Light in August, 1932; Pylon, 1935; Absalom, Absalom!, 1936; The Unvanquished, 1938; The Wild Palms, 1939; The Hamlet, 1940; Go Down, Moses, 1942; The Bear, 1942 (novella); Intruder in the Dust, 1948; Requiem for a Nun, 1951; A Fable, 1954; The Town, 1957; The Mansion, 1959; The Reivers, 1962; The Wishing Tree, 1964 (fairy tale); Flags in the Dust, 1973 (original version of Sartoris); Mayday, 1976 (fable). miscellaneous: The Faulkner Reader, 1954; William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, 1962. nonfiction: New Orleans Sketches, 1958; Faulkner in the University, 1959; Faulkner at West Point, 1964; Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, 1965; The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962, 1966 (Malcolm Cowley, editor); Lion in the Garden, 1968; Selected Letters, 1977. poetry: The Marble Faun, 1924; A Green Bough, 1933. screenplays: Today We Live, 1933; To Have and Have Not, 1945; The Big Sleep, 1946; Faulkner’s MGM Screenplays, 1982. Bibliography Fargnoli, A. Nicholas, and Michael Golay. William Faulkner A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2001. Encyclopedic reference work covering Faulkner’s life and writings, with entries on individual short stories, characters, and much more. Ferguson, James. Faulkner’s Short Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Attempt to redress the critical neglect of Faulkner’s short fiction. Discusses Faulkner’s poetic and narrative impulses, his themes of loss of innocence, failure to love, loneliness, and isolation; comments on his manipulation of time and

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point of view and how his stories relate to his novels. Ford, Marilyn Claire. “Narrative Legerdemain: Evoking Sarty’s Future in ‘Barn Burning.’” The Mississippi Quarterly 51 (Summer, 1998): 527-540. In this special issue on Faulkner, Ford argues that Faulkner experiments with the doubling of perspective in “Barn Burning” in which the omniscient narrator fuses with the protagonist to create a story with multiple narrative layers. Gray, Richard. The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1994. A noted Faulkner scholar, Gray closely integrates the life and work. Part 1 suggests a method of approaching Faulkner’s life, part 2 concentrates on his apprentice years, part 3 explains his discovery of Yoknapatawpha and the transformation of his region into his fiction, part 4 deals with his treatment of past and present, part 5 addresses his exploration of place, and part 6 analyzes his final novels, reflecting on his creation of Yoknapatawpha. Includes family trees, chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Conversations with William Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Part of the Literary Conversations series, this volume gives insight into Faulkner the person. Includes bibliographical references and index. Jones, Diane Brown. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of William Faulkner. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Discusses more than thirty of Faulkner’s stories in terms of publishing history, circumstances of composition, sources/influence, and relationship to other Faulkner works; includes interpretations of the stories and summarizes and critiques previous criticism. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Faulkner: “Barn Burning” (vol. 1), “Delta Autumn” and “Dry September” (vol. 2), “Red Leaves” and “A Rose for Emily” (vol. 6), “Spotted Horses” and “That Evening Sun” (vol. 7), and “Wash” (vol. 8). Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Shorter and less detailed than Joseph Blotner’s biography, this volume gives more attention to exploring connections between Faulkner’s life and his works. The Mississippi Quarterly 50 (Summer, 1997). A special issue on Faulkner, including articles that discuss displaced meaning, dispossessed sons, the wilderness and consciousness, and subjectivity in Go Down, Moses. Singal, Daniel J. William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Study of the thought and art of Faulkner, charting the development of his ideas from their source in his reading to their embodiment in his writing. Depicts two Faulkners: the country gentleman and the intellectual man of letters. Wagner-Martin, Linda. New Essays on “Go Down, Moses.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. After an introduction that summarizes contemporary reception and critical analysis of Go Down, Moses, Wagner-Martin collects essays that approach the work from the perspective of race, environment, gender, and ideology.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Born: St. Paul, Minnesota; September 24, 1896 Died: Hollywood, California; December 21, 1940 Principal short fiction • Flappers and Philosophers, 1920; Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922; All the Sad Young Men, 1926; Taps at Reveille, 1935; The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1951; Babylon Revisited, and Other Stories, 1960; The Pat Hobby Stories, 1962; The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1907-1917, 1965; The Basil and Josephine Stories, 1973; Bits of Paradise, 1974; The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1979; Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories, 2001 (Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor). Other literary forms • Four novels, four short-story collections, and a play make up the nine F. Scott Fitzgerald books published in his lifetime. They were issued in uniform editions by Scribner’s with a British edition of each. His short stories were widely anthologized in the 1920’s and 1930’s in collections such as The Best Short Stories of 1922, Cream of the Jug, and The Best Short Stories of 1931. The Vegetable: Or, From President to Postman (1923) was produced at the Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City, and, while Fitzgerald was under contract to MGM, he collaborated on such screenplays as Three Comrades, Infidelity, Madame Curie, and Gone with the Wind. There have been numerous posthumous collections of his letters, essays, notebooks, stories, and novels; and since his death there have been various stage and screen adaptations of his work, including film versions of The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934). Achievements • F. Scott Fitzgerald, considered “the poet laureate of the Jazz Age,” is best remembered for his portrayal of the “flapper” of the 1920’s, a young woman who demonstrated scorn for conventional dress and behavior. Fitzgerald’s fiction focuses on young, wealthy, dissolute men and women of the 1920’s. His stories written for popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and, later, Esquire were very much in demand. Fitzgerald’s literary reputation, however, is chiefly based on the artistry of stories such as “Babylon Revisited” and “The Rich Boy,” as well as the novel The Great Gatsby. In this important novel, Fitzgerald uses rich imagery and symbolism to portray lives of the careless, restless rich during the 1920’s and to depict Jay Gatsby as the personification of the American Dream, the self-made man whose quest for riches is also a futile quest for the love of the shallow, spoiled Daisy. Biography • F. Scott Fitzgerald was educated at St. Paul Academy and at the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey. While attending Princeton University he wrote for the Princeton Tiger and Nassau Literary Magazine. He left Princeton without a degree, joined the Army, and was stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre. In 1920, they were married in New York City before moving to Westport, Connecticut. Their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born in 1921. During the mid1920’s the Fitzgeralds traveled extensively between the United States and Europe, meeting Ernest Hemingway in Paris in 1925. The decade of the 1930’s was a bleak one for the Fitzgeralds; Zelda had several emotional breakdowns and Scott sank into alcoholism. They lived variously in Montgomery and on the Turnbull estate outside

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Baltimore. Fitzgerald went to Hollywood for the second time in 1931. After that they lived for a time in Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda was hospitalized and where Fitzgerald wrote the Crackup essays for Esquire. In 1937, Fitzgerald met Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham while he was living in Hollywood and writing under contract to MGM. Although he remained married to Zelda, he fell in love with Graham and lived with her through his remaining years. He began writing The Last Tycoon in 1939 and died, before it was completed, on December 21, 1940, at the age of forty-four. Analysis • F. Scott Fitzgerald was a professional writer who was also a literary artist. In practical terms this meant that he had to support himself by writing short stories for popular magazines in order to get sufficient income, according to him, to write decent books. Indeed, most of the money that FitzLibrary of Congress gerald earned by writing before he went to Hollywood in 1937 was earned by selling stories to magazines. In his twenty-year career as a writer, he published 164 magazine stories; other stories were never published. All but eight of the stories that originally appeared in magazines became available in hardcover editions. As one would expect of a body of 164 stories written in a twenty-year period mainly for popular consumption, the quality of the stories is uneven. At the bottom of this collection are at least a dozen stories, most of them written for Esquire during the last years of his life, which have few redeeming qualities; at the top of the list are at least a dozen stories which rank among the best of American short stories. One should not, however, be led to believe that these, as well as the hundred or more “potboilers” in the middle, do not serve a useful role in his development as an artist. Fitzgerald in the 1920’s was considered the best writer of quality magazine fiction in America, and his stories brought the highest prices paid by slick magazines; the Saturday Evening Post, for example, paid him four thousand dollars per story even during the Depression. The noted wit Dorothy Parker commented that Fitzgerald could write a bad story, but that he could not write badly. Thus each story, no matter how weak, has the recognizable Fitzgerald touch—that sparkling prose which Fitzgerald called “the something extra” that most popular short stories lacked. Fitzgerald also learned at the beginning of his career that he could use the popular magazines as a workshop for his novels, experimenting in them with themes and techniques which he would

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later incorporate into his novels. An understanding of a Fitzgerald story should take into account this workshop function of the story as well as its artistic merits. Fitzgerald’s career as a writer of magazine fiction breaks logically into three periods: 1919-1924, years during which he shopped around for markets and published stories in most of the important periodicals of the times; 1925-1933, the central period characterized by a close association with the Saturday Evening Post—a relationship which almost precluded his publication of stories in other magazines; and 19341940, a period beginning with the publication of his first Esquire story and continuing through a subsequent relationship with that magazine which lasted until his death. During the first of these periods, Fitzgerald published thirty-two stories in ten different commercial magazines, two novels (This Side of Paradise, 1920, and The Beautiful and Damned, 1922), two short-story collections (Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age), and one book-length play (The Vegetable). In the second period, during which The Great Gatsby and a third short-story collection (All the Sad Young Men) appeared, he enjoyed the popular reputation he had built with readers of the Saturday Evening Post and published forty-seven of the fifty-eight stories which appeared during this nine-year period in that magazine; the remaining eleven stories were scattered throughout five different magazines. In the final period, Fitzgerald lost the large Saturday Evening Post audience and gained the Esquire audience, which was smaller and quite different. Of the forty-four Fitzgerald stories to appear between 1934 and his death, twenty-eight appeared in Esquire. In addition to Tender Is the Night, which was completed and delivered before Fitzgerald’s relationship with Esquire began, Fitzgerald published his final short-story collection (Taps at Reveille); he also drafted The Last Tycoon (1941) during the Esquire years. Twelve stories, nine of which have appeared in Esquire, have been published since his death. An obvious conclusion may be drawn about Fitzgerald’s professional career: He was at his best artistically in the years of his greatest popularity. During the composition of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s commercial fiction was in such demand that large magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Hearst’s, and Metropolitan competed for it. Tender Is the Night was written during the time when Fitzgerald’s popularity with slick magazine readers was at its all-time high point; for example, in 1929 and 1930, important years in the composition of Tender Is the Night, he published fifteen stories in the Saturday Evening Post. In sharp contrast to the 1925-1933 stories, which are characteristically of an even, high quality, and many of which are closely related to two novels of this period, the stories of the Esquire years are, in general, undistinguished. In addition, with minor exceptions, the stories written in this final period have little relation to Fitzgerald’s last “serious” work, The Last Tycoon. The Esquire years thus constitute a low point from both a popular and an artistic standpoint. They are years during which he lost the knack of pleasing the large American reading public and at the same time produced a comparatively small amount of good artwork. In the first two years of Fitzgerald’s storywriting, his sensitivity to audience tastes was naïve. “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” not only the two best stories from these years but also two of the best stories in the Fitzgerald canon, were written for sale to mass-circulation magazines. Both, however, were too cynical about American values to be acceptable to a large, middle-American audience. By 1922 and the publication of “Winter Dreams” in Metropolitan, Fitzgerald had learned how to tailor his stories for slick magazine readers while at the same time using them to experiment with serious subjects and themes that he would later use in longer works.

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“Winter Dreams” • Viewed in association with The Great Gatsby, “Winter Dreams” provides an excellent illustration of Fitzgerald’s method of using his stories as a proving ground for his novels. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald describes “Winter Dreams” as a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea,” and indeed, it contains sufficient similarities of theme and character to be called a miniature of The Great Gatsby. Parallels between Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby are striking: Both men have made a total commitment to a dream, and both of their dreams are hollow. Dexter falls in love with wealthy Judy Jones and devotes his life to making the money that will allow him to enter her social circle; his idealization of her is closely akin to Gatsby’s feelings for Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby’s idealized conception of Daisy is the motivating force that underlies his compulsion to become successful, just as Dexter’s conception of Judy Jones drives him to amass a fortune by the time he is twenty-five. The theme of commitment to an idealized dream that is the core of “Winter Dreams” and The Great Gatsby, and the similarities between the two men point up the close relationship between the story and the novel. Because “Winter Dreams” appeared three years before The Great Gatsby, its importance in the gestation of the novel cannot be overemphasized. Important differences in Fitzgerald’s methods of constructing short stories and novels emerge from these closely related works. Much of the effectiveness of The Great Gatsby lies in the mystery of Gatsby’s background, while no such mystery surrounds the early life of Dexter Green. In “Winter Dreams,” Dexter’s disillusionment with Judy occurs suddenly; when he learns that she is no longer pretty, the “dream was gone. Something had taken it from him . . . the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. . . . Why these things were no longer in the world!” Because his enchantment could be shattered so quickly, Dexter’s commitment to Judy is not of the magnitude of Gatsby’s commitment to Daisy. Gatsby’s disenchantment could only occur gradually. When he is finally able to see Daisy, “the colossal significance of the green light . . . vanished forever,” but his “count of enchanted objects” had only diminished by one. Even toward the end of the novel, there is no way of knowing that Gatsby is completely disenchanted with Daisy. Nick says that “perhaps he no longer cared.” The “perhaps” leaves open possibilities of interpretation that are closed at the end of “Winter Dreams.” Although Dexter can cry at the loss of a dream, Gatsby dies, leaving the reader to guess whether or not he still held on to any fragment of his dreams about Daisy. The expansiveness of the novel obviously allowed Fitzgerald to make Gatsby and his dream believable while he could maintain the mystery of Gatsby’s past and the origins of his dream. Fitzgerald could not do this as well with Dexter in “Winter Dreams.” The point is that in writing “Winter Dreams” Fitzgerald was giving shape to his ideas about Jay Gatsby, and, after creating the story, he could better see the advantages of maintaining the sense of mystery that made Gatsby a more memorable character than his counterpart in “Winter Dreams.” “The Rich Boy” • Like “Winter Dreams,” “The Rich Boy,” published a year after The Great Gatsby, clearly illustrates the workshop function that the stories served. The story’s rich boy, Anson Hunter, falls in love with the beautiful and rich Paula Legendre, but he always finds some reason for not marrying her, although he maintains that his love for her never stops. Anson, the bachelor, ironically becomes an unofficial counselor to couples with martial difficulties and, in his role as protector of the family name, puts an end to an affair that his aunt is having. Paula marries an-

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other man, divorces him, and, when Anson encounters her late in the story, he finds her happily remarried and pregnant. Paula, whose revered place has been jeopardized by her pregnancy, finally dies in childbirth, symbolically taking with her Anson’s youth. He goes on a cruise, disillusioned that his only real love is gone. Yet he is still willing to flirt with any woman on the ship who will affirm the feeling of superiority about himself that he cherishes in his heart. In “The Rich Boy,” then, Fitzgerald uses many of the themes—among them, lost youth and disillusionment in marriage—that he had covered in previous stories; in addition, he uses devices such as the narrator-observer point of view that had been successful in The Great Gatsby, and he pulls from the novel subjects such as the idealization of a woman who finally loses her suitor’s reverence. “The Rich Boy” also blends, along with the themes he had dealt with before, new topics that he would later distill and treat singly in another story, just as he first deals explicitly with the rich-are-different idea in “The Rich Boy” and later focuses his narrative specifically on that idea in “Six of One.” Finally, particularly in the use of the theme of bad marriages in “The Rich Boy,” there are foreshadowings of Tender Is the Night and the stories which cluster around it. “Babylon Revisited” • The best of these Tender Is the Night cluster stories is “Babylon Revisited,” which earned Fitzgerald his top Saturday Evening Post price of four thousand dollars and which is generally acclaimed as his finest story. “Babylon Revisited” represents a high point in Fitzgerald’s career as a short-story writer: It is an artistically superior story which earned a high price from a commercial magazine. In the story’s main character, Charlie Wales, Fitzgerald creates one whose future, in spite of his heroic struggle, is prescribed by his imprudent past, a past filled with heavy drinking and irresponsibility. He is destined to be haunted by reminders of his early life, embodied by Lorraine and Duncan, drinking friends from the past; to be judged for them by Marion, his dead wife’s sister who, like Charlie’s conscience personified, is disgusted by his past and demands punishment; and to be denied, for his penance, any right to fill the emptiness of his life with his daughter Honoria, who is in Marion’s custody and who is the only really meaningful thing left. Fitzgerald fashions Charlie as a sensitive channel through which the reader can simultaneously view both Paris as it existed for expatriate wanderers before the Depression and the now-dimmed Paris to which Charlie returns. The contrast is masterfully handled in that the course of Charlie’s emotional life closely parallels the changing mood of the city—a movement from a kind of unreal euphoria to a mood of loss and melancholy. The contrast at once heightens the reader’s sense of Charlie’s loneliness in a ghost town of bad memories and foreshadows his empty-handed return to Prague, his present home. All of Charlie’s present misery has resulted, in Fitzgerald’s precise summary, from his “selling short” in the boom—an allusion to the loss of his dead wife Helen. Charlie, however, refuses to be driven back to alcohol, even in the face of being denied his daughter Honoria. Although he might easily have done so, Fitzgerald avoids drawing the reader into a sentimental trap of identification with Charlie’s plight, the responsibility for and consequences of which must finally be borne only by Charlie. As he later did in Dick Diver’s case in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald has shown in “Babylon Revisited” how one man works his way into an existence with nada at the core; how he manages to dissipate, “to make nothing out of something,” and thus prescribe for himself a future without direction. It is also in the creation of this mood of Charlie’s isolation

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that the artistic brilliance of the story, as well as its kinship to Tender Is the Night, lies. The popular thrust of “Babylon Revisited” is a dual one in which Fitzgerald plays on what were likely to be ambivalent feelings of popular readers toward Charlie. On one hand, he is pictured first as an expatriate about whose resolution to remain abroad American audiences may have been skeptical. On the other, Charlie appears to have reformed and obviously loves his daughter. Marion, by contrast, is depicted as a shrew, and the reader is left to choose, therefore, between the punishment of a life sentence of loneliness for a penitent wrongdoer and the granting of his complete freedom and forgiveness rendered against the better judgment of the unsympathetic Marion. Fitzgerald guarantees that the reader will become emotionally involved by centering the story around the highly emotional relationship between a father and his daughter. Because Charlie is, in fact, guilty, to let him go free would be to let wrongdoing go unpunished—the strictest kind of violation of the Puritan ethic. To deprive Charlie of Honoria, however, would be to side with the unlikable Marion. Fitzgerald, then, resolves the conflict in the only satisfactory way—by proposing a compromise. Although Marion keeps Honoria for the moment, Charlie may be paroled, may come back and try again, at any time in the future. The story, therefore, is successful on three major counts: It served as a workshop in which Fitzgerald shaped the mood of Tender Is the Night; it entertained with the struggle against unfair odds of a well-intentioned father for the affection of his daughter; and it succeeded on the mythic level, suggested in the title, as a story in which all ingredients conspire to lead to Charlie’s exile—an isolation from the city that has fallen in the absence of a now-reformed sinner, carrying with it not only the bad but also the good which Charlie has come to salvage. Esquire Stories • About four years after the publication of “Babylon Revisited,” Fitzgerald had lost the knack of writing Saturday Evening Post stories, and he began writing shorter pieces, many of which are sketches rather than stories, for Esquire. Esquire, however, was not a suitable medium to serve a workshop function as the Saturday Evening Post had been. On the one hand, it did not pay enough to sustain Fitzgerald through the composition of a novel; even if it had, it is difficult to imagine how Fitzgerald would have experimented in the framework of short Esquire pieces with the complex relationships that he was concurrently developing in The Last Tycoon. Moreover, there is the question of the suitability of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon material, regardless of how he treated it, for Esquire: The Monroe Stahr-Kathleen relationship in The Last Tycoon, for example, and certainly also the Cecelia-Stahr relationship, would have been as out of place in Esquire as the Esquire story of a ten-year binge, “The Lost Decade,” would have been in the Saturday Evening Post. In short, Esquire was ill-suited to Fitzgerald’s need for a profitable workshop for The Last Tycoon, and it is difficult to read the Esquire pieces, particularly the Pat Hobby stories about a pathetic movie scriptwriter, without realizing that every hour Fitzgerald spent on them could have been better spent completing The Last Tycoon. From a practical standpoint, it is fair to say that the small sums of income for which Fitzgerald worked in writing the Esquire stories may have interfered with the completion of his last novel, whereas the high prices Fitzgerald earned from the Saturday Evening Post between 1925 and 1933 provided the financial climate that made it possible for him to complete Tender Is the Night. Indeed, if the Esquire stories in general and the Pat Hobby stories in particular, close as they were in terms of composition to The Last Tycoon, marked the distance

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Fitzgerald had come in resolving the professional writer-literary artist dichotomy with which he had been confronted for twenty years, any study of the function of the stories in Fitzgerald’s overall career would end on a bleak note. Two stories, “Discard” and “Last Kiss,” neither of which was published in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, indicate, however, that he was attempting to re-create the climate of free exchange between his stories and novels characteristic especially of the composition period of Tender Is the Night. “Last Kiss” provides a good commentary on this attempt. When the story appeared in 1949, the editors remarked in a headnote that the story contained “the seed” that grew into The Last Tycoon. The claim is too extravagant for the story in that it implies the sort of relationship between the story and the novel that exists between “Winter Dreams” and The Great Gatsby, a relationship that simply does not exist in the case of “Last Kiss” and The Last Tycoon. There are, however, interesting parallels. “Last Kiss” • Fitzgerald created in “Last Kiss” counterparts both to Monroe Stahr and Kathleen in The Last Tycoon. Jim Leonard, a thirty-five-year-old film producer in “Last Kiss,” is similar to Stahr in that he possesses the same kind of power: When the budding starlet, Pamela Knighton, meets Leonard, her agent’s voice tells her: “This is somebody.” In fact, on the Hollywood success ladder he is, in Fitzgerald’s words, “on top,” although, like Stahr, he does not flaunt this fact. Although Pamela is fundamentally different from Kathleen in her self-centered coldness, they also share a resemblance to “pink and silver frost” and an uncertainty about Americans. Kathleen is no aspiring actor, but her past life, like Pamela’s, has an aura of mystery about it. Moreover, the present lives of both are complicated by binding entanglements: Pamela’s to Chauncey Ward, and Kathleen’s to the nameless man she finally marries. There are other parallels: The first important encounter between Leonard and Pamela, for example, closely resembles the ballroom scene during which Stahr becomes enchanted by Kathleen’s beauty. In fact, the nature of Leonard’s attraction to Pamela is similar to that of Stahr’s to Kathleen; although there is no Minna Davis lurking in Leonard’s past as there is in Stahr’s, he is drawn to Pamela by the kind of romantic, mysterious force which had finally, apart from her resemblance to Minna, drawn Stahr to Kathleen. Moreover, both attachments end abruptly with the same sort of finality: Pamela dies leaving Jim with only film fragments to remember her by, and Kathleen leaves Stahr when she marries “the American.” The possibility that these parallels were the seeds of The Last Tycoon is small. The important point, however, is that “Last Kiss” is a popular treatment of the primary material that Fitzgerald would work with in the novel: Jim’s sentimental return to the drugstore where he had once seen Pamela and his nostalgic remembrance of their last kiss earmark the story for a popular audience which, no doubt, Fitzgerald hoped would help pay his bills during the composition of the novel. Fitzgerald was unable to sell the story, probably because none of the characters generates strong emotion. It is sufficiently clear from “Last Kiss,” however, that Fitzgerald was regaining his sense of audience. In the process of demonstrating how well he understood Hollywood, the story also captured much of the glitter that is associated with it in the popular mind. In order to rebuild the kind of popular magazine workshop that he had had for Tender Is the Night, it remained for him to subordinate his understanding of Hollywood to the task of re-creating its surface. If he had continued in the direction of “Last Kiss,” he would perhaps have done this and thus returned to the kind of climate which had in the past proven to be most favorable for his serious novel work—one in which he

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wrote handfuls of stories for popular magazines while the novel was taking shape. It is also possible that he might have used such stories to make The Last Tycoon something more than a great fragment. Regarding the role of the stories in Fitzgerald’s career, one can finally state that they functioned as providers of financial incentive, as proving grounds for his ideas, as workshops for his craft, and as dictators of his popular reputation. The problem for the serious student of Fitzgerald’s works is whether one should examine the popular professional writer who produced some 164 stories for mass consumption or limit one’s examination of Fitzgerald to his acclaimed works of art, such as “Babylon Revisited,” “The Rich Boy,” The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. To do one to the exclusion of the other is to present not only a fragmented picture of Fitzgerald’s literary output but also a distorted one. Just as the stories complement the novels, so do the novels make the stories more meaningful, and the financial and emotional climate from which they all came illuminates the nature of their interdependence. Bryant Mangum With updates by Mary Ellen Pitts Other major works play: The Vegetable: Or, From President to Postman, pb. 1923. novels: This Side of Paradise, 1920; The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; The Great Gatsby, 1925; Tender Is the Night, 1934; The Last Tycoon, 1941. miscellaneous: Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1958; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Princeton Years, Selected Writings, 1914-1920, 1996 (Chip Deffaa, editor). nonfiction: The Crack-Up, 1945; The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1963; Letters to His Daughter, 1965; Thoughtbook of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, 1965; Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, 1971; As Ever, Scott Fitzgerald, 1972; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger, 1972; The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1978; A Life in Letters, 1994 (Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor); F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, 1996; Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 2002 (Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, editors). Bibliography Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. In this outstanding biography, a major Fitzgerald scholar argues that Fitzgerald’s divided spirit, not his lifestyle, distracted him from writing. Bruccoli believes that Fitzgerald both loved and hated the privileged class that was the subject of his fiction. Eble, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A clearly written critical biography, this book traces Fitzgerald’s development from youth through a “Final Assessment,” which surveys scholarship on Fitzgerald’s texts. Gale, Robert L. An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Provides everything students should know about Fitzgerald’s life and works. Indispensable. Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Part of the Literary Lives series. Concise rather than thorough, but with some interesting details.

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Jefferson, Margo. “Still Timely, Yet a Writer of His Time.” The New York Times, December 17, 1996, p. C17. A brief biography of Fitzgerald on the occasion of his centennial year; calls him one of those rare artists with a cultural radar system that is constantly picking up sensations, responses, and fresh thoughts. Kuehl, John. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Part 1 discusses Fitzgerald’s major stories and story collections, part 2 studies his critical opinions, and part 3 includes selections from Fitzgerald critics. Includes chronology and bibliography. Mangum, Bryant. A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories. New York: Garland, 1991. Discusses all of Fitzgerald’s stories, both those in collections and those uncollected, focusing on their relationship to his novels and their role as a proving ground for his ideas. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eight short stories by Fitzgerald: “Absolution” and “Babylon Revisited” (vol. 1), “Crazy Sunday” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (vol. 2), “The Freshest Boy” (vol. 3), “May Day” (vol. 5), “The Rich Boy” (vol. 6), and “Winter Dreams” (vol. 8). Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. In this biography, which makes use of previously unknown materials about Fitzgerald’s life, Meyers discusses how such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and Joseph Conrad influenced Fitzgerald’s fiction. Petry, Alice Hall. Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Study of Fitzgerald’s short stories in relationship to his novels, American society, and his personal life. Summarizes and critiques critical reception to his short-story collections and discusses his relationship with his editor Max Perkins; analyzes all the major stories and a number of minor ones. Tate, Mary Jo. F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 1998. Comprehensive study of the man and his works. Provides bibliographical references and an index.

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Gustave Flaubert Born: Rouen, France; December 12, 1821 Died: Croisset, France; May 8, 1880 Principal short fiction • Novembre, wr. c. 1840, pb. 1885 (November, 1932); Trois Contes, 1877 (Three Tales, 1903). Other literary forms • Gustave Flaubert is best known for his novels Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886) and L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; A Sentimental Education, 1898), which offer a realistic view of life in his native Normandy and, in the latter somewhat autobiographical novel, in Paris. He also wrote narratives of his travels to the Pyrenees and Corsica in 1840 (1927), to Italy in 1845, and to Egypt and the Middle East in 1849-1851 (Notes de voyage, 1910). Much of the exotic material gleaned on these trips helped inspire La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1895) and Salammbô (1862; English translation, 1886), novels in which he fictionalized figures from history. Achievements • Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary may be regarded as the great French novel, but upon its publication, in 1857, it was attacked for its immorality, and a famous lawsuit attempted to suppress it. In a sense, Emma Bovary differs little from many heroines of earlier novels, who engaged in enough amorous adventures to attract avid readers but whose eventual punishment served to uphold a moral perspective sufficient to keep the books socially respectable. What is new in Madame Bovary, as in Flaubert’s other realist work, lies in the author’s style. His detailed documentation of the society in which Emma lived emphasized the hypocrisy endemic in that society. Careful control of physical description delineates the personalities of the various characters and creates a style that has strongly influenced subsequent writers. Flaubert’s realistic compositions form only one aspect of his literary production. His other works, closer to the romantic tradition of the historical novel, testify to his depth and versatility. Biography • Gustave Flaubert was the second of three surviving children of a provincial doctor. Although it was Gustave’s older brother, Achille, who would succeed their father in his medical practice, young Gustave accompanied his father even into the dissecting room, where he gained a knowledge of anatomy and a habit of close observation that would contribute to his future literary style. Unlike Emma’s husband, the inept country doctor Charles Bovary, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert was a respected professional. Even after his father’s death, Flaubert wrote to his mother from Egypt of his pleasure at meeting during his travels a man who knew and respected his father’s reputation. Flaubert began the study of law but discontinued in part because of his poor health. Epileptic, he had infrequent seizures, but despite his robust appearance, his friends and family sought to protect him from excess strain. Flaubert’s only sustained professional activity was as an author. Although he lacked other employment, he felt no particular pressure to rush his works into publication. During the years 1835

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to 1840, he composed a number of short pieces of prose, some fictitious and some personal memoirs, yet he published little. Most of these juvenilia were collected for publication only after his death. During 1843-1845, Flaubert composed the first version of his autobiographical novel, A Sentimental Education, which would finally be published in a considerably revised version in 1869. The story that it tells of young Frédéric Moreau and his frustrated love for an older, married woman parallels Flaubert’s own passion for the wife of Maurice Schlésinger, a financially successful bourgeois who provided a vehicle for the criticism of a materialistic society. Flaubert’s hesitation to publish increased in 1849 after reading the manuscript of The Temptation of Saint Library of Congress Anthony to his friends Maxima Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet, who harshly criticized it. In October, 1849, Flaubert and Du Camp set out together on a trip to Egypt and the Mediterranean coast as far as Constantinople. During the early part of this journey, Flaubert suffered from considerable depression, which he related to the poor reception of his book and doubts about his literary future. These doubts seem ironic in retrospect, given that in the fall of 1851 he was to begin writing Madame Bovary. Despite a lengthy relationship with Louise Colet, Flaubert never married. His numerous affairs may have been somewhat compromised after his tour of the Orient, however, in that he returned home suffering from syphilis. The publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 brought Flaubert both fame and notoriety because of the accusation of its immorality. During the remaining years of his life, Flaubert divided his time between his residence in Paris and his country house in Normandy. He also occasionally traveled to North Africa, the setting of his novel Salammbô published in 1862, and to Germany and England. In 1877, three years before his death, he published what are now his best-known short stories, in Three Tales. Analysis • Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales, published during the year 1877, when he was fifty-six years old, reflects the variety of styles of his literary production as a whole. “Un Cœur simple” (“A Simple Heart”) employs the Norman realism of Madame Bovary. “La Légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier” (“The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler”) reflects the preoccupation with exotic locales and the history of the early Christians evident in The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Flaubert’s travel narratives. “Hérodias” retains this exotic context while focusing on a singular heroine from the past, as Flaubert had done in Salammbô.

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These three texts, Flaubert’s only short fiction to be widely read, provide the usual choices for modern readers seeking an introduction to his work. Flaubert wrote them in a spontaneous burst of activity between September, 1875, and February, 1877, as if he were capping his career with a demonstration piece of his various styles. “A Simple Heart” • “A Simple Heart,” the life story of the good-hearted servant Félicité, draws its material from Flaubert’s own life. In 1825, a servant, Julie, joined the Flaubert household and may have provided a model for the character of Félicité. Critics have further suggested comparisons between Félicité and the old woman Catherine Leroux, who, in the Comices agricoles scene of Madame Bovary (part 2, chapter 8), is awarded “for fifty-four years of service on the same farm, a silver medal— valued at twenty-five francs.” Twenty-five francs may at that time have represented a fairly impressive sum but was nevertheless a mediocre value to place on fifty-four years of service. Flaubert, echoing his habit of undercutting both characters and social conventions with a final, damning detail, ends the official statement addressed to Catherine Leroux on this materialistic note. In “A Simple Heart,” as in Madame Bovary, the materialism of Norman society appears in the form of a continual preoccupation with money. Yet in both works, this harsh theme contrasts with a persistent romanticism linked to the vain hopes of the various characters. Cupidity in the form of jealousy appears in the very first sentence of “A Simple Heart”: “For half a century, the bourgeois women of Pont-l’Évëque envied Madame Aubain because of her servant, Félicité.” The motivations of characters throughout the story revolve around money, often to the disadvantage of trusting Félicité. Some figures appear prejudged, as society would have classified them economically, from their very first mention in the text. Thus, Madame Aubain’s uncle, an impoverished aristocrat who visits early in the second section of the story, “always arrived at lunch time, with a horrid poodle whose paws spread dirt on all the furniture.” Even the characters dearest to Félicité do not hesitate to hurt her when money is involved. When Félicité befriends Nastasie Barette, who does exploit her by accepting numerous presents, Madame Aubain cuts off this opportunity for friendship by decreeing their prompt return from Trouville to Pont-l’Évëque. Even Félicité’s beloved nephew, Victor, imposes on her generosity, although he does bring back to her gifts from his travels. His sudden departure on a voyage to the United States throws Félicité into despair, augmented by Madame Aubain’s insensitive incomprehension of her suffering when she learns of Victor’s death. Throughout, characters are defined, usually in a negative manner, by the objects that surround them, objects that often appear in themselves hostile. The initial description of Madame Aubain’s house in Pont-l’Évëque tells the reader that “it had interior differences of level that made people trip,” and the family members appear through the presentation of their rooms, where the “two children’s beds without mattresses” and the attic room of Félicité testify to the subordinate status of children and servants. Yet appearances can be deceiving, still with a bias toward the negative. Because of her harsh life and limited diet, Félicité “at the age of twenty-five appeared to be forty years old.” The considerable catalog of objects in these defining descriptions parallels Flaubert’s technique in Madame Bovary and echoes much of the realistic style of Honoré de Balzac, whose death in 1850 had appeared to Flaubert as a great loss.

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Thus, the detailed menu of the lunch at the Liébard farm recalls the even more expansive description in Emma Bovary’s view of the dinner at the château, and Virginie, after her death, survives in memory in her clothes—reminiscent of the wedding bouquet of Charles’s previous wife that greets Emma upon her arrival at the house at Tostes—clothes that Madame Aubain could bring herself to inspect only when “moths flew out of the wardrobe.” The central documentation, however, must be that of Félicité’s own room. Flaubert makes a significant decision to withhold this description until the very end of the story. The mention of Félicité’s room in the opening pages tells the reader only that it was in the attic and had a view over the fields. There is no description of the interior. By the time it is revealed, the room contains the debris of Félicité’s life and “had the appearance both of a chapel and a bazaar, as it contained so many religious objects and varied things.” The separation of the religious objects here from the others underlines their dual role. Religion, as will be seen, held great importance for Félicité, but the objects that represent her devotion share with the others in her room echoes of deterioration and loss. Further, the distinction blurs between religious and secular: “On the dresser, covered with a cloth like an altar, was a box made of seashells that Victor had given her.” She retains with religious veneration objects linked to her memories. Negative emphasis within the realistic catalog again parallels Madame Bovary. The determining events of Félicité’s unhappy memories grow from the same avaricious society that surrounded Emma. The one man she loved, Théodore, abandoned her to marry “a very rich old woman,” an action analogous both to Charles Bovary’s first, arranged marriage to Héloïse and to Paul’s later marriage in “A Simple Heart” to the daughter of a man who could help his career. Victor’s death, attributed to poor medical treatment of his case of yellow fever, recalls Charles Bovary’s unfortunate failure in the operation on Justin, and the heirs who pillage Madame Aubain’s house parallel the actions of Emma’s creditors. The most obvious negative emphases, however, result from a series of exclusions. The bad can be defined most easily by contrast with the good. Often, this ranking comes from the arbitrary expectations of society, expectations that Flaubert documented in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1910, 1913; Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 1954). Thus, Charles Bovary bought for Emma “a second-hand vehicle that, once equipped with new lanterns and pierced leather mud flaps, almost resembled a tilbury,” and at the beach at Trouville, Virginie “went swimming in a shirt, for lack of a bathing costume; and her maid dressed her in a customs-inspection cabin that served for the bathers.” Things, not allowed to be as they naturally exist, are described as “almost” something more prestigious. Those moments of high prestige in which the characters participate, however, disappear from the text. At Virginie’s funeral, for example, readers see the preparation of the body for the burial but not the more uplifting religious ceremony. Flaubert states simply, “after mass, it took three quarters of an hour to get to the cemetery.” Similarly, though romance dominates Emma Bovary’s life, Flaubert never shows her at the moment of central significance when she is a bride in church. Again, he emphasizes distance to be traversed: “The town hall being at half a league from the farm, they went there on foot, and came back in the same manner, once the ceremony was over at the church.” The last phrase, added almost as an afterthought, effectively deemphasizes what could have been the most positive moment of Emma’s life. One may certainly argue that liturgy, with its set patterns, need not

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be described in detail to be understood. Still, as Alphonse Daudet so aptly demonstrated in “Les Trois Messes basses,” the personal circumstances woven into each liturgy make it a unique event. This must hold especially true for both weddings and funerals. Although the drama of liturgical moments disappears from Flaubert’s texts, a current of romanticism persists throughout “A Simple Heart.” Linked in part to the religious element in the story, this romanticism includes references both to traditional romantic themes and to other passages in which Flaubert appears to parody such themes. This again echoes Madame Bovary and Flaubert’s dual feelings concerning romantic passion. Emma Bovary’s emotional confusion clearly derives from the false ideas of love, which she had taken from sentimental novels. Immediately after her marriage, she “sought to know exactly what people meant in real life by the words felicity, passion and intoxication that had appeared so beautiful to her in books.” Flaubert’s use of the word félicité in this description of Emma’s disappointment anticipates the irony in the choice of the word as the name for his heroine in “A Simple Heart.” Félicité does occasionally achieve joy but only despite the numerous forces working against her happiness. Religion provides the central solace of Félicité’s life. At the beginning of the story, she rises at dawn to attend Mass and falls asleep each night with her rosary in her hand. She derives a dual joy from attending catechism classes with Virginie. She admires the beauty of the stained-glass windows, much as Emma Bovary “rather than following the mass looked at the holy pictures framed in azure in her book,” and thus Félicité gains a rudimentary religious education, such training “having been neglected in her youth.” The repeated images in the church of the Holy Spirit in the form of a bird prepare for Félicité’s vision at the end of the story. Along with religion, a romantic joy in external nature touches Félicité. In a way that underlines her solitude, however, these fleeting moments of happiness come to Félicité only with the rare experience of love. Flaubert tells the reader very early that Félicité “had had, like anyone else, her tale of love,” thus deemphasizing this formative experience. Still, during her interlude with Théodore, they were surrounded by the beauty of nature: “The wind was soft; the stars shone,” but as Emma could not regain the luxury of the ball at the château, Félicité only rarely returns to the joys of nature. One other such interlude does occur when she accompanies the Aubain family to the countryside. This enjoyment coincides with the fulfillment that Félicité feels in taking care of Paul and Virginie when they are children, but even here there is a sense of deterioration from a better state of things past. The house they visit “was all that remained of a vacation house, now disappeared.” Consistent with the romantic pathetic fallacy identifying elements of nature with the emotional condition of the protagonist, nature remains pleasant in “A Simple Heart” while Félicité is relatively happy. Later, as she worries about Victor, who has gone to sea, she focuses on violent storms and finally learns that, “as in a memory of engravings in a geography book, he was eaten by savages, trapped in a forest by monkeys, or dying on a deserted beach.” Like Emma, she takes her imaginings from an overly literal application of material from books. As Flaubert cites these tales of savages and monkeys, modern elements of romantic travel literature, he draws on a rich source of contemporary allusion. Elsewhere, the names of Paul and Virginie he chooses for Madame Aubain’s children recall the novel Paul et Virginie (1788), by Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, the exotic setting of which provided a model of preromantic nature description. Later, the ap-

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pearance of the de Larsonnière family with their black servant and their parrot continued this current of exotic allusion. Flaubert’s critique of romanticism leads him to use a degree of exaggeration that approaches parody. When their uncle gives the children a geography book with engravings, “they represented different scenes of the world, cannibals with feathers on their heads, a monkey carrying off a young girl, bedouins in the desert, a whale being harpooned. . . .” These dramatic choices may have been typical of geography books of the time, but in Flaubert’s description of Virginie after her death, the choices are entirely his own. He begins with a conventional tableau, where Virginie’s pale face contrasted with a black crucifix echoes the contrast of light and darkness dear to the Romantics. As Félicité remains “for two nights” near the body, however, the description, drawn from Flaubert’s realistic medical observations, inclines toward the grotesque. Grotesque exaggeration linked to the theme of death culminates in the story of Félicité’s parrot. She had become so attached to the bird, the last voice audible to her as she became progressively deaf, that she had it stuffed after its death. Its place among the religious objects in her room reinforced an association: “In church she always contemplated the Holy Spirit and observed that he somewhat resembled the parrot.” The bird, however, badly preserved, deteriorated. At the end, when Félicité’s friend brought the parrot to her to kiss, “worms were devouring it.” Félicité does not see the deterioration of the parrot. Her eyes as well as her ears are failing. The brief fifth and final section of the story brings the reader at last to the perspective of Félicité herself, who, thanks to the very narrowness of her perceptions, achieves the happiness promised in her name. Earlier references have slighted Félicité’s intelligence and alluded to her lack of education, but what she does not know may protect her. The fifth section opens with the line “The grass sent the odor of summer,” appealing to one sense that Félicité retains and bringing back to her the sense of joy in nature. A religious procession is about to pass by the house, and readers see it through Félicité’s imagination. The holy sacrament is displayed on an altar containing many objects representative of life in the local area, including the stuffed parrot, Loulou. This accumulation of mismatched objects, however, no longer conveys the lack of aesthetic sense that it might have represented earlier. It has become a “mound of bright colors” amid which “Loulou, hidden under some roses, showed only a blue forehead, like a piece of lapis.” Properly selected and arranged, even the realistic debris of village life can present a form of beauty. At the end, Félicité is vindicated in that her “simple heart” had led her to make instinctive choices that protect what beauty there was in her world. The complex style of “A Simple Heart” derives from the tension between its realistic and romantic elements. A similar contrast in “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier” (“The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler”), however, produces a much simpler narrative, where quantities of relatively generic images replace the nuances of the objects in Félicité’s surroundings. “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler” • “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler” conveys the life of its protagonist from birth to death, neatly divided into three parts: the growing violence of the young man, who fears that he will fulfill a prophecy that he will kill his parents, a period of flight that ends with Julien unwittingly killing his parents when they come to seek him, and his final repentance and salvation. The story, set in a vaguely described medieval Europe, contains numerous exotic

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elements that link it to Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Although Antoine spends the greater part of his story doing penance and resisting temptations, however, Julien’s violent years dominate a story with only a brief phase of penitence. The fairy-tale opening of “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler”—“Julien’s father and mother lived in a chateau, in the middle of a wood, on the slope of a hill”—contrasts with the more theatrical style with extensive dialogue that dominates The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Exotic elements proliferate in “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler” from the very first description, where the family’s castle contains armaments of foreign origins, to the Asian merchants and pilgrims from the Holy Land who describe their journeys and to the diverse adversaries whom Julien faces during his extensive travels as a soldier. The analogy with the story of Oedipus, similarly destined to kill his father, adds a foreign element, but description in “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler” lacks the details and contrasts of the Norman scene. When Julien kills animals while hunting and later finds himself surrounded by beasts intent on avenging his excessive savagery, the catalog of creatures retains the artistic sense of animals highlighted in a tapestry: “A marten slipped quickly between his legs, a panther bounded over his shoulder, a serpent wound around an ash tree.” Except for the stag that speaks to Julien to warn him of his fate, the animals and other objects Julien encounters remain generic, devoid of descriptive detail. Similarly, the pathetic fallacy linking landscape to emotion disappears in this text. When, in the second part, Julien marries and attempts to lead a settled life, the sky over his château “was always blue.” Even in the emotional hunting scene that reawakens his savagery and leads to the death of his parents, readers see him surrounded by natural beauty: “The shadows of trees spread out across the moss. Sometimes the moon dappled the clearings.” Occasionally, description does serve, as elsewhere in Flaubert’s work, to define the mood of characters. As Julien grows more ferocious in hunting, he returns home one night “covered with blood and dirt, with thorns in his hair and smelling like savage beasts.” Flaubert, however, continues here, “He became like the beasts.” The symbolism is more explicit and heavy-handed than in Flaubert’s more realistic texts. A night lamp “in the form of a dove” symbolizes his parents’ care for Julien but with a more simplistic suggestion than that in Félicité’s vision of the Holy Spirit. If the characters are not seen as motivated by the objects that surround them, a strong theme of fate provides an alternate controlling force. When Julien’s thirst for blood is first aroused and he begins to kill birds with stones, “the wall being broken at that place, a piece of stone happened to be under his fingers. He turned his arm and the stone knocked down the bird.” The stone, not Julien, is responsible, and later, when Julien attempts to repent, violent dreams come unbidden to renew his desire to kill. Fate finds its voice in the prophecies governing Julien’s life. At his birth, a beggar, “a Bohemian with plaited beard, silver rings on his arms, and blazing eyes,” warns Julien’s father of the violence to come, much as the beggar in Madame Bovary foreshadows Emma’s death. At the end of the story, the leprous traveler whom Julien rescues flashes the same blazing eyes just before Julien is carried off to heaven. This salvation, ordained by Christ, responds to another kind of external—this time divine—manipulation.

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“Hérodias” • Just as Julien’s story follows what has been preordained, “Hérodias” must not depart from the set sequence of events from the biblical story. This time, Flaubert narrates not the entire life of his protagonist but the events of a single day. During the first two parts of the story, a delegation arrives from Rome and, while searching Herod’s cellars for treasures, finds the imprisoned John the Baptist, called here Iaokanann, who rails against Herod’s incestuous marriage. The third part narrates the banquet where Salomé’s dance earns Iaokanann’s death. Again, Flaubert uses a considerable amount of description, much of it derived from his own visit to the shores of the Dead Sea, but the view remains that of the camera, avoiding detailed analysis of the characters’ emotions. Readers first see Herod on a terrace with a panoramic view of the surrounding country. The descriptive catalog of the terrain and Herod’s embattled position parallel the situation at the beginning of Salammbô. Later, an enumeration of armaments in Herod’s cellars recalls the similar listing in “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler,” but very little of this relates to character exposition. Only the menacing “hot wind with the odor of sulfer” that blows as Hérodias, Herod’s wife, arrives hints at the personal confrontations to come. Even when, at the end of the first part, Herod’s view of a beautiful young girl on another terrace foreshadows Hérodias’s manipulation of him, the portrait of the girl herself has the impersonality of an Asian painting. A principal animation of “Hérodias” comes from recurrent animal imagery. Iaokanann appears in prison, covered with animal skins, “in the depths of his lair.” He screams that he will cry out “like a bear, like a wild ass” and forces Hérodias finally to “roar” like a lion. Contrasting with this animal imagery, however, Salomé’s dance appears mechanical. In a parallel scene in Salammbô, the heroine dances with a python “placing the middle of its body around the back of her neck,” but Salomé, instructed by her mother, remains externally controlled “like a flower shaken by a storm.” Almost inevitably Iaokanann is beheaded. The story ends as two Christians carry the head away toward Galilee: “Since it was very heavy, they took turns carrying it.” This final realistic touch parallels the closing of “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler,” where Flaubert adds, “There is the story of Saint Julien l’Hospitalier approximately as one finds it on the church window in my country.” Each story, exoticism notwithstanding, ends grounded by a realistic touch. Flaubert’s instinctive return to realism reflects the importance of the documentary style, founded on his detailed observation of Norman life, through which he orchestrated objects to reflect the psychological composition of his characters. A comparison of “A Simple Heart” with Flaubert’s more exotic short stories reveals a shift in the latter toward a formal objectivity. Animals like those of a tapestry and the image of a girl portrayed as if in a painting distance themselves from the emotional content of the story. Flaubert’s realistic manner bridges this distance. In “A Simple Heart,” as in Madame Bovary, he develops a complexity that relies on the careful selection of objects to define both the feelings of his characters and the societal forces that often conflict with them. This conflict, closely tied to the clash of romantic and realistic elements, provides the basic tension that gives life to Flaubert’s work. Dorothy M. Betz

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Other major works plays: Le Château des cœurs, wr. 1863, pr. 1874 (with Louis Bouilhet; The Castle of Hearts, 1904); Le Candidat, pr., pb. 1874 (The Candidate, 1904). novels: La Première Éducation sentimentale, wr. 1843-1845, pb. 1963 (The First Sentimental Education, 1972); Madame Bovary, 1857 (English translation, 1886); Salammbô, 1862 (English translation, 1886); L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869 (A Sentimental Education, 1898); La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874 (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1895); Bouvard et Pécuchet, 1881 (Bouvard and Pécuchet, 1896). miscellaneous: The Complete Works, 1904 (10 volumes); Œuvres complètes, 19101933 (22 volumes). nonfiction: Par les champs et par les grèves, 1885 (with Maxime Du Camp; Over Strand and Field, 1904); Correspondance, 1830-1880, 1887-1893; Dictionnaire des idées reçues, 1910, 1913 (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 1954); Notes de voyage, 1910; Correspondance, 1981 (Alphonse Jacobs, editor; Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, 1993); Gustave Flaubert-Alfred Le Poittevin, Gustave-FlaubertMaxine Du Camp: Correspondances, 2000 (Yvan Leclerc, editor). Bibliography Addison, Claire. Where Flaubert Lies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Detailed study of Flaubert’s life and art, focusing on the relationship between his personal life, historical context, and his fiction. Bloom, Harold, ed. Gustave Flaubert. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. This collection of fourteen essays with an introduction by Bloom covers multiple aspects of Flaubert’s life and work. Jane Robertson writes on the structure of “Hérodias,” noting the relative difficulty of the work. Shoshana Felman’s essay on “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler” stresses legendary and symbolic elements in the story. Contains a chronology of Flaubert’s life, a bibliography, and an index. Brown, Frederick. Flaubert: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 2006. This penetrating study of Flaubert in nineteenth century Paris paints a lively portrait of the man and his time. Cronk, Nicholas. “Reading Un Cœur Simple: The Pleasure of the Intertext.” NineteenthCentury French Studies 24 (Fall/Winter, 1995/1996): 154-161. Discusses the story’s allusion to eighteenth century works from the Rousseauesque tradition of sentiment and the Voltairean tradition of satire. Claims that Flaubert appropriates a character of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s as a model for Félicité. Greenbaum, Andrea. “Flaubert’s Un Cœur Simple.” The Explicator (Summer, 1995): 208-211. Discusses the satire in Flaubert’s story, particularly its mockery of religious devotion by means of the parrot, the story’s satirical centerpiece. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Flaubert: “Hérodias” (vol. 3); “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler” (vol. 4); and “A Simple Heart” (vol. 7). Nadeau, Maurice. The Greatness of Flaubert. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Library Press, 1972. This biographical work devotes chapter 16 to the Three Tales, stressing how these works evolved from ideas that Flaubert had accumulated during his previous writing. Sources considered are largely biographical, and the chapter details the immediate context in which the three stories were written. Supplemented by a chronology and a bibliography.

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Porter, Laurence M., ed. Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. This collection of sixteen essays includes work by a number of authorities in the field. Two studies treat the Three Tales: Raymonde Debray-Genette studies “Narrative Figures of Speech” in “A Simple Heart” in a structural analysis that still insists on the importance of illusion, and Benjamin F. Bart examines “Humanity and Animality” in “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler.” Bibliography, index. Stipa, Ingrid. “Desire, Repetition, and the Imaginary in Flaubert’s Un Cœ ur Simple.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Fall, 1994): 617-626. Argues that although Flaubert maintains an ironic perspective in the story, a pattern of repetitions of imagery makes the transformation of the parrot into a sacred symbol acceptable to the reader, a tactic that protects the protagonist from being the victim of the irony. Unwin, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Replete with tools for further research, this is an excellent aid to any study of Flaubert’s life and work. Wall, Geoffrey. Flaubert: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Critically acclaimed narrative biography that gives Lottman and Troyat a run for the standard. Offers plenty of fresh detail and a great read.

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E. M. Forster Born: London, England; January 1, 1879 Died: Coventry, England; June 7, 1970 Principal short fiction • The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories, 1911; The Eternal Moment, and Other Stories, 1928; The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster, 1947; The Life to Come, and Other Stories, 1972; Arctic Summer, and Other Fiction, 1980. Other literary forms • E. M. Forster wrote six novels, one of which (Maurice, 1971) was published posthumously because of its homosexual theme. He also wrote travel books, essays, reviews, criticism, biography, and some poetry. Together with Eric Crozier he wrote the libretto for the four-act opera Billy Budd (1951), adapted from Herman Melville’s famous work. Achievements • As a novelist of rare distinction and one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, E. M. Forster enjoyed international recognition and received many literary awards and honors. In 1921, as private secretary to the maharajah of Dewas State Senior, he was awarded the Sir Tukojirao Gold Medal. The publication of A Passage to India (1924) brought him much acclaim, including the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1925. In 1927, he was elected Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and he delivered Clark Lectures at Trinity College. In 1937, the Royal Society of Literature honored him with the Benson Medal. In 1945, he was made Honorary Fellow, King’s College, where he remained until his death in 1970. In 1953, he was received by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honor. Between 1947 and 1958, several universities, including Cambridge, conferred on him the honorary degree of doctor of laws. In 1961, the Royal Society of Literature named him a Companion of Literature. He attained the greatest recognition when, on his ninetieth birthday, on January 1, 1969, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth. Biography • Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on January 1, 1879. He was the great-grandson of Henry Thornton, a prominent member of the Evangelical Clapham Sect and a member of Parliament. His father, an architect, died early, and he was brought up by his mother and his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton (whose biography he published in 1956). He received his early education at Tonbridge School, but he did not like the public school atmosphere. His bitter criticism of the English public school system appears in his portrayal of Sawston School in his first two novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907). From Tonbridge, Forster went on to the University of Cambridge—thanks to the rich inheritance left by Marianne Thornton, who died when he was eight—where he came under the influence of Goldworthy Lowes Dickinson (whose biography he wrote in 1934) and quickly began to blossom as a scholar, writer, and humanist. After graduating from King’s College, Forster traveled, with his mother, to Italy and Greece in 1901. His first short story, “Albergo Empedocle,” was published in 1903. Between 1903 and 1910, he published four novels, nine short stories, and other,

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nonfictional items. His travels to Greece and Italy led to his representation of life in those countries as being less repressive than life in England. During World War I, he served as a volunteer with the Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt. His stay there resulted in Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923). His two visits to India, the first in 1912 in company of Goldworthy Lowes Dickinson and the second in 1921 as private secretary to the maharajah of Dewas State Senior, provided him material for his masterpiece novel A Passage to India (1924) as well as The Hill of Devi (1953). With A Passage to India, Forster’s reputation was established as a major English novelist of the twentieth century. He made a third visit to India in 1945 to attend a conference of Indian writers at Jaipur. He then wrote, “If Indians had not spoken English my own life would have been infinitely poorer.” He visited the United States in 1947 to address the Symposium on Music Criticism at Harvard and again in 1949 to address the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Though Forster stopped publishing fiction after 1924, he continued to produce significant nonfiction writing to the end. In a statement at the beginning of B. J. Kirkpatrick’s A Bibliography of E. M. Forster (1965), Forster said: “The longer one lives the less one feels to have done, and I am both surprised and glad to discover from this bibliography that I have written so much.” He died on June 7, 1970, at the age of ninety-one. Throughout his life he kept his faith in liberal humanism, in the sanctity of personal relationships, and, above all, in individualism. His charismatic personality and his personal warmth have led many people to believe that the man was greater than his books. Analysis • All of Forster’s best-known and most anthologized stories appeared first in two collections, The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment. The words “celestial” and “eternal” are especially significant because a typical E. M. Forster story features a protagonist who is allowed a vision of a better life, sometimes momentarily only. Qualifications for experiencing this epiphany include a questioning mind, an active imagination, and a dissatisfaction with conventional attitudes. The transformation resulting from the experience comes about through some kind of magic that transports him through time—backward or forward—or through space—to Mt. Olympus or to heaven. Whether or not his life is permanently changed, the transformed character can never be the same again after a glimpse of the Elysian Fields, and he is henceforth suspect to contemporary mortals. Forster termed his short stories “fantasies,” and when the discerning reader can determine the point at which the real and the fantastic intersect, he will locate the epiphany, at the same time flexing his own underused imaginative muscles. Perhaps “The Machine Stops,” a science-fiction tale about a world managed by a computerlike Machine that warns men to “beware of first-hand ideas,” was at the time of its writing (1909) the most fantastic of Forster’s short fiction, but its portrayal of radio, television, and telephones with simultaneous vision seems to have been simply farsighted. Forster frequently uses a narrator who is so insensitive that he ironically enhances the perception of the reader. In “Other Kingdom,” for example, when Mr. Inskip finds it “right” to repeat Miss Beaumont’s conversation about a “great dream” to his employer, the reader correctly places the tutor on the side of unimaginative human, rather than in the lineup of Dryads to which the young lady will repair. When the narrator of “The Story of a Panic” boasts that he “can tell a story without exaggerating” and then unfolds a tale about a boy who obviously is visited by Pan and who finally

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bounds away to join the goat-god, the readers know that they must themselves inform the gaps of information. When the same narrator attributes the death of the waiter Gennaro to the fact that “the miserable Italians have no stamina. Something had gone wrong inside him,” the reader observes the disparity between the two statements and rightly concludes that Gennaro’s death has a supernatural cause—that he had been subjected to the same “panic” as had Eustace, and that only the latter had passed the test. In Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster suggests that fiction will play a part in the ultimate success of civilization through promotion of human sympathy, reconciliation, and understanding. In each of the short stories the protagonist gets a fingerhold on the universal secret, but he sometimes loses his grip, usually through the action of someone too blind, materialistic, or enslaved by time to comprehend the significance of the moment. If, as Forster himself declares, the emphasis of plot lies in causality, he allows the reader an important participation, because the causes of transformation are never explicit, and the more mundane characters are so little changed by the miraculous events taking place around them that they are not puzzled or even aware that they occur. “The Eternal Moment” • In “The Eternal Moment,” the stiffly insensitive Colonel Leyland, Miss Raby’s friend and traveling companion, is just such a character. Although Miss Raby is determined to accept the responsibility for the commercialization of the mountain resort Vorta engendered by her novel, Colonel Leyland can understand her feelings no more readily than can Feo, the uneducated waiter who is the immediate object of Miss Raby’s search. Although Miss Raby ostensibly has returned to the village to see how it has been affected by tourism since she made it famous, she also is drawn to the spot because it was the scene of the one romantic, although brief, interlude of her life. For twenty years she has recalled a declaration of passionate love for her by a young Italian guide whose advances she had rejected. This memory has sustained her because of its reality and beauty. She finds the once rustic village overgrown with luxury hotels, in one of which Feo, her dream-lover, is the stout, greasy, middle-aged, hypocritical concierge. Miss Raby, whose instincts have warned her that the progress of civilization is not necessarily good, sees that “the passage of a large number of people” has corrupted not only the village and its values, but also Feo. Observing that “pastoral virtues” and “family affection” have disappeared with the onslaught of touristry, she accosts the embarrassed peasant who had once offered her flowers. In a scene that is the quintessence of a human failure to communicate, Feo believes that she is attempting to ruin him, while she is actually appealing to him to help the old woman who owns the only hotel untouched by modernity. Colonel Leyland, who cannot bear the thought, much less the reality, of such intimate contact with a member of the lower class, gives up his idea of marrying Miss Raby. The rich novelist, whose entire life has been enriched by the “eternal moment” when she briefly and in imagination only had spanned class barriers, asks Feo if she can adopt one of his children. Rebuffed, she will live alone, able perhaps to blot out reality and relive the happiness that the memory of the “eternal moment” has brought her. Another misunderstood protagonist is Eustace, the fourteen-year-old English boy considered a misfit by the group of tourists with whom he is seeing Italy. Listless and pampered, bad-tempered and repellent, Eustace dislikes walking, cannot swim, and

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appears most to enjoy lounging. Forced to go to a picnic, the boy carves from wood a whistle, which when blown evokes a “catspaw” of wind that frightens all of the other tourists into running. When they return to their picnic site in search of Eustace, they find him lying on his back, a green lizard darting from his cuff. For the first time on the trip the boy smiles and is polite. The footprints of goats are discerned nearby as Eustace races around “like a real boy.” A dazed hare sits on his arm, and he kisses an old woman as he presents her with flowers. The adults, in trying to forget the encounter, are cruel to Eustace and to Gennaro, a young, natural, ignorant Italian fishing lad, who is a “stop-gap” waiter at the inn, and who clearly understands the boy’s experience. As Eustace and Gennaro attempt to flee to freedom from human responsibility, the waiter is killed, the victim of a society which in its lack of understanding had attempted to imprison Eustace, oblivious to his miraculous change, or at least to its significance. He has turned into an elfin sprite of the woods, to which he escapes forever, leaving behind him Forster’s customary complement of complacent, nonplussed tourists. “Other Kingdom” • No Pan, but a Dryad, is Evelyn Beaumont of “Other Kingdom.” Mr. Inskip, who narrates the tale, has been hired as a tutor of the classics by handsome, prosperous, and pompous Harcourt Worters. Inskip’s charges are Worters’s fiancé, Miss Evelyn Beaumont, and his ward, Jack Ford. When Worters announces that he has purchased a nearby copse called “Other Kingdom” as a wedding gift for Evelyn, she dances her gleeful acceptance in imitation of a beech tree. On a celebratory picnic Evelyn asks Jack to stand in a position that will hide the house from her view. She is dismayed to learn that Worters plans to build a high fence around her copse and to add an asphalt path and a bridge. Evelyn values the fact that boys and girls have been coming for years from the village to carve their initials on the trees, and she notes that Worters finds blood on his hands when he attempts to repeat the romantic ritual. Upon hearing that Worters has obtained Other Kingdom by taking advantage of a widow, she realizes that he is a selfish person who views her as one of his possessions to be enjoyed. Broken in spirit, she apparently agrees to his plan of fencing in the copse, but she dances away “from society and life” to be united with other wood nymphs and likely with Ford, who knows intuitively that she is a free spirit that can never be possessed. “The Road from Colonus” • Although Eustace in “Story of a Panic” is a Pan-figure, Evelyn a Dryad, and Harcourt Worters a prototype of Midas, Mr. Lucas of “The Road from Colonus” is associated with Oedipus. The tale’s title is reminiscent of Sophocles’ play, and Ethel, Mr. Lucas’s daughter, represents Antigone. As do Miss Raby, Eustace, and Evelyn Beaumont, Mr. Lucas enters into a special union with nature and humankind. Riding ahead of his daughter and her friends, he finds the “real Greece” when he spies a little inn surrounded by a grove of plane trees and a little stream that bubbles out of a great hollow tree. As he enters this natural shrine, he for the first time sees meaning to his existence, and he longs to stay in this peaceful spot. The other tourists, however, have schedules and appointments to adhere to, and they forcibly carry Mr. Lucas away from the scene of his revelation. That night the plane tree crashes to kill all occupants of the inn, and Mr. Lucas spends his remaining days fussing about his neighbors and the noises of civilization, especially those made by the running water in the drains and reminiscent of the pleasant, musical gurgles of the little stream in Greece.

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“The Celestial Omnibus” • More fortunate than Mr. Lucas is the boy who rides “The Celestial Omnibus” from an alley where an old, faded sign points the way “To Heaven.” After the driver, Sir Thomas Browne, delivers the boy across a great gulf on a magnificent rainbow to the accompaniment of music, and back home to his nursery, the boy’s parents refuse to believe his tale. Mr. Bons, a family friend, attempts to prove the boy is lying by offering to make a repeat journey with him. On this trip the driver is Dante. Even though Mr. Bons is finally convinced that the boy has actually met Achilles and Tom Jones, he wants to go home. When Mr. Bons crawls out of the omnibus shrieking, “I see London,” he falls and is seen no more. His body is discovered “in a shockingly mutilated condition,” and the newspaper reports that “foul play is suspected.” The boy is crowned with fresh leaves as the dolphins awaken to celebrate with him the world of imagination. Mr. Bons, when accosted with this world, rejected it so violently that he suffered physical pain. In all of these “fantasies,” a gulf separates reality from illusion, and the latter is clearly to be preferred. If one must inhabit the real world, one can bear its existence and even love its inhabitants if that person is one of the fortunate few receptive to a special kind of vision. Sue L. Kimball With updates by Chaman L. Sahni Other major works play: Billy Budd, pb. 1951 (with Eric Crozier; libretto). novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1905; The Longest Journey, 1907; A Room with a View, 1908; Howards End, 1910; Maurice, wr. 1913, pb. 1971; A Passage to India, 1924. miscellaneous: The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, 1972-1998 (17 volumes; Oliver Stallybrass, editor). nonfiction: Alexandria: A History and a Guide, 1922; Pharos and Pharillon, 1923; Aspects of the Novel, 1927; Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 1934; Abinger Harvest—A Miscellany, 1936; Virginia Woolf, 1942; Development of English Prose Between 1918 and 1939, 1945; Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951; The Hill of Devi, 1953; Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, 1797-1887, 1956; Commonplace Book, 1978; Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, 1983-1985 (2 volumes; Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, editors); The Feminine Note in Literaturem 2001. Bibliography Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. In this biography devoted primarily to the first forty-five years of Forster’s life, when he was developing as a fiction writer, Beauman discusses the origins of Forster’s fictional themes in his family background and claims that his most successful years as a writer were also his unhappiest as a person due to his sexual repression and his conflicts over his homosexuality. Caporaletti, Silvana. “Science as Nightmare: ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster.” Utopian Studies 8 (1997): 32-47. Discusses the dystopian theme in the story; claims the story denounces materialism and conformism imposed by rigid social conventions that repress diversity, spontaneity, and creativity. ____________. “The Thematization of Time in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Eternal Moment’ and Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (Winter, 1997): 406-419. Discusses how the two stories are influenced by Henri Bergson’s dual concept of

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time as sequential and psychological. Argues that most of the characters in the stories reflect the contrast between these two modes of time. Gardner, Philip, ed. E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1997. Critical essays on Forster’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Iago, Mary. E. M. Forster: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Succinct study of Forster’s novels and work for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Helpful notes. McDowell, Frederick P. W. E. M. Forster. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Brilliant, wellbalanced, and compendious overview of Forster’s life, times, career, work, and achievement. This book contains a useful chronology, a select bibliography, and an index. It also offers a concise and perceptive analysis of Forster’s short stories. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Forster: “The Celestial Omnibus” (vol. 1), and “The Other Side of the Hedge” and “The Road from Colonus” (vol. 6). Rapport, Nigel. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature, and the Writing of E. M. Forster. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Provides excellent interpretation and criticism of Forster’s literary works. Seabury, Marcia Bundy. “Images of a Networked Society: E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops.’” Studies in Short Fiction 34 (Winter, 1997): 61-71. Discusses the story as a vision of the computer revolution. Examines interrelations between technology and religious thinking in the story; explores what happens to people when they spend much of their time connected to computer networks. Stone, Wilfred. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966. Well-researched and scholarly book. Contains a vast amount of useful information about Forster’s background, career, esthetics, and work. Includes a detailed and illuminating chapter on the short stories. Using psychological and Jungian approaches, Stone offers insightful and masterly critiques of Forster’s fiction. Supplemented by notes and a comprehensive index.

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Mavis Gallant Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada; August 11, 1922 Principal short fiction • The Other Paris, 1956; My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel, 1964 (pb. in England as An Unmarried Man’s Summer, 1965); The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories, 1973; The End of the World, and Other Stories, 1974; From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories, 1979; Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, 1981; Overhead in a Balloon, 1985; In Transit, 1988; Across the Bridge, 1993; The Moslem Wife, and Other Stories, 1994; The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, 1996; Paris Stories, 2002; Varieties of Exile: Stories, 2005. Other literary forms • A journalist and essayist as well as a writer of fiction, Mavis Gallant has chronicled various social and historical events, such as the case of Gabrielle Russier, a young high school teacher in Marseille, who was driven to suicide by persecution for having become romantically involved with one of her students. Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986) is a collection of essays in which Gallant offers observations relating to her many years spent in France, scrutinizing French culture and life in general. Her accounts of the student revolt of 1968 are particularly riveting. In addition, Gallant wrote The War Brides (1978), a collection of biographical articles, and the play What Is to Be Done? (pr. 1982), a drama about two young women who idealize communism. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. Achievements • Mavis Gallant’s stature as a writer of short fiction is unassailable. The elegant simplicity of her pieces is an unchanging trait of her work and was in fact recognized in her first published piece, “Madeleine’s Birthday,” for which The New Yorker paid six hundred dollars in 1951. In 1981, Gallant was awarded Canada’s Governor-General’s Literary Award for fiction for Home Truths. Other awards include the Canadian Fiction Prize (1978), Officer of the Order of Canada (1981), and honorary doctorates from the University of Saint Anne, Nova Scotia (1984), York University (1984), the University of Western Canada (1990), Queen’s University (1992), University of Montreal (1995), and Birnap’s University (1995). She has also received the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1985) and the Canadian Council Molson Prize for the Arts (1997). Biography • Born in Montreal in 1922, Mavis Gallant (née Mavis de Trafford Young), an only child, was placed in a Roman Catholic convent school at the age of four. She attended seventeen schools: Catholic schools in Montreal, Protestant ones in Ontario, as well as various boarding schools in the United States. After the death of her father, Gallant lived with her legal guardians in New York, a psychiatrist and his wife. At the age of eighteen, Gallant returned to Montreal. After a short time working for the National Film Board of Canada in Ottawa during the winter of 1943-1944, Gallant accepted a position as reporter with the Montreal Standard, which she left in 1950. In 1951, Gallant be-

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gan contributing short-fiction stories to The New Yorker. During the early 1950’s, she moved to Europe, living in London, Rome, and Madrid, before settling in Paris in the early 1960’s. It was through her travels and experiences in France, Italy, Austria, and Spain that she observed the fabric of diverse societies. During the initial years of her life in Europe, Gallant lived precariously from her writings, ultimately becoming an accomplished author, depicting loners, expatriates, and crumbling social structures. Gallant settled in Paris, working on a history of the renowned Dreyfus affair in addition to her work in fiction. Gallant settled in Paris, occasionally traveling to Canada, the United States, and England.

Analysis • The often somber tone of Mavis Gallant’s work is strengthened by the combination of acute lucidness and understated stylistic © Allison Harris richness. Gallant is a remarkable observer. She succeeds in creating worlds that are both familiar and foreign, appealing yet uninviting. Her mastery in the restrained use of language and in her incomparable narrative powers make her undeniably one of the world’s greatest fiction writers. “The Other Paris” • The title story of Mavis Gallant’s first collection strikes the pitch to which the others that follow it are tuned. Most of these stories are about young Americans in Europe just entering into marriage, uncertain about what they should feel, unsure of their roles, and unable to find appropriate models around them for the behavior that they think is expected of them. The young protagonists in the stories grope through their ambivalences, looking for guidance in others who seem more sure of themselves, or clutching written words from some absent sibling—advice recorded in a letter, or written down by themselves about appropriate responses to their present situation. In the other stories in which a parent is present, the other parent, usually ill or divorced, is absent, and the rules of conduct become equally tenuous because of that absence. The European stories are set in the early 1950’s, when the devastations of World War II are still being felt. Refugee figures haunt the fringes. “The Other Paris” refers to the romantic illusions generated by films about that city which Carol feels she is missing. She is about to be married to Howard Mitchell, with whom she works in an American government agency, and with whom she is not yet in love. She keeps remembering her college lectures on the subject to reassure

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herself. Common interests and similar economic and religious backgrounds were what mattered. “The illusion of love was a blight imposed by the film industry, and almost entirely responsible for the high rate of divorce.” Carol waits expectantly for the appropriate emotions to follow the mutuality of their backgrounds: Their fathers are both attorneys, Protestants, and from the same social class. In Carol’s mind, the discovery of that mysterious “other Paris” is linked with the discovery of love. She believes the Parisians know a secret, “and if she spoke to the right person or opened the right door or turned down an unexpected street, the city would reveal itself and she would fall in love.” She tries all the typical tourist things, such as listening to carols at the Place Vendôme, but everything has been commercialized. Newsreel cameras and broadcast equipment spoil the atmosphere she seeks. Plastic mistletoe with “cheap tinsel” is tied to the street lamps. Odile, Howard’s secretary, invites her to a private concert. Excitedly Carol thinks that she has finally gained entrance into the aristocratic secrets that are hidden from foreigners. Instead of the elegant drawing room she had anticipated, it is an “ordinary, shabby theatre” on an obscure street, nearly empty except for a few of the violinist’s relatives. Odile is thin, dark, seldom smiles, and often sounds sarcastic because of her poor English. She is involved with Felix, pale, ill, hungry, and without papers, who sells things on the black market. He is twenty-one, she is more than thirty years old, and Carol finds the gap in their ages distasteful. They have no common interests, no mitigating mutual circumstances; yet, one night in Felix’s dark, cluttered room, she discovers that they love each other. The thought makes her ill. In that dusty slum, with revulsion, she discovers that, at last, she has “opened the right door, turned down the right street, glimpsed the vision.” On this paradox, that the sordid reality reveals the romantic illusion, the story closes with a time shift to the future in which Carol is telling how she met and married Howard in Paris and making it “sound romantic and interesting,” believing it as it had never been at all. “Autumn Day” • “Autumn Day” is another initiation story of a nineteen-year-old, Cissy, who follows her Army husband to Salzburg. She has a list of instructions: “Go for walks. Meet Army wives. Avoid people on farm.” She attributes her unhappiness, her failure to feel like a wife, to the fact that they have no home. They are boarding in a farmhouse from which she takes dutiful long walks under the lowering Salzburg skies, gray with impending snow. An American singer practices a new setting of the poem “Herbsttag” (“Autumn Day”), whose most haunting line, which the narrator feels had something to do with her, is “who does not yet have a home, will never have one.” She feels that the poet had understood her; it was exactly the life she was leading, going for lonely walks. She slides a note under the singer’s door, asking if they might meet. After a complicated day she returns to the farmhouse to find the singer had invited her to lunch and had returned to America. Walt, her bewildered husband, finds her crying. He tries, timidly, to console her by insisting that they “will be all right” when they get their own apartment. She wonders if her present mood is indeed temporary or whether their entire marriage will be like this. It is in depicting these border states of consciousness that Gallant excels. Her portraits of girls who are trying to become women without having internalized a strong role model to emulate are moving because the portrayal of their inner sense of being lost is augmented by the setting; it is externalized into the girls’ awareness of being foreigners alone in a strange country. The psychic territory has been projected outward into an alien land. Both Cissy and her friend Carol have heard music which they

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feel contains some secret knowledge that can help them understand their feeling of having been somehow left out, excluded from a love they would like to feel. Both accommodate themselves to lives that are less than the songs promised they might be. “Autumn Day” closes with Cissy’s ritually repeating the magic formula, like an incantation, like a figure in a fairy tale casting a spell over her own anxiety, “We’ll be all right, we’ll be all right, we’ll be all right.” “Poor Franzi” • “Poor Franzi” is also set in Salzburg and in the same wavering space. The young American Elizabeth is engaged to the grandson Franzi of Baroness Ebendorf, an Austrian aristocrat, who dies in the course of the story. Because Franzi refuses to go to the funeral, Elizabeth feels obligated to attend. A party of American tourists serves as choric voices. They insinuate that the young Austrian has become engaged to the American girl simply to escape from the country. They gossip about his failure to visit the old woman in her last illness, his refusal to pay for the funeral, and his having burned her will. Her landlady, “out of helplessness and decency,” had arranged for the last rites, which she could ill afford, a peasant paying homage to a noble line. Elizabeth’s nearsightedness is a physical correlative of her failure to see her fiancé’s faults, which are obvious to everyone else. “Blind as a bat!” the other Americans mutter as she walks straight past them. She gazes at the edge of the horizon, but her myopia prevents her from distinguishing whether she is seeing clouds or mountains. She sees Franzi in this same suffused haze. Instead of the cynicism and selfishness his behavior so clearly outlines, there is a fuzzy aura blurred by her feeling of having to be protective of his great grief. Poor thing, he is all alone now; he must never suffer again. The soft shapes, “shifting and elusive,” which better eyes than hers saw as the jutting rocks of the Salzburg mountains, become an emblem of her emotional condition. The story closes on this ambiguous haze: “What will happen to me if I marry him? she wondered; and what would become of Franzi if she were to leave him?” The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant • This anthology contains fifty-two stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Gallant has divided her anthology into nine sections: thirty-five stories, with settings chronologically arranged between 1930 and 1990; five autobiographical stories with Linnet Muir, a young Canadian girl, as the main character; four about the Canadian Carette Sisters; four focused on Edouard, a Frenchman and his two “wives”; and four featuring Henri Grippes, a French “hack” writer and charlatan. In the introduction, Gallant says she gets her ideas for stories through imaginary flashes. She compares the process to looking at a snapshot. Then she begins by developing a unique character with a name, age, nationality, profession, voice and accent, family history, destination, personality quirks, secrets, ambitions, and attitudes toward love, money, religion. Next, she writes scenes between her characters with dialogue and develops a plot that is “entire but unreadable.” She says that revision takes her a long time; it is a “slow transformation from image to story.” The stories are written in a powerful and fluent style with precise details. Many have settings during and after World War II in Canada, France, and Germany, when people’s lives are in a state of flux. Gallant’s settings and characters are reproduced like filmed images, complete with background noise and dialogue. However, her extraordinary ability to get inside her characters’ minds provides ironic contrast

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between external events and their fragmented thoughts and confused emotions. Typically, her main characters are rootless young women trapped by the past in an existential world, lonely, isolated, and uncertain of the direction their lives should take. Secondary characters often include neglected, love-starved children, surrounded by insensitive adults. “The Moslem Wife” • The title of this story does not refer to a North African setting or to the Islamic religion. It refers to the role of Muslim women, who traditionally submit to the domination of fathers and husbands. These women have great responsibility for the management of their homes and the well-being of their families. Most have limited contact with the outside world. Gallant compares the Muslim wife’s lifestyle to that of Netta Asher, an inexperienced young English girl, whose family ties and cultural roots have been severed by death and circumstance. Netta’s dying father provides for her future by signing a one-hundred-year lease on his resort hotel in southern France and marrying her to Jack, a philandering cousin. Thus, locked into her role as owner/manager of the hotel, Netta leads a confined life, while Jack enjoys much freedom. On the eve of Adolf Hitler’s European conquest, Jack goes on holiday to England and does not return until World War II is over. Meanwhile, Netta takes care of Jack’s temperamental mother and survives deprivation and the presence of Italian and German soldiers billeted at the hotel. Miserable and lonely, Netta longs to escape her “prison.” However, when Jack, the perpetual adolescent, returns, Netta, still dependent on his masculine charm, remains locked into her role as “The Moslem Wife.” “Across the Bridge” • “Across the Bridge” is a lighthearted initiation story, set in Paris in the 1950’s. It gives insight into postwar French families and their attempt to reestablish social classes and tradition. American teenagers, who enjoy considerable freedom to select their own love interests without parental involvement, will consider this story old-fashioned and foreign. However, ethnicity, religious background, and economic and social status are realistic factors that continue to influence a person’s selection of a mate. After much negotiation, teenage Sylvie Castelli’s parents arrange her marriage to Arnaud Pons, a quiet, unromantic young man. The Italian/French Castellis have a modest fortune, but the Pons family has an old and respected name. On a bridge en route to having wedding invitations printed, Sylvie confesses to her mother that she is in love with Bruno, a boy she met at the park. Her doting parents allow her to break her engagement to Arnaud, and Mr. Castelli contacts Bruno’s wealthy parents, who deny their son’s interest in Sylvie and humiliate the Castellis. Eventually, Sylvie “crosses the bridge” from romantic, adolescent dreams to realistic maturity and on her own, without parental involvement, selects Arnaud as her fiancé. The question of whether pragmatic considerations offset romantic ideals and physical attraction remains unanswered as Sylvie and Arnaud begin their new relationship. “The Doctor” • The Linnet Muir stories are fictionalized, coming-of-age memoirs based on Gallant’s own experiences as a member of a dysfunctional family. Biographical data confirms much, but not all, of the content of the stories. During her childhood, Gallant, like Linnet, observed her parents’ unhappy marriage. In “The Doctor” a precocious Linnet recalls the sterile and bewildering relationship between her parents, Charlotte and Angus Muir, and their eccentric friends, Mrs. Erskine and Dr.

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Chauchard, Linnet’s pediatrician, who is treating her for a lung disease from which she recovers. After Gallant’s father’s untimely death, her mother placed her in a series of boarding schools and left her care and education to strangers. In her late teens, Gallant, like Linnet, attempted a reconciliation with her mother that failed. “In Youth Is Pleasure,” an ironic title because of somber events in the story, eighteen-year-old Linnet asserts her independence, breaks off an unhappy relationship with her mother, and returns to Montreal from New York. There, she discovers family secrets: that her father suffered from tuberculosis of the bone and committed suicide and that her mother ran off with a lover. Gallant became a successful journalist in Canada, an experience she considered boring, but one that sharpened her writing skills and techniques of observation. After selling her first short story, she left Canada and moved to France, where she hoped to establish new roots and become a successful writer. Similarly, in the story “Between Zero and One,” Linnet works at a boring government job surrounded by men who are either too old or disabled to serve in the army during World War II. At first they resent Linnet, but later accept her. When Mrs. Ireland, an outspoken feminist, arrives, dynamics in the office change. After looking at a graph of statistics, Linnet becomes more assertive. She discovers that what occurs during a person’s lifegraph “Between Zero and One” determines the future. Ruth Rosenberg With updates by Kenneth W. Meadwell and Martha E. Rhynes Other major works play: What Is to Be Done, pr. 1982. novels: Green Water, Green Sky, 1959; Its Image on the Mirror, 1964 (novella); A Fairly Good Time, 1970. nonfiction: The Affair of Gabrielle Russier, 1971; The War Brides, 1978; Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews, 1986. Bibliography Besner, Neil. The Light of Imagination: Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988. Extremely thorough analysis of Gallant’s fiction from The Other Paris to Overhead in a Balloon. Includes a biographical review as well as a useful critical bibliography. Clement, Lesley D. Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. This “visual” study of Gallant’s work analyzes her descriptive powers, which generally take priority over plot per se. Cote, Nicole, Peter Sabor, and Robert H. Jerry, eds. Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Collection of essays on a range of topics, chiefly focusing on Gallant’s view of Canada from her self-imposed Parisian “exile” as well as her depiction of other types of exile—literal, figurative, and psychological—in her work. Dobozy, Tamas. “‘Designed Anarchy’ in Mavis Gallant’s The Moslem Wife, and Other Stories.” Canadian Literature, no. 158 (Autumn, 1998): 65-88. Discusses an anarchic aesthetic in the collection in which the stories challenge the impulse to create a master narrative and instead allow a variety of competing narratives that prevent a unified vision.

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Hatch, Ronald. “Mavis Gallant.” In Canadian Writers Since 1960: First Series. Vol. 53 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by W. H. New. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. Thorough general introduction to Gallant’s fiction up to, and including, Home Truths. Supplemented by a bibliography of interviews and studies. Jewison, Don. “Speaking of Mirrors: Imagery and Narration in Two Novellas by Mavis Gallant.” Studies in Canadian Literature 10, nos. 1, 2 (1985): 94-109. A study of Green Water, Green Sky and Its Image on the Mirror. Focuses on the importance of mirrors from the perspective of imagery as well as of narration. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these nine short stories by Gallant: “Acceptance of Their Ways” and “Across the Bridge” (vol. 1); “Dédé” (vol. 2); “Going Ashore” (vol. 3); “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” “Jorinda and Jorindel,” and “Lena” (vol. 4); “The Other Paris” (vol. 6); and “Speck’s Idea” (vol. 7). Schaub, Danielle. Mavis Gallant. New York: Twayne, 1998. Book-length discussion of Gallant’s fiction focusing on the relationship between thematic tensions and narrative devices. Argues that Gallant’s irony, stylistic devices, atmosphere, and structure create a tension that reflects the disconnectedness of her characters. Features chapters on Gallant’s major short-story collections from The Other Paris to Across the Bridge. Schenk, Leslie. “Celebrating Mavis Gallant.” World Literature Today 72 (Winter, 1998): 18-26. In this interview, Gallant discusses the short story as a genre, the extent to which her stories are biographical or autobiographical, and her relationship to contemporary France. She also discusses some of her stories, including “Across the Bridge.” Simmons, Diane. “Remittance Men: Exile and Identity in the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.” In Canadian Women: Writing Fiction, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Discusses characters in a number of Gallant’s short stories who, suffering some early loss, are adrift and, by choosing to live abroad, are acting out their inner sense of exile.

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Gabriel García Márquez Born: Aracataca, Colombia; March 6, 1928 Principal short fiction • Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, 1962 (Big Mama’s Funeral, stories included in No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968); Isabel viendo llover en Macondo, 1967 (Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo, 1972); No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968; Relato de un náufrago, 1970 (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time, 1986); El negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles, 1972; La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada, 1972 (Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories, 1978); Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972; Ojos de perro azul, 1972; Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez, 1975 (Collected Stories, 1984); Collected Novellas (1990); Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 1981 (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982); Doce cuentos peregrinos, 1992 (Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, 1993). Other literary forms • Besides his short fiction, including short stories and novellas, Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional work includes full-length novels, such as his masterpiece and best-known novel, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). Among his other novels are El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), Del amor y otros demonios (1994; Of Love and Other Demons, 1995), and Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). During García Márquez’s long career as a journalist, he has written numerous articles, essays, and reports on a variety of topics, particularly relating to Latin American life and politics. He has published more than twenty volumes of nonfiction writings, most of which have not been translated into English. Among his translated nonfiction works are Noticia de un secuestro (1996; News of a Kidnapping, 1997), an account of the nefarious activities of drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1990, and Vivir para contarla (2002; Living to Tell the Tale, 2003), the first part of a projected three-volume autobiography. Achievements • In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez’s highly acclaimed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared and was immediately recognized by critics as a masterpiece of fiction. As a work of high literary quality, this novel was unusual in that it also enjoyed tremendous popular success both in Latin America and in translation throughout the world. This work made García Márquez a major figure—perhaps the major figure—of contemporary Latin American literature. García Márquez’s work has been praised for bringing literary fiction back into contact with real life in all of its richness. His combination of realism and fantasy known as Magical Realism (realismo mágico) sets the stage for a full spectrum of Latin American characters. His stories focus on basic human concerns, and characters or incidents from one work are often integrated into others, if only with a passing reference.

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García Márquez won the Colombian Association of Writers and Artists Award in 1954, for the story “Un dia despues del sabado.” The novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) garnered the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Italian Chianciano Award, and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallego Prize. Awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, the Nobel committee compared the breadth and quality of his work to that of such great writers as William Faulkner and Honoré de Balzac. In 1988 García Márquez won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, for El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988). Biography • Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a town near the Atlantic coast of Colombia, on March © The Nobel Foundation 6, 1928. His parents, Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio Márquez, sent him to live with his maternal grandparents for the first eight years of his life. He attended school in Barranquilla and Zipaquirá and went on to law studies at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá. García Márquez’s first short story was published in 1947 in the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. The literary editor praised the work, and in the next five years several more short fictions were also published. When his studies were interrupted by political violence in 1948, García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena, but he never received his degree. Instead, he began his career as a journalist, writing for El Universal. He soon had a daily column and became friends with the writers and artists of the “Barranquilla group.” In 1950, he moved to Barranquilla and in 1954 to Bogotá, continuing his work as a journalist. During this time, he also published Leaf Storm, and Other Stories and received a prize from the Association of Artists and Writers of Bogotá. In 1955, he was sent to Geneva, Switzerland, as a European correspondent. When El Espectador was closed down in January, 1956, García Márquez spent a period of poverty in Paris, working on La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour, 1979) and writing some freelance articles. In the summer of 1957, he traveled through Eastern Europe before moving to Caracas, Venezuela, as a journalist. With the prospect of a steady job, he married Mercedes Barcha in March, 1958. Interested since his university days in leftist causes, García Márquez worked for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina in Bogotá after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, then in Havana, Cuba, and later New York. After leaving the agency, he moved to Mexico City, where he worked as a journalist and screenwriter with Carlos Fuentes during the period 1961-1967. In 1962, In Evil Hour was published and won the Esso Literary Prize in Colombia. That same year, a collection of stories, Los funerales de la

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Mamá Grande, also appeared. Then, in a spurt of creative energy, García Márquez spent eighteen months of continuous work to produce his best-selling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which won book prizes in Italy and France in 1969. In order to be able to write in peace after the tremendous success of this book, he moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he met Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. In 1972, he won both the Rómulo Gallego Prize in Venezuela and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The money from both prizes was donated to political causes. García Márquez left Barcelona in 1975 and returned to Mexico. That same year, El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), about the life of a Latin American dictator, was published, and in 1981, his Chronicle of a Death Foretold appeared. His news magazine, Alternativa, founded in 1974 in Bogotá to present opposing political views, folded in 1980, but García Márquez continued his activism by writing a weekly column for Hispanic newspapers and magazines. His Nobel Prize speech in 1982 made a strong statement about conditions in Latin America yet sounded the note of hope in the face of oppression. García Márquez continued his literary production after receiving the Nobel Prize, publishing, among other works, El general en su laberinto in 1989 (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), based on the life of South American revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar. He also continued his political work, appearing at conferences with, variously, Colombian, Venezuelan, Mexican, and U.S. presidents discussing such issues as civil war and drug trafficking. In 1999 he fell ill in Bogotá, in one of his seven houses, and was diagnosed with cancer. Analysis • Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction is characterized by a thread of common themes, events, and characters that seem to link his work together into one multifaceted portrayal of the experiences of Latin American life. From the influences of his early childhood, when he learned from his grandmother how to tell the most fantastic stories in a matter-of-fact tone, to his later observations of the oppression and cruelties of politics, García Márquez captures the everyday life of the amazing people of coastal Colombia, with its Caribbean flavor, as well as the occasional resident of the highlands of Bogotá. He has an eye for the details of daily life mixed with humor and an attitude of acceptance and wonder. His characters experience the magic and joy of life and face the suffering of solitude and isolation but always with an innate dignity. García Márquez’s vision touches real life with its local attitudes and values, and in the process it also reveals a criticism of politics, the Church, and U.S. imperialism, as they contribute to the Latin American experience. García Márquez’s body of work portrays a complete reality breaking out of conventional bounds. Characters from one story regularly show up or are mentioned in another, while his complex mix of fantasy and reality reveals a consummate storyteller capable of bringing to his work the magic of his non-European world. His impact as a writer lies in the fact that although his work describes the Latin American experience of life, it also goes beyond to reveal a universal human experience. Ojos de perro azul • García Márquez’s earliest stories have a bizarre, almost surreal, tone, reminiscent of Franz Kafka. Collected in Ojos de perro azul, these stories represent an experimental phase of García Márquez’s development as a writer. They exemplify his new, or strange, realism, extending the reality of life into and beyond the experience of death. “La tercera resignación” (“The Third Resignation”), for example, deals with the thoughts and fears of a young man in his coffin. “Nabo, el negro que

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hizo esperar a los ángeles” (“Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait”) tells of a man who is locked in a stable because he goes insane after being kicked in the head by a horse. In “Isabel viendo llover en Macondo” (“Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo”), published the same year as his first novella, Leaf Storm, García Márquez captures the atmosphere of a tropical storm through the eyes of his protagonist. Here, the world of Macondo, used in Leaf Storm as well and made world-famous in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is presented amid the suffocating oppressiveness of tropical weather. Here as later, nature itself is often a palpable force in the fiction of García Márquez—often exaggerated and overwhelming in order to reflect the reality of Latin American geography and the natural forces within it. The repetition underscores the monotony of the continuing deluge, and the theme of solitude is reflected in the imagery as well as in the personal relationship of Isabel and Martin: “The sky was a gray, jellyish substance that flapped its wings a hand away from our heads.” No One Writes to the Colonel • After demonstrating his ability to capture the tropical atmosphere, García Márquez shows himself capable of capturing a portrait in words with his well-structured novella No One Writes to the Colonel. The central character is a dignified man with a deep sense of honor who has been promised a military pension. Every Friday, he goes to the post office to wait for mail that never comes, and then he claims that he really was not expecting anything anyway. He is a patient man, resigned to eternal waiting and hope when there is no reason to expect that hope to be fulfilled. “For nearly sixty years—since the end of the last civil war—the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.” His other hope is his rooster, which belonged to his son, who was executed for handing out subversive literature, but since he is too poor to feed the rooster, some townspeople work out an arrangement to provide food until after the big fight. The political background is introduced subtly as the story opens with the funeral of the first person to die of natural causes in this town for a long time. Violence, censorship, and political repression are a given, as is the pervasive poverty. The colonel continues passing out the literature in his son’s place and waiting for his pension. His dignity sustains him in the face of starvation. The dialogues between the colonel and his practical wife of many years are woven through the novella and reach a climax at the very end of the story. She presses him to sell the rooster, asking plaintively and persistently what they will eat: It had taken the colonel seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied: “S—!” Los funerales de la Mamá Grande • The image of dignity is developed again in the first story of Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, entitled “La siesta del martes” (“Tuesday Siesta”) and also set in Macondo. Said to be García Márquez’s favorite, it tells of a woman and her young daughter who arrive by train in the stifling heat at siesta time. The woman asks the priest to be allowed to visit her son in the cemetery. The young man was shot for being a thief, but she proudly claims him as her own with quiet selfcontrol: “I told him never to steal anything that anyone needed to eat, and he minded me.”

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The title story, “Los funerales de la Mamá Grande” (“Big Mama’s Funeral”), still set in Macondo, breaks the tone of the other stories into a technique of hyperbole, which García Márquez later used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to good effect. The opening sentence sets the tone: This is, for all the world’s unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for ninety-two years, and died in the odor of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope. The panorama and parody of the story mention Mama’s power and property in highsounding phrases, many from journalism. The pageantry is grandiose to the point of the absurd for this powerful individual, a prototype of the patriarch who appears in García Márquez’s later work. She is a legend and local “saint,” who seemed to the local people to be immortal; her death comes as a complete surprise. The story criticizes the manipulation of power but also skillfully satirizes the organized display or public show that eulogizes the holders of power with pomp and empty words. The story ends when the garbage men come and sweep up on the next day. Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories • Fantastic elements characterize the collection entitled Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories. Two of the stories, “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”) and “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo” (“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”), have adult figures who are like toys with which children, and other adults, can play. With the second story, García Márquez also tries a technique of shifting narrators and point of view to be used later in the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. A political satire is the basis for another story, “Muerte constante más allá del amor” (“Death Constant Beyond Love”). The situation that forms the basis for the satire is also incorporated into the longer “Innocent Eréndira.” Geographically, in this collection García Márquez has moved inland to the barren landscape on the edge of the Guajiro desert. Here, he sets a type of folktale with an exploited granddaughter, a green-blooded monster of a grandmother, and a rescuing hero named Ulises. Combining myth, allegory, and references from other works, García Márquez weaves a story in which “the wind of her misfortune” determines the life of the extraordinarily passive Eréndira. Treated as a slave and a prostitute by her grandmother, Eréndira persuades Ulises to kill the evil woman—who turns out to be amazingly hard to kill. Throughout the story, García Márquez demonstrates the ability to report the most monstrous things in a matter-of-fact tone. Some critics have pointed out that the exaggeration that seems inherent in many of his tales may have its roots in the extraordinary events and stories that are commonplace in his Latin American world. Chronicle of a Death Foretold • In the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, García Márquez blends his experience in journalism with his mastery of technique to tell a story based on an actual event that took place in 1955 in Sucre, where he lived at the time. Using records and witness testimony, he unfolds his story on the lines of a detective story. The incident is based on the revenge taken by Angela Vicario’s brothers on their friend Santiago Nasar, who supposedly took Angela’s virginity (although some doubt is cast on this allegation). The story is pieced together as the townspeople offer their memories of what happened, along with excuses for not having

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warned the victim. Tension builds as the reader knows the final outcome but not how or why it will occur. The use of dreams (ironically, Nasar’s mother is an interpreter of dreams), the feeling of fatalism, and submission to the code of honor, all of which form a part of this society’s attitudes, play a central role in the novella, as do García Márquez’s use of vision and foreshadowing. Although the basis for the story is a journalistic report of a murder, the actual writing captures the themes of love and death as well as the complex interplay of human emotions and motives in a balanced and poetic account, which reveals García Márquez’s skill as a writer. Strange Pilgrims • Strange Pilgrims picks up the Magical Realism of the earlier short stories, orchestrating twelve works written between 1976 and 1982 so that seven stories, having to do with the death-force of life, are followed by five stories which evoke the vitality of death. The opening story portrays a septuagenarian ex-president whose imminent death proves to be illusory; the seventh story portrays a septuagenarian woman, to whom the approach of death proves to be illusory. In both stories, dying is detailed as a form of intensified living. The second and sixth stories deal with the supernatural, one through a corpse that does not putrefy and the other through a haunted bedroom, and both include Italian settings. The third and fifth stories carry fairy-tale variations: a sleeping beauty who, unkissed, awakes of her own volition, and a lady in distress who, imprisoned in a madhouse, transcends her incarceration. In the fourth story, the umbilicus of the seven, a woman, whose life consists of dreaming, awakens from her dreams only through death. The concluding five stories present, first, two stories of murder—between which is a story of suicide—and two stories dealing with strange fatalities. In one, the wave function of light drowns persons without diving gear; in the other, an apparently negligible rose-thorn prick on a young bride’s ring fingertip inexorably causes her death. Susan L. Piepke With updates by Roy Arthur Swanson Other major works novels: La hojarasca, 1955 (novella; translated as Leaf Storm in Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972); El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (novella; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968); La mala hora, 1962 (revised 1966; In Evil Hour, 1979); Cien años de soledad, 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970); El otoño del patriarca, 1975 (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975); El amor en los tiempos del cólera, 1985 (Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988); El general en su laberinto, 1989 (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990); Collected Novellas, 1990; Del amor y otros demonios, 1994 (Of Love and Other Demons, 1995); Memoria de mis putas tristes, 2004 (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005). nonfiction: La novela en América Latina: Diálogo, 1968 (with Mario Vargas Llosa); Cuando era feliz e indocumentado, 1973; Chile, el golpe y los gringos, 1974; Crónicas y reportajes, 1976; Operación Carlota, 1977; De viaje por los países socialistas, 1978; Periodismo militante, 1978; Obra periodística, 1981-1999 (5 volumes; includes Textos costeños, 1981; Entre cachacos, 1982; De Europa y América, 1955-1960, 1983; Por la libre, 1974-1995, 1999; Notas de prensa, 1961-1984, 1999); El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, 1982 (The Fragrance of the Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, 1983; also known as The Smell of Guava, 1984); La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, 1986 (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, 1987); Noticia de un secuestro, 1996 (News of a Kidnapping,

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1997); Por un país al alcance de los niños, 1996 (For the Sake of a Country Within Reach of the Children, 1998); Vivir para contarla, 2002 (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003). Bibliography Bell, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. This book explores García Márquez’s works from a number of different perspectives, ranging from comparative literary criticism to political and social critiques. Aso included are commentaries on García Márquez’s styles, including journalism and Magical Realism. Bell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Includes biographical information on García Márquez, analyses of his major works, an index, and a bibliography. Bloom, Harold, ed. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Essays by eighteen critics, with an introduction by Bloom, on the fiction of García Márquez. Includes two studies of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, estimates of the influences of Kafka and Faulkner, analyses of narrative stylistics, and inquiries into the author’s types of realism. Byk, John. “From Fact to Fiction: Gabriel García Márquez and the Short Story.” MidAmerican Review 6 (1986): 111-116. Discusses the development of García Márquez’s short fiction from his early imitations of Kafka to his more successful experiments with Magical Realism. Gerlach, John. “The Logic of Wings: García Márquez, Todorov, and the Endless Resources of Fantasy.” In Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Argues that the point of view of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” makes readers sympathize with the old man by establishing his superiority over the villagers. González, Nelly Sfeir de. Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1986-1992. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Annotated bibliography that includes works by García Márquez, criticism and sources for him, and an index of audio and visual materials related to the author and his works. McMurray, George R., ed. Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Collection of book reviews, articles, and essays covering the full range of García Márquez’s fictional work. Very useful for an introduction to specific novels and collections of short stories. Also includes an introductory overview by the editor and an index. McNerney, Kathleen. Understanding Gabriel García Márquez. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Overview addressed to students and nonacademic readers. After an introduction on Colombia and a brief biography, the five core chapters explain his works in depth. Chapters 1 through 3 discuss three novels, chapter 4 focuses on his short novels and stories, and chapter 5 reviews the role of journalism in his work. Includes a select, annotated bibliography of critical works and an index. McGuirk, Bernard, and Richard Cardwell, eds. Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Collection of twelve essays in English by different authors reflecting a variety of critical approaches and covering García Márquez’s major novels as well as a selection of his early fiction: No One Writes to the Colonel, Innocent Eréndira, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Also includes a translation of García Márquez’s Nobel address and a select bibliography.

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Oberhelman, Harley D. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Argues that García Márquez’s short fiction is almost as important as his novels. Suggests that his stories have the same narrative pattern as his novels. Includes five interviews with García Márquez and essays by four critics. Solanet, Mariana. García Márquez for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers, 2001. Part of the “Beginners” series of brief introductions to major writers and their works. Very basic, but a good starting point.

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Hamlin Garland Born: West Salem, Wisconsin; September 14, 1860 Died: Hollywood, California; March 4, 1940 Principal short fiction • Main-Travelled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories, 1891; Prairie Folks, 1893; Wayside Courtships, 1897; Other Main-Travelled Roads, 1910; They of the High Trails, 1916; The Book of the American Indian, 1923. Other literary forms • Hamlin Garland’s more than fifty published works include nearly every literary type—novels, biography, autobiography, essays, dramas, and poems. His best and most memorable novels are Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), similar in plot to the later Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie (1900), and Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), chronicling the social history of Garland’s boyhood. One book of essays, Crumbling Idols (1894), presents his theory of realism (“veritism”). His autobiographical quartet, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), Trail-Makers of the Middle Border (1926), and Back-Trailers from the Middle Border (1928), recounts the story of his family. A Daughter of the Middle Border won the Pulitzer Prize for 1922. These books contain episodes that are treated in greater detail in some of his short stories. Achievements • Hamlin Garland’s work stands at an important transition point leading from Romanticism to realism, playing a role in ushering in the new literary trend. His best works are important for their depiction of a segment of society seldom delineated by other writers and for the relationship they show between literature and its socioeconomic environment. He used American themes—rather than Americanized European themes—and commonplace characters and incidents that turned the American writer away from his colonial complex, even away from the New England tradition of letters. His realism emancipated the American Midwest and West and the American farmer particularly from the romanticized conception that kept their story from being told before. Like Walt Whitman, Garland wanted writers to tell about life as they knew it and witnessed it. His realism foreshadowed the work of young writers such as Stephen Crane, E. W. Howe, and Harold Frederic. His naturalistic inclination, apparent in his belief that environment is crucial in shaping men’s lives, preceded the naturalistic writing of Crane, Frank Norris, and Dreiser. Aside from their value as literature, Garland’s best stories are a comprehensive record of an otherwise relatively unreported era of American social history. Much read in his prime, he enjoyed considerable popularity even while antagonizing, with his merciless word pictures, the very people about whom he wrote. Garland was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Southern California, Northwestern University, and Beloit College. In 1918, he was elected to the board of directors of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Autobiography in 1922. Biography • Of Scotch-Irish descent, Hannibal Hamlin Garland moved with his family from Wisconsin, where he was born in West Salem on September 14, 1860, to an

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Iowa farm while still a child. Years spent on the farm made him seek escape through a career in oratory. To this end, he attended Cedar Valley Seminary, from which he graduated in 1881. He held a land claim in North Dakota for a year but mortgaged it for the chance to go East and enroll in Boston University. He succeeded in getting to Boston but was unable to attend the university; however, he embarked on a selfdirected program of reading in the holdings of the Boston Public Library. While in Boston, he began writing, his first attempts being lectures, then stories and books. It was around this time also that he joined the Anti-Poverty Society and became an active reformer. He read Henry George and embraced the Single Tax theory as a solution to some of the many contemporary social problems. Donald Pizer, along with many scholars, divides Garland’s career into three general phases: a period of political and social reform activity that coincides with his most memorable fiction set in the Middle West (1884-1895); a period of popular romance-writing in which his settings shifted from the Midwest to the Rocky Mountains (1896-1916); and a period of increasing political and social conservatism, during which he wrote his major autobiographical works (1917-1940). In 1899, Garland married Zulime Taft, and they became parents of daughters born in 1904 and 1907. His list of acquaintances and friends grew to include such literary figures as William Dean Howells, Eugene Field, Joseph Kirkland, Edward Eggleston, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, and Rudyard Kipling. Garland lived the last years of his life in Hollywood, where he could be near his married daughter. In these later years, he turned more seriously to a lifelong fascination with the occult, producing two books on the subject. He died of cerebral hemorrhage in Hollywood on March 4, 1940. Analysis • Hamlin Garland’s most enduring short stories are those dealing with the Middle Border (the prairie lands of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas). Collected for the most part in four books, they touch on nearly every subject of everyday life, from birth through youth, adulthood, courtship, and marriage, to death. They deal with the unromantic life of harassed generations on the farms and in the small towns of the prairie. Garland’s belief that an author must write of “what is” with an eye toward “what is to be” causes him alternately to describe, prophesy, suggest, and demand. Although often subtle in his approach, he is sometimes, when championing the cause of the farmer, more the reformer than the artist. Social protest is the single most recurrent theme in his work. “A Stopover at Tyre” and “Before the Low Green Door” show with some skill the unrelenting drudgery of the farmer’s life. “Under the Lion’s Paw” • “Under the Lion’s Paw,” Garland’s most anthologized story, is his most powerful statement of protest. In it, one man, Tim Haskins, like thousands of struggling farmers, is exploited by another man, representative of scores of other land speculators. Haskins, through months of arduous labor, pushing his own and his wife’s energies to their limits, has managed to make the dilapidated farm he is renting a productive place of which he can be proud. He has begun to feel confident that he can buy the farm and make a success of it. The owner, however, has taken note of the many physical improvements Haskins has made and recognizes its increased value. Thus, when Haskins talks to the owner about buying the place, he is astonished to learn that the purchase price has doubled and the rent has been increased. Haskins is “under the lion’s paw,” caught in untenable circumstances that

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will hurt him no matter what he does. If he gives up the farm, as his angry indignation dictates, he will lose all the money and time he has invested in the farm’s improvements. If he buys, he will be under a heavy mortgage that could be foreclosed at any time. If he continues to rent at the higher fee, all his work will almost literally be for the owner’s benefit, not for himself and his family. The personally satisfying alternative of simply striking the man dead is wildly considered by Haskins momentarily until the thought of the repercussions to his family brings him to his senses, and he agrees to buy on the owner’s terms. The situation in itself is cruel. Garland clearly shows that it is even worse when one realizes that the exploitation of Haskins is only one of thousands of similar cases. “Lucretia Burns” • “Lucretia Burns,” another social protest story, is longer and has more action and a more complex major character than the similar “Before the Low Green Door.” Although some of its impact is diminished by its tiresome discussions on reform and by its weak denouement, Garland has created in Lucretia an unforgettable character who makes the story praiseworthy. Lucretia is a strong personality who had “never been handsome, even in her days of early childhood, and now she was middle-aged, distorted with work and childbearing, and looking faded and worn.” Her face is “a pitifully worn, almost tragic face—long, thin, sallow, holloweyed. The mouth had long since lost the power to shape itself into a kiss.” She has reached a point of desperation that calls for some kind of action: confrontation (with her husband), capitulation, or a mental breakdown. She chooses to renounce her soul-killing existence and operate on a level of bare subsistence, with no more struggling to “get ahead” or do what is expected. When the spirit of rebellion overcomes her, she simply gives in to her chronic weariness and refuses to do more than feed her children and the husband for whom she no longer cares. For a successful conclusion to this powerful indictment against the farm wife’s hopeless life, Garland had several choices. Unfortunately, he chose the ineffectual ending in which a dainty, young, idealistic schoolteacher persuades Lucretia to give life another try. The reader, having seen Lucretia’s determination to stop the drudgery in her life forever, is dissatisfied, knowing it would have taken a great deal more than a sympathetic stranger to convince Lucretia that her life was worth enduring. This kind of lapse is not Garland’s only flaw. Occasionally, he leads on his readers, telling them what they should think about a character. In “A Sociable at Dudleys,” for example, he describes the county bully: “No lizard Library of Congress revelled in the mud more hideously

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than he. . . . His tongue dropped poison.” Garland apparently abhorred the “vileness of the bully’s whole life and thought.” Moreover, in most of the stories, one can tell the heroes from the villains by the Aryan features and Scottish names of the former and the dark, alien looks of the latter. His heroes are further categorized into two prevailing physical types: Either they are tall, imposing, strong, even powerful and handsome (Tim Haskins is an older, more worn version of this type) or they are stocky, sturdy, ambitious, cheerful, and optimistic counterparts of the young Hamlin Garland as he described himself in A Son of the Middle Border. Will Hannan of “A Branch Road” falls into this category. “A Branch Road” • “A Branch Road” develops another favorite theme of Garland— a romantic one in which boy meets girl; misunderstanding separates them; and then adversity reunites them. Although this plot is well-worn today, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the reading public still liked it, and Garland occasionally catered to the larger reading public. “A Branch Road” is long enough for the author to develop character, setting, and plot in a more leisurely, less personal manner than in some of his other stories on the same theme, such as “A Day of Grace,” “A Sociable at Dudleys,” and “William Bacon’s Man.” In “A Branch Road,” young Will Hannan and Agnes Dingman have fallen in love. Will is ecstatic when he goes to the Dingman farm to help with the threshing, secure in his belief that she cares as much for him as he for her. Once at the farm, however, listening to the other men, both young and older, making casual, joking comments about Agnes’s prettiness and her attraction to most of the young swains in the county, Will becomes apprehensive that they will notice her obvious preference for him and make light of his deep private feelings. To prevent this, he repays her smiling attentions to him with curt words and an aloof manner. Agnes is hurt and confused by this, not understanding his masculine pride and sensitivity to ridicule. She responds by keeping up a light-hearted demeanor by smiling and talking to the other men, who are delighted, a response that makes Will rage inwardly. The day is a disaster for Will, but because he is to take Agnes to the fair in a few days, he is confident that he will be able then to set things right. On the morning of the day of the fair, however, the hopeful lover sets out early but promptly loses a wheel from his buggy, requiring several hours of delay for repair. By the time he gets to Agnes’s house, she has gone to the fair with Will’s rival, Ed Kinney. Will is so enraged by this turn of events that he cannot think. Dominated by his pride and jealous passion, blaming her and considering no alternatives, he leaves the county, heading West, without a word of farewell or explanation to Agnes. Seven years later he returns to find Agnes married to Ed Kinney, mother of a baby, daughter-in-law to two pestering old people, and distressingly old before her time. Will manages to speak privately to her and learns how he and she had misunderstood each other’s actions on that day long ago. He finds she had indeed loved him. He accepts that it is his fault her life is now so unhappy, that she is so abused and worn. In defiance of custom and morality, he persuades her to leave her husband and go away with him. They flee, taking her baby with them. In outline, this is the familiar melodrama of the villain triumphing over the fair maiden while the hero is away; then, just in time, the hero returns to rescue the heroine from the villain’s clutches. Actually, however, Garland avoids melodrama and even refrains from haranguing against farm drudgery. He avoids the weak denouement and chooses instead a rather radical solution to the problem: The

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abduction of a wife and baby by another man was a daring ending to an American 1890’s plot. Yet Garland makes the justice of the action acceptable. Will Hannan, a very sensitive young man living among people who seem coarse and crude, is propelled through the story by strong, understandable emotions: love, pride, anger, fear of humiliation, remorse, pity, and guilt. Love causes the anger that creates the confusion in his relationship with Agnes. Pride and fear of humiliation drive him away from her. Remorse pursues him all the time he is away and is largely responsible for his return. Pity and guilt make him steal Agnes away from the life to which he feels he has condemned her. Many of Garland’s other stories do not have the emotional motivation of characters that “A Branch Road” has (in all fairness, most are not as long); nor are Garland’s characters generally as complex. He seems less concerned with probing a personality’s reaction to a situation than with describing the consequences of an act. The theme of the return of the native to his Middle Border home is used in several stories, among them “Up the Coolly,” “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip,” and “Among the Corn Rows.” “The Return of a Private” • Less pessimistic and tragic and more sentimental than these is “The Return of a Private,” an elaboration of Garland’s father’s return from the Civil War (1861-1865) as told in the first chapter of A Son of the Middle Border. The story describes the sadness which old war comrades feel as they go their separate ways home. It describes the stirring emotions which the returning soldier feels as he nears his home and sees familiar landmarks; when he first catches sight of the homestead; when he sees his nearly disbelieving wife and the children who hardly remember him. They are tender scenes, but Garland the artist cannot contain Garland the reformer, who reminds the reader of the futility facing the soldier, disabled physically from war-connected fever and ague and handicapped financially by the heavy mortgage on his farm. The soldier’s homecoming is shown as one tiny, bright moment in what has been and will continue to be an endless cycle of dullness and hardship. Garland obviously empathizes with the character and shows the homecoming as a sweet, loving time, but, as with so many of his stories, “The Return of a Private” is overcast with gloom. Garland’s stories show the ugly and the beautiful, the tragic with the humorous, the just with the unjust. He tries always to show the true, reporting the speech and dress of the people accurately, describing their homes and their work honestly. Truth, however, is not all that he seeks; he wants significance as well. To this end, his stories show the effects of farm drudgery on the men and women, of the ignorant practices of evangelists, of the thwarted ambitions of the youth because of circumstances beyond their control. Garland does not always suppress his reformer’s instincts, and so in some stories he offers solutions. In his best stories, however, he simply shows the injustice and moves the reader, by his skillful handling of details, to wish to take action. Although his stories are often bitter and depressing, there is a hopefulness and optimism in Garland that compels him to bring them to a comparatively happy ending. In his best stories, he does for the Middle Border what Mary E. Wilkins Freeman does for New England, brings the common people into rich relation with the reader and shows movingly the plights of the less fortunate among them, especially women. Jane L. Ball With updates by Terry Heller

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Other major works play: Under the Wheel: A Modern Play in Six Scenes, pb. 1890. novels: A Little Norsk, 1892; A Member of the Third House, 1892; A Spoil of Office, 1892; Jason Edwards: An Average Man, 1892; Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, 1895; The Spirit of Sweetwater, 1898 (reissued as Witch’s Gold, 1906); Boy Life on the Prairie, 1899; The Eagle’s Heart, 1900; Her Mountain Lover, 1901; The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop, 1902; Hesper, 1903; The Light of the Star, 1904; The Tyranny of the Dark, 1905; Money Magic, 1907 (reissued as Mart Haney’s Mate, 1922); The Long Trail, 1907; The Moccasin Ranch, 1909; Cavanagh, Forest Ranger, 1910; Victor Ollnee’s Discipline, 1911; The Forester’s Daughter, 1914. nonfiction: Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art, 1894; Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character, 1898; Out-of-Door Americans, 1901; A Son of the Middle Border, 1917; A Daughter of the Middle Border, 1921; Trail-Makers of the Middle Border, 1926; The Westward March of American Settlement, 1927; Back-Trailers from the Middle Border, 1928; Roadside Meetings, 1930; Companions on the Trail: A Literary Chronicle, 1931; My Friendly Contemporaries: A Literary Log, 1932; Afternoon Neighbors, 1934; Joys of the Trail, 1935; Forty Years of Psychic Research: A Plain Narrative of Fact, 1936. poetry: Prairie Songs, 1893. Bibliography Garland, Hamlin. Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland. Edited by Keith Newlin and Joseph B. McCullough. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. The volume’s introduction serves as a good entry into Hamlin’s biography. Joseph, Philip. “Landed and Literary: Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Production of Regional Literatures.” Studies in American Fiction 26 (Autumn, 1998): 147-170. Compares some of Garland’s early stories with the stories in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs to examine ideological conflict within literary regionalism. Argues that while Garland’s support for social reform leads him to challenge some of the conventions of late nineteenth century realism, Jewett does not see class differences as a hindrance to U.S. destiny. McCullough, Joseph. Hamlin Garland. Boston: Twayne, 1978. This study follows Garland through his literary career, dividing it into phases, with major attention to the first phase of his reform activities and the midwestern stories. A primary bibliography and a select, annotated secondary bibliography are included. Martin, Quentin E. “Hamlin Garland’s ‘The Return of a Private’ and ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’ and the Monopoly of Money in Post-Civil War America.” American Literary Realism 29 (Fall, 1996): 62-77. Discusses how Garland made money and power the central features in his two stories; discusses the connection between the stories and the financial system of Gilded Age America in the 1890’s. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these three short stories by Garland: “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip” (vol. 5), “The Return of a Private” (vol. 6), and “Under the Lion’s Paw” (vol. 8). Nagel, James, ed. Critical Essays on Hamlin Garland. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Nagel’s introduction surveys the critical responses to Garland’s work. This volume is especially rich in reviews of Garland’s books, and it also includes twenty-six biographical and critical essays.

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Newlin, Keith. “Melodramatist of the Middle Border: Hamlin Garland’s Early Work Reconsidered.” Studies in American Fiction 21 (Autumn, 1993): 153-169. Discusses Garland’s development of a dramatic method to express the privation of the Middle Border; argues that he was torn between his admiration for the universal truths of melodrama and his realization that melodrama was limited in its realistic presentation of life. ____________, ed. Hamlin Garland: A Bibliography, with a Checklist of Unpublished Letters. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1998. Basically a primary bibliography, with one section listing articles that addressed Garland extensively. The introduction surveys the availability of primary and secondary sources. Newlin includes a chronology and title index. Silet, Charles. Henry Blake Fuller and Hamlin Garland: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. This volume contains a comprehensive annotated guide to writing about Garland through 1975. For information about scholarly writing on Garland after 1975, see American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Silet, Charles, Robert Welch, and Richard Boudreau, eds. The Critical Reception of Hamlin Garland, 1891-1978. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1985. This illustrated volume contains thirty-three essays that illustrate the development of Garland’s literary reputation from 1891 to 1978. The introduction emphasizes the difficulty critics have had trying to determine the quality of Garland’s art.

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Nikolai Gogol Born: Sorochintsy, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine); March 31, 1809 Died: Moscow, Russia; March 4, 1852 Principal short fiction • Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki, vol. 1, 1831, vol. 2, 1832 (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, 1926); Arabeski, 1835 (Arabesques, 1982); Mirgorod, 1835 (English translation, 1928). Other literary forms • Nikolai Gogol established his reputation on his remarkable short stories, but he is often better known in the West for his play Revizor (pr., pb. 1836; The Inspector General, 1890) and for the first part of his novel Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead Souls, 1887). Still the subject of much debate and criticism, his Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami (1847; Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, 1969) represents a range from literary criticism to tendentious and presumptuous evaluation of Russia as seen from abroad. Achievements • In Russian literature of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Nikolai Gogol as an innovator in style and subject matter. He created a great and enduring art form composed of the manners of petty officials, small landowners, and the fantastic and all-too-real people who inhabit the three worlds that he describes: the Ukraine, St. Petersburg, and the Russian heartland. Outside Russia, his influence can be detected most noticeably in Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936), which centers on a conceit not unlike Nikolai Gogol’s hapless titular councillor in Gogol’s “Nos” (“The Nose”). Inside Russia, Fyodor Dostoevski is reputed to have begun the saying that “we all came from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” meaning that Gogol’s stories originated the themes, social and spiritual anguish, and other literary preoccupations of the rest of Russian literature. Biography • Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in the Ukraine on March 31, 1809, to a Ukrainian landowner, Vasily Afanasievich Gogol-Yanovsky, and his young wife, Mariya Ivanovna. Vasily Afanasievich wrote plays in Ukrainian and sponsored artistic evenings at his home. Nikolai would write almost nothing in Ukrainian throughout his life. On his father’s estate, Nikolai would absorb the manner and, significantly, the pace of provincial life, which would flavor his works from his early stories through Dead Souls. At school and later in the Gymnasium, Nikolai remained something of a loner. He participated in activities, especially in drama performances, where he is said to have excelled. His classmates called him “the mysterious dwarf,” though, for his predilection to aloofness and his unassuming stature. Gogol’s first work, Hans Kuechelgarten (1829), which he published at his own expense, was received so poorly that he bought all the unsold copies, burned them, and never wrote in verse again. He fled the country (in what was to become a characteristic retreat) and took refuge in Germany for several weeks. When he returned,

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he occupied a minor post in the civil service in St. Petersburg and began writing the stories that would begin to appear in 1831 and subsequently make him famous. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, met with great critical and popular acclaim and set the stage for the series of successes that his later stories were to have. In 1836, however, his play The Inspector General premiered, was produced most outlandishly in Gogol’s mind, and created a minor scandal. Although this initial reaction was reversed and, through the intercession of the czar himself, the play was to continue its run, Gogol was nevertheless mortified at the antagLibrary of Congress onism that he had aroused in the spectators. He again left the country, only this time—with the exception of two rather short trips back to Russia— forever. Gogol’s last and most enduring works, “Shinel” (“The Overcoat”) and Dead Souls, were thus written abroad. The irony of the profound resonance that his writing enjoyed at home was not lost on him. He began to doubt his ability to convey the “truth” to the Russians from such a distance and began to search for artistic inspiration. His self-doubt gave birth to his last literary production, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. This product of his doubt was met with indignation and even anger in Russia. Vissarion Belinsky wrote his famous letter excoriating Gogol for his “fantastic book” and for writing from his “beautiful distance.” Had Gogol forgotten the misery of Russia, its serfdom and servility, its “tartar” censorship, its totalitarian clout? Belinsky believed that the public was justified in its censure of this work; the public has the right to expect more from literature. Gogol spent the last six years of his life fighting depression and artistic barrenness, trying to reach the “truth” in the second part of Dead Souls. However, he failed to finish this work and, shortly before his death, burned what he had written. Physically ill, spiritually empty, emotionally depleted, he died in pain in Moscow on March 4, 1852. Analysis • Nikolai Gogol combines the consummate stylist with the innocent spectator, flourishes and flounces with pure human emotion, naturalism with delicate sensitivity. He bridges the period between Romanticism and realism in Russian literature. He captures the “real” against the background of the imagined and, in the estimation of at least one critic, the surreal. Frequently, the supernatural or some confounding coincidence plays a major role in his works. His heroes of the “little man” variety imprinted the most profound impression on his readers and critics alike. These petty clerks, all socially dysfunctional in some major respect, nevertheless

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explore the great depth of the human soul and exhibit certain personality traits characteristic of the greatest heroes in literature. Gogol focuses his major creative occupation on the manners of his characters; his creative energy is nowhere more apparent than in the “mannerizing” in which he describes and characterizes. His genius does not dwell in philosophical dialogues, allegory, or involved interior monologue as do the realist novels of the latter half of the century. Nor does he engender his heroes with abandon and ennui, as do his near contemporaries Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. The depth of his psychological portraiture and the sweep of his romantic apostrophes, however, remain powerful and fascinating. In his plays, speech is swept aside from its characteristic place in the foreground; the dramatic foreground is given over to the manner or mannerisms of the characters. The actions literally speak louder than words. The social satire, deeply embedded in the manners of the characters, unfolds without special machinations and with few unnatural speech acts, such as asides. It is a tribute to Gogol’s skill that his characters do not necessarily become superficial or unidimensional as a result but are imbued with certain attributes that display a wide range of human passion, particularly human dignity and the cognizance of the injustices created in social stratification. One of Gogol’s favored narrative devices can be called the chatty narrator. This narrator, seemingly prolix and sometimes random, will supply the reader with most of the information that will ever be revealed about a character. In a typical passage, the reader will encounter a character who might say something utterly commonplace such as: “I won’t have coffee today, Praskovia Osipovna, instead I will take some hot bread with onions.” The character says little that can be used to describe himself. The reader’s attention, however, is then directed to the information supplied by the narrator: “Actually, Ivan Yakovlevich would have liked to take both, but he knew it was utterly impossible to ask for two things at the same time since Praskovia Osipovna greatly disliked such whims.” Thus Ivan Yakovlevich is described by his manners—he speaks to his wife in a formal tone that relates very little information to the reader— but the narrator, in his chatty, nosy fashion reveals much about this individual and describes Ivan’s wife, his subordinate position at home, and his struggle for dignity within this relationship at the same time. Thus, from a seeming excess of information, the reader becomes familiar with a character who might otherwise remain nondescript. Gogol’s narratives abound in descriptions, and these tend to be humorous. Many times, humor is created by the device of metonymy, whereby a part stands for the whole. Thus, women become “slender waists” and seem so light that one fears that they will float away, and men are mustaches of various colors, according to their rank. Another humorous effect might be created by the chatty narrator’s remark about some individual in a very unfavorable light. This information that he, for some reason, knows in regard to the character informs the reader’s opinion of that character and often lends either a humorous or a pathetic tone to his or her person. Also humorous is the effect created through realized metaphors, another favorite technique of Gogol. Thus, instead of “he ate like a pig,” the person is actually transformed into a pig with all the attributes of a perfect pig, at least temporarily. In general, Gogol’s works abound with descriptions packed with colors, similes, and wayward characterizations by his narrator or actors. Gogol’s works fall roughly into three categories, which in turn correspond approximately to three different periods in his creative life. The first period is repre-

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sented solely by short stories that exhibit lush local color from the Ukraine and Gogol’s own mixing of devils and simple folk. Seven of the eight stories from the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which appeared in 1831 (with the second part following in 1832), belong in this category, as well as the stories in Mirgorod, first published in 1835. The second major period of Gogol’s literary life features works either centered on a locus in the imperial center of Russia, St. Petersburg itself, or surrounding the bureaucrats and petty officials ubiquitous in the provinces of the empire. This period stretches roughly from 1835 to 1842 and includes the short stories “Nevsky Prospekti” (“Nevsky Prospect”), “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (“The Diary of a Madman”), “The Overcoat,” “The Nose,” the play The Inspector General, and the novel Dead Souls. The short story “Portret” (“The Portrait”), although definitely a product of this period, is singular for its strong echoes of the devil tales in the early period. The last period can claim only one published work, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, and is typically interpreted as a reversal in Gogol’s creative development. If the analyst, however, can keep in mind Gogol’s rather fanatic attachment to his artistic life as a devotional to God, then perhaps this otherwise unexplainable curve in his creative evolution might seem more understandable. The two volumes of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka contain eight stories. However atypical they were to become in terms of setting and subject matter, these tales of the Ukraine, with various elements of the supernatural adding terror, exhibit many of the qualities found in the mature writer of the second period. They are magical and engaging, heroic and base, simply enjoyable to read and quite poignant. “A May Night” • An excellent example of these tales is “Mayskaya Noch: Ili, utoplennitsa” (“A May Night: Or, The Drowned Maiden”). The plot is a simple love story in which the lovers are not allowed to wed because of the objection of the man’s father. The seeming simplicity, however, is overwhelmed by acts of Satan, witches, and rusalki. (In folk belief, rusalki are female suicides who endlessly inhabit the watery depths of ponds, tempting men and often causing their deaths.) When the antics of Ukrainian Cossack youths do not by themselves bring the matter to resolution, the rusalka puts a letter into the young man’s hand, which secures for him his marriage. The characters are depicted in ways highly reminiscent of the oral folktales. Levko, the hero, sings to his beloved to come out of her house. He speaks of his “brighteyed beauty,” her “little white hands,” and her “fair little face.” All these figures of speech are fixed epithets common in folklore. He promises to protect her from detection—“I will cover you with my jacket, wrap my sash around you, or hide you in my arms—and no one will see us,”—forfending the possible intrusion three ways. Likewise, he promises to protect her from any cold—“I’ll press you warmer to my heart, I’ll warm you with my kisses, I’ll put my cap over your little white feet”— that is, a threefold protection. The reinforcement of images in threes is also quite common in folklore. Thus, clearly, Gogol is invoking folklore in his artistic works. Nevertheless, there are hints of the mature Gogol in the landscape descriptions. Even the intervention of the supernatural to produce, in this case, the successful outcome of the story belongs to the second period as well as to the first. “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt” • One story, in retrospect, however, stands out clearly from the others. “Ivan Fyodorovich Shpon’ka i ego tetushka”

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(“Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”) certainly presages the later works that will come to be regarded as Gogol’s most characteristic. Set in the Ukraine, the story begins with an elaborate frame involving the following: The original storyteller of the tale wrote the story entirely and gave it to the narrator (for reasons that are not explained), but the narrator’s wife later used the paper to wrap her pies, so the end of the story was unfortunately lost. Readers are assured, however, that should they desire, they may contact the original storyteller, who still lives in that village and who will certainly oblige in sharing the ending. There are many details in this frame alone that are very typical of the mature Gogol. First, the narrator does not take responsibility for the story—that is, that it is left unfinished; the abrupt end is presented as something over which he has no control. Second, the woman is the undoing of the man, although, in this case, the undoing is caused by her stupidity (she is illiterate) and not by an inherent evil. Moreover, the narrator could have rectified the situation himself, but, seemingly, he was fated to forget to ask the storyteller for another copy of the ending. Most of all, the story in the frame abounds with chatty, seemingly irrelevant details that serve to characterize the narrator, his wife, and the storyteller but that, ultimately, motivate the plot and occasion the sometimes precipitous changes in the course of the narrative. The motifs described above reappear in forms both changed and unchanged throughout Gogol’s work. A woman will appear in many guises in three of the four stories in Mirgorod. In “Taras Bulba,” a long story with the color and force of an epic, a Polish beauty causes the son, Andrei, to defect to the enemy. Later, the traitor will be murdered by his father’s own hands, described in the father’s own words as a “vile dog.” “Viy” • In another story from this collection, “Viy,” a young student, Khoma Brut, meets an old woman on his way home on vacation. When he stays for the night in her barn, she comes after him with outstretched arms. Khoma tries to avoid her three different ways, but she persists and, to his amazement, he loses the use of his arms and legs. The old woman turns out to be a witch who wickedly torments and then rides on the back of the young philosopher. Remembering some exorcisms, however, he renders her harmless and, in fact, exchanges places with her, now riding on her back. Khoma makes an incredible trek in this fashion until she falls in a faint. Now, watching her prone form, he is amazed to find not a witch or an old woman but a fair young maiden. Khoma races off, making it all the way to Kiev, but is called back to watch over her corpse for three nights, which was the last request of the dying maiden. During the third night, he is overcome by the supernatural devil, Viy, who emanates from the dead woman and thus brings his own doom. “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” • This tale revolves around the motif of the evil woman, although almost imperceptibly. Here, it is a “stupid” woman who sets out the gun while cleaning the house, which causes Ivan Ivanovich to envy this possession of his neighbor Ivan Nikiforovich. This seemingly insignificant act is the very act that causes an ensuing argument and that in turn builds into a lasting enmity between the former friends and then lasts in the courts for a decade. In Russia, this story is often invoked when people quarrel over imagined improprieties or insignificant trifles.

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“Nevsky Prospect” • In Arabesques, the two most famous stories, “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Diary of a Madman,” similarly feature the demonic power of women over men. “Nevsky Prospect” indeed centers on this “demonic” nature of women. Two tales are told, one of the “sensitive young man,” the artist Piskarev, and the other of a rather older, down-to-earth lieutenant named Pirogov. The artist, perhaps fooled by the falling darkness, is stunned by the dazzling beauty of a woman walking by on Nevsky Prospect, a main avenue in St. Petersburg. At the same moment, Pirogov notices and blindly takes off after a blond woman, “convinced that no beauty could resist him.” Piskarev, almost overwhelmed at his own audacity, meekly follows his beauty to her “home,” only to find out that she is, indeed, a prostitute. This development soon becomes the undoing of the poor artist as he falls into daytime and nighttime dreaming in a vain attempt to rescue his former exalted vision and save her image from the reality of her vile lifestyle. He takes to opium and, finally emboldened, decides on the desperate act of proposing marriage to her. When she rebuffs him, he goes mad and takes his own life. Pirogov, on the other hand, for all of his selfconfidence and experience, fares only slightly better after following his blond beauty home—to her husband. He blindly but cunningly continues his pursuit of her, only to end up being humiliated and physically abused. Indignant, he sets out to put his case before the court, but, somehow, after eating a little and spending some time rather pleasantly, he becomes diverted and seemingly forgets the whole thing. The narrator then closes the story with the admonition not to trust Nevsky Prospect, since nothing is as it seems, especially not the ladies. “The Diary of a Madman” • “The Diary of a Madman” appears to be the personal journal of Popryshchin, whose name sounds very much like “pimple.” The story is written as a series of entries with the chronology becoming entirely skewed at the end in accordance with the degree of dementia within the protagonist. The appearance of Popryshchin, the poor government clerk, marks the introduction of a new incarnation of the meek Shponkin type who will populate many of Gogol’s works thereafter and enter the world of Russian literature as a prototype for many writers, notably Dostoevski. Popryshchin, a rather older, undistinguished man, adores the director’s daughter but recognizes that pursuing her is useless. Moreover, he sees that his infatuation for her will be his doom: “Dear God, I’m a goner, completely lost!” Virtually at the same moment that he admits his futile position, his attention is drawn to the thin voice of Madgie, the young lady’s dog, who is speaking to Fido. This rather fantastic conversation is centered on the letter that poor Fido seemingly never received from Madgie. Popryshchin’s delusions continue to build up, with him even reading the canine correspondence. It is actually through Madgie’s letters that Popryshchin learns of the young lady’s love for, and engagement to, a handsome young chamberlain. Moreover, Popryshchin finds the young man’s description unflattering. The sentence, “Sophie always laughs at him,” becomes the crowning blow to his sanity. Shortly thereafter he goes mad, imagining himself to be the king of Spain. He is committed to Spain, more accurately, to a mental hospital, where he is constantly tormented. The pathos of the “little man” is palpable, conveyed through the evocation of a beautiful image—a troika coming to fly to him and rescue him—juxtaposed to the hateful attendants dousing him repeatedly with cold water. “The Overcoat” • Another “little man” follows closely in Popryshchin’s footsteps. In “The Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich, whose humorous name is a reminder of fecal

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matter (kaka), represents such a meek and orderly person that he can perform only one duty: copying papers. This duty he discharges perfectly and with great pleasure, sometimes so much so that he occasionally brings the document home and, in his spare time, copies it again. Akaky Akakievich lives in St. Petersburg, victim of almost unimaginable poverty with barely enough means to keep himself alive. It was, indeed, a terrible day when he could no longer persuade his tailor to have his overcoat remade; he would have to buy a new one. The physical privations that were necessitated by this desperate position are reminiscent of saintly asceticism. However, Akaky begins to sublimate his anguish and dreams of the great overcoat as though of a wife. With the mention of the word “wife,” the reader who is accustomed to Gogol might immediately suspect the potential danger of this coat, since women in Gogol’s fiction are almost always the undoing of a man. True to form, after withstanding all the hardships, enduring all the misgivings and new sensations, Akaky wears the new coat only once before he is mugged and the coat stolen from him. Dazed and exposed in the cold of St. Petersburg, he musters the courage to petition a “Person of Consequence” who dismisses him pompously. Akaky then falls into a fever from which he will not emerge alive. The tale, however, takes on a fantastic ending. Akaky comes back from the dead, intimidates and robs the Person of Consequence of his overcoat, and then, apparently satisfied, leaves the scene forever. “The Nose” • The supernatural revenge makes “The Overcoat” quite singular in Gogol’s work. The fantastic element, however, appears again in another story of the same period, “The Nose.” A barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, takes a roll for breakfast and finds, much to his alarm, a human nose in it, and he recognizes the nose as that of the Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov. Ivan Yakovlevich tries to rid himself of the nose. Meanwhile, its erstwhile owner wakes up to find a completely smooth area where his nose and incipient pimple had been the previous evening. He sets out on foot with the empty spot concealed by a handkerchief, only to witness his own former nose walking about freely, moreover in the uniform of a civil councillor—that is, a higher-ranking individual than Kovalyov himself. He accosts the nose very deferentially, but the nose claims to be an independent individual and not part of Kovalyov at all. In desperation, he sets out for the police department but, thinking better of it, decides to place an advertisement in the local newspaper. There, the clerk, thinking about it, decides against publishing such an advertisement to avoid potential scandals for the paper. Luckily for Kovalyov, the nose is returned to him by a police officer, but to his horror, it will not stick to his face. Then, as absurdly as the story began, it ends. Kovalyov wakes up with the nose back in its former place, goes to Ivan Yakovlevich and has a shave (the barber now not touching the olfactory organ), and it is as though nothing happened. Many of Gogol’s characters have penetrated into everyday Russian speech. If someone works hard at a brainless job, he is called an “Akaky Akakievich,” for example, an attestation how well the writer created a type of Russian “little man” who, however uncreative, still captures the hearts and alliances of readers. There is something real about these absurd, impossible characters, something in their unidimensionality that transcends their locus and becomes universal. Gogol, while embroidering in highly ornate circumlocution, directly touches the wellspring of humanity in even the lowliest, most unattractive character. In his descriptions, there are simultaneously resonances of slapstick humor and the depths of human misery and social injustice.

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Gogol left quite an imprint on the course of Russian literature. Very few subsequent writers will produce anything that does not at all reverberate the Gogolian legacy. Even in the twentieth century, writers incorporate his artistic ideas or emulate his style to a degree. Christine Tomei Other major works plays: Vladimir tretey stepeni, wr. 1832, pb. 1842; Zhenit’ba, wr. 1835, pr., pb. 1842 (Marriage: A Quite Incredible Incident, 1926); Revizor, pr., pb. 1836 (The Inspector General, 1890); Utro delovogo cheloveka, pb. 1836, pr. 1871 (revision of Vladimir tretey stepeni; An Official’s Morning, 1926); Igroki, pb. 1842, pr. 1843 (The Gamblers, 1926); Lakeyskaya, pb. 1842, pr. 1863 (revision of Vladimir tretey stepeni; The Servants’ Hall, 1926); Otryvok, pb. 1842, pr. 1860 (revision of Vladimir tretey stepeni; A Fragment, 1926); Tyazhba, pb. 1842, pr. 1844 (revision of Vladimir tretey stepeni; The Lawsuit, 1926); The Government Inspector, and Other Plays, pb. 1926. novels: Myortvye dushi, part 1, 1842, part 2, 1855 (Dead Souls, 1887); Taras Bulba, 1842 (revision of his 1835 short story; English translation, 1886). miscellaneous: The Collected Works, 1922-1927 (6 volumes); Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1940-1952 (14 volumes); The Collected Tales and Plays of Nikolai Gogol, 1964. nonfiction: Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami, 1847 (Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, 1969); Letters of Nikolai Gogol, 1967. poetry: Hanz Kuechelgarten, 1829. Bibliography Fanger, Donald L. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979. Fanger presses deeply into the background material and includes in his purview works both published and unpublished, in his effort to reveal the genius of Gogol’s creative power. This book is worthwhile in many respects, particularly for the wealth of details about Gogol’s life and milieu. Includes twenty-eight pages of notes and an index. Fusso, Susanne, and Priscilla Meyer, eds. Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Collection of essays on Gogol from a conference at Wesleyan University. Bibliography and index. Hart, Pierre R. “Narrative Oscillation in Gogol’s ‘Nevsky Prospect.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Fall, 1994): 639-645. Argues that the story is a commentary on the author’s development of strategies to deal with reality; discusses the urban scene in the story, suggesting that the city forces the protagonist into a final defensive position. Karlinsky, Simon. The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. 1976. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Look at Gogol’s literature and his relations with men. Contains annotated bibliography of Gogol’s works in English. Index. Luckyj, George Stephen Nestor. The Anguish of Mykola Hohol a.k.a. Nikolai Gogol. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1998. Explores Gogol’s life and how it affected his work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Maguire, Robert A. Exploring Gogol. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. The most comprehensive study in English of Gogol’s entire writing career. Incorporates a chronology, detailed notes, and an extensive bibliography.

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____________, ed. Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974. This collection of essays, with a lengthy introduction by the editor and translator, represents some of the most famous and influential opinions on Gogol in the twentieth century. Some of the most problematic aspects of Gogol’s stylistics, thematics, and other compositional elements are addressed and well elucidated. Bibliography, index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these five short stories by Gogol: “The Diary of a Madman” (vol. 2), “The Nose” and “Old-World Landowners” (vol. 5), “The Overcoat” (vol. 6), and “Viy” (vol. 8). Rancour-Laferriere, David. Out from Under Gogol’s “Overcoat”: A Psychoanalytic Study. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982. This specialized study proves very exciting to the reader of Gogol. Much of the discussion focuses on the particular usage of words by Gogol. Even students with no command of Russian will find the explication understandable since the examples are clear and self-defining. Much of the discussion consists of very modern literary-analytical technique and may prove of good use to the reader. Contains a bibliography that includes many background works. Tosi, Alessandra. “Andrei Kropotov’s ‘Istoriia o Smurom Kaftane’: A Thematic Source for Gogol’s ‘Shinel’?” The Slavonic and East European Review 76 (October, 1998): 601-613. Compares Gogol’s “The Overcoat” with Kropotov’s earlier story; in both stories a trivial garment takes on significance for the main characters and ultimately causes their ruin. Discusses the similarity in the twists in the plots; suggests that Kropotov’s story may have been source for Gogol’s.

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Nadine Gordimer Born: Springs, Transvaal, South Africa; November 20, 1923 Principal short fiction • Face to Face: Short Stories, 1949; The Soft Voice of the Serpent, and Other Stories, 1952; Six Feet of the Country, 1956; Friday’s Footprint, and Other Stories, 1960; Not for Publication, and Other Stories, 1965; Livingstone’s Companions: Stories, 1971; Selected Stories, 1975; A Soldier’s Embrace, 1980; Something out There, 1984; Reflections of South Africa, 1986; Crimes of Conscience, 1991; Jump, and Other Stories, 1991; Why Haven’t You Written? Selected Stories, 1950-1972, 1992; Loot, and Other Stories, 2003; Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, and Other Stories, 2007. Other literary forms • Nadine Gordimer is well known for several of her novels, including A World of Strangers (1958), The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and The House Gun (1998), as well as the acclaimed My Son’s Story (1990). She has also published extensively in nonfiction and has made notable contributions to South African scholarship with such books as Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986; with David Goldblatt) and Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (1999). Her other publications have included volumes essays; two edited works on the literature of her homeland, South African Writing Today (1967) and Telling Tales (2004); and several teleplays. Achievements • As a courageous chronicler of life in South Africa, particularly through her short fiction, Nadine Gordimer is known throughout the world. She published her first collection of short stories in 1949 and has continued to publish books into the twenty-first century. One of her latest collections, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, and Other Stories (2007), contains a diverse mix of stories, ranging from a tale about a former anti-apartheid activist trying to understand his own racial identity to a fantasy about a parrot with an embarrassing habit of reproducing the voices and intimate conversations of people whom it overhears. Gordimer received the W. H. Smith and Son Prize in 1971 for Friday’s Footprint, and Other Stories. Two years later she won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour (1970). The next year, The Conservationist shared with Stanley Middleton’s Holiday (1974) the prestigious Booker Prize. Gordimer was also a recipient of France’s Grand Aigle d’Or, and in 1991 she won what many consider the ultimate literary honor—the Nobel Prize in Literature. An opponent of all forms of discrimination, Gordimer rejected candidacy for the Orange Prize in 1998 because the award was restricted to female writers. She has been the vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. Her other honors have included the Modern Literature Association Award and the Bennett Award in the United States and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Her short fiction has been published in such magazines as The New Yorker. One American reviewer summed up Gordimer’s importance in literature, writing: “Gordimer is in the great mainstream of the short story—Maupassant, Chekhov, Turgenev, James, Hemingway, Porter.” Most of Gordimer’s fiction has been pub-

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lished in paperback form, enabling a greater number of readers and critics to recognize and enjoy her work. Biography • Nadine Gordimer grew up a rebel. Both her parents were immigrants to South Africa; her mother was English, her father an eastern European Jew. In Springs, the gold-mining town near Johannesburg in which she spent her early years, Gordimer frequently played hooky from her convent school. When she did attend, she would sometimes walk out. She found it difficult to tolerate all the pressures for conformity. In the white, middle-class South African environment in which Gordimer grew up, a girl could aspire only to marry and rear a family. After leaving school and then working at clerical jobs for a few years, girls would © The Nobel Foundation eventually be singled out as prospective wives by young men from families much like their own. From there, within months the girls would actualize the greatest dreams of young womanhood: They would have their engagement parties, linen showers, and wedding ceremonies, and they would bear their first children. None of these dreams would be served by the girls’ education; books, in perhaps leading their minds astray, would interfere with the years of the girls’ preparation for the mold. At an early age, however, Gordimer did not fit the mold—she was an avid reader. By nine, she was already writing, and at the age of fourteen she won a writing prize. Her favorite authors were Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, D. H. Lawrence, and the Americans Katherine Anne Porter, O. Henry, and Eudora Welty. As Gordimer became a young woman, she became increasingly interested in politics and the plight of black South Africans. She did not, however, launch her writing career as a way to bring change. A male friend was an important influence on Gordimer. He told her that she was too ignorant and too accepting of society’s values. Gordimer has written, “It was through him, too, that I roused myself sufficiently to insist on going to the university.” Since she was twenty-two at the time and still being supported by her father, her family did not appreciate her desire to attend the university. Gordimer commuted to Johannesburg to attend the University of Witwatersrand. While at the university, she met Uys Krige, an Afrikaans poet who had shunned his privileged Afrikaner heritage, lived in France and Spain, and served with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He, too, was a profound influence on her. She had been “a bolter,” as she put it, at school; she was in the process of bolting from her family and class and the culture of white South Africa, and Krige gave her a final push. She would be committed to honesty alone. She began to send

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stories to publications in England and the United States. They were well received, and she began to build her reputation as a short-story writer and novelist. She published her first collection of stories, Face to Face, in 1949. During the 1950’s, Gordimer married her first husband, Reinhold Cassirer, a German Jew who had fled Berlin. They had a son, Hugo, with whom Gordimer would collaborate during the mid-1990’s on a documentary about Berlin and Johannesburg. A second marriage later produced another child. During the mid-1980’s Gordimer turned to a new medium. She wrote teleplays of four of her stories–Praise, Oral History, Country Lovers, and A Chip of Glass Ruby (all 1985); she also participated in the production of other teleplays. Taken together, the films present a compelling vision of Gordimer’s South Africa. A filmed interview of Gordimer by Joachim Braun often accompanies the showing of her films. In this interview, Gordimer had many interesting things to say about both her work and the tragic state of her country. Always passionate about politics, Gordimer was a member of the African National Congress during the 1990’s and an enthusiastic supporter of South Africa’s peaceful transition to full democracy. She continued writing and publishing prolifically into the twenty-first century and published her fifteenth collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, and Other Stories, in 2007, at the age of eighty-four. Analysis • Nadine Gordimer is a distinguished novelist and short-story writer. About Selected Stories, drawn from her earlier volumes of stories, a reviewer said that the stories “are marked by the courage of moral vision and the beauty of artistic complexity. Gordimer examines, with passionate precision, the intricacies both of individual lives and of the wide-ranging political and historical forces that contain them.” About the stories in A Soldier’s Embrace, a reviewer wrote, “Their themes are universal: love and change, political transition, family, memory, madness and infidelity, to name a few. . . . What makes Nadine Gordimer such a valuable—and increasingly valued— novelist and short-story writer is her ability to meet the demands of her political conscience without becoming a propagandist and the challenges of her literary commitment without becoming a disengaged esthete.” Over the course of her career, three of her books were banned in South Africa. It would be easy for Gordimer to declare self-exile. Unlike James Joyce, however, she chose not to abandon the inhospitable country of her birth, accepting the obligation of citizenship to help make her country better. She did this by practicing her art, for it is an art that enables her diverse compatriots to understand better themselves and one another. The settings and characters in Gordimer’s stories cut across the whole spectrum of South African life. She writes about black village life and black urban experiences. She writes about the Afrikaans-speaking whites, English-speaking whites, Indians, and others. Her protagonists are as likely to be male as female, and reviewers have commented on her uncanny ability to make her male characters fully realized. In The House Gun, Gordimer ponders the deeply personal question of whether parents can even trust their own child not to commit murder. With amazing range and knowledge, she reveals the intricacies of individual lives and of the historical and political forces that shape them. Reading one of Gordimer’s stories is always exciting, because one does not know what will have caught her interest—urban or rural blacks, urban or rural Afrikaners, leisured or working or revolutionary whites, an African or a European setting. It is a

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great surprise, for example, to discover a story in the form of a letter from a dead Prague father to the son who predeceased him. It is a made-up letter in which Hermann Kafka tells off ungrateful, congenitally unhappy Franz. As she has demonstrated again and again during more than thirty years of writing, Gordimer does not restrict her focus to people and scenes that are the most familiar. One marvels in reading “A City of the Dead, a City of the Living,” for example, at what the author, a well-off white woman, knows of black-township life, at the total credibility of characters Samson Moreke and his wife, Nanike. Gordimer’s knowledge and credibility are characteristic of all of her short fiction. “A City of the Dead, a City of the Living,” “Sins of the Third Age,” and “Blinder” could easily be included among the twenty best short stories of the twentieth century. “Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?” • Among Gordimer’s most gripping stories are those in which blacks and whites are at cross-purposes. “Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?” from The Soft Voice of the Serpent, and Other Stories is one of the simplest and best of this group. On a country road, a young white woman’s handbag is torn from her by a passing local, whose bedraggled condition had evoked the woman’s pity. The day is very cold, yet he is shoeless and dressed in rags. When she attains safety and has brought her fear under control, she decides not to seek aid or inform the police. “What did I fight for” she thinks. “Why didn’t I give him the money and let him go? His red eyes, and the smell and those cracks in his feet, fissures, erosion.” “Six Feet of the Country” • The title piece of Gordimer’s 1956 collection, Six Feet of the Country, is another exceptional story. A young black laborer walks from Rhodesia to find work in South Africa, where he has family who are employed on a weekend farm of a white Johannesburg couple. When he arrives at the farm, the illegal immigrant becomes ill and dies. There ensues a prolonged entanglement with the authorities, who insist on having the body so that it can be examined and the bureaucratic requirement for a statement of the cause of death can be fulfilled. With great reluctance, the family surrenders the body. When at last the casket is returned to the farm for burial, they discover that the body in it is that of a stranger. In the course of spinning out a plot about the fate of a corpse, Gordimer provides great insight into the lives of the farm laborers, the proprietors, and the police official, and she also reveals the relative inability of the laborers to deal with illness and the bureaucracy. “A Chip of Glass Ruby” • “A Chip of Glass Ruby,” in Not for Publication, and Other Stories, is about an Indian family in the Transvaal. The wife and mother is loving and unassuming and a very competent manager of a household that includes nine children. To the chagrin of her husband, Bamjee, she is also a political activist. It makes no sense to him that she takes grave risks for blacks, who are regarded as lower even than Indians. During the course of the story, she is arrested and imprisoned and participates in a prison hunger strike. Bamjee, a poor, small-time fruit and vegetable dealer, cannot understand any of this: He asks, “‘What for?’ Again and again: ‘What for?’” His birthday comes, and he himself does not even remember. The eldest daughter brings word from her mother, in the prison, however, that his birthday must not be forgotten. Bamjee is moved and begins to have a glimmer of understanding of the wonderful woman who is his wife. As the daughter explains: “It’s because she always remembers; remembers everything—people without somewhere to live, hungry kids, boys who can’t get educated—remembers all the time. That’s how Ma is.”

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“The Intruder” • “The Intruder,” which appears in Livingstone’s Companions, focuses on the decadence of an upper-class man of English descent. After shedding his last wife, hard-drinking, stay-out-late James Seago takes up with the beautiful teenage daughter of Mrs. Clegg, a woman of his age who affects a bohemian morality. Seago refers to the daughter, Marie, whom he uses sexually and enjoys having in his lap as he drinks, as his teenage doll, his marmoset, his rabbit. Because he has financial problems, Seago is plausibly able to postpone committing himself to her in marriage. Once they are married, Seago’s irresponsible life of nightly partying does not change. Having married his pet, however, he must live with her, and so they set up housekeeping in an unpleasant flat. Marie becomes pregnant. The arrival of a child will force changes in Seago’s way of life: For one thing, they will have to find living quarters more suitable for a child; for another, his wife-pet will have to give her primary attention to the child, not him. Arriving home early one morning after a night of partying, they fall into bed exhausted. A few hours later, Marie awakens hungry. She wanders out of the bedroom and finds the rest of the flat a wreck. All the kitchen staples have been spilled or thrown about; toothpaste is smeared about the bathroom. In the living room, on one of the sofa cushions, is “a slime of contraceptive jelly with haircombings—hers.” Gordimer only hints at the perpetrator. It seems more than likely, though, that it is James Seago, who again is rebelling at the prospect of being forced into a responsible mode of life. “Abroad” • In “Abroad,” the main character is an Afrikaner. Manie Swemmer is a likable, middle-aged widower who has worked hard his entire life at construction and with cars. His grown sons have moved to neighboring black-run Zambia, known as Northern Rhodesia while still a British colony. Manie decides to take the train up to Zambia and visit his sons. Arriving in Lusaka, the capital, Manie is met by his younger son, Willie. Having expected to stay with Willie, Manie is surprised to learn that Willie does not have quarters of his own but is staying at a friend’s, where there is no room for his father. To his dismay, Manie learns that all the local hotels are booked. The irrepressible Manie, though, manages to talk the manager of the Regent into placing him in a room that already has been rented as a single. The problem is that it is rented to an Indian, although an educated Indian. Although Manie has been given a key to the room and has placed his belongings inside, when he returns later, the Indian, from the inside, has bolted the door and locked out the Afrikaner. Manie then is offered a bed in a room intended for black guests. The blacks have not yet arrived, and Manie uses the door bolt to lock them out. “Abroad” is a beautiful story about a well-meaning Afrikaner who is excited by the racial mixing of the new nation and who wants to stretch himself to his liberal limit. His feelings toward blacks, though, are still conditioned by his South African base, where all blacks are automatically regarded as inferior. “I’ve only just got here, give me a bit of time,” Manie tells the desk clerk. “You can’t expect to put me in with a native, right away, first thing.” “A Soldier’s Embrace” • Upon gaining its independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique became another black-ruled neighbor of South Africa. “A Soldier’s Embrace,” the title story of Gordimer’s 1980 collection, is about the changeover, the exultation, and the disillusionment of a liberal white couple. The story begins with a brilliant scene of the celebration of the victory of the guerrillas who have been fighting the colonial power. Swept up by the street crowd, the woman finds herself embraced by two soldiers, one a white peasant youth, the other a black guerrilla. She

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puts an arm around each and kisses each on the cheek. Under the new regime, one is certain, a human being will be a human being; all groups will be treated equally. Although many whites take flight to Europe, the woman and her husband, a lawyer, are eager to participate in building the new nation. Weeks and months pass, however, and, despite the friends the lawyer has among highly placed blacks, the government does not ask the lawyer for his services. There is an atmosphere of hostility toward whites. There is looting and violence. When a friend in nearby Rhodesia, soon to be Zimbabwe, offers the lawyer a position in that country, with reluctance and relief he and his wife pack and go. The couple have wanted the country in which they have spent their adult years to be black-run; when that comes about, they find that there is no role for them. Something Out There • In the novella that provides the title for Gordimer’s volume of short fiction Something Out There, a race war looms but has not yet erupted. Acts of violence are taking place; any one of them might well precipitate such a war. In the novella, the “something out there” is a baboon. Gordimer’s intention is to suggest that the response of white South Africans to the baboon corresponds to the irrational way they have been responding to the carefully planned symbolic acts of violence by guerrillas. Those acts of violence are handwriting on the wall announcing the coming of race war, which still could be prevented if the writing were read intelligently. All that the whites want, however, is to be left alone. They want the animal “to be confined in its appropriate place, that’s all, zoo or even circus.” They want South African blacks to be confined to their appropriate places—locations and townships, black homelands, villages in the bush. As the baboon is “canny about where it was possible somehow to exist off the pickings of plenty,” so, too, is the South African black majority, before the cataclysm, somehow able to exist off pickings of white wealth. That wealth will not be shared, only protected, “while charity does not move those who have everything to spare, fear will”—the fear of the baboon, the fear of the guerrilla. What is the fate of the baboon? It is finally shot and slowly bleeds to death from its wounds. The implication is clear: A similar fate awaits the guerrillas. Gordimer’s prime minister speaks: “This government will not stand by and see the peace of mind of its peoples destroyed. . . . We shall not hesitate to strike with all our might at those who harbour terrorists. . . .” The four guerrillas who are the novella’s human protagonists, in counterpoint to the movements of the baboon, succeed in blowing up a power station; three escape and it is made clear that they will carry out further attacks. The meaning in this plot—though not in all Gordimer plots on this subject—is that a ruthless government will be a match for those attempting to destroy it. The fact that the white population is greatly outnumbered makes no difference. They have the education, the technology, the will to defend to the death what they have. Racial justice is an idea with which only a few whites—the man and woman on the power-station mission—are concerned. Protecting privilege and property is what most whites care most about. They cannot understand the few who act from disinterested motives. A minor character in “Something Out There” is a decent white police sergeant. He is totally mystified by the white guerrillas whom he interrogates: “There’s something wrong with all these people who become enemies of their own country. . . . They’re enemies because they can’t enjoy their lives the way a normal white person in South Africa does.”

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One of the black guerrillas is dispassionate, determined, fearless Vusi, whose life is dedicated to bringing about black majority rule. Vusi says. “They can’t stop us because we can’t stop. Never. Every time, when I’m waiting, I know I’m coming nearer.” A Vusi, however, is rare. “At the Rendezvous of Victory,” another story in this volume, looks ahead to the ultimate black victory. It is about the man who served as commander in chief of the liberation army, known as General Giant. As a warrior, he was invaluable; as a cabinet minister after victory, he is a great burden to his prime minister. He led his people to victory and freedom; in freedom, his chief interest is women. “A City of the Dead, a City of the Living” • In “A City of the Dead, a City of the Living,” a young black man who has committed illegal acts for his people’s liberation and who is on the run from the police is given shelter by a township family. With their small house already overcrowded, the family is inconvenienced, but the husband knows his duty. His wife, nursing her fifth child, does not like the idea of taking in a stranger, but the man is pleasant and helpful, and she softens. She softens and begins to feel attracted to him. Frightened, she goes to the police to inform on him, thus betraying the cause of her people’s liberation. “Sins of the Third Age” • “Sins of the Third Age,” surprisingly, is not a political story. It is about a couple who survived World War II as displaced persons. Nothing remained of their pasts. They met and in a strange country began to build their lives together. Gordimer is wonderfully evocative as she suggests the passing of years and the deepening of their love. The wife’s job as an interpreter takes her on frequent trips, many times to Rome and Milan. On one of her trips, she gets the idea that they should buy a home in Italy for their retirement, near a Piedmontese village. He retires first and goes to Italy to prepare the house. After several months, he appears suddenly and announces, “I’ve met somebody.” His affair eventually ends, but the betrayal destroys the vitality of the marriage. To have done otherwise than to take her husband for granted would have been betrayal on her part. She trusted, and she loses. “Blinder” • “Blinder” is still another fine story in the 1984 volume. It is about an aging servant woman’s loss of her lover, a man who was the main consolation of her life. Ephraim’s first loyalty, however, was to his wife and children in his home village; the wife got his earnings, and after his death, her children get his bicycle. When Ephraim suddenly dies, Rose’s white family expected her to increase her drinking, to go on a “blinder.” Instead, she plays hostess to Ephraim’s wife, who has come to the city to see about a pension. “The Defeated” • “The Defeated” was originally published in the collection Why Haven’t You Written? Selected Stories, 1950-1972 and was reprinted in 1993. It is a firstperson narrative concerning a European Jewish family that runs a concession store for black South Africans in a forbidden, filthy part of town. The narrator, a young girl, befriends Miriam Saiyetovitz, whose immigrant parents work long hours selling goods to indecisive customers. The shop they live above is across from an eating establishment teeming with the smells of slaughtered animals. Mrs. Saiyetovitz, “ugly, with the blunt ugliness of a toad; the ugliness not entirely at home in any element— as if the earth were the wrong place, too heavy and magnetic for a creature already blunt,” and her dull husband devote their lives to giving their daughter everything

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they possibly can. When Miriam describes all the birthday gifts her friend received, her mother assures her they will throw her a huge party. As the two girls grow up together and it comes time for university, Miriam’s parents labor to send her to a good college. Miriam grows further apart from them, moving into the upper classes as she attends pool parties and eventually marries a doctor. Ultimately, she abandons the two people who made her comfortable life possible. When the narrator, now a grown woman, goes to visit Mr. and Mrs. Saiyetovitz, she learns that they hardly see their daughter or her baby son at all. In “The Defeated,” Gordimer conjures up an evocative variety of discordant but powerful moments: the sweaty smell of the black Africans mingling with the odor of bloodied meat, the toadlike mother juxtaposed with her blossoming daughter, the quietly rage-filled father who takes terrible advantage of his status as a white man to humiliate his black customers. Also noticeable is the contrast between the narrator’s relatively benign home life and the concession area where black South Africans are forced to shop among the refuse. “The Defeated” deftly envelops in its fold class differences, the burgeoning of female sexuality, and the tragedy of wasted lives, both of immigrants and of dispossessed indigenous peoples. Gordimer does not openly judge Miriam, but it is clear through the telling of her growing alienation that Miriam is only one of the upwardly mobile Afrikaners whose sights are set on material gain and not on remaining true to those who sacrificed happiness for them. Paul Marx With updates by Carol Bishop Other major works novels: The Lying Days, 1953; A World of Strangers, 1958; Occasion for Loving, 1963; The Late Bourgeois World, 1966; A Guest of Honour, 1970; The Conservationist, 1974; Burger’s Daughter, 1979; July’s People, 1981; A Sport of Nature, 1987; My Son’s Story, 1990; None to Accompany Me, 1994; The House Gun, 1998; The Pickup, 2001; Get a Life, 2005. teleplays: A Chip of Glass Ruby, 1985; Country Lovers, 1985; Oral History, 1985; Praise, 1985. nonfiction: On the Mines, 1973 (with David Goldblatt); The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing, 1973; Lifetimes Under Apartheid, 1986 (with Goldblatt); The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places, 1988 (Stephen Clingman, editor); Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, 1990 (Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, editors); Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics, 1991; Writing and Being, 1995; A Writing Life: Celebrating Nadine Gordimer, 1999 (Andries Walter Oliphant, editor); Living in Hope and History: Note from Our Century, 1999. anthologies: South African Writing Today, 1967 (with Lionel Abrahams); Telling Tales, 2004. Bibliography Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. The scope of this volume renders it invaluable. It reveals some of Gordimer’s insights and attitudes toward her works and their origins, in conversations spanning thirty years. Supplemented by an index and a bibliography. Driver, Dorothy, Ann Dry, Craig MacKenzie, and John Read, comps. Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 1937-1992. London: Hans Zell,

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1994. More than three thousand entries listed chronologically. Each critical book or article entry indicates which Gordimer works are covered. Includes a chronology of Gordimer’s career to 1993. Several helpful indexes. Ettin, Andre Vogel. Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Ettin examines all Gordimer’s genres of writing and discovers the recurring themes: betrayal, politics of family, concept of homeland, ethnicity, and feminism. Head, Dominic. Nadine Gordimer. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Head interprets Gordimer’s first ten novels. Indexed. Select bibliography of works by and about Gordimer. Chronology of Gordimer’s career and major South African political events to 1991. King, Bruce, ed. The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. The introduction, surveying the variety in Gordimer’s novels from The Late Bourgeois World to My Son’s Story, is followed by five general essays dealing thematically or stylistically with multiple novels, seven essays dealing with one or two novels in depth, and three essays dealing with short stories. Indexed. Notes on contributors. Lazar, Karen. “Feminism as ‘Piffling’? Ambiguities in Nadine Gordimer’s Short Stories.” In The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Examines a number of Gordimer’s short stories in terms of her changing attitudes toward women’s oppression and feminism, ranging from her early view that many women’s issues are “piffling” to views that reveal Gordimer’s politicization on the question of gender. Lomberg, Alan R. “Once More into the Burrows: Nadine Gordimer’s Later Short Fiction.” In The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Analysis of how Gordimer continues to examine concerns raised in early stories in her later ones. After discussing how two early stories are developed into a later novella, Lomberg analyzes other stories that Gordimer has written again and again, particularly those that treat love affairs. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of nine short stories by Gordimer: “Another Part of the Sky” (vol. 1); “The Defeated” (vol. 2); “Livingstone’s Companions” (vol. 4); “Open House” (vol. 5); and “Something Out There,” “The Smell of Death and Flowers,” “A Soldier’s Embrace,” “Town and Country Lovers,” and “The Train from Rhodesia” (vol. 7). Smith, Rowland, ed. Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Excellent selection of essays on Gordimer’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Temple-Thurston, Barbara. Nadine Gordimer Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Part of Twayne’s World Authors series, this is a good updated study of the author and her works. Bibliographical references and an index are provided. Trump, Martin. “The Short Fiction of Nadine Gordimer.” Research in African Literatures 17 (Spring, 1986): 341-369. Argues that in her best stories Gordimer describes the hardships of South Africans, particularly women, who suffer social inequality; summarizes a number of stories that illustrate this focus.

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Graham Greene Born: Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England; October 2, 1904 Died: Vevey, Switzerland; April 3, 1991 Principal short fiction • The Basement Room, and Other Stories, 1935; The Bear Fell Free, 1935; Twenty-four Stories, 1939 (with James Laver and Sylvia Townsend Warner); Nineteen Stories, 1947 (revised 1954; as Twenty-one Stories); A Visit to Morin, 1959; A Sense of Reality, 1963; May We Borrow Your Husband?, and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life, 1967; Collected Stories, 1972; How Father Quixote Became a Monsignor, 1980. Other literary forms • Graham Greene published twenty-six novels including the posthumously issued No Man’s Land (2004). His other novels include The Power and the Glory (1940; reissued as The Labyrinthine Ways), The Heart of the Matter (1948), Brighton Rock (1938), The End of the Affair (1951), and The Human Factor (1978). In addition to his many novels and short-story collections, Greene published five plays; three collections of poetry of which the last two, After Two Years (1949) and For Christmas (1950), were privately printed; travel books, including two centering on Africa; several books of literary essays and film criticism; a biography, Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1974); and two autobiographical works, A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980). In addition, Greene published journals, book reviews, and four children’s books. Achievements • Although the Nobel Prize eluded Graham Greene, he remains one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. With more screen adaptations than any other modern author, translations into twenty-seven different languages, and book sales exceeding twenty million dollars, Greene enjoyed a combination of critical success and popular acclaim not seen by a British author since the time of Charles Dickens. In 1984, Great Britain made Greene a Companion of Literature, and in 1986, a member of the elite Order of Merit. France bestowed on Greene one of its highest honors, naming him a Commander of Arts and Letters. In addition, Greene’s most famous novels–The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, and The Heart of the Matter—have been acknowledged as literary masterpieces. Combining the outer world of political intrigue and the inner world of the human psyche, Greene’s world is one of faith and doubt, honor and betrayal, love and hate. Both the depth and breadth of Greene’s work make him one of Britain’s most prolific and enduring writers. Biography • Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, Graham Greene served in the Foreign Office, London, from 1941 to 1944. He married Vivien Dayrell-Browning in 1927 and had two children. He was a staff member of the London Times from 1926 to 1930, and he served as movie critic (1937-1940) and literary editor (1940-1941) of The Spectator. He also served as director for Eyre and Spottiswoode, publishers (1944-1948), and for The Bodley Head, publishers (1958-1968). The recipient of numerous awards, Greene received the Hawthornden Prize for The Labyrinthine Ways in 1941; the Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter in 1949; the

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Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg, 1968; and the Thomas More Medal, 1973. Other awards of distinction include a D.Litt. from the University of Cambridge in 1962, a D.Litt. from Edinburgh University, 1967, Honorary Fellow at Balliol College (Oxford) in 1963, Companion of Honor in 1966, and Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1969. With fifty-four books to his credit, Greene remained a productive writer throughout his life. His last publication was in 1988, but he was said to be working on a new book at the time of his death on April 3, 1991. Greene spent his last years in Antibes, France, and died in Vevey, Switzerland.

© Amanda Saunders

Analysis • “Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.” So said Graham Greene in his essay “The Lost Childhood,” and the statement as well as any defines the worldview manifested in his fiction. The “perfect incarnation” is Jesus Christ, and it is against this backdrop of the divine-made-human that Greene draws and measures all the actions of his stories. Whether the stories are explicitly religious in theme, such as “The Hint of an Explanation,” or not, or whether Greene chooses to view humanity in a tragic or comic light, the basic vision is the same: human nature steeped in evil and struggling with the fundamental problems of egotism, love and hate, responsibility, innocence and guilt. As a result of this vision, the central action in Greene’s fictional world is invariably betrayal—the Judas complex—betrayal of one’s fellow human beings, of one’s self, or of one’s God. For Greene’s heroes and heroines there is no escape; they fall by virtue of their very humanity. Yet their flawed humanity is not presented and then judged from the standpoint of any simplistic orthodoxy. As a thinker and as a fiction writer Greene was a master of paradox, creating a world of moral and theological mystery in which ignobility and failure may often be the road to salvation. Indeed, in Greene’s world the worst sin is a presumed innocence which masks a corrosive egotism that effectively cuts human beings off from their fellow creatures and from God. “The Hint of an Explanation” • Greene’s paradoxical treatment of his major themes within a theological perspective is best evident in “The Hint of an Explanation.” The story develops in the form of a conversation between the narrator, an agnostic, and another passenger, a Roman Catholic, while the two are riding on a train in England. Although he confesses to have occasionally had intuitions of the existence of God, the agnostic is intellectually revolted by the whole notion of “such a God who can so abandon his creatures to the enormities of Free Will . . . ‘When you think of what God—if there is a God—allows. It’s not merely the physical agonies, but think of the corruption, even of children.’” The question posed by the agnostic is the mystery of

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evil—why an omniscient God permits it. In response, the Catholic reminds him that the limitations of human understanding make a full answer impossible for human beings. Nevertheless, he insists, there are “hints” of an explanation, hints caught by men when they are involved in events that do not turn out as they were intended— “by human actors I mean, or by the thing behind the human actors.” The suggested “thing” behind the human actors is Satan, and it is the Catholic traveler’s conviction of Satan’s ultimate impotence and defeat, derived paradoxically from an experience of evil in his own childhood, that provides the underpinning for his own belief in divine providence. As a child, the Catholic son of a Midland bank manager was tempted by the town freethinker to steal a consecrated Host while serving Mass and deliver it to him. The tempter, a baker named Blacker, is corruption incarnate; he both entices the boy by letting him play with an electric train and promising to give it to him, and at the same time threatens to bleed him with a razor if the boy will not do his bidding. The boy is conscious of the eternal consequences his actions will have: “Murder is sufficiently trivial to have its appropriate punishment, but for this act the mind boggled at the thought of any retribution at all.” Still, driven by fear of Blacker, he steals the communion wafer—the Body of Christ—and prepares to deliver it to the baker. Nevertheless, when Blacker appears that evening under the boy’s bedroom window to collect the Host, his diabolical purposes are defeated when the boy abruptly swallows the communion wafer rather than deliver it into the hands of the Enemy. As he now recalls this episode from his childhood for the agnostic stranger, the Catholic sees in it a “hint” of the manner in which the mystery of the divine will operates, for that episode was the “odd beginning” of a life that eventually led him to become a priest. Looking back on it now, he sees in his struggle with Blacker nothing less than the struggle between God and Satan for the human soul, and the inevitable defeat of “that Thing,” doomed to hopelessness and unhappiness. Although the story is clear in its religious theme, any danger of its being merely a tract disguised as fiction is skillfully circumvented both by the paradoxical quality of Greene’s thought and by his technical skill as a writer. For one thing, Greene undercuts the threat of dogmatic rigidity by creating enormous compassion for the malevolent figure of Blacker, imprisoned in his own misery, at the same time leaving the door open for his eventual redemption through defeat. Moreover, much of this compassion derives from the reader’s awareness that, as a human being, Blacker is as much the victim of satanic forces working through him as he is agent of his own fate. Greene sustains a delicate dramatic balance between man’s free will and responsibility on the one hand, and on the other, the suggestion or “hint” of supernatural forces at work in human affairs. Greene leaves the reader with a sense of the ineffable mystery of reality, and even the rather hackneyed and mechanical surprise ending of the story—the discovery in the last paragraph that the Catholic is indeed a priest—is consistent with the dramatic logic of the story. “The Hint of an Explanation” bears many of the trademarks that made Greene one of the most important and widely read artists of the twentieth century, earning him both popularity and high critical esteem. His technical skill and sheer virtuosity as a storyteller stemmed equally from his mastery of the high formalist tradition of Henry James and Joseph Conrad and from the conventions of the melodramatic thriller, with its roots in classical, Renaissance, and Jacobean drama. Mastery of the themes and devices of the thriller—love and betrayal, intrigue, unexpected plot turns, the use of the hunt or chase, danger and violence—gave him a firm founda-

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tion upon which to base his subtle explorations of the spiritual condition of human beings in the twentieth century. In short, one of his most important contributions to the short story lies in the way in which he took the conventional form of popular fiction and infused it with a dimension of mystery that often penetrates to the deepest theological levels of experience. Although occasionally the action in Greene’s stories may seem contrived, it is contrivance brought off with great dynamism—the energy and unpredictability of life’s happenstances—and not the sealed, airless contrivance wrought by the aesthetic purists (whom Greene denounced), those modern fiction writers who have elevated artistic form to an absolute. Although the social milieu of Greene’s fiction is most often the commonplace world of modern England and Europe, it is his ability to infuse this landscape with the sense of mystery that gives the stories their imaginative power and depth. Often the most fertile ground for imagination is childhood, and this may well account for the fact that, as in “The Hint of an Explanation,” Greene frequently makes childhood the locus of action for his themes of innocence, egotism, and betrayal. Yet his depiction of childhood is not a sentimentalized, romantic portraiture of innocence betrayed by a hostile world. Greene focuses on childhood because he finds in children a sense of reality which is keener and more alive, a sharper moral imagination, and a more vivid awareness of the personal consequences of their choices as they struggle with the demands of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. In an essay on James, Greene remarked that “to render the highest justice to corruption you must retain your innocence: you have to be conscious all the time within yourself of treachery to something valuable.” Greene’s fictional children, still unjaded by maturity, feel the potential for treachery both within themselves and surrounding them. Greene was able to make this complex childhood world palpable and render it with great psychological fidelity, perhaps seen best in one of his finest stories, “The Basement Room.” “The Basement Room” • Betrayal and the spiritually fatal consequences of choosing a specious innocence over the unalterable fact of the fallen state are the driving forces in “The Basement Room.” Phillip Lane, a seven-year-old upper-class boy, develops a strong bond of friendship with Baines, the family butler, while his parents are gone on a fortnight’s holiday. With Baines, whom he sees as a “buccaneer” and man-of-the-world, Philip feels that he has begun “to live,” and indeed he is initiated into a complex world of love and hate, deceit, the demands of friendship, and eventually betrayal. For Baines and Phillip have a common enemy: Mrs. Baines, a bitter shrew who bullies both her husband and young Phillip. During a day’s outing with Baines, Phillip also meets the butler’s mistress, Emmy, whom Baines introduces as his “niece.” When Mrs. Baines is called away suddenly because of family illness, Baines, in a holiday mood, brings Emmy home for the night, convinced that Phillip will loyally keep his secret. “Life,” however, so complex and confusing in its demands, is too much for young Phillip. The suspicious Mrs. Baines returns unexpectedly during the night and terrifies him, demanding to know where “they” are. Too frightened to answer, Phillip manages to reach the bedroom door in time to see the enraged Mrs. Baines attacking her husband in the upstairs hallway, and in the ensuing struggle she topples over the bannister and is killed. Phillip runs frightened from the house, while the butler quickly removes her body to the foot of the stairs of their basement apartment to make it appear that she has accidentally fallen there. Phillip wanders aimlessly in the streets, waiting for someone to lift the burden of responsibility from him, for “life”

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has now become intolerable. “He loved Baines, but Baines had involved him in secrets, in fears he didn’t understand. That was what happened when you loved—you got involved; and Phillip extricated himself from life, from love, from Baines.” So when he is returned home by the police, Phillip betrays Baines, blurting out the facts that condemn the butler. The effect of Phillip’s betrayal—choosing an egotistic “innocence” over the ambiguous responsibilities of love in a fallen world—is disastrous to his own spiritual growth. At the end of the story, Greene skillfully shifts the scene forward to Phillip’s own deathbed where, having “never faced it [life] again in sixty years . . . ,” he agonizingly relives the moment of his betrayal, murmuring the policeman’s question to Baines (“Who is she? Who is she?”) as he sinks into death. Greene’s point is clear: Phillip’s spiritual development stopped at the age of seven when he refused the consequences of his love for Baines. Instead of the reality of being a fallen, yet free and mature, creature, he chose egotism and the illusion of innocence. The innocence Phillip elects, however, is not a true childlike quality. On the contrary, the childhood Phillip loses is exactly that keen awareness of the potentialities for love and treachery, of the power of evil and the vital sense of mystery inspiring terror and awe which constitutes for Greene the real human condition. We are reminded of Greene’s quoting from Æ’s poem “Germinal”: “In the lost childhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.” “The Destructors” • Greene’s depiction of the lost childhood theme in “The Basement Room” is devastating and terrible, but he can also present the same theme in a manner which is devastatingly funny. Such is the case in “The Destructors,” in which the callous youngster Trevor leads a gang of neighborhood boys in the systematic dismantling of the house of Mr. Thomas—“Old Misery” as the children call him—a retired builder and decorator. Because his own father was once an architect, Trevor fully understands the value of Old Misery’s house; indeed, it is an elegant, twohundred-year-old structure built by Sir Christopher Wren, which embodies the refinements of tradition. In fact, Old Misery’s house is an emblem of civilization itself, the whole legacy of humane values and order and design passed from generation to generation, still imposing even though it stands amid the ruins of bombed-out postwar London. Fully conscious of its historical and cultural significance, Trevor diabolically mobilizes the gang of youths to bring the house down, working from the inside “like worms, don’t you see, in an apple.” Trevor ingratiates himself with Old Misery by asking to tour the inside of the house and then, learning that the owner will be away for a weekend holiday, sets his plan of destruction in motion. Working floor by floor, the gang wrecks everything— furniture, china and ornamental bric-a-brac, doors, personal mementos, porcelain fixtures, the winding staircase, and parquet floors; even Old Misery’s hidden cache of pound notes is burned up. The evil inspired by Trevor goes beyond simple thievery; it is destruction for its own sake, a satanic love of chaos. When Trevor’s minion Blackie asks him if he hates Old Misery, the leader replies coldly that “There’d be no fun if I hated him. . . . ‘All this love and hate,’ he said, ‘it’s soft, it’s hooey. There’s only things, Blackie. . . .”’ In Trevor’s remark Greene has touched the nerve of a fundamental side of the modern consciousness, its brutal amorality and contempt for the past. Greene’s inventive genius manages to make “The Destructors” humorous, although terrifyingly so. Trevor’s plan to destroy the house is endangered when Old Misery returns prematurely from his holiday, but Trevor is up to the challenge and

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instantly contrives a plot to trap the aged owner in his own outdoor privy. Locked in by the gang for the night, Old Misery can only sit helplessly and wonder what the faint sounds of hammering and scraping mean. The next morning a driver arrives to remove his lorry from the parking lot next door, and as he pulls away, unaware of the rope tying his truck to the foundation beams, Old Misery’s house comes down in a heap of rubble. The driver manages to free Old Misery from the privy, but he cannot restrain himself from laughing at the scene of devastation. “‘How dare you laugh,’ Mr. Thomas said, ‘It was my house. My house.’” The driver can only reply, chuckling, “I’m sorry. I can’t help it, Mr. Thomas. There’s nothing personal, but you got to admit it’s funny.” “The Destructors” represents Greene at his best in presenting his vision of human perversity and folly in a comic vein. The depiction of Trevor’s unmitigated evil is frightening, but it is finely balanced by the humor of the final scene; and in the lorry driver’s laughter and the absurdly pathetic character of Old Misery the reader finds a basic affirmation of the common values of human existence which, paradoxically, triumph over the cold diabolism of young Trevor. It is he who is the ultimate loser. Knowing the world only as “things,” he himself has become a thing—T. the destructor—and he cannot respond either with love or hate to the life around him. Greene’s stories, with their remarkable craftsmanship, exercise a powerful fascination on the reader. Even at their most melodramatic, his stories unfailingly create a plausible sense of reality because they touch the full range of human experience: petty foibles, corruption, deceit, love, responsibility, hope, and despair. Whether Greene’s emphasis is tragic or comic, or a wry mingling of both, the reader is again and again confronted in the stories with the fundamental mystery of existence on earth, making them at once rich, entertaining, and profound. John F. Desmond With updates by Karen Priest Other major works children’s literature: The Little Train, 1946; The Little Fire Engine, 1950 (also known as The Little Red Fire Engine, 1952); The Little Horse Bus, 1952; The Little Steam Roller: A Story of Mystery and Detection, 1953. plays: The Heart of the Matter, pr. 1950 (with Basil Dean; adaptation of his novel); The Living Room, pr., pb. 1953; The Potting Shed, pr., pb. 1957; The Complaisant Lover, pr., pb. 1959; Carving a Statue, pr., pb. 1964; The Return of A. J. Raffles: An Edwardian Comedy in Three Acts Based Somewhat Loosely on E. W. Hornung’s Characters in “The Amateur Cracksman,” pr., pb. 1975; For Whom the Bell Chimes, pr. 1980, pb. 1983; Yes and No, pr. 1980, pb. 1983; The Collected Plays of Graham Greene, pb. 1985. anthologies: The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands, 1934; The Best of Saki, 1950; The Spy’s Bedside Book: An Anthology, 1957 (with Hugh Greene); The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 1962, 1963 (4 volumes); An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri, 1975. novels: The Man Within, 1929; The Name of Action, 1930; Rumour at Nightfall, 1931; Stamboul Train: An Entertainment, 1932 (pb. in U.S. as Orient Express: An Entertainment, 1933); It’s a Battlefield, 1934; England Made Me, 1935; A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment, 1936 (pb. in U.S. as This Gun for Hire: An Entertainment); Brighton Rock, 1938; The Confidential Agent, 1939; The Power and the Glory, 1940 (reissued as The Labyrinthine Ways); The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment, 1943; The Heart of the Matter, 1948; The Third

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Man: An Entertainment, 1950; The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, 1950; The End of the Affair, 1951; Loser Takes All: An Entertainment, 1955; The Quiet American, 1955; Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment, 1958; A Burnt-Out Case, 1961; The Comedians, 1966; Travels with My Aunt, 1969; The Honorary Consul, 1973; The Human Factor, 1978; Dr. Fischer of Geneva: Or, The Bomb Party, 1980; Monsignor Quixote, 1982; The Tenth Man, 1985; The Captain and the Enemy, 1988; No Man’s Land, 2004. miscellaneous: The Portable Graham Greene, 1973 (Philip Stout Ford, editor). nonfiction: Journey Without Maps: A Travel Book, 1936; The Lawless Roads: A Mexican Journal, 1939 (reissued as Another Mexico); British Dramatists, 1942; Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett, 1948; The Lost Childhood, and Other Essays, 1951; Essais Catholiques, 1953 (Marcelle Sibon, translator); In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, 1961; The Revenge: An Autobiographical Fragment, 1963; Victorian Detective Fiction, 1966; Collected Essays, 1969; A Sort of Life, 1971; The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40, of Graham Greene, 1972 (John Russell-Taylor, editor; pb. in U.S. as The Pleasure-Dome: Graham Greene on Film, Collected Film Criticism, 1935-1940); Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, 1974; Ways of Escape, 1980; J’accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, 1982; Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement, 1984. poetry: Babbling April: Poems, 1925; After Two Years, 1949; For Christmas, 1950. radio play: The Great Jowett, 1939. screenplays: Twenty-one Days, 1937; The New Britain, 1940; Brighton Rock, 1947 (adaptation of his novel; with Terence Rattigan); The Fallen Idol, 1948 (adaptation of his novel; with Lesley Storm and William Templeton); The Third Man, 1949 (adaptation of his novel; with Carol Reed); The Stranger’s Hand, 1954 (with Guy Elmes and Giorgino Bassani); Loser Takes All, 1956 (adaptation of his novel); Saint Joan, 1957 (adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play); Our Man in Havana, 1959 (adaptation of his novel); The Comedians, 1967 (adaptation of his novel). teleplay: Alas, Poor Maling, 1975. Bibliography Bayley, John. “Graham Greene: The Short Stories.” In Graham Greene: A Reevaluation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Basing his comments on his analysis of “The Hint of an Explanation,” Bayley argues that many Greene stories have a hidden subject in a sense that none of his novels does. Claims that by means of almost invisible contrasts and incongruities, the story leads the reader both away from and toward its central revelation. De Vitis, A. A. Graham Greene. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Most interesting in this volume are an overview of critical opinion about Greene, a chronology, and a chapter on the short stories. Supplemented by a thorough primary bibliography and an annotated bibliography of secondary sources. Kelly, Richard. Graham Greene. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. General introduction to Greene and his work. The chapter on the short stories discusses “The Destructors,” “The Hint of an Explanation,” and “The Basement Room” as the best of Greene’s stories. ____________. Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Discusses the influence of Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, and W. Somerset Maugham on Greene’s stories, but also discusses how the stories reflect Greene’s own personal demons. Includes an interview with Greene, his introduction to his Collected Stories, and three previously published essays by other critics.

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May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Greene: “Across the Bridge,” “The Basement Room,” and “Cheap in August” (vol. 1); “The Destructors” and “A Drive in the Country” (vol. 2); and “The Hint of an Explanation” (vol. 3). Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Graham Greene: A Revaluation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. These essays by eight scholars offer critical analyses of Greene’s accomplishments, in the shadow of his death. Miller, R. H. Understanding Graham Greene. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Guide to all of Greene’s writing. The style is concise yet informative and evaluative, but the author runs too quickly through the canon. Bibliography and index. O’Prey, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to Graham Greene. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Critical overview of Greene’s fiction. The excellent introduction familiarizes the reader with Greene’s major themes. Supplemented by a complete primary bibliography and a brief list of critical works. Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene. 2 vols. New York: Viking Press, 1989-1995. The first two parts of what is certainly the most comprehensive, most authoritative account of Greene’s life yet published, written with complete access to his papers and the full cooperation of family, friends, and the novelist himself. Includes a generous collection of photographs, a bibliography, and an index. Smith, Grahame. The Achievement of Graham Greene. Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1986. Includes an excellent introduction, with an overview of themes and biographical data. Contains chapters on “Fiction and Belief” and “Fiction and Politics,” as well as sections titled “The Man of Letters” and “Greene and Cinema.” Augmented by a select bibliography.

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Brothers Grimm Jacob Grimm Born: Hanau, near Kassel, Hesse-Kassel (now in Germany); January 4, 1785 Died: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany); September 20, 1863

Wilhelm Grimm Born: Hanau, near Kassel, Hesse-Kassel (now in Germany); February 24, 1786 Died: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany); December 16, 1859 Principal short fiction • Kinder-und Hausmärchen, 1812, 1815 (revised 1819-1822; German Popular Stories, 1823-1826; 2 volumes; better known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales). Other literary forms • The Brothers Grimm published important studies of German tales and mythology, as well as philological works recognized for their importance to the study of the German language. Achievements • The tales collected and edited by the Brothers Grimm are the defining instances of Märchen, a term only approximately translated by “fairy tale.” At a time when the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution threatened to make the traditions of oral storytelling disappear, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were able to preserve these tales in written form. Now, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, the tales recounted by the Brothers Grimm are more familiar than any stories except those of the Bible. The literary influence of the collection has been considerable: It has shaped much of subsequent children’s literature and has inspired a great many sophisticated fictions, particularly among the German Romantics, the English Victorians, and the so-called Fabulators of the mid-twentieth century. Most important, however, has been the direct human influence of the tales. The collection epitomizes the psychological wisdom of generations of storytellers, and the tales themselves provide for nearly every child in the West a first map of the territory of the imagination. Biography • Both of the Brothers Grimm devoted their lives to literary and philological scholarship. Following in their father’s footsteps, they studied law at Marburg, but, under the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder and Clemens Brentano, they turned from the law, and between 1806 and 1826, first at Marburg and later at the library of the Elector in Kassel, they collaborated in the study of folklore, producing not only the Märchen but also Deutsche Sagen (1816-1818; German Legends, 1981), on local historical legends and other works. In 1830, they left Kassel to become librarians and later professors at Göttingen. After a decade of largely independent work, the two collaborated again on a monumental lexicon of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854). The project was begun in 1838, was carried to Berlin when the brothers were appointed professors at the university in 1841, and was completed only in 1961—Wilhelm had died working on the letter D, Jacob at F. Wilhelm Carl Grimm was in his own right an editor of medieval texts who did im-

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portant work on runes and Germanic legend. Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was one of the greatest scholars in the history of a nation of scholars. His Deutsche Mythologie (1835; Teutonic Mythology, 1880-1888), attempted to establish a theoretical base for the Märchen collected earlier, viewing them as the detritus of a German mythology suppressed by Christianity. In thus laying the groundwork for all further speculation on the origins of folklore and myth, he has come to be acknowledged as the founder of the scientific study of folklore. At the same time, he is the uncontested founder of the systematic study of the German language and indeed of historical linguistics itself; this assessment is based on the strength of his work that begins with the formulation of Grimm’s law in Deutsche Grammatik (1819-1837) and culminates in the Deutsches Wörtebuch. Analysis • Grimm’s Fairy Tales came into being in the context of German Romanticism, particularly with its renewed interest in the medieval past. Just as European society was becoming urban, industrial, and literate, a growing nationalism turned attention to folk culture. The Brothers Grimm first began collecting songs and stories for the poet Clemens Brentano and his brother-in-law Achim von Arnim, who had themselves collaborated on an influential collection of folksongs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805, 1808; the boy’s wonderhorn), still familiar from Gustav Mahler’s many settings of its songs. The Grimms drew on oral as well as printed sources, interviewing both peasant storytellers and middle-class urban informants. The resulting collection of some two hundred stories preserved a substantial body of folklore, fortuitously, at the very moment when its milieu was being irreparably destroyed by the modernization of nineteenth century Europe. Translated into at least seventy languages, Grimm’s Fairy Tales stands as the model for every subsequent collection of folklore, however much more sophisticated in theory or method. The brothers’ own notes and commentaries on the tales, included in the second edition, form the basis of the science of folklore. One source of the appeal of these tales is their complex chemistry of both art and artlessness. The Grimms did not think of themselves as authors of short fiction but as what would now be considered anthropologists. They set for themselves the task of contriving, from many different versions of any tale, an account that achieved artistic integrity without sacrificing folkloric quality. This meant sometimes restoring details that seemed to have been dropped or distorted in the course of oral tradition, or deleting what seemed purely literary invention. Many decisions were arbitrary since this was, after all, the beginning of a discipline, and the Grimms sometimes changed their minds, as differences between the first and second editions make clear. They were guided on the whole, however, by an aim of reconstructing prototypes which they assumed to be oral. Thus, in each tale they were responding to two different challenges. First, they attempted to preserve and even enhance the atmosphere of performance through traditional rhetorical devices such as repetition of songs and narrative formulas in which the audience would share and through the general circumstantial quality characteristic of every spellbinding teller. At the same time, their versions were meant to be definitive and fixed in print, a medium with aesthetic demands of its own that had to be met. “Six Soldiers of Fortune” • As a result, within the Grimm style, which is instantly recognizable as a matter of motif, several substyles of narrative are apparent. There are some tales that strike the reader as archetypal for their transparency of struc-

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ture. “Six Soldiers of Fortune,” for example, assembles a group of soldiers, each with a unique preternatural power, makes use of, and so in a sense exhausts, each power in a deadly contest for the hand of a princess, and then dismisses the group with a treasure to divide. Perhaps most lucid of all is the haunting “The Fisherman and His Wife”; this tale combines heightening ambitions and lowering weather against the measured rhythm of wishes demanded and granted, all strung on the thread of a summoning spell sung six times to the generous fish, an enchanted prince who disturbingly remains enchanted throughout the tale, until in the end everything is as Library of Congress it was. In this tale, no wish is offered at first, until the wife, knowing with the logic of fairy tale that enchanted fish grant wishes, sends her husband back. After wishing herself from hovel to cottage to castle, however, her third wish is for a change not of station but of identity. She wishes to be king, and this moves beyond the rule of three to the inordinate and outlandish: emperor, pope, ruler of the sun and moon, things she cannot be. “The Lady and the Lion” • Other tales seem authentic not for their clarity but for a sense of free-ranging invention in loose, barely articulated forms. “The Lady and the Lion” is a prime example of a tale that seems ready to go anywhere a teller is inclined to take it. It relies heavily on familiar but heterogeneous motifs, and so while it fascinates readers from moment to moment (especially if heard rather than read) with an almost Asian opulence of invention, it seems in the end unmotivated. “Godfather Death” • The tension between the commitment to transcribe tales as told and the need to devise viable written artifacts can best be exemplified by contrasting two stories. In “Godfather Death,” a man seeking a godfather for his thirteenth child rejects God himself and the Devil but accepts Death because he “makes all equal.” When the boy is grown, Death gives him an herb that restores life, with these instructions: “If I stand by the head of the sick-bed, administer this herb and the man will recover; but if I stand at the foot, the man is mine, and you must say that nothing can save him.” The boy becomes a famous healer. Once when the King is sick, with Death at his feet, the boy risks using the herb to save him, but Death pardons him with a warning. Later, however, the King’s daughter is in the same situation, and for love of her the doctor again overrules Death. Death seizes him with an icy hand and leads him to a cave where thousands of candles are burning, some very large, some mere stubs. “Show me the light of my life,” says the doctor, and he finds it guttering. He begs his godfather to replace it, and the story ends like this:

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Death behaved as if he were going to fulfill his wish, and took hold of a tall new candle, but as he desired to revenge himself, he purposely made a mistake in fixing it, and the little piece fell down and was extinguished. The physician too fell on the ground; now he himself was in the hands of Death. “The Wonderful Glass” • Grimm’s Fairy Tales preserves another version of this story, “The Wonderful Glass,” which is, from the point of view of a written tale, almost incoherent. It is less carefully composed than “Godfather Death”: Only one stranger appears, the child is merely “another child,” and the gift of healing is given oddly not to the child but to his father; in fact the child plays no role at all. The father never misuses the gift but one day decides to visit the godfather. Five steps lead to the house. On the first a mop and a broom are quarreling, on the next he finds a “number of dead fingers,” on the next a heap of human heads give him directions, on the next a fish is frying itself in a pan. At the top the doctor peeks through the keyhole and sees the godfather with a set of horns on his head. When he enters the house, the godfather hides under the bedclothes. When he says, “I saw you through the keyhole with a pair of horns on your head,” the godfather shouts, “That is not true,” in such a terrible voice that the doctor runs away and is never heard of again. “The Wonderful Glass” is hardly worth preserving except as a transcript of a clumsy horror story. The immense superiority of “Godfather Death” may suggest how the Grimms’ decision to proceed by artful selection among versions rather than by wholesale recasting in another mode produced masterpieces. Again and again their editorial tact added formal power to the visual interest and psychological depth of the inherited stories. “Rapunzel” • “Rapunzel,” for example, begins like many of the Märchen (“Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Almond Tree”), with a couple who wish for a child. A small window in their house overlooks a witch’s garden, and one night the husband climbs over the high wall to steal some “rapunze,” a salad green. He is soon caught by the witch, however, and to save his life he promises to amend the theft by giving her his child when it is born. It was pregnancy that made his wife crave rapunze; the unborn child thus causes the theft and by a rough justice replaces the thing stolen. The witch takes her at birth, names her Rapunzel, and walls her up, even more securely than the plant she replaces, in a tower accessible only by a high window. This generates the central image of the tale: the long-haired nubile girl imprisoned in the tower. Like the husband, the Prince (potential husband of the next generation) climbs over the wall to steal the witch’s Rapunze(l), and he, too, is eventually caught by the possessive witch. Learning of the Prince’s visits, she banishes Rapunzel to a wasteland, first cutting off her hair, which will be used to lure the Prince to a confrontation. He escapes, but in his terror falls on thorns that blind him. After years of wandering, he hears Rapunzel’s voice again, they embrace, and her tears restore his sight. “Rapunzel” is usually read as a story of maturation, with Rapunzel as the central figure, but she is a passive character throughout, an instrument in the relations of others. It is at least equally a tale of possessiveness and longing. The parents desire a child; in the wife’s craving for greens the reader sees the child at once gained and lost. Like the parents (although more like Rumpelstiltskin) the witch desires a child, and the Prince’s longing is obvious—it is the chief character trait of princes throughout the Märchen. The remarkable dearth of magic is related to these themes. In spite of the presence of the witch, the only magic is the healing tears of love. In other versions the witch’s magic harms the prince; here it is mysteriously not her doing, but

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ironic coincidence. The pathos of that reticence is owed to the Brothers Grimm; their instinct for invoking folk style is apparent in the repeated motifs but above all in their inspired invention of the phrase, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” which sounds, even when the reader knows better, like the archaic root of the whole story. Thus, the Grimms reconciled the values of folklore with what were recognized as the requirements of short fiction, but they were scrupulously aware that the versions they contrived were only moments seized out of the continuing tradition of telling and retelling. The proper habitation of the Märchen is in the mouths of storytellers. Form, the proportion of parts, and even readers’ sympathies are always being accommodated to new audiences in new circumstances. As early as 1893, Marian Cox could study 345 variants of “Cinderella” alone. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, then, were folktales accommodated to print: more symmetrical, more compressed, as a rule spatially rather than linearly conceived, and with formal rhythms replacing the lost rhythm of speech. The brothers’ devotion to their originals or to the sources behind their originals, however, is apparent. As the example of “Rapunzel” suggests, their versions are much less stylized than other literary versions; the reader never feels the presence of an author as in those printed versions that antedate the Grimms, such as Charles Perrault and Giambattista Basile. They would never say, as Perrault does, that Sleeping Beauty was beautiful even though she dressed like someone’s grandmother in clothes out of fashion for a century. Thanks to the Grimms, the Märchen have survived in a new kind of world, but the process of accommodation continues. One of the measures of how thoroughly these tales have been internalized in the West is the shock every reader feels on first reading the Grimms’ own account of tales so profoundly familiar. This is not how they are remembered, and the difference frankly reveals how tastes have changed in the intervening years. Through several generations of editors, and especially of parents, the Märchen have become more magical, much more romantic, and decidedly less violent than the Grimms’ own versions. Magic is a most important variable. Although there is plenty of it in the tales, modern readers will find the Grimms often unexpectedly discreet in the use of magic. “The Little Farmer” • There is even at least one plainly antimagical story, “The Little Farmer,” in which the protagonist defeats a whole town because the people are gullible about magic (eventually they are all drowned when, after the farmer tells them he collected a fine flock of sheep under water, they see fleecy clouds reflected on the surface as confirmation of his story and jump in). There is much use of gratuitous magic, not only for ornament but also, in particular, to establish a tone of fantasy at the start of a story. The beginning of “Sleeping Beauty” offers an extreme example: A frog jumps out of the water, prophesies that the queen will soon bear a daughter, and disappears never to be mentioned again. Indeed, supernatural helpers put in abrupt appearances throughout the tales. “Snow White” • Often in reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales, however, the reader finds coincidence or rationalization where memory led him to expect magic. Thus, in “Snow White,” although the wicked queen has her magic mirror, much that could be magic is more nearly pharmacology. Even the revival of Snow White is not, as Walt Disney and memory would have it, by the magic of a kiss from Prince Charming, but like this: The dwarfs gave the coffin to the Prince, who had his servants carry it away.

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Now it happened that as they were going along they stumbled over a bush, and with the shaking a bit of the poisoned apple flew out of her throat. It was not long before she opened her eyes, threw open the cover of the coffin, and sat up, alive and well. “Oh dear, where am I?,” cried she. The King’s son answered, full of joy, “you are near me. . . . Come with me to my father’s castle and you shall be my bride.” And Snow White was kind, and went with him. An earlier generation of commentators would have woven from bush and fruit a myth of fall and redemption, but at least as interesting is the calculated avoidance of overt magic even in resurrection. The blinding of the Prince in “Rapunzel” is treated with similar ambiguity. Violence • Apart from the treatment of magic, the most unexpected feature of the Grimms’ tales is their violence. The stories are full of treachery, mutilation, cannibalism, and over and over again the visual and visceral impact of the sight of red blood against pale skin, white snow, black wood, or stone. This is most shocking in the wellknown stories. When Snow White’s stepmother cannot resist coming to the wedding to see if the girl really is “a thousand times more fair,” she finds that “they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead.” The ending of “Cinderella” is similar, although it is better integrated with the shape of the story. The two stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to fit into the tiny slipper, but as each in turn passes the grave of Cinderella’s true mother, which is marked by a hazel tree grown from a twig she asked as a gift from her father and watered with her tears, two birds perched in the tree, her helpers earlier, make known the mutilations so that at last Cinderella can put on the shoe that was made for her. As a result, she marries the Prince, and the tale ends with the same birds pecking out the eyes of the stepsisters. Violence in Grimm’s Fairy Tales nearly always has a human origin. The reader grows accustomed to witches, stepmothers, and evil elder siblings, but the overwhelming sense of the world here is optimistic. The stories regularly assert a harmony between humans and nature, often seen as more reliable than human harmony: The birds will help when other people will not. By their plotting, the stories also project a harmony in time. In the end, the good live happily ever after, while for the evil there are dire and, to most modern readers, disproportionate punishments. The harmonious close of a Grimm tale is grounded on a faith in justice. Indeed, several of the tales have this as their theme: No crime can remain hidden; truth will come to light. Behind this is a sense of divine Providence, for beneath all the magic the milieu of these tales is thoroughly Christian. There is hardly a trace of the tragic weight of Germanic myth in even the most harrowing of the Märchen. “The Singing Bone” • Consider “The Singing Bone”: Through the clear water of a river, a herdsman sees on the sandy bottom a bone as white as snow. He retrieves it to make a mouthpiece for his horn, and at once it begins to sing its own story, “I killed the wild boar, and my brother slew me,/ Then gained the Princess by pretending it was he.” The marvel is brought to the King, the victim’s skeleton is found, the wicked brother is ordered drowned, and the bones are “laid to rest in a beautiful grave.” This is quite brutal, even in summary, but the formal symmetries of the violence here reinforce the demonstration of justice. If a modern reader tends to worry about the bereft Princess and is less than satisfied with a beautiful grave, it may be that he has lost

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faith in any ultimate distribution of justice. That may be the chief reason that so much of the violence of the Grimms’ tales is now suppressed in the telling. The Grimms’ theory of folklore as the doctrine of a mythology is now discredited, but they were right to sense the tremendous resonance of these tales in the imagination. More recently, psychological approaches from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung down to Bruno Bettelheim have pointed to the archetypal force of these stories. This force is not the Grimms’ creation; it is a wisdom concentrated through a long process of transmission. What the Grimm brothers contributed was an array of formal devices learned in the context of literate fiction—devices that increased the strength and resilience of the tales in the period when their survival was most threatened. Along with the form of the stories, what the Grimms’ retelling often particularly enhanced were the visual images. The traditional tales were full of images of seminal power from which much of the psychological impact emanated. In stories meant to be heard, however, the visual imagination is free, and images can be invoked by a word or two. Consciously or not, the Brothers Grimm realized that in the act of reading, the visual imagination is engaged, so images must be sharpened and developed in order to act on a preoccupied eye. As a result, Grimm’s Fairy Tales is crowded with images of emblematic power such as the gingerbread house, the palace of sleepers, Snow White in her glass coffin, and Little Red Riding Hood and the bedded wolf. These images have attracted the finest illustrators (and animators) of every intervening generation to join with storytellers in transmitting a body of tales that speaks to readers, it seems, in the native language of the imagination. Laurence A. Breiner Other major works nonfiction: Deutsche Sagen, 1816-1818 (German Legends, 1981; 2 volumes); Deutsche Grammatik, 1819-1837 (by Jacob Grimm alone); Über deutsche Runen, 1821 (by Wilhelm Grimm alone); Die deutsche Heldensage, 1829 (by Wilhelm Grimm alone); Deutsche Mythologie, 1835-1837 (4 volumes; by Jacob Grimm alone; Teutonic Mythology, 1880-1888); Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1848 (by Jacob Grimm alone); Deutsches Wörterbuch, 1852-1862 (3 volumes). Bibliography Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Random House, 1976. Bettelheim’s book discusses the major motifs and themes of fairy tales from a Freudian psychological perspective, focusing on their meanings for the growing child. He discusses many of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and in part 2 examines in detail eight of the stories still popular today. He includes a useful bibliography, though many of the books listed are in German, and an index. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Edited and translated by Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam Press, 1992. This is perhaps the best of the many translations in English. The introduction is informative, and data are also given on the informants the Grimm brothers used in their research. Also included are thirty-two tales that the Grimms dropped from earlier editions, as well as eight variants showing how the Grimms edited and re-created tales as they were compiling their collection.

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Haase, Donald, ed. The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Valuable essays on public and critical opinions of the Grimms’ tales. Kamenetsky, Christa. The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. Surveys the Grimms’ lives, theories and practices, critical appraisals of their folktales, and extensive bibliographical resources. Michaelis-Jena, Ruth. The Brothers Grimm. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Michaelis-Jena has written a thorough biography of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and she includes a chapter called “The ‘Nursery and Household Tales’ and Their Influence,” which provides information on early reactions to the collection and its translations, noting that the tales spurred an interest in collection of other national folktales. Contains an index and bibliography. Murphy, G. Ronald. The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Examines the religious aspects of the tales. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Paradiz, Valerie. Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books 2005. Examination of the source of the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, specifically; Paradiz argues that many of the tales were contributed not by peasants from the German countryside but rather by educated and aristocratic German women. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Tatar provides close readings of many of the tales, mostly from a psychological perspective, though the book is aimed at a more scholarly audience than Bettelheim’s. She examines typical motifs and situations and attempts to bring in the perspectives of folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and literary critics, as well as that of the psychologists. Notes, index. Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1988. Zipes’s book arose out of talks he gave at various conferences. The work is quite scholarly, and many of the chapters examine the effects of the tales on modern society and place them in a sociohistorical context. Supplemented by notes, a good bibliography, and an index.

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Bret Harte Born: Albany, New York; August 25, 1836 Died: Camberley, Surrey, England; May 5, 1902 Principal short fiction • Condensed Novels, 1867; The Lost Galleon, and Other Tales, 1867; The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches, 1870; Stories of the Sierras, 1872; Mrs. Skaggs’s Husbands, 1873; Tales of the Argonauts, 1875; Thankful Blossom, 1877; Drift from Two Shores, 1878; The Story of a Mine, 1878; The Twins of Table Mountain, 1879; Flip and Found at Blazing Star, 1882; In the Carquinez Woods, 1883; Maruja, 1885; A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready, 1887; The Crusade of the Excelsior, 1887; A Phyllis of the Sierras, 1888; Cressy, 1889; The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh, 1889; A Waif of the Plains, 1890; A First Family of Tasajara, 1891; Sally Dows, 1893; A Protégée of Jack Hamlin’s, 1894; The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, 1894; In a Hollow of the Hills, 1895; Barker’s Luck, and Other Stories, 1896; Three Partners, 1897; Stories in Light and Shadow, 1898; Tales of Trail and Town, 1898; Mr. Jack Hamlin’s Meditation, 1899; Condensed Novels: Second Series, 1902; Trent’s Trust, 1903; The Story of Enriquez, 1924. Other literary forms • Bret Harte attempted practically every form of belles lettres common in the nineteenth century. He wrote several collections of poems, almost entirely forgotten in the years since his death. Indeed, his poetic reputation to modern readers depends completely on the success of one poem, his comic verse masterpiece “Plain Language from Truthful James,” more commonly known as “The Heathen Chinee,” published in 1870. He wrote and edited newspaper material, essays, the novel Gabriel Conroy (1876), and some excellent satirical work, notably his Condensed Novels; and he collaborated with Mark Twain on a play, Ah Sin (1877), based on his poem “The Heathen Chinee.” Achievements • Bret Harte’s influence on “local color” fiction, especially the literature of the American West, was profound but not totally fortunate. He was one of the earliest writers, and certainly the most influential one, to set stories on the mining frontier that evolved from the California gold rush of 1849. His interest in the Western story and his success in transforming his raw material into popular fiction led many subsequent writers to explore American Western themes that they might otherwise have dismissed as unworthy of serious notice. Harte’s stories, however, focusing on colorful characters that he deemed worthy of treatment for their own sake, tend to undervalue plot and setting, and his contrived plots and sentimental treatment of character gave subsequent Western fiction an escapist, juvenile bent, which it took a long time to outgrow. Biography • Born in Albany, New York, as Francis Brett Harte (he would later drop the “Francis” and change the spelling of his middle name to Bret), Harte went to California in 1854, where for a while he lived many of the lives he was later to re-create imaginatively in the biographies of his fictional characters. Among other occupations, he worked an unsuccessful mining claim on the Stanislaus River; he may have been a guard for the Wells Fargo stagecoach lines; and he was employed in various

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capacities at the San Francisco mint before drifting into journalism. He was associated with the founding (1864) of C. H. Webb’s journal the Californian, in which some of his own early work was published. Subsequently he became editor of the Overland Monthly (1868-1870), in which many of his most famous works first saw print. Notable among these are the short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and the comic poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” which led to an offer from The Atlantic Monthly of a ten-thousand-dollar yearly contract, annually renewable, for exclusive rights to his material. On the strength of this contract Harte moved to Boston, but the contract was never renewed after the first year. Indeed, Harte’s later work never came up to the standard of his earlier, and although he was a tireless writer his production rapidly degenerated into hack work. He moved to Europe, serving for a brief time as American consul in Krefeld, Germany, and in Glasgow, Scotland, before finally settling in London, where he lived the rest of his life. He was happy in London, where people viewed his work more charitably than in the United States and where he was respected as an authentic voice of “the ’49.” Analysis • In any discussion of Bret Harte, one must begin by making a clear distinction between importance and quality, that is, between the influence of an author’s work and its intrinsic value. That Harte was an extremely important writer, no one will deny. Almost entire credit should be given to him for the refinement of the gold fields of California into rich literary ore. More than a mere poet of “the ’49,” he firmly established many of the stock character types of later Western fiction: the gentleman gambler, the tarnished lady, the simple though often lovably cantankerous prospector, all invariably possessed of hearts of gold. These prototypes, so beloved of later Western writers both of fiction and film, seemed to spring, like rustic Athenas, full-grown from his fertile brain. Yet with all his admitted importance there have been doubts from the very beginning about the intrinsic quality of his work. After publication of The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches and the overwhelming success of his famous comic poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” in the same year, the set of brilliant tomorrows confidently predicted for him developed instead into rediscovery only of a series of remembered yesterdays. What, the critic should initially ask, is the reason behind Harte’s meteoric rise and his equally precipitous fall? Perhaps a partial answer may be found by examination of a term often applied to Harte’s work: It is, critics are fond of saying, “Dickensian.” There is much truth to this critical commonplace, for the influence of Charles Dickens is everywhere to be found in Harte’s writing, from the often brilliantly visualized characters, through the sentimental description, to the too-commonly contrived plot. Perhaps the first of these influences is the most important, for, like Dickens, when Harte is mentioned one immediately thinks of memorable characters rather than memorable stories. What would Dickens be without his Bob Cratchit, Mister Micawber, and Little Nell? Similarly, what would Harte be without his gambler John Oakhurst or his lovable but eccentric lawyer, Colonel Starbottle? The answer to these rhetorical questions, however, conceals a major limitation in Harte’s literary artistry which the often too-facile comparison to Dickens easily overlooks. For in Dickens’s case, in addition to the characters mentioned above, equally powerful negative or evil ones may be added who are completely lacking in Harte’s own work. Where are the Gradgrinds and Fagins and Uriah Heeps in Harte’s writing? The answer, to the detriment of Harte’s stories, is that they are nowhere to be found. The result, equally unfortunate, is that Harte’s stories lack almost completely any tragic vision of the world or of human

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beings’ place in it. Misfortune in Harte’s stories is uniformly pathetic rather than tragic, and the unfortunate result is that too often these stories settle for a “good cry” on the part of the reader rather than attempting any analysis of humanity’s destiny or its place in an unknown and often hostile universe. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” • A brief glance at one of Harte’s bestknown stories, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” may serve at once to indicate both the strengths and the limitations of his work. This story tells of the fortunes of four “outcasts” from the California gold camp of Poker Flat, who have been escorted to the city limits by a vigilance committee, operating in the flush of civic pride, and told never to return on peril of their lives. The Library of Congress four outcasts are Mr. John Oakhurst, a professional gambler; “the Duchess” and “Mother Shipton,” two prostitutes; and “Uncle Billy,” a “confirmed drunkard,” suspected as well of the more serious crime of robbing sluices. The four outcasts hope to find shelter in the neighboring settlement of Sandy Bar, a long day’s journey away over a steep mountain range; but at noon the saddle-weary Duchess calls a halt to the expedition, saying she will “go no further.” Accordingly, the party goes into camp, despite Oakhurst’s pointing out that they are only half way to Sandy Bar and that they have neither equipment nor provisions. They do, however, have liquor, and the present joys of alcohol soon replace the will to proceed toward Sandy Bar where, in all fairness to the outcasts, their reception may not be overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Oakhurst does not drink, but out of a feeling of loyalty stays with his companions. Some time later during the afternoon, the party is joined by two refugees from Sandy Bar, Tom Simson and his betrothed, Piney Woods. They have eloped from Sandy Bar because of the objections of Piney’s father to their forthcoming marriage and are planning to be wed in Poker Flat. It transpires that Simson, referred to throughout the story as “the Innocent,” had once lost to Oakhurst his “entire fortune—amounting to some forty dollars”—and that after the game was over Oakhurst had taken the young man aside and given him his money back, saying simply “you’re a good little man, but you can’t gamble worth a cent. Don’t try it over again.” This had made a friend-for-life of the Innocent and also serves to show that Poker Flat’s view of Oakhurst as a monster of iniquity is not to be taken totally at face value. Since it is now too late to travel on, both the outcasts and the young lovers decide to encamp in a ruined house near the trail. During the night Uncle Billy abandons the group, taking all the animals with him. It also begins to snow. The party, predictably, is snowed in, although the situation

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does not appear too grave since the extra provisions which the Innocent has brought with him and which Uncle Billy did not take in his departure are enough, with careful husbandry, to last the party for ten days. All begin to make the cabin habitable, and they spend the first few days listening to the accordion the Innocent has brought and to a paraphrase of the Iliad which the Innocent has recently read and with which, much to Oakhurst’s delight, he regales the company. The situation, however, deteriorates. Another snowstorm totally isolates the camp, although the castaways are able to see, far below them, the smoke of Poker Flat. On the tenth day, Mother Shipton, “once the strongest of the party,” who had mysteriously been growing weaker, dies. Her serious decline, it turns out, is a result of the fact that she had not eaten any of her carefully husbanded rations, which she had selflessly saved for her companions. Oakhurst then makes a pair of snowshoes out of a pack saddle and gives them to the Innocent, whom he sends off to Poker Flat in a last attempt to bring aid. If the Innocent reaches Poker Flat within two days, Oakhurst says, all will be well. He follows the Innocent part way on his journey toward Poker Flat, but does not return. Meanwhile, back at the camp, the situation goes from bad to worse. Only the Duchess and Piney are left, and—although they discover and are properly grateful for the pile of wood which Oakhurst has secretly gathered and left for them—the rigors of a cruel world prove too strong. They die of starvation in the snow, and a rescue party arriving too late is properly edified by their moral courage—and, the reader trusts, properly chastened by recognition of Poker Flat’s own despicable conduct. Oakhurst, we discover at the end of the story, in the best tradition of noblesse oblige, has committed suicide. The story concludes with a rehearsal of his epitaph, written by himself on a deuce of clubs and pinned to a pine tree with a bowie knife: “Beneath this tree lies the body of John Oakhurst, who struck a streak of bad luck on the 23d of November 1850, and handed in his checks on the 7th of December, 1850.” It is pointless to pretend that “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” does not have a certain power; indeed, the evidence of its continuing popularity, as shown through inclusion in countless anthologies of every persuasion, clearly indicates that the story is not a totally negligible effort. Yet after thoughtful readers have finished the story, they are conscious of a certain dissatisfaction. The question to be asked is, “Why?” The obvious answer seems to be that the story has little new to say. In European literature, prostitutes with hearts of gold were scarcely novel figures by the 1860’s; furthermore, the fact that holier-than-thou individuals, who are likely not only to cast the first stone but also to be sorry when it hits, can scarcely have been new to any reasonably perceptive reader. What Harte no doubt intended was to evoke an emotion on the part of the reader, an emotion of sorrow and pity for the poor victims of the social ingratitude (one hates to say injustice) of Poker Flat. The argument, from one perspective, is the oldest in the world—the tiresome tu quoque statement that the holier-than-thou are little better than the lowlier-than-them. Yet this easy answer will not entirely work. As has been pointed out many times, considered purely from the perspective of “ideas,” most literature is commonplace. Perhaps a better question is to ask how Harte approached his parable and whether his fictional method works. To this the answer must be “No,” for if readers consider the story carefully, they must agree that it simply is not successful, even in its own terms. They have, as Harte’s friend and sometime collaborator Mark Twain would have said, been “sold.” Let us examine the story closely. A group of outcasts is sent up a long day’s journey

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to another place. They stop only halfway—that is, half a day’s journey—there. The place they left, in fact, is clearly visible behind them. Four in number, they are joined by two others; when Uncle Billy deserts, their number is five. Harte tells us that with careful management they have ten days’ food, even though they have no animals. (What Uncle Billy could possibly have wanted with the seven animals he stole, particularly since he had no provisions to put on them, is never clarified, nor is the bothersome detail of how he could have managed the theft in the first place, considering he had to remove them single-handedly from under the noses of his companions, one of whom, John Oakhurst, is, Harte specifically tells us, “a light sleeper.” The animals do not simply wander off; Harte calls our attention to the fact that they had been “tethered.” Uncle Billy must therefore have released them on purpose.) In any event, the unfortunate castaways survive on meager rations for a week until Oakhurst suddenly remembers how to make snowshoes. Why he could not remember this skill on the second day or perhaps the third, is never clarified, but no matter. The reason is obvious, at least from Harte’s point of view of the logic of the story. It is necessary for Harte to place his characters in a situation of romantic peril in order that their sterling qualities be thrown into high relief; to place his characters in extremis, however, Harte totally sacrifices whatever logic the story may have in its own terms. When Uncle Billy leaves, then, the group discovers that it has sufficient supplies for ten days—that is, fifty man days’ worth of food. Mother Shipton eats none of hers, dying of starvation at the end of a week. This means that the party now has some twenty-two man days of food left, with at the most only three people to eat it, since Mother Shipton is already dead and Oakhurst is about to commit suicide. This is, according to the data Harte has previously given, easily a week’s rations. Why, then, do the two surviving ladies die of starvation before the rescue party arrives some four days later? The answer has nothing to do with the story, which is designed, rather, for the moral Harte wishes to impale upon it. For in his single-minded pursuit of the commonplace notion that appearances may be deceiving and that there is a spark of goodness in all of us, Harte has totally sacrificed all fictional probabilities. Any potential tragic effect the story might presumably possess evaporates in the pale warmth of sentimental nostalgia. This inability to allow his stories to speak for themselves is Harte’s besetting fictional weakness. Rather than allowing his tales to develop their own meaning, he obsessively applies a meaning to them, a meaning which, in far too many cases, cheapens the fictional material at his disposal. Perhaps the fault is that Harte, in his relentless search for this new California literary ore, did not really know where to find it. The mother lode consistently escaped him, and whatever flakes his search discovered were too often small and heavily alloyed. James K. Folsom With updates by John W. Fiero Other major works plays: Two Men of Sandy Bar, pr. 1876; Ah Sin, pr. 1877 (with Mark Twain); Sue, pr. 1896 (with T. Edgar Pemberton). novels: Gabriel Conroy, 1876. miscellaneous: The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Writings, 2001. nonfiction: Selected Letters of Bret Harte, 1997 (Gary Scharnhorst, editor).

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poetry: “Plain Language from Truthful James,” 1870 (also known as “The Heathen Chinee”); East and West Poems, 1871; Poems, 1871; Poetical Works, 1880; Poetical Works of Bret Harte, 1896; Some Later Verses, 1898. Bibliography Barnett, Linda D. Bret Harte: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. With a brief introduction outlining the historical directions of Harte scholarship and criticism, this work provides a good annotated bibliography and checklist through 1977. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Harte: “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (vol. 5), “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (vol. 6), and “Tennessee’s Partner” (vol. 7). Morrow, Patrick. Bret Harte. Boise, Ida.: Boise State College Press, 1972. This brief but excellent study analyzes Harte’s major work in both literature and criticism. Although concise, it is a very helpful introduction. Supplemented by a select bibliography. Nissen, Axel. Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. This scholarly biography provides a new assessment of the life and achievements of the writer. O’Connor, Richard. Bret Harte: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. Lively, anecdotal, and gossipy account limited to Harte’s life, this work is not critical in focus. It does list Harte’s best-known literary characters. Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte. New York: Twayne, 1992. Critical biography of Harte, providing analyses of stories from four different periods of his life, fully informed by critical reception of Harte’s work. An afterword summarizes Harte’s critical reputation. ____________. Bret Harte: A Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Excellent tool for the student of Harte. ____________. Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Study of the writer/editor and his struggle to make the West part of the wider American culture. ____________. “Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and the Literary Construction of San Francisco.” In San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature, edited by David Fine and Paul Skenazy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Discusses Harte’s acceptance of the eastern canon’s taste in such stories as “The Idyl of Red Gulch” and his romanticized depiction of San Francisco as a rough-and-tumble boomtown in several late stories. Stevens, J. David. “‘She War a Woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte’s Western Fiction.” American Literature 69 (September, 1997): 571-593. A discussion of gender in Harte’s Western fiction; argues that what critics have labeled sentimental excess in Harte’s fiction is in fact his method of exploring certain hegemonic cultural paradigms taken for granted in other Western narratives; discusses stories that deal with the structure of the family and how they critique gender roles.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne Born: Salem, Massachusetts; July 4, 1804 Died: Plymouth, New Hampshire; May 19, 1864 Principal short fiction • Twice-Told Tales, 1837 (expanded 1842); Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846; The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, 1851. Other literary forms • Nathaniel Hawthorne is a major American novelist whose early Fanshawe: A Tale (1828) did not lead immediately to further long fiction. After a period largely given to tales and sketches, he published his classic study of moral prejudice in colonial New England, The Scarlet Letter (1850). In the next decade, three more novels—he preferred to call them romances—followed: The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). He wrote books for children, including A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls (1852), and travel sketches of England, Our Old Home (1863). His posthumously published notebooks and letters are also important. Achievements • This seminal figure in American fiction combined narrative skill and artistic integrity as no previous American writer had done. A dozen of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories remain anthology favorites, and few modern American students fail to become familiar with The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s influence on subsequent American writers, especially on his younger American friend Herman Melville, and on Henry James, William Faulkner, and Robert Lowell, has been enormous. Although he wrote comparatively little literary theory, his prefaces to his novels, preeminently the one to The House of the Seven Gables, and scattered observations within his fiction reflect a pioneering concern with his craft. Biography • It is fitting that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birth in 1804 came on the Fourth of July, for, if American writers of his youth were attempting a literary declaration of independence to complement the successful political one of 1776, Hawthorne’s fiction of the 1830’s, along with Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and fiction and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and lectures of the same decade, rank as the fruition of that ambition. Undoubtedly his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, exerted a powerful shaping influence on his work, even though his sea-captain father died when Nathaniel, the second of three children, was only four and even though Nathaniel did not evince much interest in the sea. No one could grow up in Salem without a strong sense of the past, especially a boy one of whose ancestors, John Hathorne (as the family name was then spelled), had served as a judge in the infamous witchcraft trials of 1695. In 1813, confined to home by a foot injury for two years, young Nathaniel formed the habit of reading for hours at a stretch. On graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, where he was a classmate of Franklin Pierce, the future president, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the future poet, the bookish Hawthorne returned to Salem and began a decade of intensive reading and writing. He published a novel,

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Fanshawe: A Tale (later repudiated), in 1828 and began to compose the short stories that eventually brought him into prominence. The first collection of these, TwiceTold Tales, appeared in 1837. In 1838, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody, of Salem, and the following year was appointed to a position in the Boston Custom House, but he left in 1841 to join the infant Brook Farm community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. As a rather solitary man with no prior practical experience of farming, he did not thrive there and left before the end of the year. Marrying in 1842, the couple settled at the Old Manse in Concord. Although he befriended Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne found the Concord Transcendentalists generally pretentious and boring. During the administration of James K. Polk, he left Concord for another customhouse appointment, this time back in Salem. From this period comes his second short-story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse. Moving thereafter to Lenox in the Berkshires, Hawthorne met the younger writer Herman Melville and produced, in a few weeks in 1850, The Scarlet Letter, which was the first of his successful novels; The House of the Seven Gables and another collection of short fiction, The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, followed the next year. Back in Concord at “The Wayside” in 1852, he wrote a campaign biography for his friend Pierce, which resulted in Hawthorne’s appointment as U.S. consul in Liverpool, England. That same year he also wrote the novel The Blithedale Romance, based loosely on his Brook Farm experience. In England, Hawthorne kept an extensive journal from which he later fashioned Our Old Home. Resigning his office in 1857, Hawthorne traveled with his family on the Continent; in Florence, he began his last novel, published in 1860 as The Marble Faun. By the time he returned to Concord, his health was failing, and although he worked at several more novels, he did not get far into any of them. In 1864, he set forth on a trip with Pierce but died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 19. Analysis • Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reading in American colonial history confirmed his basically ambivalent attitude toward the American past, particularly the form that Puritanism took in the New England colonies. Especially interested in the intensity of the Puritan-Cavalier rivalry, the Puritan inclination to credit manifestations of the supernatural such as witchcraft, and the psychology of the struggle for liberation from English rule, Hawthorne explored these themes in some of his earliest stories. As they did for his Puritan ancestors, sin and guilt preoccupied Hawthorne, who, in his move from Salem to Concord, encountered what he considered the facile dismissal of the problem of evil by the Concord intellectuals. He developed a deeply ambivalent moral attitude that colored the situations and characters of his fiction. In the early masterpiece “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Hawthorne’s concern with the coming of age of the United States blends with the maturation of a lad on the verge of manhood. Introduced to the complexities of evil, characters such as Robin of this story and the title character of “Young Goodman Brown” have great difficulty summoning the spiritual strength to resist dark temptations. Often, Hawthorne’s characters cannot throw off the burden of a vague and irrational but weighty burden of guilt. Frequently, his young protagonists exhibit a cold, unresponsive attitude toward a loving fiancé or wife and can find no spiritual sustenance to redeem the situation. Brown, Parson Hooper of “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and Reuben Bourne of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” are examples of such guilt-ridden and essentially faithless men.

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Another prevalent type of protagonist rejects love to become a detached observer, such as the husband of “Wakefield,” who for no apparent reason deserts his wife and spends years living nearby in disguise. In the stories of his middle and later periods, these detached characters are usually scientists or artists. The former include misguided idealists such as Aylmer of “The Birthmark” and the scientist Rappaccini in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” who experiments remorselessly on female family members in search of some elusive abstract perfection. Hawthorne’s artists, while less dangerous, tend also to exclude themselves from warm and loving relationships. At their most deplorable, Hawthorne’s isolated, detached characters become, like Ethan Brand in the story of the same name and Library of Congress Roger Chillingworth of The Scarlet Letter, violators of the human heart, unreclaimable souls whose estrangement from normal human relationships yields them little in compensation, either material or spiritual. Characteristically, Hawthorne builds his stories on a quest or journey, often into the woods or wilderness but always into an unknown region, the protagonist emerging enlightened or merely chastened but invariably sadder, with any success a bitterly ironical one, such as Aylmer’s removal of his wife’s birthmark, which kills his patient. The stories are pervasively and often brilliantly symbolic, and Hawthorne’s symbolic imagination encompasses varieties ranging from more or less clear-cut allegory to elusive multiple symbolic patterns whose significance critics debate endlessly. A century and a half after their composition, Hawthorne’s artistry and moral imagination, even in some of his seriously flawed stories, continue to engage readers and critics. Two of Hawthorne’s most enduringly popular stories—“Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”—appeared initially in the 1831 edition of a literary annual called The Token but remained uncollected until long afterward. Both seem to have been intended for a book, Provincial Tales, that never materialized, and both begin with paragraphs explicitly linking the narratives to historical events. “Roger Malvin’s Burial” • “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is set in the aftermath of a 1725 confrontation with Native Americans called Lovell’s Fight. Roger is a mortally wounded soldier; Reuben Bourne, his less seriously injured companion, must decide whether to stay with his older friend on the desolate frontier or make his way back to his company before he becomes too weak to travel. Urged to the latter course by

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Roger, his prospective father-in-law, Reuben makes the older man as comfortable as he can at the base of a huge rock near an oak sapling, promises to return as soon as he can, and staggers away. Eventually, he is discovered by a search party and taken home to be ministered to by Dorcas, his fiancé. After several days of semiconsciousness, Reuben recovers sufficiently to answer questions. Although he believes he has done the right thing, he cannot bring himself to contradict Dorcas’s assumption that he had buried her father, and he is undeservedly lionized for his heroic fidelity. Eighteen years later, this unhappy and uncommunicative husband takes Dorcas and their fifteen-year-old son Cyrus to the frontier, presumably to resettle but really to “bury” Roger and expiate his own guilt. On the anniversary of the day Reuben had left Roger, Dorcas and Cyrus are led to the rock and the now blasted oak tree, a fatal gunshot is fired, and in a chillingly ambiguous way Reuben relieves himself of his “curse.” This pattern of irrational guilt and ambivalent quest would be repeated in other stories, using New England historical incidents and pervasive symbols such as the rock and oak of “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” • “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is justly considered one of Hawthorne’s greatest stories. The historical introduction here serves to establish the setting as a time of bitter resentment toward Massachusetts colonial governors. The location is left deliberately vague, except that Robin, the young protagonist, must arrive by ferry in a town where he hopes to meet his kinsman, a colonial official. Robin has come from the country with an idea of getting a boost toward a career from Major Molineux. The town is tense and lurid when he enters at nightfall, and the people act strangely. In particular, whenever Robin mentions the name of his kinsman, he is rebuffed. Although frequently described as “shrewd,” Robin seems naive and baffled by the events of this disquieting evening. Eventually, he is treated to the nightmarish spectacle of the public humiliation of his kinsman, though it appears that Major Molineux is the more or less innocent victim of colonial vindictiveness toward the authority of the Crown. At the climax, Robin finds himself unaccountably laughing with the townspeople at Molineux’s disgrace. By the end of the evening, Robin, convinced that nothing remains for him to do but to return home, is counseled by the only civil person he meets to wait a few days before leaving, “as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux.” At one level, this is clearly a rites-of-passage story. Robin has reached the point of initiation into an adult world whose deviousness and obliquity he has hardly begun to suspect, but one in which he can hope to prosper only through his own efforts. The conclusion strongly implies that he cannot go home again, or that if he does, life will never be the same. As the stranger suggests, he may well be obliged to stay and adjust to the new world that he has discovered. The historical setting proclaims “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” an imaginative account of the colonial struggle toward the challenges and perils of an independence for which the people are largely unprepared. The ferry ride, reminiscent of the underworld adventures of epic heroes such as Odysseus and Aeneas—and perhaps more pointedly yet, the Dante of the Inferno— leads to a hellish region from which newcomers cannot normally expect to return. The multiplicity of interpretations that this story has provoked attests to its richness and complexity. Several of Hawthorne’s best stories first appeared in 1835. One of these, “Wakefield,” has been criticized as slight and undeveloped, but it remains intriguing. It

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poses in its final paragraph an exacting problem: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.” Wakefield “steps aside” by leaving his wife for no apparent reason and secretly taking up residence in the next street. The setting of this story, unusual for Hawthorne, is London, and the couple have been married for ten years. Wakefield seems to be an embryonic version of the ruthless experimenter of several later stories, but here his action is more of a joke than an experiment. He is “intellectual, but not actively so”; he lacks imagination; and he has “a cold but not depraved nor wandering heart.” When he leaves, he promises to be back in three or four days, but he stays away for twenty years. He adopts a disguise, regularly walks by his old home and peers in, and even passes his wife in the street. Wakefield has a purpose that he cannot define, but the author describes his motive merely as “morbid vanity.” He will frighten his wife and will find out how much he really matters. He does not matter that much, however, for his wife settles into the routine of her “widowhood.” Finally, passing his old home in a rain shower, he suddenly decides to enter, and at this point the story ends, leaving unanswered the question of whether he has lost his place forever. “The Minister’s Black Veil” • Of the many Hawthorne stories that point toward his masterpiece in the novel The Scarlet Letter, “The Minister’s Black Veil” boasts the character most akin to Arthur Dimmesdale of the novel. Like Dimmesdale, Parson Hooper has a secret. He appears one morning at a Milford meeting house (a reference to “Governor Belcher” appears to place the story in Massachusetts in the 1730’s or early 1740’s) with his face shrouded by a black veil, which he never thereafter removes. Unlike Dimmesdale, he thus flaunts his secret while concealing it. The whole story revolves around the veil and its meaning. His sermon, unusually energetic for this mild minister, is “secret sin.” That afternoon, Hooper conducts a funeral service for a young woman, and Hawthorne hints darkly that Hooper’s sin may have involved her. In the evening, at a third service, Hooper’s veil casts gloom over a wedding ceremony. The congregation speculates endlessly but inclines to avoid the minister. One person who does not avoid him is a young woman named Elizabeth, who is engaged to Hooper. Elizabeth unavailingly begs him to explain or remove the veil and then breaks their engagement. In the years that follow, the lonely minister exerts a strange power over his flock. Dying sinners always insist on his visiting them and never expire before he reaches them, although his presence makes them shudder. Finally, Hooper himself sickens, and Elizabeth reappears to nurse him. On his death bed, he questions the aversion of his onlookers and insists that he sees a similar veil over each of their faces. He then expires and is buried with the veil still over his face. A question more important than the nature of Hooper’s transgression concerns his increase in ministerial efficacy. Is Hooper’s veiled state a kind of extended stage trick? (In death a smile lingers on his face.) Is it advantageous to be ministered to by a “mind diseased?” Is Hooper’s effectiveness an implicit condemnation of his and his congregation’s religion? Such questions Hawthorne’s story almost inevitably raises and almost equally inevitably does not presume to answer directly. “The May-Pole of Merrymount” • “The May-Pole of Merrymount” is simple in plot but complex in theme. One midsummer’s eve, very early in the colonial life of the

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Massachusetts settlement at Mount Wollaston, or Merry Mount, a reenactment of ancient Maypole rites accompanies the wedding of an attractive young couple, Edith and Edgar. Into the scene storms a belligerent group of Puritans under John Endicott, who hacks down the Maypole, arrests the principals, including the flowerdecked priest and the bridal couple, and threatens punishment to all, though Edith’s and Edgar’s will be light if they can accommodate themselves to the severe Puritan life hereafter. Hawthorne uses history but does not follow it strictly. The historical Endicott’s main motive in attacking Merry Mount was to stop its denizens from furnishing firepower and firewater—that is, guns and liquor—to Native Americans. The real Merry Mounters were not so frivolous, nor the Puritans necessarily so austere as Hawthorne depicts them. His artistic purpose required the sharp contrast of two ways of life among early Massachusetts settlers, neither of which he is willing to endorse. The young couple are caught between the self-indulgence of their own community and the “dismal wretches” who invade their ceremony. Like many of Hawthorne’s characters, Edith and Edgar emerge into adulthood in an environment replete with bewildering moral conflicts. It is possible to see the conflict here as one between “English” and “American” values, the Americans being the sober seekers of a new, more disciplined, presumably more godly order than the one they chose to leave behind; the conflict can also be seen as one between a form of religion receptive to “pagan” excesses and a strict, fiercely intolerant one; yet another way of seeing it is as one between hedonists and sadists—for the pleasure principle completely dominates Hawthorne’s Merry Mount, while the Puritans promise branding, chopping of ears, and, instead of a Maypole, a whipping post for the miscreants. The resolution of the story echoes John Milton’s description of Adam and Eve leaving Eden at the end of Paradise Lost (1667), but Hawthorne has Endicott throw a wreath of roses from the Maypole over the heads of the departing newlyweds, “a deed of prophecy,” which signifies the end of the “systematic gayety” of Merry Mount, which also symbolizes the “purest and best of their early joys” that must sustain them in the strict Puritan regimen that lies ahead. “Young Goodman Brown” • “Young Goodman Brown,” first appearing in print in 1835, is set in Salem at the end of the seventeenth century—the era of the witchcraft trials. Again, the names of some minor characters are historical, but Brown and his wife, Faith, whom the young protagonist leaves one night to go into the woods, are among his most allegorical. In its outline the allegory is transparent: When a “good man” abandons his faith, he can expect to go to the devil. Hawthorne complicates his story by weaving into it all sorts of subtleties and ambiguities. Brown’s guide in the woods is simultaneously fatherlike and devilish. He encounters a series of presumably upright townspeople, including eventually Faith herself, gathering for a ceremony of devil-worship. At the climactic moment, Brown urges Faith to “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.” The next thing he knows, he is alone in the forest, all his companions having fled—or all having been part of a dream. Brown returns home in the morning, his life radically altered. He can no longer trust his neighbors, he shrinks from his wife, and he lives out his years a scowling, muttering misanthrope. As in “The May-Pole of Merrymount,” Hawthorne’s motive in evoking an episode of New England history is not primarily historical: No one proceeds against witches; there is no allusion to Judge John Hathorne. Rather, the setting creates an atmo-

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sphere of guilt, suspicion, and unstable moral imagination. Breathing this atmosphere, Brown falls victim not to injustice or religious intolerance but to himself. In a sense it does not matter whether Brown fell asleep in the woods and dreamed the Black Sabbath. Regardless of whether he has lost faith, he has manifestly lost hope. His apparent capacity to resist evil in the midst of a particularly unholy temptation dispels his own guilt no more than the guilt he, and seemingly only he, detects in others. “Young Goodman Brown” is a masterful fictive presentation of the despairing soul. All the preceding stories had been published by the time Hawthorne turned thirty-one. For about three more years, stories continued to flow, although most of those from the late 1830’s are not among his best. He broke a subsequent dry spell with a series of stories first published in 1843 and 1844, many of which were later collected in Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846. Most notable of these later stories are “The Birthmark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” “The Birthmark” • In these later efforts, the artist-scientist appears frequently. Aylmer of “The Birthmark” becomes obsessed by the one flaw in his beautiful wife, Georgiana, a birthmark on her left cheek that had not previously bothered her or her prior lovers. To Aylmer, however, it is a “symbol of imperfection,” and he undertakes its removal. Hawthorne foreshadows the result in many ways, not the least by Georgiana’s observation that her brilliant husband’s “most splendid successes were almost invariably failures.” She submits to the operation nevertheless, and he succeeds at removing the mark but fails to preserve her life, intertwined somehow with it. Aylmer equates science with religion; words such as “miracle,” “votaries,” “mysteries,” and “holy” abound. He is also an artist who, far from subjecting Georgiana to a smoky laboratory, fashions an apartment with beautiful curtains and perfumed lamps of his creation for her to inhabit during the experiment. Neither hero nor villain, Aylmer is a gifted man incapable of accepting moral limitations and therefore unable to accept his wife as the best that life could offer him. The artist appears in various guises in Hawthorne’s later stories and novels. He may be a wood-carver as in “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” a poet like Coverdale of The Blithedale Romance, a painter like Kenyon of The Marble Faun, or, as in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” a watchmaker with the ambition “to put the very spirit of beauty into form.” Owen Warland is also a peripheral figure, not yet alienated from society like many twentieth century artists real and fictional but regarded as quaint and ineffectual by his companions. Like Aylmer, he attempts to improve on nature, his creation being a mechanical butterfly of rare and fragile beauty. Owen appears fragile himself, but it is part of Hawthorne’s strategy to reveal his inner toughness. He can contemplate the destruction of his butterfly by a child with equanimity, for the artifact itself is only the “symbol” of the reality of art. Owen suffers in living among less sensitive and spiritual beings and in patiently enduring their unenlightened patronization, but he finds security in his capacity for beauty. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” • “Rappaccini’s Daughter” has three familiar Hawthorne characters. His young initiate this time is an Italian university student named Giovanni Guasconti, whose lodgings in Padua overlook a spectacular garden, the pride and joy of a scientific experimenter, Dr. Rappaccini, whose human subject is his daughter Beatrice. A scientific rival, professor Baglioni, warns Giovanni that Rappaccini much

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prefers science to humankind, but the young man falls in love with Beatrice and thus comes within Rappaccini’s orbit. This scientist is more sinister than Aylmer and exerts his power over Beatrice more pervasively than does Aylmer over Georgiana. Beatrice’s very life is bound up with the powerful poison with which he grows the exotic flowers in his garden. Giovanni, who has himself imbibed the poison, tries to counter its effect on Beatrice by offering her a medicine obtained from Baglioni, but its effect on her, whose whole life has depended on the poison, is fatal. This story and its four main characters have generated a bewildering variety of interpretations. One reason for the critical quarrels is a subtle shift in point of view late in the story. For most of the way, the reader is with Giovanni and knows what Giovanni knows, but about four-fifths of the way, an omniscient narrator begins to comment on the limitations of his perceptions, the truth being deeper than he can plumb. This double perspective creates difficulties in gauging his character and that of the other three principals. Hawthorne’s allegorical propensities also complicate one’s understanding of the story. For example, Beatrice can be seen as an Eve, an already corrupted temptress in the garden; as a Dantean, who guides her lover through what is for him, initially at least, Paradise; and as the Pomona of Ovid’s tale of Vertumnus, the vegetarian god who wins her love and takes her away. (There is a statue of Vertumnus in Rappaccini’s garden.) Obviously, Beatrice is not consistently any of these figures, but each of them leads to further allegorizing. Perhaps the ultimate explanation of the interpretive difficulties arising from “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is the author’s profound ambivalence. In this fictional world, good and evil, beauty and deformity, are inextricably intermingled. Is Baglioni, for example, wise counselor or jealous rival, the protector of Giovanni or the vindictive agent of Beatrice’s destruction? He fulfills these roles and others. In this story he conjoins with three other familiar Hawthorne types, the young initiate into life’s malignities, the trusting victim of a detached manipulator, and the insensitive violator of his victim’s integrity. Nearly every conceivable critical method has been applied to “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; ultimately each reader must make up his or her own mind about its primary significance. After these three stories of the mid-1840’s, all viewed incidentally as landmarks of science fiction by historians of that genre, Hawthorne, back in Salem and busy with his customhouse duties, wrote little for several years. Before turning his attention to long fiction in 1850, however, he completed a few more short stories in the late 1840’s, the most important of which is “Ethan Brand.” “Ethan Brand” • Like several of his best stories, this one occupies the time from nightfall to the following dawn, but unlike “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” it has a contemporary setting. Bartram is a lime burner attending his fire on Mount Greylock in northwestern Massachusetts with his son Joe, when a man appears, a former lime burner who long ago decided to devote his life to searching for the Unpardonable Sin, which, by cultivating his intellect at the expense of his moral sense, he found in his own heart. All this he explains to the unimaginative and uncomprehending Bartram. The sensitive son fears the glint in the stranger’s eye, and even Bartram cringes at Ethan Brand’s sinister laugh. Since Brand has passed into local folklore, Bartram dispatches Joe to inform the villagers that he is back, and soon a contingent of neighbors comes on the scene. When Brand demonstrates his abrogation of human brotherhood, they retire, and Brand offers to

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watch Bartram’s fire so that the latter and his son can retire for the night to their nearby hut. When Bartram and Joe awake in the morning, they find Brand gone, but a look into the fire reveals his skeleton burned to lime, his hardened heart also burnt but distinctly outlined. What was the sin? Hawthorne subtitled this story “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance.” No fragments of such a romance have ever turned up, although the story alludes briefly to past relationships between Brand and some of the villagers, including an “Esther” on whom Brand had performed a “psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.” Hawthorne seems to have intended no specifying of this or any other of Brand’s activities but succeeded in delineating a character who represents the ultimate development—at least in his short fiction—of the coldly intellectual seeker who has denied his heart, exploited others in relentless quasi-scientific experimentation, and isolated himself from humanity. Hawthorne would depict such characters in more detail in his novels but never one who acknowledged his sin so completely and regarded suicide as the only act remaining to him. At one time, Hawthorne’s short stories were viewed mainly as preliminaries to the novels to which he turned shortly after publishing “Ethan Brand” in January of 1850, but he is now recognized as a master of the short story. Unlike all other major American writers of his time, he devoted his creative energies almost exclusively to fiction. Only Edgar Allan Poe, who began to publish his fiction shortly after Hawthorne’s early stories appeared, approaches his position as the United States’ first artist of short fiction. If Poe excelled at the psychology of terror, Hawthorne prevailed at the psychology of guilt. Both brilliantly characterized the isolated or alienated individual, but only Hawthorne regularly enriched the cultural significance of his stories by locating these characters within the context of an American past and thus contributing imaginatively to his readers’ sense of that past. Robert P. Ellis Other major works children’s literature: Grandfather’s Chair, 1841; Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; True Stories from History and Biography, 1851; A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls, 1852; Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls, 1853. edited text: Peter Parley’s Universal History, 1837. novels: Fanshawe: A Tale, 1828; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven Gables, 1851; The Blithedale Romance, 1852; The Marble Faun, 1860; Septimius Felton, 1872 (fragment); The Dolliver Romance, 1876 (fragment); Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, 1883 (fragment); The Ancestral Footstep, 1883 (fragment). miscellaneous: Complete Works, 1850-1882 (13 volumes); The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1900 (22 volumes); The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1962-1997 (23 volumes). nonfiction: Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; Our Old Home, 1863; The American Notebooks, 1941; The French and Italian Notebooks, 1980; Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 19841987 (4 volumes); Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2002 (Joel Myerson, editor). Bibliography Bunge, Nancy. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Discusses Hawthorne’s major short stories in three categories: isolation and

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community, artists and scientists, and perspective, humility, and joy. Includes excerpts from Hawthorne’s journals, letters, and prefaces; also includes excerpts on Hawthorne from Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and several contemporary critics. Keil, James C. “Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’: Early Nineteenth-Century and Puritan Constructions of Gender.” The New England Quarterly 69 (March, 1996): 33-55. Argues that Hawthorne places his story in the seventeenth century to explore the nexus of past and present in the attitudes of New Englanders toward theology, morality, and sexuality. Points out that clear boundaries between male and female, public and private, and work and home were thresholds across which nineteenth century Americans often passed. Kelsey, Angela M. “Mrs. Wakefield’s Gaze: Femininity and Dominance in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Wakefield.’” ATQ, n.s. 8 (March, 1994): 17-31. In this feminist reading of Hawthorne’s story, Kelsey argues that Mrs. Wakefield finds ways to escape and exceed the economy of the male gaze, first by appropriating the look for herself, then by refusing to die, and finally by denying her husband her gaze. Mackenzie, Manfred. “Hawthorne’s ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’: A Postcolonial Reading.” New Literary History 27 (Summer, 1996): 459-472. Argues that the story is postcolonial fiction in which Hawthorne writes the emerging American nation and recalls European colonial culture; claims that Hawthorne rehearses the colonialist past in order to concentrate and effectively “expel” its inherent violence. McKee, Kathryn B. “‘A Small Heap of Glittering Fragments’: Hawthorne’s Discontent with the Short Story Form.” ATQ, n.s. 8 (June, 1994): 137-147. Claims that Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful” and “Downe’s Wooden Image” are examples of his dissatisfaction with the short story as a form; argues that the fragile articles at the center of the tales mirror the limitations Hawthorne saw in the short-story genre. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eleven short stories by Hawthorne: “The Ambitious Guest,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and “The Birthmark” (vol. 1); “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (vol. 2); “Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance” (vol. 3); “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (vol. 5); “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (vol. 6); and “Wakefield” and “Young Goodman Brown” (vol. 8). Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. For each of fifty-four stories, this valuable guide furnishes a chapter with four sections: publication history; circumstances of composition, sources, and influences; relationship with other Hawthorne works; and interpretations and criticism. The discussions are arranged alphabetically by title and keyed to a bibliography of more than five hundred secondary sources. Scharnhorst, Gary. The Critical Response to Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Includes chapters on the novel’s background and composition history, on the contemporary American reception, on the early British reception, on the growth of Hawthorne’s reputation after his death, on modern criticism, and on The Scarlet Letter on stage and screen.

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Swope, Richard. “Approaching the Threshold(s) in Postmodern Detective Fiction: Hawthorne’s ‘Wakefield’ and Other Missing Persons.” Critique 39 (Spring, 1998): 207-227. Discusses “Wakefield” as a literary ancestor of “metaphysical” detective fiction, a postmodern genre that combines fiction with literary theory. “Wakefield” raises many of the questions about language, subjectivity, and urban spaces that surround postmodernism. Von Frank, Albert J., ed. Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Divided into nineteenth and twentieth century commentary, with a section of new essays, an introduction, and a chronology of the tales. Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Analysis of Hawthorne’s often contradictory life that proposes that many of Hawthorne’s stories are autobiographical.

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Ernest Hemingway Born: Oak Park, Illinois; July 21, 1899 Died: Ketchum, Idaho; July 2, 1961 Principal short fiction • Three Stories and Ten Poems, 1923; In Our Time, 1924, 1925; Men Without Women, 1927; Winner Take Nothing, 1933; The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, 1938; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Other Stories, 1961; The Nick Adams Stories, 1972; The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 1987. Other literary forms • During the four decades in which Ernest Hemingway worked at his craft, he published seven novels, a collection of fictional sketches, and two nonfiction accounts of his experiences in Spain and in Africa; he also edited a collection of war stories and produced a considerable number of magazine and newspaper articles. The latter have been collected in posthumous editions. Manuscripts of two unfinished novels, a series of personal reminiscences, and a longer version of a bullfighting chronicle have been edited and published posthumously as well. In 1981, Hemingway’s first biographer, Carlos Baker, brought out an edition of the writer’s correspondence. Achievements • After spending a decade in relative obscurity, Ernest Hemingway finally became a best-selling author with the appearance of A Farewell to Arms in 1929. His long association with the publishing firm Charles Scribner’s Sons, where the legendary Max Perkins was his editor for more than two decades, assured him wide publicity and a large audience. His passion for high adventure and his escapades as a womanizer made him as famous for his lifestyle as for his literary accomplishments. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was selected to receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, but the award was vetoed. In 1952, the Pulitzer committee did give its annual prize to The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Two years later, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even more significant than these personal awards has been the influence that Hemingway has exerted on American letters. His spare style has become a model for authors, especially short-story writers. Further, Hemingway has received significant critical attention, though not all of it laudatory. His tough, macho attitude toward life and his treatment of women have been the subjects of hostile reviews by feminist critics during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Biography • Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, in 1899, the second child of Clarence (Ed) and Grace Hemingway’s six children. Growing up in a doctor’s house, under the domination of a forceful mother, would provide Ernest grist for his literary mill in years to come. The family’s frequent trips to northern Michigan would also figure in his development as a writer, providing him a locale for numerous stories and an appreciation for wild terrain. After graduating from high school, Hemingway left Chicago to take a job on the Kansas City Star. Shortly after the United States entered World War I, he quit his job and went to Italy as a Red Cross volunteer. There, he was wounded while

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assisting Italian soldiers. He spent several weeks in a Milan hospital, where he met Agnes von Kurowsky, who would serve as a model for Catherine Barkeley in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway returned to the U.S. in 1919 and began writing stories— none of which sold. In 1920, he met Hadley Richardson, whom he married the following year. They returned to Europe late in 1921, and for the next decade, Hemingway spent his time in Paris or in other locales on the Continent, sharpening his skills as a short-story writer. Two collections of his work were published by literary presses. The many expatriates who he met in Paris served as models for his first fulllength novel, The Sun Also Rises, which appeared to favorable reviews in 1926. In the same year, he and Hadley separated, and Hemingway © The Nobel Foundation pursued his relationship with Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married in 1927. In 1928, Hemingway began the novel that would establish his reputation, A Farewell to Arms. Published in 1929, it sold quite well and freed the novelist to pursue other interests for several years. Though he had his residence in Key West, Florida, during the 1930’s, he spent considerable time in Spain studying the art of bullfighting and took Pauline on a big-game safari in Africa. Out of these experiences came Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935); neither received the acclaim that the earlier novels had enjoyed. In 1937, Hemingway managed to secure a position as a reporter to cover the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). While in Spain, he spent most of his time with Martha Gellhorn, a young writer whom he had met the previous year in Florida. They were married in 1939 after Hemingway divorced Pauline. The Spanish Civil War furnished him materials for a major novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and a play, The Fifth Column (1938), which had a brief run on Broadway. After the outbreak of World War II, Hemingway found a way to be with the American troops, joining his third wife as a war correspondent in Europe. His relationship with Gellhorn deteriorated as the war progressed, and by 1945, they had agreed to divorce. Hemingway made Mary Welsh his fourth wife in 1946, after courting her for two years. The two spent Hemingway’s remaining years together in Cuba or in various retreats in the United States and in Europe. During the years following World War II, Hemingway started several major projects, but few came to fruition. A notable exception was The Old Man and the Sea, which ran in Life magazine, sold millions in hardback, and became a motion picture. Growing bouts of depression became harder and harder to fight off, however, and in 1961, Hemingway finally committed suicide while staying at his second home, in Ketchum, Idaho.

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Analysis • Any study of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories must begin with a discussion of style. Reacting against the overblown, rhetorical, and often bombastic narrative techniques of his predecessors, Hemingway spent considerable time as a young man working to perfect the spare form of narration, dialogue, and description that became the hallmark of his fiction. Nowhere does he achieve greater mastery of his medium than in his short stories. He expressed his belief and described his own method in a passage in Death in the Afternoon: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer has stated them.” Following this dictum, Hemingway constructed stories that sometimes make readers feel as if they are unseen auditors at some closet drama, or silent observers at intimate moments in the lives of characters struggling with important, although often private, issues. “Hills Like White Elephants” • The technique is readily apparent in “Hills Like White Elephants.” Set in Spain during the hot summer, the story contains little overt action. Hemingway sketches the background deftly in a single opening paragraph of half a dozen sentences, each of which provides vital information that establishes a physical setting and a symbolic backdrop for the tale. On one side of the little junction station, there are fertile fields; on the other, a barren landscape. Only three characters appear: a man identified as an American, a girl, and a woman who serves them in the little café at which they have stopped to wait for the train that passes through the unnamed town on the route from Barcelona to Madrid. The entire story consists of a single scene in which the man and the girl sit in the café, drink various alcoholic beverages, and converse. Much of the dialogue seems little more than small talk, but there is an underlying sense of tension from the very first exchange between the man and the girl after they order their beer. The girl mentions that the hills in the distance “look like white elephants,” to which her companion replies, “I’ve never seen one.” She immediately responds, “No, you wouldn’t have,” and he fires back, “I might have. . . . Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.” The harshness of their responses contrasts with the inconsequential nature of the subject of their discussion, suggesting that the relationship between them is somehow strained but that neither wishes to discuss openly the real issue over which they are at odds. For nearly half the story, the two try to make conversation that will ease the tension, but their remarks serve only to heighten it. The man finally mentions, in an almost offhand way, the subject that is really on his mind: He wants the woman to have an abortion. “It’s really an awfully simple operation,” he tells her. “It’s just to let the air in. . . . it’s all perfectly natural.” The woman, who sits silent through his pleading, finally replies, “Then what will we do afterward?” The man repeatedly assures her that things will be fine if she agrees only to terminate her pregnancy, since in his view the baby will destroy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. The woman is wiser; she knows that their relationship has already been poisoned forever and that her pregnancy is not the sole cause. Theirs has been a peripatetic, rootless life, as barren in some ways as the countryside in which they now find themselves. This summary of the story, like summaries of so many of Hemingway’s stories, is inevitably an artificial construct that does not convey the sense of significance that readers get from discovering the larger issues lurking beneath the surface of the dialogue and description. This story is about choice, a vital choice for the woman, who

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must face the dilemma of either acquiescing to the man’s wishes and undergoing what is for her more than a routine operation or risking the loss of a man for whom she has had some genuine feelings of love. Ultimately, either through his insistence or through her own realization that she must try to salvage their relationship even though she senses it will be futile to do so, she agrees to his demands. Her closing remark, on which the story ends, carries with it the strong note of cynicism that pervades the entire story: “I feel fine,” she tells the man as they wait for the train’s imminent arrival. In addition to his distinctive style, Hemingway has made his mark in the literary world through the creation of a special kind of hero. The “Hemingway hero,” as this figure has come to be known, is usually a man scarred by some traumatic experience—war, violence, a love affair gone bad. Often a physical maiming serves as a symbolic reminder of the psychological dysfunction that characterizes these figures. Despite having received a bad deal from the world, the Hemingway hero perseveres in his search for a good life, creating his own meaning out of the chaos of existence— the hallmark of existential heroes in both American and continental literature. These heroes do what is right without expecting reward, either in this life or in the next. “In Another Country” • Two fine examples of Hemingway heroes appear in the story “In Another Country.” The tale is set in Italy during World War I. A young American officer is recuperating at an Italian hospital, where he mingles with Italian soldiers who have seen considerably more action than he has seen. The extent of their physical injuries mirrors the psychological scars that the war has inflicted on them. One of them, a major who had been a champion fencer before the war, diligently undergoes therapy on a machine designed to restore his withered hand. He is hard on the young American for entertaining thoughts that full recovery for any of them is possible, yet he insists that they all go through the motions—not only with their therapy but also with other activities as well. He demands that the young man learn Italian correctly, for example, arguing that one must follow the rules in life, even when they seem meaningless. Clearly bitter over his fate, he nevertheless keeps up his treatment, until an even more ironic blow strikes him: His young wife contracts pneumonia, and while he is going through the motions to recover the use of a hand damaged beyond restoration, she lies dying. His anger at the cruelty of her impending senseless death drives him to lash out at the institution of marriage; when she dies, however, he breaks down in tears and abandons his therapy. The young American, witness to the Italian’s great love, comes to understand how nothing of value can last in this world. The lesson is bitter, but it is one that Hemingway heroes must learn if they are to go on living in a world where the only certainties are chance and chaos. The young American in “In Another Country” is similar to the main figure in Hemingway’s stories, Nick Adams. Seen often as an alter ego for the writer himself, Nick appears in almost twenty stories, and from them readers can piece together his history. A youth who spends time in Michigan and who has many of his ideals shattered by his participation in World War I, Nick develops the characteristics of the Hemingway hero: He becomes convinced of the world’s essential callousness, yet he steels himself against its cruelties by observing the rituals that give his own life meaning. Hence, in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick uses the activities associated with fishing as a kind of therapy to recover from the trauma of war.

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“The Killers” • One of the most anthologized of the Nick Adams stories is “The Killers.” In this tale, Nick is a young man, still quite naïve and still given to romanticizing events in his life. Two Chicago gunmen arrive at the small diner where Nick is eating. They bully the waiter, bind and gag Nick and the cook, and wait impatiently for a boxer named Ole Andresen, a frequent patron of the diner, so that they can kill him. When Andresen fails to come to dinner, the gangsters finally leave. Knowing that they will seek out Andresen, Nick runs to the boxer’s boarding house to warn him. Surprisingly, Andresen refuses to run away; he is content to wait for whatever fate brings him. Nick cannot understand how anyone can accept his lot with such resignation. The lesson for him—and for Hemingway’s readers—is that there comes a point when it is impossible to keep moving on, to keep effecting changes by running away. All people must stand and meet the destiny allotted to them, no matter how bitter and unfair that may seem. “Soldier’s Home” • Like Nick Adams and the young American in “In Another Country,” the hero of “Soldier’s Home” has been scarred by his experience in World War I and has discovered upon his return to his hometown that he cannot find a sympathetic audience for his complaints. The people who did not go to war have already formed their opinions of what happened “over there” and have spent their patriotic energies feting the first groups of returning servicemen. Krebs, the protagonist of the tale, had remained in Germany with the occupation forces for a year beyond the declaration of the armistice. He is greeted with suspicion by his fellow townspeople; they cannot understand why he has waited so long to come home. When he tries to tell people what the war was actually like for him, he is rebuffed. He finds that only when he invents tales of heroism do people pay attention to him. Krebs has slipped into a continual state of ennui; no suggestion for action, either from family or friends, strikes him as worthwhile. In this sense, he fails to fulfill the role of typical Hemingway heroes, most of whom go on doggedly with their lives, all the while knowing that their efforts are doomed to failure. The overriding atmosphere of this story is one of pessimism, almost defeatism without hint of defiance—a rather unusual stance for Hemingway. Two of Hemingway’s greatest short stories are set in Africa, a land to which the author traveled on safari in 1933-1934. Often anthologized and frequently the subject of critical discussion, both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” detail relationships between weak men and strong women, displaying Hemingway’s hostility toward women who seem to prey upon men, sapping their creativity and in some cases emasculating them. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” • “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” tells the story of a writer who is no longer able to practice his craft. Harry, the protagonist, has lost his ability to write well, having chosen to live a life of adventure and luxury. When the story opens, Harry is lying on a cot in the African plains, dying of the gangrene that he contracted by failing to take routine care of a scratch. Much of the story is given over to dialogue between Harry and his wife (presumably his second or third wife), a rich woman on whom he depends now for his livelihood; the tension in their marriage is seen by Harry at times as the cause of his inability to produce the kind of work that had once made him the darling of critics and the public. As Harry sees it, “He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in.” In his imagination, he writes fragments of the wonderful tales that he wishes

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to tell; these are presented in italic passages interspersed throughout the story. Though the wife holds out hope that she will be able to get Harry back to a hospital, the writer knows that he is condemned to die of his wound—itself a trivial cut, but in this case fatal because of the circumstances in which Harry finds himself. The physical landscape mirrors Harry’s failed aspirations. He is dying on the plains in sight of Africa’s highest mountain; he can see the summit, but he knows he will never reach it. Similarly, the gangrenous wound and the resultant decay parallels the decay of the writer who fails to use his talents. Both the striving for some imaginary heights and the senseless destruction of the hero are highlighted in the short epigraph that begins the story. In it, Hemingway notes the presence of a leopard carcass, frozen near the summit of Kilimanjaro. “No one has explained,” Hemingway writes, “what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” No one can really explain, either, why men such as Harry strive to be good writers, nor can anyone explain why some succeed while others are blocked from achieving their goals. Hemingway portrays the wife in this story with only a modicum of sympathy. She seems concerned about her husband, but only because she entertains some romantic notion that believing strongly in something will make it so; she is convinced that she can save her husband despite clear evidence that he is beyond hope. Harry calls her names and blames her for his failure, and though he realizes in the moments before he dies that she is not actually the cause of his failure—“when he went to her [to marry her] he was already over”—she never achieves a level of dignity that merits the reader’s sympathy. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” • The story that critics often cite as Hemingway’s finest is also set in Africa. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” details the relationship of Francis and Margot Macomber, wealthy Americans on an extended hunt with their professional guide, Robert Wilson. Told nonchronologically, the story reveals Francis’s initial cowardice in the face of danger, his eventual triumph over his fear, and his untimely death at the moment when he is able to display his courage. It would be hard to characterize Francis Macomber as a Hemingway hero. In fact, he is quite the opposite. He has money, but he possesses none of the qualities that Hemingway considers admirable in a man. Francis is dominated psychologically by his wife, and much of what he does is aimed at proving his manhood to her. Their African safari is but another effort on his part to display his worthiness for her continued affection. Unfortunately, Francis is a coward. The story opens with a scene that displays the strain that he is under, having just displayed his inability to stand up to danger. Through conversation among the three principal characters, the reader is able to infer that Francis had failed to complete a kill on a lion he had wounded. When he had gone into the bush to finish off the animal, the lion had charged, and Francis had run away; Wilson had been forced to kill the animal. Margot had observed his behavior, and she is now openly disdainful of her husband. She even plays up to Wilson right in front of Francis. As a final insult, after the Macombers retire to their tent for the evening, Margot slips out and goes to Wilson’s tent to spend the night with him. The following day, Francis has a chance to redeem himself. He and Wilson go out to hunt again; this time the quarry is buffalo. Margot remains in the vehicle once more, and the incident with the lion is repeated: Macomber wounds a bull, which slumps off deep into the brush, and he must go in after the beast to finish the job that

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he started. This time, when the bull charges, Francis holds his ground and fires at the animal, but the beast keeps on coming at him. Almost immediately, Margot fires from the car, but she hits her husband rather than the buffalo. Francis is killed instantly. Margot Macomber is a classic Hemingway woman—the kind for which Hemingway has been criticized severely in the years since feminist critics have gained influence in American literary studies. She is physically attractive, though she is reaching the age at which her beauty is starting to fade. She is portrayed as being almost desperate to find some kind of security and is willing to use her sexual wiles to obtain it. She is cruel toward Francis when he shows himself a coward: She rejects physical contact with him and openly fawns over Wilson, though she taunts him, too, about his rather callous attitude toward killing. When Wilson mentions that hunting from a car (which he had done with the Macombers earlier) is a violation of the sport hunting laws and doing so could cost him his license, Margot leaps on the opportunity to suggest that she will use this information to blackmail him at some later time. Unlike the Macombers, Wilson, Hemingway’s white hunter, possesses several of the qualities that the author admires. He is good at his job. He understands people like Francis and Margot, and he has little respect for either of them because they are essentially fakes. He makes his living by taking advantage of the desires of people like them to dabble in life’s more dangerous experiences. Having confronted danger almost every day, Wilson has become accustomed to living with his fears. He has even developed a certain callousness toward hunting and especially toward people who go on safaris. The behavior of the Macombers does not shock him. On the contrary, he is prepared for Margot’s gesture of infidelity; he carries a double cot with him so he can accommodate wives like her who find their husbands despicable and the white hunter irresistible. Though Wilson is not admirable, in his self-awareness he achieves a certain esteem that is clearly missing in either of the Macombers. The major critical question that dominates discussion of this story is: Did Margot kill her husband intentionally, or is Francis’s death an accident? This is not idle speculation, for the answer at which one arrives determines the interpretation of the story’s central theme. If Francis’s death is indeed accidental, one can argue that Hemingway is making an ironic statement about the nature of self-fulfillment. At the moment that Francis achieves his greatest personal triumph, his life is ended. The fates simply destroy the possibility of his taking control of his life now that he has displayed himself capable of facing danger. Few details in the story, however, suggest that Francis should be considered a real hero. He may appear heroic at the instant of his death, but nothing he does before he faces the buffalo makes him worthy of emulation, and little that follows his death indicates that he has won new respect or lasting remembrance. Wilson does remind Margot that, had he lived, Francis would have had the courage to leave his wife. One must remember, though, that Wilson is the person who accuses Margot of murdering her husband, and he is searching to attach a motive to Margot’s actions. If one assumes that Margot shoots her husband intentionally, the ending of the story prompts a different interpretation. Francis is a type of the man struggling to break free of the bond that strong women have placed on weak men—and, by extension perhaps, on all men. This harsh antifeminist viewpoint is supported by Hemingway’s portrayal of Margot as a classic femme fatale, valued for her beauty and grasping for security in a world where men ostensibly are dominant but where in reality women use their sexuality to gain and maintain control. Francis’s killing of the buf-

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falo is symbolic of his ability to destroy the barriers that are keeping him from breaking free of his wife; when she realizes what the event means, Margot takes immediate action to prevent her husband from carrying through on his triumph. However, Hemingway never lets the reader see into the mind of Margot Macomber (though he does share the inner thoughts of Francis, Wilson, and even the lion), so it is impossible to settle on a definitive reading of the wife’s motivation and hence of the story itself. As so often happens in real life, readers are left to draw conclusions for themselves from the events which they witness. A key scene in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” may serve as a key to understanding Hemingway’s philosophy of life. After Macomber has wounded the lion, he and Wilson have a lengthy discussion about the necessity of going after the animal to kill it. “Why not leave him there?” Macomber asks. “It isn’t done,” Wilson replies; “But,” the professional hunter continues, “you don’t have to have anything to do with it [the final kill].” Wilson seems to be speaking for Hemingway here. Once something is started, it must be completed. Society depends on that dictum. This is more profound than it may seem at first. As anyone who has read Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa knows, the author sees the safari as a metaphor for life itself. The activities on the safari are self-generated: No one is forced to undertake anything on the hunt, but once one agrees to participate, one has an obligation to carry through according to the rules of the game. Wilson, who sees himself in terms of his profession, must finish the kill even if his dilettante employer refuses to do so. One’s duty, Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, is what one decides to do. Men and women are free to choose their destiny, knowing their struggle will always end in death; doing well that which they choose to do is what makes people heroic. Laurence W. Mazzeno Other major works novels: The Sun Also Rises, 1926; The Torrents of Spring, 1926; A Farewell to Arms, 1929; To Have and Have Not, 1937; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940; Across the River and into the Trees, 1950; The Old Man and the Sea, 1952; Islands in the Stream, 1970; The Garden of Eden, 1986; True at First Light, 1999. drama: Today Is Friday, pb. 1926; The Fifth Column, pb. 1938. nonfiction: Death in the Afternoon, 1932; Green Hills of Africa, 1935; A Moveable Feast, 1964; By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, 1967; Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, 1981; Dateline, Toronto: The Complete “Toronto Star” Dispatches, 1920-1924, 1985; The Dangerous Summer, 1985; Ernest Hemingway on Writing, 1999 (Larry W. Phillips, editor); Hemingway on Fishing, 2000 (Nick Lyons, editor); Hemingway on Hunting, 2001 (Sean Hemingway, editor); Hemingway on War, 2003 (Sean Hemingway, editor); Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner, 2005 (Albert J. DeFazio, III, editor); Hemingway and the Mechanisms of Change: Statements, Public Letters, Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and Endorsements, 2006 (Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor). Bibliography Benson, Jackson J., ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Section 1 covers critical approaches to Hemingway’s most important long fiction; section 2 concentrates on story techniques and themes; section 3 focuses on critical interpretations of the most impor-

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tant stories; section 4 provides an overview of Hemingway criticism; section 5 contains a comprehensive checklist of Hemingway short fiction criticism from 1975 to 1989. Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 2000. Includes articles by a variety of critics who treat topics such as Hemingway’s style, unifying devices, and visual techniques. Burgess, Anthony. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Originally published in 1978 as Ernest Hemingway and His World, an insightful appreciation of Hemingway by one of Great Britain’s leading writers. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Dubus, Andre. “A Hemingway Story.” The Kenyon Review, n.s. 19 (Spring, 1997): 141147. Dubus, a respected short-story writer himself, discusses Hemingway’s “In Another Country.” States that, whereas he once thought the story was about the futility of cures, since becoming disabled he has come to understand that it is about healing. Lamb, Robert Paul. “The Love Song of Harold Krebs: Form, Argument, and Meaning in Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home.’” The Hemingway Review 14 (Spring, 1995): 18-36. Claims that the story concerns both war trauma and a conflict between mother and son. Discusses the structure of the story; argues that by ignoring the story’s form, one misses the manner of Hemingway’s narrative argument and the considerable art that underlies it. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of fifteen short stories by Hemingway: “After the Storm,” “An Alpine Idyll,” “The Battler,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and “A Canary for One” (vol. 1); “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (vol. 2); “Hills Like White Elephants” (vol. 3); “In Another Country,” “Indian Camp,” and “The Killers” (vol. 4); “My Old Man” (vol. 5); “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (vol. 6); and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Soldier’s Home,” and “The Three-Day Blow” (vol. 7). Nolan, Charles J., Jr. “Hemingway’s Complicated Enquiry in Men Without Women.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Spring, 1995): 217-222. Examines the theme of homosexuality in “A Simple Enquiry” from Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Argues that the characters in the story are enigmatic, revealing their complexity only after one has looked carefully at what they do and say. Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. New York: Blackwell, 1986. ____________. Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Blackwell, 1989. ____________. Hemingway: The American Homecoming. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. ____________. Hemingway: The 1930’s. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. ____________. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. These five volumes by Michael Reynolds come as close to being a definitive study of the life and work of Hemingway as anything yet published. Monumental in scope and exhaustive in detail. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Collection of essays ranging from Gertrude Stein’s 1923 review of Hemingway’s stories to recent responses to The Garden of Eden. Includes essays on “Indian Camp,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and In Our Time as self-begetting fiction.

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Amy Hempel Born: Chicago, Illinois; December 14, 1951 Principal short fiction • Reasons to Live, 1985; At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, 1990; Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories, 1997; The Dog of the Marriage, 2005; The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, 2006. Other literary forms • Primarily a short-story writer, Amy Hempel has published comparatively little in othe genres. During the mid-1980’s, she was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She also edited Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs in 1995. Achievements • Amy Hempel’s stories have appeared in leading American journals and have been widely anthologized in publications such as The Best American Short Stories and The Best of the Missouri Review, 1978-1990 (“Today Will Be a Quiet Day” appeared in both), The Pushcart Prize, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (1978), and New American Short Stories: The Writers Select Their Own Favorites (1987). Biography • Amy Hempel was born in Chicago, the eldest of three children (she has two younger brothers). Her family moved to Denver when she was in the third grade, and when she was in high school they moved to San Francisco. Her mother committed suicide when Hempel was eighteen, and at about the same time, Hempel was involved in two serious auto accidents. She spent a number of years in California and studied at both Whittier College and San Francisco State University, and she held a variety of jobs in her twenties. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont for a while but started writing in earnest when she studied with author Gordon Lish in a fiction workshop at Columbia University in 1982. (Lish arranged for her first collection of stories to be published in 1985.) After settling in New York City with her husband, Hempel worked as an editor and contributor to several periodicals and taught and lectured at a number of writing programs and workshops. Analysis • Amy Hempel is one of the original short-story writers upon whom the term “minimalist” was conferred but, as several critics have noted, “miniaturist” may be a more accurate term. Some of her stories are very short (including the one-sentence “Housewife,” which appears in Tumble Home). Even in her longer stories the style is compressed and economical in the extreme, the action limited, and the characters constantly making cryptic, ironic comments to one another. In an interview, Hempel said: A lot of times what’s not reported in your work is more important than what actually appears on the page. Frequently the emotional focus of the story is some underlying event that may not be described or even referred to in the story. Her stories demonstrate this minimalist philosophy again and again. Hempel’s stories often revolve around sadness, loss, and survival: Characters are in hospitals or in recovery or in trouble. However, even in these stories of crisis, Hempel is distinguished by her humor; characters, even children, always have clever things to say to one another, and their conversations are full of metaphors, parables, and symbolic

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lessons. Hempel’s stories often feature dogs, other animals, and best girlfriends, thus often bordering on sentimentality. What saves the stories from falling into that easier literary condition, if anything, is their sardonic wit. “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” • “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” is probably Hempel’s best-known work. Originally published in Tri-Quarterly, it has been reprinted in The Editors’ Choice: New American Stories (1985) as well as in the popular Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and it is quintessentially Hempel. The situation is dire: The narrator is visiting a friend in the hospital whom she has avoided visiting for two months; the friend is dying, and both women are in denial. Their conversation is filled with popular trivia, jokes, and funny stories—but many of these hint at the situation (like the narrator’s fear of flying). After an earthquake, the narrator relates, a teacher got her sixth-grade students to shout, “Bad earth!” at the broken playground. She asks her friend, “Did you know when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied?” In the end, the friend dies, although the narrator cannot express the thought and says euphemistically, “On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried.” In the last image of the story, the narrator describes what happened when the signing chimp had a baby and it died: “her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.” Only the narrator is inarticulate in that language, but the sublimation of her feelings makes the story a powerful emotional experience for readers. As is often the case in reading Amy Hempel, less is surely more. “Today Will Be a Quiet Day” • This short story was also published in Hempel’s first collection, Reasons to Live, and was later included in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XI, and The Best of the Missouri Review: Fiction, 1978-1990, the journal where it first appeared. The story describes a father in San Francisco taking his son and daughter out for the day. The father drives north across the Golden Gate Bridge; the three eat lunch in Petaluma, and then the daughter drives them home by a different route. Little happens, in other words, and the story is filled with their conversation, joke-telling, and jousting—like the title, an inscription the son once imagined on his tombstone. The father has taken them out for the day because He wanted to know how they were, is all. Just—how were they. . . . You think you’re safe, the father thought, but it’s thinking you’re invisible because you closed your eyes. A friend of the boy has recently killed himself, readers learn, and the father wants to make sure his own kids are okay. The imagery of the story underlines the question of the difference between appearance and reality: The restaurant where they have lunch still looks like the gas station it originally was; the daughter discovers that the dog she thought was taken to live on a ranch has been put to sleep. At the end of the story, all three are in sleeping bags in the master bedroom of their house. Has the mother died recently? Are the parents divorced? Something hidden has given a tension to the simple events of the story. As they fall asleep, the father asks if they want the good news or bad news first and then says he lied, that there is no bad news. For a little while longer, perhaps, he is going to be able to protect his two teenagers from the dangers of the world, but this protective posture, as Hempel intimates to readers, is precarious.

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“The Harvest” • “The Harvest” was originally published in The Quarterly and collected in At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Hempel’s second collection of stories, and it is the best example of her metafictional style, a style which has occasionally appeared in her fiction. The story is narrated by a young woman who has been in an auto accident: She and her date were headed for dinner in his car when they were hit, and in the accident the narrator almost lost her leg—or did she? In the second half of the story, she starts to unravel her narrative, and to describe the things she left out of the story, made up, or exaggerated—the marital status of the man, the seriousness of her injuries—and by the end, readers question what, if anything, took place. A psychiatrist tells the girl that victims of trauma often have difficulties distinguishing fiction from reality, and the insight underlines what Hempel is doing in “The Harvest”: telling a story that becomes a narrative about making up a story—or about storytelling itself. “The Most Girl Part of You” • This story was first published in Vanity Fair and was subsequently reprinted in New American Short Stories and in At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and it displays the basic Hempel style. A teenage narrator tells of her relationship with her friend, “Big Guy,” whose mother hung herself eight days earlier. Although the surface conversation is, as usual, full of jokes, clearly there is something deeper going on. Big Guy sews the girl’s name into the skin of his hand, sucks ice to try to crack his teeth, and cuts the insect bites on her body with a razor. When Big Guy starts to make love to her after a dance, the girl claims she is “ready to start to truly be alive,” but readers sense something else—his instability, her insecurity, and her obvious pity for his tragedy. The title of the story comes from a film she was forced to watch at school years earlier, The Most Girl Part of You, and her own mother has apparently encouraged her sexual initiation. To readers, that introduction to adult sexuality seems wrong. Like the iceberg Ernest Hemingway used to describe a story’s hidden content, a large part of this story’s cryptic meaning may lie beneath the tense fictional surface. Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories • This collection contains seven stories and the title novella, an eighty-page letter the narrator is writing to an artist she may or may not have met, describing her life inside a mental hospital. Little happens, and readers learn more about the narrator’s friends in the institution—Karen, Warren, and Chatty—than about the narrator’s own life. There is hardly anything remarkable in their conversations except the wit and sardonic humor of Hempel’s elliptical, firstperson style. The other stories in the collection—several of them just a few pages long—reflect typical Hempel concerns. “Sportsman,” probably the strongest story here, for example, describes the breakup of Jack and Alex. Jack drives east from California to stay with his friends Vicki and her husband, “the doctor,” who live on Long Island. Vicki arranges for Jack to see Trina, a psychic, but then Alex calls from California to say that her mother has suffered a stroke. The story ends with Jack and Trina headed into New York City on a date, but the resolution of the relationships here is far from certain. As usual, appearances can be deceiving. The city looks pretty good, Jack comments; “Give it a minute,” the psychic responds. Like Raymond Carver, Hempel often tells deceptively simple stories about contemporary characters in deeper trouble than they realize. David Peck

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Other major works anthology: Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs, 1995 (with Jim Shepard). Bibliography Aldridge, John W. Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992. In a chapter that considers Carver, Ann Beattie, and Frederick Barthelme, Aldridge accuses Hempel of “chronic minimalist constipation” and claims that behind her stories, several of which he analyzes, “there seems to be nothing but a chilly emotional void generated by either an incapacity to feel or a determination to express no feeling if one is there.” Ballantyne, Sheila. “Rancho Libido, and Other Hot Spots.” Review of Reasons to Live, by Amy Hempel. The New York Times Book Review, April 28, 1985, p. 9. Laudatory review that offers useful insights on minimalism and Hempel’s treatment of California’s culture. Blythe, Will, ed. Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. As one of twenty-six contributors to this collection, Hempel suggests some of the reasons that she creates her short fiction. Hallett, Cynthia J. “Minimalism and the Short Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 487-495. In an essay that uses Hempel, Raymond Carver, and Ernest Hemingway as primary examples, Hallett attempts to lay down a theoretical foundation for minimalist fiction. Hemple, Amy. Interview by Suzan Sherman. BOMB, Spring, 1997, 67-70. In this wideranging interview, Hempel talks about her background as a writer, the origins of many of her stories, and her theories about reading and writing short fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Hempel: “Going” (vol. 3), “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” (vol. 4), and “Today Will Be a Quiet Day” (vol. 7). Towers, Robert. “Don’t Expect Too Much of Men.” Review of At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, by Amy Hempel. The New York Times, March 11, 1990, sec. 7, p. 11. Contains helpful remarks on Hempel as a miniaturist.

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O. Henr y Born: Greensboro, North Carolina; September 11, 1862 Died: New York, New York; June 5, 1910 Principal short fiction • Cabbages and Kings, 1904; The Four Million, 1906; Heart of the West, 1907; The Trimmed Lamp, 1907; The Gentle Grafter, 1908; The Voice of the City, 1908; Options, 1909; Roads of Destiny, 1909; Let Me Feel Your Pulse, 1910; Strictly Business, 1910; The Two Women, 1910; Whirligigs, 1910; Sixes and Sevens, 1911; Rolling Stones, 1912; Waifs and Strays, 1917; Postscripts, 1923; O. Henry Encore, 1936; Tales of O. Henry, 1969; The Voice of the City, and Other Stories: A Selection, 1991; The Best of O. Henry, 1992; Collected Stories: Revised and Expanded, 1993; Selected Stories, 1993; The Best Short Stories of O. Henry, 1994; One Hundred Selected Stories, 1995. Other literary forms • Although almost all of O. Henry’s literary output is in the short-story form, he contributed verse and anecdotes to Rolling Stone, the humorous weekly magazine which he founded and edited in 1894. He also experimented with playwriting, collaborating on a musical comedy based on “He Also Serves,” with two other gentlemen; the play was staged once, in mid-1909. He also prepared a play based on “The World and the Door.” Achievements • A widely read and published writer, O. Henry wrote short stories that influenced not only the development of magazine fiction as a popular form but also the evolution of modern narrative. Indeed, even very diverse European and South American writers adopt the devices O. Henry perfected. This phenomenon is no accident: His short stories have been widely reprinted and translated, especially in Russia and France, and have been adapted for radio, stage, and television performances. O. Henry was, however, especially popular in the United States. Extremely humorous, clever, and entertaining, he also managed to capture all that was recognizably and uniquely American—the variegated language, attitudes, spirit, geographical locations, social environments, and, most important, the inclination to identify with the downtrodden, the underdog. O. Henry’s contribution to American letters was so obvious that a long-lived literary prize—the annual O. Henry Memorial Award for Prize Stories—was established in 1918 by the New York Society of Arts and Sciences. Biography • Receiving little formal education, O. Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, found themes and plots for his short stories in his early jobs as pharmacist, ranch hand, draftsman, and bank teller. After being arrested for embezzlement in 1894, he fled to Honduras, where much of the material for Cabbages and Kings was acquired. He returned to Texas in 1897 to be with his dying wife and was convicted and sent to prison one year later. During his imprisonment he began to achieve national prominence for his stories and subsequently continued his writing career in New York. He signed contracts with the Sunday World and Munsey’s for weekly stories drawn from his own experiences in the city. In 1907, he married his childhood sweetheart; three years later he died, finally succumbing to alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes.

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Analysis • O. Henry’s widely varied background provided not only plots for his tales but also characters drawn from all walks of life. Ham in “The Hiding of Black Chief,” Caesar in “A Municipal Report,” and Lizzie in “The Guilty Party” are only isolated examples of O. Henry’s proficiency in creating a vivid sense of the texture of language for the reader by reproducing native dialect, be it Western, southern, or even “New Yorkese.” This linguistic sensitivity contributes to O. Henry’s versatility as a local colorist, as does his literary self-education. Echoes of Charles Dickens appear in “Elsie in New York,” allusions to Greek and Roman mythology in “Hygeia at the Solito” and “The Reformation of Calliope,” and parodic references to Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Library of Congress Adventure of Shamrock Jolnes.” O. Henry’s popularity stems not only from his depiction of commonplace events and human responses but also from the surprise endings of his “well-made” plots. Talented as an ironist, he both comments upon and sympathizes with the ranch hands, bank clerks, and shop girls whose sorrows and foibles he re-creates. Although much of his humor redounds from his likely use of puns and literary allusions, much might be called the humor of recognition—the rueful grin that occurs when a reader sees his or her own petty flaws mirrored in a character and predicts the almost inevitable downfall. The downfall, however, is often given the comic turn which made O. Henry famous. Kid Brady in “Vanity and Some Sables,” for example, would rather go to jail for the theft of furs than tell his girlfriend that her “Russian sables” cost $21.50 in a bargain basement; Maida, the shop girl in “The Purple Dress” who “starves eight months to bring a purple dress and a holiday together,” gives up her carefully garnered money to save a spendthrift friend from eviction. Molly sacrifices her furs—and her vanity—to prove Kid’s honesty, and Maida is outdone by her tailor in generosity so that she gets both her dress and the marriageable head clerk: These are the twist endings that turn minor personal tragedies into comic triumphs. “The Gift of the Magi” • Possibly one of the most anthologized of O. Henry’s stories is “The Gift of the Magi,” a tale about the redeeming power of love. The protagonists, a couple named James and Della Young, struggle to live on a small salary. By Christmas Eve, Della’s thrift has gained her only $1.87 for her husband’s gift, which she had hoped would be “something fine and rare and sterling.” She decides to sell one of the family “treasures”—her long, beautiful chestnut hair—to buy a platinum chain for her husband’s prized possession, his watch. The first reversal is that he has

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bought her a set of pure tortoiseshell combs with which to adorn her long hair; the second, that he has sold his watch to do so. In this story about the true spirit of gift-giving, both the family treasures and the protagonists take on Old Testamentary significance. Della’s hair, the reader is told, puts the queen of Sheba’s wealth to shame; Jim’s watch rivals all of Solomon’s gold. Both unselfishly sacrifice their most precious possession for the other, thereby ushering in a new dispensation on Christmas Eve. Even more, these “two foolish children” acquire allegorical value in their act of giving insofar as they replicate the giving of the three wise men: “Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest,” O. Henry tells us: “They are the magi.” In O. Henry’s version, then, the “Gift of the Magi” turns out not to be gold, frankincense, or myrrh, not even hair-combs or a watch chain, but rather, selfless love. “Past One at Rooney’s” • This love is what O. Henry posits as a cure for such social ills as the almost inevitable gang fights and prostitution he portrays in his New York stories. In “Past One at Rooney’s,” a tale introduced as a modern retelling of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595-1596), a gangster, hiding from the police, falls in love with a prostitute. They lie about their occupations for the sake of the other: Eddie MacManus pretends to be the son of a Wall Street broker, while Fanny claims to be a factory girl. When a policeman recognizes MacManus, however, she gives up her new identity to prevent the arrest. Pulling her night’s money out of her garter, she throws it at the policeman and announces that MacManus is her procurer. Once they are allowed to leave, MacManus confesses that he really is wanted by the police but intends to reform; and seeing that she still loves him, saves her (as she had “saved” him by sacrificing her hoped-for respectability) through marriage. Such stories of the “golden-hearted prostitute” are plentiful in the O. Henry canon and in themselves provide another clue to O. Henry’s popularity—his emphasis on the remnant of human compassion in the most cynical of characters. Roads of Destiny • O. Henry is interested as well in what might be called the moment of choice: the decision to act, speak, or dress in a way which seems to determine the whole course of a life. The title story of the volume Roads of Destiny, a story allegorical in nature, suggests that the choice is not so much among different fates as among different versions of the same fate. Environment, in short, determines character, unless some modicum of self-sacrificing love as in “The Gift of the Magi” intervenes. More concretely, O. Henry saw poverty and exploitation as the twin evils of urban life. Often cited for his sympathetic portrayal of the underpaid store clerk who struggles to survive, he is, as well, a biting critic of those who perpetuate an inhumane system to satisfy personal greed or lust. “An Unfinished Story,” for example, castigates an aging lady-killer who is “a connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a shop-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea.” Piggy, with whom O. Henry himself ruefully identified, preyed on shop girls by offering them invitations to dinner. The working girl might thus keep her conscience and starve, or sell herself and eat: This was her condition as well as her choice. “The Trimmed Lamp” • Where a choice need not be made through hunger alone is the middle moral ground on which many of O. Henry’s stories take place. “The Trimmed Lamp,” the titular story of another volume, suggests two opposing ways to

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deal with an exploitative economic system. Nancy, a country girl content to work for small wages in a department store, mimics not only the quietly elegant dress but also the manners of her wealthy customers, while her friend Lou, a highly paid laundry presser, spends most of her money on expensive, conspicuous clothing. Nancy exploits the system by educating herself in the best it has to offer; Lou works for the system and profits monetarily. In the long run Nancy’s education teaches her the difference between purchased quality, such as the clothes Lou wears, and intrinsic quality, which cannot be bought. She refuses an offer of marriage from a millionaire because he is a liar: As O. Henry writes, “the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind’s eye, and shaped itself into . . . such words as ‘truth’ and ‘honor’ and now and then just ‘kindness.’” Lou, in contrast, becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, leaving her quiet, serious fiancé to Nancy. The final vignette, a plainly clothed but vibrantly happy Nancy trying to comfort her sobbing, fashionably dressed friend, illustrates the divergence between their two philosophies. Although neither can escape completely from the economic system, Nancy refuses to measure human worth in monetary terms; instead, she adopts the same set of values posited in “The Gift of the Magi.” “The Ransom of Red Chief” • Many of the stories O. Henry writes are quite outside the moral framework that is suggested in “The Trimmed Lamp.” Like others written about the “gentle grafters” who populated the nether side of his world, the story of “The Ransom of Red Chief” is of the “biter bit” variety. O. Henry’s humorous focus on the problems that two kidnappers have with their charge—a redhaired version of Tom Sawyer with the same unflagging energy for mischief—deflects the moral question about the criminal action. Johnny enjoys his adventure; he styles himself Red Chief and tries to scalp one of his captors at daybreak, then rides him to the stockade to “rescue” settlers, feeds him oats, and worries him with questions about why holes are empty. His father’s reply to a demand for ransom shows that he understands who is in captivity; he offers to take his son back for a sum of $250. The Gentle Grafter • Similarly, the exploits recounted in The Gentle Grafter are modern tall tales, the heroes at times acquiring a mythological aura, at times appearing to be no different from the average man on the street. Grafting, in short, is an occupation which carries the same code of responsibilities as any legitimate business, as is made clear in “Shearing the Wolf.” When two con men, Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, discover that the leading hardware merchant in town intends to frustrate someone else’s scheme to sell forged money, they agree that they cannot “stand still and see a man who has built up a business by his own efforts and brains and risk be robbed by an unscrupulous trickster.” The twist is that the “trickster” is the merchant and the “businessman” is the forger. In a number of respects, then, O. Henry contributed immeasurably to the development of the American short story. To be sure, many of his works are considered ephemeral today, primarily because they first appeared as magazine fiction; but a careful perusal reveals that behind the humor lies the mirror of the social reformer. In the characters and situations one notices common human problems of the beginning of the twentieth century; in the humor one notices the attempt to deal with apparently insurmountable social problems. With his clever plot reversals, O. Henry does more than create a new story form; he keeps the reader alive to the connota-

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tions of language and aware that in a world dominated by an unfair economic system, human kindness may be the answer. Patricia Marks With updates by Terri Frongia Other major works play: Lo, pr. 1909 (with Franklin P. Adams). miscellaneous: Rolling Stones, 1912; O. Henryana, 1920. nonfiction: Letters to Lithopolis, 1922; The Second Edition of Letters to Lithopolis from O. Henry to Mabel Wagnalls, 1999 (with Mabel Wagnalls). Bibliography Arnett, Ethel Stephens. O. Henry from Polecat Creek. Greensboro, N.C.: Piedmont Press, 1963. Described by Porter’s cousin as a delightful and authentic story of O. Henry’s boyhood and youth, this entertaining biography of the early years goes far in illuminating the character-shaping environment and experiences of both Porter and his fiction. Supplemented by illustrations, notes, a bibliography, and an index. Current-Garcia, Eugene. O. Henry: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Introduction to O. Henry’s stories, largely drawn from Current-Garcia’s earlier Twayne volume. Focuses on O. Henry’s frequent themes, his romanticism, and his narrative techniques, such as his use of the tall-tale convention. Includes critical excerpts from discussions of O. Henry by other critics. Eichenbaum, Boris. O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story. Translated by I. R. Titunik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Originally published in Russia in 1925, this study reflects both the Russian interest in O. Henry as a serious writer and the brand of criticism known as Russian Formalism. Because Formalism was more concerned with technical achievement than thematic profundity, O. Henry, who was a technical master, is a perfect candidate for the exercise of this kind of analysis. Evans, Walter. “‘A Municipal Report’: O. Henry and Postmodernism.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 26 (1981): 101-116. Recognizing modern criticism’s either trite interpretation or complete indifference to O. Henry’s work, through the fiction of postmodernists like Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Robert Coover, and William Gass, Evans embarks on a radical revisioning of Porter’s literary contributions. Gallegly, Joseph. From Alamo Plaza to Jack Harris’s Saloon: O. Henry and the Southwest He Knew. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. By investigating contemporary photographs, literature, popular pursuits, news items, and personalities—both real and fictional—from the contemporary scene of the author, Gallegly provides significant insight into the southwestern stories. Langford, Gerald. Alias O. Henry: A Biography of William Sidney Porter. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Well-documented biography that considers in detail Porter’s marriages and the evidence used in his embezzlement trial. The foreword provides a brief but penetrating overview of O. Henry’s critical reputation (including overseas) and his place within the context of American literature. Supplemented by illustrations, an appendix about Rolling Stones, notes, and an index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena,

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Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by O. Henry: “The Furnished Room” and “The Gift of the Magi” (vol. 3), “Mammon and the Archer” and “A Municipal Report” (vol. 5), and “The Ransom of Red Chief” (vol. 6). Monteiro, George. “Hemingway, O. Henry, and the Surprise Ending.” Prairie Schooner 47, no. 4 (1973-1974): 296-302. In rehabilitating O. Henry and his most famous technique, Monteiro makes comparisons with Hemingway’s own—but very different—use of the same device. This significant difference Monteiro ascribes to Hemingway’s essentially uneasy reception of Porter’s work and to the two authors’ divergent outlooks on life. Stuart, David. O. Henry: A Biography of William Sydney Porter. Chelsea, Mich.: Scarborough House, 1990. Good, updated volume on O. Henry. Includes bibliographical references. Watson, Bruce. “If His Life Were a Short Story, Who’d Ever Believe It?” Smithsonian 27 (January, 1997): 92-102. Biography strewn with anecdotes and some literary criticism. Includes photographs.

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Langston Hughes Born: Joplin, Missouri; February 1, 1902 Died: New York, New York; May 22, 1967 Principal short fiction • The Ways of White Folks, 1934; Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950; Laughing to Keep from Crying, 1952; Simple Takes a Wife, 1953; Simple Stakes a Claim, 1957; The Best of Simple, 1961; Something in Common, and Other Stories, 1963; Simple’s Uncle Sam, 1965; The Return of Simple, 1994; Short Stories, 1996. Other literary forms • Although perhaps best known for his poetry, Langston Hughes explored almost every literary genre. His prose fiction includes novels, humorous books, historical, biographical, autobiographical, and cultural works, translations, lyrics, librettos, plays, and scripts. His total output includes more than seventy volumes, as well as numerous articles, poems, and stories, most which which were published in book form for the first time in the sixteen-volume Collected Works of Langston Hughes (2001-2004). Achievements • Langston Hughes has been acknowledged both before and after his death as the most influential African American writer in the English-speaking world. As a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, he not only wrote in a variety of genres but also edited and encouraged the literary, dramatic, and musical productions of other people of color. Recognition came during his lifetime as early as 1925, when he won the Poetry Prize given by Opportunity magazine and the Spingarn prizes of Crisis magazine for both poetry and essay writing. His novel Not Without Laughter (1930) won the Harmon Gold Medal in 1931. That year he received his first Rosenwald Fellowship, an award repeated in 1941. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1935, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 1946, and the Ainsfield-Wolf Award in 1953 continued to keep him in the forefront of the literary community, particularly in New York, throughout his life. His alma mater, Lincoln University, awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1943, and he received others from Howard University and Case Western Reserve University in 1963 and 1964, respectively. Biography • James Mercer Langston Hughes came from an educated family whose energies were spent primarily in entrepreneurial efforts to combat poverty and institutionalized racism in order to survive. His life repeats a well-known pattern of early twentieth century African American families: a resourceful mother who rented out their home to boarders, a father who had to leave home to find work, a grandmother who cared for him during his early years, and a stepfather. He grew up in the Midwest—Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio—and participated in athletics as well as in literary activities in high school. Graduating from Central High School in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1920, Hughes attended Columbia University before shipping out on liners bound for Africa and Holland. He also traveled extensively in Europe before returning to the United States in 1925. Then, in 1929, he received a bachelor’s degree from Lincoln University, Penn-

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sylvania. Hughes at first subsisted with the help of patrons, but gradually began to earn a living on the proceeds from his writings and his poetry readings. Although mainly basing himself in Harlem, New York City, Hughes continued to travel extensively. He won numerous prizes, grants, and fellowships for his literary achievements before his death in 1967. Analysis • Langston Hughes records in The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940) his feelings upon first seeing Africa: “when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! The real thing!” The trip to Africa confirmed what he already knew—that the subject matter of his writings would reflect his desire “to write seriously and as well as I knew how about the Negro people.” Most of Hughes’s short stories concern themselves with black people presented from many different perspectives and in both tragic and comic dimensions. Even when a white is the protagonist of a story, as in “Little Dog,” the gentle black man to whom Miss Briggs is attracted is given special focus. Hughes, however, is not racist in his presentation. People, regardless of their racial background, are people first participating in a common humanity before they are individuals distorted by prejudice based on ignorance, by fear, or by social conditions which create a spiritual and psychological malaise, sometimes crippling in its effect. “Little Dog” • “Little Dog” tells the story of a white and gaunt middle-aged woman, head bookkeeper of a coal and coke firm for twenty-one years, who, because of her own sense of prudence, responsibility, and concern, sublimates her own desires to care for her mother, and then, after her mother’s death, is left alone and lonely. Although she keeps busy, is comfortably situated, and does not think too much of what she may be missing, she occasionally wonders why she knows no one whom she can appreciate as a friend. One day she inexplicably stops the taxicab in which she is riding in front of a pet shop featuring in its window “fuzzy little white dogs,” and she purchases for herself a puppy at a very steep price. She arranges with the janitor of her apartment building, “a tow-headed young Swede,” to provide food for her dog, which she names Flips, and soon her life revolves around activities centering on Flips. One day the janitor does not show up to feed the dog; several days pass until Miss Briggs decides she needs to go down to the basement to search out the janitor. With her dog by her side, she knocks at a door behind which she hears sounds of “happy laughter, and kids squalling, and people moving.” The door is opened by a small black boy and soon Miss Briggs discovers that the “tall broad-shouldered Negro” standing amid the children is the new janitor. The image patterns and juxtapositions in the story now begin to form meaningful patterns. The white woman, living “upstairs” with the “fuzzy white dog,” is contrasted with the black man and his “pretty little brown-black” children who live “downstairs.” The gentle and kind black man begins to service Miss Briggs’s needs, bringing more food than is good for the dog because he believes the woman desires it and because he is being paid for it; Miss Briggs, however, never tells him that meat every few days is sufficient. Soon Miss Briggs finds herself hurrying home, never realizing that it is no longer the dog but rather the nightly visits of the janitor that compel her to hurry. One evening her words inadvertently reveal her subconscious needs. The black janitor has just left after delivering Flips’s food and she can hear him humming as he returns to his family. Suddenly Miss Briggs says to Flips: “Oh, Flips . . . I’m so hungry.”

Hughes, Langston Now, although she never consciously knows why, Miss Briggs decides she needs to move; “she could not bear to have this janitor come upstairs with a package of bones for Flips again. . . . Let him stay in the basement, where he belonged.” The accumulation of references to bones, meat, and services provides for the reader, if not for Miss Briggs, a moment of epiphany: “He almost keeps me broke buying bones,” Miss Briggs says to the tall and broadshouldered black janitor. “True,” the janitor answers her. The sustenance the black man provides for the dog is no sustenance for the gaunt and bony woman, nor is the dog, like children, sufficient to keep memory of the departed alive. Miss Briggs moves and shortly is completely forgotten by the people in the neighborhood in which she had lived.

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“Thank You M’am” • If Miss Briggs seems a portrait of a woman dead before she is buried, Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones of “Thank You M’am” is a picture of middle-aged woman still vital and vigorous, although she, too, lives alone; and although it appears she has no children of her own, she is still potent, giving new life to a young black boy who attempts to mug her. The child is no match for the woman, who is identified with her purse so large “that it had everything in it but a hammer and nails.” She drags him home with her, sees that he washes, and shares with him her frugal meal. Her presence is so overpowering that the boy is more fearful of trying to get away than of staying, but she breaks down his resistance when she speaks to him of common problems. “I was young once and I wanted things I could not get.” The boy waits expecting the “but” to follow. The woman anticipates: “You thought I was going to say, but I didn’t snatch people’s pocketbooks. Well, I wasn’t going to say that. . . . I have done things, too, which I would not tell you, son. . . . Everybody’s got something in common.” The woman’s actions, however, tell the boy more than her words do, and at the end of the story the boy is unable to use words, although his lips try to phrase more than “Thank you M’am.” “Professor” • One of Hughes’s most frequently praised stories is “Professor.” Focused through the point of view of its protagonist, Dr. T. Walton Brown (T for Tom, Uncle Tom?), the story examines how a black professor of sociology “bows” and “bobs” like a puppet on a string to members of the wealthy white establishment, doing only those things of which they approve, saying what they want to hear, although at times he knows the lies diminish him.

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Bitterly ironic in tone, the story begins with the juxtaposition of Brown in dinner dress against the lobby of a run-down segregated hotel and Brown cared for by a white chauffeur who tucks the professor carefully into the luxury of a limousine to carry him through the black ghetto to a private house as large as a hotel. Brown’s posture and attire are carefully contrasted with the “two or three ash-colored children” who run across the street in front of the limousine, “their skinny legs and poor clothes plain in the glare of the headlights.” So also are the streets and buildings contrasted—“the Negro streets”: “pig’s knuckle joints, pawnshops, beer parlors—and houses of vice, no doubt—save that these latter, at least, did not hang out their signs” with the “wide lawns and fine homes that lined the beautiful well-lighted boulevard where white people lived.” Brown has bought entry into the white establishment by prostituting himself, by accepting the degradation of the constant diminishing of his selfhood and his negritude. He listens to his white counterpart say: “Why, at our city college here we’ve been conducting some fine interracial experiments. I have had some colored ministers and high school teachers visit my classes. We found them most intelligent.” Although at times Brown is moved to make slight and subtle protest, in the end he agrees with the biased white people, saying “You are right.” Brown’s behavior is dictated by his desire for the money the white people offer him as long as he conforms to their expectation. Money will buy Brown prestige, will enable his college to survive, and will further his career. Money will also “take his family to South America in the summer where for three months they wouldn’t feel like Negroes.” Thus, he dances to the “tune of Jim Crow education,” diminishing both himself and his race. Although carefully constructed, the story offers no subtleties beyond the ironies present; image patterns are at a minimum, complex symbolism nonexistent. Characterization, too, is sparse. The reader learns only enough about the professor to make his behavior immediately credible, but a traditional plot line moves with careful pacing to climax and pointed resolution, and the theme overshadows technique. “Fine Accommodations” • Similar in theme and technique to “Professor” is “Fine Accommodations.” In this story, a young black porter learns that the Dr. Jenkins, booked into sleeping car accommodations, is not the leader of his race and “fine man” the naïve porter expects but rather another Uncle Tom who keeps on “being a big man” by “bowing to Southern white customs,” by helping to keep poor black people just where they have always been “all the time—poor and black.” At the end of the story, the porter makes the point of the story: “The last Negro passenger I had in that drawing room was a pimp from Birmingham. Now I got a professor. I guess both of them have to have ways of paying for such fine accommodations.” “Big Meeting” • From the perspective of complexity, subtlety, and power, “Big Meeting” is a considerably better story. Told in the first person by a young black boy who with a companion is observing a church revival meeting held in the woods, the story recounts the boy’s moment of epiphany when he realizes, if only subconsciously, that as a cynical observer rather than a participant in the ritual he is more akin to the white folks gathered to watch than to his own people. Making use of dialect and gospel songs, Hughes builds the story to a powerful sermon where the preacher recounts the betrayal of Christ to the accompaniment of echoing refrains and then moves the sermon to the cadences of poetry:

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They brought four long nails And put one in the palm of His left hand. The hammer said . . . Bam! They put one in the palm of His right hand. The hammer said . . . Bam! They put one through His left foot . . . Bam! And one through His right foot . . . Bam! . . . “Don’t drive it!” a woman screamed. “Don’t drive them nails! For Christ’s sake! Oh! Don’t drive ’em!” In the woods observing the action, the narrator and his companion are near enough to a car full of white people to overhear what they are saying as they comment in ways showing their biases, limitations, and prejudices. As the narrator hears these comments, he begins to respond, but not enough to cause him to identify with the participants in the service. Rather, both he and his companion seem more concerned with the behavior of their mothers who are taking part in the church rituals. At the climax of the story, the narrator hears his mother’s voice: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?/ Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?” At the same time as the mother cries out the questions, the preacher opens his arms wide against the white canvas tent, and his body reflects a crosslike shadow. As the mother asks the question again, the white people in the car suddenly drive away creating a swirl of dust, and the narrator cries after them, “Don’t go. . . . They’re about to call for sinners. . . . Don’t go!” The boy’s cry to the white people reflects his understanding of the parallel setup between the white people and the betrayers of Christ. Hughes goes further than this, however, and provides in the last sentence of the story an epiphanic moment: “I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted my tears in my mouth.” The epiphany projects a revelation dimly understood by the narrator but clearly present—that as bad as the white people’s behavior seemed, his own rejection of his people and heritage was worse. Mary Rohrberger With updates by Emma Coburn Norris Other major works children’s literature: Popo and Fijina: Children of Haiti, 1932 (story; with Arna Bontemps); The First Book of Negroes, 1952; The First Book of Rhythms, 1954; The First Book of Jazz, 1955; The First Book of the West Indies, 1955; The First Book of Africa, 1960. plays: Little Ham, pr. 1935; Mulatto, pb. 1935; Troubled Island, pr. 1935 (opera libretto); Don’t You Want to Be Free?, pb. 1938; Freedom’s Plow, pb. 1943; Street Scene, pr., pb. 1947 (lyrics; music by Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice); Simply Heavenly, pr. 1957 (opera libretto); Black Nativity, pr. 1961; Five Plays, pb. 1963 (Walter Smalley, editor); Tambourines to Glory, pr., pb. 1963; Jerico-Jim Crow, pr. 1964; The Prodigal Son, pr. 1965. anthologies: The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, 1949 (with Arna Bontemps); The Book of Negro Folklore, 1959 (with Bontemps); New Negro Poets: U.S.A., 1964; The Book of Negro Humor, 1966; The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present, 1967. novels: Not Without Laughter, 1930; Tambourines to Glory, 1958.

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miscellaneous: The Langston Hughes Reader, 1958; The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 2001-2004 (16 volumes). nonfiction: The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940; Famous American Negroes, 1954; Famous Negro Music Makers, 1955; The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955 (photographs by Roy De Carava); A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, 1956 (with Milton Meltzer); I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956; Famous Negro Heroes of America, 1958; Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, 1962; Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, 1967 (with Meltzer); Black Misery, 1969 (illustrations by Arouni); Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters, 1980; Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, 2001 (Emily Bernard, editor). poetry: The Weary Blues, 1926; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927; Dear Lovely Death, 1931; The Negro Mother, 1931; Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, 1932; The Dream Keeper, and Other Poems, 1932; A New Song, 1938; Shakespeare in Harlem, 1942; Jim Crow’s Last Stand, 1943; Lament for Dark Peoples, 1944; Fields of Wonder, 1947; One Way Ticket, 1949; Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951; Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1959; Ask Your Mama: Or, Twelve Moods for Jazz, 1961; The Panther and the Lash: Or, Poems of Our Times, 1967; The Poems, 1921-1940, 2001 (volume 1 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Dolan Hubbard, editor); The Poems, 1941-1950, 2001 (volume 2 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Hubbard, editor); The Poems, 1951-1967, 2001 (volume 3 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Hubbard, editor). screenplay: Way Down South, 1939 (with Clarence Muse). translations: Masters of the Dew, 1947 (of Jacques Roumain; with Mercer Cook); Cuba Libre, 1948 (of Nicolás Guillén; with Ben Carruthers); Gypsy Ballads, 1951 (of Federico García Lorca); Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, 1957. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Useful collection of some of the best literary criticism of Hughes’s works, with several articles on his poetry, but these reprinted essays do not have notes and Bloom’s introduction is perfunctory. Supplemented by a useful bibliography and an index. Borden, Anne. “Heroic ‘Hussies’ and ‘Brilliant Queers’ Genderracial Resistance in the Works of Langston Hughes.” African American Review 28 (Fall, 1994): 333-345. Discusses Hughes’s focus on the interrelationship between gender and racial issues, as well as his treatment of gender issues within the black community—particularly the ways in which gender affects the struggle to maintain community in racist society. Dickinson, Donald C. A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. 2d ed. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972. With its preface by Arna Bontemps, a major scholar and critic of the Harlem Renaissance and a contemporary of Hughes, the reader has both older and updated assessments of Hughes’s achievement. Part 1 is the biography, which incorporates information throughout Hughes’s life; part 2 includes all of his work through 1965, except short newspaper articles, song lyrics, and phonographic records. Even a glance at the bibliography gives an indication of the range of Hughes’s imaginative achievement. Harper, Donna Sullivan. Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Good analysis of Hughes’s tales that includes useful bibliographical references and an index. Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston

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Hughes.” Mosaic 31 (December, 1998): 61-82. Examines how Hughes uses be-bop jazz to challenge both the boundaries between music and poetry and the distinctions between popular and high culture; argues that Hughes’s work constitutes a distinctively “popular” modernism that uses jazz to ground its poetic experimentation in the vernacular tradition of African American culture. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Hughes: “Gospel Singers” (vol. 3); “On the Road” (vol. 5); and “Thank You, M’am” (vol. 7). Leach, Laurie F. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Overview of Hughes’s life and development as a playwright, poet, and journalist. Ostrom, Hans. Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Includes critical analyses of Hughes’s short fiction; excerpts from his essays and speeches on his life, racial issues, and writings; and remarks from critics on his works. Contains a life chronology and selected bibliography. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986-1988. This major critical biography illustrates not only the triumphs but also the struggles of the man and the writer. The importance of Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance and his symbolic significance in the developing artistic and imaginative consciousness of African American writers come alive in concrete examples. Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Schwarz examines the work of four leading writers from the Harlem Renaissance—Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent—and their sexually nonconformist or gay literary voices. Trotman, C. James, ed. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland, 1995. Fine collection of essays dealing with such topics as the Harlem Renaissance, “Race, Culture, and Gender,” and Hughes’s continuing influence on poetry, fiction, and drama.

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Zora Neale Hurston Born: Eatonville, Florida; January 7, 1891 Died: Fort Pierce, Florida; January 28, 1960 Principal short fiction • Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston, 1985; The Complete Stories, 1995. Other literary forms • Though best known for her novels, especially Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston wrote in most major genres during her forty-year career. In addition to two posthumously published collections of her short stories, she wrote a few early poems, several short plays, folklore collections, essays, reportage, and an autobiography. Three of her plays were published during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and a fourth, Polk County, that she published in 1944, was produced in 2002. Her four novels include Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). Posthumously published collections of her nonfiction writings include Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings (1999), Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Foktales from the Gulf States (2001), and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002). Achievements • Zora Neale Hurston is best known as a major contributor to the Harlem Renaissance literature of the 1920’s. Not only was she a major contributor, but also she did much to characterize the style and temperament of the period; indeed, she is often referred to as the most colorful figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Though the short stories and short plays that she generated during the 1920’s are fine works in their own right, they are nevertheless apprentice works when compared to her most productive period, the 1930’s. During the 1930’s, Hurston produced three novels, all telling examples of her creative genius, as well as two collections of folklore, the fruits of her training in anthropology and her many years of fieldwork. It is Hurston’s interest in preserving the culture of the black South that remains among her most valuable contributions. Not only did she collect and preserve folklore outright, but also she used folklore, native drama, and the black idiom and dialect in most of her fiction. Although Hurston’s popularity declined during the 1940’s and 1950’s, and although she died in relative obscurity in 1960, scholars and critics sparked a Hurston revival during the mid-1970’s. Hurston’s popularity has never been greater, as her works are considered mainstays in any number of canons, among them African American literature, folklore, southern literature, feminist studies, and anthropology. Biography • Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, near Orlando. She was the youngest daughter and the seventh of eight children born to John and Lucy Hurston. Her father was a minister and local government official who wrote many of Eatonville’s laws upon its incorporation and served several terms as mayor. Her mother was a homemaker who cared not only for her children but also for an extended family that included, at various times, her own mother and her brother Jim. By all accounts, Hurston’s childhood was happy, almost idyllic, free

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from the poverty and racism that characterized much of the black experience in the South. Indeed, this wholesome upbringing informed much of Hurston’s later work and earned for her the designation as an early black cultural nationalist. Whatever idyllic aspects Hurston’s childhood possessed were shattered when Hurston was about nine. The death of Hurston’s beloved mother, who encouraged the young Zora to “jump at the sun,” precipitated a change. This was followed by her father’s remarriage to a woman who had no interest in the children and the subsequent dismantling of the relative happiness of the Hurston household. The next several years of Hurston’s life found her much displaced, living variously with older siblings and receiving only sporadic schooling. Although exact dates are difficult to place in Hurston’s early chronology because she frequently lied about her age, various sources reveal that Hurston joined a Gilbert and Sullivan traveling show when she was about fourteen as a wardrobe maid to one of the show’s stars. Hurston worked for this show for several years, traveling throughout the South, sometimes without pay. It was with this show, however, that Hurston’s talents as raconteur were first noticed, as she often entertained the company with stories, anecdotes, and tales from the black South, told with their own humor, mimicry, and dialect. Hurston left her job with the Gilbert and Sullivan show in Baltimore, and, out of an intense desire to complete her education, she enrolled in the high school department of the Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University) in that city, completing the high school program in 1919. From Morgan, Hurston entered Howard University, at that time known as “the Negro Harvard,” in Washington, D.C. At Howard, Hurston soon came to the attention of Alain Locke, adviser to the Howard Literary Society and later a principal critic of the New Negro movement. Locke invited Hurston to join the literary society, and she soon began publishing in Stylus, the Howard University literary magazine. Her first published short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” appeared in Stylus in 1921. Hurston’s talent soon came to the attention of Charles S. Johnson, founder and editor of the National Urban League’s magazine Opportunity, which held annual contests for young writers. Johnson encouraged Hurston to submit her works to Opportunity, which she did; “Drenched in Light” appeared in December, 1924, and “Spunk” in June, 1925. Both “Spunk” and a short play, “Color Struck,” were second-place prizewinners in their respective divisions in Opportunity’s 1925 contest, and another short story, “Black Death,” won honorable mention. Hurston traveled to New York to attend the 1925 contest awards banquet and found herself in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, the great outpouring of artistic expression revolving around Harlem. She became an active member of the Harlem literati and soon became the Harlem Renaissance’s most colorful figure. In the fall of 1925, Hurston entered Barnard, the women’s college of Columbia University, on a scholarship arranged by Annie Nathan Meyer. There, she studied anthropology under Franz Boas and received her degree in 1928. Beginning in 1927, Hurston traveled throughout the South, collecting folklore, first under the sponsorship of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and later through various fellowships, including a Guggenheim, and the private sponsorship of Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white patron of Harlem Renaissance writers including Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. In 1930, Hurston and Hughes collaborated on a black folk play, Mule Bone, an undertaking that severed the personal and professional relationship between Hurston

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and Hughes; the break was never mended and kept the play from being published in its entirety until 1991, long after the deaths of both authors. The dispute, precipitated by the question of principal authorship, while certainly unfortunate, nevertheless illustrates the fiercely independent temperament that Hurston maintained throughout her lifetime. Though the 1930’s got off to a rough start with the controversy with Hughes, the decade proved to be Hurston’s most productive. She published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, in 1934, followed in rapid succession by the folklore collection Mules and Men in 1935; another novel, the now classic Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937; another folklore collection, Tell My Horse, in 1938; Library of Congress and another novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. In addition, Hurston wrote several short stories and several essays, notably those on black culture, published in Nancy Cunard’s massive collection, Negro, in 1934. In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Although the book won the Saturday Review’s Ainsfield-Wolf Award for race relations, it proved to be the last significant work of Hurston’s career, although she did publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948. There are several reasons for the decline in Hurston’s popularity, the most important among them being that her folk-based literature did not fit into protest literature, the dominant literary trend of the 1940’s, coupled with Hurston’s growing conservatism. Further, in September, 1948, shortly before the publication of Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston was falsely charged with seducing a minor, but before the charges could be dismissed as unfounded, the black press, in particular the Baltimore Afro-American, had spread the story to its readers and had severely, almost irreparably, damaged Hurston’s reputation. Disillusioned and outraged at her treatment by the court and the black press, Hurston moved back to the South, where she lived for the remainder of her life. The 1950’s was a tragic decade for Hurston. Her career was stagnant, and although she kept writing, she received rejection after rejection. She did, however, do some reporting for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black paper with a national circulation; published several essays; and accepted several speaking engagements. She supported herself with occasional work, including substitute teaching and writing freelance articles for various papers. Toward the end of the 1950’s, Hurston’s health became increasingly fragile. She suffered from overweight, hypertension, poor diet, gallbladder trouble, ulcers, and

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various stomach ailments. In 1959, she suffered a stroke, and in October of that year was placed in the Saint Lucie County welfare home, where, alone and penniless, she died on January 28, 1960. She was buried by subscription a week later in Fort Pierce’s segregated cemetery, the Garden of the Heavenly Rest. Analysis • The bulk of Zora Neale Hurston’s short fiction is set in her native Florida, as are most of her novels. Even when the setting is not Florida, however, the stories are informed by the life, habits, beliefs, and idioms of the people whom Hurston knew so well, the inhabitants of Eatonville primarily. One criticism often leveled at Hurston was that she frequently masqueraded folklore as fiction, or, in other cases, imposed folklore on the fictive narrative. Whatever the merits of such criticism may be, Hurston’s short stories abound with an energy and zest for life that Hurston considered instructive for her readers. “John Redding Goes to Sea” • Hurston’s first published short story is entitled “John Redding Goes to Sea.” It was published in the May, 1921, issue of the Stylus, the literary magazine of Howard University, and was reprinted in the January, 1926, issue of Opportunity. Although the story is obviously the work of a novice writer, with its highly contrived plot, excessive sentimentality, and shallow characterizations, its strengths are many, strengths upon which Hurston would continue to draw and develop throughout her career. The plot is a simple one: Young John Redding, the titular character, wants to leave his hometown to see and explore parts and things unknown. Several circumstances conspire, however, to keep him from realizing his dream. First, John’s mother, the pitifully possessive, obsessive, and superstitious Matty Redding, is determined not to let John pursue his ambitions; in fact, she pleads illness and threatens to disown him if he leaves. Second, John’s marriage to Stella Kanty seems to tie him permanently to his surroundings, as his new wife joins forces with his mother to discourage John’s desire to travel. Further, his mother’s tantrums keep John from even joining the Navy when that opportunity comes his way. Later, when John is killed in a tempest while working with a crew to build a bridge on the St. John’s River, his father forbids his body to be retrieved from the river as it floats toward the ocean. At last, John will get his wish to travel and see the world, although in death. If the plot seems overdone and the sentimentality overwhelming, “John Redding Goes to Sea” does provide the reader with the first of many glimpses of life among black Floridians—their habits, superstitions, strengths, and shortcomings. For example, one of the more telling aspects of the story is that Matty believes that her son was cursed with “travel dust” at his birth; thus, John’s desire to travel is Matty’s punishment for having married his father away from a rival suitor. Hurston suspends judgment on Matty’s beliefs; rather, she shows that these and other beliefs are integral parts of the life of the folk. Another strength that is easily discernible in Hurston’s first short story is her detailed rendering of setting. Hurston has a keen eye for detail, and nowhere is this more evident than in her descriptions of the lushness of Florida. This adeptness is especially present in “John Redding Goes to Sea” and in most of Hurston’s other work as well. By far the most important aspect of “John Redding Goes to Sea” is its theme that people must be free to develop and pursue their own dreams, which is a recurring theme in the Hurston canon. John Redding is deprived of self-expression and

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self-determination because the wishes and interpretations of others are imposed upon him. Hurston clearly has no sympathy with those who would deprive another of freedom and independence; indeed, she would adamantly oppose all such restrictive efforts throughout her career as a writer and folklorist. “Spunk” • Another early short story that treats a variation of this theme is “Spunk,” published in the June, 1925, issue of Opportunity. The central character, Spunk Banks, has the spunk to live his life as he chooses, which includes taking another man’s wife and parading openly around town with her. Although Hurston passes no moral judgment on Banks, she makes it clear that she appreciates and admires his brassiness and his will to live his life according to his own terms. When the story opens, Spunk Banks and Lena Kanty are openly flaunting their affair in front of the Eatonville townspeople, including Lena’s husband, Joe Kanty. The other town residents make fun of Joe’s weakness, his refusal to confront Spunk Banks. Later, when Joe desperately attacks Spunk with a razor, Spunk shoots and kills him. Spunk is tried and acquitted but is killed in a work-related accident, cut to death by a circle saw. Again, superstition plays an important role here, for Spunk claims that he has been haunted by Joe Kanty’s ghost. In fact, Spunk is convinced that Joe’s ghost pushed him into the circle saw, and at least one other townsman agrees. As is customary in Hurston’s stories, however, she makes no judgment of the rightness or wrongness of such beliefs but points out that these beliefs are very much a part of the cultural milieu of Eatonville. “Sweat” • Another early Eatonville story is “Sweat,” published in 1926 in the only issue of the ill-fated literary magazine Fire!, founded by Hurston, Hughes, and Wallace Thurman. “Sweat” shows Hurston’s power as a fiction writer and as a master of the short-story form. Again, the story line is a simple one. Delia Jones is a hardworking, temperate Christian woman being tormented by her arrogant, mean-spirited, and cruel husband of fifteen years, Sykes Jones, who has become tired of her and desires a new wife. Rather than simply leaving her, though, he wants to drive her away by making her life miserable. At stake is the house for which Delia’s “sweat” has paid: Sykes wants it for his new mistress, but Delia refuses to leave the fruit of her labor. Sykes uses both physical and mental cruelty to antagonize Delia, the most farreaching of which is Delia’s intense fear of snakes. When Delia’s fear of the caged rattlesnake that Sykes places outside her back door subsides, Sykes places the rattlesnake in the dirty clothes hamper, hoping that it will bite and kill Delia. In an ironic twist, however, Delia escapes, and the rattlesnake bites Sykes as he fumbles for a match in the dark house. Delia listens and watches as Sykes dies a painful, agonizing death. Although “Sweat” makes use of the same superstitious beliefs as Hurston’s other stories, a more complex characterization and an elaborate system of symbols are central to the story’s development. In Delia, for example, readers are presented with an essentially good Christian woman who is capable of great compassion and long suffering and who discovers the capacity to hate as intensely as she loves; in Sykes, readers are shown unadulterated evil reduced to one at once pitiful and horrible in his suffering. In addition, the Christian symbolism, including the snake and the beast of burden, adds considerable interest and texture to the story. It is this texture that

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makes “Sweat” Hurston’s most rewarding work of short fiction, for it shows her at her best as literary artist and cultural articulator. “The Gilded Six-Bits” • Although Hurston turned to the longer narrative as the preferred genre during the 1930’s, she continued writing short stories throughout the remainder of her career. One such story is “The Gilded Six-Bits,” published in 1933, which also examines relationships between men and women. In this story, the marriage bed of a happy couple, Joe and Missie May Banks, is defiled by a city slicker, Otis D. Slemmons. Missie May has been attracted by Slemmons’s gold money, which she desires to get for her husband. The gold pieces, however, turn out to be goldplated. Hurston’s message is nearly cliché—“all that glitters is not gold”—but she goes a step further to establish the idea that true love transcends all things. Joe and Missie May are reconciled at the end of the story. Last Stories • Hurston’s last stories are fables that seem to have only comic value but do, however, advance serious thoughts, such as the ridiculousness of the idea of race purity in “Cock Robin, Beale Street” or the equal ridiculousness of the idea that the North was better for blacks, in “Story in Harlem Slang.” Although these stories are not artistic achievements, they do provide interesting aspects of the Hurston canon. In many ways, Hurston’s short stories are apprentice works to her novels. In these stories, she introduced most of the themes, character types, settings, techniques, and concerns upon which she later elaborated during her most productive and artistic period, the 1930’s. This observation, however, does not suggest that her short stories are inferior works. On the contrary, much of the best of Hurston can be found in these early stories. Warren J. Carson With updates by the Editors Other major works plays: Color Struck, pb. 1926; The First One, pb. 1927; Mule Bone, pb. 1931 (with Langston Hughes); Polk County, pb. 1944, pr. 2002. novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948. miscellaneous: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 1979. nonfiction: Mules and Men, 1935; Tell My Horse, 1938; Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942; The Sanctified Church, 1981; Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 1995; Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings, 1999 (Pamela Bordelon, editor); Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Foktales from the Gulf States, 2001; Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 2002 (Carla Kaplan, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. From the series Modern Critical Views. An excellent collection of criticism of Hurston’s work and life. Includes early commentary by Franz Boas and Langston Hughes, as well as later studies. Chinn, Nancy, and Elizabeth E. Dunn. “‘The Ring of Singing Metal on Wood’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Artistry in ‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’” The Mississippi Quarterly 49

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(Fall, 1996): 775-790. Discusses how Hurston uses setting, ritual, dialect, and the nature of human relationships in the story; argues that the story provides a solution to the problem of reconciling her rural Florida childhood with her liberal arts education and training. Cooper, Jan. “Zora Neale Hurston Was Always a Southerner Too.” In The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, edited by Carol S. Manning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Examines the hitherto neglected role that Hurston played in the Southern Renaissance between 1920 and 1950. Argues that Hurston’s fiction is informed by a modern southern agrarian sense of community. Suggests that the Southern Renaissance was a transracial, cross-cultural product of the South. Cronin, Gloria L., ed. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Useful collection of essays by various scholars that includes bibliographical references and an index. Donlon, Jocelyn Hazelwood. “Porches: Stories: Power: Spatial and Racial Intersections in Faulkner and Hurston.” Journal of American Culture 19 (Winter, 1996): 95110. Comments on the role of the porch in Faulkner and Hurston’s fiction as a transitional space between the public and the private where the individual can negotiate an identity through telling stories. Hill, Lynda Marion. Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996. Chapters on Hurston’s treatment of everyday life, science and humanism, folklore, and color, race, and class. Hill also considers dramatic reenactments of Hurston’s writing. Includes notes, bibliography, and an appendix on “characteristics of Negro expression.” Hurston, Lucy Anne. Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Brief biography written by Hurston’s niece. Most notable for the inclusion of rare photographs, writings and other multimedia personal artifacts. Also contains an audio CD of Hurston reading and singing. Lyons, Mary E. Sorrow’s Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. Perhaps the only straightforward biography of Hurston, written with the younger reader in mind. Especially useful for those who need a primer on Hurston’s background in all-black Eatonville. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Hurston: “Drenched in Light” (vol. 2), “The Gilded Six-Bits” (vol. 3), and “Spunk” and “Sweat” (vol. 7). Newsom, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Catalog of Hurston criticism spanning the years 1931-1986, arranged chronologically with annotations. This source is an invaluable aid to serious scholars of Hurston. Also contains an introduction to the criticism on Hurston. An especially useful resource for all inquiries. West, Margaret Genevieve. Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Chronicle of Hurston’s literary career and a look at why her writing did not gain popularity until long after her death.

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Washington Ir ving Born: New York, New York; April 3, 1783 Died: Tarrytown, New York; November 28, 1859 Principal short fiction • The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819-1820; Bracebridge Hall, 1822; Tales of a Traveller, 1824; The Alhambra, 1832; Legends of the Conquest of Spain, 1835; The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, 1975, 1998 (Charles Neider, editor). Other literary forms • Washington Irving distinguished himself in a variety of genres. His finest and most typical book, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., blends essay, sketch, history, travel, humor, and short story; his first best-seller was a satire, A History of New York (1809); he coauthored a successful play, Charles the Second: Or, The Merry Monarch (1824); but he devoted the latter and most prolific part of his career to books of travel and especially of history. Achievements • Washington Irving was America’s first internationally recognized author. Although he achieved national attention with his satiric A History of New York, his fame abroad was made with The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Irving was a prolific writer throughout his life, from his first collaborations with his brother William and friend James Kirke Paulding, to his many biographies of well-known historical figures, including George Washington. Among his most successful works were his collections of sketches and tales, a distinction then made between realistic and imaginative types of fiction. His sketches often make use of historical sources, while the tales usually derive from traditional folktales. His best-known stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” although largely copied from German folktales, still maintain an originality through their American settings and Irving’s own gently humorous style. Biography • The eleventh and last child of a successful merchant, Washington Irving, somewhat frail and indulged as he was growing up, was the favorite child of his Anglican mother and Presbyterian minister father. As a young man, Irving studied law in the office of Josiah Ogden Hoffman, to whose daughter he was attracted, and enjoyed the social and cultural advantages of New York City as something of a gentlemanplayboy. At this time, he dabbled in satirical writing in serial publications. He gained a certain amount of cosmopolitan sophistication with a tour of Europe in 1804-1806, during which time he kept a journal. Irving was admitted to the New York bar at the age of twenty-three and nominally began to work as a lawyer on Wall Street, although he practiced little. Instead, he wrote serial essays with his brother and James Kirke Paulding for a periodical they called Salmagundi, modeled on Joseph Addison’s Spectator, “to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age.” This amounted to making light fun of fashion and social mores in high society, although occasionally they made jabs at Thomas Jefferson’s “logocratic” democracy. “Diedrich Knickerbocker’s” A History of New York followed in 1809; originally in-

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tended as a parody of a pretentious New York guidebook, it had become instead a comic history of the Dutch in New York. When Matilda Hoffman died in the same year, Irving, distraught, stopped writing for a time. He moved in 1811 to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the Irving brothers’ importing firm. Still affected by Matilda’s death, he drifted into several different occupations, lost the brothers’ firm to bankruptcy, yet benefited from his literary contacts to the point where he began to pursue writing with renewed effort. By the time he published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819, he was on his way to supporting himself through his writing. In order to find original materials for his sketches, he made various trips through Europe and Library of Congress America, including a ministry to Spain; he returned to New York finally in 1832. His long absence, reminiscent of Rip Van Winkle’s, provided him with a new perspective on the United States, whose western frontier was beginning to open; he packed again, this time for the West, and wrote many of his books out of the experience. He finally returned home to the Hudson, ensconced in family and friends, where he died in 1859. Analysis • Washington Irving’s masterpiece, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., has a historical importance few American books can match. No previous American book achieved a really significant popular and critical success in England, the only arena of opinion which then mattered; but Irving demonstrated that an American could write not only well but also brilliantly even by British standards. In fact, throughout the century English as well as American schoolboys studied Irving’s book as a model of graceful prose. Irving had achieved some popularity in his own country well before the British triumphs. In 1807-1808, Irving, his brother William, and James Kirke Paulding collaborated on the independently published periodical series, Salmagundi. Since the project was a true collaboration, scholars are in doubt as to precisely who deserves credit for precisely what, but two pieces deserve particular notice. “Sketches from Nature” sentimentally sketches two old bachelors, one of whom restores the spirits of the other by leading him through scenes reminiscent of their youth. “The Little Man in Black” is supposedly a traditional story passed through generations of a single family. Irving here introduces another old bachelor, who wanders into the village a stranger to all and sets up housekeeping in a decrepit house rumored to be haunted. First ostracized by the adults, then tormented by the local children, ultimately he dies by

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starvation, in his last moments forgiving all, a true but misunderstood Christian. Both pieces display Irving’s graceful style, his prevalent sentimentality, and his wholehearted commitment to charming, pleasing, and entertaining his audience. Both feature an old bachelor stereotype which he inherited from the Addisonian tradition and continued to exploit in later works. The pieces differ in their formal focus, however, and aptly illustrate the two poles of Irving’s fictional nature. The second shows his fondness for the tale tradition: He cites a source in family folklore; the narrative hangs on striking incident; and he flavors the atmosphere with a suggestion of the supernatural. The first features virtues of the periodical essay: evocation of character divorced from dramatic incident; a style dominated by smoothness (Edgar Allan Poe’s term was “repose”) and by descriptions strong on concrete detail; and an essentially realistic atmosphere. Irving’s unique genius led him to combine the best of both traditions in his finest fiction and thereby to create the modern short story in America. Irving’s early career coincided with the rise of Romanticism, and the movement strongly influenced his greatest book, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Here he capitalized on the element which strongly marks his most successful stories: imagination. Consistently, Irving’s most successful characters, and stories, are those which most successfully exploit the imagination. “The Spectre Bridegroom” • In “The Spectre Bridegroom,” the title character triumphs not through strength, physical skills, or intelligence, but rather through manipulating the imaginations of those who would oppose his aims. The story’s first section humorously describes a bellicose old widower, the Baron Von Landshort, who has gathered a vast audience, consisting mostly of poor relatives properly cognizant of his high status, to celebrate his only daughter’s marriage to a young count whom none of them has ever seen. In the story’s second part, the reader learns that as the count and his friend Herman Von Starkenfaust journey to the castle, they are beset by bandits; the outlaws mortally wound the count who, with his last breath, begs Von Starkenfaust to relay his excuses to the wedding party. The story’s third part returns to the castle where the long-delayed wedding party finally welcomes a pale, melancholy young man. The silent stranger hears the garrulous Baron speak on, among other matters, his family’s longstanding feud with the Von Starkenfaust family; meanwhile the young man wins the daughter’s heart. He shortly leaves, declaring he must be buried at the cathedral. The next night the daughter’s two guardian aunts tell ghost stories until they are terrified by spying the Spectre Bridegroom outside the window; the daughter sleeps apart from her aunts for three nights, encouraging their fears the while, and finally absconds. When she returns with her husband, Von Starkenfaust, who had pretended to be the Spectre, they both are reconciled with the Baron and live happily ever after. By becoming in one sense artists themselves, Herman and his bride both manipulate the imaginations of the Baron, the aunts, and the entire wedding party to make their courtship and elopement possible; here, happily, the dupees lose nothing and share the ultimate happiness of the dupers. There are at least three dimensions to “The Spectre Bridegroom”: As it is read, one can imaginatively identify with the duped family and believe the Spectre genuine, or alternately identify with the young couple innocently manipulating their elders. A third dimension enters when the reader recalls the personality of the frame’s Swiss tale-teller, occasionally interrupting himself with “a roguish leer and a sly joke for the buxom

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kitchen maid” and himself responsible (it is surely not the modest and proper Geoffrey Crayon or Washington Irving) for the suggestive antlers above the prospective bridegroom’s head at the feast. “Rip Van Winkle” • The narrative perspectives informing Irving’s single greatest achievement, “Rip Van Winkle,” radiate even greater complexities. At the simplest level the core experience is that of Rip himself, a good-natured idler married to a termagant who drives him from the house with her temper. While hunting in the woods, Rip pauses to assist a curious little man hefting a keg; in a natural amphitheater he discovers dwarfish sailors in archaic dress playing at ninepins. Rip drinks, falls asleep, and awakens the next morning alone on the mountainside. In a subtle, profound, and eerily effective sequence, Irving details Rip’s progressive disorientation and complete loss of identity. The disintegration begins mildly enough—Rip notices the decayed gun (a thief’s substitute he thinks), his dog’s absence, some stiffness in his own body—each clue is emotionally more significant than the last, but each may be easily explained. Rip next notices changes in nature—a dry gully has become a raging stream, a ravine has been closed by a rockslide; these are more dramatic alterations, but still explainable after a long night’s sleep. Upon entering the village, he discovers no one but strangers and all in strange dress; he finds his house has decayed, his wife and children have disappeared; buildings have changed as well as the political situation and even the very manner and behavior of the people. In a terrible climax, when Irving for once declines to mute the genuine horror, Rip profoundly questions his own identity. When he desperately asks if anyone knows poor Rip Van Winkle, fingers point to another ragged idler at the fringe, the very image of Rip himself as he had ascended the mountain. Even Poe or Franz Kafka never painted a loss of identity more absolute, more profound, more credible, more terrible. After a moment of horror, Irving’s sentimental good humor immediately reasserts itself. Rip’s now-adult daughter appears and recognizes him; the ragged idler turns out to be his son, Rip, Jr. Rip himself hesitates for a moment, but, upon learning that his wife has died “but a short time since,” declares his identity and commences reintegrating himself in the community, eventually to become an honored patriarch, renowned for recounting his marvelous experience. Thus is the nature of the core narrative, which is almost all most people ever read. The reader values the story for its profound mythic reverberations; after all, throughout Western civilization Irving’s Rip has become an archetype of time lost. The reader may also appreciate Irving’s amoral toying with lifestyles, and although the Yankee/Benjamin Franklin lifestyle Rip’s wife advocates and which leads to her death (she bursts a blood vessel while haggling) fails to trap Rip, he triumphs by championing the relatively unambitious, self-indulgent lifestyle Irving identifies with the Dutch. Still, many people feel tempted to reject the piece as a simplistic fairy tale dependent on supernatural machinery for its appeal and effect. This is a mistake. Those who read the full story as Irving wrote it will discover, in the headnote, that Irving chose to relate the story not from the point of view of an omniscient narrator but from that of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the dunderheaded comic persona to whom years earlier he had ascribed the burlesque A History of New York. The presence of such a narrator—and Irving went to some trouble to introduce him—authorizes the reader to reject the supernatural elements and believe, as Irving tells us many of

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Rip’s auditors believed, that in actuality Rip simply tired of his wife, ran away for twenty years, and concocted a cock-and-bull story to justify his absence. Looking closer, the reader discovers copious hints that this is precisely what happened: Rip’s reluctance to become Rip again until he is sure his wife is dead; the fact that when his neighbors hear the story they “wink at each other and put their tongues in their cheeks”; the fact that, until he finally established a satisfactory version of the events, he was observed “to vary on some points every time he told it.” In the concluding footnote, even dim Diedrich Knickerbocker acknowledges the story’s doubtfulness but provides as evidence of its truth the fact that he has heard even stranger supernatural stories of the Catskills, and that to authenticate his story Rip signed a certificate in the presence of a justice of the peace. “The story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt.” Irving clearly intends to convince his closest readers that Rip, like the couple in “The Spectre Bridegroom,” triumphed over circumstances by a creative manipulation of imagination. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” • In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” our source is again Diedrich Knickerbocker, and again, creatively manipulating the imaginations of others proves the key to success. The pleasant little Dutch community of Sleepy Hollow has imported a tall, grotesquely lanky Yankee as schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane. Although he is prey to the schoolboys’ endless pranks, he himself ravenously and endlessly preys on the foodstuffs of the boys’ parents. Ichabod finally determines to set his cap for the pretty daughter of a wealthy farmer, but Brom Bones, the handsome, Herculean local hero, has likewise determined to court the girl. The climax comes when the principals gather with the entire community at a dance, feast, and “quilting frolic” held at Katrina Van Tassel’s home. Brom fills the timorous and credulous Ichabod full of tales of a horrible specter, ghost of a Hessian soldier beheaded by a cannonball, who inhabits the region through which Ichabod must ride that night to return home. As he makes his lonely journey back, Ichabod encounters the dark figure who carries his head under his arm rather than on his neck and who runs him a frightful race to a bridge. At the climax the figure hurls his head and strikes Ichabod, who disappears, never to be seen in the village again. Brom marries Katrina, and years later the locals discover that Ichabod turned lawyer, politician, newspaperman, and finally became a “justice of the Ten Pound Court.” Again it is the character who creatively manipulates the imagination who carries the day; the manipulatee wins only the consolation prize. Again the Dutch spirit triumphs over the Yankee. In this story there is something quite new, however; for the first time in American literature there is, in the characterization of Brom Bones, the figure of the frontiersman so important to American literature and American popular culture: physically imposing, self-confident, rough and ready, untutored but endowed with great natural virtues, gifted with a rude sense of chivalry, at home on the fringes of civilization, and incorporating in his own being the finer virtues of both the wilderness and the settlements. Ir ving here brilliantly anticipated both the essence of southwestern humor and of James Fenimore Cooper’s seminal Westerns. Irving wrote a great many other stories, including several romantic tales set in Spain, most of them flawed by superficiality and sentimentality; he also produced a number of gothic stories, some of which are still read with pleasure, among them “The Adventure of the German Student” and “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Irving,

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however, reached his highest point in his first published short story, “Rip Van Winkle.” He never equaled it in any subsequent story—but then, only a tiny handful of writers ever have. Walter Evans With updates by Ann A. Merrill Other major works miscellaneous: The Complete Works of Washington Irving, 1969-1989 (30 volumes). play: Charles the Second: Or, The Merry Monarch, pb. 1824 (with John Howard Payne). nonfiction: A History of New York, 1809; Biography of James Lawrence, 1813; A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1828; A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, 1829; Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, 1831; A Tour of the Prairies, 1835; Astoria, 1836; The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 1837; The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, 1849; The Life of George Washington, 1855-1859 (5 volumes). Bibliography Aderman, Ralph M., ed. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Collection of essays on Irving, from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Includes discussions of Irving’s art and literary debts, the relationship of his stories to his culture, and his generic heritage. Hiller, Alice. “‘An Avenue to Some Degree of Profit and Reputation’: The Sketch Book as Washington Irving’s Entree and Undoing.” Journal of American Studies 31 (August, 1997): 275-293. Claims that some of Irving’s personal correspondence reveals that The Sketch Book may have been pitched deliberately at the British market, resulting in a paralysis of Irving’s powers of writing. McFarland, Philip. Sojourners. New York: Atheneum, 1979. Although not a conventional biography, this study of Washington Irving’s life situates the writer in his various geographic, historic, and literary contexts. McFarland explores in detail the life of Irving, interweaving his biography with those of other important Americans of the time, among them Aaron Burr, the abolitionist John Brown, and John J. Astor. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Irving: “Adventure of the German Student” (vol. 1), “The Devil and Tom Walker” (vol. 2), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (vol. 4), and “Rip Van Winkle” (vol. 6). Murray, Laura J. “The Aesthetic of Dispossession: Washington Irving and Ideologies of (De)colonization in the Early Republic.” American Literary History 8 (Summer, 1996): 205-231. Argues that Euro-Americans cultivated their sense of vulnerability with respect to Great Britain and in so doing rhetorically excused themselves from their colonizing role with regard to Native Americans. Myers, Andrew B., ed. A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving. Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1976. This collection, divided into four chronologically ordered sections, offers writings on Washington Irving. Part 1 includes essays by contemporaries of Irving, such as William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; part 2 covers evaluations from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Early twentieth century scholars of American literature,

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such as Fred Lewis Pattee, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Van Wyck Brooks, are represented in part 3, and part 4 covers the period 1945 to 1975. The collection gives an excellent overview of the development of Irving criticism and provides a point of departure for further investigations. Piacentino, Ed. “‘Sleepy Hollow’ Comes South: Washington Irving’s Influence on Old Southwestern Humor.” The Southern Literary Journal 30 (Fall, 1997): 27-42. Examines how nineteenth century southern backwoods humorists adapted Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to a southern setting; discusses a number of works with clear parallels to Irving’s story. Plummer, Laura, and Michael Nelson. “‘Girls Can Take Care of Themselves’: Gender and Storytelling in Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Spring, 1993): 175-184. Argues that Sleepy Hollow is femalecentered; the tales that circulate in the region focus on emasculated, headless spirits and serve to drive out masculine interlopers like Ichabod and thus preserve the old Dutch domesticity based on wives’ tales. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. In this study of Irving’s short fiction, Rubin-Dorsky sets out to establish Irving’s Americanness, thus reversing a critical tradition that marked him as primarily imitative of British prose style. By placing Irving within his historical context, Rubin-Dorsky underscores Irving’s central position in early American letters. Tuttleton, James W., ed. Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction. New York: AMS Press, 1993. Essays of critical interpretation of Irving’s works. Williams, Stanley T. The Life of Washington Irving. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1935. This thorough biography provides a wealth of biographical and literary detail about Irving. Volume 1 is most useful for those interested in Irving’s short fiction, as it covers his life and his work up to The Alhambra.

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Shirley Jackson Born: San Francisco, California; December 14, 1916 Died: North Bennington, Vermont; August 8, 1965 Principal short fiction • The Lottery: Or, The Adventures of James Harris, 1949 (also pb. as The Lottery, and Other Stories); Just an Ordinary Day, 1996 (Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart, editors); Shirley Jackson Collected Stories, 2001. Other literary forms • Shirley Jackson’s dozen published books include novels, humorous fictionalized autobiographies, and children’s books. Many of her stories, essays, and public speeches remain uncollected. Several works have been adapted to other media: “The Lottery” for television, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) for stage, and The Bird’s Nest (1954) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) for the cinema. Achievements • Shirley Jackson is probably best known for her short story “The Lottery,” which was first published in the June 26, 1948, edition of The New Yorker. As with the majority of her works, both short stories and novels, “The Lottery” explores the darker side of the human psyche, often in a manner disturbing to the reader. In addition to using ordinary settings for extraordinary occurrences, Jackson often injects an element of the supernatural. This is seen, for example, in the story “The Visit” and in the novel The Haunting of Hill House. In addition, Jackson has published Life Among the Savages (1953), a highly humorous account of her home life. In 1961, Jackson received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for her story “Louisa, Please.” She was awarded the Syracuse University Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 1965. In 2001, Peterson Publishing brought out a new edition of her best short fiction in its Great Author series. Biography • Shirley Jackson was born in California on December 14, 1919, and moved with her family to New York when she was sixteen. After an unsuccessful year at the University of Rochester, Jackson enrolled, at the age of twenty, in the University of Syracuse. This was to be the beginning of an independent life for the author, as she would finally be away from the dominating presence of her mother. At Syracuse, Jackson met Stanley Edgar Hyman, the man she would marry in 1940. Hyman achieved fame in his own right as a teacher, writer, and critic. The marriage between Jackson and Hyman was tumultuous in many ways but provided a stabilizing factor for Jackson. Her literary production increased markedly after the marriage and the birth of their four children. Jackson’s own phobias, however, kept creeping into this successful, if odd, relationship. She was an agoraphobic and a depressive. Part of the latter affliction was contributed to by her asthma and arthritis, as well as Hyman’s extramarital affair in the early 1960’s. In addition, Jackson had never really been a social person—she was much too individualistic to fit into any of the polite social molds. In 1963, Jackson began to turn around psychologically. Her husband made a new commitment to the marriage, and an enlightened psychiatrist began to help her work with the agoraphobia. Her writing continued to be an outlet for her. Although Jackson re-

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covered emotionally, she never recovered physically. She was obese and a chain smoker. She died on August 8, 1965, at the age of forty-eight. Analysis • Shirley Jackson’s stories seem to center on a single concern: Almost every story is about a protagonist’s discovering or failing to discover or successfully ignoring an alternate way of perceiving a set of circumstances or the world. Jackson seems especially interested in how characters order their worlds and how they perceive themselves in the world. Often, a change in a character’s perspective leads to anxiety, terror, neurosis, or even a loss of identity. Although it is tempting to say that her main theme is the difference between appearance and reality, such a statement is misleading, for she seems to see reality as Herman Melville’s Ishmael comes to see it, as a mirror of the perceiving soul. It is rarely clear that her characters discover or lose their grasp of reality; rather, they form ideas of reality that are more or less moral and more or less functional. For Jackson, reality is so complex and mysterious that one inevitably only orders part of it. A character may then discover parts that contradict a chosen order or that attract one away from the apparent order, but one can never affirm the absolute superiority of one ordering to another. In this respect, Jackson’s fictional world resembles those of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the major differences between her fiction and theirs is that her protagonists are predominantly women; she explores some peculiarly feminine aspects of the problem of ideas of order. Jackson’s middle-class American women seem especially vulnerable to losing the security of a settled worldview. Their culture provides them with idealistic dream visions of what their lives should be, and they have a peculiar leisure for contemplation and conversation imposed upon them by their dependent roles. Men in her stories seem so busy providing that they rarely look at and think about the order of things. Her career women are more like these men. In “Elizabeth” and “The Villager,” the protagonists succeed, albeit precariously, in preserving ideas of themselves and their worlds despite the contradictory facts that seem increasingly to intrude. In these two stories, one sees a sort of emotional cannibalism in the protagonists as they attempt to preserve belief in an order that reality seems no longer disposed to sustain. Several stories show a woman’s loss of an ordering dream. These divide into stories about women who experience the terror of loss of identity and those who may find a liberating and superior order in what would ordinarily be called infantile fantasy. Among those who lose a dream are the protagonists of “The Little House” and “The Renegade.” In “The Little House,” a woman’s first possession of her own small country house is ruined by the terrifying insinuations of her new neighbors; they leave her alone on her first night after relating to her their fears that the previous owner was murdered and that the murderer will return. In “The Renegade,” a mother discovers an unsuspected cruelty in her neighbors and even in her children when her dog is accused of killing chickens. Although Jackson’s humorous autobiographical stories are of a different order, the often anthologized “Charles” tells of a mother’s discovery that the nemesis of the kindergarten whose antics her son reports each day is not the mythical Charles, but her own son, Laurie. Perhaps the most successful escape into fantasy is Mrs. Montague’s in “The Island.” All her physical needs are provided by a wealthy but absent son and the constant attendance of Miss Oakes. Mrs. Montague lives in her dream of a tropical paradise, virtually untouched by her actual world. This escape is judged by the ironic frame of Miss Oakes’s relative poverty and her inevitable envy, suffering, spite, and ugliness; she has no chance of such an escape herself. Some movements into fantasy

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are terrifying or at least ambiguous. In “The Beautiful Stranger,” Margaret resolves a tension in her marriage by perceiving the man who returns from a business trip as a stranger, not her husband. By the end of the story, this fantasy has led to her losing herself, unable to find her home when she returns from a shopping trip. A similar but more ambiguous situation develops in “The Tooth,” in which a woman escapes into a vision of an island to evade the pain of an aching tooth. Many of Jackson’s protagonists conceive of an island paradise as an ideal order when their control of the immediate is threatened. Some ideas of order remain impenetrable. In “Louisa, Please,” a variation on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” a runaway daughter returns home after a long absence to discover that her family has built a life around her loss and will not be convinced of her return. In “Flower Garden” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” protagonists find themselves unable to change or to abandon racist ideas because the ideas are too strong or because of community pressure. “The Visit” • A closer look at three especially interesting stories reveals more about Jackson’s themes and gives some indication of her technical proficiency. In “The Visit,” Margaret comes to visit a school friend, Carla Rhodes, for the summer. The beautiful Rhodes estate includes a dream house with numerous fantastic rooms. The house seems not quite real; nearly every room is covered with tapestries depicting the house in different hours and seasons, and there is a mysterious tower of which no one speaks. For Margaret, the house and the family are ideal, especially when Carla’s brother, Paul, arrives with his friend, the Captain. This idyll lasts until the evening of Paul’s departure, when Margaret discovers that Paul has been a hallucination or a ghost, for the Captain is Carla’s brother and no one else has seen Paul. This revelation clarifies several mysteries that have developed, especially that of Margaret’s strange visit to the tower. Paul has told Margaret that an old aunt often secludes herself in the tower. When Margaret pays her a visit, she undergoes a not really frightening but certainly haunting experience with old Aunt Margaret. At the end of the story, the reader must conclude Aunt Margaret to be an apparition, that she is probably the Margaret who died for love and whose picture in mosaic appears on the floor of one room. Young Margaret has lost a phantom lover as old Margaret lost her Paul. Young Margaret realizes this at the same time that she is made aware of time’s effect on the house: the age and weakness of the Rhodeses, the bitter darkness of their true son, and the physical decay of the buildings. Furthermore, she begins to doubt her own place and identity as she wonders if her visit to the house will ever end. The home of her dreaming now threatens to become an imprisoning nightmare. In retrospect, the device by which Jackson encourages the reader to share Margaret’s hallucination or haunting may seem contrived. This choice, however, seems effective because the more fully the reader shares Margaret’s perceptions and the more subdued (without being absent) are the disturbing elements, the more fully will the reader share the shock of her awakening into nightmare. Also technically effective are the apparent connections with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Most important among these is the succession of mirror images: multiple pictures of the house, between the house and Mrs. Rhodes, among members of the family, between the two Margarets, and between the decline of the family and of the house. These connections seem deliberately chosen in part to emphasize the contrasts between Margaret and Poe’s narrator. Because Margaret’s response to the house is so positive, the shock of her discovery is greater by contrast. Furthermore, when she dis-

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covers this house to be like what one knows the House of Usher to be, one sees the analogy between her terror at imprisonment and that of Poe’s narrator when he sees a universe unnaturally lit by a blood red moon, yet another image of the coffin lit from within. Margaret actually enters one of the dream worlds promised American girls. Under its spell, she overlooks its flaws and forgets about time, but when the Captain breaks the spell, pointing out signs of decay, Paul departs and Margaret becomes acutely aware of time as her nightmare begins. “Pillar of Salt” • Time is often the destroyer of feminine ideals in Jackson’s stories because they seem to depend on a suspension of time. In “Pillar of Salt,” another Margaret loses her secure world. A trip to New York City with her husband forces a new perspective on her which produces her anxiety and, finally, paranoia. It remains unclear, however, whether her paranoia is illness or a healthy reaction to an inimical environment. The couple’s first week in the city is idyllic, and the fast pace is a pleasant change from New Hampshire. At a party at the end of the first week, however, Margaret begins to feel isolated, unnoticed among strangers who behave in strange ways. She learns there is a fire in the building but is unable to persuade anyone else to leave. The fire turns out to be two buildings away, but she is the only one to heed the warning and flee the building. She comes to see this nightmarish experience as symbolic of her experience in New York and perhaps of her life as a whole. She begins to notice new details about the city: dirt, decay, speed, stifling crowds. She feels increasingly isolated and insignificant. Of this life she thinks, “She knew she was afraid to say it truly, afraid to face the knowledge that it was a voluntary neck-breaking speed, a deliberate whirling faster and faster to end in destruction.” Even her friends’ Long Island beach cottage shows the spreading blight; there they find a severed human leg on the sand. Margaret comes to believe that her former order was illusory. Upon returning to the city, she begins to hallucinate, to see the destruction of the city in fast motion. Windows crumble. Her bed shakes. Driven from her apartment, she finds herself unable to return, paralyzed in a fast-moving, anonymous crowd on the wrong side of a mechanical and murderous river of traffic. Margaret comes to see herself in a modern Sodom, paralyzed not because she has disobeyed God, but because she has seen in prophetic vision the truth about the city: It is no home for human beings but rather is impersonally intent upon destruction. The allusion of the title and her critique of city life verify her perception; however, those who do not share her vision remain capable of functioning. As in “The Visit,” the internal view of Margaret encourages a close identification between reader and character which makes judgment difficult until the reader can step back; but stepping back from “Pillar of Salt” plunges the reader deeper into mystery. In both stories, the protagonist moves from dream to nightmare, but in “Pillar of Salt,” the reader is much less certain that the move is to a better or more accurate view of reality. “The Lottery” • Shirley Jackson’s reputation rests primarily upon her most anthologized story, “The Lottery.” Her lecture on this story (printed in Come Along with Me) suggests that her creation of a normal setting convinced many readers that the story was largely factual. In fact, the central problem of the story seems to be to reconcile the portrait of typical small-town life in which the characters seem just like the reader with the horrifying ritualistic killing these people carry

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out. Here, apparently incompatible ideas of order are thrust upon the reader for resolution, perhaps in order tocomplicate the reader’s conceptions. “The Lottery” develops by slowly raising the level of tension in the semipastoral setting until a series of carefully arranged revelations brings about a dramatic and shocking reversal. The villagers gather at mid-morning on a late June day for an annual event, the lottery, around which a great deal of excitement centers. Jackson supplies details which arouse reader curiosity: Nearly all towns have a similar lottery; it is as old as the town; it has an elaborate ritual form which has decayed over time; every adult male must participate; some believe the orders of nature and of civilization depend on carrying it out correctly. The family of the man who draws the marked lot must draw again to determine the final winner. The tension built out of reader curiosity and the town’s moods reverses toward the sinister when the “winner’s” wife reveals that she does not want to win. Once this reversal is complete, the story moves rapidly to reveal the true nature of the lottery, to choose a victim for annual sacrifice by stoning. Jackson heightens the horror of this apparently unaccountable act with carefully chosen and placed details. Several commentators have attempted to explain the story through reconstructing the meaning of the ritual and through carefully examining the symbols. Helen Nebeker sees the story as an allegory of “man trapped in a web spun from his own need to explain and control the incomprehensible universe around him, a need no longer answered by the web of old traditions.” These attempts to move beyond the simple thriller seem justified by the details Jackson provides about the lottery. This ritual seems clearly to be a tradition of prehistoric origin, once believed essential for the welfare of the community. Even though its purpose has become obscure and its practice muddled, it continues to unify and sustain the community. Critics tend to underemphasize the apparent health and vitality of the community, perhaps feeling that this ritual essentially undercuts that impression. It is important to notice that one function of the lottery is to change the relationship between community and victim. The victim is chosen at random, killed without malice or significant protest, and lost without apparent grief. This story may be what Richard Eastman has called an open parable, a fable which applies at several levels or in several contexts. “The Lottery” creates an emotional effect of horror at the idea that perhaps in human civilization, the welfare of the many depends often on the suffering of the few: the victim race, the exploited nation, the scapegoat, the poor, the stereotyped sex, the drafted soldier. In these cases, instead of a ritual, other aspects of the social order separate oppressor and victim, yet the genuine order and happiness of the majority seems to depend on the destruction of others. In this respect, “The Lottery” resembles many stories of oppression, such as Franz Kafka’s “The Bucket Rider” and some stories by Richard Wright; its purpose may be to jar readers into thinking about ways in which their lives victimize others. Jackson places the reader of “The Lottery,” which lacks a protagonist, in a position similar to that of the protagonists of “The Visit” and “Pillar of Salt.” The story moves from a relatively secure agrarian worldview to an event which fantastically complicates that view. Here, as in most of her stories, Jackson emphasizes the complexity of reality. Nature and human nature seem unaccountable mixtures of the creative and destructive. Her best people are in search of ways to live in this reality without fear and cruelty. Terry Heller With updates by Victoria E. McLure

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Other major works children’s literature: Nine Magic Wishes, 1963; Famous Sally, 1966. play: The Bad Children, pb. 1958. novels: The Road Through the Wall, 1948 (also pb. as The Other Side of the Street); Hangsaman, 1951; The Bird’s Nest, 1954 (also pb. as Lizzie); The Sundial, 1958; The Haunting of Hill House, 1959; We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962. miscellaneous: Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures, 1968 (Stanley Edgar Hyman, editor). nonfiction: Life Among the Savages, 1953; The Witchcraft of Salem Village, 1956; Raising Demons, 1957. Bibliography Hall, Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Introduction to Jackson’s stories, with comments by Jackson herself, and a few short, previously published, critical articles by others. Discusses Jackson’s interest in the occult, her fascination with dream situations, her focus on children, and her most famous story, “The Lottery.” Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003. Strong argument for Jackson’s modernity. Analyzes her use of the supernatural as metaphor and illuminates the influences of Jackson’s substance abuse, marital strife, and political leanings on her work. Kittredge, Mary. “The Other Side of Magic: A Few Remarks About Shirley Jackson.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1985. Useful study of the use of magic and the supernatural in Jackson’s works. The author draws interesting comparisons between Jackson’s fiction and nonfiction works. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Jackson: “Charles” (vol. 1); and “The Lottery” and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (vol. 5). Murphy, Bernice M., ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Collection of essays that reveals Jackson’s better and lesser known works. Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988. This volume is the first extensive biography of Jackson. It is finely detailed and provides the reader an excellent view of this author. Oppenheimer interviewed close to seventy persons for this book, including Jackson’s family members, friends, and neighbors. Contains numerous photographs. Parks, John G. “‘The Possibility of Evil’: A Key to Shirley Jackson’s Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 15, no. 3 (Summer, 1978): 320-323. This useful article concentrates on Jackson’s short stories. Parks draws useful comparisons with authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rubinsein, Roberta. “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15 (Fall, 1996): 309-331. Explains how Jackson’s fiction demonstrates her increasingly gothic representation of the bonds between mothers and daughters; discusses this theme in a number of Jackson’s stories.

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Schaub, Danielle. “Shirley Jackson’s Use of Symbols in ‘The Lottery.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 14 (Spring, 1990): 79-86. Discusses how Jackson distracts the reader’s attention into thinking the story is a fable or fairy tale; discusses the symbolic use of setting, atmosphere, numbers, names, and objects in the story. Stark, Jack. “Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” In Censored Books, edited by Nicholas Karolider, Lee Burgess, and John M. Kean. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Discusses some of the reasons for the story’s being censored in schools and some of the values of teaching the story to teenagers; argues that it encourages reflection on some of the issues teens need to understand to become good citizens. Yarmove, Jay A. “Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’” The Explicator 52 (Summer, 1994): 242-245. Discusses the importance of setting, historical time, and irony of character names in the allegorical meaning of the story. Compares the ending of the story to the ending of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

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Henr y James Born: New York, New York; April 15, 1843 Died: London, England; February 28, 1916 Principal short fiction • A Passionate Pilgrim, 1875; The Madonna of the Future, 1879; The Siege of London, 1883; Tales of Three Cities, 1884; The Author of Beltraffio, 1885; The Aspern Papers, 1888; The Lesson of the Master, 1892; The Private Life, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, 1893; The Real Thing, 1893; Terminations, 1895; Embarrassments, 1896; The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw and Covering End, 1898; The Soft Side, 1900; The Better Sort, 1903; The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 1907-1909 (24 volumes); The Finer Grain, 1910; A Landscape Painter, 1919; Travelling Companions, 1919; Master Eustace, 1920; Stories of Writers and Other Artists, 1944; Henry James: Selected Short Stories, 1950; Henry James: Eight Tales from the Major Phase, 1958; The Complete Tales of Henry James, 1962-1965 (12 volumes; Leon Edel, editor); The Figure in the Carpet, and Other Stories, 1986; The Jolly Corner, and Other Tales, 1990; The Uncollected Henry James: Newly Discovered Stories, 2004. Other literary forms • Henry James was a prolific writer who, from 1875 until his death, published at least one book every year. In addition to his considerable output of short fiction, he wrote novels, dramas, biographies, autobiographies, reviews, travelogues, art and literary criticism, literary theory, and letters. His most notable novels include Daisy Miller (1878), The Europeans (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1880-1881), Washington Square (1880), The Bostonians (1885-1886), The Tragic Muse (1889-1890), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors (1903). James was a pioneer in the criticism and theory of fiction. Much of his criticism appears in Leon Edel and Mark Wilson’s edition of Henry James: Literary Criticism (1984). James’s creative method and the sources of many of his works are documented in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (1987). Achievements • Henry James contributed to the development of the modernist novel, invented cryptic tales that border on the postmodern, and laid the groundwork for the contemporary theory of narrative. He completed twenty novels (two uncompleted novels were published posthumously). He also wrote 112 short stories, 7 travel books, 3 autobiographies, numerous plays, 2 critical biographies, and voluminous works of criticism. James brought the American novel to its fruition and gave it an international flavor. He transformed the novel of physical adventure to one of psychological intrigue. His character studies are probing and intense. His precise use of limited point of view invites the reader to become actively engaged in interpreting events and ferreting out meaning. His works also achieve a masterful blend of summarized action and dramatic scenes. In his short fiction, he created the forerunners of the modern antiheroes and invented metafictional stories about the nature of art and writing. Also, his critical works and many prefaces have given modern critics a vocabulary for discussing character and point of view. James edited a deluxe edition of his complete works, received honorary degrees from Harvard University and the University of Oxford, and was awarded the Order of Merit from King George V. His works have influenced Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.

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Biography • Henry James’s career is usually divided into four periods: his formative years, his apprenticeship, his middle years, and his major phase. James was descended from Irish Protestants. His grandfather, a poor immigrant, lived out the American Dream and died one of the wealthiest men in the United States. James’s father, Henry James, Sr., renounced the Calvinistic work ethic and indulged in the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg and the socialism of Charles Fourier. Through most of his youth, James was shuttled back and forth between Europe and the United States, thus gaining an international perspective on art and life. He learned French and received a European education through a variety of tutors and schools. As a young man, he was exposed to the greatest museums and art galleries in the world. His eye for painting aided him in creating a painterly quality in his work. In 1858, his family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, which was to become the scene of some of his early works of fiction. In 1862, he went to Harvard University to study law but attended James Russell Lowell’s lectures and decided to pursue a literary career. In 1864, he published his first short story and continued to write stories and criticism for the rest of his life. In 1869, he spent a year abroad. With the death of his favorite cousin, Minnie, in 1870, he believed that his youth had come to an end. James entered his apprentice years between 1865 and 1882. During these years, he published his first collection of short fiction, A Passionate Pilgrim, and his first significant novel, Roderick Hudson (1876). He achieved popular success with Daisy Miller and went on to write The American (1876-1877), Washington Square (1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1880-1881). These works dealt with the international theme and explored the problems of American innocence exposed to the corrupting influence of European society. During the 1880’s, James began to take up some of the themes of the naturalists. With The Bostonians (1885-1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1885-1886), James began to treat the issues of social reformers. These novels, along with The Tragic Muse (1889-1890), were not successful. Between 1890 and 1895, James attempted to establish his reputation as a dramatist, but he was unable to please theater audiences, and his play Guy Domville (1894) was booed. In 1897, James settled down in Lamb House in Sussex, and by 1900 he had entered his major phase and had written three richly textured novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). He died in 1916 in London and was buried in the United States. Analysis • Henry James believed that an author must be granted his donnée, or central idea, and then be judged on the execution of his material. James’s stories are about members of high society. The characters do not engage in dramatic actions but spend much of their time in cryptic conversations, which slowly reveal the intense psychological strain under which they are laboring. James’s narrators are often confused individuals trying to puzzle out and evaluate themselves and the people around them. Romance is frequently at the center of James’s tales, but his lovers have difficulty coming to terms with their own feelings, and often love goes unrecognized and unfulfilled. Marriage is often rejected by his characters, and when it does appear, it is often the scene of heartaches and hidden resentments. Death and dying are also a part of James’s stories. Even though he focuses on the death of women and children, he avoids both the macabre and the sentimental. His stories can be divided into three categories: international romances, tales about writers and artists, and introspective narratives about wasted lives.

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James has not been given the same recognition for his short fiction that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe have received; yet James devoted much of his literary life to the creation of short fiction and made many attempts to master the form. Several times in his life he expressed the desire to give up writing novels and to devote himself solely to creating short fiction. For half a century, James employed himself in the writing of 112 pieces of short fiction, beginning with “A Tragedy of Error” in 1864 and ending with “The Round of Visits” in 1910. He began writing stories ten years before he published his first novel, and over his lifetime, his stories appeared in thirty-five different periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. James called his short fiction “tales,” and he divided his tales into Library of Congress types. The anecdote, which focuses on one character and one incident, is a brief, compact, and highly distilled story comparable to a sonnet. The longer nouvelle, which often ran between twenty thousand and forty-five thousand words, allowed James greater development in his short fiction, not for multiplying incidents but for probing the depths of a character’s experience. James expanded his stories because he wanted to explore the richness of human experience that lies hidden behind the surface of everyday life. James’s major tales can be divided into three periods: His early stories focus on the international theme; during his middle years, his stories center on writers and artists; and his final stories focus on older characters who have gone through life but never really lived. James’s international stories focus on taking characters with set expectations and placing them in foreign environments. Daisy Miller is one of James’s early novelettes and deals with a young American girl who finds herself out of place in a European environment. Daisy Miller • In Daisy Miller, young Frederick Winterbourne, an American living in Europe, becomes fascinated with the garrulous Daisy Miller, who is vacationing on the Continent. The free-spirited Daisy amiably flirts with Winterbourne. Although he is attracted to her, he is aware that she and her negligent mother are the source of gossip among European Americans, who are scandalized by the forward ways of the unchaperoned young American. After seeing Daisy in Vevey, he again meets her in Rome, where she is frequently seen with Giovanelli, who is thought to be an Italian adventurer. Ostracized by her American compatriots, she continues to be seen with Giovanelli and risks her life by spending a moonlit night with him at the Colosseum,

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where she contracts malaria and dies. The puzzled Winterbourne attends her funeral and realizes that she is innocent. In Daisy Miller, James explores the dilemma of an innocent American woman who flouts the social codes of European society. More than that, however, he explores the mind of Winterbourne, a Europeanized American who tries to figure out whether Daisy is naïve or reckless. Like other Jamesean heroes, Winterbourne cannot commit himself to a woman with whom he is falling in love. Finding her attractive but shallow, he is compelled to lecture her on mores, and when he sees her at the Colosseum, he “cuts her dead.” Unable to break Winterbourne’s stiffness, she sends him a message from her deathbed, noting that she was fond of him. Convinced that he has been unjust to her, Winterbourne escapes into his studies and becomes entangled with a foreign woman. James’s heroine, like Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, represents American innocence. Both have found themselves in a world order that puts them at risk, and both are sacrificed by those who should have helped them. In addition to introducing the international theme, Daisy Miller introduces two Jamesean types: the sacrificed woman and the egotist who rejects her love. Though James later rejected his subtitle A Study, the novelette Daisy Miller is a study of the complexity of human relationships. The enigmatic but vivacious Daisy is sacrificed at the Colosseum like the early Christians, while the reticent and regretful lover experiences a sense of loss as he retreats from the world of spontaneity and life. “The Aspern Papers” • In “The Aspern Papers,” James takes the international theme beyond the romance and weaves a darker and more complex tale. In order to obtain the letters of the American poet Jeffrey Aspern, an unnamed American editor takes up residence with Aspern’s former mistress Juliana Bordereau and is willing to make love to her middle-aged niece, Miss Tita. He pays exorbitant rent for a room in their Venetian hideaway and spends lavishly to create a garden in their courtyard. Feeling that he is inspired by the mystic presence of Aspern and willing to take any measure to obtain the letters, he breaks into Juliana’s drawer and is caught. He retreats, and the dying Juliana hides the papers in her mattress. After Juliana dies, Miss Tita offers to give him the papers if he will marry her. He rejects her proposal only to reconsider it too late, after Miss Tita has burned the papers. The unnamed narrator goes by an alias. Later, he reveals his name to Miss Tita but not to the reader. He is one version of the unidentifiable American hero who either shuffles names like James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking or assumes various identities like Melville’s heroes. He is a man without an identity, a parasite living on the reputation of a famous writer. He is also a typical American monomaniacal quester, fixed on an obsessive quest and willing to sacrifice all in pursuit of it. The narrator sees himself as part of a grandiose scheme; the garden that he plants becomes the symbol of a lost Eden. In Miss Tita, James again sets up woman as a sacrificial victim. Like other Jamesean heroes (and heroes from American literature in general), the narrator rejects marriage. Also, in his quest for knowledge, he is willing to sacrifice the private lives of Juliana and Aspern. “The Real Thing” • In his next set of stories, which focus on artists and writers, James explores the relationship between life and art, and the conflict between the artist’s public and private life. In “The Real Thing,” James tells the story of an unnamed artist who hires two highly polished aristocrats forced to earn their living as

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models. Major Monarch and his wife contrast with the artist’s other models, Miss Churm, a feisty cockney, and Oronte, a low-life Italian. The artist discovers that his lower-class models can transform themselves into aristocrats, whereas the real aristocrats present either a static or a distorted picture of reality. An old friend tells him to get rid of the aristocrats because they are ruining his work and jeopardizing his career. The artist, however, respects and sympathizes with their plight but eventually has to dismiss them. In “The Real Thing,” James explores not only the relationship between art and life but also the human dilemma of an artist faced with the conflict of saving his career or upholding his responsibility to two people with whom he sympathizes. The story is built on a series of finely balanced contrasts. The Monarchs are pure aristocrats. The artist thinks that they have come to sit for a portrait, but they have come to be hired as models. The Monarchs are aristocrats, yet they cannot model aristocrats, whereas Miss Churm and Oronte are commoners who can easily transform themselves into gentry. Ironically, the Englishwoman models for Italian types, while the Italian model does Englishmen. The servant-class models start out waiting on the Monarchs, but later the Monarchs wait on the servants. Thus, class distinctions are reversed. The artist wants to paint artistic portraits for which the aristocratic Monarchs are suitable, yet he devotes himself to commercial illustrations, using a working woman who can impersonate an empress. The aristocrats display themselves like slaves at an auction, whereas the servants do their job without auditioning. The lower-class models are professionals; the aristocrats are amateurs. The artist friend is supposedly a good judge of models, but he is a second-rate painter. The greatest irony of all is that people who have no sense of self can become transformed into commercial art, while people holding on to their identity, their own clothes, and their own manners become too photographic, too typical, and too much the real thing. Although the artist must rid himself of the two aristocrats, his experience with them has moved him more deeply than his work with the professional models. The story is a gem of balance and contrast that transforms an aesthetic dilemma into an ethical one and explores the relationship of art to life, servant to master, self to role, portraiture to illustration, and commercial art to lived experience. “The Real Thing” is an often-anthologized story and a perfect illustration of James’s craft in the anecdote or traditional short story. “The Figure in the Carpet” • The theme of the relationship between art and life is broadened in James’s stories about writers. During his middle period, James created a series of stories in which a young would-be writer or critic surveys the life and work of a master writer. In “The Figure in the Carpet,” a story about an eccentric writer who has gained significant critical attention, James probes the nature of criticism itself. An unidentified critic trying to gain a name for himself is called upon to review The Middle, the latest novel of the famous author Hugh Vereker, because the lead critic, George Corvick, has to meet his fiancé, Gwendolen Erme. The narrator writes a glowing review of Vereker’s work, then attends a party in hope of seeing the great author. When a socialite presents Vereker with the narrator’s review, he calls it “the usual twaddle.” Vereker later apologizes to the critic but says that critics often misunderstand the obvious meaning, which stands out in his novels like a figure in a carpet. The critic probes Vereker for clues, but the author says that the clues run throughout his entire work. After searching for the secret meaning in Vereker’s work, the critic gives up the quest as a hoax. His fellow critic Corvick, however, uses the quest for the

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narrative secret as an excuse to work more closely with his fiancé, Gwendolen. Frustrated in their efforts, Corvick leaves the country. While away, he writes Gwendolen that he has figured out the secret, and he and Gwendolen get married. When Corvick dies, Gwendolen will not reveal the secret to the narrator, who is even willing to marry her to obtain it. Gwendolen does marry a mediocre critic, Drayton Deane. After the deaths of Gwendolen, Vereker, and Vereker’s wife, the narrator tries to obtain the secret from Deane, who knows nothing about it. In “The Figure in the Carpet,” James again turns to the monomanical unnamed narrator on a quest for secret knowledge hidden in a text. Like the narrator of “The Aspern Papers,” the critic is willing to marry a woman to gain greater knowledge about an author’s work. James said that the story was about misunderstood authors and the need for more analytical criticism. Yet the story sets up typical Jamesean paradoxes. Is Vereker being honest or is “the figure” merely a hoax on critics? Does Corvick really know the secret or is he using his knowledge to win Gwendolen? What is the puzzling connection between interpreting a work and exploring the intimate relationships between men and women? Why do the many so-called possessors of the secret die? This story has been cited as a model for the critical act by many modern critics. Its metafictional qualities and its strange mixture of love and death with the act of interpretation give it a distinctly postmodern quality. The stories written in James’s later years take on a mystical tone. The artist is replaced by a sensitive individual who has alienated himself from the world. The characters are few and often focus on only two people. The characters remain obsessive, but now they are in pursuit of that part of themselves that haunts them. The Jamesean love story is played out into old age, with the woman as a patient bystander, a reflector of the man’s battle with himself. The image of the hunt found in Cooper, Melville, and Ernest Hemingway is now symbolic of an internal quest for the terrors hidden within the self. The artists, who in earlier stories sought to gain a second chance or find a next time, now become egocentric gentlemen facing the life that they could have had. The venture into the wilderness becomes a metaphor for the descent into the unconscious. “The Altar of the Dead” • In “The Altar of the Dead,” George Stransom constantly memorializes the death of his bride, Mary Antrim, who died of a fever after their wedding day. Like a character from a Poe short story, he maintains an obsessive devotion to his dead love and is chained to the observance of the anniversary of his wife’s death. While remembering his wife, he meets his friend Paul Creston and Paul’s second wife. In a strange way, James returns to the international theme by making Creston’s new wife an American who has married for money. Stransom meditates on Creston’s first wife and idealizes her in her death. Later the same day, Stransom learns of the death of his boyhood friend, Acton Hague, a man who betrayed Stransom in some undisclosed manner. Hague becomes the only dead friend that Stransom rejects, as Stransom becomes more and more absorbed with the dead and creates an altar of candles to them. A mysterious woman becomes a fellow mourner at Stransom’s shrine. It takes him months to learn her name and years to find out her address. He finally comes to her apartment after the death of her aunt, only to find that her room is a personal shrine to Acton Hague, who rejected the woman. Since Stransom cannot light a candle for Hague, the relationship ends. The loss of the woman casts a shadow over his daily devotions at his altar. Dismayed, he has a vision of his dead wife, Mary, smiling at him from heaven. Just then, the mysterious woman

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returns to him as he dies in her arms. The last candle on the altar is lit not only for Acton Hague but also for Stransom. Stransom has left the world of the living and has become obsessed with the dead. He forms a distant relationship with a fellow mourner, but she is only a part of his isolated world. Her feelings are never considered. Instead of forming a meaningful relationship, he continues to withdraw from human love. Stransom, like other heroes in James’s later tales, becomes an example of James’s reticent lover, a man who has rejected life and embraced death. The death of Stransom in the woman’s arms unites the love and death theme predominant in the later tales. “The Beast in the Jungle” • “The Beast in the Jungle” is a powerful story about one man’s quest for his illusive identity. John Marcher meets May Bartram when they are both in their thirties. Ten years earlier, Marcher revealed to her that he was singled out for a terrible fate. When Marcher recalls that he told her about his premonition, they form a relationship, and May begins to wait with him. Blindly, he rules out love as the strange fate that awaits him and forms a friendship with May, taking her to operas, giving her gifts, and spending hours talking about his fate. As the years pass, he becomes skeptical that the “beast” will ever come. He feels reluctant to take May along with him on a “tiger hunt.” Finally, May becomes ill. She knows his fate but will not tell him because she wants to make him a man like any other. He realizes that he might save her, but he is too preoccupied with his own destiny to become involved with her. She eventually tells him that his fate has already passed him by and that he never recognized it. When she dies, he contemplates that her death might be the terrible fate, but he rules out this premise. Marcher, an outsider at May’s funeral, eventually goes abroad only to return to the grave of his friend to see another mourner stricken with grief. Suddenly, the beast leaps out at Marcher, as he realizes that he has failed to love and has been unable to feel deeply about anything. He has been an empty man who has watched his life from the outside but has failed to live it. Marcher, like Stransom, is held prisoner to an obsession that removes him from the world of human relationships. He cannot give himself to another, so he must await his fate. James called the story a negative adventure. Indeed, Marcher’s trek into the wilderness is his own confrontation with his unconscious fears. In his monomaniacal obsession, he sacrifices May, who becomes dedicated to waiting for him to discover his fate, while he prides himself on his disinterestedness. In “The Beast in the Jungle,” as in other James stories, the woman becomes useful to the man as a siphon for his own obsessions. Marcher fails to recognize and accept love and wastes his life by projecting all his endeavors onto a nebulous future. He is so wrapped up in his own ego that he fails to believe that the death of a lifelong friend is a terrible fate. In the end, he is brought into the world of the dead. Like Stransom, he has lived outside the present and now has only a lost past on which to look back. Like Winterbourne at the funeral of Daisy Miller, he begins to realize what the woman has meant to him. The cemetery where he stands is compared to a garden, which can be seen as an Eden, where Marcher realizes his own ignorance and comes to a painful awareness of his loss of paradise. The cemetery is also called a wilderness, a wilderness that will take him beyond the settled life and into the terrible recesses of his own heart. Marcher is a version of the American future-oriented pioneer unattached to family and loved ones, an Emersonian hero caught in the void of his own solipsistic world. He also becomes one of the first modern antiheroes, inauthentic men who live outside themselves, men to whom nothing really happens.

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“The Jolly Corner” • Stransom becomes absorbed in the past, in the world of the dead, and he neglects to establish a relationship with the woman who mourns with him. Marcher becomes involved in a vacuous destiny, unable to see the love that surrounds him. In “The Jolly Corner,” Spencer Brydon, another alienated man who rejects the present, pursues his obsession with a past that might have been. Having lived abroad, Brydon returns to New York after a thirty-three-year absence only to find that the world has changed around him. James again explores what happens to an individual who finds himself in an alien culture. When Brydon comes to settle some property that he owns in the United States, he begins to wonder about his talents as a businessman and contemplates the kind of man he might have been had he stayed in the United States. He eventually develops a morbid obsession with his alter ego, the other self that he might have been. One night, Brydon enters the empty house called the Jolly Corner in search of his doppelgänger. When he finally comes face to face with it, he faints at the monstrous sight. Upon recovery, he finds himself in the lap of Alice Staverton, who reassures him that she does not find his shadow self so horrible. In the end, he rejoices that he has gained knowledge about himself. Spencer Brydon’s return to the United States plays an ironic twist on James’s international theme, as a Europeanized American returns to a United States that he feels alienated from and then conjures up an American self that horrifies him. Like Marcher, Brydon finds himself on a hunt stalking his secret self, his fate that might have been. Again, James uses the image of the hunt to symbolize an internal journey into the subconscious mind. As the doors of life’s options open and close around Brydon in the haunted house of his lost youth, the monster leaps out at him as it did at Marcher. Both men, like Stransom, collapse upon the women they have neglected. Alice Staverton is the woman who waited and shared his destiny, the way that May Bartram did Marcher’s. She not only knew his double but also accepted it. The use of the double figure was popular in romantic and gothic literature, but in “The Jolly Corner,” James gave a deeper psychological and philosophical undertone to the motif. In his last group of stories, James used the mystery adventure format to probe the inner psyche of his characters and to examine characters obsessed with living life outside the present. James brought a greater psychological realism to the genre of short fiction, expanded its length in order to encompass an in-depth range of inner experiences, transformed the mystery story into metafictional narratives that have a distinctly postmodern quality, and reshaped the quest motif of American literature into existential probings about authenticating one’s identity. Paul Rosefeldt Other major works plays: Daisy Miller, pb. 1883 (adaptation of his novel); The American, pr. 1891, pb. 1949 (adaptation of his novel); Guy Domville, pb. 1894, privately; pr. 1895, pb. 1949; The Reprobate, pb. 1894, pr. 1919; Theatricals: Tenants and Disengaged, pb. 1894; Theatricals, Second Series: The Album and The Reprobate, pb. 1895; The High Bid, pr. 1908, pb. 1949; The Other House, wr. 1909, pb. 1949; The Outcry, wr. 1909, pr. 1917, pb. 1949; The Saloon, pr. 1911, pb. 1949 (one act); The Complete Plays of Henry James, pb. 1949 (Leon Edel, editor). novels: Roderick Hudson, 1876; The American, 1876-1877; An International Episode, 1878-1879 (novella); Daisy Miller, 1878; The Europeans, 1878; Confidence, 1879-1880;

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The Portrait of a Lady, 1880-1881; Washington Square, 1880; The Bostonians, 1885-1886; The Princess Casamassima, 1885-1886; The Reverberator, 1888; The Tragic Muse, 18891890; The Awkward Age, 1897-1899; The Spoils of Poynton, 1897; What Maisie Knew, 1897; In the Cage, 1898; The Turn of the Screw, 1898; The Sacred Fount, 1901; The Wings of the Dove, 1902; The Ambassadors, 1903; The Golden Bowl, 1904; The Outcry, 1911; The Ivory Tower, 1917; The Sense of the Past, 1917. nonfiction: Transatlantic Sketches, 1875; French Poets and Novelists, 1878; Hawthorne, 1879; Portraits of Places, 1883; A Little Tour in France, 1884; The Art of Fiction, 1884; Partial Portraits, 1888; Essays in London, 1893; William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903; English Hours, 1905; The American Scene, 1907; Views and Reviews, 1908; Italian Hours, 1909; A Small Boy and Others, 1913 (memoirs); Notes of a Son and Brother, 1914 (memoirs); Notes on Novelists, 1914; The Middle Years, 1917; The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, 1934 (R. P. Blackmur, editor); The Notebooks of Henry James, 1947 (F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, editors); The Scenic Art, 1948 (Allan Wade, editor); Henry James Letters, 1974-1984 (5 volumes; Leon Edel, editor); Henry James: Literary Criticism, 1984; The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction, 1986; The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, 1987; Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, 1999 (Susan E. Gunter, editor); Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, 1999 (Pierre A. Walker, editor); Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, 2001 (Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe, editors). Bibliography Bell, Millicent. “‘The Pupil’ and the Unmentionable Subject.” Raritan 16 (Winter, 1997): 50-63. Claims the story is about that which was once considered almost unmentionable by the genteel: money. James focuses on the extinct code of manners and taste by which refined persons were not supposed to talk much about money. Dewey, Joseph, and Brooke Horvath, eds. “The Finer Thread, the Tighter Weave”: Essays on the Short Fiction of Henry James. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001. Critical study. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Flannery, Denis. Henry James: A Certain Illusion. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Analysis of illusion in the works of James. Bibliography and index. Gage, Richard P. Order and Design: Henry James Titled Story Sequences. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Gage examines James’s published short-story collections, such as Terminations, Embarrassments, and The Soft Side, in order to show how James collected his stories around a central theme. Focusing on the interrelatedness of James’s works, Gage shows how James’s stories can be divided into organized units based upon a holistic design. Hocks, Richard A. Henry James: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Hocks’s book is a good introduction to James’s short fiction. The book divides James’s stories into three periods: the early social realism, the middle tales dealing with psychological and moral issues, and the later works of poetic expressionism. Detailed analyses of the major works are provided, along with selections of James’s writings on short fiction and a collection of critical articles on selected works. Horne, Philip. “Henry James and the Economy of the Short Story.” In Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, edited by Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik. London: Macmillan, 1996. Discusses some of the commercial and social constraints and opportunities that affected James’s writing of short fiction in the last half of his career.

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Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Discusses James’s ghost stories and the significance of the “ghostly” for James’s work generally. Among the best-known James stories discussed are “The Jolly Corner” and “The Turn of the Screw.” Lustig devotes a third of this study to “The Turn of the Screw,” which he argues is a story about reading. Martin, W. R., and Warren U. Ober. Henry James’s Apprenticeship: The Tales, 1864-1882. Toronto: P. D. Meany Publishers, 1994. Analysis of the stories James wrote in the first fifteen years of his career, suggesting how the vision he was creating in those stories prepared for the writing of his first masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady. Discusses the sources of his basic theme of the victimized innocent. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of twelve short stories by James: “The Altar of the Dead” and “The Beast in the Jungle” (vol. 1); “Europe,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Great Good Place” (vol. 3); “In the Cage,” “The Lesson of the Master,” and “The Jolly Corner” (vol. 4); “The Middle Years” (vol. 5); “The Pupil” and “The Real Thing” (vol. 6); and “The Tree of Knowledge” (vol. 7). Rawlings, Peter. “A Kodak Refraction of Henry James’s ‘The Real Thing.’” Journal of American Studies 32 (December, 1998): 447-462. Discusses “The Real Thing” and its treatment of issues of representation and reproduction as an allegory in which the tyrannical forces of the real and the vulgar, unless subjected to the processes of selection and idealization, can be all-vanquishing. Wagenknecht, Edward. The Tales of Henry James. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. The book contains brief analyses of fifty-five of James’s major tales as well as thumbnail sketches of other stories. It provides a good reference work for someone looking for short summaries and critical bibliographies (found in the footnotes) but lacks detailed criticism of individual works as well as historical perspective.

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Sarah Orne Jewett Born: South Berwick, Maine; September 3, 1849 Died: South Berwick, Maine; June 24, 1909 Principal short fiction • Old Friends and New, 1879; Country By-Ways, 1881; The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore, 1884; A White Heron, and Other Stories, 1886; The King of Folly Island and Other People, 1888; Strangers and Wayfarers, 1890; Tales of New England, 1890; A Native of Wimby, 1893; The Life of Nancy, 1895; The Queen’s Twin, 1899; Stories and Tales, 1910; The Uncollected Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, 1971. Other literary forms • Sarah Orne Jewett wrote four novels, and she published popular books for children, including Play Days (1878) and Betty Leicester (1890). Her main work of nonfiction was a history, The Story of the Normans (1887). Achievements • Sarah Orne Jewett is best known as a local colorist who captured with fidelity the life of coastal Maine in the late nineteenth century in sensitive and moving portraits, mainly of women’s lives. Except for The Country of the Pointed Firs, widely considered her masterpiece, Jewett’s long fiction is thought less successful than her short stories. During her lifetime, she was considered one of the best shortstory writers in America. Most of her stories appeared first in popular magazines such as The Atlantic, under the editorship of William Dean Howells, and Harper’s. American literary historian F. O. Matthiessen said in his 1929 study of Jewett that she and Emily Dickinson were the two best women writers America had produced. Willa Cather offered Jewett similar praise and credited her with positively changing the direction of her literary career in a brief but rich acquaintance near the end of Jewett’s life. Biography • Sarah Orne Jewett spent most of her life in South Berwick on the Maine coast, where she was born on September 3, 1849. Daughter of a country doctor, she aspired to medicine herself, but moved toward writing because of early ill health (which led her father to take her on his calls, for fresh air), the special literary education encouraged by her family, and her discovery as a teenager of her “little postage stamp of soil” in reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862). Her father, especially, encouraged her to develop her keen powers of observation, and her grandfathers stimulated her interest in storytelling. After the death of her father in 1878, she began a lifelong friendship with Annie Fields that brought her into contact with leading writers in America and Europe, such as Henry James and George Eliot. Jewett and Fields traveled together in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, and after the death of Mr. Fields, they lived together for extended periods. Jewett began writing and publishing at the age of nineteen. During her career she developed and maintained the purpose of helping her readers to understand and love the ordinary people of her native Maine, and later she told stories about other misunderstood people such as the Irish and southern whites. In her career, she produced more than twenty volumes of fiction for children and adults, history, prose sketches, and poetry. Her short stories show rapidly increasing subtlety and power. Her early books were well received, but beginning with The Mate of the Daylight,

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and Friends Ashore, reviewers routinely praised her collections highly. It was not unusual for reviewers to be puzzled by how much they liked Jewett’s stories. A frequent response was that the stories seemed to lack plot and action and yet at the same time they were absorbing and charming. Late TO VIEW IMAGE, twentieth century critics, notably PLEASE SEE feminist critics, have suggested that PRINT EDITION Jewett was developing a kind of storyOF THIS BOOK. telling in opposition to the popular melodramas with their fast-paced romance or adventure plots. Jewett’s stories came more and more to focus on intimate relations of friendship, especially between older women, but eventually in one way or another between all kinds of people. By the time Jewett wrote her masterpiece, the novella The Country of the Pointed Firs, she had fully develJames Notman oped a form of narration that pointed toward the James Joyce of Dubliners (1914). This novella, and a number of her best stories such as “Miss Tempy’s Watchers” and “The Queen’s Twin,” would set up a problem of tact, of how to overcome barriers to communion between two or more people, and then through a subtle process of preparation would make overcoming these barriers possible. The story would end with an epiphany that involved communion between at least two people. Though she wrote a variety of other kinds of stories in her career, this type of development was probably her major accomplishment, and it achieved its fullest realization in The Country of the Pointed Firs. A tragic carriage accident on her birthday in 1902 left her in such pain that she gave up fiction writing and devoted herself to her friends. In the fall of 1908, she met Willa Cather, to whom she wrote several letters that inspired Cather to write about Nebraska. Cather recognized Jewett’s help by dedicating to Jewett her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! (1913). Jewett died at her South Berwick home on June 24, 1909. Analysis • When a young reader wrote to Sarah Orne Jewett in 1899 to express admiration of her stories for girls, Jewett encouraged her to continue reading: You will always have the happiness of finding friendships in books, and it grows pleasanter and pleasanter as one grows older. And then the people in books are apt to make us understand ‘real’ people better, and to know why they do things, and so we learn sympathy and patience and enthusiasm for those we live with, and can try to help them in what they are doing, instead of being half suspicious and finding fault. Here Jewett states one of the central aims of her fiction, to help people learn the arts of friendship. Chief among these arts is tact, which Jewett defines in The Country of the

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Pointed Firs as a perfect self-forgetfulness that allows one to enter reverently and sympathetically the sacred realms of the inner lives of others. In her stories, learning tact is often a major element, and those who are successful are often rewarded with epiphanies—moments of visionary union with individuals or with nature—or with communion—the feeling of oneness with another person that for Jewett is the ultimate joy of friendship. “A White Heron” • “A White Heron,” which first appeared in A White Heron, is often considered Jewett’s best story, perhaps because it goes so well with such American classics as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), and William Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1942). With these works, the story shares a central, complex symbol in the white heron and the major American theme of a character’s complex relationship with the landscape and society. As a story about a young person choosing between society and nature as the proper spiritual guide for a particular time in her life, however, “A White Heron” is atypical for Jewett. One main feature that marks the story as Jewett’s, however, is that the main character, Sylvia, learns a kind of tact during her adventure in the woods, a tact that grows out of an epiphany and that leads to the promise of continuing communion with nature that the story implies will help this somewhat weak and solitary child grow into a strong adult. Sylvia, a young girl rescued by her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, from the overstimulation and overcrowding of her city family, meets a young ornithologist, who fascinates her and promises her ten dollars if she will tell him where he can find the white heron he has long sought for his collection. Childishly tempted by this magnificent sum and her desire to please the hunter, who knows so much of nature yet kills the birds, she determines to climb at dawn a landmark pine from which she might see the heron leave its nest. She succeeds in this quest, but finds she cannot tell her secret to the hunter. The story ends with the assertion that she could have loved the hunter as “a dog loves” and with a prayer to the woodlands and summer to compensate her loss with “gifts and graces.” Interesting problems in technique and tone occur when Sylvia climbs the pine. The narrative tone shifts in highly noticeable ways. As she begins her walk to the tree before dawn, the narrator expresses personal anxiety that “the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest.” This statement seems to accentuate an intimacy between reader and narrator; it states the position the narrative rhetoric has implied from the beginning and, in effect, asks if the reader shares this anxiety. From this point until Sylvia reaches the top of the tree, the narrator gradually merges with Sylvia’s internal consciousness. During the climb, Jewett builds on this intimacy with Sylvia. Both narrator and reader are aware of sharing in detail Sylvia’s subjective impressions of her climb and of her view, and this merging of the subjectivities of the story (character, narrator, and reader) extends beyond the persons to objects as the narrator unites with the tree and imagines its sympathy for the climber. The merging extends further yet when Sylvia, the reader, and the narrator see with lyric clarity the sea, the sun, and two hawks that, taken together, make all three observers feel as if they could fly out over the world. Being atop the tallest landmark pine, “a great mainmast to the voyaging earth,” one is, in a way, soaring in the cosmos as the hawks soar in the air. At this point of clarity and union, the narrative tone shifts again. The narrator

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speaks directly to Sylvia, commanding her to look at the point where the heron will rise. The vision of the heron rising from a dead hemlock, flying by the pine, and settling on a nearby bough is a kind of colloquy of narrator and character and, if the technique works as it seems to intend, of the reader, too. This shift in “place” involves a shift in time to the present tense that continues through Sylvia’s absorption of the secret and her descent from the tree. It seems clear that the intent of these shifts is to transcend time and space, to unite narrator, reader, character, and the visible scene which is “all the world.” This is virtually the same technical device which is the central organizing device of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and the intent of that device seems similar as well. The reader is to feel a mystical, “transcendental” union with the cosmos that assures one of its life and one’s participation in that life. A purpose of this union is to make justifiable and understandable Sylvia’s choice not to give the heron’s life away because they have “watched the sea and the morning together.” The narrator’s final prayer makes sense when it is addressed to transcendental nature on behalf of the girl who has rejected superfluous commodity in favor of Spirit, the final gift of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s nature in his essay, “Nature.” Though this story is atypical of Jewett insofar as it offers a fairly clear transcendental view of nature and so presents a moment of communion with the nonhuman, it is characteristic of Jewett in that by subtly drawing reader and narrator into the epiphany, the story creates a moment of human communion. “The Only Rose” • More typical of Jewett’s best work is “The Only Rose,” which was first published in The Atlantic in January, 1894, and was then collected in The Life of Nancy. This story is organized by three related epiphanies, each centering on the rose, and each involving a blooming. In the first “miracle of the rose,” Mrs. Bickford and Miss Pendexter are hypnotized into communion by contemplating the new bloom on Mrs. Bickford’s poor bush. In this epiphany, Miss Pendexter enters into spiritual sympathy with Mrs. Bickford, realizing that her silence this time is unusual, resulting not from having nothing to say, but from “an overburdening sense of the inexpressible.” They go on to share the most intimate conversation of their relationship. The blooming flower leads to a blooming in their friendship. It also leads, however, to Mrs. Bickford’s dilemma: On which of her three dead husbands’ graves should she place this single rose? Her need to answer this question points to a deeper need to escape from her comparatively isolated and ineffectual life by shifting from an ethic of obligation to an ethic of love. Her heart has been frozen since her first husband’s death, and it is long past time now for it to thaw and bloom again. Miss Pendexter understands something of this and tactfully leaves Mrs. Bickford to work it out for herself. The second miracle of the rose occurs almost at the end of the story, when John confesses his love for Lizzie to his Aunt Bickford as he drives her to the graveyard. The symbolic rose of young and passionate love moves him to speak, even though he is unsure of the propriety of speaking up to the wealthy aunt from whom he hopes to receive an inheritance. His story of young love and hope, however, takes Mrs. Bickford out of herself, and she forgets her troubles in sharing his joy. As a result, he blooms, blushing a “fine scarlet.” The final miracle is that while she is taking the flowers to the graves, she realizes which of her husbands should have the rose. At the same time that John is taking the rose for his Lizzie, Mrs. Bickford is giving it in her heart to Albert, the first husband, whom she loved so passionately in her youth. Her realization of this event makes her

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blush “like a girl” and laugh in self-forgetfulness before the graveyard as she remembers that the first flower Albert gave her was just such a rose. In the overall movement of the story, Mrs. Bickford is lifted out of herself and prepared for a richer and deeper communion with her friends and relatives. The single rose blossom seems mysteriously to impose an obligation upon her, but probably it really awakens the ancient spring of love within her that was perhaps covered over by grief at losing Albert so young and by the difficult life that followed his loss. When she finally struggles free of the weight of the intervening years, she recovers her hidden capacity for friendship and joy, for forgetting herself and joining in the happiness of others. She has epiphanies, rediscovers tact, and begins again to experience communion. “Martha’s Lady” • “Martha’s Lady” first appeared in The Atlantic in October, 1897, and was then collected in The Queen’s Twin. This story illustrates Jewett’s mature control over her technique and material. She represents a kind of sainthood without falling into the syrupy sentimentality of popular melodrama. Into a community beginning to show the effects of a Puritan formalism comes Helena Vernon, a young city woman who is unselfconsciously affectionate and beautiful and, therefore, a pleasure to please. She delights her maiden cousin, Harriet Pyne, charms the local minister, who gives her a copy of his Sermons on the Seriousness of Life, and transforms Martha, Harriet’s new and awkward servant girl. In fact, Helena transforms to some extent everyone she meets in the village of Ashford, taking some of the starch out of their stiff and narrow way of life. After Helena leaves to marry, prosper, and suffer in Europe, Martha carries her memory constantly in her heart: “To lose out of sight the friend whom one has loved and lived to please is to lose joy out of life. But if love is true, there comes presently a higher joy of pleasing the ideal, that is to say, the perfect friend.” This is the ideal of sainthood that the narrative voice asks the reader to admire. Thanks largely to Martha’s living this ideal of always behaving so as to please Helena, she and Harriet live a happy life together for forty years. Helena returns to visit, worn, but with the same youthful spirit, and to reward with a kiss what she recognizes as Martha’s perfect memory of the services Helena enjoyed as a girl. This recognition acknowledges Martha’s faithfulness to her ideal and creates that moment of communion that is the ultimate reward for such faithfulness. What prevents this story from dissolving into mush? Nearly all the special features of Jewett’s technical facility are necessary. She avoids overelaboration. It is not difficult for an alert reader to notice the parallel to the Christ story type; a liberating figure enters a legalistic society to inspire love in a group of followers, which results in an apotheosis after her departure. The disciple remains true to the ideal until the liberator comes again to claim the disciple. Jewett could have forced this analogy on the reader, but she does not. Only a few details subtly suggest the analogy—character names, calling Martha a saint, and her relics—but these need not compel the reader in this direction, which, in fact, adds only a little to the story’s power. Although avoiding overelaboration, Jewett also avoids internal views. On the whole, the story is made of narrative summary and brief dramatic scenes. Emotion is revealed through action and speech; this technical choice produces less intensity of feeling than, for example, the intimate internal view of Sylvia in “The White Heron.” The result is a matter-of-factness of tone that keeps Martha’s sainthood of a piece with the ordinary world of Ashford. This choice is supported by nearly every other

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technical choice of the story—the attention to detail of setting, the gentle but pointed humor directed against religious formalism, and the emergence of Martha from the background of the story. Jewett’s intention seems to be on the one hand to prevent the reader from emoting in excess of the worth of the object, but on the other to feel strongly and warmly the true goodness of Martha’s faithfulness to love. Another purpose of this narrative approach is to demonstrate tact. In “A White Heron,” both Sylvia and the reader enter the quest for the heron with mixed motives, but the nature of the journey—its difficulties, its joys, the absorption it requires— tends to purify motives and to prepare the spirit for epiphany. Sylvia’s vision from atop the pine culminates in communion with the wild bird, a vision she has earned and that she may repeat if she realizes its value. Jewett’s light touch, her own tact in dealing with such delicate subjects, is one of her leading characteristics, and it flowers magnificently in the fiction of the last ten years of her writing career. Although the stories discussed above illustrate Jewett’s most powerful and moving storytelling, they do not illustrate so fully another of the main characteristics of her stories—humor. Humor is often present in her stories and can be found in more abundance than might be expected in “The Only Rose” and “Martha’s Lady.” She also wrote a number of funny stories that discriminating readers such as Cather would not hesitate to compare with the work of Mark Twain. “The Guests of Mrs. Timms,” though more similar to the stories of Jane Austen than Twain, is a popular story of the humorous ironies that result when a socially ambitious widow calls on another widow of higher status without announcing her visit in advance. Among her best humorous stories are “Law Lane,” “All My Sad Captains,” “A Winter Courtship,” and “The Quest of Mr. Teaby,” but there are many others that are a delight to read. Terry Heller Other major works children’s literature: Play Days: A Book of Stories for Children, 1878; The Story of the Normans, 1887; Betty Leicester: A Story for Girls, 1890. novels: Deephaven, 1877 (linked sketches); A Country Doctor, 1884; A Marsh Island, 1885; The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896; The Tory Lover, 1901. nonfiction: Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, 1911 (Annie Fields, editor); Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, 1956 (Richard Cary, editor). poetry: Verses: Printed for Her Friends, 1916. Bibliography Auten, Janet Gebhart. “‘Nothing Much Happens in This Story’: Teaching Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron.’” In Short Stories in the Classroom, edited by Carole L. Hamilton and Peter Kratzke. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. Recounts several experiences in teaching the story to high school students, making suggestions about the value of the story to exploring conflicts of interest and expanding the canon. Cary, Richard, ed. Appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett: Twenty-nine Interpretive Essays. Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1973. This book collects a good cross section of the major writing on Jewett from 1885 until 1972. Contains biographical sketches, extended reviews, examinations of her technique, interpretations of some individual works, and evaluations of her career.

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Donovan, Josephine. Sarah Orne Jewett. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. This critical study includes a chronology and an examination of Jewett’s literary career, following the development of her major themes through her works. Donovan is especially interested in Jewett’s feminist themes. She provides primary and secondary bibliographies. Graham, Margaret Baker. “Visions of Time in The Country of the Pointed Firs.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Winter, 1995): 29-37. Discusses the concept of time in Jewett’s book from Julia Kristeva’s feminist perspective; argues that Jewett presents masculine, linear time and feminine, cyclical time, yet transcends both to achieve monumental time. Contends the narrator of the stories transcends the notion of superficial change and sees that the mythical and the historical are the same. Matthiessen, F. O. Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. This short biographical study may be the most readily available in libraries. Matthiessen surveys Jewett’s life without going into great detail. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Jewett: “The Courting of Sister Wisby” (vol. 2), “Miss Tempy’s Watchers” and “A Native of Winby” (vol. 5), “The Town Poor” (vol. 7), and “A White Heron” (vol. 8). Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Critical study that asserts the importance of myth and folklore in the work of two women of different races and generations who draw on the cultural roots of their people. Nagel, Gwen L., ed. Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. This collection includes sixteen contemporary reviews of Jewett’s books, reprints of eight critical essays from 1955 to 1983, and eight original essays. These deal with biography as well as interpretation. The introduction surveys the history of critical writing on Jewett. Nagel, Gwen L., and James Nagel. Sarah Orne Jewett: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Introduced with a survey of criticism on Jewett, this reference guide lists and annotates writing about Jewett from 1873 to 1976. It is invaluable as a source for secondary writing and for forming impressions of how Jewett’s reputation has developed. For discussions of criticism since 1976, see American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Silverthorne, Elizabeth. Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1993. Silverthorne describes the increasing interest in Jewett’s treatment of women, ecology, and regional life. Silverthorne had access to letters and manuscripts unavailable to previous biographers, and she takes full advantage of Jewett scholarship.

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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Born: Cologne, Germany; May 7, 1927 Principal short fiction • Like Birds, Like Fishes, and Other Stories, 1963; A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories, 1968; An Experience of India, 1971; How I Became a Holy Mother, and Other Stories, 1976; Out of India: Selected Stories, 1986; East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, 1998. Other literary forms • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the author of several novels, ranging from To Whom She Will in 1955 (pb. in U.S. as Amrita) to My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past in 2004. Her 1975 novel Heat and Dust won a Booker McConnell Prize and a National Book League award. In screenplay form, that work won an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Her screenplay adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) won a Writers Guild of America Award in 1986 and an Academy Award in 1987. Jhabvala’s screenplay Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990) received a New York Film Critics Circle Award. In 1993, her screenplay adaptation of Forster’s Howards End (1910) was nominated for an Academy Award. She also adapted Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl (1904) to the screen in 2000 and Diane Johnson’s novel Le Divorce (1997) in 2003. Achievements • In addition to the many awards she has won for her fiction, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1976 and a Neil Gunn International Fellowship in 1979. She was a MacArthur Foundation fellow from 1986 to 1989. Biography • Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne, Germany, on May 7, 1927, the second child of Marcus Prawer, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, and Eleanora Cohn. The family left Germany in 1939. Most of their relatives perished in World War II. In England, Prawer was educated at a grammar school and at Queen Mary College, London University. In 1951, she received her master’s degree in English literature; her thesis was on the eighteenth century short story. Soon afterward, she married Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi, who had studied architecture at the university. They settled in New Delhi, India, where, with her husband’s encouragement, she began producing fiction. Shortly after the birth of their first daughter, Jhabvala completed a novel, To Whom She Will (1955). In 1957, her stories began appearing in The New Yorker. In 1961, film producers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant asked Jhabvala to write a screenplay of her novel The Householder (1960). Thus began a collaboration that produced some of the most admired films of the twentieth century. In 1975, Jhabvala moved to New York City but continued to maintain a close relationship with her husband. Analysis • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s lack of ties to any one place may account for her objectivity as a writer. However, her detachment does not prevent her from empathizing with her characters, nor does her rootlessness make her less conscious of the im-

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portance of place. Jhabvala’s experiences may have made her more capable of understanding how feelings of isolation affect individuals, whether they are Indian women, restricted by too many traditions, or Manhattanites, burdened by too many options. Jhabvala’s early stories reflect the delight that, in her story “Myself in India,” she describes as a Westerner’s initial reaction to India. Like Jane Austen, to whom she has been compared by critics, Jhabvala here emphasizes the comic elements in family life, though she does satirize self-deception, snobbery, or pretentiousness. In these lighthearted stories, Jhabvala’s characters emerge from their adventures relatively unscathed. For example, the narrator of “My First Marriage,” from Like Birds, Like Fishes and Other Stories, regards her seduction and abandonment as incidents that merely make her more interesting. During the 1970’s, Jhabvala’s short fiction became more pessimistic. Some of her characters seek to escape from the world by following spiritual leaders, as does the protagonist in the title story of An Experience of India; others, like the minister in “Rose Petals,” from the same collection, have hopes of improving society; still others, such as the minister’s wife, dedicate their lives to amusing themselves. Whether they reside in New Delhi or New York, the characters in East into Upper East live with the same uncertainties. Although these later stories often end unresolved, one can find satisfaction in their artistic perfection. “The Old Lady” • “The Old Lady,” from Like Birds, Like Fishes, and Other Stories, is typical of Jhabvala’s early works. Its plot is minimal: The author simply records a few hours of ordinary life in a prosperous Indian family. Besides the servants, the household includes the old lady, her daughter Leila, her son Bobo, and Leila’s daughter Munni. Leila’s estranged husband Krishna and her older brother Satish, a lawyer, appear for lunch. The household is filled with tension. Leila finds her husband irritating and is annoyed with her mother, her brother, and her daughter for being so fond of him. During their lunch together, Leila embarrasses the inoffensive Krishna and quarrels with Bobo and Satish. Afterward, she criticizes her mother for being too oldfashioned to understand divorce. However, to Satish’s annoyance, nothing is decided. The protagonist recognizes this atmosphere as the one that prevailed when her husband was still living. Then she, too, was unhappy; now, however, she has learned from a guru how to distance herself from the emotional turmoil around her. There is a wonderful comic irony in the fact that though her offspring think themselves so much cleverer than their mother, she alone has found the secret of happiness. “A Course of English Studies” • One of the recurring subjects of Jhabvala’s short fiction is the conflict between East and West. In the early story “A Course of English Studies” from An Experience of India, an encounter between East and West is shown as essentially comic. Both of the major characters are worthy targets of satire, the silly Indian girl Nalini, who comes to a British university in order to have a literary love affair, and Dr. Norman Greaves, the weak-willed English teacher whom Nalini chooses as her lover. The story is told from Nalini’s perspective, and though it is told in a third-person narrative, the style reflects her breathless enthusiasm. Although Nalini has no common sense, she is a brilliant tactician, and as she is unhampered by principles and incapable of feeling shame or embarrassment, Greaves does not stand a chance against her. Nalini thoroughly enjoys the affair; it is Greaves who lives in ap-

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prehension. After Nalini pays a visit to his wife and begins planning to take him back to India with her, Greaves terminates the relationship. Nalini recovers rapidly. Convinced that the English poets were wrong about their countrymen’s capacity for passion, she decides that she should return to India alone. In other stories, Jhabvala shows cross-cultural adventures as dangerous and potentially tragic, but the lovers in “A Course of English Studies” end up no worse for their affair, though probably no wiser. “How I Became a Holy Mother” • The title story from the collection How I Became a Holy Mother, and Other Stories focuses on a phenomenon which the author finds puzzling, the migrations of Westerners to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. The story is told in the first person by Katie, who at the age of twenty-three tires of her life in London and heads for India. Katie settles down in an ashram, which is relatively clean, has a picturesque setting, and is headed by an energetic but undemanding master. Katie enjoys conversing with the master and with the best looking of his Indian disciples, Vishwa, who eventually becomes her lover. However, she sees right through the master’s chief sponsor, the rich, tyrannical “Countess,” who plans to take Vishwa to the West with her. Determined not to lose him, Katie lets the Countess discover them making love. The master solves the problem by suggesting that they go on tour together, with Vishwa cast as the Guru and Katie as a Holy Mother. The story is particularly interesting because, unlike so many of Jhabvala’s spiritual pilgrims, this protagonist does not allow herself to be overwhelmed by India. Though Jhabvala has said that one can resist India only by escaping from it, here she suggests that common sense may be one’s best defense. “Fidelity” • Although it is set in Manhattan, “Fidelity,” from East into Upper East, is much like such stories of one-sided devotion as “Bombay” and “On Bail,” from Out of India, and the poignant “Expiation,” one of the New Delhi stories in East into Upper East. In “Fidelity,” Sophie loves her self-centered, habitually unfaithful husband, Dave, so much that she will not tell him she has a terminal illness for fear of causing him pain. Sophie knows how easily Dave is driven to tears. She also knows that he is having trouble with the young girl for whom he left her. However, as Dave admits to his sister, he has more than his mistress to worry about. If he does not come up with a significant amount of money, he will be sent to prison for fraud, as happened once before. After his nephew Michael has paved the way for him, Dave appears at Sophie’s bedside. Although he pretends concern about her health, Dave is much too focused on himself to notice that she is dying. However, Sophie has decided that the easiest way to give Dave the money he needs is to die as soon as possible. While he holds her, she prepares to take the pills that will end her life, and though Dave has no idea what is really happening, as usual, he prepares to shed his convenient tears. “Fidelity” demonstrates Jhabvala’s power to reveal the very souls of her characters without intruding into the narrative. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Other major works novels: To Whom She Will, 1955 (pb. in U.S. as Amrita, 1956); The Nature of Passion, 1956; Esmond in India, 1958; The Householder, 1960; Get Ready for Battle, 1962; A Backward Place, 1965; A New Dominion, 1972 (pb. in U.S. as Travelers, 1973); Heat and Dust,

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1975; In Search of Love and Beauty, 1983; Three Continents, 1987; Poet and Dancer, 1993; Shards of Memory, 1995; My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, 2004. screenplays: The Householder, 1963; Shakespeare Wallah, 1965 (with James Ivory); The Guru, 1968; Bombay Talkie, 1970; Autobiography of a Princess, 1975 (with Ivory and John Swope); Roseland, 1977; Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, 1978; The Europeans, 1979 (with Ivory); Quartet, 1981 (with Ivory); The Courtesans of Bombay, 1982; Heat and Dust, 1983 (based on her novel); The Bostonians, 1984 (with Ivory; based on Henry James’s novel); A Room with a View, 1986 (based on E. M. Forster’s novel); Maurice, 1987 (based on Forster’s novel); Madame Sousatzka, 1988 (with John Schlesinger); Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 1990 (based on Evan S. Connell, Jr.’s novels); Howards End, 1992 (based on Forster’s novel); The Remains of the Day, 1993 (based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel); Jefferson in Paris, 1995; Surviving Picasso, 1996; A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, 1998 (based on Kaylie Jones’s novel); The Golden Bowl, 2000 (based on James’s novel); Le Divorce, 2003 (with James Ivory; based on Diane Johnson’s novel). teleplays: The Place of Peace, 1975; Jane Austen in Manhattan, 1980; The Wandering Company, 1985. Bibliography Chakravarti, Aruna. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study in Empathy and Exile. Delhi, India: B. R. Publishing, 1998. Discusses other European authors who have written about India, and Jhabvala’s role as expatriate. Useful for scholars and students approaching Jhabvala for the first time. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Twayne, 1992. In a chapter entitled “Sufferers, Seekers, and the Beast That Moves: The Short Stories,” Jhabvala’s first five volumes of short fiction are discussed. Crane maintains that the differences among Jhabvala’s stories reflect her own ambivalence toward India. Includes biographical chapter, chronology, notes, and bibliography. ____________, ed. Passages to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1991. Only one of the essays in this volume deals specifically with short stories. However, much of what is said about theme in the analyses of the novels is applicable to the short fiction as well. Godden, Rumer. “A Cool Eye in a Parched Landscape.” The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1986, 1, 20. Points out stories in Out of India that exemplify the internal struggle that Jhabvala discusses in “Myself in India.” Gray, Paul. “Tributes of Empathy and Grace.” Time 127 (May 12, 1986): 90. In Out of India, women repeatedly sacrifice themselves for undeserving men. However, Jhabvala’s Western women choose to immerse themselves in India, while her Indian women have fewer options. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. “The Artistry of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.” Interview by Bernard Weinraub. New York Times Magazine, September 11, 1983, 64. An important interview/profile, in which Jhabvala explains why she left India for New York City. ____________. “Introduction: Myself in India.” In Out of India: Selected Stories. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Jhabvala defines the “cycle” of reactions to India which all Westerners seem to experience. Essential reading. Mason, Deborah. “Passage to America.” The New York Times Book Review, November 29, 1998, 20, 22-23. The stories in East into Upper East prove once again that Jhabvala is

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a “spellbinding urban fabulist,” whose rootless characters escape from reality in various ways. “The Temptress” is the only story of true redemption. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Jhabvala: “The Englishwoman” (vol. 2), “In a Great Man’s House” (vol. 4), and “The Man with the Dog” (vol. 5). Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Utilizes four novels and nine short stories to prove that Jhabvala’s detachment masks her real romanticism, as seen in her interest in feminine sexual politics. Includes bibliography. Urstad, Tone Sundt. “Protecting One’s Inner Self: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s ‘Rose Petals.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Winter, 1996): 43-49. “Rose Petals” exemplifies what Jhabvala has stated about how different people react to India’s overwhelming social problems. An excellent starting point for the study of Jhabvala’s short fiction.

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James Joyce Born: Dublin, Ireland; February 2, 1882 Died: Zurich, Switzerland; January 13, 1941 Principal short fiction • Dubliners, 1914. Other literary forms • James Joyce’s name is synonymous with twentieth century fiction, a revolution to which he devoted himself with remarkable single-mindedness. The results are to be found in three extremely influential works of fiction–A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915, serial; 1916, book), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Though his work in other genres is of much less significance, Joyce also wrote two books of poetry, as well as one play. His youthful critical essays, crucial to an understanding of his artistic origins, were collected posthumously and edited by Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason as The Critical Writings of James Joyce (1959). The raw material for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Theodore Spencer, was also published posthumously as Stephen Hero (1944). Achievements • James Joyce is acknowledged by many as the twentieth century’s greatest prose artist and is also, arguably, that century’s most famous author. Despite his small output and the increasing difficulty of his works, Joyce’s name stands as a monument to commitment and artistic integrity. Since the end of World War II, there has hardly been a novelist in the West who has not felt Joyce’s influence. Continuing interest in his complex mind and work is sustained by a vast array of academic commentators. The reasons for Joyce’s eminence are not hard to find. Each of his works, beginning with the short stories of Dubliners, is notable for its startling originality of language and conception. His fiction, moreover, placed his native city, Dublin, indelibly on the map of the world’s culture. His life, a continual struggle against ill health, exile, and the almost total neglect of publishers, has come to be perceived as an eloquent expression of self-determination in an age of totalitarian conformity. Biography • James Augustine Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, the eldest child of John Stanislaus and Mary Jane (May) Murray Joyce. The family was typical of the growing ranks of the Irish Catholic middle class of the day, socially confident, politically optimistic, though less than well established economically. During Joyce’s early years, however, the family remained in comfortable circumstances, and at the age of six, Joyce was enrolled in Clongowes Wood College, an elite Jesuit boarding school outside Dublin. After two years at Clongowes, Joyce’s education was interrupted because of a decline in family fortunes, the result in large part of John Joyce’s improvidence. In 1893, Joyce began to attend Belvedere College, another Jesuit school, in Dublin, where, in addition to undergoing a thorough exposure to the narrow Roman Catholicism of the day, he won a number of academic prizes. In 1898, Joyce entered University College, Dublin, from which he graduated in 1902. Throughout the 1890’s, the Joyce family continued to experience hard times.

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Their setbacks had a parallel in the reversal of Ireland’s political fortunes during the same period. In 1891, Charles Stewart Parnell, the disgraced leader of the Irish cause, died. This event was the occasion of Joyce’s first-known literary work, an accusatory poem directed against the foremost of Parnell’s lieutenants, who had turned against him, entitled “Et tu, Healy.” The 1890’s also saw the rise of a literary and intellectual movement in Ireland. By the time Joyce had begun his undergraduate career, this movement was sufficiently evolved to be criticized, a task that Joyce took upon himself, most notably in a pamphlet entitled “The Day of the Rabblement.” While at college, Joyce also distinguished himself by other literary essays, mostnotably with an article on Henrik Ibsen—an important early influence—which appeared in the prestiLibrary of Congress gious Fortnightly Review. In 1902, Joyce left Ireland for Paris, intending to study medicine in order to secure an income to support his writing. This unsuccessful trip was abruptly curtailed by news of his mother’s terminal illness. After her death in 1903, Joyce spent an unproductive year in Dublin, relieved only by writing poems and the initial versions of some of the Dubliners stories and by meeting Nora Barnacle, his wife-to-be. With her, he left Ireland in 1904, remaining abroad, with a few brief exceptions, for the rest of his life. Joyce and his wife began life in Pula, then a backwater in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later known as the town of Pulj in Yugoslavia. Most of their lives before World War I, however, were spent in Trieste. There, their two children were born, Giorgio in 1905 and Lucia two years later. Joyce earned an uncertain and reluctant living teaching English as a foreign language and worked on the stories of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A number of prospective publishers deemed the stories to be too scandalous to issue, and Dubliners languished in limbo until 1914. That year was to prove decisive to Joyce’s development as a writer. Through the good offices of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, the American poet Ezra Pound contacted Joyce and arranged for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be serialized. In that year, also, Joyce started his most celebrated work, Ulysses, and moved with his family to Zurich, where they lived for the duration of the war. Briefly returning to Trieste in 1919, the family moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. Beset by ill health and by the mental illness of his daughter, though immune from financial difficulties through the generosity of a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce remained in Paris working on his opaque masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, until World

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War II obliged him to resettle in Zurich. There, Joyce died of complications arising from perforated ulcers on January 13, 1941. Analysis • In August, 1904, James Joyce wrote to his friend C. P. Curran: “I am writing a series of epicleti. . . . I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.” This note announces, in effect, a transformation of the short story as a form. The note’s pretentious jargon reveals the attitude of the young Joyce’s artistic demeanor. In addition, it calls attention to some of the main technical and thematic characteristics of a volume that had to wait a further ten years for a publisher to consider it acceptable. There is still some scholarly debate over the term “epicleti,” whose etymology remains obscure. It is clear, however, that Joyce’s use of the term shows him to be in pursuit of an aesthetic method. This self-conscious search for a method reveals Joyce as a preeminently twentieth century modernist author. As with his eminent contemporaries and advocates T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, to write was to articulate a theory of writing. Moreover, the search was successfully concluded, as the closing chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man records. It culminated in the “epiphany,” which means “showing forth” and which describes not only Joyce’s method but also his objectives in using one. Joyce used the term “epiphany” to describe some of his own early artistic efforts in prose. These sketches sometimes resemble prose poems, calibrating moments of intense perception and emotional heightening. At other times, they take the form of life studies of banal moments in everyday life. The overall intention is one of unmasking hidden states, whether of the exalted or humdrum variety. In both instances, the pieces are marked by a fastidious language, which clearly anticipates the “style of scrupulous meanness” in which Joyce said Dubliners is written. Dubliners • Artistic theory is not the only novelty of Dubliners. Joyce’s note to Curran also draws attention to his subject matter. From a strictly historical point of view, Joyce’s characterization of his birthplace is to some extent misleading. The stories of Dubliners tend to overlook those factors that distinguished the city in Joyce’s time. The impact and significance of the establishment in Dublin of Ireland’s national theater, the Abbey, for example, which opened in 1904, may be lost on non-Irish readers of Joyce’s stories. In general, Joyce is at pains to belittle the various attempts at cultural self-renewal, which were a marked feature of Dublin life in the early years of the twentieth century, as the satire of the story “A Mother” shows—although in “The Dead” this satirical attitude is significantly modified. Joyce also fails to provide a cross section of the city’s social composition, there being no stories featuring the upper echelon. The city was not quite the paraplegic of Joyce’s diagnostic imagination. The stories’ emphasis is on what Joyce asserts to be typical of his city. This democratic vision of his brings to the reader’s notice a range of marginalized citizens. These include children, the alienated, the helpless and hopeless, and particularly women—Dubliners has a feminist undercurrent, all the more noteworthy because of its time. These citizens, often known merely by a single name, represent the social, cultural, and moral cost of living in a city that was less a capital than one of the British Empire’s provincial administrative centers. The fact that their humdrum and unpromising lives should be subjected to the artistic and intellectual powers that Joyce possessed is significant on a number of counts. From the standpoint of literary history, Dubliners combines the two prevailing literary modes of Joyce’s day. In a refine-

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ment of an approach pioneered by the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert, Joyce subjects material that had hitherto been the artistic property of the naturalists to the aesthetic commitments of the Symbolists. One way of describing the function of the epiphany is to note its author’s organization of commonplaces in such a manner that they ultimately yield possibilities of meaning greater than their culturally preconditioned, or factual, appearances admit. From the point of view of Irish literary history, the stories of Dubliners eloquently, though untypically, participate in the overall effort of the Irish Literary Revival to address national realities. The careful delineation of lost lives, which characterizes most of Dubliners, is a unique contribution to the spirit of the critique, which informs much of the stories’ Irish cultural context. It is not surprising to learn that they were considered too controversial to publish with impunity, or that, by virtue of being so, they confirmed their author’s belief that they constituted “a chapter in the moral history of my country.” A further notable feature of the book is that, unlike many collections of short stories, particularly those of that period, Dubliners is a collection of stories that, however limited in range, is disparate while at the same time functioning as a coherent whole. Its coherence is not merely a matter of Joycean cunning, whereby the collection’s opening story is entitled “The Sisters” and centers on a death, while the final story is called “The Dead” and takes place at a party hosted by sisters. The history of the book’s composition, to which must be added a recognition of the complications brought about by publishers’ lack of commitment, precludes any such facile observation, since “The Dead” was conceived and written after Joyce’s initial version of Dubliners had been completed and submitted for publication. Two other stories were added to the original dozen, “Two Gallants” and “A Little Cloud.” Rather more subtly, the collection achieves coherence by numerous overlapping means. These include the integrity of its style, its thematic consistency, the largely uniform character of its dramatis personae, and its use of a major device in the overall scheme of Joyce’s aesthetic, repetition and variation. In addition, Joyce himself had an integrated vision of the work’s coherence, one whereby the whole would be seen to be greater than the sum of the parts. This view holds good particularly when applied to the twelve stories of the initial Dubliners, where it describes a mode of symmetrical organization as well as a principle of thematic development, so that a case can readily be made for the work as a whole comprising a “moral history.” According to Joyce, Dubliners may be divided into four consecutive sections. The first of these consists of the three opening stories, “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby.” These are followed by a sequence of stories dealing with adolescence, “The Boarding House,” “After the Race,” and “Eveline.” Three stories of mature life come next, “Clay,” “Counterparts,” and “A Painful Case.” Finally the volume closes with a trio of stories devoted to public life, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “A Mother,” and “Grace.” Although the symmetry of this quartet of trios is disrupted by the introduction of further stories, two of the new additions, both written in 1906, enlarge rather than negate their respective categories. The range of the stories of adolescence is considerably broadened by the addition of “Two Gallants.” Similarly, the motifs of entrapment and disillusion, typical of the stories of mature life, are further adumbrated in the history of Chandler, the protagonist of “A Little Cloud.” In “The Dead,” written in 1907, Joyce’s artistry as a writer of short fiction is seen to best advantage. In addition, this story crystallizes and elevates to a higher plane of intellection and feeling

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many of the themes of Dubliners, the result being what is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest short stories in the English language. The titles of the stories of Dubliners offer a clue to the nature of their contents. Such titles as “An Encounter,” “A Painful Case,” “Counterparts,” “A Mother,” and “The Dead”—to take some of the most obvious cases in point—seem deliberately to offer little or nothing to the reader, neither a sense of expectation nor a sense of anything particularly distinctive within the material, even though Joyce insisted to his publishers that presenting his fellow citizens to the world at large had undoubted novelty value. Yet the very anonymity of many of the titles points with precision to both their character and their method. The stories’ protagonists are for the most part colorless, unpromising, defeated, and lacking in interiority. For the most part, they are unaware of these facts about their personalities and conditions, and the stories evolve somewhat remorselessly to a point where these hapless characters are on the threshold of recognizing, or deliberately overlooking, their morally abject lives. The fact, therefore, that the stories’ titles frequently evoke generic types or states is a pointer to one of their prominent attributes. The stories that do not conform to this general rule have titles that are extremely localized and opaque in a different sense. Few readers will know automatically that the ivy day referred to in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” refers to the custom of commemorating the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell, or that “Araby,” in addition to its generic connotations, refers to an actual bazaar that was held in Dublin in mid-May, 1894. This obscure fact makes the story’s protagonist the same age as Joyce was when the bazaar was held. The sense of comparative anonymity and insignificance suggested by the titles is replicated in the case of the protagonists, a large number of whom are either anonymous or known by a single name, as though they had not yet succeeded in attaining the measure of identity required to merit being fully named. The very title Dubliners is clearly generic, and Joyce, approaching his material from such a standpoint, reveals his interest in the typical, the representative, and the norm. In this sense, Joyce shows his deep sense of the short-story form, with its traditional emphasis on the delineation of representative characters in representative contexts. Such an interest is amplified with great deftness and versatility in the language of the stories, which frequently draws on official, generic codes of utterance. Gabriel’s speech on hospitality in “The Dead” is an important example of one such code, particularly when contrasted with the highly wrought meditation that closes the story. The sermon that concludes “Grace” is another, despite being rendered in the narrative mode known as free indirect style for satirical purposes. A third example is the mimicry of the newspaper report of police evidence in “A Painful Case.” The collection as a whole is saturated by formal and informal exploitation of the characters’ various modes of utterance from which a sense of their cultural orientation and impoverishment may be extrapolated. As with all Joyce’s works, the latently satirical manipulation of cliché is a crucial feature of Dubliners. In addition, by virtue of the author’s uncanny ear not merely for the demotic but for the quality of consciousness that such utterances reveal, the stories possess a convincing patina of objectivity, as though it is the restless but unobtrusive activity of their language that produces their effects, rather than anything as unrefined as the author’s direction and intentions. Thus, the doctrine of the artist’s impersonality, which has numerous important implications for modernist aesthetics and which Joyce, possibly following the example of Gustave Flaubert, invokes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is utilized in Dubliners to telling effect.

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It is in the matter of the stories’ presumed objectivity that Dubliners fell afoul of the publishing industry of the day. Joyce freely availed himself of the civic furniture of his native city, including by name actual business premises—pubs and hotels, notably— as well as churches and other well-known amenities and distinctive features of the social life of his birthplace. By so doing, he not only went further in his pursuit of documentary verisimilitude than the vast majority of even naturalistic writers of Joyce’s generation but also revealed a conception of language—or of what happens to language once it is written—which, in its mature development in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, provided a complex, integrated code of cultural semiotics. Joyce’s use of placenames, the names of businesses, and most notoriously the names of English royalty, shows his understanding that a name is a word, not a supposedly photographic facsimile of the entity it denotes. Dubliners is replete with names chosen with a sensitivity to their artistic and cultural resonance as well as to their geographical precision. For example, the North Wall, Eveline’s terminus in the story that bears her name, is both correct in a documentary sense and thematically appropriate. A subtler instance is Mr. Duffy’s residence at Chapelizod, a short distance outside Dublin. Not only does the choice of residence underline Duffy’s standoffish nature, but also the name of where he lives is a corruption of Chapel Iseult. This name invokes the legend of the lovers Tristan and Iseult, of whose tragic love Duffy’s affair is a banal but nevertheless heartfelt shadow. Use of the legend is an anticipation of the method in Ulysses, where the heroic stuff of epic forms an ironic but by no means belittling counterpoint to the trial of twentieth century human beings. Neither of Joyce’s English and Irish publishers was very interested in the longterm consequences or subtle immediacies of Joyce’s art. Both feared that his use of actual names would lead them into serious legal difficulties, which would be compounded by what was considered a use of blasphemous language and an impersonation of the thoughts of Edward, Prince of Wales, in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” Joyce’s favorite story in the collection. Joyce, against his better judgment, toned down the impersonation and made a number of other minor adjustments, while basically upholding his right of documentary representation in the service of artistic integrity and objectivity. The most conclusive evidence for the stories’ objectivity, however, is provided by their use of the epiphany. Much critical ink has been consumed in attempting to explicate this device. Undoubtedly it is a key concept not only in the appreciation of the art of Joyce’s short stories but also in the comprehension of the form’s development under the influence of Dubliners. At the same time, the reader who does not possess a firm grasp of the concept may still read Dubliners with satisfaction, insight, and sympathy. The epiphany makes its presence felt, typically, at the conclusion of a Dubliners story. It is here that the reader is likely to experience a certain amount of distancing from the action, which cannot be accounted for merely by the foreignness of the characters and their locale. These, in themselves, do not inhibit either the forward movement of the narrative or that movement’s potential for significance. At the point when that potential might well be expected to be realized, however, it may strike the reader as being deferred or repressed. This discovery is intended to alert the reader that the narrative technique of a Dubliners story only superficially conforms to the introduction-developmentdenouement model of story organization. Early critics of the work, indeed, complained that for the most part, through their lack of dramatic issue or intriguing theme, the stories were no more than sketches, not seeing that what Joyce was inter-

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ested in was as much manner as matter, and that only a minimalist approach of the kind he used would grace with art the marginal conditions of his characters and articulate, in a mode that did not violate the impoverished spirit of his paralyzed raw material, its worthiness and the value of bringing it to the reader’s attention. Concern for the reader’s attention is therefore critical, since so much of what Joyce was writing about had already been effectively written off socially, culturally, politically, and spiritually. The comprehensive nature of this silencing is spelled out in the collection’s opening story, “The Sisters.” The strain placed on the reader’s attention by the typical conclusion of the stories is Joyce’s method of expressing his concern that the material’s impact not be diminished by meeting the preconditioned expectations of how its conflicts might be resolved. Rather than have the story reach a conclusion, with its connotations of finality and mastery, Joyce ends the story, breaks off the action before all its implications and ramifications have been extrapolated. He thereby extends to the reader an invitation, which may also be a duty, to draw out the inferences of this act of narrative termination. The development of inferences is the means whereby the story achieves the statement of itself, an achievement that describes the epiphany in action. In order to participate in the activity of revelation that the term “epiphany” connotes, the reader will note that not only does a Dubliners story conventionally, if loosely, observe the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, but also that unity is achieved by the tissue of correspondences, insinuations, nuances, echoes, and general interplay that exists among the various phases of a given story’s action and the language. The introduction of the train at the end of “A Painful Case” is an obvious example of Joyce’s cunning and tacit strategies. One of the outcomes of these effects is to offset any purely deterministic sense of plot. The compulsiveness and irreversibility of action, on a sense of which plot tends to be based, is offset, modified, or at the very least has its crudely dramatic character diminished by Joyce’s effects. As a result, the reader is placed in a position of assembling what the story’s fabric of data signifies. It is the reader, typically, rather than the protagonist, who recognizes the epiphanic moment, the moment at which the tendencies of the action become undeniably clear. At this moment, the reader attains the point of maximum perspective. It is a moment of closure but of reinvestment, of withdrawal and of sympathy, of estrangement and acceptance. Its result is to make the reader morally complicit with the material, since were it not for the epiphany’s appeal to the reader the material’s significance, or rather its ability to signify, would be moot. The empowered reader becomes the type of citizen whom the representative protagonist of a Dubliners story cannot be. The stories represent a mastery over material and circumstances with which the reader is called upon to identify, but which the characters cannot embody. Although it is possible to consider the stories of Dubliners from many different artistic, cultural, and moral perspectives, the theme of independence or the lack of it is the one that seems most central to Joyce’s concerns. His preoccupation with the paralyzed condition of his native city may be described as an awareness of how little the spirit of independence moved there. The numerous implications of this lack are addressed in story after story. The typical trajectory of the story is the optimistic going out, the counterpart of which is the disillusioned return. In even such a simple story as “An Encounter,” the youngster’s naïve dream of adventure and access to the adult world is both realized and made unrecognizable and unacceptable by the form it takes. Encounters with worldly others, such as the flirtatious couples at the bazaar at

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the end of “Araby,” or Frank in “Eveline,” the sophisticated foreigners in “After the Race,” or Ignatius Gallaher in “A Little Cloud,” all leave the protagonists reduced and defeated. The world is a more complex and demanding environment than their dreams of fulfillment might have led them to believe. The self withdraws, pained that the world is not a reflection of its needs. As in “Two Gallants,” when the world can be manipulated to serve the ego, the process is crude, exploitative, and morally despicable. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” • Some of the most far-reaching implications of the independence theme may be seen in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” There, the heirs of a dramatically successful political movement for a constitutional form of Irish independence are depicted as bemused, opportunistic, devoted to rhetoric rather than action, stagnant in thought and deed. Their conspicuous lack of will is matched by their inconsistency of thought. Yet, while satire is a pronounced feature of the story, Joyce also makes clear that the characters cannot be merely scorned. The poem that affects them is certainly not a fine piece of writing, as the story’s closing comment would have readers believe. On the contrary, it is a heartfelt performance, genuine in its feeling and authentic in its response. The negative elements of these characters’ lives and the bleak outlook for the productive commissioning of their human potential become, in Joyce’s view, as compelling a set of realities as the triumph of the will or worldly fulfillment. “The Dead” • This view receives its most comprehensive expression in “The Dead,” making the story, for that reason alone, the crowning achievement of Dubliners. From the playful malapropism of its opening sentence to its resonant closing periods, this story provides, in scale, thematic variety, psychological interest, and narrative tempo, a complete and enriched survey of Joyce’s artistic and moral commitments at the close of the first phase of his writing career. Whereas previously, the collection’s stories were representations of a quality, or poverty, of consciousness to which the characters were unable to relate, in “The Dead” Gabriel achieves an awareness of his particular consciousness. The moment of recognition, the epiphany, in which Gabriel realizes what his wife’s story of lost love says about his own emotional adequacy, is not an experience whose meaning the reader infers. It is a meaning whose articulation by Gabriel the reader overhears. Unlike many of the other stories, however, “The Dead” does not end on this note of recognition. Gabriel, for all that “The Dead” has shown him having difficulty in being self-possessed and autonomous, acknowledges the force and significance of Gretta’s revelation. He relates to those limitations in himself, which the story of Michael Furey underlines. In doing so, he attains a degree of sympathy, honesty, and freely chosen solidarity with the finite, mortal nature of human reality, his mind enlarging as its sense of defeat becomes a central and constraining fact of life. The balance achieved in “The Dead” between subjective need and objective fact, between romance and reality, between self-deception and self-awareness gives the story its poise and potency and makes it a persuasive recapitulation of the other Dubliners stories’ concerns. It is by the conclusive means of “The Dead” that Joyce’s Dubliners identifies itself with the critique of humanism, which was a fundamental component of the revolution in the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. The invisibility of the author’s personality, the tonal and stylistic restraint with which the stories are told, and the aesthetic subtlety of the epiphany add up to rather more than simply a revolution

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in short fiction. They also, by their nature, draw attention to the force of the negative as a reality in the lives of the characters, a reality that Joyce, by refusing to overlook it, helped place on the agenda of twentieth century consciousness. George O’Brien Other major works play: Exiles, pb. 1918. novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1914-1915, serial (1916, book); Ulysses, 1922; Finnegans Wake, 1939; Stephen Hero, 1944 (edited by Theodore Spencer). nonfiction: Letters of James Joyce, 1957-1966 (3 volumes); The Critical Writings of James Joyce, 1959; Selected Letters of James Joyce, 1975 (Richard Ellmann, editor); The James Joyce Archives, 1977-1979 (64 volumes); On Ibsen, 1999; Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 2000. poetry: Chamber Music, 1907; Pomes Penyeach, 1927; “Ecce Puer,” 1932; Collected Poems, 1936. Bibliography Alter, Robert. Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Lucid argument for the complex influence that the Bible has exerted on three important and diverse authors: Franz Kafka, Hayyim Hahman Bialik, and James Joyce. Benstock, Bernard. Narrative Con/Texts in “Dubliners.” Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Includes analyses of narrative principles, symbolic systems, theological contexts, and a variety of themes and techniques in Dubliners. Blades, John. How to Study James Joyce. Houndmills, England: Macmillan, 1996. Excellent study guide for students of Joyce. Includes bibliographical references, outlines, and syllabi. Bosinelli, Rosa M. Bollettieri, and Harold F. Mosher, Jr., eds. ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners.” Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Fourteen new essays on Dubliners that argue Joyce questioned literary, cultural, and political developments of his time. The essays examine themes, style, intertexuality, politics, linguistics, and gender conflicts in Joyce’s stories. Brunsdale, Mitzi M. James Joyce: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. General introduction to Joyce’s stories, focusing on the five most familiar stories from Dubliners. Also includes excerpts from Joyce’s own nonfiction criticism and from other critics. Fargnoli, Nicholas, and Michael P. Gillespie. James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dictionary-type reference book with approximately eight hundred entries on characters, concepts, locales, terminology, and critics of Joyce. Jones, Ellen Carol, and Morris Beja, eds. Twenty-first Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. This useful reference work collects 13 scholarly essays written by Joyce experts. Part of the Florida James Joyce Series. Leonard, Garry M. Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Using Lacan’s Freudian approach to language’s role in creating our experience of reality, Leonard examines the stories in Dubliners, urging readers to explore their kinship with the moral paralysis of the characters.

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May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of twelve short stories by Joyce: “Araby” and “The Boarding House” (vol. 1); “Clay,” “Counterparts,” and “The Dead” (vol. 2); “Eveline” and “Grace” (vol. 3); “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and “A Little Cloud” (vol. 4); “A Painful Case” (vol. 6); “The Sisters” (vol. 7); and “Two Gallants” (vol. 8). Schwarz, Daniel R., ed. “The Dead” by James Joyce. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Casebook of essays on “The Dead,” from such critical perspectives as readerresponse theory, new historicism, feminism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Summer, 1995). A collection of sixteen new essays on Dubliners, along with eleven reviews of new books on Joyce. Includes general essays on techniques and themes of Dubliners as well as analyses of “Araby,” “The Sisters,” “Grace,” “The Dead,” and discussions comparing Joyce’s stories with those of William Trevor and Edna O’Brien. Theall, Donald F. James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Representative of a new wing of Joyce studies, Theall’s work examines Joyce as a progenitor of today’s cyberculture. Includes bibliography and index.

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Franz Kafka Born: Prague, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Czech Republic); July 3, 1883 Died: Kierling, Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, Austria; June 3, 1924 Principal short fiction • Betrachtung, 1913 (Meditation, 1948); Das Urteil, 1913, 1916 (The Sentence, 1928; also as The Judgment, 1945); Die Verwandlung, 1915 (novella; The Metamorphosis, 1936); Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen, 1919 (The Country Doctor: A Collection of Fourteen Short Stories, 1945); “In der Strafkolonie,” 1919 (“In the Penal Colony,” 1941); Ein Hungerkünstler: Vier Geschichten, 1924 (A Hunger Artist, 1948); Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer: Ungedruckte Erzählungen und Prosa aus dem Nachlass, 1931 (The Great Wall of China, and Other Pieces, 1933); Erzählungen, 1946 (The Complete Stories, 1971); The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, 1948; Selected Short Stories, 1952. Other literary forms • Franz Kafka did not attempt to write drama or poetry. His métier was prose. He was a perfectionist who apparently intended only a portion of what he had written for publication. Much of his reputation rests on his three posthumously published novels: Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), and Amerika (1927; America, 1938). Those three novels and several volumes of Kafka’s short stories were prepared for publication by the executor of his literary estate, Max Brod, who took great liberties in rearranging Kafka’s often chaotic manuscripts. During the 1990’s, better trained scholars reedited Kafka’s original manuscripts and made new translations that superseded the editions that had been in print for more than sixty years. Kafka also wrote voluminously in other categories of prose that bear the same distinctive style as his creative work. His diaries and letters contain many comments that aid in the understanding of his stories, and his meticulous legal reports are exemplary professional documents. Achievements • Every year, more secondary literature is published about Franz Kafka than about almost any other author except William Shakespeare. This attests the extraordinary power and alluringly enigmatic content of his works. Although his inimitable prose style describes everything as if it were self-evident, he invariably introduces elements of the fantastic and surreal and portrays the demise of his characters as almost inevitable. His works are imbued with a sense of horror as isolated characters struggle futilely against malign forces that they do not understand. Kafka unintentionally became the voice of the age. Coming after the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, and being contemporary with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, he captured the existential angst of the generation. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the father no longer worked from the home but dominated the family from a distance. The figure of authority was a stranger. Biography • Franz Kafka’s literary achievements are all the more remarkable when one considers that he lived to be only forty, was increasingly ill with tuberculosis dur-

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ing the last seven years of his life, and up until two years before his death held a full-time position as a lawyer. Although his lifestyle was in keeping with that of his mother’s bachelor brothers, one of whom was a country doctor, Kafka and his father were very different in TO VIEW IMAGE, personality. The efforts of the robust, self-confident, and sometimes PLEASE SEE abusive businessman to rear a frail, PRINT EDITION insecure, and sensitive son led to OF THIS BOOK. a constant state of friction between the two. Unlike his younger sisters, who married and established families of their own, Kafka lived mainly with his parents, attempting always to relate to the father who could not understand him. Kafka’s parents had a strong marriage but did not have much time for their children, who were cared for by household help. During the day, the parents worked together in their store. In the evening, the two of them played cards. Kafka did well in school, contrary to his fears, and received a good education, especially in Latin, from dedicated teachers. In 1901, Kafka entered the German University in Prague and obtained his doctorate in law in 1906. He resigned from his first position, stating as his reason that he was upset by the cursing and swearing, even though it had not been directed at him. Through the intercession of a friend, he then obtained a position with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute and remained with the firm from 1908 to 1922, when his declining health necessitated an early retirement. His work was appreciated, and he received many benefits from the firm. Kafka was never without friends, and he had a good sense of humor—something that could be emphasized more in the interpretation of his works. He liked to read his stories aloud and sometimes broke down in uncontrollable laughter over the plots that he had invented. Marriage was something that Kafka both desired and feared. He was engaged twice to Felice Bauer, a woman who lived in another city. He had met her briefly through a friend and soon afterward initiated an epistolary relationship. This became a pattern that he repeated with two other women, always being reluctant to be with them in person. Only in the last year of his life did he overcome his inhibitions enough to live for a few months with a woman half his age, Dora Dymant. Dymant did not realize the value of Kafka’s literar y works and at his request burned many manuscripts. Kafka also stipulated in his will that his friend and exec-

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utor, the author Max Brod, was to burn ever ything not published during Kafka’s lifetime. It was an ambivalent request, because Brod had said he would never do so. Although Jewish, Kafka was relatively unaffected by anti-Semitism. The gravestone for him and his parents is in the Strasnice Cemetery in Prague. His three sisters were later killed in concentration camps. Analysis • Franz Kafka’s stories are not about love or success. They do not leave the reader feeling comfortable. Writing was, for him, a necessity. On August 6, 1914, Kafka wrote in his diary: “My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me.” The meaning of the images from his dreamlike inner life was not always clear to him at the time of writing. Sometimes he realized only several years later what he may have subconsciously meant. Toward the end of his life, he decided that psychoanalysis was a waste of time and abandoned that approach in retrospective reading. Critics may not be of the same opinion. “The Metamorphosis” • The opening sentence of “The Metamorphosis” is one of the most famous in modern fiction: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” In the story’s first section, Gregor accepts his fantastic transformation matter-of-factly, perhaps wishing to bury its causes in his subconscious mind. Instead of worrying about the mystery of his metamorphosis, he worries about the nature and security of his position as traveling salesperson for a firm whose severity he detests. In the second section, Gregor’s isolation and alienation intensify. Readers learn about his relations, past and present, with his family; they have been characterized by concealment, mistrust, and exploitation on the father’s part. Gregor’s mother is gentle, selfless, weak, and shallow; in the story’s development she becomes increasingly her husband’s appendage. His sister Grete is his favorite; however, although she ministers to his new animal needs, she fails him emotionally. In the third section, Gregor, defeated, yields up all hope of returning to the human community. His parents and sister shut him out, as his miserable existence slopes resignedly toward death. Gregor’s metamorphosis accomplishes several of his aims: First, it frees him from his hated job with an odious employer by disabling him from working; second, it relieves him of the requirement to make an agonizing choice between his filial duty to his parents—particularly his father—and his desperate yearning to emancipate himself from such obligations and dependence. It thus enables him to “bug out” of his loathsome constraints yet do so on a level of conscious innocence, with Gregor merely a victim of an uncontrollable calamity. Moreover, Gregor’s fantasies include aggressive and retaliatory action against the oppressive firm. He accomplishes this by terrorizing the pitiless, arrogant office manager, who tells him, “I am speaking here in the name of your parents and of your chief.” On the conscious level, Gregor pursues the clerk to appease him and secure his advocacy for Gregor’s cause at the office; subconsciously, his threatening appearance and apparently hostile gestures humiliate his hated superiors. Gregor’s change also expresses his sense of guilt at having betrayed his work and his parents, at having broken the familial circle. It is a treacherous appeasement of this guilt complex, inviting his isolation, punishment, and death. His loss of human

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speech prevents him from communicating his humanity. His enormous size, though an insect (he is at least two feet wide), his ugly features, and his malodorous stench invite fear and revulsion. Yet his pacific temperament and lack of claws, teeth, or wings make him far more vulnerable than when his body was human. His metamorphosis therefore gives him the worst of both worlds: He is offensive in appearance but defenseless in fact, exposed to the merciless attack of anyone—such as his furious father—ready to exploit his vulnerability. “The Metamorphosis,” then, can be seen as a punishment fantasy with Gregor Samsa feeling triply guilty of having displaced his father as leading breadwinner for the family, for his hatred of his job, and resentment of his family’s expectations of him. He turns himself into a detestable insect, thereby both rebelling against the authority of his firm and father and punishing himself for this rebellion by seeking estrangement, rejection, and death. Insofar as Gregor’s physical manifestation constitutes a translation of the interior self to the external world, “The Metamorphosis” is a stellar achievement of expressionism. “The Judgment” • Kafka wrote “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”) in one sitting through the night of September 22-23, 1912. It was an eminently satisfying experience, the only one of his works that he said came out of him like a birth. When he sat down to write, he had intended to depict a war scene. Then, the story took its own direction, and when he finished, early in the morning, he was not sure what it meant. He knew only that it was good. In the course of “The Judgment,” the main character, Georg Bendemann, experiences a complete reversal in his plans. At the outset, he announces his engagement to Frieda Brandenfeld. At the end, he commits suicide. The transition from good news to bad and the descent from normalcy into apparent madness are subtly accomplished. With hindsight, one can see that warning signs are held up all the way. Yet none of these signs is in itself shocking enough to alienate the reader. Only their cumulative effect is overwhelming. Kafka’s stories wield their powerful influence over the reader’s mood by always remaining plausible. While never losing the semblance of logical reportage, Kafka creates scenes of horror, which both spring from and give rise to psychological suffering. Anything resembling such scenes has come to be called “Kafkaesque.” Kafka writes metaphorically, letting characters, actions, and objects represent emotional and psychological states. Thus, the works are understood best not as narrative advancing a plot but in terms of the protagonist’s attempts to transcend absurdity, depersonalization, and alienation. There is a strong autobiographical element in all the stories. Most critics equate Georg Bendemann with Kafka, and Georg’s father with Kafka’s father. The issue to be dealt with, then, is why the father would violently oppose the son’s engagement to a woman from a well-to-do family. To accept that, one has to subscribe to an inverse standard. Kate Flores interprets this aspect of “The Judgment” in an anthropological way, explaining that for precivilized man it was an act of insubordination to supplant the dominant male. Certainly, “The Judgment” does contain elements of a primal struggle. Also consistent with this reading is the father’s tenacious hold on Georg’s watch chain, as if to halt the inexorable advance of time and the aging process. There is also the fact that Kafka’s father did indeed deride one of his engagements, although at a much later date than when “The Judgment” was written. Kafka’s stories support many interpretations. It is important, when reading “The

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Judgment,” that one not concentrate on the apparent polarity of father and son to the exclusion of the curious figure of the friend in Russia, to whom the first third of the story is devoted. In fact, preposterous though it may seem, the most comprehensive reading results from considering all three male figures—the friend in Russia, Georg Bendemann, and his father—to be different aspects of the same person, namely Kafka. It is significant that only one name is provided. The friend in Russia immediately becomes associated with writing, because Georg has been writing to him for years. This association is reinforced when the father, surprisingly, also claims to have been writing to the friend. After Georg has brought up the matter of an engagement on three separate occasions, the friend in Russia responds by showing some interest, but as with his emotionless reaction to the death of Georg’s mother, the friend’s interest in human affairs seems perfunctory. He has few social contacts, has let his business slide, and seems to be in a general state of ill health and decline. His life has dwindled dreadfully. This identifies him with Kafka the writer. Georg Bendemann’s business seems to have been operating in inverse proportion to that of his friend in Russia. It is thriving, and he has recently become engaged. The thriving business and the engagement go hand in hand in “The Judgment.” Both are traditionally recognized outward signs of success. Kafka, at the time of writing “The Judgment,” was already a successful lawyer, well established in his firm and becoming interested in Felice Bauer, who seems to be represented in the story by her close namesake, Frieda Brandenfeld. Frieda makes a remark to Georg that, on the surface, is very puzzling. She tells him that since he has friends such as the one in Russia, he should never have gotten engaged. This is the warning sign that either Frieda or the friend in Russia will have to go. The application to Kafka’s life seems clear: Either Felice or the writing will have to go. The most interesting and complex of the three male figures is the father. While appearing to oppose Georg, the older man can, in this case, actually be relied on to say what Georg wants to hear. Faced with the irreconcilable conflict between loyalty to his longtime friend in Russia and loyalty to his new fiancé, Georg finds himself inexplicably going to his father’s room, where he has not been for some time. The sunlight is blocked by a wall, the father is surrounded by ancient newspapers, and the window is shut. It is a trip into the dark and the past, which is sealed off from the outside world. The father represents the subconscious. He is also the progenitor, and he is still, despite some deceptive signs of senility, the figure of authority. The father’s first remark, which points beyond the frame of the surface story, is his question of whether Georg really has a friend in St. Petersburg. What the father really seems to be asking is whether the friend can continue to be called a friend when he has been so neglected. Georg at this point is still inclined to decide in favor of Frieda and an outwardly successful life, so he endeavors to quell the troubling reference to his friend by carrying his father from the dark out into the light and then covering him up, thereby forcibly suppressing the question of the friend. Contrary to Georg’s intent, this results in the father’s exploding into action. In an extraordinarily dramatic scene, he hurls off the blankets, leaps to his feet, and, standing upright on the bed and kicking, denounces Georg’s plans for marriage and accuses him of playing the false friend all these years. Georg realizes that he should be on his guard against attack but then forgets again and stands defenseless before his father.

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The father’s second remark that seems rather incredible in terms of the surface story is that the friend in Russia has not been betrayed after all, because he, the father, has also been writing to him all along and representing him. Suppressed talents are only strengthened in the subconscious. The father now unquestionably has the upper hand and pronounces his judgment over Georg: He was an innocent child, but he has been a devilish human being. Presumably, it was during childhood that Georg cultivated the friend now in Russia. As an adult, getting ever more into business and thoughts of marriage, Georg has been devilish by denying his true self, the writer. The father finishes by sentencing Georg to death by drowning. To drown is to be plunged into the creative element. Georg confirms the validity of his father’s verdict by carrying out the sentence. It is important for the reader to remember that as the father crashes on the bed exhausted, the subconscious having asserted itself, and as Georg lets himself fall from the bridge, effectively ending the business career and the engagement, it is the formerly faded and foreign true self, the writer, who remains. Thus, what seems on first reading to be a horror story of insanity and suicide is actually not a disaster at all but an exercise in self-preservation. No sooner had Kafka become romantically involved with Felice than he had worked out subconsciously how detrimental such a relationship would be to his career as a writer. With such personal material, it is no wonder the writer in Kafka felt inspired to finish “The Judgment” in one sitting. Ironically, his conscious mind was at that point still so far behind the insights of the subconscious that he dedicated the story to none other than Felice Bauer. The subtitle of Heinz Politzer’s book on Kafka, Parable and Paradox, evokes the elusive nature of Kafka’s story lines, which are charged with opposing forces seeking synthesis. Although most of the stories are grim, the reader cannot help but be amused at the outrageous, at times burlesque turns of events. Only the bleak and disquieting desperation of the characters contradicts the humor inherent in their situations. Also, many of the stories end with the main character dead or reduced to a state of utter hopelessness. Many of the longer stories, such as “The Judgment,” are so complex that they can be confusing. Kafka’s shorter stories, consisting of only a paragraph or a page or two, sometimes leave a more lasting impression, because they each center on one main event. “Give It Up!” • Politzer begins his study with a lengthy discussion of a 124-word commentary that Kafka wrote late in 1922. In the commentary, which has become known as “Give It Up!,” a traveler heading for the train station early one morning becomes disconcerted when he checks his watch against a clock tower and thinks that he must be late. In his haste, he becomes uncertain of the way and has to ask a police officer. The officer repeats the question, then tells the man to give up and turns away from him. The police officer’s reply is both hilarious and profoundly unsettling. It is hilarious because it is completely out of line with what a police officer would say. It is unsettling because it lifts the story out of the mundane into a world where not only time but also, apparently, place have lost their relevance and it is impossible to determine one’s way. The issue has become existential. “Before the Law” • Kafka innately distrusted figures of authority and frequently portrayed them maliciously misleading and abusing those who came under their power. The 1922 commentary is simply a lighter variation on the theme that Kafka stated unforgettably in 1914 in his parable “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law”).

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This moving and perfect piece of writing was later incorporated into chapter 19 of Kafka’s novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937). In the two-page parable, a man from the countr y seeks access to the law. He is told by the doorkeeper that he may not enter at the moment but possibly later. The man is deterred from entering without permission by the doorkeeper’s telling him that this is only the first of many doors that are guarded by increasingly powerful doorkeepers. The man spends the rest of his life there waiting for admittance and gives away everything he owns in unsuccessful attempts to bribe the doorkeeper. Finally, in his dying hour, he asks why no one else has come to that door, only to hear the doorkeeper say: “This door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.” The parable is not enlightening. By the time the man finds out that he should go through the door after all, it is shut in his face. The story seems, rather, to be a comment on the human condition as Kafka experienced it in early twentieth century Europe. The rise of science and industry had displaced but could not replace religion, with the result that human beings could no longer find their way. The human institutions, the apparent absolutes represented by the law, prove to be fallible, imperfect, and unreliable. Nothing now can fill the human need for direction in life. Reality has become fragmented and disjunctive. “Before the Law” is particularly poignant because the reader cannot help but believe that, before the law, human beings are all people from the country, simple, helpless creatures who have lost their way. “The Bucket Rider” • The way out of this impossible situation is brilliantly described with humor and sadness in Kafka’s three-page story “Der Kübelreiter” (“The Bucket Rider”), written during a coal shortage in the winter of 1916. The main character has no coal, and it is bitterly cold. He also has no money but goes to the coal dealer anyway, to ask for only a shovelful. To show how desperate he is, he rides there on his empty coal bucket, sailing through the air and calling down from high above the dealer’s house. The dealer is deeply moved by the voice of an old customer, but it is his wife who goes to the street to investigate. Once she finds that the bucket rider cannot pay immediately, she claims to see no one and waves him away with her apron. The bucket is too light to offer any resistance. The rider ascends “into the regions of the ice mountains” and is “lost for ever.” This story contains the delightful, dreamlike element of the fantastic that is a source of great beauty in Kafka’s works. The moment the main character decides to ride on his bucket, which occurs at the beginning of the second paragraph, he is lifted out of everyday reality, in which he would surely have frozen to death. Kafka shows, once again, that it is useless to plead with others, especially those who have some authority. Rather than send his main character on an empty bucket back to his freezing room, Kafka has the bucket whisk him away into the ice mountains, never to return. Coal and indeed all mundane concerns cease to be a problem as the bucket rider leaves behind the human habitat. Thwarted by everyday pettiness, he has moved instead into a timeless mental space that seems infinitely more interesting. In “The Bucket Rider,” Kafka represents that space with the image of distant ice mountains. In his fifty-second aphorism, he writes a literal description of that saving space: “There is only a spiritual world; what we call the physical world is the evil in the spiritual one, and what we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development.” The bucket rider has transcended the evil phase.

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“A Country Doctor” • The winter of 1916 was one of Kafka’s most prolific periods and one in which he seemed especially visually oriented and inclined toward the fantastic. His seven-page masterpiece “Ein Landarzt” (“A Country Doctor”) is one of his most involved works. It contains all Kafka’s main themes and the salient features of his style. As in “The Bucket Rider,” the setting of “A Country Doctor” is an icy winter, and the mood is one of confused, melancholy desperation. The situation is hopeless, and the doctor sees no way out of it. Unlike “The Bucket Rider,” which has only one main event, “A Country Doctor” is a richly textured work. The most rewarding interpretive approach is that employed here in examining “The Judgment.” There are three main male characters: the country doctor, the groom, and the sick boy. They seem to represent different aspects of the same person, and the story, once again, seems to be autobiographical. The country doctor is an older man who has been working for a long time in his profession, and he is disillusioned. The local people, while placing many demands on him, do nothing to help him. Not one of the neighbors would lend him a horse in an emergency. In keeping with the spirit of the age, the people have lost their faith in religion and look instead to science and medicine to perform the miracles, backing up the doctor’s efforts with choral chanting as if he were a medicine man. He is the only one sadly aware of the limitations of his profession but plays out the charade in a resigned fashion, eventually lying outright to the boy by minimizing the severity of his fatal wound. Kafka was a professional as well, a lawyer who in 1916 had already worked nine years after articling. Although he was a dedicated and valued member of his firm, he regarded his work as a necessary evil, as his means of earning a living so that he could write in his spare time. He was not disillusioned with law, but neither did he harbor any cherished illusions about his distinguished profession. He believed that, as it did to the man from the country in “Before the Law,” law was wearing him out. Readers will equate the country doctor with Kafka the lawyer. In order of appearance, the second male character in “A Country Doctor” is the groom. That he belongs to the country doctor or is part of him is evidenced by the servant girl’s remark, “You never know what you’re going to find in your own house.” Certainly, the groom represents a source not tapped in a long time—so long, in fact, that the country doctor is surprised when the man emerges from the abandoned pigsty. By association with the steaming horses, by the birthlike nature of their emergence, and by his rape of Rose, the groom stands for vitality, sensuality, and sex. He is also associated with savagery and filth. At the time of writing “A Country Doctor,” Kafka had broken off his first engagement to Felice Bauer and had had several short-lived affairs. He was attracted to women but still believed that marriage and his work as a writer were mutually exclusive. His belief that marriage was not for him was based also on his perception of the sexual act as something terrible. Just as the groom represents a repressed aspect of the country doctor, who had all but ignored Rose, so, too, he represents the sexual fulfillment that Kafka decided again and again to sacrifice in order to continue his writing. Readers will equate the groom with Kafka the lover. The groom and the two horses emerge from the pigsty together, then go off in different directions. While the groom was pursuing Rose, the unearthly horses transported the country doctor to the sick boy. Perhaps the boy was only to be reached by supernatural means. There is a fairy-tale quality to the ten-mile journey. It took only

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a moment, and the blinding snow was gone, replaced by clear moonlight. The nature of the journey is significant for the reader’s interpretation of the boy. Kafka has placed him in the spiritual world. Whereas the country doctor is only one of many, as stressed by the indefinite article in the title, the boy is unique. His father, family, and the villagers have no understanding of the boy’s condition. Clearly, the boy is having a hard time of it in these surroundings. Even the doctor feels ill “in the narrow confines of the old man’s thoughts.” Disheartened, the boy at first wants to die. So does the doctor. Once the doctor becomes aware of the unique nature of the boy’s great wound, however, which is both attractive and repulsive, rose-colored and worm-eaten, the boy decides that he wants to live. By then, though, it is too late. The blossom in his side is destroying him. Like the friend in Russia in “The Judgment,” the boy in “A Country Doctor” appears sickly but turns out to be of supreme importance. Kafka was not physically strong. In 1916, his tuberculosis had not yet been diagnosed, but he suffered from stomach problems. He lived with his parents, who were concerned that the long hours he spent writing were ruining his health. It is therefore fitting that those characters in his stories who represent Kafka the writer appear to be sickly. Readers will equate the boy with Kafka the writer. Like the surface level of “The Judgment,” the surface level of “A Country Doctor” reads like a tragedy of unequaled proportions. Unable to help the boy, the country doctor finds himself also unable to get home, for the trip away from the boy is as slow as the trip to him was fast. “Exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages,” the doctor realizes that, as a result of this trip, he has not only sacrificed his servant girl but also lost his flourishing practice to his successor. What this translates into, though, is a triumph. Kafka the writer has subjugated Kafka the lawyer and Kafka the lover. The famous, peremptorily fatalistic last line of the story reveals its double meaning. “A false alarm on the night bell once answered—it cannot be made good, not ever.” Once Kafka accepted his gift as a writer, he could never abandon that link with the spiritual world. Kafka’s works show, simultaneously and paradoxically, not only the existential angst inherent in the human condition but also a way out of that hopeless state. If the various characters are considered as elements of a personality seeking integration, the stories end not bleakly but on a transcendent note. Kafka’s refuge was in his writing, in the spiritual world, and in laughter. Jean M. Snook With updates by Gerhard Brand and the Editors Other major works novels: Der Prozess, 1925 (The Trial, 1937); Das Schloss, 1926 (The Castle, 1930); Amerika, 1927 (America, 1938; better known as Amerika, 1946). miscellaneous: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass, 1953 (Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, 1954; also known as Wedding Preparations in the Country, and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, 1954). nonfiction: Brief an den Vater, wr. 1919, pb. 1952 (Letter to His Father, 1954); The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1948-1949; Tagebücher, 1910-1923, 1951; Briefe an Milena, 1952 (Letters to Milena, 1953); Briefe, 1902-1924, 1958; Briefe an Felice, 1967 (Letters to Felice, 1974); Briefe an Ottla und die Familie, 1974 (Letters to Ottla and the Family, 1982).

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Bibliography Ben-Ephraim, Gavriel. “Making and Breaking Meaning: Deconstruction, Four-Level Allegory, and The Metamorphosis.” The Midwest Quarterly 35 (Summer, 1994): 450467. Argues that Kafka’s ability to combine oppositions without resolving them enables him to simultaneously build and dismantle an allegorical ladder ascending the four levels of traditional interpretation. Bloom, Harold, ed. Franz Kafka. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Collection of essays, on Kafka himself and on themes that pervade his works, by distinguished scholars. Includes essays on the short stories “Up in the Gallery,” “A Country Doctor,” “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”), and “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”). Contains an excellent index that itemizes specific aspects of the works. Corngold, Stanley. Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Chapter 3 (43 pages) contains what is very likely the definitive analysis of “The Metamorphosis.” Also includes excellent analysis of “The Judgment,” in chapters 2 and 7, discussions of form and critical method, and comparisons with other authors. Corngold also wrote a critical bibliography of “The Metamorphosis” in The Commentator’s Despair (1973). Flores, Angel, ed. The Problem of “The Judgement”: Eleven Approaches to Kafka’s Story. New York: Gordian Press, 1976. English translation, followed by a valuable collection of essays on the short story that Kafka considered his best. Harmut Binder reveals a surprising number of background sources in literature and legend. Kate Flores writes a convincing analysis based on the nature of human fatherhood. Walter Sokel provides an extensive interpretation. Very worthwhile. Hayman, Ronald. K: A Biography of Kafka. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981. More than a biography, this study contains many helpful discussions of the literary works, showing how they arose in response to specific situations and linking them with contemporary passages from Kafka’s diary and letters. A moving portrayal particularly of Kafka’s last days, when his steps toward liberation coincided tragically with the final stages of tuberculosis. Heinemann, Richard. “Kafka’s Oath of Service: ‘Der Bau’ and the Dialectic of Bureaucratic Mind.” PMLA 111 (March, 1996): 256-270. Analyzes “Der Bau,” as a literary representation of what Kafka called the bureaucratic mind, which reflects both the acceptance of authority as a foundation for attachment to a community and the paralysis of a restlessly critical consciousness that makes impossible any reconciliation between self and other. Jofen, Jean. The Jewish Mysticism of Kafka. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Detailed, learned examination of Kafka’s connections to Jewish writers, including Y. L. Peretz, Martin Buber, Morris Rosenfeld, and other Yiddish authors. Contains notes but no bibliography. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of ten short stories by Kafka: “The Burrow” (vol. 1); “A Country Doctor” (vol. 2); “The Great Wall of China” (vol. 3); “A Hunger Artist,” “The Hunter Gracchus,” “In the Penal Colony,” “Jackals and Arabs,” and “Josephine the Singer; Or, The Mouse Folk” (vol. 4); “The Metamorphosis” (vol. 5); and “A Report to an Academy” (vol. 6). Oz, Amos. “A Log in a Freshet: On the Beginning of Kafka’s ‘A Country Doctor.’” Partisan Review 66 (Spring, 1999): 211-217. Argues that the story is not a story of crime and punishment, nor is it a fable about making the wrong decision. The feelings of

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guilt the doctor experiences are not the result of any action. Under the terms of Kafka’s contract, the doctor is guilty a priori, convicted from the start, despite his innocence. Reiner, Stach. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. First published in Germany in 2002, this stellar work serves as the first of a projected three-volume Kafka biography. Inclues photos, thorough notes, bibliography, and several indexes. Speirs, Ronald, and Beatrice Sandberg. Franz Kafka. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Chapters on “a writer’s life” and on the novels and short stories. Provides detailed notes and extensive bibliography.

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Jamaica Kincaid Born: Saint Johns, Antigua; May 25, 1949 Principal short fiction • At the Bottom of the River, 1983. Other literary forms • In addition to her short stories, Jamaica Kincaid has written the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), and Mr. Potter (2002). Her nonfiction writings include a book-length essay concerning her native island Antigua, A Small Place (1988) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005). She has also written a children’s book, Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip (1986) and has edited several anthologies, including The Best American Essays 1995 (1995), My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love (1998), and The Best American Travel Writing 2005 (2005). Achievements • Jamaica Kincaid’s short-story collection At the Bottom of the River received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. Her novel Annie John was one of three finalists for the international Ritz Paris Hemingway Award in 1985. Her short story “Xuela” was included in The Best American Short Stories 1995; “In Roseau” was included in The Best American Short Stories 1996. Biography • Born in 1949, Jamaica Kincaid, then Elaine Potter Richardson, lived with her homemaker mother and carpenter father on Antigua, a small West Indian island measuring nine by twelve miles. The family was impoverished: Their house had no running water or electricity. The young girl’s chores included drawing water from a community faucet and registering with the public works so that the “night soil men” would dispose of the family’s waste. Even so, her childhood was idyllic. She was surrounded by the extraordinary beauty of the island, was accepted by her community, and was loved and protected by her mother. When Kincaid was nine, however, her mother gave birth to the first of three more children—all boys. At that point, the closeness that Kincaid had enjoyed was at first disturbed and then destroyed. She credits the lies that she began to tell her mother as the catalyst for her fiction writing: “I wasn’t really lying. I was protecting my privacy or protecting a feeling I had about something. But lying is the beginning of fiction. It was the beginning of my writing life.” Also at this time, she began to comprehend the insidious impact of colonialism. (Antigua was a British colony until 1967, and only in 1981 did it receive full independence.) The Antiguans’ docile acceptance of their inferior status enraged her. Thus the serenity she had known as a child was displaced by loneliness and anger. In 1966, Kincaid, seeking to disassociate herself from her mother, left Antigua not to return for nineteen years and then only after she was a naturalized citizen of the United States and an established writer. Arriving in Scarsdale, New York, the seventeen-year-old Kincaid worked as a live-in baby-sitter. She did not open her mother’s letters, and when, after a few months, she took an au pair position in New York City, she did not send her mother her new address. For the next three years, she cared for the four young girls of Michael Arlen, a writer for The New Yorker and a future col-

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league when she herself would become a staff writer for the magazine. Her childhood and early New York experiences are fictionalized in At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy. During her first few years in New York, she wanted to continue TO VIEW IMAGE, her education at a university but PLEASE SEE found her Antiguan schooling to PRINT EDITION be inferior; instead, she first studied for a high school diploma, OF THIS BOOK. took a few photography courses at a community college, and then attended Franconia College in New Hampshire on scholarship, leaving after a year because, although only in her twenties, she felt too old. After jobs as a secretary and receptionist, she wrote for a teen magazine. In 1973, she changed Sigrid Estrada her name to Jamaica Kincaid, perhaps suggesting that she had achieved her own identity. Associating with New York writers and artists, she met George Trow (Lucy is dedicated to him), who wrote “Talk of the Town” for The New Yorker. She collaborated on a few columns, and eventually one of her pieces was accepted by editor William Shawn, who was known for encouraging fledgling writers. In 1978, the magazine published her first short story, “Girl.” Soon after, she married Allen Shawn, the editor’s son. In 1983, her first collection, At the Bottom of the River, was published to generally favorable reviews, as was her subsequent work, which has earned for her a devoted following. She continued to write short stories, usually published in The New Yorker, and give lectures and readings. She and Allen Shawn, a composer and professor at Bennington College, along with their two children—Annie, named after her mother, and Harold—settled in Bennington, Vermont. In addition to being a writer, Kincaid developed a passion for gardening, a subject on which she wrote for The New Yorker. She also published a collection of her gardening writings, My Favorite Plant, in 1998. Analysis • Jamaica Kincaid is noted for her lyrical use of language. Her short stories and novels have a hypnotic, poetic quality that results from her utilization of rhythm and repetition. Her images, drawn from her West Indian childhood, recall Antigua, with its tropical climate, Caribbean food, local customs, and folklore laced with superstitions. Many of her stories move easily from realism to surrealistic fantasy, as would a Caribbean folktale. She is also praised for her exploration of the strong but ambiguous bond between mother and daughter and her portrayal of the transformation of a girl into a woman. Thus her work touches upon the loss of innocence that comes when one moves out of the Eden that is childhood. These are the features that are found not only in her short fiction but also in her novels, the chapters of which The New Yorker originally published as short stories, and in Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tu-

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lip, a children’s book that was part of a project designed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the original publisher, who sought to bring together contemporary authors and artists for a series of limited editions aimed primarily at collectors. Kincaid’s concern with racism, colonialism, class divisions, and sexism is rooted in her history: “I never give up thinking about the way I came into the world, how my ancestors came from Africa to the West Indies as slaves. I just could never forget it. Or forgive it.” She does not hesitate to tackle these issues in her writing. In her nonfictional A Small Place, she directs the force of her language toward an examination of her native island of Antigua, presenting the beauty as well as the racism and corruption rooted in its colonial past. In her fiction, these same issues are not slighted; for example, Annie John and Lucy address various forms of oppression and exploitation. Jamaica Kincaid’s short stories, strongly autobiographical, are often set in the West Indies or incorporate images from the islands and include many events from her youth and young adulthood. In general, her stories chronicle the coming of age of a young girl. Because the mother-daughter relationship is central to the process, Kincaid often examines the powerful bond between them, a bond that the child must eventually weaken, if not break, in order to create her own identity. Kincaid has been accurately called “the poet of girlhood and place.” “Girl” • The first of the ten stories in At the Bottom of the River is the often-praised and quoted “Girl.” Barely two pages in length, the story outlines the future life of a young girl growing up on a small Caribbean island. The voice heard belongs to the girl’s mother as she instructs her daughter in the duties that a woman is expected to fulfill in a culture with limited opportunities for girls. Twice the girl interrupts to offer a feeble protest, but her mother persists. The girl is told how to wash, iron, and mend clothes; how to cook fritters and pepper pot; how to grow okra; and how to set the table—in short, everything that will enable her to care for a future husband. She is told how to smile, how to love a man, and how to get rid of an unborn baby should it be necessary. Most important, however, her mother warns her about losing her reputation because then the girl (and this is unsaid) loses her value as a potential wife. Almost as a refrain, the mother cautions, “On Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” or “This is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.” On the island, the girl’s most important asset is her virginity. The language is a prime example of Kincaid’s ability to work a hypnotic spell. The story consists of a series of variations on particular instruction: “This is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming.” The rhythm and repetition create a lyric poetic quality that is present to some degree in all Kincaid’s fiction. Her prose demands to be read out loud. “Girl” suggests the child’s future life on the island, but several stories in the collection re-create the atmosphere of her present existence. The story “In the Night” recounts her daily experiences. Thus, details such as crickets or flowers that would be important to her are recorded, often in the form of lists or catalogs: “The hibiscus flowers, the flamboyant flowers, the bachelor’s buttons, the irises, the marigolds, the whiteheadbush flowers, lilies, the flowers on the daggerbush,” continuing for a full paragraph. Here cataloging, a familiar feature of Kincaid’s prose, represents a

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child’s attempt to impose an order on her surroundings. The young narrator does not question her world but only reports what she observes. Thus witchcraft exists side by side with more mundane activities: “Someone is making a basket, someone is making a girl a dress or a boy a shirt . . . someone is sprinkling a colorless powder outside a closed door so that someone else’s child will be stillborn.” This melding of the commonplace with the supernatural occurs frequently in Kincaid’s fiction. The narrator’s troubles, such as wetting the bed, are those of a child and are easily resolved by her mother. Her plans for the future, marrying a woman who will tell her stories, also are typical of a child. This is an idyllic world before the fall from innocence, a world in which everything is ordered, listed, and cataloged. Nothing is threatening, since the all-powerful mother protects and shields. “Holidays” • In several other stories, including “Wingless” and “Holidays,” the girl is again shown to be occupied by the usually pleasant sensations of living: walking barefoot, scratching her scalp, or stretching, but sometimes, as illustrated in “Holidays,” experiencing pain: “spraining a finger while trying to catch a cricket ball; straining a finger while trying to catch a softball; stepping on dry brambles while walking on the newly cut hayfields.” The trauma, however, is clearly limited to physical sensations. When the child thinks of the future, the images are those of wishful thinking, similar to daydreams. This tranquil state of youth, however, is only temporary, as “Wingless” implies. The narrator, wingless, is still in the “pupa stage.” “The Letter from Home” • In “The Letter from Home,” the narrator’s growing awareness makes it impossible for her to maintain the comforting simplicity of her child’s world. Questions about life and death intrude: “Is the Heaven to be above? Is the Hell below?” These inquiries, however, are set aside in favor of the present physical reality—a cat scratching a chair or a car breaking down. Even love and conception are reduced to the simplest terms: “There was a bed, it held sleep; there was movement, it was quick, there was a being.” She is not ready to confront the idea of death, so when death beckons, she “turned and rowed away.” “What I Have Been Doing Lately” • Just as the philosophical questions about life and death disrupt the bliss of childhood, so does the journey toward selfhood, which Kincaid symbolically represents as a journey over rough or impassable terrain or water. In “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” the obstacle is water: “I walked for I don’t know how long before I came to a big body of water. I wanted to get across it but I couldn’t swim. I wanted to get across it but it would take me years to build a boat. . . . I didn’t know how long to build a bridge.” Because the journey is difficult, as any passage to adulthood would be, the narrator is hesitant, afraid of finding the world not beautiful, afraid of missing her parents, so she goes back to bed: She is not ready yet. Soon, however, she will not have the option of retreating and waiting. “My Mother” • The journey toward selfhood necessitates a separation from the mother, as is suggested in the story “My Mother.” The protection that was vital during childhood becomes stifling in adolescence: “Placing her arms around me, she drew my head closer and closer to her bosom, until finally I suffocated.” Furthermore, the girl’s feelings are ambiguous. Realizing that she has hurt her mother, she cries, but then she utilizes those tears to create a pond, “thick and black and poisonous,” to form a barrier over which they “watched each other carefully.” The all-protecting

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mother of the earlier stories transforms herself into a mythic monster and thus threatens the emerging selfhood of the daughter. The daughter, however, also grows “invincible” like her mother, and she, too, metamorphoses into a similar beast. Strong as the daughter has become, however, she can never vanquish her mother: “I had grown big, but my mother was bigger, and that would always be so.” Only after the daughter completes her own journey toward selfhood is her mother no longer a threat: “As we walked along, our steps became one, and as we talked, our voices became one voice, and we were in complete union in every way. What peace came over me then, for I could not see where she left off and I began, or where I left off and she began.” “At the Bottom of the River” • The concluding and title story is also the longest in the collection, at about twenty pages. “At the Bottom of the River” suggests answers to the questions raised in the other stories. Again, Kincaid employs the symbol of a journey through forbidding terrain to suggest traveling through life. What is the purpose of the journey, for what does one ultimately face but death? One man, overwhelmed, does nothing. Another discovers meaning in his family, his work, and the beauty of a sunrise, but still he struggles and “feels the futility.” How can one live with the paralyzing knowledge that “dead lay everything that had lived and dead also lay everything that would live. All had had or would have its season. And what should it matter that its season lasted five billion years or five minutes?” One possible response is suggested in the life of “a small creature” that lives in the moment, aware only of the sensation of grass underfoot or of the sting of a honeybee. The narrator, who at first knew only the love of her mother, suffers from its necessary withdrawal. Adrift, she embarks on a symbolic journey in which she submerges herself in a river-fed sea. Discovering a solution at the bottom of the river, she emerges with a commitment to the present. Death, because it is natural, cannot be destroyed, but the joys derived from the commonplace—books, chairs, fruit—can provide meaning, and she “grow[s] solid and complete.” “Xuela” • Kincaid’s story “Xuela” became the first chapter of her novel The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Like many of her other stories, it is set against a rich description of the botany and geography of tropical Dominica, and it continues Kincaid’s meditation on the theme of mothers and daughters. Xuela, the daughter who shares her mother’s name, also shares with many Kincaid women an anger at the mother who has rejected her and a fury at the world which little understands—and little cares—about her needs. In the story’s first sentence, the reader learns that Xuela’s mother died in giving her birth, and the rest of the story is the record of the first seven years of Xuela’s life. Her father places the infant in the care of Eunice, his laundrywoman and visits her every two weeks when he delivers the dirty clothes he cares for as little as he cares for his baby daughter either physically or emotionally, oblivious as he is to his laundrywoman’s lack of affection for her foster child. The child, however, knows very well that her foster mother has no use for her, and she grows ever more bitter and withdrawn. When she breaks Eunice’s treasured china plate, she cannot bring herself to utter the words “I’m sorry.” Like the turtles she captures and carelessly kills, Xuela has withdrawn into a shell which threatens to destroy her with enforced isolation. At that point her father sends Xuela to school. The few other students are all boys;

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like their teacher they are “of the African people” and unable to respond to the powerful element of Carib Indian in Xuela’s ancestry. The teacher wears her own African heritage like a penance and is quick to label Xuela’s intelligence as a sign of her innate evil. When the child is found writing letters to her father, he removes her from the school and takes her to live with him and his new wife, another woman who has no love for the child. Like her insensitive teacher, her father’s power as a jailer seems to suggest the destructive powers of colonialism, another Kincaid theme. Through all these trials, the child is sustained by a vision of her mother, who appears to her in sleep. In the dream, she sees her true mother descending a ladder to her, but always the dream fades before she can see more than her mother’s heels and the hem of her robe. Frustrating as it is, the dream also comes to represent the presence of the only person outside herself that Xuela can identify with unreserved love. The story’s themes of the mother who, from the child’s point of view, has willfully withdrawn her love joins with the theme of the child’s wakening to the use of sexuality to replace her lost mother’s love, linking this story to the rest of Kincaid’s work. Kincaid’s stories are praised for their strong images, poetic language, and challenging themes, and they are criticized for their lack of plot and sometimes obscure symbolism. Any reader, however, who, without reservations, enters Kincaid’s fictive world will be well rewarded. Barbara Wiedemann With updates by Ann D. Garbett and the Editors Other major works children’s literature: Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip, 1986 (with illustrations by Eric Fischl). anthologies: The Best American Essays 1995, 1995; My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, 1998; The Best American Travel Writing 2005, 2005. novels: Annie John, 1985; Lucy, 1990; The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996; Mr. Potter, 2002. nonfiction: A Small Place, 1988; My Brother, 1997; My Garden (Book), 1999; Talk Stories, 2001; Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, 2005. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Jamaica Kincaid. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Collection of individually authored chapters on Kincaid, this critical study includes bibliographical references and an index. Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Examination of Kincaid’s life, including her relationship with her mother, her homeland of Antigua, and her conflicting relations with her father and brother. De Abruna, Laura Nielsen. “Jamaica Kincaid’s Writing and the Maternal-Colonial Matrix.” In Caribbean Women Writers, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Lonsdale. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Discusses Kincaid’s presentation of women’s experience, her use of postmodern narrative strategies, and her focus on the absence of the once-affirming mother or mother country that causes dislocation and alienation. Ellsberg, Peggy. “Rage Laced with Lyricism.” Review of A Small Place. Commonweal 115

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(November 4, 1988): 602-604. In her review of A Small Place, with references to At the Bottom of the River and Annie John, Ellsberg justifies the anger that is present in A Small Place, anger that is occasioned by exploitation. Emery, Mary Lou. “Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination: Tropes of Visuality in Writing by Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16 (Fall, 1997): 259-280. Emery uses one of Jean Rhys’s novels to illustrate a dialectical relationship between the European means of visualization and image-making in postcolonial literatures as something not just of the eye. Argues that the use of the rhetorical trope of ekphrasis (an artistic hybrid) reflects the cultural hybrid nature of postcolonial literature. Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Includes bibliographical references and an index. ____________. “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” The Kenyon Review, n.s. 16 (Winter, 1994): 163-188. Kincaid discusses the inspiration for her writing and the reasons she wrote her first book in an experimental style; describes the influence of the English tradition on fiction in the Caribbean; comments on the nature of colonial conquest as a theme she explores through the metaphor of gardening. MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Garland, 2001. Focuses on these two Caribbean women writers. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Kincaid: “At the Bottom of the River” (vol. 1), “Girl” (vol. 3), and “My Mother” (vol. 5). Paravisini-Gerbert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Two biographical chapters are followed by penetrating analyses of At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994. Lucid critical overview of Kincaid’s life and work. A good introduction to her work for nonspecialist readers.

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Barbara Kingsolver Born: Annapolis, Maryland; April 8, 1955 Principal short fiction • Homeland, and Other Stories, 1989. Other literary forms • Barbara Kingsolver is known primarily for her long fiction, which includes The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Prodigal Summer (2000). She has also written travel articles, book reviews, essays, and poetry. Her nonfiction work Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1989) compellingly presents the plight of miners in southern Arizona’s copper mining company towns. Her other nonfiction books include High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995), Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands (2002), and Small Wonder (2002). Kingsolver’s only published volume of poetry is Another America (1992, 1998). The form in which verses are presented in that collection invites awareness of diverse perspectives, with Kingsolver’s poetry and its Spanish translations printed on facing pages. A selection of her essays in High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995) offers thoughts on parenting, home ownership, cultural habits, travel, and writing. Her observations on the natural order of things, from child rearing to exploring a volcanic crater in Hawaii, range from self-deprecatingly humorous to awe-inspired. All celebrate one’s connection to and citizenship of the world. Achievements • Kingsolver has received many awards for her writing. In 1986 the Arizona Press Club gave her its feature-writing award. She received American Library Association awards in 1989 for The Bean Trees and in 1990 for Homeland. The Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award (1990) for Animal Dreams and the prestigious PEN Western Fiction Award (1991) added to her reputation. In 1993 and 1994 she received the Los Angeles Book Award and Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association Award for Pigs in Heaven. She also received an Enoch Pratt Library Youth Book Award for The Bean Trees. Her other awards include the Enoch Pratt Library Lifetime Achievement Medal in 2005; the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Prodigal Summer; an award for the Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2001; a National Humanities Medal in 2000; the 1999 Patterson Fiction Prize; a New York Times Ten Best Books selection for The Poisonwood Bible in 1998; a citation of accomplishment from the United Nations National Council of Women in 1989. In 1995, De Pauw University conferred an honorary doctorate on her. She spent two semesters as a visiting writer at Emory and Henry College. True to her activist principles, she is the founder of the Bellwether Prize, given in support of literature of social change. Biography • Born in Annapolis, Maryland, on April 8, 1955, Barbara Kingsolver spent most of her childhood in eastern Kentucky’s rural Nicholas County and began writing before beginning high school. She studied biology at DePauw University in Indiana and graduated magna cum laude in 1977. While working for a master’s degree in science at the University of Arizona, she took a creative writing class. Between her stints as a student, she lived for a time in Greece and France. After completing her

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master’s degree, she did science writing for the University of Arizona and began to write feature articles, which appeared in such national publications as Smithsonian, Harper’s, and The New York Times. After marrying Joseph Hoffman in 1985, she wrote The Bean Trees during insomniac interludes she experienced while pregnant with her daughter Camille. She later divorced Hoffman and married Steven Hopp, with whom she settled in Tucson, Arizona. Kingsolver has been a political activist all of her adult life. Analysis • Barbara Kingsolver’s short stories are notable for their clear-eyed, sometimes ironic, and always empathic look at the daily lives of ordinary people. Her narrators are mostly female or compassionate omniscient voices telling stories of homecomings, intergenerational misunderstandings, and mundane events such as scheduling errands or getting to know one’s neighbors. She pays close attention to the tensions that control events like Thanksgiving dinners and accurately captures the dynamics of husband and wife and of mother and daughter. In her stories, characters struggle to understand who they are in the context of family history and their present circumstances. The epiphanies of Kingsolver’s women are small but searingly personal. They range from deciding not to have a child to a sudden understanding of a mother’s point of view. In a News Hour online interview with David Gergen, editorat-large for U.S. News and World Report, Kingsolver explained her fascination with the quotidian episodes in families’ and couples’ lives: We need new stories. We need stories that can help us construct, reconstruct the value of . . . solidarity, of not . . . the lone solo flier, but the family, the community, the value of working together. Kingsolver’s short fiction is not minimalist. She belongs to generations of storytellers who create settings rich in sensual and situational detail. Her characters are clearly situated and her stories have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end as do the stories of nineteenth century writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She is also distinctly contemporary because her characters reach an episode’s end when they achieve some insight or understanding of their condition. They do not, however, find sentimental or easy answers. Each story concludes with characters more able to cope with the literal and emotional landscapes of their lives. Like poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, Kingsolver embraces the political. She believes art should reflect the world she sees daily, so she writes, for example, about the plight of mine workers in the American Southwest and the displacement of American Indians. College professors, aging hippies, and small-town eccentrics all wrestle with bigotry and stereotyping as they move through their lives. Kingsolver’s characters avoid the cynicism of many contemporary fictional voices, seeking instead a synthesis that will see them through or the moral vision that will allow them to rise above prejudices they cannot control. She combines the narrative structure of nineteenth century realists with the frank look at life espoused by John Steinbeck, one of her inspirations. Kingsolver’s characters offer an alternative to ironic, angry characters. They struggle with the inequities of American life without losing their ability to maintain human connection. Kingsolver creates characters who confront life without relinquishing hope. Her vision is distinctive and welcome. Homeland, and Other Stories • Barbara Kingsolver’s collection is divided between stories in which the difficulties of small-town life are controlled by the fears and sensibil-

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ities of people wedded to the status quo and those in which the clash between alternative lifestyles and the ordinary routines of existence is prominent. With one exception, the narrators are women or feature omniscient narrators, whose voices elucidate women’s lives and points TO VIEW IMAGE, of view. The stories frequently have PLEASE SEE a postmodern view of time, jumpPRINT EDITION ing nonchronologically from one episode or memory to the next, the OF THIS BOOK. changes marked by spaces in the text as well as by narrated events. Kingsolver interestingly blurs the line between character and narrator by interspersing narrative passages with snippets of dialogue. Often the narrator’s contributions could just as easily be spoken by the main character; this shared quality underlines the universal relevance of private stories. Kingsolver’s stories, built around family routines, usually emphasize a thoughtful female character grappling with a problem. These range from spending quality time with a child (“Quality Time”), facing the need to break off a love affair (“Stone Dreams”), coping with suffering the failure of a long-standing relationship (“Blueprints”), and fighting economic and social injustice (“Why I Am a Danger to the Public”) to deciding whether or not to have a child (“Covered Bridges”). Another theme is how one comes to terms with one’s past. “Survival Zone” and “Extinctions” have dual tensions: The eternal city/country dilemma surfaces differently in each story, and each considers the opportunities for a life in the larger world as opposed to a well-known existence. “Rose-Johnny” tackles the divisive and meanspirited effects of racial prejudice in a small southern town. A young girl, curious and kindhearted, tells the story, which highlights the socially sanctioned cruelty of adults. Kingsolver’s characters realize the beginnings of personal solutions or they relate histories that reveal insights won after the scrutiny of their pasts. Either way, readers know life always goes on in its complicated and demanding way. Survival is mandatory; understanding possible. “Homeland” • The title story of Kingsolver’s collection Homeland, and Other Stories retrospectively tells the tale of an aging Cherokee grandmother’s last days. Gloria St. Clair, Great Mam’s granddaughter, a grown woman with her own grown children, narrates a family history that begins with the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Great Mam’s band had eluded relocation by hiding and was finally allowed to settle where they chose. Still, they called the refugee years “The Time When We Were Not.” Gloria’s reference initiates the reader into history as a personal experience. A reminiscence of the family’s trip back to Great Mam’s birthplace, the Hiwassee Valley in Tennessee, follows. Gloria’s father, a coal miner just back to work after a season of wildcat strikes,

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decides this trip is necessary for his mother, who is in her waning days; he plans it despite his wife’s skepticism. Great Mam and Gloria’s special relationship evolves along with the story. During lazy afternoons or quiet evenings in the dark, Great Mam tells Gloria stories of the animals “as if they were relatives [her] parents had neglected to tell [her] about.” The trip, with the three children bumping along in the back of a pickup truck, as well as the fact that they slept three to a bed, reveals the family’s economic situation. Gloria’s mother represents a third dynamic, the social status quo; she is thankful God spared her children a “Cherokee nose.” Mrs. Murray rises above the common-law, racially mixed marriage of her husband’s parents. Gloria balances between her mother and her love for the soft-spoken woman, who tells her how the world began and calls her Waterbug. She fatalistically laments her lack of attention to stories she now knows were rare treasures. The trip fails, the home of a once-proud people houses a troop of sideshow Indians in Cherokee Park. Great Mam does not get out of the truck but remarks to Gloria, “I’ve never been here before.” Great Mam’s death is unremarkable, personal, and poignant for Gloria and a troublesome irritation for her mother—the three of them a perfect metaphor for the pain of America’s position on “the Indian question.” “Islands on the Moon” • Annemarie and her mother Magda are intimate antagonists because Annemarie thinks her mother “doesn’t seem mid-forties, she seems like Grandma Moses in moonstone earrings.” Annemarie has been alienated from her mother, an aging hippie with wild hair, since her father’s death, and her aggravation only increases when Magda turns up pregnant at the same time that she does. As it turns out, Annemarie is not presently married and is contemplating remarrying her first husband. Her own son, Kevin, is moving steadily beyond her reach. Magda breaks her practice of keeping her distance because she wants Annemarie to accompany her when she has amniocentesis, a test to which she would not have agreed had her doctor not threatened to drop her as a patient if she refused. On the way to the clinic, the two have an automobile accident and are rushed to the hospital. The shock of the accident and their time side by side in the hospital free a torrent of resentments from Annemarie. Her persistence prompts Magda to say, “I never knew what you expected from me, Annemarie. I never could be the mother you wanted.” When Annemarie makes the ultimate accusation, that Magda does not miss her husband, Magda recounts her husband’s obsessive attempts to try to think of all the things she would need to remember to do after he was gone. Stunned, Annemarie understands her error. “How could I not ever have known that, that it wrecked your life, too?” she asks her mother. At the story’s end, Annemarie reaches over to touch her unborn sister, establishing a tenuous bond which now has a chance to flourish. Karen L. Arnold With updates by the Editors Other major works anthology: The Best American Short Stories, 2001, 2001. novels: The Bean Trees, 1988; Animal Dreams, 1990; Pigs in Heaven, 1993; The Poisonwood Bible, 1998; Prodigal Summer, 2000. nonfiction: Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, 1989;

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High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, 1995; Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, 2002 (photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt); Small Wonder, 2002. poetry: Another America/Otra America, 1992. Bibliography DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Good overview of Kingsolver’s work, emphasizing her ecofeminism. Draper, James P. “Barbara Kingsolver.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Yearbook 1993. Vol. 81. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Collection of critical views of Kingsolver’s work. Epstein, Robin. “Barbara Kingsolver.” Progressive 60 (February, 1996): 33-38. An informative interview with Kingsolver; Kingsolver believes that most readers do not think that her writing is overly political; she feels that she has a responsibility to discuss her beliefs with the public. Fleischner, Jennifer, ed. A Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Barbara Kingsolver: “The Bean Trees,” “Homeland, and Other Stories,” “Animal Dreams,” “Pigs in Heaven.” New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Good resource for the student new to Kingsolver’s work. Gaard, Greta. “Living Connections with Animals and Nature.” In Eco-Feminism: Women, Animals, Nature, edited by Greta Gaard. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Discusses the implications of a personal/political commitment to the natural world. Kingsolver, Barbara. Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly 237 (August 31, 1990): 46. Kingsolver discusses her early literary influences and her research and writing methods. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Kingsolver: “Homeland” (vol. 3), “Islands on the Moon” (vol. 4), and “RoseJohnny” (vol. 6). Pence, Amy. “Barbara Kingsolver.” Poets and Writers 21, no. 4 (July/August, 1993): 1421. Pence looks at Kingsolver’s writing and her commitments to political activism and family. Ross, Jean W. “CA Interview.” In Contemporary Authors. Vol. 134, edited by Susan M. Trotsky. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Brief biographical and professional information sections are followed by an interview covering Kingsolver’s writing methods, the sources of some of her characters, the importance of her background, and some of her nonfiction writing. Ryan, Maureen. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction.” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 77-123. Ryan compares Kingsolver’s first three novels with her first short-story collection.

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Rudyard Kipling Born: Bombay, India; December 30, 1865 Died: Hampstead, London, England; January 18, 1936 Principal short fiction • Quartette, 1885 (with John Lockwood Kipling, Alice Macdonald Kipling, and Alice Kipling); In Black and White, 1888; Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888; Soldiers Three: A Collection of Stories, 1888; The Phantom ’Rickshaw, and Other Tales, 1888; The Story of the Gadsbys, 1888; Under the Deodars, 1888; Wee Willie Winkie, and Other Child Stories, 1888; The City of Dreadful Night, and Other Places, 1890; The Courting of Dinah Shadd, and Other Stories, 1890; Life’s Handicap, 1891; Mine Own People, 1891; Many Inventions, 1893; The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895; Soldier Tales, 1896; The Day’s Work, 1898; Stalky and Co., 1899; Just So Stories, 1902; Traffics and Discoveries, 1904; Puck of Pook’s Hill, 1906; Actions and Reactions, 1909; Rewards and Fairies, 1910; A Diversity of Creatures, 1917; Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, 1923; Debits and Credits, 1926; Thy Servant a Dog, 1930; Limits and Renewals, 1932; Collected Dog Stories, 1934. Other literary forms • Rudyard Kipling’s literary career began in journalism, but his prose sketches and verse brought him early fame. He wrote several novels, most lastingly Kim (1901), and he also wrote works of history, including a study of his son’s military regiment from World War I. In his lifetime as well as posthumously, however, his fame depended upon his poetry and short stories, both of which he wrote for adult audiences and for children. Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (1937), was published after his death. Achievements • By his early twenties, Rudyard Kipling had become one of the bestknown writers in the English language. His first poems and stories were written and published in India, but his popularity quickly spread throughout the Englishspeaking world and beyond. Although he published several novels, the short-story form proved to be his most successful métier. Drawing upon his experiences in India, many of his early stories featured the adventures of ordinary soldiers, junior officers, and civil officials, and his use of dialect was a recognized feature of his literary technique. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, he also received honorary degrees from many universities. Kipling wrote extensively about the benefits of the United Kingdom’s paramount position in the world, and over time his public persona was perceived to be that of a political reactionary. Although some of his finest short stories were written in the last two decades of his life, by that time, to many of his contemporaries, he had become yesterday’s man, irrevocably associated with political imperialism, a dying creed even before his death in 1936. After his death, however, his stories received much critical study and acclaim, and Kipling is considered to be one of the major practitioners of the short-story art ever to write in English. Biography • Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and teacher. His mother, Alice Macdonald

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Kipling, was from a family of exceptional sisters. One married the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, and another was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister in the years between the two world wars. As was customary at the time, Rudyard and his younger sister remained in England when their parents returned to India, and Kipling dramatized his misery at being left behind in his later writings. He attended a second-rank private school that prepared middle-class boys for careers in the military; small, not athletic, and forced to wear glasses, Kipling was not an outstanding or popular student, but his literary interests proved a defense and a consolation. The university was not an option for him, primarily for financial reasons, and he returned to India, where his parents had found a position for him on an English-language newspaper. Kipling was fascinated by India. Often unable to sleep, he spent his nights wandering the streets. He had written some poetry as a schoolboy and continued to do so, while also composing newspaper sketches featuring his Anglo-Indian environment. By the end of the 1880’s, he had already published several volumes of short stories and poems. No British writer since Charles Dickens had become so well known, and Kipling was only in his mid-twenties. His works were often satiric, and some readers believed that he cast aspersions upon the British army and imperial authorities in India, but the opposite was closer to Kipling’s own feelings. He doubted that the English at home understood the sacrifices that the average soldier, the young officer, and the district commissioners were making to preserve Great Britain’s prosperity and security. Kipling left India in 1889 and established himself in London, where he became acquainted with the major literary figures of the day, including Thomas Hardy and Henry James. In 1890, he published his first novel, The Light That Failed. With the American Wolcott Balestier, Kipling, in spite of his previous unwillingness to attach himself to any literary partnership, wrote a second novel, The Naulahka: A Story of East and West (1892). Kipling’s relationship with Balestier was very close, and, after the latter’s death, he married Balestier’s sister, Caroline (Carrie), in 1892. Kipling subsequently settled in Vermont, near his wife’s family. Although residing there for four years before returning to England, Kipling never admired the United States and had difficulty with Carrie’s family. Kipling’s fame reached its pinnacle in the years before the South African (Boer) War broke out in 1899. His portrayal of the Empire struck a chord in the British psyche during the 1890’s; a changing political climate, however, began to make Kipling’s public posture as an imperialist less acceptable. Still, he continued to write, both for children and for adults. In 1902, he purchased Bateman’s, a country house in Sussex, which remained his home for the rest of his life. Long a frustrated man of action and a Francophile from his schoolboy years, he vehemently opposed Germany during World War I. His only son was killed in action in 1915. Kipling’s health had begun to decline, his marriage was less than fulfilling, and although he received much formal praise, his later stories were not widely read. He died in 1936 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, more a recognition for his earlier than his later career. Only after his death was it possible to separate the public man—imperialist and antiliberal—from the literary artist whose best stories have continued to survive. Analysis • Many of Rudyard Kipling’s earliest short stories are set in the India of his early childhood years in Bombay and his newspaper days in Lahore. The intervening

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years at school in England had perhaps increased his sensitivity to the exotic Indian locale and British imperial presence. Kipling was a voracious reader of English, French, and American writers, trained by his newspaper experience in the virtues of conciseness and detail. His art arrived almost fully revealed in his earliest works. Kipling focused, however, not on the glories and conquests of empire but on the lives—work and activities, passions and emotions—of ordinary people responding to what were often extraordinary or inexplicable events. Love, especially doomed love, terror and the macabre, revenge and its consequences—these were the elements upon which his stories turned, even later when the settings were often English. His fame or notoriety was almost instantaneous, in part because of the locations and subject matter of the stories, because of his use of dialect in re-creating the voices of his nonestablishment characters, and because Kipling’s early writings appeared at a time when England and Western civilization as a whole were caught up in imperial dreams and rivalries. A number of his stories pivot around the relations between men and women. Kipling has been called a misogynist, and often his characters, particularly those in the military, blame women for their own and others’ misfortunes. Most of his stories employ a male voice, and many critics agree that Kipling’s women are not often fully realized, particularly in his early years. The isolation of British soldiers and officials in India could itself explain these portrayals. There were boundaries in that esoteric environment—sexual, social, racial—that were violated only at a cost, but in Kipling’s stories they are crossed because his characters choose to do so or cannot help themselves. “Beyond the Pale” • In “Beyond the Pale,” Christopher Trejago seduces and is seduced by a fifteen-year-old Hindu widow, Bisea, before misunderstanding and jealousy cause the lovers to terminate the relationship. Later, Trejago returns to their place of rendezvous only to discover that Bisea’s hands have been cut off at the wrists; at the instant of his discovery, he is attacked by a sharp object that injures his groin. One of Kipling’s shortest stories, it exhibits several of his continuing concerns. Love, passion, even understanding are often doomed, whether between man and woman or between British and Indians, while horror and unexpected shock can occur at any time and have lasting effects; revenge is a human quality. Stylistically, the story is rich in the descriptive detail of the dead-end alley where Bisea and Trejago first met but is enigmatic in explaining how the affair became known, leading to Bisea’s maiming. The story does not end with the assault on Trejago. As often with Kipling, there is a coda. Trejago is forced to carry on, with a slight limp and the remembrance of horror leading to sleepless nights. “Love-o’-Women” • Dangerous boundaries and illicit relationships also feature in his “Love-o’-Women,” the story of Larry Tighe, a gentleman who had enlisted as a common soldier, a gentleman-ranker who stepped down out of his proper world. Kipling often used the technique of a story-within-a-story, told by a narrator who may or may not be telling the total truth but whose own personality and perception are as important as the plot itself, accomplished most notably in “Mrs. Bathurst.” Here, in “Love-o’-Women,” the tale opens with Sergeant Raines shooting one of his own men, Corporal Mackie, who had seduced Mrs. Raines. After Raines’s trial, several soldiers ruminate on the dead Mackie’s fate. One of them, Terrence Mulvaney, comments that Mackie is the lucky one: He died quickly. He then tells the story of Tighe,

Kipling, Rudyard whoc laimed the nickname of Loveo’-Women and made a career in the military of seducing daughters and wives, governesses and maids. When Tighe attempts to commit suicide by exposing his body to enemy fire during a battle, Mulvaney saves him and learns that Tighe deeply regrets what he has done, including his treatment and loss of his only real love, a woman named Egypt who turned to prostitution. Dying of syphilis, Tighe collapses in Egypt’s arms; she then shoots herself. Kipling did not necessarily believe in justice in the world, and, although reared a Christian, he was not orthodox in his religious beliefs but believed that there was a mortality for which one must answer. In “Love-o’-Women,” sin required confession, contrition, and penance.

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“The Phantom ’Rickshaw” • Ghosts or phantoms also often played a role in Kipling’s stories. In “The Phantom ’Rickshaw,” Jack Pansay, an English official in India, begins a shipboard flirtation with a married woman, Mrs. Keith-Wessington, while returning from England. The affair continues in India, but Pansay grows tired of her, becoming engaged to someone else. Mrs. Wessington refuses to accept the termination of the romance and subsequently dies after losing control of her rickshaw while attempting to renew the affair. Soon, as a ghostly presence, she and her rickshaw begin to appear to Pansay, and feeling that his rejection had killed her, he himself sinks into decline. Although his doctor believes that his illness is merely the result of overwork, Pansay believes otherwise: His death is the payment required for his treatment of Mrs. Wessington. “The Wish House” • From the beginning of his literary career, Kipling was considered to be a master in the use of dialect. Mulvaney’s telling of Tighe’s tale was rendered in an Irish dialect. In Kipling’s Indian stories, Mulvaney’s Irish was joined by characters speaking London Cockney, Yorkshire in northern England, and others. In many of his later stories, Kipling incorporated various English dialects, such as the Sussex dialect spoken by Grace Ashcroft and Liz Fettley in “The Wish House.” He generally used dialect when portraying the speech of persons from the undereducated classes or foreigners—persons different from his middle-class readers—and his treatment is often successful, even though some critics have claimed that his dialect re-creations were not entirely accurate. It has also been argued that, at times, the use of dialect gets in the way of the reading and understanding of the story itself, although this is more true of his early stories than his later ones. In “The Wish House,” Grace Ashcroft goes to an abandoned house, inhabited by

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wraiths, where it was possible to take on the pain of some loved one; for her, it was her former lover. Like the blind woman in “They,” however, she is driven by a love that is ultimately a selfish one: She is willing to accept his pain as hers not only because she loved him but also because she hopes that he will never marry and find happiness with anyone else. “The Brushwood Boy” • On occasion, Kipling attempted to create the speaking style of the middle or upper classes. Here the use of words and phrases can be disconcerting to the reader, particularly after the diction and slang of an era has become dated. In “The Brushwood Boy,” George Cottar, the perfect public-school graduate and heroic young officer, resorts to “By Jove” on a regular basis. Possibly accurate then, it is artificial and stereotyped to a later generation. The same might be said about Kipling’s attempts to re-create the voices of children: Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not. If dialogue and dialect can deepen and extend the meaning and quality of a story, they can also date a story and detract from it. During the 1890’s, after his marriage to Carrie and the birth of his three children, Kipling, although continuing to write short stories and novels for an adult audience, also turned his hand to works for children. Kipling had an empathetic feeling for children; some critics suggest that he never entirely outgrew his own childhood, with its traumas and rewards. The Jungle Book was published in 1894 and The Second Jungle Book the following year. The series of stories of the baby Mowgli reared by wolves in the jungle is perhaps the most enduring of Kipling’s many short-story collections. Several generations of children read about Father and Mother Wolf, the tiger Shere Khan, the sleepy bear Baloo, the panther Bagheera, and Kaa, the python. In later decades, other children came to know them through the Walt Disney cartoon feature, but there is a quality in the Kipling stories that did not translate fully to the screen. Like authors of other animal stories, Kipling anthropomorphized his creatures, and they exhibit recognizable human characteristics, but his jungle contains a quality of danger, of menace, which was not replicated in the Disney production. “The King’s Ankus” • Kipling’s City of the Cold Lair in “The King’s Ankus,” inhabited only by the evil White Cobra, places the reader in a dark, dangerous, and claustrophobic building, a house of fear and death. A continuing motif in the stories involves references to the Law of the Jungle—Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest—an ideology very prominent in the imperialist years of the late nineteenth century. The villainous Shere Khan, Mowgli’s rival who is always eager to put Mowgli to death, belonged to that jungle world, while the Monkey-People as portrayed in “Kaa’s Hunting” and human beings, driven from their village in “Letting in the Jungle,” did not. Both species did not properly follow the law; both were cowardly, vindictive, thoughtless, greedy, and irrational. Just So Stories • The Just So Stories were published in 1902. These were composed for an audience younger and more innocent than the readers of The Jungle Book stories. The teller of the tales, or fables, addresses his hearer as “O My Best Beloved,” who was Kipling’s eldest child, Josephine, who died at the age of six, in 1899. The Just So Stories appeal on two levels. First, they purport to answer some of the eternal questions of childhood such as “How the Camel Got His Hump” and “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” In so doing, Kipling’s genius for specific details captivates the reader. From “How the Whale Got His Throat” comes the following:

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If you swim to latitude Fifty North, longitude Forty West (that is magic), you will find sitting on a raft, in the middle of the sea, with nothing on but a pair of blue canvas breeches, a pair of suspenders (you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved), and a jack-knife, one shipwrecked Mariner. Second, the settings of the tales enchant with their exotic locale, such as the Howling Desert of the camel, the High Veldt of the leopard, and “the banks of the turbid Amazon” in those High and Far-Off Times. Puck of Pook’s Hill • The fourth collection of Kipling’s children’s stories was Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906. Now ensconced in the English countryside at Bateman’s, Kipling turned to the history of England. Puck, “the oldest Old Thing in England,” appears to two young children, Dan and Una, and through the use of magic conjures up for them various past eras from pre-Roman times onward. The nationalistic bias of the tales is not heavy-handed, and generally the narrative and the conversations of the characters are appropriate for children, while Puck’s world, if not Puck himself, is more familiar and less exotic than Kipling’s earlier children’s books. Among re-created practical Romans, patriotic Saxons, and archetypal peasants, the most evocative tale is “Dymchurch Flit,” recited by the narrator in a Sussex dialect. In the aftermath of Henry VIII’s Protestant Reformation, England’s fairies (“pharisees”) wished to flee from the land, and a peasant woman gives her two disabled sons through a “pure love-loan” to ferry them to the Continent. At the end of each conjuring of the past, however, Puck causes the children to forget him and his creations; he and his magic belong in the stories, not in so-called real life. Although Puck uses magic, the stories themselves are more realistic, being grounded in history, than either the fables of The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, or Just So Stories. “Mrs. Bathurst” • One of Kipling’s most successful short stories was “Mrs. Bathurst,” published in 1904 and set in South Africa. On one level, the story is told through an unidentified first-person narrator. He and his friend Inspector Hooper, a railway investigator who had just returned from surveying railway equipment in the interior, are passing time drinking beer on a hot day. Hooper has something in his pocket for which he occasionally reaches but never quite removes. They are shortly joined by Pycroft, a sailor, and Sergeant Pritchard, whom the narrator knows but Hooper does not. Pycroft and Pritchard begin to reminisce about sailors whom they have known: Boy Niven who led them astray in the forests of British Columbia supposedly searching for his uncle’s farm, Spit-Kit Jones who married “the cocoanutwoman,” and Moon, who had “showed signs o’bein’ a Mormonastic beggar” and who deserted after sixteen years of service. The talk then turns to “V,” who had disappeared just recently while up-country, only eighteen months before his pension. “V” was also known as Click because of his false teeth, which did not quite fit. Hooper is interested in what Pycroft and Pritchard have to say about “V” and asks them if “V” has any tattoos. Pritchard takes umbrage, believing that Inspector Hooper is seeking information in order to arrest his friend “V.” Apologies are made, and then Hooper asks to hear more about “Vickery,” though until that moment only “V” had been used in the discussion. The narrator asks why Vickery ran away, and Pycroft, through a smile, lets it be known that there was a woman involved. Mrs. Bathurst, a widow, owned a hotel in New Zealand frequented by sailors and others. Asked to describe her, Pycroft an-

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swered that “‘Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It.” Pycroft has now become the primary narrator, and Vickery and Mrs. Bathurst are filtered through his memories and perceptions. According to Pycroft, Mrs. Bathurst had “It,” and Vickery was captivated although he did not let that be known to Pycroft at the time. Last December, as Pycroft tells the story, while on liberty in Cape Town, he ran into Vickery who, visibly disturbed, demanded that Pycroft accompany him to a biograph or cinematograph. This early motion picture—a recent novelty—featured scenes from England. Sitting in the front row, Vickery and Pycroft watched various London views appear on the “magic-lantern sheet.” The scene shifted to London’s Paddington Station, and among the passengers who came down the platform in the direction of the camera was Mrs. Bathurst, who “looked out straight at us with that blindish look. . . . She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture—like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle.” At Vickery’s urging, Pycroft accompanies him for five consecutive evenings to the cinematograph. On one occasion, Vickery agitatedly claims that Mrs. Bathurst is looking for him. Then, under obscure circumstances, Vickery is assigned upcountry, and before he leaves he tells Pycroft that the motion picture of Mrs. Bathurst would appear again in a town where he would be able to see her once more. Vickery also abruptly informs Pycroft that he is not a murderer, for his wife had died during childbirth after Vickery had shipped out. Confused, Pycroft asked for the rest of the story but was not enlightened: “‘The rest,’ ‘e says, ‘is silence,’” borrowing from Hamlet (c. 1600-1601). Pycroft heard no more from Vickery. At this point Hooper again reaches into his pocket and makes a reference to false teeth being acceptable evidence in a court of law. He then tells of his recent experience in the interior. Told to watch for a couple of tramps, Hooper recites how he could see them from a long way off, one standing and one sitting. They were dead. There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see—charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to shift ‘em. The man who was standin’ up had the false teeth. I saw ‘em shinin’ against the black. . . . Both burned to charcoal. Again, Hooper reaches to his pocket, and again he does not bring forth anything. Although no other evidence appears, Pritchard for one seems to assume that the other body, unidentified by Hooper, is Mrs. Bathurst. Pycroft concludes that he for one is glad that Vickery is dead, wishing only to drink the last of the beer. Throughout the story, Mrs. Bathurst is perceived through a series of images, as seen and related by Pycroft and Pritchard, who had known her in New Zealand, as told by Vickery to Pycroft, as she appears flickering on the motion-picture screen and as the unidentified narrator recites these varying images to the reader. If one theme in “Mrs. Bathurst” is the difficulty of perceiving the reality behind the images, another is the compulsive and destructive power of love. This was not a new aspect in Kipling’s work, but perhaps never before had the woman, and even the man, Vickery, been quite so filtered from the reader through the various narrators and now including her image on the screen. Vickery’s death apparently resulted because of his experience with Mrs. Bathurst. What was that experience? Was he escaping from her or seeking her out? Was he guilty of something? Apparently he was not guilty of murdering his wife. Had love or its consequences driven him mad? One critic has pointed out the element of “synchronicity,” or the significant coincidence as an element in “Mrs. Bathurst.” Many twentieth century writers, from James Joyce to Anthony

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Powell, have employed this device. In “Mrs. Bathurst,” the most notable example was the coincidence of Vickery and then Pycroft discovering Mrs. Bathurst on the motion-picture screen. The story is of seemingly disjointed events, like individual scenes in a motion picture. Combined, they may have a coherence, but what that coherence is, or means, remains obscure, merely flickering images. Readers have puzzled over “Mrs. Bathurst” ever since the story first appeared. “They” • Several of Kipling’s later stories continue to develop his earlier themes. In 1904, Kipling wrote “They.” A ghost story, or perhaps a fantasy, its setting is a beautiful, isolated country house in England inhabited by a young blind woman who, through her sheer need, has been able to bring back the spirits of dead children and thus to transcend the grave, the ultimate barrier. Like Mrs. Bathurst and other of Kipling’s female characters, the blind woman has a power that profoundly affects the world around her. “Mary Postgate” • “Mary Postgate,” a powerful story of repression and revenge, portrays a middle-aged spinster and companion who passively accepts the abuse of the young boy of the house, Wyndham Fowler. He treated her shabbily for years, throwing things at her, calling her names such as “Posty” and “Packhead,” and belittling her abilities. Then, while in training as a pilot in World War I, Wynn is accidentally killed. Postgate has long repressed and denied any feelings and does so again when his death is announced; her only regret is that he died before he had the chance to “kill somebody.” While she is in town getting paraffin to burn Wynn’s effects, a building collapses, killing a young girl; although the local doctor tells her that the crash occurred from natural causes, she refuses to accept it, convinced that the Germans have bombed the house. Returning home to light the fire, she comes across an injured pilot in the garden and, assuming that he is German, refuses to summon a doctor, electing instead to watch him die. In choosing the pilot’s death, Postgate not only is having her revenge for the death of Wynn and the girl killed supposedly at the hands of the hated German enemy but also is gaining her personal revenge for the hollowness of her own life. The pilot in the garden might well be German, but for Mary it makes no difference: It could be anyone. As he dies and as the fire consumes Wynn’s effects, Mary experiences a rush of ecstasy comparable to a sexual release. “Mary Postgate” is a deeply felt exploration of a damaged human psyche. “Dayspring Mishandled” • “Dayspring Mishandled” is one of Kipling’s last and finest stories. It, too, is a story of revenge, but revenge ultimately not taken. It tells of two writers, Manallace and Castorley, cynically writing for pulp publication: “If you save people thinking you can do anything with ‘em.” After they quarrel, Castorley decides to write real literature and becomes a pseudoexpert on Geoffrey Chaucer; Manallace, who does have literary abilities, chooses not to pursue his talent and continues the easy path. Over an unspecified insult by Castorley to a woman for whom Manallace has been caring—typically in Kipling, much is left unsaid—Manallace vows revenge, creating a fake Chaucerian manuscript that Castorley publicly proclaims as legitimate, thus earning a knighthood. Manallace plans to reveal the fake, perhaps to the press, perhaps to Castorley himself to drive him insane, but he delays his plan as Castorley’s health begins to fail and as he is put under the care of a doctor, Gleeag, who Manallace later suspects is poisoning Castorley. Lady Castorley urges Manallace to help Castorley assemble his collected works for publication and implies

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that she knows about the forgery; Manallace believes that she is having an affair with Gleeag, the doctor, and that she wants knowledge of the fake Chaucer manuscript to come out in hopes that the shock will kill her husband. On his deathbed, Castorley confesses his fears to Manallace: The manuscript was “too good,” and his wife has reminded him that “a man could do anything with anyone if he saved him the trouble of thinking,” which is exactly what Manallace has done with Castorley by allowinghim to validate the fake without really thinking. Castorley dies of what Gleeag, Lady Castorley’s paramour, said was “Malignant kidney-disease—generalized at the end.” Like most of Kipling’s best stories, “Dayspring Mishandled” explores the recurring themes of passion and revenge, the failure of human nature, the confusion in relationships, frustrated ambition, and the inability to see clearly, even in the understanding of oneself. It is rich in allusions and references that remain unexplained and are left for the reader to explore. Kipling’s most popular stories were the product of his early life, but some of his greatest stories—too often ignored for a time— were written toward the end. Eugene S. Larson Other major works novels: The Light That Failed, 1890; The Naulahka: A Story of East and West, 1892 (with Wolcott Balestier); Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks, 1897; Kim, 1901. miscellaneous: The Sussex Edition of the Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, 1937-1939 (35 volumes). nonfiction: American Notes, 1891; Beast and Man in India, 1891; Letters of Marque, 1891; The Smith Administration, 1891; A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips with the Channel Squadron, 1898; From Sea to Sea, 1899; Letters to the Family, 1908; The New Army in Training, 1914; France at War, 1915; The Fringes of the Fleet, 1915; Sea Warfare, 1916; Letters of Travel, 1892-1913, 1920; The Irish Guards in the Great War, 1923; A Book of Words, 1928; Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown, 1937; Uncollected Prose, 1938 (2 volumes); Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, 1965 (Morton N. Cohen, editor); The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 1990-2004 (6 volumes; Thomas Penney, editor); Writings on Writing, 1996 (Sandra Kemp, editor); Kipling’s America: Travel Letters, 1889-1895, 2003 (D. H. Stewart, editor). poetry: Schoolboy Lyrics, 1881; Echoes, 1884 (with Alice Kipling); Departmental Ditties, 1886; Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses, 1892; The Seven Seas, 1896; An Almanac of Twelve Sports, 1898; Recessional, and Other Poems, 1899; The Five Nations, 1903; Collected Verse, 1907; A History of England, 1911 (with C. R. L. Fletcher); Songs from Books, 1912; Sea Warfare, 1916; Twenty Poems, 1918; Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1885-1918, 1919; The Years Between, 1919; Q. Horatii Flacci Carminum Librer Quintus, 1920 (with Charles L. Graves, A. D. Godley, A. B. Ramsay, and R. A. Knox); Songs for Youth, 1924; Sea and Sussex from Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1926; Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1886-1926, 1927; Songs of the Sea, 1927; Poems, 1886-1929, 1929; Selected Poems, 1931; Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1885-1932, 1933; Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1940 (definitive edition). Bibliography Adams, Jad. Kipling. London: Haus Books, 2005. This biography reveals Kipling’s inspiration for his poetry and portrays sides of his character that are rarely seen.

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Battles, Pau. “‘The Mark of the Beast’: Rudyard Kipling’s Apocalyptic Vision of Empire.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Summer, 1996): 333-344. A reading of Kipling’s story as his most powerful critique of the Empire; argues that “The Mark of the Beast” is an allegory of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Bauer, Helen Pike. Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1994. Discusses the themes of isolation, work, the Empire, childhood, the supernatural, and art in Kipling’s short stories. Includes Kipling’s comments on writing and excerpts from a formalist and a postcolonial analysis of Kipling. Coates, John. The Days’s Work: Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Explores one of Kipling’s favorite themes. Daniel, Anne Margaret. “Kipling’s Use of Verse and Prose in ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep.’” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 37 (Autumn, 1997): 857-875. Argues that the story relies on a literary self-consciousness to bring under artistic control the possible untruths and chaos of memory; claims that Kipling’s use of both prose and poetry creates a comfortable connection with his audience. Dillingham, William B. Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. This biography offers a close look at some of Kipling’s most noted works while exploring the complexities of his personality. Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Interesting account of Kipling’s life and his complex and changing views of the British Empire, written with an awareness of the rise of terrorism emanating from the postcolonial developing world. Mallett, Phillip, ed. Kipling Considered. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. This collection contains essays on Plain Tales from the Hills, Stalky and Co., Kipling and Conrad, and “Mrs. Bathurst.” The most helpful for readers interested in Kipling’s short stories is Clare Hanson’s discussion of the meaning of form in Kipling’s short stories; Hanson establishes a theoretical framework for the short story as a genre and discusses Kipling’s “Mary Postgate” to illustrate her concepts. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eight short stories by Kipling: “The Gardener” (vol. 3); “Lispeth” (vol. 4); “The Man Who Would Be King” (vol. 5); “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” “They,” and “Thrown Away” (vol. 7); and “Wireless” and “The Wish House” (vol. 8). Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Sections on Kipling’s poetry, his writing on India, his work as a mature artist, his unfinished memoir, and his controversial reputation. Introduced by a distinguished critic. No bibliography. Ricketts, Harry. Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. In a detailed and lively account of Kipling’s life, Ricketts also analyzes the literary works that emerged from that popular but controversial career.

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Ring Lardner Born: Niles, Michigan; March 6, 1885 Died: East Hampton, New York; September 25, 1933 Principal short fiction • Bib Ballads, 1915; Gullible’s Travels, 1917; Treat ‘em Rough, 1918; Own Your Own Home, 1919; The Real Dope, 1919; How to Write Short Stories, 1924; The Love Nest, and Other Stories, 1926; Round Up: The Stories of Ring Lardner, 1929; Lose with a Smile, 1933; Ring Around the Bases: The Complete Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner, 1992 (Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor). Other literary forms • Ring Lardner is known chiefly as a short-story writer, but in his own time was better known as a sportswriter, columnist, and humorist. He also wrote two novel-length works, You Know Me Al (1915) and The Big Town (1921), and he tried his hand at writing musical comedies, June Moon (1929; in collaboration with George S. Kaufman) being his only successful one. Most of Lardner’s nonfictional prose remains uncollected, although a few works have appeared in book form, including an early piece about the return of the Chicago White Sox from a worldwide tour, a book of verse about successful business and professional men (Regular Fellows I Have Met, 1919), three humorous essays, “The Young Immigrunts,” “Symptoms of Being Thirty-five,” and “Say It with Oil,” and a burlesque autobiography, The Story of a Wonder Man (1927). Achievements • Ring Lardner added significantly to a tradition dating back at least as far as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Using first-person monologue (usually humorous, always steeped in colloquialisms, occasionally in the form of correspondence), Lardner allowed his characters to reveal themselves, warts and all. As such, the superficiality and insincerity of his narrators is starkly contrasted with the often harsh truths they unintentionally reveal. This allowed Lardner to illustrate some of the less edifying aspects of American society and human nature in general. He also captured the spoken language (and slang) of ordinary people, rendering it as an art form unto itself. Thus, in addition to their entertainment value, Lardner’s stories provide a telling picture of American manners and morals during the first third or so of the twentieth century. Finally, Lardner was a pioneer in the fruitful marriage between the game of baseball and American letters, laying the foundation for later works by prominent authors such as Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly, 1956), W. P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe, 1982, filmed as Field of Dreams, 1989), Bernard Malamud (The Natural, 1952), and Philip Roth (The Great American Novel, 1973). Biography • Ring Lardner was born into a wealthy, genteel family and educated at home by his mother and a tutor before he attended the public high school. After a brief stay at the Armour Institute in Chicago, where his father sent him to study mechanical engineering, he held a series of jobs with newspapers, chiefly as a sportswriter, which led him into writing fiction about ball players and athletes. He married Ellis Abbott in 1911; they had four sons. He died in 1933 of a heart attack.

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Analysis • The question that almost inevitably arises in any discussion of Ring Lardner’s stories is: What is Lardner’s attitude toward his characters and by extension toward the culture out of which they come? Is Lardner, in other words, a misanthrope who hated not only his own characters but also himself, or is he, rather, a disappointed idealist who found in the world of his immediate experience constant instances of cruelty, vulgarity, and insensitivity? Those who point to Lardner’s sheltered upbringing and the apparently happy family life both of his early years and of his later married life favor the latter view, while those who wish to find in his fiction some affirmation of the goodness of human beings prefer the former. Obviously, no final answer to the question is possible. “Champion” • If one reads an early story such as “Champion,” one sees a heavyhanded author stacking the cards against his brutal hero, Midge Kelly. Midge beats his disabled brother to steal his half dollar and, when their mother objects, beats her, too. Thereafter Midge’s life is a succession of victories and brutalities: He becomes a prizefighter who wins fight after fight and, at the same time, does in those who have befriended him. Although his disabled brother is sick and unable to get out of bed and longs to have a letter from his famous brother, Midge refuses to write. When his wife and son are ill and destitute, he tears up a letter from his wife begging for help. He fires the manager who has helped make him a champion fighter and heaps money on a woman who is obviously using him, although he later casts her off, too, and then takes for himself the wife of his new manager. Through the obvious cardstacking one sees Lardner’s intention. He hates brutality and he hates the way brutality is not only ignored but also rewarded in our society. Midge Kelly is not a believable character; he is a symbol on which Lardner heaps all of the abuse he can muster. If it were not for the brutality, “Champion” would be a maudlin tearjerker. The truth seems to be that, underneath the pose of the realist, observer, and reporter of American crudities, Ring Lardner was a sensitive, even a sentimental man. The monologue form exactly suited his need to keep the sentimentality out of sight while letting his crude, vulgar, insensitive types condemn themselves out of their own mouths, but it was also a way of allowing the victims of the bullies to engage the reader’s sympathies without having to make them stereotyped victims: people with disabilities who are beaten, mothers knocked down by their sons, abandoned wives and babies. Lardner’s best stories present the reader with a story in which the real author has all but disappeared while his narrator tells his ironically revealing, selfcondemning tale. “Haircut” • One of the best of Lardner’s stories, “Haircut,” is told by a barber who is giving a haircut to an unnamed stranger in a small Midwestern town. The hero of the barber’s tale is Jim Kendall, a practical joker, whom the barber describes as “all right at heart” but whom the reader quickly sees as a man who enjoys inflicting pain on other human beings under the guise of being funny. To pay his wife back for getting his paycheck (he gives her no money to run the household), Kendall tells her to meet him with their children outside the tent of a visiting circus. Instead of joining her there with the tickets as he promised, he hides out in a saloon to savor the joke he is playing on his family. Meanwhile, a new doctor in the town, “Doc” Stair, appears on the scene, and feeling sorry for the mother with the crying children, buys the tickets for them. When Kendall hears how Doc Stair spoiled his fun, he gets furious and vows revenge. He tricks a young woman, Julie Gregg, who is “sweet on” Doc Stair, into com-

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ing into the doctor’s office late at night. No one is there but Kendall and his friends hiding in the dark. When Julie calls out the doctor’s first name, “Oh, Ralph,” Kendall and his crowd leap out and mimic her. When she retreats, they chase her home. Another frequent victim of Kendall’s jokes, a “cuckoo” named Paul who is fond of Julie and the doctor and who hears the doctor say that a man like Kendall ought not to be allowed to live, invites himself to go duck hunting with Kendall. Kendall gives Paul his gun to hold, the gun goes off, and Kendall is killed. Doc Stair, the coroner, rules the shooting accidental. Although in this story the chief villain is given his comeuppance, a subtler cruelty is revealed by the barber who says of Kendall that in letting a man like Paul hold his gun, he probably got what he deserved.

“Golden Honeymoon” • Another of Lardner’s best stories, “Golden Honeymoon,” is a gentler satire; indeed, critics have disagreed about whether this is the portrait of a happy marriage or a vicious attack on marriage in general. Doubtless the truth lies somewhere in between, for the old man who tells the story of his and his wife’s trip to Florida on their golden honeymoon is a boring windbag. He is impressed with himself and his son, who is “high up in rotary”; with the commonplace, vulgar details of their trips to cafeterias, church socials, card games, and movies; and with their encounter with his wife’s old beau. The main action of the story concerns the conflict that arises between the couple over the reappearance fifty years later of the suitor, who is married to a woman the narrator describes as a rotten cardplayer. Although he is not as brutal or despicable as other Lardner narrators, he has many of the same faults: insensitivity, vanity, pettiness, and even a little cruelty. When he wins a game of checkers, he gloats; when he loses at horseshoes, he pouts. When his wife hurts her back on the croquet court, he laughs at her, and when he is beaten at horseshoes, he quarrels with his wife and she quits speaking to him. The story ends “happily”—that is, the two make up and get “kind of spoony”—but the essential portrait remains that of a boring, vain, pompous old man. “Some Like Them Cold” • “Some Like Them Cold” is a story told through the exchange of letters between a young woman named Mabelle Gillespie who allows herself to be picked up by a young man in the La Salle Street Station in Chicago. Chas. F. Lewis (as he signs his letters) is on his way to New York to break into the songwriting business. He is a typical Lardner monologuist—vain, crude, and cruel—and Mabelle is the familiar Lardner victim—sensitive, trusting, and foolish. Her letters to Lewis play up her virtues as a “home body”; his become increasingly short, emphasizing

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how well he is getting on in the Big Town and offering accounts of women who chase him. After he announces his marriage to a woman whom he had earlier described as cold and indifferent to home life, he advises Mabelle not to speak to “strange men who you don’t know nothing about as they may get you wrong and think you are trying to make them.” “Some Like Them Cold” was later converted by Lardner into the successful musical comedy June Moon. “Ex Parte” • A story technically subtler is “Ex Parte,” told in the first person by a man attempting to justify his part in the breakup of his marriage. As he tells it, he and his wife were happy on their honeymoon but as soon as they moved into the house he had bought as a surprise for her (he had promised they would choose a house together), their marriage began to go bad. The trouble is that the house and furniture (picked out by a decorator) are too shiny and new-looking to suit his wife; she hates the house and admires the converted barn and early American furniture of her school friend. Even the nicks and burns on her friend’s dining room table seem beautiful to her. So the narrator, after consuming a large quantity of “early American Rye,” goes home and mutilates their table with a blow torch. His wife leaves him, and he is now trying to get his friends to take his side in the quarrel. What is unusual about this story is that, instead of the typical opposition of bully and victim, there is rather a battle between two people equally insensitive and shallow: the husband who likes bright, shiny new things and the wife who likes antiques. For both, marriage is simply a matter of having the right things. To call Ring Lardner either a misanthrope or a humorist, or even a realist who observed American manners, is to miss the point. Lardner was a moralist, like his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, although at times he could be merely funny or sentimental or tiresome, his best stories are homilies, camouflaged by humor, on meanness, cruelty, and vanity. Lardner had a remarkable ear for a certain kind of native American speech, and he used that talent for giving his stories the ring of truth and passing on to succeeding generations a small but enduring collection of excellent short stories. W. J. Stuckey With updates by Ira Smolensky Other major works play: June Moon, pr. 1929 (with George S. Kaufman). novels: You Know Me Al, 1915; The Big Town, 1921. nonfiction: My Four Weeks in France, 1918; Regular Fellows I Have Met, 1919; “The Young Immigrunts,” 1920; “Symptoms of Being Thirty-Five,” 1921; “Say It with Oil,” 1923; What of It?, 1925; The Story of a Wonder Man, 1927; Letters from Ring, 1979 (Clifford M. Caruthers, editor; revised as Letters of Ring Lardner, 1995). Bibliography Blythe, Hal, and Charlie Sweet. “Lardner’s ‘Haircut.’” The Explicator 55 (Summer, 1997): 219-221. Poses the question of why Whitey would tell his tale of homicide to a stranger; argues that Whitey feels guilty because he has been involved and thus, like the Ancient Mariner, stops strangers to tell his tale. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Richard Layman. Ring Lardner: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976. This highly accessible and useful summary of Lardner’s work provides a good starting point for getting a sense of Lardner’s overall achievements, range, and productivity.

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Cowlishaw, Brian T. “The Reader’s Role in Ring Lardner’s Rhetoric.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Spring, 1994): 207-216. Argues that readers of Lardner’s stories perceive a set of corrective lessons conveyed satirically by an implied author. Readers who accept the role of implied reader and thus align themselves with the implied author as perceptive and intelligent people accept these lessons and thus fulfill the basic purpose of satire, which is social correction. Friedrich, Otto. Ring Lardner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Admirably concise work that discusses Lardner’s command of different dialects. Puts the darker side of Lardner’s psyche into the context of myths and misconceptions popular at the time he wrote. An expert on the historical period both in the United States and Europe, Friedrich provides a lucid and insightful introduction to Lardner’s main themes and techniques. Geismar, Maxwell. Ring Lardner and the Portrait of Folly. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972. Probably the most ambitious work of literary criticism devoted entirely to Lardner. Geismar draws a full-blown critique of American materialism out of Lardner’s work, arguing that Lardner’s sarcasm and satire masked a deeply felt idealism. Lardner, James. “Ring Lardner at 100—Facing a Legacy.” The New York Times Book Review 90 (March 31, 1985): 3. James Lardner reflects on the life and work of his grandfather, Ring Lardner, and describes the Ring Lardner Centennial Conference held at Albion College in Michigan; discusses Lardner’s satire, although he contends he gives his characters more depth than one usually associates with satire. Lardner, Ring. Letters of Ring Lardner. Edited by Clifford M. Caruthers. Washington, D.C.: Orchises, 1995. Lardner’s correspondence reveals biographical elements of his life. Lardner, Ring, Jr. The Lardners: My Family Remembered. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Lardner’s third son, a successful screenwriter, provides a charming portrait of the Lardner family. As portrayed here, Ring Lardner, Sr., was humble and completely unpretentious about his work. He was also a good family man and had an interesting circle of friends, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Lardner: “The Golden Honeymoon,” “Haircut,” and “Harmony” (vol. 3); and “Some Like Them Cold” (vol. 7). Robinson, Douglas. Ring Lardner and the Other. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Examines Lardner’s themes in his fiction. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Yardley, Jonathan. Ring. New York: Random House, 1977. This well-written, thorough biography is especially good at drawing the very strong connection between Lardner as journalist and Lardner as short-story writer. According to Yardley, the journalistic desire of unadorned facts that Lardner had to present leads logically to an unflinching examination of human nature and American society through the medium of fiction.

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Mar y Lavin Born: East Walpole, Massachusetts; June 11, 1912 Died: Dublin, Ireland; March 25, 1996 Principal short fiction • Tales from Bective Bridge, 1942; The Long Ago, and Other Stories, 1944; The Becker Wives, and Other Stories, 1946; At Sallygap, and Other Stories, 1947; A Single Lady, and Other Stories, 1951; The Patriot Son, and Other Stories, 1956; Selected Stories, 1959; The Great Wave, and Other Stories, 1961; The Stories of Mary Lavin, 1964-1985 (3 volumes); In the Middle of the Fields, and Other Stories, 1967; Happiness, and Other Stories, 1969; Collected Stories, 1971; A Memory, and Other Stories, 1972; The Shrine, and Other Stories, 1977; A Family Likeness, and Other Stories, 1985; In a Café, 1995. Other literary forms • Mary Lavin’s novel Gabriel Galloway was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944 and was later published as a book under another title, The House in Clewe Street (1945). The House in Clewe Street and the novel Mary O’Grady (1950, 1986) are a loosely connected series of episodes in family life, structured to dramatize the lives of family members over several generations. Without an overall unity, the novels lack direction and force; there are, however, numerous examples within the novels of the social mores and restrictive attitudes more artfully handled in the short stories. Lavin’s fine children’s stories, A Likely Story (1957) and The Second-Best Children in the World (1972), capture the imaginative life of children. Achievements • As a major Irish writer, Mary Lavin is a realist in the tradition of Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin. The resemblance to those important Irish writers, however, stops there. Her characters are usually solidly middle class, and they tend to be shopkeepers and clerks, a population that is, perhaps, less “submerged” than that of O’Connor’s fiction. For Lavin, social class is a determining factor in a character’s behavior and fate. She stresses the limitations imposed by a character’s social role. In addition, she does not use humor as a major fictional device. Instead of humor, there is often an ironic twist to the plot. Lavin’s plots also tend to avoid the simple solution provided by techniques such as reversal and recognition. Instead, she closely examines the problems that her characters encounter. If there is a resolution, it is by no means a simple one. Lavin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1944, the Katherine Mansfield-Menton Prize in 1962, the Ella Lynam Cabot Fellowship in 1971, the Gregory Medal in 1974, and the American Irish Foundation Award in 1979. Lavin was president of the Irish Academy of Letters from 1971 to 1973, and she received the American Irish Foundation award in 1979. Lavin was honored at the Kells Heritage Festival in County Meath in 1993, when an Irish television documentary about her life and work, An Arrow in Flight, was screened. Also in 1993, Aosdana, the Irish body that honors writers, musicians, and visual artists, granted her its highest distinction by electing her to the rank of Saoi, “in recognition of creative work which has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland.” The Irish President at the time, Mary Robison, praised Lavin’s ability to “catch the tones of the Irish family and the tensions therein.”

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Biography • Born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, on June 11, 1912, and the only child of Irish-born Nora Mahon and Tom Lavin, Mary Lavin emigrated to Ireland in her ninth year. Educated at Loreto Convent in Dublin and University College, Dublin, she wrote her master’s thesis on Jane Austen; she then taught French at Loreto Convent for two years while preparing her unfinished doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf. In 1942, she married William Walsh, and they had three daughters: Valentine, Elizabeth, and Caroline. After the death of her husband in 1954, Lavin had little time to write fiction since she had to bring up her children and run the farm at Bective. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1959, however, and another in 1962, gave her the time and confidence to create fiction once more. She published a number of stories that were then collected in The Great Wave, and Other Stories. Thereafter, the years became serene and productive. Lavin received a number of awards and prizes, including a third Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1972, and a D.Litt. from the National University of Ireland in 1968. In 1969, she married an old friend from her university days, Michael MacDonald Scott, a laicized Jesuit. Lavin, who had been living in a nursing home in Blackrock, a southern suburb of Dublin, died on March 25, 1996, at the age of eighty-three. She was praised by both the president of Ireland, Mary Robison, and the Taoiseach, John Bruton, who said her life was characterized by the ability to “make the ordinary extraordinary.” She was eulogized in Irish and English newspapers by many of the most famous Irish critics and authors, such as William Trevor, Clare Boylan, W. J. McCormack, and Maurice Harmon. Publication of the first full-length biography of Lavin was stalled in May, 1998, because one of her daughters was unhappy with her portrayal in the book. Analysis • Neither national nor international events find their way into Mary Lavin’s fiction, which is crammed with incidents from the lives of Dublin shopkeepers, country people, island fishermen and their families, nuns, priests, her parents, her children, and her husbands. Lavin’s characters, much more important than the plots, which are rather mundane, are usually autobiographical. They represent the author and her acquaintances at various stages in her lifetime: childhood, student life, marriage, motherhood, and widowhood. Whereas James Joyce was haunted by a father-son conflict, Lavin was plagued by a mother-daughter conflict, resulting in what might be called an Electra complex. It partially accounts for the frequent revelations of unhappy marriages between mismatched couples, although the differences were a source of attraction before the birth of children or the assumption of responsibilities. More often than not, the wife characters are domineering, unhappy, practical slaves to social mores. Some other women characters—nuns, spinsters, sisters, and widows—are vain, flighty, insecure, and emotionally labile. Husband characters, in contrast, no matter how beaten they are by their wives and circumstances, have a certain poetic vision, while the priests, bachelors, brothers, and widowers appear robust, in command of life and their emotions. “Miss Holland” • “Miss Holland,” Lavin’s first short story, published in Dublin Magazine and reprinted in Tales from Bective Bridge, is the story of a typical spinster. Agnes Holland, lonely and ill prepared to face life, traveled for years with her father, who made all the decisions. At his death, Agnes must adjust to the world without anyone to help her. The story, set in England, begins with Agnes searching for a place to live; she finally decides to live at the guest house of Mrs. Lewis because of a playful cat.

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Also living there are two men and three women with whom Agnes has nothing in common. She is not a conversationalist and cannot join in the spirited exchanges held during dining hours. Since the other boarders are younger, age is a further obstacle. Agnes feels trapped by her surroundings; there is nothing from the past that she can recollect which will bridge the gap between her and the boorish boarders. Agnes thinks she must try to enter this strange world and wants to discover something to share with the group, needing to be part of her environment. The black cat affords the opportunity. Agnes sees him jumping in the sun after running through the flower bed where he plucked one red carnation; the image is like that of a Spanish dancer, and she can hardly wait to tell the group. At dinner she and a male guest begin to speak simultaneously, so Agnes waits to let him tell his story. To her horror, she learns that he has shot the cat. Amused, the other guests begin to laugh. Agnes is silent, withdrawing from the boisterous group; no longer can she associate with such people. Having no place else to go because she must live on the small amount of money left to her by her father, she determines to live on past memories of more genteel days. All the ugly characteristics of the uncultured men and women rush to her mind, separating her from them. Loneliness will become a fixed part of life, borne with dignity. Agnes’s emotional drama is the conflict of the story. Forever opposed to vulgarity, Agnes realizes she can no longer use her imagination to disguise poor taste and must protest “because my people before me went that way.” “At Sallygap” • Annie Ryan in “At Sallygap” and Ella in “A Happy Death” are typical examples of the wife characters who pressure their husbands. Childless, Annie is a real terror. Artistic Manny Ryan, a fiddler who years earlier was heading to Paris with a band, jumped ship for Annie. He thought she was loving, fragile, and in need of him. Their marriage, however, symbolizes the paralysis and stagnation of Irish urban life. After years of labor, they have nothing more tangible than a tiny Dublin shop where they work and live. Manny knows that “All the Dublin people were good for was talking.” Annie was no exception. Her tongue lashes out at Manny usually because he is not aggressive enough in commercial dealings. Annie dominates him while wishing he would be the dominant spouse. Manny’s gentility, unfortunately, serves as a red flag for Annie’s temper. By ordering him to go to Sallygap to set up a trade in fresh eggs, Annie gives him a brief escape from his hateful marriage. A lover of nature, Manny draws strength from the rural scenes. On missing the last bus, he walks home, free “at last from the sordidness of the life he led.” While Manny feels elated, however, Annie, accustomed to her husband’s regularity, goes through a variety of emotions awaiting his return. First, she plans to taunt him. Then, thinking he is out drinking to get the courage to fight back, she relishes that prospect and prepares herself for a grand battle. Next, fear overcomes her: Perhaps Manny is dead. No, he would be brought home alive with a “latent mutinous instinct” activated, which she hopes will enliven their relationship. On hearing his footsteps, however, Annie realizes nothing has changed. Manny is sober and servile, “imprisoned forever in her hatred.” “A Happy Death” • In “A Happy Death,” Ella, with three daughters to rear, has to control her emotions in dealing with her dying husband Robert. To supplement their income, Ella rents rooms in their home, using some of the money to buy clothes for Robert so he can get a better job at the library. Outraged when he is demoted

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from clerk to porter because of his coughing, she demands that he quit, but he refuses and works as a porter. Ella cannot comprehend Robert’s need to work and bring her his wages, so she convinces herself that he works to spite her and lower the family’s social class. The emotional charges between Ella and Robert build up until his death and explode in Ella afterward. Through a series of flashbacks, a device Lavin uses in most of her stories, the reader learns of Ella’s happy courtship with Robert, her admiration of his white skin and his interest in poetry, and their elopement against her parents’ wishes. Their happiness is fleeting. After they are married, she burns his poetry books, sees his white skin as a sign of weakness, and understands why her shopkeeping parents opposed her marriage to unemployed Robert. When Robert is hospitalized, with a flush of excitement Ella insists on keeping up appearances. He must have the best ambulance, a private ward, a new nightshirt, and oranges which he cannot eat. The daughters are embarrassed by their mother’s vain fussing over Robert; it is unnatural to send out for grapes, apples, and newspapers when they know he can neither eat not read. Ella, however, wants everyone to know Robert is a person of importance, with people who care for him. More fruit, biscuits, and sweets are brought to him, making it difficult for the nurses to find space for the thermometer. Eventually, Ella realizes that the unconscious Robert is dying and prays for his happy death; meanwhile, her prayers and behavior at the bedside are a continued source of distress to her daughters. Thrusting a crucifix in Robert’s face, Ella tries to get him to say an act of contrition; he does not. Then he regains his senses long enough to call out for Ella with the lovely golden hair. Misunderstanding her request for him to repeat “I am heartily sorry,” Robert thinks she is sorry for having offended him and says, “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You always made me happy, just by being near me.” Robert’s delirious mind recollects their youth and plans for “just the two of them,” ignoring the daughters, and a look of “rapturous happiness” returns to his face before he dies. Bewildered, Ella refuses comfort from the priest, nurse, and her daughters. Screaming and sobbing, she is led from the ward, disbelieving God’s refusal to answer her prayers for Robert’s happy death. Ironically, she does not know that her prayers have been answered. “Say Could That Lad Be I” • The young boy in “Say Could That Lad Be I,” an early story in the first collection, Tales from Bective Bridge, and Tom in “Tom” from the collection The Shrine, and Other Stories, are portraits of Lavin’s father. The farm boy, mischievous and carefree, has a dog, White Prince, the greatest fighter in the countryside. On a visit to his grandmother, the boy takes along White Prince. It is a great mistake to lock him in the cottage when he goes on an errand for his grandmother, since the dog jumps through a closed window and follows his master to the village. After a disturbance in a shop, White Prince flies through its window, causing even greater destruction. Pretending that it is not his dog, the boy walks back to his grandmother. On the road, White Prince, dragging a leg of mutton in his mouth, joins his master. There is not much the lad can do but wash the mutton, present it to his grandmother, and head home before the townspeople pounce on him. “Tom” • In “Tom,” Lavin opens the story by saying, “My father’s hair was black as the Devil’s, and he flew into black, black rages.” Everything about him was black except for “the gold spikes of love with which he pierced me to the heart when I was a child.” The author leaves little doubt about the affection she held for her father. In

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this story she recounts with pride his exploits at school, his walks under a sky filled with birds, his travels to Dublin, Liverpool, Scotland, and America, plus his return to Ireland. Lavin’s portrait of her mother is quite different. She states with disinterest that her mother had numerous memories filling her head, but they could all be reduced to her mother at the piano with her singing sisters and their beaux about her. Her courtship with Tom was more ardent on his part than hers. Yet she, at thirty years old, realized she had snared a desirable fifty-year-old bachelor even though she disliked him at first because of his coarseness, ignorance, and arrogance. Lavin surmises her mother would have preferred her Protestant suitor, Mr. Barrett, a land agent on a large estate. Because of the age difference, Nora lived twenty-four years after Tom’s death; Lavin agrees it was an unfair relationship. Her father had her “mother’s beauty when he could proudly display it but she did not have his support when she needed it most.” Mary, in contrast, had Tom’s support when she needed it. While at the university, he took her to Roscommon, revisiting his boyhood haunts and sharing his memories. Ignoring the material changes, he points out the unchanging mounds, stone walls, and streams running over mossy stones. Although he recognizes old friends, very aged and worn, they do not recognize him. A childhood friend, Rose Magarry, on seeing him says he is Tom’s son, “Sure, you’re the dead spit of him!” Silently, they leave without correcting the woman. “Senility” • Tom does not follow the same rules that Nora does, and Mary accepts his lifestyle without complaint. If he was ever a burden to her, it does not appear in Lavin’s fiction. Incidentally, the old mother in “Senility” from the same collection is an exquisite portrait of a widowed woman who lives with her daughter. The emotional tension between them is acute, and neither mother nor daughter will release it. The son-in-law acts as a referee in a continuing war of nerves. When not writing about her family, Lavin presents other people’s problems. Always busy with her own difficulties as the correspondence with Lord and Lady Dunsany reveals, she records some fresh insights about psychotic behavior in a tightly structured society. In writing about insanity, she is more comprehensive in Mary O’Grady, her second novel, with a description of Patrick’s withdrawal from his family and its effect on the members, but the short stories also document the exploits of schizophrenic people, giving the impression that such people are an integral part of Irish society. “Eterna” • Eterna, the nun in “Eterna,” is an excellent example of a woman who cannot face life. A young doctor called to treat the novice Eterna finds her arrogant, despite an outward appearance of humility. He discovers that her infected arm was caused by turpentine soaking through the bandage over a cut which she received by falling off a ladder. Eterna, he learns, is an artist. As the eldest of ten from a poor family, she was educated by the nuns because of her talent and joined the order to continue her work; she could not remain with her impoverished family, and the doctor learns that in time she would not remain with the order. Years after his calls at the convent in a provincial town, he sees Eterna again at the national Gallery in Dublin. She has a crazed look, wears outlandish clothes, and fixes her daft gaze on him. It brings back his memories of her former life and his brief, questioning visits with her. He flees from the gallery and rushes to his car to await his

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wife. She, who also knew Eterna, is nonchalant about his encounter with the artist, saying, “If she’d gone a bit cracked, what about it . . . she was probably headed that way from the start.” She then tells her husband that people have to clip their wings in order to keep their feet on the ground. The many widows in Lavin’s fiction have their feet on the ground, representing their author after the death of her first husband. Mary and Maudie from “In a Café,” Brede from “Bridal Sheets,” the unnamed widow from “In the Middle of the Fields,” and Vera Traska from “The Cuckoo-Spit,” “Happiness,” “Trastevere,” and “Villa Violella” trace Lavin’s battle against loneliness and her eventual adjustment to another self and remarriage. “Happiness” • Vera in “Happiness” is a central widow character. Her story is told in the first person by her eldest daughter, an unusual technique for Lavin, who generally uses the omniscient third-person point of view. Kate, the eldest daughter in “The Will,” the novice in “My Vocation,” the neighbor-narrator in “The Small Bequest,” the niece-narrator in “A Wet Day,” the daughter in “The Mouse,” and the husband in “My Molly” are other exceptions to the omniscient viewpoint. The daughter in “Happiness” describes Vera’s thoughts about happiness and how it must not be confused with pleasure or perceived as the opposite of sorrow. The narrator then introduces her younger sisters, Bea and Linda (the latter was only a year old at the time of their father’s death), Father Hugh (Michael Scott), a family friend filling the place of the lost father, and Grandmother, whom “God Almighty couldn’t make happy.” This is a portrait of Lavin’s family. Episodes from Lavin’s life with husband Robert (William Walsh) and grandfather Tom reveal happy moments. The black period immediately after Robert’s death is an unhappy period when the narrator and Bea guard against their mother’s suicide. Their trips to Europe are in vain because Vera cannot forget her husband, but since the children learn geography and history, the trips are not completely a waste. In rearing her daughter after returning home, Vera rejects advice from relatives, friends, and strangers, who want her to accept life as a vale of tears. By accepting life’s chaos, symbolized by her disordered study, Vera painfully pursues life. Father Hugh is there to help, but at times she has him “as distracted as herself.” Writing, working for her family, and gardening consume much energy, and it is not surprising that Vera eventually collapses while working in her garden. Father Hugh carries her into the house, where she dies four hours later, recalling the day Robert died. It is necessary for Vera to die and natural that she would remember Robert’s last day. A finality to that relationship opens new doors for Mary Lavin, through which she and Father Michael Scott can pass. “Happiness,” more autobiographical than fictive, is the story of an insecure, emotionally fragile woman dealt some cruel blows. In a Café • The final book Mary Lavin saw through publication was In a Café, which included reprints of such stories as “In the Middle of the Fields” and “In a Café”; revised versions of such stories as “The Convert” and “The Will”; and one story, “The Girders,” which had never been published before. According to Elizabeth Lavin, one of her three daughters, who was responsible for selecting the stories, Lavin had been revising a number of stories for a collected edition of her short fiction; this shorter selection was published when she broke her hip and had to halt the revision process. The new story in the collection was found by Lavin’s daughter quite by accident.

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According to those who knew her, Lavin was quite sensitive about the stories she sent under contract to The New Yorker which were rejected. She reportedly had a big heap of such stories under a bed. Her daughter has said that she is sure she will discover many more unpublished Lavin stories, which will probably see print in the near future. It is not known whether “The Girders” is a New Yorker reject or a story Lavin had not gotten around to submitting for publication. However, it is a typical Lavin story, straightforward and unadorned—an example of what William Trevor has referred to as her ability to be subtle “without making a palaver about it.” The story reflects a typical Irish conflict between nostalgia for the country and pride in progress and work in the city. The central character is a man who works on large construction sites in Dublin as part of the economic boom in Ireland in the last decade of the twentieth century. Life in the city for the man seems crazed and giddy, but he knows that outside was a world “still as sane and sweet as ever.” Thus, he longs to make enough money to return to the country. When the man has an accident that cripples his feet and necessitates his return to his mother’s house in the country, he is not so sure that this is what he wants. The story ends with him looking out the hospital window at the construction girders and thinking he will never see them again. Instead, he would be looking at the trees and fields for the rest of his life. As he thinks of them, the fields seem a monotonous green and the trees clumsy and stupidly twisted. Now the girders of the great buildings do not look so cruel at all, and “the cranes looked as frail as the silk wings of a dragonfly that wouldn’t harm a thing.” Eileen A. Sullivan With updates by James Sullivan and Charles E. May Other major works children’s literature: A Likely Story, 1957; The Second-Best Children in the World, 1972. novels: The House in Clewe Street, 1945; Mary O’Grady, 1950, 1986. Bibliography Caswell, Robert W. “Political Reality and Mary Lavin’s Tales from Bective Bridge.” EireIreland 3 (Spring, 1968): 48-60. Caswell argues that Lavin’s stories lack the “political reality” found in the works of Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin. He also states that she does not show nationalism as a driving force of her characters. Yet Caswell still feels that Lavin captures a distinctly Irish identity. Hawthorne, Mark D. “Words That Do Not Speak Themselves: Mary Lavin’s ‘Happiness.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Fall, 1994): 683-688. Claims that in this wellknown Lavin story the narrator’s attempt to understand and account for her mother’s enigmatic use of the word “happiness” illustrates the futility of trying to understand verbal constructs; the inability to communicate is a major theme in the story. Kelly, A. A. Mary Lavin: A Study. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980. Perhaps the best critical book available on Lavin. Kelly discusses Lavin’s use of the social hierarchy in her fiction. There are also excellent chapters on the themes of the family and religion found in Lavin’s work. Lynch, Rachel Sealy. “‘The Fabulous Female Form’: The Deadly Erotics of the Male

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Gaze in Mary Lavin’s The House on Crewe Street.” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (Fall, 1997): 326-338. An analysis of Lavin’s novel, concentrating on gender relations and Lavin’s use of satire. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Lavin: “The Great Wave” and “Happiness” (vol. 3); “The Nun’s Mother” (vol. 5); “A Wet Day,” “The Widow’s Son,” and “The Will” (vol. 8). Murray, Thomas J. “Mary Lavin’s World: Lovers and Strangers.” Eire-Ireland 7 (Summer, 1973): 122-131. Murray finds much “sterility” in the characters and situations in Lavin’s fiction. The role of women in many of the stories, Murray argues, is to destroy the life-affirming fantasies of men. Neary, Michael. “Flora’s Answer to the Irish Question: A Study of Mary Lavin’s ‘The Becker Wives.’” Twentieth Century Literature 42 (Winter, 1996): 516-525. Discusses the protagonist of the story as a passive projection of a national Irish ideal; shows how the story deals with the Irish struggle to establish an identity from within. Peterson, Richard F. Mary Lavin. Boston: Twayne, 1980. This book offers a brief biography of Lavin and then examines specific examples of the stories and novels. A useful introduction to the writer. Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. “Sacrificial Women in Short Stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Spring, 1995): 185-197. Examines sacrificial women in two stories by Lavin and two by O’Brien; claims that in the stories, female martyrdom (en)gendered by the Madonna myth has different forms, from becoming a nun to becoming a wife, mother, or “fallen woman.” Vertreace, Martha. “The Goddess Resurrected in Mary Lavin’s Short Fiction.” In The Anna Book: Searching for Anna in Literary History, edited by Mickey Perlman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Argues that Lavin creates a number of mother figures in her stories based on pre-Christian goddesses worshiped in ancient Ireland. Suggests that characters who interact with this figure are redeemed through her by relinquishing other forms of creativity, such as artistic expression.

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Born: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England; September 11, 1885 Died: Vence, France; March 2, 1930 Principal short fiction • The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories, 1914; England, My England, 1922; St. Mawr: Together with “The Princess,” 1925; Rawdon’s Roof, 1928; The Woman Who Rode Away, and Other Stories, 1928; Love Among the Haystacks, and Other Stories, 1930; The Lovely Lady, and Other Stories, 1933; A Modern Lover, 1934; The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence, 1961. Other literary forms • D. H. Lawrence is one of the most prolific writers in English literary history. His major works include ten volumes of poetry, a collection of critical essays, four books of travel writings, several translations, and plays, in addition to the four novels (among others) for which he is popularly known. His most famous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), brought him fame and further assured that he would be remembered as a novelist rather than a poet and short-story writer. After his novels, his most widely read and anthologized works are short stories and poems. In many of his works, Lawrence uses identical situations, plots, images, and themes. Achievements • The subject and style of Lawrence’s works, of whatever kind, are so distinct and consistent that his name has given birth to an adjective, “Lawrentian,” to describe a way of looking at the world and a method for presenting it. The bold originality and powerful style of his early novels attracted the attention of upper-class British writers and intellectuals such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell and even the prime minister Herbert Asquith. Lawrence’s values, however, were not the same as theirs, and he spent most of his life as a nomad, searching for amenable landscapes and cultures. All of his works record that search and reveal its remarkable unity of purpose. After Lawrence’s death, his critical reputation eventually declined, though his works continued to sell. Then, in 1955, the influential modern English critic F. R. Leavis published a study of the novels and declared Lawrence to be the most important writer of his generation and as good as Charles Dickens. He praised Sons and Lovers (1913) as the first honest treatment of the British working class. Also in 1955 the American critic Harry T. Moore published the first authoritative biography, The Intelligent Heart, introducing Lawrence to a public as fascinated by his life as by his work. His reputation is worldwide; in 1982, there were nearly three hundred titles pertaining to Lawrence translated into thirty languages. Biography • David Herbert Lawrence’s life went through four distinct stages. The first may be indicated as the Nottingham or Eastwood years, the formative years before March, 1912. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, was a miner and his mother, a teacher. Married beneath her status, Lydia Beardsall Lawrence detested the commonness of her husband and vowed that her sons would never work the pits. She therefore doggedly saw Lawrence through a teacher-training program at Nottingham University College. The class struggle at home mirrored the larger class struggle, of which Lawrence was acutely aware.

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Within the grim industrial village life there remained a lyrical beauty in intimate relations. In Eastwood, Lawrence was romantically involved with two women who represented the contradictory nature of love. Jessie Chambers (Muriel in Sons and Lovers), his mother’s choice, was too spiritual and possessive for Lawrence. He was physically attracted to another, Louie Burrows, but the oedipal bonds were too strong to break. When Lydia Lawrence died in December, 1910, Lawrence drifted aimlessly and over the next few months severed all romantic attachments. Then, in March, 1912, he met Frieda Weekley, the wife of his modern languages professor. They were married in May. The next period lasted until the end of World War I and his subsequent departure from England. Lawrence published poems that treat his marriage to Frieda as at once physical and spiritual. He was at work on a long novel, The Sisters, which he split into two and published the first part, The Rainbow, in 1915. The work was suppressed by British censors because of its frank portrayal of sexual relations, and Lawrence was unable to find an American publisher. In 1917, he and Frieda applied for passports, which they were denied, ostensibly because Frieda’s family was German and some of her relatives (notably, the infamous Red Baron) served prominently in the German army. For the next two years, the Lawrences lived in dire poverty, in cottages and on funds lent by friends. Years of wandering characterize the third period. After relatively short residencies in various Italian towns, Lawrence visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Australia, and then from September, 1922, until September, 1925, lived in Taos, New Mexico, and Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico, interspersed with a short return to England in late 1924. He traveled to the United States at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had read Sea and Sardinia (1921) and was convinced that only Lawrence could describe the “soul” of the Southwest landscape and Native Americans. His American works lyrically reveal the landscape but show little empathy for the people and their history. In November, 1925, the Lawrences moved to Spotorno, Italy. In June, 1926, Lawrence declared that he no longer wanted to write fiction and began a series of watercolors and large oil paintings. From a villa near Florence in 1927, Lawrence wrote his last novel and succès de scandale, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and collected his lyrical accounts of travels in Mexico and the American Southwest. His last works, just before he moved to Bandol and then Vence in the French Provence, included his studies of the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia; a short novel, The Escaped Cock, which is an idiosyncratic account of Christ’s death and resurrection; Apocalypse (1931), a study of the Book of Revelation; and Last Poems (1932), which deals with the experience of dying. All of them reflect Lawrence’s preparation for his own death, from tuberculosis, in March, 1930. Analysis • D. H. Lawrence’s early stories are set, except for “The Prussian Officer,” in the English Midlands; their plot and characters are a thinly veiled autobiography and are built on incidents that Lawrence would develop at length in other forms, notably the novels and plays that he was writing concurrently. Some readers prefer the stories to Lawrence’s longer forms, which they regard as too insistent and repetitious; his stories, like his poems, are more structured, their images more intense. Like the longer works, however, the stories reveal Lawrence’s central belief in a “fatal change” in the early twentieth century: “the collapse from the psychology of the free human individual into the psychology of the social being.” Lawrence tried always to see unity in the

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behavior of human beings and the historical changes through which ages lived. In the longer works and in many essays, he developed a didactic style appropriate to his sweeping interpretation of human history and types of personality. In the stories, he lyrically and more intimately explores how the quality of individuals’ lives is affected by their human relationships. “Odour of Chrysanthemums” • A majority of the stories more frequently treat the failure of human relationships. “Odour of Chrysanthemums” is one of five accounts of such a discovery of lost human possibilities; other versions appear in three novels and a play, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914), from this period. A proud miner’s wife, Elizabeth Bates, waits with her two children for her husband, who is late coming from the pits. At first, she angrily surmises that he has gone to a pub; as time passes, the anger changes to fear. The husband has been killed in a mining accident, and his fellow colliers bring his body home. The climax of the story is one of Lawrence’s best scenes, as the miner’s mother and wife wash the corpse. In early versions of the story, from 1911, Lawrence treated the mother’s and wife’s whimperings and reveries equally; in the collected version in 1914, however, he added the powerful dramatic epiphany of Mrs. Bates’s feeling of shame for having denied her husband’s body. “She had denied him what he was . . . refused him as himself.” The discovery is also liberating: “She was grateful to death, which restored the truth. And she knew she was not dead.” The symbol of flowers is a derivative, almost gratuitous device. Their fragrance equates to memory, as the wife recalls the events of her married life: birth, defeat and reconciliation, and death. Before Lawrence’s own fulfillment with Frieda Weekley, it is problematic whether he could have known, or treated so honestly, the complex nature of human sexuality or the separateness of lovers. Without the revisions, the story is successful only as an account of lost love and patent realizations, much like others in The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories. “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” and “The Shades of Spring” are stories about return and realization, but they lack dramatic climaxes. In “The Shadow in the Rose Garden,” an unnamed woman returns on her honeymoon to the town where she first fell in love. There, she discovers that her first lover, whom she believed a South African (Boer) War casualty, is alive but confined to an insane asylum. In an unresolved ending, her husband learns that she is still attached to the soldier and concludes that it “would be violation to each of them to be brought into contact with the other.” In “The Shades of Spring,” Hilda Millership—rejected by a cultured suitor, John Syson—gives herself to her gamekeeper, Arthur Pilbury, on Syson’s wedding night. Later, still foppishly attached to Hilda, Syson returns to her farm, learns about Hilda’s affair, and is taunted by the gamekeeper for not having seduced her. Both stories lack the dramatic structure of “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” They exemplify a style that Lawrence told his literary agent in 1914 he wanted to outgrow: a method of “accumulating objects in the light of a powerful emotion, and making a scene of them.” Nevertheless, these early stories use situations, characters, and symbols that one finds in all Lawrence’s work. At the end of “The Shades of Spring,” for example, a bee stings Pilbury, and Hilda sucks the wound and smears his mouth with bloody kisses. This gesture is one of the first symbolic statements of a Lawrentian paradigm: Blood symbolizes natural, unconscious life, in contrast to the mechanically intellectual and socially correct existence of Syson.

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“The Blind Man” • These two ways of living are also represented in a contrast between feeling and seeing, between intuitive knowledge and acquired, social knowledge. “The Blind Man” is Lawrence’s most powerful treatment of both the necessity and the consequence of intimate physical contact. Isabel Pervin is married to Maurice, who was blinded and scarred in World War I and is completely dependent on her. The focus of the story is not their love but Maurice’s sudden passion for his wife’s cousin and her former admirer, Bertie Reid. Maurice asks Isabel to invite Bertie for a visit, hoping that he can become his closest friend. Isabel’s ambivalent feelings about Bertie, fond yet contemptuous, derive from her knowledge of his lifestyle. “He had his friends among the fair sex—not lovers, friends.” She knew that he was “unable to enter into close contact of any sort.” This failure at relationships, Lawrence bitingly asserts, made him a “brilliant and successful barrister, also a litterateur of high repute, a rich man, and a great social success”—in short, the epitome of the aristocratic Englishman. The story, however, is more serious than it is satirical. At the electrifying climax, Maurice first runs his hand over Bertie’s face and body, and then, to Bertie’s horror, puts Bertie’s hand over his scars and into his eye sockets. Maurice tells Isabel of the experience, which he regards as a ritual of undying friendship, but she sees Bertie’s revulsion and his urge to flee such intimacy. In his own life, Lawrence was attracted to the ritual of Blutbruderschaft, in which two male friends mix their blood from self-imposed cuts, and he used that ritual, along with a nude wrestling scene, in Women in Love (1920). The equivalent contact in “The Blind Man,” heightened by Maurice’s disfigurement, shows the failure of male relationships as a corollary of failed sexual love. Lawrence had been reading Carl Jung’s “Psychology of the Unconscious” and “found much truth” in the oedipal “mother-incest idea.” At times, Frieda could become for Lawrence the devouring mother: A man “casts himself as it were into her womb, and . . . the Magna Mater receives him with gratification. . . . It is awfully hard, once the sex relation has gone this way, to recover. If we don’t recover we die.” Lawrence professed to “believe tremendously in friendship between man and man, a pledging of men to each other inviolably.” “The Prussian Officer” • Although male friendship remained for all Lawrence’s life an ideal, he was never able to produce an account of successful male relations, whether the bonds were sexual or not. “The Blind Man” symbolically rejects male friendship as a way out of an unavoidable sexual regression, despite what Lawrence professed to believe. In an earlier story, “The Prussian Officer,” Lawrence had not yet acquired the skill of using symbolic gestures. He thus treats more directly the destructive nature of suppressed desires—in this case, for an overtly sexual male relationship. Originally entitled “Honour and Arms,” the story’s title was changed by an editor, much to Lawrence’s dismay. Although the revised title focuses on the dominant character and necessarily minimizes another, it removes the pun and limits Lawrence’s intent to show how repressed or unconscious desires can erupt in sadistic violence in any relationship. The Prussian captain, attracted to his young orderly, Anton Schoner, vents his forbidden attraction, first in sadistic assaults and then by refusing to let the orderly see his sweetheart. The orderly’s “normal” heterosexuality eventually yields to unconscious responses toward the captain, which drive Schoner to murder him. Lawrence treats the murder like a rape: “It pleased him . . . to feel the hard twitchings of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame. . . .” The theme common to both “The

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Prussian Officer” and “The Blind Man” lies in the similarity between otherwise dissimilar characters. Anyone who has avoided his feelings, or acknowledged but repressed them, on being forced to recognize them, destroys himself—or, more usually, as in Bertie’s case, flees to avoid entrapment in any permanent sexual relationship. “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” • In contemporaneous stories of heterosexual love, physical contact has the opposite effect. A woman is, like Sleeping Beauty, awakened by physical touch to know and accept, usually gradually, her unconscious desires. In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” a doctor rescues a drowning girl, takes her to his home, and strips off her wet clothes. When she awakens, she embraces him and stirs him into love for her. (Lawrence develops the same plot in a longer version in The Virgin and the Gipsy, 1930.) “You Touched Me” • “You Touched Me” also explores the theme of touch, complicated by an additional motive of inherited wealth. The lower-class male, ironically named Hadrian, has been adopted from a charity house. After wartime service, he returns to his adoptive father, Ted Rockley, a dying invalid cared for by his two natural spinster daughters, Emmie and Matilda. One night, Matilda goes into Hadrian’s room, genuinely mistaking it as her father’s, and caresses his face before discovering who he is. The touch stirs Hadrian’s desire and determines him to conquer the proud Matilda. Ted Rockley approves Hadrian’s offer to marry and threatens to leave his estate to Hadrian if Matilda refuses. Matilda’s reason for agreeing to marriage is not the point, though it adds a realistic, common touch. The point is that her touching Hadrian validates his desire and gives him rights. “You Touched Me” shares its plot with a longer work of this period, The Fox. In both narratives, a young man returns to England from Canada and falls in love with an older woman. In The Fox, the plot complication is not inheritance but a romantic and economic liaison of the loved one, Nellie March, with another woman, Jill Banford. As he does with other homosexual characters, Lawrence simply kills Jill: The young man, Henry Grenfel, cuts down a tree so that it falls where Jill is standing. Henry’s repeated warnings to Jill to move and her refusal to do so leave vague whether the act was suicide or murder. Homoeroticism in stories such as The Fox and the subject of sexual awakenings in all his works elicited the popular view of Lawrence’s works as being pornographic. It was a charge against which Lawrence vigorously defended himself. His narratives were erotic, designed to awaken readers to their sexuality when they identified with his characters, but they were not pornographic, designed for genital arousal. Pornography offered a life-denying and self-consuming masturbatory release; the erotic stimulated the need for fulfillment with another. According to Lawrence, the British public was not accustomed to the open treatment of sexual relations as healthy. Instead, earlier writers had denied normal sexuality and reduced virile male characters to enervated victims of accidents or war. Nineteenth century readers could accept such vital characters as Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) only when they were physically ruined or subjugated to a feminine domesticity. The impotent characters, Lawrence believed, that recur so often are both cause and effect of the decline of modern British civilization. In 1917, hoping to flee to the United States, Lawrence wrote to Bertrand Russell, “I cannot do any more work for this country . . . there is no future for England: only a decline and fall. That is the dreadful and un-

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bearable part of it: to have been born into a decadent era, a decline of life, a collapsing civilization.” “The Crown” • Even a dying civilization has its beauty, Lawrence decided, but it was a demonic and apocalyptic one. In the most important essay for understanding his credo, “The Crown,” Lawrence characterized modern society as the end of a civilization. It was self-indulgent, self-destructive, sensuous, power-seeking, monotheistic, and light-denying. A new and balanced society would eventually follow. Meanwhile, for generations caught at the end of such epochs, the only way out of a narcissistic egoism was to indulge demonically in sex or bloodlust. Destruction, like creation, required vitality. Lawrence hoped that demonic vitality, spent at last, would lead to a new civilization. Even if it made things worse, it was preferable to apathy. Lawrence always saw correspondences between individuals, the kinds of societies that they fostered, and the religious myths that they created. The most cogent interpretation that Lawrence gives of the Christian myth is an oedipal one recorded in an unpublished foreword to Sons and Lovers: The Father was flesh—and the Son, who in himself was finite and had form, became Word. For form is the uttered Word, and the Son is the Flesh as it utters the word, but the unutterable Flesh is the Father. And God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the Flesh, in woman. She is the door for our ingoing and our out-coming. In her we go back to the Father. Much of this echoes Jung’s “Psychological Approach to the Trinity.” For both Lawrence and Jung, father and son constitute polarities in the male psyche. At the personal level, Lawrence has been separated from his father by the mother’s interventions. The only way back to the father was to reject the mother and replace her with another female object of desire. The wife replaces mother and restores the son to the father. Like civilization, Christianity had hardened into meaningless dogma. Lawrence’s travels were undertaken not only to avoid a dying British culture but also to discover the nature of other, pre-Christian religions. In the Native American culture, Lawrence found, for a while, what he was seeking: the “oldest religion,” when “everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive.” The Native Americans’ “whole life effort” was to “come into immediate felt contact and, so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy.” Their efforts to become one with the cosmos, without intermediation, was the “root meaning” of religion. Such rapturous description suggests an equivalence to Lawrence’s “blood-consciousness” as an attempt to revive a vital religion. The stories and short novels set in the American Southwest and Mexico blend religious vitality and demonic indulgence. Many readers, unaware of Lawrence’s metaphysical framework, disparage the stories for what they see as his approval of brute, male force against women. At the naturalistic level, the stories are gratuitously violent, but in the context of Lawrence’s credo, they become fabulistic, not realistic. Character and action should be interpreted as symbolic. The presentation of a scene does not necessarily indicate the author’s approval. The juxtaposition of characters in three stories of the Southwest—“The Princess,” “The Woman Who Rode Away,” and the short novel St. Mawr—recalls the structure of earlier stories. Egotistical, haughty, coddled but unfulfilled American and European women come under the sway of dark-skinned heroes who embody Lawrence’s ideal.

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Lawrence’s male Native Americans are distinguished from even the most intuitive British men, like Maurice in “The Blind Man” or Henry in The Fox: They have rejected a white culture, including religion, which threatens to demean and confine them. Having escaped the coming Christian apocalypse, they are neither selfindulgent nor spiritual but living embodiments of a phallic mystery, the “only mystery” that the female characters have not unraveled. Their attempts to “know” that mystery leads to their alienation or destruction. “The Princess” • In “The Princess,” Dollie Urquhart travels, after her aristocratic father’s death, to a dude ranch in New Mexico. There, she is drawn ineluctably to Domingo Romero, a guide at the ranch and the last of a line of great Native American landholders. Romero is himself unfulfilled and waits for one of two Lawrentian fates: to die or to be “aroused in passion and hope.” One day, Dollie arranges a trip, with a female companion and Romero as guide, over the Rockies to a spot where animals can be observed in their “wild unconsciousness.” Even though the companion’s horse is injured, Dollie and Romero continue the trip. The cold mountains both terrify and seduce Dollie, as Lawrence makes the mountains represent what she is seeking, in perhaps his most successful use of settings as symbols. The guide and his charge spend the night in a miner’s shack. Frightened by dreams of snow, a symbol of spiritual death, Dollie goes to Romero for “warmth, protection” and to be “taken away from herself,” and Romero obliges. The next day, when Dollie tells him that she does not like “that sort of thing,” Romero is broken and angry. Like Hadrian in “You Touched Me,” he argues that Dollie’s coming to him has given him the right to marry her. When she refuses, he strips her and violates her repeatedly, but she refuses to relent. Romero had successfully reached some “unrealised part” of her that she had never wanted to feel. Soon, rangers rescue Dollie and kill Romero. Unable to find her old self, “a virgin intact,” she goes “slightly crazy.” “The Woman Who Rode Away” • In “The Woman Who Rode Away,” the knowledge sought by the unnamed woman is much more profound. She wants to visit a remote tribe of Chilchuis and “to know their gods.” She does not know that for years the Chilchui have waited for a female sacrificial victim to appease their gods. The woman uses the ploys that society has taught her to engage the Chilchuis, but they remain indifferent. They “were not human to her, and they did not see her as a beautiful white woman . . . no woman at all.” Instead, she sees in the dark eyes of her guard a “fine spark” of derision. In a masterful confusion of object and metaphor, Lawrence has the Chilchui ask if the woman will “bring her heart to the Chilchui.” Her affirmative response convinces the Chilchuis that she was sent in fulfillment of the prophecy. An aged Chilchui appears, drugs her, cuts away her clothes, and touches her body with his fingertips, which he has moistened at his mouth. At the dawn of the winter solstice, four Chilchuis lay her on a stone and hold her legs and arms. At her head, with knife poised and one eye on the sky, the old priest figure waits for the moment to strike. St. Mawr • In St. Mawr, Lawrence uses not a Native American or even a human figure but a red stallion to symbolize ideal maleness. Lou Witt’s husband, typically for Lawrence, has lost his sense of what it means to be a man. The other two male characters, the grooms Phoenix and Lewis, a Navajo and a Welshman, respectively, retain some of their fierce male separateness. None of them, however, measures up to the horse,

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who “stands where one can’t get at him” and “burns with life.” When St. Mawr throws Rico, an event full of symbolic suggestion, Lou plans to sell the horse. Then she discovers that the new female owner plans to geld him. To avoid that fate Lou moves with the horse to New Mexico. St. Mawr thrives in the new, stark, mountain landscape, but Lou feels thwarted and diminished. As in “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Lawrence ritualizes Lou’s quest and transforms her into another mythic sacrificial figure. “She understood now the meaning of the Vestal Virgins. . . . They were symbolic of herself, of woman weary of the embrace of incompetent men.” So she turns to “the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire” and devotes herself “to that, and that alone.” The Man Who Died • In Lawrence’s last major story, Lou’s character and function as the waiting Vestal Virgin are transformed into the mythological figure of Isis, although with a peculiarly Lawrentian twist. The Man Who Died is Lawrence’s ultimate revision of Christianity’s emphasis on the Crucifixion. The work is divided in two parts. The first, published with the title that Lawrence wanted for all editions, “The Escaped Cock,” follows the traditional story of Christ’s rising and healing. He perceives intellectually the life around him but laments, “The body of my desire has died and I am not in touch anywhere.” In 1927, when Lawrence wrote “The Escaped Cock,” he may have seen the ending as incomplete, but he did not return to create a second part for two years. In part 2, Lawrence recasts Christ as the dismembered Osiris whose parts are reassembled by Isis. Reborn in part 1, Christ can function only as a pagan male seasonal deity, dying in winter, while the eternal feminine, symbolized in Isis, waits for his rebirth in spring to reanimate her. Lawrence thus effectively unites two themes that obsess all his works: the renewal of the sexes and the concomitant discovery of a revitalized religion. At one level, Christ and Isis are merely man and woman, but as both deity and human, this new Christ integrates the physical and the spiritual. Lawrence is not advocating a return to paganism, as a facile reading might conclude, but a return of Christianity to its archetypal origins. The new Christ says, “On this rock I built my life,” the rock of the living woman. It is not the rock of Saint Peter, of masculine control, but of phallic marriage. Alvin Sullivan Other major works plays: The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, pb. 1914; Touch and Go, pb. 1920; David, pb. 1926; The Plays, pb. 1933; A Collier’s Friday Night, pb. 1934; The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence, pb. 1965 novels: The White Peacock, 1911; The Trespasser, 1912; Sons and Lovers, 1913; The Rainbow, 1915; Mr. Noon, wr. 1920-1922, pb. 1984; The Lost Girl, 1920; Women in Love, 1920; Aaron’s Rod, 1922; Kangaroo, 1923; The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, 1923; The Boy in the Bush, 1924 (with M. L. Skinner); The Plumed Serpent, 1926; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928; The Escaped Cock, 1929 (best known as The Man Who Died); The Virgin and the Gipsy, 1930. nonfiction: Study of Thomas Hardy, 1914; Twilight in Italy, 1916; Movements in European History, 1921; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 1921; Sea and Sardinia, 1921; Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1922; Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, and Other Essays, 1925; Mornings in Mexico, 1927; Pornog-

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raphy and Obscenity, 1929; À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1930; Assorted Articles, 1930; Apocalypse, 1931; Etruscan Places, 1932; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1932 (Aldous Huxley, editor); Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, 1936 (Edward McDonald, editor); The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1962 (2 volumes; Harry T. Moore, editor); Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works, 1968 (Moore and Warren Roberts, editors); The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1979-2000 (8 volumes; James T. Boulton and others, editors); Selected Critical Writings, 1998; Cafe Letters and Articles, 2004; Introductions and Reviews, 2005. poetry: Love Poems, and Others, 1913; Amores, 1916; Look! We Have Come Through!, 1917; New Poems, 1918; Bay, 1919; Tortoises, 1921; Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, 1923; The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1928; Pansies, 1929; Nettles, 1930; The Triumph of the Machine, 1931; Last Poems, 1932; Fire, and Other Poems, 1940; Phoenix Edition of Complete Poems, 1957; The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1964 (Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, editors). Bibliography Balbert, Peter. D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Well-reasoned response to feminist critics who accused Lawrence of misogyny. For “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Balbert gives a revisionist study that shows the causes for misreadings in other works. Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Discusses the development of Lawrence’s metaphysics not only in terms of his emotional life but also in terms of Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics. Although this study focuses primarily on Lawrence’s novels, its comments on his thought are relevant to his short fiction as well. Black, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. In this sensitive study, Black discovers new layers of meaning in five of the eight stories that he examines. He rejects earlier psychoanalytic readings as too reductionist. As soon as critics characterized Lawrence’s works as oedipal, they went no further. Ellis, David. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922-1930. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. The third volume of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence links his writings with the incidents of his life; argues that more than most authors, Lawrence’s fiction was associated with his daily living. Discusses his fiction and revisions during the 1920’s, including his work on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” Harris, Janice Hubbard. The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Harris’s book is the first to treat chronologically all Lawrence’s short fiction. Weak discussions of some works (for example “England, My England”) are more than compensated for by enlightening readings of others (such as The Man Who Died). Jackson, Dennis, and Fleda Brown Jackson, eds. Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Various critical insights may be found in this collection of twenty essays, which includes articles by scholars and by well-known writers such as Anaïs Nin and Sean O’Casey. All literary genres in which Lawrence was involved are represented by one or more contributions here. Also of note is the editors’ introduction, which deals with trends in critical and biographical literature about Lawrence. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena,

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Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these eleven short stories by Lawrence: “The Blind Man” (vol. 1); “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” (vol. 4); “The Man Who Loved Islands” and “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (vol. 5); “The Prussian Officer” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (vol. 6); “Sun,” “Tickets, Please,” and “Two Blue Birds” (vol. 7); and “The White Stocking” and “The Woman Who Rode Away” (vol. 8). Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986. Tracing all the major works chronologically, Schneider treats Lawrence’s religious nature at all stages of his life. Nineteen stories, both early and late, are briefly analyzed to show how Lawrence shaped, over the years, his credo about kinds of consciousness and knowledge. Squires, Michael, and Keith Cushman, eds. The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. This group of essays, which deal both with individual works and with broader literary contexts, supplies some interesting and provocative insights. Of particular note is the first article, by Wayne C. Booth, a self-confessed “lukewarm Lawrentian” who maintains that Lawrence’s works are better appreciated upon rereading and reconsideration. Thornton, Weldon. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Makes a case for the technical skill, psychological depth, and thematic subtlety of Lawrence’s short fiction by focusing on his most important short stories. Argues that Lawrence’s work is always exploratory, a means of working through his own tentative ideas.

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Born: Berkeley, California; October 21, 1929 Principal short fiction • The Word for World Is Forest, 1972; The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 1975; Orsinian Tales, 1976; The Water is Wide, 1976; Gwilan’s Harp, 1981; The Compass Rose, 1982; The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine, with Wonders Hidden, 1984; Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, 1987; Fish Soup, 1992; A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Science Fiction Stories, 1994; Solitude, 1994 (novella); Unlocking the Air, and Other Stories, 1996; Tales from Earthsea, 2001; The Birthday of the World, and Other Stories, 2002; Changing Planes, 2003. Other literary forms • Although Ursula K. Le Guin has published fifteen volumes of short fiction, she is best known for her novels, especially the Earthsea books, which include A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), and Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990). Other well-known novels include The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), Always Coming Home (1985), and the four linked novellas Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). Her unlinked novels include The Telling (2000) and The Other Wind (2001). Le Guin has also published eight volumes of poetry, including Wild Angels (1975), Hard Words, and Other Poems (1981), Going Out with Peacocks, and Other Poems (1994), Sixty Odd: New Poems (1999), and Incredible Good Fortune: New Poems (2006). Her nonfiction writings include The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979), Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, and Places (1988), Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew (1998), and The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004). Le Guin’s edited works include The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993) and Selected Stories of H. G. Wells (2005). Her translations include Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way (1997) and Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (2003). Achievements • Ursula K. Le Guin is recognized as a leading American writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her short stories, especially “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” winner of a 1974 Hugo Award, often appear in college literature anthologies. Le Guin has received many awards and honors for her work. The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed received both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Volumes of the Earthsea books earned awards for adolescent literature, including the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for A Wizard of Earthsea, a Newbery Honor Book Citation for The Tombs of Atuan, and the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for The Farthest Shore. Her other awards include a Hugo for The Word for World Is Forest, a Nebula and Jupiter Award in 1975 for “The Day Before the Revolution,” and Jupiters for The Dispossessed and “The Diary of the Rose.” She was given a Gandalf Award in 1979, an American Book Award nomination and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction for Always Home in 1986, and Nebula Awards for Tehanu in 1991 and for Solitude in 1995.

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Biography • Ursula Kroeber was born on October 21, 1929, in Berkeley, California, the daughter of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and author Theodora Kroeber. She received her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1951 and her master’s from Columbia University in 1952. While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Paris in 1953, she married Charles A. Le Guin. They had three children: daughters Elisabeth and Caroline and a son, Theodore. She taught French at Mercer University and the University of Idaho before settling in Portland, Oregon, in 1959. In 1962, she began publishing fantasy and science fiction. In addition to writing, she was active in the Democratic Party, in writing workshops, and in Tai Chi Chuan, a Chinese form of exercise. Throughout her life, Le Guin has been reticent about discussing her personal life. Analysis • As literary scholars and critics give more attention to fantasy and science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin attracts a large share of their interest because she creates possible worlds that cast an informative light on perennial human problems, she explores gender issues that make her fiction popular among feminist readers, and she is precise and powerful in her use of language. When Le Guin writes about her craft and her works, she often refers to Jungian psychology and Daoist philosophy as major components of her worldview. In her 1975 essay “The Child and the Shadow,” Le Guin uses Jungian psychology to support her contention that fantasy is “the language of the night,” an important means by which the collective unconscious speaks to the growing individual. In Le Guin’s understanding of Jungian thought, consciousness, the part of the self that can be expressed in everyday language, emerges from the unconscious as a child matures. The individual’s unconscious is shared in its essentials with all other humans and so is called the collective unconscious. To become an adult, an individual must find ways of realizing the greatest potential of the unconscious. For Le Guin, these are summed up in the recognition by the individual that on unconscious levels, an individual is identical with all other humans. This recognition releases the irrational forces of social binding, such as compassion, love, creativity, and the sense of belonging to the human community. A major problem in achieving this recognition is learning to deal with “the shadow.” Choosing to be one person involves choosing not to be other persons that one could be. Both the positive and the negative choices must be maintained to sustain an identity; the negative choices become one’s shadow. The process of achieving adulthood is blocked by the shadow, an unconscious antiself with which one must deal in order to take possession of the rest of the unconscious. For Le Guin, children become adults when they can cease projecting evil impulses onto others and to recognize that these impulses are part of their selves. This process, she believes, is symbolically represented in the many fairy tales and fantasies in which an animal helps the protagonist to discover and attain his true identity. Such stories speak to the unconscious, telling the child by means of myth and symbol how to achieve wholeness of self. Le Guin’s writings tend to equate Daoism, a Chinese philosophy expressed about two thousand years ago in the Dao De Jing, with Jungian psychology. This goal of wholeness, as expressed in the Circle of Life, or yin and yang symbol of Daoist philosophy, is a recurrent theme in her fiction. The Circle of Life is a diagram of the dynamic relationship between being and nonbeing in the universe. Le Guin celebrates the balancing of such oppositions. This metaphysic leads to an ethic of passive activity. All acts in the world of being

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imply their opposites, the assertion of being activating the potential for nonbeing of the end one seeks. Acts of coercion aimed at controlling human behavior are especially prone to produce equal and opposite reactions. Therefore, Le Guin’s more successful characters do not try to influence people’s actions by direct persuasion or by force but rather by being models of the desired activity. Le Guin’s science fiction differs from her fantasy and psychomyths in that the distinguishing feature of the story’s world is technology rather than magic. Her best sciencefiction stories accept the unique technology as a given and center on fully realized characters coming to terms with the problems or implications of that technology. “The Eye Altering” recounts the struggle of Courtesy, Allen and Unwin colonists trying to adjust to a new planet that does not quite mesh with their metabolism, especially the difficulties they encounter when they discover that they are bearing children who, in fact, are better suited to this new planet than to Earth. In “The Diary of the Rose,” the psychoscope, a therapeutic tool, allows a form of mind reading. An apprentice analyst confronts the problem of how to treat a patient who seems perfectly sane but who is accused of political deviation. Several of Le Guin’s best science-fiction stories became the seeds of later novels or developed in relation to her novels. “Winter’s King” led to The Left Hand of Darkness. Written after The Dispossessed, “The Day Before the Revolution” is about the death of Odo, the woman who founded Odonianism, the anarchist philosophy of Anarres society in The Dispossessed. In “The New Atlantis,” Le Guin combines psychomyth and science fiction. While a future America sinks into the sea under the weight of political tyranny and ecological sin, a mythical new world awakens and rises from the sea. In each of these stories, the fates of fully realized characters are more central than the sciencefiction settings and technology. Though Le Guin’s stories nearly always contain multiple layers of meaning that repay rereading, they are usually also engaging and entertaining on first reading. She interests the reader in her characters or she sets up her problems in images and symbols that stimulate the imagination and lead to speculation. Many of her stories are also witty. Sometimes the wit is broad, as in “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” which tells of efforts to translate the writings of ants. Sometimes, her wit is more subtle, as in “Sur,” an account of the “real” first expedition to the South Pole, made by a group of women who kept their feat a secret to avoid embarrassing Roald Amundsen. This brief account cannot deal with many of Le Guin’s themes. She has shown significant interest in feminism and other political and social themes. Her family background in anthropology contributed to her interest in imagining cultures and con-

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tact between alien cultures. Over the span of her career, she has tended to move from more traditional forms of fantasy and science fiction toward imagining alternative cultures and their interactions. “Darkness Box” • Several of these aspects of Le Guin’s worldview appear in “Darkness Box,” one of her earliest publications. “Darkness Box” is a fairy tale allegory that takes place in a world of cycles. In this world, time does not pass. There is no source of light, though it is always midmorning. Certain events repeat themselves exactly and perpetually. A young prince rides with his army to the seashore to repel an invasion by his rebel brother. The brother always comes from the sea; he is always defeated and killed. At the same time that he leaves, the prince returns to the palace of his father, who exiled the brother. The prince always rides out again with his army to meet the restored and returning invaders. Into this cycle intrudes what appears to be a unique set of events that are sequential rather than cyclical. The son of a witch finds a box on the shore and gives it to the prince. The king recognizes it as a box he cast into the sea and warns the prince not to open it. The prince’s longing for music that ends, for wholeness, leads him to knock the box open and restrains him from closing it. Darkness spills out, the darkness of shadows and their opposite, the sun. He begins to experience conflict, death, and the passing of time. Having achieved a shadow, he has entered into time and being. Read as a Jungian myth of maturation, the tale represents the collective unconscious as a place of unrealized potentials for identity. The prince is a potential ego, his exiled brother a potential shadow, their endless battle a portent of the struggle consciousness must undergo to create a mature personality. Opening the box that lets out darkness becomes a symbolic representation of the birth of the ego, the entrance into time, and self-creation with real consequences for the self, such as the creation of a shadow and the acceptance of mortality. Read as a Daoist allegory, the tale represents nonbeing, the dark half of the Circle of Life, as a place of unrealized potential for being. Nonbeing is timeless and changeless yet full of possibilities. In this reading, opening the box realizes some of the potentials for being. A real world begins, a world of cause and effect in time, a world bounded by nonbeing as reflected in the introduction of true death. Though not all of Le Guin’s stories so directly communicate the Jungian and Daoist aspects of her worldview, many become richer and deeper when viewed in this context. Le Guin defines fantasy as the manipulation of myths and symbols to communicate with the unconscious. Some of her fantasies she called psychomyths: “more or less surrealistic tales, which share with fantasy the quality of taking place outside any history, outside of time, in that region of the living mind which . . . seems to be without spatial or temporal limits at all.” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” • “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is probably Le Guin’s best-known psychomyth. This story combines fiction and essay in an unusual way. The narrator describes the beautiful and happy city of Omelas beginning its summer festival. Gradually, she reveals that this is an imagined city. The narrator cautions the reader against doubting that a utopian city filled with joy might also be a place of dynamic and meaningful life. The reader is encouraged to follow his own fancy in imagining a truly happy city. She suggests attitudes toward technology, sexual pleasure, and drug use that would foster happiness, then returns to a description of the festival.

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Guessing that the reader will be skeptical even after helping to imagine this wonderful city, she then reveals two more facts. First, the happiness of Omelas depends upon one small child being locked forever in a dark room, deprived of all comfort and affection. Any effort to provide care and justice for that child would destroy the happiness of Omelas. Second, there are people who cannot bear to accept their happiness under this condition. These are the ones who walk away. Structured as a mutually imagined myth, this story seems designed to provoke examination of the tendencies of human imagination. Why must people find a dark side of beauty in order to believe in it? Why is happiness unimaginable without suffering? How do people manage to find ways of accepting life under these terms? Why are some people unable to accept that living almost inevitably entails gaining from the suffering of others? Although this story is somewhat different in form from her more typical fantasies, it seems to share with them the central aim of fantasy Le Guin described in “The Child and the Shadow”: to reduce the reader’s inclination “to give up in despair or to deny what he sees, when he must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we must all bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.” A Fisherman of the Inland Sea • The importance of imagination in achieving balance continues in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. The volume begins with an eleven-page introduction in which Le Guin dichotomizes readers into “us”—science-fiction readers—and people who cannot or will not program their VCRs, which is how she characterizes those who spurn the genre. She also explains thematic aspects of the eight stories in the collection, the last three of which are space-exploration fantasies that involve imagined cultures and technologies she has previously developed, namely the Hanish world and the ansible. She adds to these a time-space device called a “churten” drive, which allows instantaneous transmission of matter across any points in space. “The First Contact with the Gorgonids” is a straightforward “justice served” narrative that explains how the much-abused housewife, Annie Laurie Debree, became the hero of Grong Crossing, at the expense of her difficult husband, Jerry. The second story, “Newton’s Sleep,” explores the psychological impact of an earthwide holocaust on the surviving escapees. “Ascent of the North Face” is predicated on the language pun of the title and rolls out in journal-entry style. “The Rock That Changed Things” depicts the evolutionary dynamic of an oppressed race as it attains autonomy, reminiscent of The Word for World Is Forest. The fifth story, “The Kerastion,” describes a coherent set of cultural behaviors that involve the production of a musical instrument from human flesh. Taken together, these five stories show Le Guin to be varied in approach and treatment and interested in different subjects. The trilogy of space stories begins with “The Shobies’ Story.” The HanishGethenian-Human crew of ten take a test flight using a new “churten” drive. Their noninterval “transilence” to a distant location becomes problematic as they seek to interpret their separate realities. They are able to reintegrate into a unified story of their travel only out of a willingness to achieve group harmony. The next test, described in “Dancing to Ganam,” involves a smaller crew of Cetians and Hanish that included Dalzul, a charismatic leader. Their arrival in another world, where they are treated as gods, ends in Dalzul’s sacrifice, apparently as a willed conclusion from the collective group. The collection’s title story, “Another Story: Or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” continues the “churten” theme. The narrator, Hideo, begins with the fa-

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ble of a fisherman who catches the attention of the sea king’s daughter, agrees to stay with her for a night, then finds that more than one hundred years have passed in the short time of his absence. Hideo leaves home and a nascent love interest, Isidri, in order to study temporal physics. Eventually, he becomes disjunct in time, when experimenting with the churten drive, and arrives back at home fifteen years earlier, just after he had decided to leave. Instead, he chooses to stay and follow a different path. Hideo then accepts the love of Isidri but wonders what has happened in the temporal paradox of his future. Terry Heller With updates by Eunice Pedersen Johnston, Scott Vander Ploeg, and the Editors Other major works children’s literature: The Adventure of Cobbler’s Rune, 1982; The Visionary, 1984; A Visit from Dr. Katz, 1988; Catwings, 1988; Solomon Leviathan’s 931st Trip Around the World, 1988; Catwings Return, 1989; Fire and Stone, 1989; A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back, 1992; More Tales of the Catwings, 1994; Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings, 1994; Tales of the Catwings, 1996; Tom Mouse and Ms. Howe, 1998; Tom Mouse, 1998; Jane on Her Own: A Catwings Tale, 1999; Gifts, 2004; Voices, 2006. anthologies: Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 19601990, 1993; Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, 2005. novels: Planet of Exile, 1966; Rocannon’s World, 1966; City of Illusions, 1967; A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968; The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969; The Lathe of Heaven, 1971; The Tombs of Atuan, 1971; The Farthest Shore, 1972; The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974; Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, 1976; The Eye of the Heron, 1978; Leese Webster, 1979; Malafrena, 1979; The Beginning Place, 1980; Always Coming Home, 1985; Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, 1990; Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand, 1991; Four Ways to Forgiveness, 1995 (four linked novellas); The Telling, 2000; The Other Wind, 2001. nonfiction: From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, 1973; The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1979 (Susan Wood, editor); Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, and Places, 1988; Napa: The Roots and Springs of the Valley, 1989; Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, 1998; The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, 2004. poetry: Wild Angels, 1975; Hard Words, and Other Poems, 1981; In the Red Zone, 1983; Wild Oats and Fireweed: New Poems, 1988; Blue Moon over Thurman Street, 1993; Going Out with Peacocks, and Other Poems, 1994; Sixty Odd: New Poems, 1999; Incredible Good Fortune: New Poems, 2006. translations: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way, 1997 (of Laozi); Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, 2003. Bibliography Bittner, James W. Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984. This author discusses both Le Guin’s short stories and her novels, making connections among her works to show how certain themes are apparent in all of them. Collins, Jerre. “Leaving Omelas: Questions of Faith and Understanding.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall, 1990): 525-535. Argues that “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” can be read either as a religious allegory of the “suffering servant” or as

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an allegory of Western capitalism; however, rejection of the capitalist exploitation story undermines the redemption story. Thus, Le Guin indirectly supports the scapegoat theodicy she tries to undermine. Cummins, Elizabeth. Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Analysis of Le Guin’s work emphasizing the different worlds she has created (Earthsea, the Hannish World, Orsinia, and the West Coast) and how they provide the structure for all of her fiction. De Bolt, Joe, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. This volume is a collection of critical essays that discusses Le Guin’s work from a variety of perspectives, including anthropology, sociology, science, and Daoist philosophy. Kaler, Anne K. “‘Carving in Water’: Journey/Journals and the Images of Women’s Writings in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Sur.’” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 7 (1997): 5162. Claims that Le Guin’s story “Sur” provides a cleverly coded map for women striving to be professional writers; to illustrate the paths that women writers must take into the tundras ruled by male writers, she uses the devices of disorder, dislocation, and reversal in the journey/journal. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (vol. 5), “Schrödinger’s Cat” (vol. 6), and “Sur” (vol. 7). Reid, Suzanne Elizabeth. Presenting Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Twayne, 1997. This critical biography helps young readers to understand how her childhood, family, and life have helped to shape Le Guin’s work. Rochelle, Warren. Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Liverpool, England: University of Liverpool Press, 2001. Analyzes Le Guin’s construction of myth and use of mythological themes in her work. Walsh, William. “I Am a Woman Writer; I Am a Western Writer: An Interview with Ursula Le Guin.” The Kenyon Review, n.s. 17 (Summer/Fall, 1995): 192-205. Le Guin discusses such topics as the genre of science fiction, her readership, the feminist movement, women writers, and the Nobel Prize. White, Donna R. Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999. Part of the Studies in English and American Literature, Linguistics, and Culture series, this volume examines Le Guin’s works and critical reaction to them.

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Born: Kermanshah, Persia (now Bakhtaran, Iran); October 22, 1919 Principal short fiction • This Was the Old Chief’s Country, 1951; Five: Short Novels, 1953; No Witchcraft for Sale: Stories and Short Novels, 1956; The Habit of Loving, 1957; A Man and Two Women, 1963; African Stories, 1964; The Black Madonna, 1966; Winter in July, 1966; Nine African Stories, 1968; The Temptation of Jack Orkney, and Other Stories, 1972 (also known as The Story of a Non-Marrying Man, and Other Stories); The Sun Between Their Feet: Volume 2 of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, 1973; This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Volume 1 of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, 1973; Sunrise on the Veld, 1975; A Mild Attack of Locusts, 1977; Collected Stories, 1978 (2 volumes; also known as Stories, 1978); London Observed: Stories and Sketches, 1991 (also known as The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, 1992); Spies I Have Known, and Other Stories, 1995; The Old Age of El Magnifico, 2000; The Grandmothers, 2003. Other literary forms • In addition to her twenty volumes of short fiction, Doris Lessing’s many books include poetry, memoirs, reportage, plays, essays, and reviews. She is best known, however, for her novels, particularly The Golden Notebook (1962), and the five-volume Children of Violence series, which includes Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). She explored the genre she terms “space fiction” in the volumes Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), as well as “inner space fiction” in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). During the mid-1980’s, she returned to more realistic fiction, publishing, among others, two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers. Lessing’s latest novels include Playing the Game (1995), Love, Again (1996), Mara and Dann (1999), Ben, in the World (2000), The Sweetest Dream (2001), The Story of General Dan and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005), and The Cleft (2007). Lessing has also written several plays that have been produced; these are collected in Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays (1996). Her many nonfiction books include the autobiographical works Going Home (1957), African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992), Under My Skin (1994), and Walking in the Shade (1997). Many of her critical writings have been collected in Time Bites: Views and Reviews (2005). Achievements • Doris Lessing was a finalist for the Booker McConnell Prize for Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Sirian Experiments, and The Good Terrorist (1985). She was nominated for the Australian Science-Fiction Achievement Award in 1982 for The Sirian Experiments. The Good Terrorist won her the W. H. Smith and Son Literary Award, the Palermo Prize, and the Premio Internazionale Mondello. In 1995 the nonfiction Under My Skin (1994) earned the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Walking in the Shade received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Critics Award in the biography/autobiography category. Lessing has been a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Biography • Born to British parents in Persia, where her father, Alfred Cook Tayler, worked in a bank, Doris May Lessing moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925, when she was five. There she lived on a remote farm, south of the TO VIEW IMAGE, Zambezi River. “Our neighbors PLEASE SEE were four, five, seven miles off. In PRINT EDITION front of the house . . . no neighbors, nothing; no farms, just wild bush OF THIS BOOK. with two rivers but no fences to the mountains seven miles away.” In her teens, she moved to a “very small town that had about ten thousand white persons in it. The black population did not count, though it was fairly large.” This was the Africa of rigid racial separation; Lessing Ingrid Von Kruse would later chronicle its horrors. While still in her teens, Lessing married and had two children. She later married again and, in 1949, left her second husband to go to England, bringing her son with her. The emptiness of the African veld and the life of small African towns are the themes of much of her earlier work, including the early volumes of the Children of Violence series. The scene then shifts in her fiction, as it did in her life, to England, and particularly London. Lessing was a member of communist groups in both Africa and England. In Africa, she describes the group as “having no contact with any kind of reality. . . . I found this when I came to England and had a short association with the British Communist party.” Lessing’s disillusionment with the difference between the official Communist Party and the “beautiful purity” of the ideas which lie behind communism is an extremely important theme in her fiction. For many of her characters, disillusionment with the possibility of a political solution to the inequities and horror of modern life, leads them first to madness, suicide, or acquiescence. Later, beginning with The FourGated City, it leads them to visionary solutions. Once her characters give up politics as a solution, they come more and more to accept the mystic resolutions of the Eastern traditions, especially those of Sufism, an ancient form of Islamic human-centered mysticism. In Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a series of lectures she gave for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she reaffirms her view that the survival of the human race depends on its recognizing its connection to all nature rather than stressing a sense of separation. In 1995 Lessing returned to Southern Africa to visit her daughter and grandchildren. It was her first return to the region in which she grew up since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. The same year she also received an honorary degree from Harvard University and collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to publish the novel Playing the Game. In 1996 she published Love, Again, her first novel in seven years. In 1997 Walking in the Shade, the second volume of her autobiography, was issued.

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Analysis • Doris Lessing engaged in a lifelong process of self-education, becoming involved with all the important intellectual and political movements of the twentieth century: Freudian and Jungian psychology, Marxism, feminism, existentialism, mysticism, sociobiology, and speculative scientific theory. All these interests appear in her fiction, which consequently serves as a record of the changing climate of the times. She has also displayed in her writing an increasing anxiety about humanity’s ability to survive. In Doris Lessing’s short fiction, the reader meets characters remarkable for their intelligence, their unceasing analysis of their emotions, and their essential blindness to their true motivations. The people who move through her stories, while very vividly placid in the details of their lives, are in essence types. As Lessing says in her preface to The Golden Notebook, they are “so general and representative of the time that they are anonymous, you could put names to them like those in the old Morality Plays.” Those whom the reader meets most frequently in the short fiction are Mr. I-am-free-because-I-belong-nowhere, Miss I-must-have-love-and-happiness, Mrs. I-have-to-be-good-at-everything-I-do, Mr. Where-is-a-real-woman, and Ms. Where-is-areal-man; and there is one final type Lessing names, Mrs. If-we-deal-very-well-withthis-small-problem-then-perhaps-we-can-forget-we-daren’t-look-at-the-big-ones. This last type is the character so often met at the beginning of Lessing’s stories, the character who has become uneasily aware of a discrepancy between intention and action, between the word and the deed, but who would prefer not to take the analysis too far. Lessing is inexorable, however, and in story after story characters are driven to new, usually unpleasant knowledge about themselves and their motivations. Typically, the stories end with the situation unresolved. The reader sees the awakening but not the translation of new knowledge into action. For Lessing, the jump from dealing very well with small problems to looking at the big ones is the jump from History to Vision and lies beyond the scope of short fiction. The great obstacle facing Lessing’s characters in their movement toward selfknowledge, toward vision, is emotion—particularly romantic love. Lessing sees romantic love as essentially egocentric; people love what they wish to see in the beloved, not what is really there. They love so that they will feel loved in return. They love, in the terms of the title story of one of her collections, from “the habit of loving.” This, Lessing insists, is nothing but masochistic self-indulgence. Love robs people of their ability to reason clearly, diverts their energy into useless and potentially harmful channels, causes them to agonize over choices which make, in the end, very little real difference. Worse, in terms of her visionary philosophy, romantic love, by keeping people focused on the particular, prohibits their making the necessary connections between the individual and the collective consciousness. In story after story, readers watch people live out the same patterns, search for love at all costs, focus on the small problems, the matter at hand: Does he love me? Readers watch them try to believe that this is fundamentally what matters, that there is meaning in the small patterns of their lives. Lessing would deny that this is so. There is meaning, she seems to say, but it lies beyond these insignificant details. One must break through them, destroy them, in order to find it. Some of her characters, although by no means all, do so. Anna Wulf, the writerheroine of The Golden Notebook, succeeds in first dismantling the old patterns and then in synthesizing new ones, as does the anonymous narrator of “How I Finally Lost My Heart.”

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“How I Finally Lost My Heart” • An uncharacteristic story in its resemblance to fable, “How I Finally Lost My Heart” is fascinating in its diagrammatic exposition of Lessing’s views on romantic love. The story opens as the unnamed “I,” a woman, is awaiting the arrival of her escort for the evening, a man designated only as C. The narrator explains that C is the third “serious” love of her life, the first two being A and B. Earlier in the day, the speaker has had lunch with A and tea with B and is pleased that she has been able to enjoy their company with equanimity; she is, finally, “out of love” with them. Recognizing her sensation at this discovery as one of relief, the speaker begins to question her exhilaration at the thought of spending the evening with C, “because there was no doubt that both A and B had caused me unbelievable pain. Why, therefore, was I looking forward to C? I should rather be running away as fast as I could.” The narrator’s questioning leads her to a new recognition of what lies behind the human desire to be “in love.” It is not, she concludes, that “one needs a person who, like a saucer of water, allows one to float off on him/her, like a transfer.” It is not, then, that one needs to “lose one’s heart” by blending with another. Rather, “one carries with one a sort of burning spear stuck in one’s side, that one waits for someone else to pull out; it is something painful, like a sore or a wound, that one cannot wait to share with someone else.” One needs to “lose one’s heart” literally, to get rid of it by giving it to someone else. The catch is that we are expected to take their heart in return. Lessing envisages a grotesque sort of barter, two people demanding of each other, “take my wound.” Moving to the telephone to call C and suggest that they agree to keep their hearts to themselves, the speaker is forced to hang up the phone: For I felt the fingers of my left hand push outwards around something rather large, light and slippery—hard to describe this sensation, really. My hand is not large, and my heart was in a state of inflation after having had lunch with A, tea with B, and then looking forward to C. . . . Anyway, my fingers were stretching out rather desperately to encompass an unknown, largish, lightish object, and I said: Excuse me a minute to C, looked down, and there was my heart, in my hand. There her heart stays, attached to her hand, for four days, growing to the flesh of her palm. She cannot remove it by any “act of will or intention of desire,” but when, distracted by events outside her window, she temporarily forgets herself, she feels it begin to loosen. One can “lose one’s heart” only by forgetting about it, but it is still attached, and who is one to give it to? She has previously covered the heart with aluminum foil, in part because it is messy and in part because, unaccustomed to the air, “it smarts.” Now wrapping a scarf around her hand, heart and all, she walks about London, finally taking a train on the underground. In the train, she sits across from a woman maddened by love, who ceaselessly, jerkily, accuses her lover or husband of giving his mistress a gold cigarette case. The woman is on the verge of total breakdown, of lapsing into total immobility and, watching her, the narrator forgets herself. She feels the heart loosen from her hand, plucks it off and gives it to the mad woman: For a moment she did not react, then with a groan or a mutter of relieved and entirely theatrical grief, she leaned forward, picked up the glittering heart, and clutched it in her arms.

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The woman has “taken heart”; she now has the energy of the heart and the “theatrical” grief it brings with it. She can once again play love as a game, insisting that her husband or lover “take her wound.” The narrator, finally, is free. “No heart. No heart at all. What bliss. What freedom.” “How I Finally Lost My Heart,” although uncharacteristic in its style, can serve as a paradigm for most of Lessing’s stories on the relations between men and women. It is valuable because it points out so clearly her vision that the important choice is not among A and B and C, but it is rather the choice of freedom or bondage. If people choose freedom and break out of the patterns of romantic love, they are then able to see clearly and can move on to new ways of loving. This will necessitate new forms of the family, which Lessing sees, in its traditional structure, as the institutionalized destruction of its individual members. If, however, they remain convinced that the important choice is that of who to love, not how to love, they remain in delusion. “A Man and Two Women” • This same lesson is exemplified in the more traditional story “A Man and Two Women,” one of Lessing’s many explorations of the strains and restrictions of marriage. The plot is simple: Two couples, good friends, arrange to spend some time together in a country cottage. The couple who own the cottage, Dorothy and Jack, have recently had a baby. Of the visiting couple, Stella and Paul, only Stella is actually able to come. The story is impressive in its precise delineation of the relationships among the members of the quartet and in its explorations of Dorothy’s languor and withdrawal after childbirth. The real excitement, however, lies in Stella’s slow examination of her own marriage in light of the situation she finds between Jack and Dorothy. Both marriages are perceived by the couples to be extraordinary in their strength and exuberance, yet both are strained. The connection between Jack and Dorothy is threatened by the strength of Dorothy’s attachment to her new son. Also, Stella realizes that her connection with Paul has been more strained by their occasional infidelities than she has realized. In the final scene, Jack begins to make love to Stella, something Dorothy has goaded him into, declaring that she does not care what he does; he has become insignificant to her. At first, Stella responds: She thought: What is going to happen now will blow Dorothy and Jack and that baby sky-high; it’s the end of my marriage. I’m going to blow everything to bits. There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it. Remembering the baby, however, she pulls back and waits for Jack to drive her to the station, making the final comment “It really was a lovely night”—a mundane comment for a return to the usual. Using the paradigm of “How I Finally Lost My Heart,” readers see that the story ends with Stella’s struggle over choosing A or B, Jack or Paul, and with her desire to abandon herself to love. “There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.” She agonizes only over whom she will ask to “take my wound.” Although she perceives that both her marriage and Jack’s marriage are failures, she leaves with her heart in her hand, carrying it back to Paul. She sees more clearly than she did at the opening of the story, but she is not yet able to act on her perceptions. She has not yet lost her heart. “A Man and Two Women” ends, then, in ambiguity but not in pessimism. Stella may not yet be able to act on her perceptions, but she is admirable in her willingness to reexamine her life. Readers should consider emulating her. They are left not with

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a blueprint for action but with feelings and emotions that must be examined. It is typical of Lessing’s short fiction that they, like Stella, are awakened to reality and then are left to take their own directions. “The New Café” • In her collection The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, Lessing offers glimpses of life in her hometown of London in the 1980’s, played out in a series of everyday human experiences. As usual, Lessing’s stories on a surface level are simple enough, common to even the most detached observer of urban life. However, her aim is much deeper, as demonstrated in “The New Café,” the story of a woman entranced by the conduct of a fellow customer who appears at once distant and interested in his flirtatious banter with female acquaintances, but whose charms suddenly disappear during a mysterious encounter with a young mother and her child on a London street. In recalling the story, Lessing’s narrator notes: here, as in all good cafés, may be observed real-life soap operas, to be defined as series of emotional events that are certainly not unfamiliar, since you are bound to have seen something like them before, but to which you lack the key that will make them not trite, but shockingly individual. “Sparrows” • With “Sparrows,” set again in a café, the trite once more becomes the profound, as a series of diners react to a family of sparrows who persist in feeding off scraps of food thrown by guests or left at tables. The seemingly innocuous behavior of the birds elicits reactions ranging from outright indifference to the intrigue expressed by members of one family who see in the sparrows’ actions a lesson that applies to their own personal situations. “Casualty” • In “Casualty” matters of life and death are clearly distinguished, as Lessing relates the tale of a group of hospital emergency room patients and their reactions not only to their own plights but also to the hysterics of an elderly woman who feels her condition warrants immediate attention, despite being deemed minor by the head nurse. Only when a critically injured young workman is rushed into the room do the others give pause to their situations, and then only temporarily in the case of the older woman, who appears to the reader to be a casualty of another kind. “Storms” • Lessing’s love of London comes through clearly in “Storms,” the story of a woman’s encounter with a cranky old taxi driver with whom she is paired upon her return from a visit to Frankfurt. Adding to the driver’s dim disposition is the debris covering the streets through which he is attempting to maneuver following an overnight storm. With each compliment the woman expresses for her hometown on the drive back, the driver immediately counters with an invective. By journey’s end the woman comes to the realization that the litany of complaints she was hearing was born of sorrow, not of age. “Two Old Women and a Young One” • “Two Old Women and a Young One” explores the seemingly unlimited capacity of people to deal in delusional thoughts, particularly when engaged in social intercourse with the opposite sex. Beginning with the two women of the title who grossly misinterpret the charms of their young male host at a business luncheon, to the host himself, who later mistakes the atten-

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tions of an attractive young woman at the same affair, there is little but empty rhetoric. The conversations reflect neither the personal needs nor the identities necessary to building a human connection. It is a rampant self-absorption that inflicts many of Lessing’s characters throughout her work, no matter the setting. Mary Baron With updates by Mary LeDonne Cassidy, William Hoffman, and the Editors Other major works plays: Each His Own Wilderness, pr. 1958; Play with a Tiger, pr., pb. 1962; Making of the Representative for Planet 8, pr. 1988 (libretto); Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays, pb. 1996. novels: The Grass Is Singing, 1950; Martha Quest, 1952; A Proper Marriage, 1954; Retreat to Innocence, 1956; A Ripple from the Storm, 1958; The Golden Notebook, 1962; Landlocked, 1965, 1991; The Four-Gated City, 1969; Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971; The Summer Before the Dark, 1973; The Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974; Shikasta, 1979 (also known as Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta); The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, 1980; The Sirian Experiments, 1981; The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 1982; Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983; The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 (as Jane Somers); If the Old Could . . . , 1984 (as Jane Somers); The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1984 (includes The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could . . .); The Good Terrorist, 1985; The Fifth Child, 1988; Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1992 (5 novel cycle includes Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, The Sirian Experiments, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire); Playing the Game, 1995; Love, Again, 1996; Mara and Dann, 1999; Ben, in the World, 2000; The Sweetest Dream, 2001; The Story of General Dan and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, 2005; The Cleft, 2007. miscellaneous: The Doris Lessing Reader, 1988 (selections). nonfiction: Going Home, 1957; In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary, 1960; Particularly Cats, 1967; A Small Personal Voice, 1974; Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 1987; The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 1987; African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe, 1992; A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, 1994; Doris Lessing: Conversations, 1994 (also known as Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994, 1996); Shadows on the Wall of the Cave, 1994; Under My Skin, 1994 (autobiography); Walking in the Shade, 1997 (autobiography); Time Bites: Views and Reviews, 2005. poetry: Fourteen Poems, 1959. Bibliography Butcher, Margaret. “‘Two Forks of a Road’: Divergence and Convergence in the Short Stories of Doris Lessing.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 55-61. Asserts that “Homage to Isaac Babel” provides a rebuttal that Lessing’s later stories move away from her earlier larger concerns with moral and political issues and retreat into a feminine world of social satire. In her appreciation of Babel’s detachment and control, Lessing has at last learned that mannerism and a directness in writing are neither mutually exclusive nor antithetical. Fishburn, Katherine. The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Technique. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. This study considers Lessing’s science fiction from Briefing for a Descent into Hell through the Canopus in Argos se-

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ries. It argues that the science fiction has the purpose of transforming reality and involving the reader in ideas and the intricacies of the texts rather than in characterization. Fishburn also published Doris Lessing: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: York Press, 1987), which provides a brief overview of Lessing’s life and works, including literary biography, critical response, and an annotated bibliography. Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Greene centers this study on how Lessing’s novels are concerned with change. Several different critical approaches to Lessing’s works, including Marxist, feminist, and Jungian, are included in the study. Halisky, Linda H. “Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable Heroines of ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ and ‘To Room Nineteen.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Winter, 1990): 45-54. Discusses the inexplicable behavior of the protagonist of Lessing’s story by comparing it to Gail Godwin’s “A Sorrowful Woman.” Argues that the heroine of “To Room Nineteen” is inexplicable only if one is locked into a belief that reason is the only integrating, sense-making force. Discusses the redemptive force of mythic truth in the story. Klein, Carole. Doris Lessing: A Biography. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. Unauthorized biography that nonetheless draws on extensive interviews with Lessing’s friends and colleagues. Klein draws many connections between events in Lessing’s life and episodes in her novels. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Lessing: “The Day Stalin Died” (vol. 2), “Homage for Isaac Babel” (vol. 3), “How I Finally Lost My Heart” (vol. 4), “Mrs. Fortescue” (vol. 5), “To Room Nineteen” (vol. 7), and “A Woman on a Roof” (vol. 8). Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Interesting collection of essays that look at spiritual themes in Lessing’s work, touching on both the realistic and the science-fiction novels. Pickering, Jean. Understanding Doris Lessing. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Brief, clear overview of Lessing’s work. Begins with a chapter providing a biographical and analytical look at Lessing’s career, then continues with a short but sharp analysis of her fiction through The Fifth Child (1988). Includes an index and an annotated bibliography of books and articles about Lessing. Tyler, Lisa. “Our Mothers’ Gardens: Doris Lessing’s ‘Among the Roses.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Spring, 1994): 163-173. Examines the mother-daughter relationship in Lessing’s short story “Among the Roses”; argues that the breach between mother and daughter suggests a division between two worlds—one of female community and another of heterosexuality. Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. The section on Lessing focuses on the process of her “Englishing” after leaving Rhodesia.

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Jack London London, Jack

Born: San Francisco, California; January 12, 1876 Died: Glen Ellen, California; November 22, 1916 Principal short fiction • The Son of the Wolf, 1900; The God of His Fathers, and Other Stories, 1901; Children of the Frost, 1902; The Faith of Men, and Other Stories, 1904; Love of Life, and Other Stories, 1906; Moon-Face, and Other Stories, 1906; Lost Face, 1910; South Sea Tales, 1911; When God Laughs, and Other Stories, 1911; A Son of the Sun, 1912; Smoke Bellew Tales, 1912; The House of Pride, and Other Tales of Hawaii, 1912; The Night-Born, 1913; The Strength of the Strong, 1914; The Turtles of Tasman, 1916; The Human Drift, 1917; The Red One, 1918; On the Makaloa Mat, 1919; Dutch Courage, and Other Stories, 1922. Other literary forms • Jack London’s more than fifty published books include plays, children’s fiction, novels, sociological studies, essays, and short stories. Although generally known as a writer of short fiction, London is remembered also for two novels, The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904), both of which have been made into motion pictures several times. London is also credited with pioneering work in the development of tramp fiction (The Road, 1907) and science fiction (The Star Rover, 1915). Achievements • Jack London’s numerous stories and his many novels capture with a bold and sometimes brutal reality the confrontation between humans and nature, which by some writers may easily have been portrayed romantically. Instead, London was at the forefront of the move toward naturalistic fiction and realism. He was influenced by social Darwinism, and his stories often reflect the idea that human beings, to survive, must adapt to nature yet are themselves creatures of nature, subject to forces they do not really understand. London was also interested in Marxism, and his work often employs a working-class hero. London’s realistic stories were very popular in the United States when they were first published and continue to be so. He has also achieved wide popularity abroad, with his work being translated into more than fifty languages. His stories in the naturalistic mode continue to influence writers. Biography • Largely self-educated, Jack London was the product of California ranches and the working-class neighborhoods of Oakland. London’s rise to fame came as a result of the Klondike Gold Rush. Unsuccessful in his attempt to break into the magazine market, he joined the flood of men rushing to make instant riches in the Yukon. Although he found little gold, he returned after the winter of 1897 with a wealth of memories and notes of the Northland, the gold rush, and the hardships of the trail. London married Elizabeth May Maddern in 1900, and the couple settled in Oakland, soon adding two daughters to the family. The marriage, however, was not successful, and London divorced his wife in 1905 and married Charmian Kittredge the same year. With Charmian, he sailed across the Pacific aboard a small yacht, intending to continue around the world on a seven-year voyage. The trip ended in Australia, however, when ill health forced London to abandon the voyage after only two years. London’s last years were spent in the construction of a scientifically

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run ranch complex in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California. It was there that he died at the age of forty, on November 22, 1916. His death still has not been satisfactorily explained. Analysis • Jack London’s fame as a writer came about largely through his ability to interpret realistically humans’ struggle in a hostile environment. Early in his career, London realized that he had no talent for invention and that in his writing he would have to be an interpreter of the things that are rather than a creator of the things that might be. Accordingly, he turned to the Canadian Northland, the locale where he had gained experience, for his settings and characters. Later on he would move his setting to the primiLibrary of Congress tive South Seas, after his travels had also made him familiar with that region. By turning to harsh, frontier environment for his setting and themes, London soon came to be a strong voice heard over the genteel tradition of nineteenth century parlor-fiction writers. His stories became like the men and women about whom he wrote—bold, violent, sometimes primitive. London was able to give his stories greater depth by using his extraordinary powers of narrative and language, and by infusing them with a remarkable sense of irony. “To Build a Fire” • “To Build a Fire” has often been called London’s masterpiece. It is a story which contrasts the intelligence of human beings with the intuition of the animal and suggests that humans alone cannot successfully face the harsh realities of nature. The story begins at dawn as a man and his dog walk along a trail which eventually could lead them, thirty-two miles away, to a companion’s cabin and safety. The air is colder than the man has ever experienced before, and although the man does not know about the cold, the dog does. Although the animal instinctively realizes that it is time to curl up in the snow and wait for warmer weather, the man lacks the imagination which would give him a grasp of the laws of nature. Such perception would have enabled him to see the absurdity of attempting to combat the unknown, especially since an old-timer had warned him about the dangers of the cold to inexperienced men. With his warm mittens, thick clothes, and heavy coat, the man feels prepared for the cold and protected while the dog longs for the warmth of a fire. As the man walks along the trail, he looks carefully for hidden traps of nature, springs under the snow beneath which pools of water lie, since to step into one of these pools would mean calamity. Once he forces the dog to act as a trail breaker for him, and, when the dog breaks through and ice immediately forms on its extremities, the man helps the dog remove the ice.

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At midday the man stops, builds a fire, and eats his lunch. The dog, without knowing why, feels relieved; he is safe. The man, however, does not stay beside the fire; he continues on the trail and forces the dog onward too. Finally, almost inevitably, the man’s feet become wet. Although he builds a fire to dry out, snow puts out the fire, and before he can build another fire, the cold envelops him, and he freezes to death. The dog senses the man’s death and continues on the trail toward the cabin, wherein lies food and the warmth of a fire. The irony of the story is that the man, even with the benefit of all the tools with which civilization has provided him, fails in his attempt to conquer nature and instead falls victim to it, while the dog, equipped only with the instinct which nature has provided, survives. The story, representing London’s most mature expression of pessimism, stresses the inability of human beings to shape their environment and conquer the unknown. Unlike the dog, they cannot draw from instinct since civilization has deprived them of it. They are therefore unfit and totally unequipped to face the unknown and conquer the cosmic power. “Law of Life” • “Law of Life” exhibits another recurring theme in London’s work, the inability of humans to assert positive values. It tells the story of the last moments of life for an old Native American. As the tale begins, the old man, son of the chief of the tribe, sits by a small fire with a bundle of wood nearby. The tribesmen are busy breaking camp in preparation for departure since they must go to new hunting grounds in order to survive. The old man, too old to benefit the tribe further, represents only a burden to the rest of his society and must therefore stay behind. As the man sits beside the fire, he remembers the days of his youth and an incident when he tracked an old moose. The animal had become separated from the rest of the herd and was being trailed by wolves. Twice the young Native American had come across the scene of a struggle between the moose and the wolves, and twice the moose had survived. Finally, the Native American witnessed the kill, the old moose dying so that the wolves might live. The moose-wolf analogy to the old Native American’s situation is obvious, and as the story closes, the old Native American feels the muzzle of a wolf upon his cheek. At first he picks up a burning ember in preparation for battle, but then resigns himself to the inevitability of fate and extinguishes it. London uses several vehicles to express his pessimism. Like the protagonist in “To Build a Fire,” the old Native American is a man of limited vision. Encircled by an everconstricting set of circumstances, he waits by a dying fire for his own death. Finally, as the moose-wolf analogy has foretold, the inevitability of nature dominates. As the story ends, the fire goes out, the wolves are no longer kept at bay, and the reader is left repulsed by the knowledge of the Native American’s horrible death. London employs a number of symbols in this story as well. The fire gives light which symbolizes life, as does the white snow which falls gently at the beginning of the story. As the fire ebbs, the man remembers the grey wolves, and at the end of the moose-wolf analogy, London writes of the dark point in the midst of the stamped snow, foretelling the end of the fire, and thus of life. Although London’s earlier stories embody a pessimism which reflects humans’ helplessness in challenging the unknown, his later ones mark a dramatic changeover. Following an intensive study of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, London began writing stories in the last years of his life which reflected his discovery of some unique human quality that enabled humans to challenge successfully the cosmos and withstand the crushing forces of nature. One of London’s last stories, also with a North-

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land setting, reflects this change of philosophy and contrasts markedly with the earlier “To Build a Fire” and “Law of Life.” “Like Argus of Ancient Times” • “Like Argus of Ancient Times” begins as a largely autobiographical account of London’s trek to Dawson City with a man known as “Old Man” or “John” Tarwater. Unlike the unnamed protagonist of “To Build a Fire,” Tarwater is totally unequipped to face the rigors and challenges of the north. He is old and weak; furthermore, he arrives on the trail without money, camping gear, food, and proper clothing. Somehow he manages to join a group of miners, serve as their cook, and earn his passage to Dawson. Although the winter snows force the group to make camp until spring, Tarwater (who is also called “Old Hero” and “Father Christmas”) is driven by gold fever. He strikes out on his own, gets lost in a snowstorm, and falls to the ground, drifting off into a dreamlike world between consciousness and unconsciousness. Unlike London’s earlier characters, Tarwater survives this confrontation with nature, awakens from his dream, turns toward the “rebirthing east,” and discovers a treasure of gold in the ground. Couched in Jungian terms, the story is directly analogous to the Jungian concepts of the wandering hero who, undertaking a dangerous night journey in search of treasure difficult to attain, faces death, reaches the highest pinnacle of life, and emerges in the East, reborn. “Like Argus of Ancient Times” marks London’s return to the many stories he wrote in which the hero feels the call of adventure, encounters difficulties and confronts nature, battles with death, and finally achieves dignity. Often called the successor to Edgar Allan Poe, an imitator of Rudyard Kipling, or a leader of writers emerging from the nineteenth century, London wrote stories which mark the conflict between the primitive and the modern, between optimism and pessimism. He created fiction which combined actuality and ideals, realism and romance, and rational versus subjective responses to life. More than a new Poe, imitator of Kipling, or new genre writer, however, London is a legitimate folk hero whose greatness stems from his primordial vision and ability to center upon the fundamental human struggles for salvation and fears of damnation. David Mike Hamilton With updates by Karen M. Cleveland Marwick Other major works children’s literature: The Cruise of the Dazzler, 1902; Tales of the Fish Patrol, 1905. plays: Scorn of Women, pb. 1906; Theft, pb. 1910; The Acorn-Planter, pb. 1916; The Plays of Jack London, pb. 2001. novels: A Daughter of the Snows, 1902; The Call of the Wild, 1903; The Sea-Wolf, 1904; The Game, 1905; Before Adam, 1906; White Fang, 1906; The Iron Heel, 1907; Martin Eden, 1908; Burning Daylight, 1910; Adventure, 1911; The Abysmal Brute, 1913; The Valley of the Moon, 1913; The Mutiny of the Elsinore, 1914; The Scarlet Plague, 1915; The Star Rover, 1915; The Little Lady of the Big House, 1916; Jerry of the Islands, 1917; Michael, Brother of Jerry, 1917; Hearts of Three, 1920; The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., 1963 (completed by Robert L. Fish). nonfiction: The Kempton-Wace Letters, 1903 (with Anna Strunsky); The People of the Abyss, 1903; The War of the Classes, 1905; The Road, 1907; Revolution, and Other Essays, 1910; The Cruise of the Snark, 1911; John Barleycorn, 1913; Letters from Jack London, 1965 (King Hendricks and Irving Shepard, editors); No Mentor but Myself: Jack London on

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Writers and Writing, 1979, revised and expanded, 1999 (Dale L. Walker and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, editors). Bibliography Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Auerbach reverses the trend of earlier London studies, emphasizing how London used his writing to reinvent himself. Above all, Auerbach argues, London wanted to become a successful author, and in that respect he shaped his life to suit his art. Includes detailed notes but no bibliography. Cassuto, Leonard, and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, eds. Rereading Jack London. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Essays on London as “representative man,” his commitment to authorship, his portrayal of American imperialism, his handling of power, gender, and ideological discourse, his relationship to social Darwinism, and his status as writer/hero. Includes end notes, but no bibliography. Furer, Andrew J. “Jack London’s New Women: A Little Lady with a Big Stick.” Studies in American Fiction 22 (Autumn, 1994): 185-214. Discusses London’s representation of “new womanhood” that emphasizes physical power and capability and an economic and intellectual independence, but is nonetheless feminine and heterosexual. Howard, Ronald W. “A Piece of Steak.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “A Piece of Steak” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Kershaw, Alex. Jack London: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Concentrates on the “powerful drama” of London’s life. Includes notes, illustrations, bibliography, and several helpful maps. Labor, Earle, and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Jack London. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1994. This clear introduction, first published in 1974, takes into account the twenty years of scholarship after the volume first appeared. This volume also takes issue with the widespread belief that the quality of London’s work declined in the last decade of his life. Includes chronology, notes, and an annotated bibliography. McClintock, James I. White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wolf House Books, 1975. McClintock’s work is the only one to focus solely on London’s short stories. He provides a detailed analysis of the stories in a clear and useful way. Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. “‘Never Travel Alone’: Naturalism, Jack London, and the White Silence.” American Literary Realism 29 (Winter, 1997): 33-49. Argues that even in London’s most naturalistic stories, readers find the search for spirit, the desire for community, and the need to address the Other. Provides a detailed analysis of “To Build a Fire” to illustrate these concepts. Stefoff, Rebecca. Jack London: An American Original. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Examines the life, beliefs, adventures, and works of London. Threepage bibliography and index. Welsh, James M. “To Build a Fire.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “To Build a Fire” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis.

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Carson McCullers McCullers, Carson

Born: Columbus, Georgia; February 19, 1917 Died: Nyack, New York; September 29, 1967 Principal short fiction • The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, 1951; The Ballad of the Sad Café and Collected Short Stories, 1952, 1955; The Shorter Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, 1972. Other literary forms • Carson McCullers’s remarkable first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), establishes the themes that were to concern her in all her other writing: the spiritual isolation of individuals and their attempt to transcend loneliness through love. Thereafter, she wrote short stories, some poetry (mostly for children), three other novels, and two plays. The most popular of the novels, The Member of the Wedding (1946), she adapted for the stage; the play was a great success on Broadway and was also made into an award-winning film. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and her somber Freudian novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), were also adapted for film. McCullers also wrote a number of significant essays, which are collected in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). The essays that are most important to understanding the method and content of her fiction, especially her use of the grotesque, are “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature” and “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing.” Her unfinished autobiography was published in 1999. Achievements • Carson McCullers was the winner of a number of literary awards during her lifetime, including membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, and an Arts and Letters Grant. She also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Gold Medal, and the Donaldson Award (all for the play version of The Member of the Wedding). Her fiction and nonfiction works were published in a number of reputable magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Mademoiselle. For her story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud,” she was nominated for an O. Henry Award. A praiseworthy writer of short fiction, McCullers succeeds with objective narration, the theme of loneliness, and her lyric compression. Although McCullers is perhaps not as great a writer of short stories as her peers Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter, she is nevertheless successful at affecting her readers’ emotions. The brevity and compression of stories such as “The Jockey” and “The Sojourner” are remarkable based on any standards. Although her techniques are not as innovative as those of many other postmodern fiction writers, she influenced, among others, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, and Anne Tyler, particularly with the expert use of the grotesque and the freakish, and the portrayal of human alienation. Her knowledge of human psychology also makes her a great spokesperson for the complexity of human experience. Biography • Carson McCullers, born Lula Carson Smith, was reared in a small southern town, a milieu that she used in much of her fiction. Exhibiting early talent in both writing and music, she intended to become a concert pianist but lost her tui-

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Analysis • Carson McCullers’s short stories (ruling out for the moment the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café, 1943, serial; 1951, book) often explore the intense emotional conLibrary of Congress tent of seemingly undramatic situations. Plot is minimal, although there is often at least one unusual or grotesque element. “Wunderkind,” for example, deals with the confused feelings of a gifted fifteen-year-old girl at a piano lesson. Her social development has been sacrificed to her musical talent; now her mastery of the keyboard is faltering, and she is profoundly humiliated. The reader realizes that part of her difficulty is the awakening of sexual feelings for her teacher, Mister Bilderbach. Neither the teacher, who thinks of her as a child prodigy, nor the young girl herself understands her tension and clumsiness. “The Jockey” • “The Jockey” describes an even more ordinary situation—a brief encounter in a restaurant between a jockey and three other men identified as a trainer, a bookie, and a rich man whose horse the jockey has ridden. The dwarflike jockey, called Bitsy Barlow, is one of those grotesque figures who seem an embarrassing mistake in nature. The point of the story is the ironic contrast between the three “normal” men’s callous pretense of sympathy for a rider’s crippling accident on the track and the jockey’s bitter grief for that rider, who is his closest friend. Although the jockey, because of his physical deformity, seems a caricature of humanity, the intensity of his sorrow makes the other men’s callousness seem the more monstrous. “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” • “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” is, on the most obvious level, at least, a revelation of the emotional price of artistic excellence. Like “Wunderkind” and “The Jockey,” the story concerns the sub-

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jective significance of seemingly minor events. Mr. Brook, head of a college music department, hires Madame Zilensky, a famous composer and teacher, for his faculty. He is tolerant of her several eccentricities, her tales of adventures in exotic places, and even her somewhat shocking assertion that her three sons are the offspring of three different lovers. When she claims to have seen the King of Finland, however, Mr. Brook realizes that she is a pathological liar, since Finland has no king. Mr. Brook is sensitive enough to intuit the motive for her prevarications: the terrible constriction of her actual experience. “Through her lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.” Point of view is vital in this story. The pathetic emotional dependence of Madame Zilensky on fantasy is the explicit and obvious content, but the story’s real focus is on the growing perception of Mr. Brook, who has himself led a somewhat dull, repetitive life in academia. It is his character which receives the more subtle delineation. He represents those countless ordinary people whose individuality has been subdued, but not utterly extinguished, by professional duties. When Mr. Brook, in his official capacity, feels he must reprimand Madame Zilensky for propagating lies about herself, he comes face to face with stark tragedy. The terrible emotional deprivation he is about to expose echoes in his own solitary soul. Compassion for her loneliness and his own makes him realize that truth is not the highest virtue. This terrified retreat from reality into the most banal of polite conversation ironically combines tragedy and sardonic humor. To use the name of love in this context is surprising, at once accurate and absurd. A final symbolic image captures the grotesque irrationality embedded in the most familiar landscape. As Mr. Brook looks out of his office window later, he sees, perhaps for the hundredth time, a faculty member’s old Airedale terrier waddling down the street. This time, however, something is strange: The dog is walking backward. He watches “with a kind of cold surprise” until the dog is out of sight, then returns to the pile of student papers on his desk. This story is thematically typical of McCullers’s fiction. Love, which has little or nothing to do with sexuality, is the only way to bridge the terrible isolation which separates individuals. Too many other factors in the situation, however—habit, social custom, human perversity, the demands of artistic creativity, or simply devotion to duty—conspire against the goal of giving love and comfort to one another. All persons are trapped, incommunicado, in the little cages they have chosen. “A Domestic Dilemma” • The irrational persistence of love and its inadequacy to solve the everyday problems of existence are also apparent in “A Domestic Dilemma.” Here, too, the story is told from the point of view of a patient, kindly man whose attitude toward his alcoholic wife is a curious blend of compassion, love, and angry exasperation. He fears for the welfare of his two children. He comes home to the suburbs from his New York office to find his children unattended, playing with Christmas tree lights, a supper of cinnamon toast on the kitchen table, untouched except for one bite. The little boy complains, “It hurt. The toast was hot.” His wife, Emily, had mistaken cayenne pepper for cinnamon. The bewildered children do not understand the painful scene between mother and father, in which Emily vacillates drunkenly between belligerent defense of her behavior and tearful shame. Martin finally persuades her to go to bed and let him feed the children, bathe them, and put them to bed. He successfully reestablishes an atmosphere of tender solicitude, hoping the children will not remember their

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mother’s puzzling behavior. How long will it be, he wonders, before they understand and despise her? There are moments when Martin hates his wife, imagining “a future of degradation and slow ruin” for himself and his children. When he finally lies down beside Emily and watches her sleeping, however, his anger gradually dissipates. “His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.” One interpretation offered for “A Domestic Dilemma” points to the stresses of an urban lifestyle on a woman reared in an emotionally supportive small southern town. In suburbia, Emily is isolated from everyone she ever knew, while Martin commutes long distances into the inner city. Thus, it is social isolation that is destroying her. This interpretation has considerable validity, although the cause of her alcoholism is not really central to the story; isolation and loneliness occur in all kinds of social situations in McCullers’s fiction, and small southern towns are as deadly as urban suburbs in that regard. Isolation is a metaphysical affliction more than a cultural one. Emily’s social isolation is analogous to Bitsy Barlow’s physical deformity or even Madame Zilensky’s enslaving musical genius—one of the many accidents of nature or situation over which people have little control. As Mr. Brook’s empathy for Madame Zilensky cannot alleviate her isolation, Martin’s love for his wife will not necessarily save her from her unhappiness. In McCullers’s fiction it is usually the act of love, not the comfort of being loved, that has power to transform the lover. “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud” • One of the most anthologized of McCullers’s stories is “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud,” which was chosen for the 1942 Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, even though it may be inferior, in some ways, to “A Domestic Dilemma,” “Wunderkind,” and “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland.” It deals more philosophically and perhaps more ironically with the art of loving. The lover, in this case, is an old, boozy wanderer who waylays a newspaper delivery boy in a café. He is compulsively dedicated to explaining how he learned to love “all things both great and small.” The quotation comes not from the story but from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), which is quite possibly its inspiration. The irony of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner waylaying an impatient wedding guest with his story of salvation through love is translated here into a somewhat different context. Three persons, rather than two, are involved. Although the tale is addressed to the naïve newspaper delivery boy, it is overheard by Leo, the proprietor of the café, who is early characterized as bitter and stingy. When the wanderer accosts the boy and says distinctly, “I love you,” the initial laughter of the men in the café and their immediate return to their own beer or breakfasts suggest both a widespread cynicism and an utter indifference concerning the welfare of the boy. Although Leo is also cynical and often vulgar, he listens to the conversation carefully. When the old man orders a beer for the boy, Leo brings coffee instead, reminding the other man, “He is a minor.” Although Leo soon understands that the old man’s intention is not to proposition the boy, he continues to interject insulting remarks into the wanderer’s sad tale of love for a wife who deserted him for another man. The old man struggles to explain the unifying effect of love on the fragmented psyche. Before his marriage, he says, “when I had enjoyed anything there was a peculiar sensation as though it was laying around loose in me. Nothing seemed to finish itself up or fit in with other things.” His wife, however, transformed his experience of himself—“this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her

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and I come out complete.” Yet, after years of frantic search for the lost wife, the man realizes with horror that he cannot even remember distinctly what she looked like. It was then that he began his “science” of love. At this point, Leo explodes in exasperation: Leo’s mouth jerked with a pale, quick grin. “Well none of we boys are getting any younger,” he said. Then with sudden anger he balled up a dishcloth he was holding and threw it down hard on the floor. “You draggle-tailed old Romeo!” The wanderer solemnly explains that one must practice the art of loving by starting with small or inanimate things—a tree, a rock, a cloud—and graduate from one thing to another. He learned to love a goldfish next. Now he has so perfected the science of loving that he can love anything and everyone. By this time, Leo is screaming at him to shut up. As an explanation of Platonic love, this, to be sure, may be feeble. The reactions of Leo and the boy do, however, provide depth to the story. The newsboy is puzzled and confused—presumably because he has yet to pass through adolescence, when the importance and complexity of love will become clearer to him. After the old man leaves, the boy appeals to Leo for answers. Was the man drunk? Was he a dope fiend? Was he crazy? To the first two questions Leo says, shortly, “No.” To the last, he is grimly silent. Probably Leo responds so emotionally to the old man’s tale because it makes him too keenly aware of his own barren lovelessness. His role is somewhat analogous to that of Mr. Brook in this respect. He recognizes, perhaps, that the old man, unlike himself, has found a way to transcend his wretchedness. Can it be “crazy” to be at peace with oneself, in spite of outwardly miserable circumstances? If so, it is a craziness a sane man might covet. The boy, thinking of nothing else to say, comments that the man “sure has done a lot of traveling.” As the story ends, McCullers emphasizes therefore that the story is about adolescent versus adult perceptions of love. Autobiographical Elements • McCullers’s short fiction, like her most popular novel, The Member of the Wedding, has many autobiographical elements. Her own absorption in music and early aspirations to be a concert pianist are reflected in “Wunderkind” and “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland.” The particular mode of Madame Zilensky’s escape from a narrowly focused existence is even more pertinent to McCullers’s short, intense life. She escaped the limitations of her frail body through fantasy, transforming it into fiction and drama. Even the situation in “A Domestic Dilemma” echoes her own life, curiously altered. She lived both the Emily role, that is, the maimed personality who desperately needs love and companionship, and the Martin role, the hopeless lover of the psychologically disabled person. McCullers’s husband, whom she divorced and later remarried, was an alcoholic whose drinking was aggravated by the fact that, although he fancied himself a writer, she was so much more successful than he. She has disguised the personal element in the situation by changing the presumed cause of the alcoholism (although she, too, knew the effect of migrating from a small southern town to New York) and by projecting her role more on the husband than the wife. Both Martin and Mr. Brook exhibit qualities ordinarily ascribed to women— intuition, gentleness, patience, and unselfish love. McCullers’s blurring of gender roles (Miss Amelia in “The Ballad of the Sad Café” is strikingly masculine) was probably not motivated by a feminist revolt against stereotyped sex roles; she was not a polemicist but a lyrical writer, projecting her own personality, feelings, dreams, and

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fears. If her men act like women or vice versa, it is because she was herself decidedly androgynous. She loved both men and women and somehow contained them both. Some of her most ardent attractions were for women who repudiated her attentions (or at least did not remain in her vicinity), which may account for the wistful need for love in some of her fictional characters. In spite of her personal sorrows and her emotional isolation and loneliness, McCullers was beloved by many friends and generous in her own affections. Even the odd triangular love affairs that appear in The Member of the Wedding and Reflections in a Golden Eye have some autobiographical parallels. Both Carson and her husband, according to McCullers’s biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, were intimately involved with Jack Diamond, a concert musician. It is not an accident that McCullers was one of the first American writers to deal openly (in Reflections in a Golden Eye) with repressed homosexuality. In the case of her husband, at least, his homosexual orientation was not always repressed; whether she was an active bisexual is more ambiguous. McCullers’s personal life and her fiction both seem marked by a curious combination of sophisticated intuition into human motives and an odd childlike quality that sometimes verges on immaturity. Most writers, for example, would not write of Mr. Brook that he could not speak until “this agitation in his insides quieted down”; nor would many writers try to express the blurred Platonic idealism of “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” Although the situational irony of that story saves it from being naïvely expressed philosophy, one has a lingering impression that the writer is mocking a sentiment that she really wants to advocate. “The Ballad of the Sad Café” • “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” sometimes grouped with novellas, sometimes with short stories, is the most successful of McCullers’s ventures into the grotesque. The melancholy mood suggested by the title is appropriate; like many a folk ballad, it tells a mournful tale touched with sardonic humor. The story celebrates the love of a cross-eyed, mannish woman for a conceited, hunchbacked dwarf. It also involves a curious love triangle, for the climax is a grotesque battle between the protagonist, Miss Amelia, and her former husband for the affection of the dwarf. True love, paradoxically, is both a cruel joke and the means of redemption, not only for the lover, Miss Amelia, but also for the whole ingrown, backwoods community, which otherwise dies of emotional starvation. The inhabitants of this stifling southern village, like a somber chorus in a Greek tragedy, observe and reflect the fortunes of Miss Amelia, their leading citizen. Cousin Lymon, the hunchback, appears out of nowhere at the door of Miss Amelia, who runs the town store and the best distillery for miles around. To everyone’s amazement, instead of throwing him out, as she has done to others who claimed kinship, Miss Amelia takes in the wretched wanderer and even falls in love with him. Cousin Lymon becomes a pompous little king of the castle, although not, apparently, her bed partner. Love transforms the mean, hard, sexless Miss Amelia into a reasonable facsimile of a warmhearted woman. She opens a café in her store because Cousin Lymon likes company, and her place becomes the social center of the community. Miss Amelia blossoms; the community blooms with goodwill, until the arrival of another person who is to destroy this interlude of happiness and peace. Miss Amelia had once married the town bad boy, who had unaccountably fallen in love with her. Her motivation had apparently been solely commercial, the hope of acquiring a strong helper in her business; when the bridegroom expected sexual fa-

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vors, Miss Amelia had indignantly refused. After ten stormy days, she threw him out entirely, earning his undying hatred for causing him such frustration and humiliation; he turned to a life of crime and landed in the penitentiary. Now he is out of jail and returns with malevolent thoughts of revenge. Poor Miss Amelia, now vulnerable in a new and surprising way, accepts his unwelcome presence in her café because Cousin Lymon is fascinated with him, and Miss Amelia and her former spouse become rivals for the affection of the dwarf. This rivalry culminates in a ludicrous variation of the western showdown, solemnly witnessed by the whole community, when Miss Amelia and her former husband have a battle of fisticuffs in the café. Moreover, Miss Amelia, who has been quietly working out with a punching bag in preparation for the event, is winning. At the last moment, however, the traitorous Cousin Lymon leaps onto her back, and the two men together beat her senseless. Afterward, they vandalize her store and her still in the woods and flee. Miss Amelia thereafter closes her business and becomes a permanent recluse in a town now desolate and deserted. Katherine Snipes With updates by D. Dean Shackelford Other major works children’s literature: Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig, 1964. plays: The Member of the Wedding, pr. 1950, pb. 1951 (adaptation of her novel); The Square Root of Wonderful, pr. 1957, pb. 1958. novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940; Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1941; The Ballad of the Sad Café, 1943, serial (1951, book); The Member of the Wedding, 1946; Clock Without Hands, 1961. miscellaneous: The Mortgaged Heart, 1971 (short fiction, poetry, and essays; Margarita G. Smith, editor). nonfiction: Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, 1999 (Carlos L. Dews, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Essays on McCullers’s novels and major short stories. Includes introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Thoughtful guide to McCullers’s works by the author of The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1975). Includes bibliographical references. Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Collection of essays ranging from reviews of McCullers’s major works to tributes by such writers as Tennessee Williams and Kay Boyle, to critical analyses from a variety of perspectives. Most helpful to a study of the short story is Robert Philips’s “Freaking Out: The Short Stories of Carson McCullers.” James, Judith Giblin. Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940-1990. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Examines McCullers’s place in literature as a southern female author. Bibliographical references and an index are provided. Jenkins, McKay. The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940’s.

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Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Covers McCullers along with several other writers in a consideration of the role of race and sex in southern literature. McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Good general introduction to McCullers’s fiction, with a chapter on each of the novels, the short stories, and The Ballad of the Sad Café. Also included are a chronology, endnotes, and a select bibliography. Stressing McCullers’s versatility, McDowell emphasizes the lyricism, the musicality, and the rich symbolism of McCullers’s fiction as well as McCullers’s sympathy for lonely individuals. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by McCullers: “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (vol. 1), “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” (vol. 5), “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud” (vol. 7), and “Wunderkind” (vol. 8). Savigneau, Josyane. Carson McCullers: A Life. Translated by Joan E. Howard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. The McCullers estate granted Savigneau access to McCullers’s unpublished papers, which enables her to deepen the portrait painted by previous biographers. Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. In this study, important comparisons are made between these three major southern writers of short fiction and novels. Although Westling is not the first to use a feminist approach with McCullers, the book offers useful insight concerning the portrayal of the female characters and the issue of androgyny in McCullers’s fiction. Her analysis of The Ballad of the Sad Café is particularly good. Supplemented by useful endnotes and a bibliography of secondary material. Whitt, Margaret. “From Eros to Agape: Reconsidering the Chain Gang’s Song in McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Café.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Winter, 1996): 119122. Argues that the chain gang was a rare visual example of integration in an otherwise segregated South; notes the irony suggested through the song—that the men must be chained together to find harmony.

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Bernard Malamud Malamud, Bernard

Born: Brooklyn, New York; April 26, 1914 Died: New York, New York; March 18, 1986 Principal short fiction • The Magic Barrel, 1958; Idiots First, 1963; Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, 1969; Rembrandt’s Hat, 1973; The Stories of Bernard Malamud, 1983; The People, and Uncollected Stories, 1989; The Complete Stories, 1997 (Robert Giroux, editor). Other literary forms • Bernard Malamud devoted his writing career to fiction. In addition to his highly praised short stories, he wrote seven well-received novels: The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), A New Life (1961), The Fixer (1966), The Tenants (1971), Dubin’s Lives (1979), and God’s Grace (1982). He is also the author of many literary essays and reviews. Achievements • Of the last half of the twentieth century, Bernard Malamud is one of the best American writers. In his seven novels and numerous short stories, he transcends the Jewish experience so ably chronicled by the so-called Jewish literary renaissance writers (such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth) by using Jewish life as a metaphor for universal experience. Critic Robert Alter has proclaimed that short stories such as “The First Seven Years,” “The Magic Barrel,” “The Last Mohican,” “Idiots First,” and “Angel Levine” will be read “as long as anyone continues to care about American fiction written in the 20th century.” Both a traditionalist and an experimenter in his fiction, Malamud won rave reviews, literary plaudits, and many awards. The Magic Barrel brought a National Book Award in 1959. In 1967, The Fixer won for him a second National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize. In addition, he was president of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN Club) from 1979 to 1981. Biography • Born on April 26, 1914, Bernard Malamud was the eldest of two sons of Max and Bertha Malamud. His parents, who had emigrated from Russia, ran a grocery store. Both Yiddish and English were spoken in the Malamud household, where much emphasis was placed on the cultural aspects of Judaism. This milieu as well as his father’s tales of life in czarist Russia provided much fodder for Malamud’s fiction. He was also influenced by many trips to the Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Second Avenue, and by novels such as his favorite Horatio Alger stories and a multivolume Book of Knowledge that his father gave him when he was nine. Throughout his boyhood in the back room of the family store, where he wrote stories, and his high school days at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, where he was an editor of the literary magazine, he was devoted to storytelling. In 1936, he graduated from City College of New York. He had written a few stories in college and continued to write during a series of odd jobs. While working on a master’s degree at Columbia University, he taught at Erasmus Hall Evening High School and wrote. In 1945, he married a Gentile, Ann de Chiara. During the 1940’s, Malamud’s stories appeared in some noncommercial maga-

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zines. Then, in 1949, he sold the appropriately titled “The Cost of Living” to Harper’s Bazaar. That same year, he moved with his family to Corvallis, Oregon, where he worked at Oregon State University. Finally adjusting from the urban to the ruTO VIEW IMAGE, ral lifestyle, Malamud developed a PLEASE SEE new perspective and a weekly routine that allowed him much quality PRINT EDITION time for writing: He taught three OF THIS BOOK. days a week and wrote four. Without a doctoral degree, he was forced to teach composition, not literature, so his favorite course was a compromise—a night workshop in shortstory writing for townspeople. His stories began to appear in such noted magazines as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Harper’s Bazaar. The Natural, his first novel, appeared in 1952 to mixed reviews. © Jerry Bauer Some critics were put off by what they saw as an obscure symbolism, while others applauded the masterful use of fable and its art of ancient storytelling in a modern voice. In 1956, the Partisan Review made him a fellow in fiction and recommended him for a Rockefeller grant, which made it possible for Malamud to spend a year in Europe. In 1957, his next novel, The Assistant, was published, winning for him many awards and establishing him as a major Jewish American writer. The short-story collection The Magic Barrel came out in 1958, followed by his third novel, A New Life. In 1961, he moved to Bennington College, where he taught for more than twenty years. Idiots First was followed by The Fixer, which was researched during a trip to Russia. From 1969 until his death in 1986, Malamud continued to publish both novels and short stories. His works include Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, a collection of stories about one character; The Tenants, a novel; Rembrandt’s Hat, another shortstory collection; Dubin’s Lives, a novel; God’s Grace, a novel; and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, still another collection. Analysis • All Bernard Malamud’s fiction seems based on a single affirmation: Despite its disappointments, horror, pain, and suffering, life is truly worth living. His work may be best understood in the context of mid-twentieth century American literature. When Malamud arrived upon the literary scene, he disagreed with the period’s twin pillars of negativism and nihilism, and his work is a reaction to this prevailing trend. “The purpose of the writer,” contends Malamud, “is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Therefore, his characters, no matter how bad their lot, push toward a better life, a new life. “My premise,” notes the author, “is that we will not destroy each other. My premise is that we will live on. We will seek a better life. We may not become better, but at least we will seek betterment.”

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In this respect, for Malamud the most important element of fiction is form, a belief that appropriately reinforces his thematic beliefs. Literary form as “ultimate necessity” is the basis of literature. The writer’s duty, he argues “is to create the architecture, the form.” This element of structure, so prevalent in both his short and long fiction, runs counter to the practice of many of his contemporaries, who preferred the inherent formlessness of the so-called New Novel. The essence of this form, says Malamud, is “story, story, story. Writers who can’t invent stories often pursue other strategies, even substituting style for narrative. I feel that story is the basic element of fiction.” This belief, however, raises the question of what for Malamud constitutes a good story. Here Malamud is likewise a traditionalist, returning to such nineteenth century influences as Fyodor Dostoevski, Leo Tolstoy, and Gustave Flaubert. Malamud’s stories grow out of character. More often than not, the typical protagonist is the schlemiel (usually Jewish, though sometimes Italian). According to the author himself, “A Malamud character is someone who fears his fate, is caught up in it, yet manages to outrun it. He’s the subject and object of laughter and pity.” When Malamud began publishing his stories, the emphasis was often on case studies rather than elaborate personality development, a trend that irritated Malamud: The sell-out of personality is just tremendous. Our most important natural resource is Man. The times cry out for men of imagination and hope. Instead, our fiction is loaded with sickness, homosexuality, fragmented man, “other-directed” man. It should be filled with love and beauty and hope. We are underselling Man. And American fiction is at its weakest when we go in for journalistic case studies instead of rich personality development. A typical Malamud story, then, is an initiation story, the classic American pattern. Malamud admits that his American literary roots lie in Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson. The story usually begins with a youth—or an older man with arrested personality development—who has led an unfulfilled life because of undeveloped emotions, failed relationships, and questionable morality. This protagonist then encounters a father figure—similar to the Hemingway tutor-tyro technique—who guides him through his odyssey by prodding him to ask the right questions, teaching him the meaning of suffering and spirituality, and ultimately coaxing him to accept the responsibility for his own life. Because Malamud is Jewish, his protagonists are, more often than not, Jewish as well. Given Malamud’s background—his father was a Jewish immigrant and passed on his knowledge of the Yiddish tradition of storytelling—this is to be expected. Malamud himself admits, “I write about Jews because I know them. But more important, I write about them because Jews are absolutely the very stuff of drama.” By itself, this assertion is misleading, for unlike his fellow members of the Jewish literary renaissance, Malamud is not preoccupied with the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. The Jew for Malamud is a metaphor for all human beings. “Jewishness is important to me,” Malamud asserts, “but I don’t consider myself only a Jewish writer. I have interests beyond that, and I feel I am writing for all men.” Malamud’s method, then, is synecdochic—by detailing the plight of his Jews, he reveals the human’s common humanity. Throughout his career Malamud alternated writing novels with short stories. Of the two forms, he confesses to “having been longer in love with short fiction.” One aspect of the short story that Malamud especially enjoys is “the fast payoff. Whatever

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happens happens quickly.” A related matter is compression. Short fiction, Malamud argues, “packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime. . . . In a few pages a good story portrays the complexity of a life while producing the surprise and effect of knowledge—not a bad payoff.” Ironically, this fastness and compression are part of the ultimate illusion of Malamud’s art. For him the writing of a short story is a long task that demands constant revision. “I would write a book, or a short story,” Malamud admits, “at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” “The First Seven Years” • “The First Seven Years,” which first appeared in the Partisan Review in 1950 and later in The Magic Barrel, is a straightforward tale set in the favorite Malamudian milieu, the New York Jewish ghetto. Feld, the shoemaker, decides to play matchmaker for his nineteen-year-old daughter, Miriam, whom he desires to attend college. Feld’s choice is Max, a college boy, but the shoemaker is disappointed to learn that Max is a materialist (he wants to be an accountant), and for this reason his daughter rejects the chosen suitor. Simultaneously, Sobel, Feld’s assistant, quits his job, and Feld has a heart attack. The story turns on a typical Malamud irony. What Feld has failed to realize is that he, like Max, is a materialist and that his dreams of his daughter’s having “a better life” are wrapped up in money, her marrying well. Malamud here also reverses the typical older-man-equals-tutor, younger-man-equals-tyro pattern. Apparently, Feld is teaching Sobel the shoemaker’s trade, but in truth, Sobel is the instructor: He admits that he has worked cheaply and lived poorly for the past five years only to be around the woman whom he truly loves, Miriam. As Malamud might have punned, the assistant teaches the master the difference between soles and souls. Finally, Sobel agrees to remain an assistant for two more years before asking Miriam to marry him. Malamud’s symbolism is both simple and mythic. Feld suffers literally from a damaged heart and metaphorically from an organ that is too materialistic. The rebirth pattern is inherent in the story’s time frame, which moves from winter toward spring. The seven-year cycle of fertility—Sobel’s wait—suggests that he is in tune with larger forces in the universe. Interestingly, the story is also an early version of the tale on which Malamud would elaborate in The Assistant. “The Magic Barrel” • “The Magic Barrel” utilizes another familiar Malamud pattern, the fantasy. Here, he blends elements of the traditional fairy tale with Jewish folklore. The story in fact begins like a fairy tale, with the line “Not long ago there lived. . . .” In the story, Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student searching for a wife, is the prince; Salzman, the marriage broker with the “magic” barrel and his sudden appearances, is the supernatural agent; and Stella, Salzman’s prostitute daughter, is the princess of the tale. The plot is likewise reminiscent of a fairy tale as the prince finally meets the princess and through the intervention of the supernatural agent has a chance at a happy ending. Malamud’s fairy tale borrows elements from Jewish folklore. The characters are certainly stereotypical: the marriage broker, the schlemiel, and the poor daughter. The setting is the usual lower-class milieu. With Leo helping Salzman at the end (each man plays both tutor and tyro), the plot has the familiar reversal, and the story is based on the age-old subject of parent as matchmaker. Even the theme is familiar:

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Love is a redemptive force earned through suffering and self-knowledge. Malamud also infuses his story with humor. Aside from the stock characters and stock situations, he utilizes puns (for example “Lily wilted”), hyperbole, and comic juxtaposition (prospective brides are described in the jargon of used-car salesmen). Finally, the story contains social criticism directed at the Jews. Leo Finkle, the would-be rabbi, has learned the Jewish law but not his own feelings. He takes refuge in his selfpity (a frequent Malamud criticism), he wants a wife not for love but for social prestige, and he uses his religion to hide from life. “Angel Levine” • “Angel Levine” is part fable, part fantasy, and an example of the typical Malamud theme, the brotherhood of all people. Manischevitz, a Malamudian Job-victim, seeks relief from his suffering and aid for his sick wife, Fanny. In the Malamudian world, help comes from human rather than divine sources; here, the aide is a Jewish Negro angel, Angel Levine. In his narrow religious pride and prejudice, Manischevitz can only wonder why God has failed to send him help in the form of a white person. The tailor’s subsequent refusal of aid, an act saturated with egotistical pride, fails to lead to relief. Eventually, Manischevitz, in pursuit of aid, roams into Harlem, where, finding Angel Levine in Bella’s bar, he overhears the essential Malamudian lesson about the divine spark in all persons: “It de speerit,” said the old man. “On de face of de water moved de speerit. An’ dat was good. It say so in de Book. From de speerit ariz de man. . . .” God put the spirit in all things. Socially color-blind at last, Manischevitz can now believe that the same spirit dwells within every human, uniting them all. In a scene reminiscent of Felicity’s vision at the end of Flaubert’s “Un Cœur simple,” Manischevitz is rewarded by the sight of a dark figure flying with dark wings. The final meaning of his experience he conveys to Fanny when he admits, “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.” Here, he is Malamud’s rationalizer, mouthing the familiar theme of brotherhood. “The Last Mohican” • “The Last Mohican” introduces the recurring Everyman character Arthur Fidelman (the stories about him were collected in Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition) and reveals Malamud’s growth and artistry in enlarging the scope of his essentially Jewish materials. Although the setting is not New York City but Rome, the protagonist is familiar. Fidelman, “a self-confessed failure as a painter,” is also a failure as a human being, a self-deluded egotist who knows little about his self. His teacher is the familiar aged Jew—this time called Shimon Susskind in typical Malamudian gentle irony, “a Jewish refugee from Israel.” The essential lesson is again brotherhood. As Susskind persists in asking for help on his own terms, Fidelman inquires, “Am I responsible for you, Susskind?” The elderly Jew replies, “Who else . . . you are responsible. Because you are a man. Because you are a Jew, aren’t you?” Like Dante descending into the depths of Hell, Fidelman must enter the personal hell of his own ego to learn the powerful lesson. Fearing that Susskind has stolen his manuscript-laden briefcase, Fidelman discovers the refugee in the Jewish ghetto of Rome, “a pitch black freezing cave.” Susskind admits to burning the Giotto manuscript inside the case because “the spirit was missing.” This “rebirth of the spirit” story reads less like a Jewish parable than do many of Malamud’s stories. Malamud has set the tale in Rome, and he has obviously undergirded it with mythic dimensions by using Inferno motifs (using, for example,

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“Virgilio” Susskind and a street named Dante). Some critics even contend this is the best of the stories in The Magic Barrel. Perhaps this story is more believable than others, for rather than merely learning an abstract lesson, Fidelman actually begins to care about Susskind, even forgiving him. “Idiots First” • “Idiots First,” the title story of his second collection, reveals Malamud’s willingness to experiment. The story is a strange combination of fantasy and fable. Although set at night in his familiar territory, this New York is more of a dreamscape, a nightmare, than a realistic environment. No character motivation is provided, key information is omitted, and one Jewish character, Ginzburg, matter-offactly introduced à la the fairy godmother in “Cinderella,” follows an elderly Jew named Mendel, has the ability to freeze people, and seems to represent God/death. Malamud has either invented a new dramatic form or reverted to an old, nineteenth century American mode known as the romance. Mendel, convinced that he will die that night, desperately seeks thirty-five dollars in order to send his mentally disabled son to Uncle Leo in California. What is not made clear is that Mendel seems to have made a pact with Ginzburg—he will go willingly to his death if he is given time to take care of his son. Mendel is helped not by the rich (a pawnbroker or the supposedly philanthropic Mr. Fishbein), but by the poor, a dying rabbi who gives him a coat, and by death (or Ginzburg) himself, who gives him extra time. Whereas earlier Malamud stories usually had contrivances such as obvious symbols or preachy raisonneurs, “Idiots First” offers no such aid. On one level, the story seems almost metaphysical, a questioning of God/death for being so detached (“What will happen happens. This isn’t my responsibility”) and wrathful (Ginzburg sees wrath mirrored in Mendel’s eyes) that He no longer understands what it means to be human. In any case, this open-endedness and general ambiguity represent a new development. “Black Is My Favorite Color” • “Black Is My Favorite Color,” first appearing in The Reporter in 1963, is representative of another of Malamud’s frequent concerns, the relationship among the races. Like “Angel Levine” before it and the novel The Tenants after it, this story explores the fragile love-hate bonds between Jews and African Americans. Nat Lime, a white Jew who operates a liquor store in Harlem, professes to be colorblind (“there’s only one human color and that’s the color of blood”). Throughout his life, Lime has befriended “colored” people, but they all seem to resent his attempts. Buster Wilson, his would-be childhood buddy, Ornita Harris, the black woman to whom he proposes marriage, and Charity Sweetness, his current maid, all reject his overtures of friendship and more. This story is difficult to understand. Both Lime’s words and his actions indicate that he is free of prejudice. He operates a business in black Harlem, and he hires black workers. In return, he is rejected by the three black people he truly likes and helps; twice, he is beaten and robbed by blacks, once obviously for dating a black woman. Yet, through it all, Lime retains his good sense as well as his good humor, and he pursues his cleaning lady everywhere (“Charity Sweetness—you hear me?—come out of that goddamn toilet!”). Malamud appears to be indicating that prejudice and divisiveness can reside in black people as well as white.

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“The German Refugee” • “The German Refugee,” one of the few first-person stories in the Malamud canon, also illustrates the theme of brotherhood. The narrator, Martin Goldberg, relates his attempts to teach English to a German refugee, Oskar Gassner, who is scheduled to give a lecture in English about Walt Whitman’s relationship to certain German poets. Two distinct stories emerge: Oskar’s anguish over his failure to comprehend English and the irony of Goldberg’s failure to understand why. Thus, once again, each man is both tutor and tyro. While Martin teaches Oskar English, the German army begins its summer push of 1939. What the narrator fails to grasp is his pupil’s deep involvement in his former country’s fate and that of his non-Jewish wife, whom he left there. To emphasize the irony, Malamud uses references to Whitman. Oskar ends up teaching his teacher the important lesson when he declares about the poet that “it wasn’t the love of death they [German poets] had got from Whitman . . . but it was most of all his feeling for Brudermensch, his humanity.” When Oskar successfully delivers his speech, the narrator feels only a sense of pride at what he taught the refugee, not the bonds of Brudermensch that have developed between them. When Oskar commits suicide, the narrator never sees that he is partially responsible. “The Jewbird” • “The Jewbird” is a modern, urban version of “The Raven.” Just as the raven flew through the open window of Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator and stayed to haunt his conscience, so Schwartz, this black jewbird, which looks “like a dissipated crow,” flaps through the window of Harry Cohen’s top-floor apartment and lingers to bedevil him. “Bird or devil,” demands Poe’s narrator; “How do I know you’re a bird and not some kind of a goddman devil?” asks Cohen. Malamud’s beast fable, however, is concerned with more than nebulous guilt over a lost love. On one hand, the tale is lighthearted with a considerable amount of hyperbole, sarcasm, and comic banter; on the other, “The Jewbird” focuses on a heavier theme, prejudice. When Schwartz first enters the Cohen apartment, the bird announces that it is running from “anti-Semeets.” At the conclusion of the story, young Maurie Cohen goes in search of the bird, which had been driven from the apartment by his father. Finding the damaged jewbird by the river, the boy asks his mother who so hurt Schwartz, and his mother replies, “Anti-Semeets.” In other words, Harry Cohen is anti-Semitic. Malamud’s story, however, is still more than a parable of anti-Semitism. Harry Cohen is a cruel man and an inherently selfish father who has little to do with his son. When Schwartz begins to help Maurie with his reading, math, violin lessons, and even games, the narrator notes that the bird “took on full responsibility for Maurie’s performance in school.” Harry Cohen is so self-absorbed that he has been unable to function successfully as a parent. “Rembrandt’s Hat” • Nathaniel Hawthorne once admitted that a few of his tales suffered from an inveterate love of allegory. The same diagnosis might apply to some of Malamud’s stories. “Rembrandt’s Hat,” the title story from the collection that was published in 1973, is typical of the essentially two-person psychological dramas that Malamud does so well. Often in such stories, two people who apparently work closely together never grasp what is truly going on in each other. As a result, painful misunderstandings occur, with a major one and its subsequent suffering leading to selfknowledge as well as a greater understanding between the two. Feld and Sobel,

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Finkle and Salzman, Manischevitz and Levine, Goldberg and Gassner, Fidelman and Susskind—the names change, but the pattern remains. In “Rembrandt’s Hat,” Rubin, a sculptor, and Arkin, an art historian, are colleagues at a New York art school, and they run into each other occasionally and utter polite, meaningless words. One day, Arkin makes a chance remark to Rubin that the latter’s white headwear resembles a hat that Rembrandt wears in one of his selfportraits. From this point on, Rubin grows silent and starts shunning his colleague. Then, each wearing a different hat, the two art teachers go to great lengths to avoid each other. Ultimately, Arkin apologizes, Rubin weeps, and the two men resume their tenuous friendship. The story turns on another prominent Malamud motif; like Henry James before him, Malamud uses art as a touchstone of character. For example, Fidelman’s success as a human being is mirrored in his self-appraisal as an artist. Arkin, like some other Malamud characters, uses art to hide from life; it occurs to him that “he found it easier to judge paintings than to judge people.” Rubin’s self-portrait is sculpted in a single welded piece, a dwarf tree in the midst of an iron jungle. Thus, when Arkin makes the innocent comment, Rubin’s inferiority complex interprets it as a comparison of the sculptor to the old master, Rembrandt, with the sculptor much less prominent. Finally, all the hats, from Arkin’s white Stetson to Rubin’s railroad engineer’s cap, become self-Rorschach tests of the story’s participants. “Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party” • “Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party,” appearing in Rembrandt’s Hat, is a typical Malamud tale about the relationship between the sexes. In the Malamudian world, men and women desperately seek out each other, reach the verge of true commitment, but find it difficult to communicate, often to commit. Thus, Sobel silently pursues Miriam for seven years without revealing his true feelings, and Fidelman in “Naked Nude” finds it necessary to forge paintings in a whorehouse. At a dinner party, Max Adler finds himself attracted to Karla Harris, the young wife of his former professor who is more than twice her age. Adler and Harris develop an alluring intimacy by secretly passing notes back and forth. An artist mired in the traditional role of wife-mother, Karla flirts with Adler, who, though previously daring only in his architecture, kisses her. After planning a late-night rendezvous at a nearby motel, they both get cold feet, part, and return to their separate lives of quiet desperation. Both Karla and Adler are different versions of Malamud’s self-limiting human beings. For the most part, Adler can only express his desires in architecture, while Karla’s inner self comes out only in the relative safety of watercolors and romantic notes. In Malamud’s twentieth century America, then, would-be lovers still cling to the courtly love tradition. Art is a medium not solely to express one’s feelings but a place to hide and sublimate. Love rarely blossoms. Adler is divorced. Karla is content to write enticing notes to strange men and keep getting pregnant by her aging husband. Other Malamud men never marry. Oskar Gassner and his wife live in two different countries and are separated by war. Mendel’s wife has died. Feld claims his wife does not understand man-woman relationships. Fidelman ultimately becomes bisexual. “God’s Wrath” • “God’s Wrath” is another story about parent-child relationships. As with the sexes and the races, Malamud indicates that there is very little communication between parents and children. Glasser, a retired sexton, is a Lear-like figure

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with three daughters (by two wives) who have all been disappointments. His hope for one’s having a better life is pinned on his youngest daughter, Luci, who quits college, leaves her job, and moves out of his apartment. After a long search, Glasser finally locates Luci, learning that she has become a prostitute. “God’s Wrath” offers little explanation for the reason things are the way they are, except that God occasionally winks an eye. The story’s conclusion is once again open-ended. Unable to dissuade his daughter from a life of prostitution, Glasser stations himself at her haunts and calls down God’s wrath on her. Interestingly, at this point, Malamud switches from the past to the present tense, which indicates a sort of never-ending tension between parent and child, a perpetual inability to communicate, and the ultimate ignorance about how a parent affects a child. In the midst of a pessimistic, naturalistic universe, Malamud suggests that certain conflicts are eternal. Malamud is an acclaimed twentieth century master of the short story. Often writing realistic fantasy, he is able to imbue his initiating Jews with a mythic dimension, while simultaneously depicting social and spiritual squalor in a realistic manner. His tales contain a great depth of feeling that is occasionally marred by obvious moralizing and transparent mythology. He evinces a deep concern for his fellow human beings. His major flaw has been called the narrowness of his subject matter, the plight of the lower-class Jew, but this problem is only a misunderstanding when one realizes that the Jew is a symbol for people everywhere. Hal Charles Other major works novels: The Natural, 1952; The Assistant, 1957; A New Life, 1961; The Fixer, 1966; The Tenants, 1971; Dubin’s Lives, 1979; God’s Grace, 1982; The People, 1989. nonfiction: Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, 1996 (Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco, editors). Bibliography Abramson, Edward A. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Abramson’s chapter on the short stories is a brief, general introduction, divided into such categories as fantasies, Italian stories, father-son stories, and sociopolitical stories. Echoes a familiar judgment that in his stories Malamud is a moralist in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, but that he writes with the rhythms of Yiddish and the contours of the folktale. Avery, Evelyn, ed. The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Wide-ranging collection of essays on Malamud and his writings, including personal memoirs by members of his family and friends. Bloom, Harold, ed. Bernard Malamud. New York: Chelsea House, 2000. Part of the Modern Critical Views series, this collection of essays assesses the whole spectrum of Malamud’s writings. Includes a chronology of his life and a bibliography. Giroux, Robert. “On Bernard Malamud.” Partisan Review 64 (Summer, 1997): 409413. A brief general discussion of the life and work of Malamud, commenting on his major novels and short-story collections, his reception of the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. Malamud, Bernard. Introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. This untitled introduction by Malamud offers an invaluable insight into the mind and theories of the writer himself. After a short literary

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autobiography, Malamud details his belief in form, his assessment of creative writing classes, and the reasons he loves the short story. ____________. “Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life.” The New York Times Book Review 93, no. 20 (March, 1988): 15-16. This essay, originally a lecture at Bennington College, offers numerous anecdotes and details about Malamud’s life as a writer. He elaborates upon his influences, his various professions, his friends, and some of his theories. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of ten short stories by Malamud: “Angel Levine” and “Black Is My Favorite Color” (vol. 1); “Idiots First,” “The Jewbird,” and “The Last Mohican” (vol. 4); “The Magic Barrel” (vol. 5); “The Prison” and “Rembrandt’s Hat” (vol. 6); and “A Summer’s Reading” and “Take Pity” (vol. 7). Ochshorn, Kathleen. The Heart’s Essential Landscape: Bernard Malamud’s Hero. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Chapters on each of Malamud’s novels and his short-story collections. Seeks to continue a trend in Malamud criticism that views his heroes as tending toward the mensch and away from the schlemiel. Includes a bibliography but no notes. Sío-Castiñeira, Begoña. The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud: In Search of Jewish Postimmigrant Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Excellent study of Malamud’s short fiction and its major themes. Sloan, Gary. “Malamud’s Unmagic Barrel.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Winter, 1995): 51-57. Argues that everything that Pinye Salzman does in “The Magic Barrel” can be accounted for in naturalistic terms; claims that the story is more dramatic and ingenious as a naturalistic story than as a supernatural fable. Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Intimate and extensive biography of Bernard Malamud, depicting his personal life and writing career. Watts, Eileen H. “Jewish Self-Hatred in Malamud’s ‘The Jewbird.’” MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 157-163. Argues that the interaction of assimilated Jew and the Jewbird in the story reveals the political, social, and psychological fallout of assimilated Jew as good tenant, unassimilated Jew as bad, and Gentile as landlord.

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Born: Lübeck, Germany; June 6, 1875 Died: Zurich, Switzerland; August 12, 1955 Principal short fiction • Der kleine Herr Friedemann, 1898; Tristan, 1903; Das Wunderkind, 1914; Erzählung, 1922; Children and Fools, 1928; Stories of Three Decades, 1936; Ausgewahlte Erzählungen, 1945; Death in Venice, and Seven Other Stories, 1954; Stories of a Lifetime, 1961; Collected Stories, 2001. Other literary forms • In addition to his short fiction, Thomas Mann wrote novels, essays, and some poetry. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, his novel Buddenbrooks (1901; English translation, 1924) was cited specifically, though many of his later novels have received wide acclaim. Especially widely read and written about are the novel Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927), a philosophical exploration of post-World War I dilemmas, and the four volumes of Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-1943; Joseph and His Brothers, 1934-1944, 1948), a modern mythology based on biblical tales. Mann’s essays, collected in Adel des Geistes (1945; Essays of Three Decades, 1947), cover a broad range of political and literary issues. Achievements • During more than half a century of writing and publishing both fiction and nonfiction, the German writer Mann received at least a dozen honorary doctoral degrees from universities in Europe and the United States. Though Mann lost both his honorary doctorate from the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Bonn and his German citizenship in 1936, when he was accused of “subversive attacks on, and the gravest insults to, the Reich,” he was reinstated as an honorary doctor at Bonn in 1947. Among his other honorary doctorates, two stand out in particular: One was his honorary doctorate from Harvard University, which he received together with Albert Einstein in 1935; the other was an honorary doctorate of natural sciences from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule of Zurich in 1955, a degree that especially pleased Mann because it was so unusual. Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, and he received numerous other honors throughout his writing career, including the Herder-Prize of Czechoslovakia for exiled writers in 1937. During his international travels, both before and during his exile, Mann received many personal honors. In 1935, he was the guest of American president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife at a private dinner at the White House. From 1938 to 1941, he was a visiting professor at Princeton University, and in 1953, two years before his death, Mann saw Pope Pius XII in private audience. Mann’s fiction is diverse, sometimes reflecting conventions of the nineteenth century, as in Mann’s early novel Buddenbrooks, sometimes exploring philosophical dilemmas, as in his novel The Magic Mountain, sometimes experimenting with streamof-consciousness writing, as in the final chapter of his novel Lotte in Weimar (1939; The Beloved Returns, 1940), and sometimes rewriting mythology, as in the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, based on a biblical story, and the novella The Transposed Heads, adapted from a Hindu legend. Always, however, Mann infused a new irony into his fiction. He is a key figure in Western literature.

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Biography • Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875, in Lübeck, Germany. He was the son of Johann Heinrich Mann, a minor politician and grain merchant, and Julia Mann (née da Silva-Bruhn), an accomplished musician, born and reared in Brazil. The dichotomy between the burgher and the artist, embodied in Mann’s parents, is one of the themes of Mann’s fiction, appearing in such works as the novella Tonio Kröger. One of five children, Mann was especially close to his older brother Heinrich, who traveled through Italy with him. The philosophical and political conflicts between the brothers fueled some of the debates in Mann’s fiction, particularly in The Magic Mountain. Though Mann worked briefly as an editor and an insurance agent, he was primarily a writer. When he was nineteen years old, the prestigious journal Die Gesellschaft published his first short story, “Gefallen”; after this first publication, Mann continued to write and publish until his death. In 1905, Mann married Katya Pringsheim, whose father was a mathematics professor at the University of Munich. The Manns had six children: three girls and three boys. Their oldest son, Klaus, who was a writer, took his own life in 1949 at the age of forty-three. In addition to the influence of Mann’s family on his writing, there were two other sources of influence: the political climate of Europe and the social environment of the artist. It was the political climate of Europe that brought about Mann’s exile. According to André von Gronicka’s account of Mann’s life, the “immediate cause of Mann’s exile” from Germany was Mann’s reading of the essay on Richard Wagner (“Leiden und Grösse Richard Wagner,” “The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner”) at the University of Munich in 1933. Shortly after the reading, the Manns went to Holland, where they received a call from their children, warning them not to return. As a result, the Manns went into self-imposed exile, spending a brief time in Holland, Switzerland, and the south of France. In 1934, Mann made his first visit to the United States at the invitation of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In 1936, when Mann lost his German citizenship, he and his wife became citizens of Czechoslovakia. In 1938, they returned to the United States, and in 1944, they became American citizens. Though Mann’s writing has an international flavor, as is evident in the wide range of settings in his fiction, Mann was acutely aware of his German roots. Only briefly between 1933 and his death was he able to return to his homeland. Mann’s social environment as an artist was especially diverse. Because he published from the age of nineteen, in 1894, until his death, in 1955, he had lifelong friendships with such artists as Bruno Walter and Hermann Hesse, and he often visited other friends and acquaintances, such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, André Gide, Sigmund Freud, and Gustav Mahler. In 1953, the Manns returned to Europe and went to Kilchberg, Switzerland, where they bought their last home. Though Mann had begun to show signs of ill health as early as 1945, his death was fairly sudden. On August 12, 1955, he suffered a sudden collapse. By eight o’clock that evening, he was dead. Analysis • Thomas Mann’s early stories are set in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Europe, primarily in Germany and Italy. The protagonists are artists, disillusioned romantics with an ironic view of the cost of their art, which is an isolation from others. They are often burghers turned artist, often physically deformed, further isolating them from life around them and traditional courtship. To avoid the pain and disappointment of love, these protagonists retreat to art and nature, but

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in midlife, usually when they reach thirty years of age, they are suddenly overwhelmed by passion, usually for an unworthy and superficial beloved. Simultaneously, the disillusioned romantic usually comes face to face with his own superfluity, as does Mann’s dilettante, in the story “Der Bajazzo” (“The Dilettante”), when he recognizes himself as “a perfectly useless human being.” Though the sense of superfluity is quite often triggered by unrequited love, the object of the love, the beloved, is treated only superficially. Such is the case, for example, with Amra in “Luischen” (“Little Lizzy”), who obliviously orchestrates her husband’s destruction and stares vacantly at him while he dies of grief over her mistreatment of him. Mann says of Amra that she © The Nobel Foundation is not “sensitive enough to betray herself because of a guilty conscience.” The disillusionment, in fact, has little to do with the beloved. Rather, the disillusionment is a device to trigger the protagonist’s introspection, his moment of awareness brought on by the experience. The moment of awareness for Amra’s husband, Christian Jacoby, kills him. Other protagonists live on, lacking the will even to kill themselves, such as the narrator in Mann’s story “Enttäuschung” (“Disillusionment”), who says of his disillusionment that it has left him “alone, unhappy, and a little queer.” Mann’s protagonists yearn for experience, for connection with the day-to-day living of those around them, and for a synthesis between body and spirit, discipline and impulse, reason and passion, involvement and withdrawal, action and inaction. They are fascinated by grief, death, and disease. In Mann’s story “Der Kleiderschrank” (“The Wardrobe”), for example, the dying man is drawn to the boardinghouse of a woman who has a “repulsive eruption, a sort of fungus growth, on her brow.” Again, in Mann’s story “Tobias Mindernickel,” Tobias is fascinated by a child’s bleeding injury and by his dog Esau’s injury. He is so fascinated by Esau’s injury that, after it has healed, he tries to reinjure the dog and, in the process, kills it. Two works typical of Mann’s early short fiction are “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” (“Little Herr Friedemann”) and Tonio Kröger. In these works, Mann develops the Symbolist theme of the artist’s solitude, the theme of the burgher turned artist, and the themes involved in the battles between body and mind, passion and intellect, action and inaction. “Little Herr Friedemann” • In “Little Herr Friedemann,” the title story from Mann’s 1898 collection of stories, Mann explores the themes of obsession with beauty and

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disillusionment with romanticism. Johannes Friedemann, a hunchback because he was dropped by his drunken nurse when he was an infant, seeks a life of fulfillment through art and nature. This pursuit is encouraged by his ailing mother, who, after fourteen years of a lingering illness, dies, leaving Friedemann with his three unmarried sisters. Like other protagonists in Mann’s short fiction, Friedemann “cherishes” his grief over his mother’s death and moves further into his solitary existence. To the extent that he thinks of his own death, he envisions it like his mother’s death, a “mild twilight radiance gently declining into dark.” At the age of thirty, after constructing a rigorously disciplined life, Friedemann becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman, Frau Gerda von Rinnlingen. Battling between passion and reason, between action and inaction, Friedemann finally summons his courage to go to Frau Rinnlingen and confess his love. He hopes that she will feel pity for him. She instead dismisses him with a “short, scornful laugh” as she clutches his arm and flings him sideways to the ground. The rejection leaves Friedemann “stunned and unmanned” and shuddering. In this moment of awareness, he directs his anger against himself. He is filled with “a thirst to destroy himself, to tear himself to pieces, to blot himself utterly out.” He drags himself to the river and, with a faint splash, drowns himself. The final image is a “faint sound of laughter” in the distance. Friedemann is among Mann’s disillusioned romantics who do not survive their moment of awareness. Friedemann, often considered a prototype of Gustave von Aschenbach in the novella Death in Venice, illuminates the struggle between passion and intellect, a leitmotif linking the various stories in the first volume together. It is the disillusioned romanticism embodied in Friedemann that moves Mann, in his second volume of stories, Tristan, toward what critics have called a “new artistic intellectualism.” Tonio Kröger • In the novella Tonio Kröger, Mann again develops the burgher-artist theme, evident in the title name itself. The name “Tonio,” for Mann, symbolizes the artistic heritage of Italy, and “Kröger” symbolizes the disciplined intellectualism of his German father. The protagonist, Tonio Kröger, is a sort of synthesis of the artist and intellectual. An outsider in his youth, Tonio later considers isolating himself from society, but he rejects the impulse, thus allowing himself to find a sort of consolation. The novella begins as Tonio waits for his childhood friend Hans Hansen, so that they can go for a walk, something Hans has almost forgotten while Tonio has “looked forward to it with almost incessant joy.” Though Tonio does not want to be like Hans, he loves Hans, not only because he is handsome but also because he is “in every respect his [Tonio’s] own opposite and foil.” Tonio is brooding, sensitive, and introspective, while Hans is lively, insensitive, and superficial. Hans and Tonio are separated, years pass, and when Tonio is sixteen years old, his passion for Hans turns to Ingeborg Holm, who makes his heart throb with ecstasy. Tonio, like Friedemann in “Little Herr Friedemann,” is aware that his beloved is “remote and estranged,” but still he prefers her company to that of Magdalena Vermehren, who understands him and laughs or is serious in the right places. Tonio, realizing the implications of his unrequited love for Hans and later for Inge, speaks of being flung to and fro forever “between two crass extremes: between icy intellect and scorching sense.” In contrast to Hans and Inge is Lisabeta Ivanova, Tonio’s close and candid artistfriend of approximately his own age. Though she offers Tonio consolation during his turmoil, she also calls him bourgeois, because he is drawn to the superficial Hans and

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Inge and because he wants to be ordinary. Lisabeta and Tonio explore in dialogue the implications of the artist’s existence. Lisabeta, unlike Tonio, is reconciled to her role as an artist. After thirteen years, Hans returns, and Tonio comes upon him with Inge; Hans and Inge, two of a type, get along well together. Nevertheless, when Tonio, Hans, Magdalena, and Inge all end up at a dance, Tonio tries to make Inge jealous by dancing with Magdalena. Like many of Mann’s disillusioned romantics, Tonio hopes that his beloved will suddenly return the passion that he feels for her. Inge, however, is incapable of feeling passion for Tonio. She is, in fact, oblivious to his anguish and remains at the dance with Hans. Dejectedly, Tonio returns to his room. The novella ends with a letter that Tonio writes to Lisabeta from his room at Aalsgard. In the letter, Tonio concludes that he can be happy with the unrequited love of his ideal beauty. He says to Lisabeta of his unrequited love that it is “good and fruitful.” He relishes the “longing” in it and the “gentle envy.” He concludes that, through the love, he experiences a “touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.” Unlike the unrequited love of Johannes Friedemann that leads to Friedemann’s selfloathing and death, the unrequited love of Tonio Kröger somehow consoles and sustains him. A significant change in Mann’s later short fiction appears in his treatment of aging. In the earlier works, the protagonists tend to be thirty-year-old disillusioned romantics, characters drawn to youth as much as beauty. The culminating point of this fascination with youth is in the story “Das Wunderkind” (“The Infant Prodigy”), in which the protagonist is eight, looks nine, and is given out for seven. The child, dressed in white silk, has dark circles around his eyes and is already bored, isolated, and somewhat cynical. Nevertheless, the audience is spellbound by the prodigy’s youth. In Mann’s later works, the protagonists develop a fear of aging. For example, Gustave von Aschenbach in the novella Death in Venice and Frau Rosalie von Tümmler in the novella The Black Swan, upon reaching their early fifties, fall passionately in love as they are dying, Aschenbach of cholera and Tümmler of cancer. As in Mann’s early works, the beloved ones are young. In the later works, however, the protagonists dread their own aging, eventually creating young-old death masks for themselves, masks that, ironically, turn out to be their death masks. In addition to exploring the fear of aging, Mann begins to explore new ideas, such as the effects of evil on passive people, as in Mario and the Magician, and the implications of mythologies, as in The Transposed Heads. Death in Venice • Death in Venice has received high critical acclaim; it is often called Mann’s finest novella and one of the finest novellas of Western literature. Mann explores several themes in the novella: the conflict between discipline and impulse, the fear of aging, the draw to beauty that destroys, the death wish, the draw to homoerotic love, and the battle between passion and reason. Death in Venice is set in the early twentieth century in Munich, Germany, and Venice. The central character, Gustave von Aschenbach, is a well-known German author in his early fifties. At the beginning of the novella, Aschenbach, suffering from insomnia, takes a walk near his home in Munich. On the walk, he encounters a man near the burying ground. The man, who later appears in Venice, awakes in Aschenbach an irresistible longing to travel. This longing eventually puts him on board a ship bound for Venice, where he encounters a repulsive “young-old man,”

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masquerading as one of the youths and trying to keep pace with them. The man, “pitiably drunk,” approaches Aschenbach, and as the young-old man drools and stutters nonsense, the upper plate of his false teeth falls loose. Clearly disgusted by the young-old man, Aschenbach escapes. This encounter foreshadows Aschenbach’s later battle against his own aging. In Venice, Aschenbach becomes obsessed with the beautiful Tadzio, a Polish youth about fourteen years old. Mixed with Aschenbach’s passion for Tadzio’s beauty is a conscious fascination with Tadzio’s mortality. For example, as Aschenbach watches Tadzio play, he realizes that it is not Tadzio he sees, “but Hyacinthus, doomed to die because two gods were rivals for his love.” When Aschenbach recognizes Tadzio’s ill health, he thinks that Tadzio will “most likely not live to grow old.” This idea gives Aschenbach pleasure, but Aschenbach refuses to analyze his response. Later, upon the same realization, “compassion” struggles with “reckless exultation” in Aschenbach’s heart. Though Aschenbach chooses not to explore this exultation, clearly one part of his joy lies in what critics have called “the seduction of the individual by disease and death” and the other part in Tadzio’s avoidance of the aging that disgusts and frightens Aschenbach. Aschenbach feels exultation not because Tadzio will die but because Tadzio will not live to grow old. As Venice becomes plague-ridden with Asiatic cholera, Aschenbach himself begins to look haggard. He is plagued by the odor of carbolic acid from the man from the burying ground, an odor that Aschenbach suspects others may not detect. He is repulsed by the pervasive stench of germicide and by the “odour of the sickened city.” At this point, in his own battle against the physical effects of his declining health and his aging, Aschenbach dyes his hair black and “freshens up” his skin, making himself into a ghoulish “young-old man.” Aschenbach, nearing his end, has a terrifying dream about the “bestial degradation of his fall.” In the dream, he realizes that he has lost the battle between passion and reason. Tadzio has smiled at Aschenbach and has, in that small gesture, left Aschenbach feeling “quite unmanned.” Aschenbach, still made up into a youngold man, dies in Venice of the cholera. Aschenbach’s death reinforces Mann’s theme that in the battle between spirit and body, there are no winners. In death, Aschenbach satisfies his need to be free of the yearning that is opposed to his art, the “lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal—in short, for nothingness.” Finally, in Death in Venice, Mann explores again, as he does in “Little Herr Friedemann,” the theme of the artist being drawn to “beauty that breaks the heart.” Even while Aschenbach recognizes the superficiality of the physical attraction, even of his beloved, as he comes to the subtle realization that the lover is “nearer the divine than the beloved,” he finds that beauty compelling. He concludes, as does Tonio Kröger, that “in almost every artist is inborn a wanton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks the heart, to single out aristocratic pretensions and pay them homage.” It is this homage to beauty that makes Aschenbach incapable of action and holds him in Venice to meet his death. Mario and the Magician • A novella in a different vein is Mario and the Magician, published between World War I and World War II. It is generally considered an attack on fascism. The story begins with a German family visiting Italy and experiencing a series of minor humiliations. The family later becomes part of the audience of an evil hypnotist, Cipolla, who humiliates the members of his passive audience, one at a

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time, until one of them, Mario, shoots him, an act that leaves the audience liberated. Early in the novella, Mann introduces the theme of peace. He says, “We all know how the world at once seeks peace and puts her to flight—rushing upon her in the fond idea that they two will wed, and where she is, there it can be at home.” Peace, however, is treated ironically, in that the desire for peace keeps the passive audience from acting, even as they become the humpbacked magician’s victims. Mann’s narrator soon begins to realize that in “yielding to another person’s will—there may lie too small a space for the idea of freedom to squeeze into.” In contrast to Johannes Friedemann, who is destroyed when he acts, the audience in Mario and the Magician is saved only through action. Among Mann’s last short fiction, first published between 1940 and 1955, are The Transposed Heads and The Black Swan. Significant in these last major works of short fiction are two characteristics of Mann’s work. The first is one of adapting mythology in new contexts, as he does in the novella The Transposed Heads, an adaptation of a Hindu legend about seeking harmony between the inner and outer self. The second characteristic is one represented in the novella The Black Swan, in which Mann’s earlier theme of the conflict between youth and age, life and death, occurs. The Transposed Heads • In The Transposed Heads, Mann creates his most abstract and mythic characters. Shridaman, a merchant and the son of a merchant, represents spirit and intellect, while Nanda, a smith and a cowherd, represents body and intuition. The girl represents beauty. Though Mann called this work “a metaphysical farce,” it offers an integral vision of a new humanity. It is in this tale that Mann includes his clearest synthesis of the unity between “Shridaman” and “Nanda”: This world is not so made that spirit is fated to love only spirit, and beauty only beauty. Indeed the very contrast between the two points out, with a clarity at once intellectual and beautiful, that the world’s goal is union between spirit and beauty, a bliss no longer divided, but whole and consummate. Following this vision, Mann returns to the farce, concluding, “This tale . . . is but an illustration of the failures and false starts attending the effort to reach the goal.” The Black Swan • In The Black Swan, Mann retells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach of Death in Venice but with a new twist. The novella, set in Düsseldorf in the 1920’s, tells the story of Frau Rosalie von Tümmler, a fifty-year-old widow, who is caught up in passion for her son Eduard’s youthful tutor, Ken Keaton, an American expatriate. Once again, the lover is closer to the divine than the beloved. Ken Keaton is variously described by critics as insipid, mediocre, and commonplace, an amiable nonentity. Like Aschenbach, Rosalie, as she becomes increasingly obsessed with her beloved, dyes her hair and applies cosmetics to conceal her age. Like Aschenbach, she does active battle against physical aging. Rosalie von Tümmler’s daughter Anna, born with a clubfoot, paints abstract art and tries to purge all feeling from her work. It is she, recognizing her mother’s unhealthy passion, who urges her mother to establish a more socially acceptable relationship with Keaton. Still, Rosalie ignores her daughter’s advice. In an ironic twist, Mann has Rosalie develop cancer of the womb before she can go to Keaton’s room to consummate their relationship. The cause of the cancer is, again ironically, the agitation that she experiences during menopause, her passion for Keaton thus leading to her own death in a matter of weeks. A further irony is evident in

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that the rejuvenation that Rosalie feels in her passion for Keaton is, in fact, a symptom of her physical decay. Unlike Aschenbach, however, Rosalie regains her dignity during the final weeks of her life. She yearns for the aristocratic black swans, a death symbol. The German title, Die Betrogene, means “the deceived,” and Rosalie von Tümmler is indeed deceived, by both her passion and her body, which has sent her messages of a new vitality even while she was mortally ill. Still, unlike Aschenbach, whose passion remains unresolved, Rosalie dies a “gentle death, regretted by all who knew her.” Throughout Mann’s lengthy writing career, from 1894 to 1955, the bulk of critical opinion of his work was consistently favorable. It has remained so after his death. Nevertheless, significant changes occur between his early and late short fiction. To some extent, Mann’s protagonists do achieve, if not a synthesis of polarities, at least a complex worldview in which they find consolation. The shift in worldview is particularly evident in Mann’s treatment of the conflicts between self-destruction and survival, between passion and discipline, and between action and inaction. First, in the conflict between self-destruction and survival, Mann’s early protagonists cannot survive their disillusionment. Johannes Friedemann in “Little Herr Friedemann” is filled with self-loathing and drowns himself. Christian Jacoby in “Little Lizzy” becomes suddenly aware of his wife’s infidelity and dies instantly from shock and grief. With Mann’s development of Tonio Kröger in Tonio Kröger, however, the disillusioned romantic finds a new, though not fully gratifying, illusion that can permit him to survive. Some critics have referred to this new worldview as Mann’s artistic intellectualism. This artistic intellectualism is based on a sort of ironic realization that perhaps the wanting is superior to the having, an idea that acknowledges both the passion and the intellect. Mann explores another sort of synthesis of the conflict between self-destruction and survival in Frau Rosalie von Tümmler in The Black Swan. Though Frau Tümmler’s passion triggers the cancer that kills her, she clearly comes to terms with her self-destructive passion. Her death is not a suicide but rather a “gentle” death, the sort envisioned by Johannes Friedemann before his disillusionment. Second, in the conflict between passion and discipline, Mann’s early protagonists are undone by their passion. Johannes Friedemann and Christian Jacoby illustrate Mann’s early theme that in conflicts between passion and discipline, body and intellect, there are no winners. Though Tonio Kröger provides a respite from the conflict, as he learns to live with unrequited love, Mann explores this conflict in a new light with Gustave von Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Aschenbach does not act on his passion, except insofar as he does not leave the plague-ridden Venice, an inaction that, in fact, becomes a self-destructive action. Unlike Johannes Friedemann and Christian Jacoby, however, Aschenbach does not confess his love to his beloved; to that extent, he displays discipline. Nevertheless, the inaction caused by his passion leads as clearly to his destruction as if he had taken his own life, and though he dies with his self-loathing at what he calls his “bestial degradation,” he has not destroyed his reputation as a novelist. Mann does a final exploration of the battle between passion and discipline in the character of Rosalie von Tümmler. Frau Tümmler, fully prepared to act on her passion despite her daughter’s advice, collapses on her way to meet her beloved and consummate their passion. To that point, Frau Tümmler has lost her battle between passion and discipline, but through the remainder of her mortal illness, she has a second chance to retrieve her dignity, and she does so with grace. Finally, in the conflict between action and inaction, Mann’s protagonists become

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increasingly complex. In the early stories, characters who act, especially on their passion, destroy themselves. For example, when Johannes Friedemann in “Little Herr Friedemann” acts on his passion for Frau Rinnlingen, the action leads to his death. When Christian Jacoby in “Little Lizzy” acts on his wife’s wishes and against his better judgment, he faces a moment of awareness that destroys him. Later, Mann’s Tonio Kröger in Tonio Kröger opts for inaction with his beloved Inge. That inaction saves him. Mann’s treatment of Gustave von Aschenbach in Death in Venice is among Mann’s most complex explorations of the conflict between action and inaction. Had Aschenbach not acted on the yearning to travel, triggered by the stranger at the burying ground in Munich, he might not have been in Venice during the cholera epidemic. Aschenbach’s failure to act by leaving Venice when he had the opportunity, however, results in his death of cholera. Mann introduces another new complexity into the conflict between action and inaction in Mario in Mario and the Magician. The audience sits by passively while the magician victimizes them, one after another. When Mario acts, killing the magician, his action liberates the audience. In Mann’s final exploration of the conflict between action and inaction, Rosalie von Tümmler, in her decision to act on her passion, loses her option for further action on her passion, but in her final weeks of illness, she acts again, this time to reclaim her dignity. Her final action leads to her self-respect and to a gentle death. Part of the resolution of conflicts in Mann’s later short fiction undoubtedly comes from his use of his own experience in the creation of his protagonists. In fact, in 1936, when Stories of Three Decades was published, Mann, then officially in exile, referred to the collection as “an autobiography in the guise of a fable.” In Mann’s work during his years of exile, he moved increasingly toward exploring syntheses of the conflicts in his earlier protagonists. As a result, his later protagonists, as they expand their worldviews, begin to synthesize humanism, culture, and philosophy, and through these protagonists, one sees, always, Mann’s ironic observations of the world. Carol Franks Other major works play: Fiorenza, pb. 1906. novels: Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, 1901 (English translation, 1924); Tonio Kröger, 1903 (novella; English translation, 1914); Tristan, 1903 (novella; English translation, 1925); Königliche Hoheit, 1909 (Royal Highness, 1916); Der Tod in Venedig, 1912 (novella; Death in Venice, 1925); Herr und Hund, 1919 (novella; Bashan and I, 1923; also known as A Man and His Dog, 1930); Der Zauberberg, 1924 (The Magic Mountain, 1927); Unordnung und frühes Leid, 1926 (novella; Disorder and Early Sorrow, 1929); Mario und der Zauberer, 1930 (novella; Mario and the Magician, 1930); Die Geschichten Jaakobs, 1933 (Joseph and His Brothers, 1934; also as The Tales of Jacob, 1934); Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933-1943 (collective title for previous 4 novels; Joseph and His Brothers, 1948); Der junge Joseph, 1934 (The Young Joseph, 1935); Joseph in Ägypten, 1936 (Joseph in Egypt, 1938); Lotte in Weimar, 1939 (The Beloved Returns, 1940); Die vertauschten Köpfe: Eine indische Legend, 1940 (novella; The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, 1941); Joseph, der Ernährer, 1943 (Joseph the Provider, 1944); Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde, 1947 (Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, 1948); Der Erwählte, 1951 (The Holy Sinner, 1951); Die Betrogene, 1953 (novella; The Black Swan, 1954);

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Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull: Der Memoiren erster Teil, 1954 (Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, 1955). miscellaneous: Gesammelte Werke, 1956 (12 volumes; includes critical writings in volumes 10-11); Gesammelte Werke, 1960-1974 (13 volumes; includes critical writings in volumes 9-11); Werkausgabe, 1980-1986 (20 volumes; includes 3 volumes of critical writings). nonfiction: “Friedrich und die grosse Koalition,” 1915 (“Frederick and the Great Coalition,” 1929); Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918 (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983); Rede und Antwort, 1922; Bemühungen, 1925; Die Forderung des Tages, 1930; Lebensabriss, 1930 (A Sketch of My Life, 1960); Three Essays, 1932; Past Masters and Other Papers, 1933; Leiden und Grösse der Meister, 1935; Freud, Goethe, Wagner, 1937; Achtung, Europa!, 1938; Dieser Friede, 1938 (This Peace, 1938); Vom künftigen Sieg der Demokratie, 1938 (The Coming of Victory of Democracy, 1938); Deutsche Hörer!, 1942 (Listen, Germany!, 1943); Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades, 1942; Adel des Geistes: Sechzehn Versuche zum Problem der Humanität, 1945 (Essays of Three Decades, 1947); Neue Studien, 1948; Die Entstehung des “Doktor Faustus”: Roman eines Romans, 1949 (The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of “Doctor Faustus,” 1961); Altes und Neues: Kleine Prosa aus fünf Jahrzehnten, 1953; Versuch über Schiller, 1955; Nachlese: Prosa, 19511955, 1956; Last Essays, 1958; Briefe, 1961-1965 (3 volumes; partial translation Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955, 1970); Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1963; Wagner und unsere Zeit, 1963 (Pro and Contra Wagner, 1985); Reden und Aufsätze, 1965 (2 volumes); Essays, 1977-1978 (3 volumes); Tagebücher, 1977-1986 (6 volumes; partial translation Diaries 1918-1939, 1982); Goethes Laufbahn als Schriftsteller: Zwölf Essays und Reden zu Goethe, 1982; Frage und Antwort: Interviews mit Thomas Mann 1909-1955, 1983; Thomas Mann’s “Goethe and Tolstoy”: Notes and Sources, 1984. poetry: “Gesang vom Kindchen,” 1919. Bibliography Berlin, Jeffrey B., ed. Approaches to Teaching Mann’s “Death in Venice” and Other Short Fiction. New York: Modern Language Association, 1992. Part 1 (materials) focuses on general introductions, reference works, and critical studies. Part 2 (approaches) contains perceptive essays on Mann’s handling of many themes and his approach to comedy, tradition, modernism, Sigmund Freud, and other thinkers and writers. Includes an extensive bibliography. Cullander, Cecil C. H. “Why Thomas Mann Wrote.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 75 (Winter, 1999): 31-48. Examines Mann’s statements about his creativity, his fiction, and his journals and diaries; argues that his diaries helped him come to terms with his homosexuality and to know himself. Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, a Biography. Translated by Leslie Willson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Work celebrated in Germany that provides a balanced approach to Mann’s life and work. Addresses his homosexuality and relationship to Judaism. The translation, however, is not good. Index. Lesér, Esther H. Thomas Mann’s Short Fiction: An Intellectual Biography. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Lesér states the purposes of her biography as twofold: “as a reference work in which each story may be read individually with its comprehensive study materials, and as an organic study of Thomas Mann’s intellectual development.” The chapters are arranged thematically, each integrating analyses of representative works.

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Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. Edited by Naomi Ritter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. Reprinting of a widely acclaimed translation of Mann’s novella, along with the presentation of five critical essays that serve to familiarize students to the novella. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eight short stories by Mann: “Death in Venice” and “Disorder and Early Sorrow” (vol. 2), “Gladius Dei” (vol. 3), “The Infant Prodigy” and “Little Herr Friedemann” (vol. 4), “Mario and the Magician” (vol. 5), and “Tonio Kröger” and “Tristan” (vol. 7). Reed, T. J. Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Meticulously researched and well-documented study on Mann’s thought and fiction. Includes bibliographical references and index. Robertson, Ritchie, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Thorough reference source on Mann. Bibliography and index. Votteler, Thomas, ed. “Thomas Mann: 1875-1955.” In Short Story Criticism, Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. The entry begins with a brief introduction to Mann, but it is primarily a series of excerpts of the criticism of Mann’s short fiction. Winston, Richard. Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Winston arranges the biographical information chronologically, but he intersperses chapters of thematic analysis and explication. The book, aimed at readers of literary biography, covers Mann’s early years.

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Born: Wellington, New Zealand; October 14, 1888 Died: Fontainebleau, France; January 9, 1923 Principal short fiction • In a German Pension, 1911; Bliss, and Other Stories, 1920; The Garden Party, and Other Stories, 1922; The Doves’ Nest, and Other Stories, 1923; Something Childish, and Other Stories, 1924 (also known as The Little Girl, and Other Stories, 1924). Other literary forms • Although Katherine Mansfield is best known as a writer of short stories, she also wrote poems and book reviews, which were collected and edited posthumously by her second husband, John Middleton Murry. She once began a novel, and several fragments of plays have survived. She left a considerable amount of personal documents; their bulk greatly exceeds that of her published work. Murry edited the Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927; “Definitive Edition,” 1954), The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1928), The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield (1939), and Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922 (1951). Achievements • Although extravagant claims have been made for her, many critics insist that Mansfield’s achievements were modest. She completed no novel, and, although she wrote about a hundred stories, her fame rests on no more than a dozen. Yet, in any age, her stories would be remarkable for their precise and evocative descriptions, their convincing dialogue, their economy and wit, and their dazzling insights into the shifting emotions of their characters. In her own age, she was a pioneer. She and James Joyce are often credited with creating the modern short story. Though this claim may be an exaggeration, her stories did without the old-fashioned overbearing author-narrators, the elaborate settings of scenes, and the obvious explanations of motives and themes of earlier fiction. Instead, she provided images and metaphors, dialogues and monologues with little in between. Like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), her stories seem to have had their nonpoetic dross deleted. Mansfield’s stories have influenced such writers as Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter, and Christopher Isherwood; the standard “New Yorker story” owes much to her. Most important, many decades after her death, her stories are read with pleasure. Biography • Almost everything Katherine Mansfield wrote was autobiographical in some way. It helps a reader to know about Mansfield’s life because she often does not identify her stories’ locations. For example, readers may be puzzled by her combining English manners and exotic flora in her New Zealand stories. Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888. (In her lifetime, she used many names. Her family called her “Kass.” She took “Katherine Mansfield” as her name in 1910.) Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was an importer who became chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted in 1923. In 1903, the Beauchamps sailed for London, where Kass was enrolled at Queen’s College, an institution for young women much like a university.

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She remained at Queen’s until 1906, reading advanced authors such as Oscar Wilde and publishing stories in the college magazine. Her parents brought her back to Wellington in 1906, where she published her first stories in a newspaper. She left New Zealand for London in 1908, never to return. Mansfield’s next decade was one of personal complexities and artistic growth. She was sexually attracted to both women and men. At Queen’s College, she met Ida Baker, her friend and companion for much of her life. Back in London, she fell in love with a violinist whom she had known in New Zealand. After she learned that she was pregnant by him, she abruptly married George C. Bowden on March 2, 1909, and as abruptly left him. At her mother’s insistence, she traveled to Germany, where she had a miscarriage. The Bowdens were not divorced until April, 1918. In Germany Mansfield met the Polish translator Floryan Sobieniowski, who, in the opinion of biographer Claire Tomalin, infected her with gonorrhea. Most of her medical problems may have come from this infection: the removal of a Fallopian tube, rheumatic symptoms, pleurisy, and eventually tuberculosis. Back in London, Mansfield met the future editor and critic John Middleton Murry. Their on-again, off-again relationship endured until her death. They were married on May 3, 1918; after she died, Murry edited her stories, letters, and journals. Meanwhile, she was strongly affected when her brother was killed in France in 1915. His death and her own worsening health were probably strong influences on her stories. During these years, Mansfield and Murry knew many famous writers and artists, particularly those who frequented Lady Ottoline Morrell’s famous salon at Garsington: Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, David Garnett, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Brett, J. M. Keynes, T. S. Eliot. She and Virginia Woolf had an off-and-on friendship and professional association; she seriously flirted with Bertrand Russell. The Murrys’ most notable friendship was with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence; “Gudrun” in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) is said to be based on Mansfield. Both Woolf and Lawrence were influenced by Mansfield; both made nasty remarks about her in her last years. Another result of Mansfield’s meeting Sobieniowski in Germany may have been her reading the works of Anton Chekhov. Her story “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” is a free adaptation—perhaps a plagiarism—of a Chekhov story. During 1910 and 1911, she published a number of bitter stories with German settings, collected in In a German Pension. For the next seven years, Mansfield experimented with many styles and published stories in journals such as New Age, Rhythm, and Blue Review before she discovered a mature voice. Her first great story, “Prelude,” was published as a booklet in July, 1918, by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Mansfield’s health had not been good for several years; her gonorrhea remained undiagnosed until 1918. From the time she learned that she had tuberculosis in December, 1917, she spent most of each year out of England. Accompanied by Murry or Ida Baker, she traveled to France, Switzerland, and Italy, trying to fight off her disease. In 1922, her search led her to Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s Institute of the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris, where she seems to have been moderately happy until she died. During Mansfield’s last five years, she wrote most of the stories for which she is best known. They were often published in journals such as Athenaeum, Arts and Letters, London Mercury, and Sphere. Many were then collected in Bliss, and Other Stories and The Garden-Party, and Other Stories.

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Analysis • Katherine Mansfield’s themes are not hard to discover. In 1918, she set herself the tasks of communicating the exhilarating delicacy and peacefulness of the world’s beauty and also of crying out against “corruption.” A reader will soon make his or her own list of themes: the yearnings, complexities, and misunderstandings of love; loneliness, particularly of independent women; the superficiality of much of modern life; the erosions of time and forgetfulness; the beauty and indifferent power of the natural world, especially plant life and the sea. Her exact meanings are not so easily pinned down, for her tone is complex: She mixes witty satire and shattering emotional reversals. Moreover, she uses dialogue and indirect speech extensively, and she does not often seem to speak directly in her own voice; the reader is not sure exactly who is speaking. It is vital for readers to understand that Mansfield (like Chekhov, to whom she is often compared) does not conceal a hidden “message” in her stories. If a story appears to point in many directions, not all of which are logically consistent, that is the way Mansfield feels the whole truth is most honestly communicated. This essay suggests some of the ways these stories may be read. The action of Mansfield’s stories (again, like Chekhov’s) does not surge powerfully forward. Often her stories are designed, by means of quick changes in time and by surprise turns, to lead the reader to unexpected moments of illumination or epiphanies. Her stories are economical, edited so that there is usually not one unnecessary or insignificant word. She can be witty if she chooses, but more often her stories provide arresting descriptions and startling metaphors, which evoke shifting states of happiness, yearning, or despair. “In a Café” • Mansfield’s stories often evoke the complexities of the conversational give-and-take between women and men and the unexpected courses that passion can take. An early story, “In a Café,” portrays a youthful “new woman” and her male acquaintance, a musician. They flirt as they discuss life, art, and the future. Before he leaves, he asks the girl for her violets, but once outside he drops them because he must keep his hands warm for performing. The young woman is totally happy until she sees the violets on the sidewalk. The reader knows that her love has been crushed, but, new woman that she is, she kicks the flowers and goes her way laughing. “Epilogue II” • “Epilogue II” (also known as “Violet”) is more complex. At a pension in France, where the acidly worldly narrator is recovering from an attack of nerves, she reports a long conversation with an exasperating woman named Violet, who in turns tells of a conversation she has had with a man named Arthur. Violet says that, after a few dances, Arthur asked her if she believed in Pan and kissed her. It was her first adult kiss, and they immediately became engaged. The narrator can hardly believe what Violet tells her and is repelled by how easily the naïve Violet and Arthur have found each other. The story (a conversation within a conversation) ends with the narrator thinking that she herself might be too sophisticated. (In this story, Mansfield has imported a piece of conversation from real life. Sometime before she wrote “Epilogue II,” she startled a man by asking him if he believed in Pan.) “Psychology” • In “Psychology,” Mansfield dissects the ebb and flow of attraction between two older artists, culminating in a moment of potential, a moment which, because of their agonizing self-consciousness, they miss. This story shows both minds, but readers are left with the woman and with another characteristically unexpected psychological twist. An older female acquaintance brings her flowers—violets

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again. This spontaneous gift revitalizes the woman, and with renewed hope she begins an intense letter to the man who has left her. Readers may guess that their next meeting will be no more satisfying than their last. “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” • Mansfield often portrays more complex and ambiguous sexual and psychological relationships and, as usual, constructs her story to lead her reader in roundabout ways into unexpected territory. Though she often takes readers briefly into male minds, the story “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” has one of her rare male narrators. Raoul Duqette, a grubby Parisian writer, pimp, and gigolo, tells of an Englishman, Dick Harmon, and the woman nicknamed “Mouse,” whom he brings to Paris. Not all critics agree on whom the story concerns. Although the reader learns much about the English couple’s tortured relationship (Dick leaves Mouse because he cannot betray his mother, and Mouse knows she cannot return to England), many readers think that the story centers on the Frenchman. Incapable of deep emotion, Raoul spies on those with fuller lives than his own; he despises women, is sexually attracted to Dick, and is able to recognize only dimly the suffering that he has witnessed. At the end, he revels in Mouse’s sorrow and imagines selling a girl like her to an old lecher. “Bliss” • The triangle in “Bliss” is different, and again, Mansfield mixes her tones. Bertha seems childishly happy in her marriage, her home, her child, and her arty friends. She gives a marvelous party in which sophisticated guests make inane, decadent conversation. Meanwhile, Bertha finds herself physically attracted to one of her guests, the cool Miss Fulton, and thinks that she detects Miss Fulton giving her a signal. Together in the garden, they contemplate a lovely, flowering pear tree, and Bertha senses that they understand each other intuitively. Again Mansfield surprises the reader. Bertha transfers her feelings for Miss Fulton to her husband; for the first time, she really desires him. When she overhears him making an assignation with Miss Fulton, however, her life is shattered. In “Bliss,” as elsewhere, Mansfield’s brilliant and precise descriptions of the nonhuman world are always evocative. Although sometimes nature simply reveals an unsympathetic force, allied to human passions but beyond human control, some natural features demand to be interpreted as symbols, such as the phallic pear tree in this story. Phallic it is, but it may be feminine as well, for Bertha identifies with it. The story is read, however, and the pear tree cannot be explained simply. Neither can the reader’s final reaction: Is Bertha trapped in an evil world? Is she a free adult at last? “The Lost Battle” • Mansfield also explores the problems of lonely women, often by showing the reader their inmost trains of thought. In “The Lost Battle,” a woman traveling alone is escorted to her room in a French hotel by an overbearing man who makes demeaning and insinuating remarks: A bed in a small room will be enough for her, he implies. She asserts herself and demands a better room, one with a table on which to write. She wins her struggle and is happy with her new room—its size, the view from its windows, and its sturdy table. When she overtips the boy who delivers her bags, however, her joy somehow leaves her. In a convincing but mysterious moment typical of Mansfield’s stories, the woman’s bravery collapses in selfconsciousness, memory, tears, and desire. “Miss Brill” • Perhaps Mansfield’s best-known version of the lonely woman is the central character of “Miss Brill.” The reader follows Miss Brill’s thoughts as she

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arrives at the public gardens. The first faint chill of fall and the noise of the band signal that a new season has begun. Miss Brill’s sympathetic interest extends to the various sorts of people in the park; the reader senses an older, precise woman who yearns that happiness and gentleness will come for herself and others. Even some unpleasantries fail to shake Miss Brill’s enjoyment, as she rejoices that everyone there is performing in some wonderful, happy play. Her illusions, however, are shattered by two insensitive young lovers who simply wish that the fussy old woman would move. Again the reader is taken into a lonely woman’s mind as she undergoes a psychic shock. “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” • In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” the shock is muffled, and the reader does not enter the two sisters’ minds so deeply so soon. The story at first appears to center on the familiar Mansfield theme of male domination. The sisters seem to react alike to the death of their domineering father. They are still under his spell. Mansfield shows her dry wit as their hesitant and ineffectual efforts to assert themselves with the nurse and their maid are pathetic and hilarious at the same time. Even sisters, however, may be alone. Not only have they lost their father and are without prospects of marriage, but also they differ so much in temperament that they will never understand each other—the older sister is prosaic, the younger one dreamy. It is only at the end of the story that each sister shows small signs of vitality. The prosaic sister hears a cry from within, muses on lost chances, and feels a hint of hope. When Mansfield takes readers into the thoughts of the younger sister, they discover that all along she has been living in a secret and extravagant imaginary world of repressed desire: her real life. For a moment, each sister thinks that some action could be taken, but the moment passes without communication. Their lives will never bear fruit. Mansfield’s wit is sometimes closer to the center of a story. In “Bliss,” many early pages show a devastating view of the world of artists that Mansfield knew so well at Garsington and elsewhere. “Marriage à la Mode” is more purely a social satire. A nice, plodding husband, William, supports his wife Isabel’s ambitions. They move from a cozy little house to the suburbs and entertain her artistic friends. Mansfield’s acute ear for conversation enables her to give the reader the wonderful remarks that pass for wit among the arty set. The reader cheers when William, in a dignified letter, asks for a divorce. Isabel’s friends mock the letter. Isabel herself realizes how shallow they are, but she runs to them laughing. The story has a moral, but its chief impact is satirical. This is also true of “The Young Girl.” The title character is the disgustingly spoiled and overdressed teenage daughter of a selfish mother who is mainly interested in gambling at a casino. By the end of the story, the girl has revealed her youth and vulnerability, but a reader probably remembers the story’s vapid world most vividly. “The Fly” • Mansfield’s modernist method seldom gives the reader straightforward statements of her themes; the reader needs to interpret them carefully. Her most deliberately ambiguous and hotly debated story is “The Fly.” A businessman (“the boss”) is reminded of his beloved son’s death in World War I and how he has grieved. Now, however, the boss is troubled because he can no longer feel or cry. At this point, he rescues a fly caught in his inkwell; the fly carefully cleans itself. Then the Mansfield surprise: The boss drops another gob of ink on the fly, admires its courage as it cleans itself again, but then drops more ink. The fly is dead. The boss feels

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wretched and bullies an employee. The story may remind some readers of William Shakespeare’s “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/ They kill us for their sport.” Murry said that “The Fly” represents Mansfield’s revulsion from the cruelty of war; other critics discover her antipathy to her own father. Whatever its biographical source, the reader must try to decide his or her reaction to the boss. Where are the readers’ sympathies? At first they are with the aged employee who jogs the boss’s memory and perhaps with the boss himself. When readers hear of the son’s death, they do sympathize with the father. What do they make of his torturing—yet admiring—the fly? Do readers despise him as a sadistic bully? Do they sympathize with him? Is the fly simply another victim of society’s brutality, the boss’s brutality? Are readers to see Mansfield as the fly, unfairly stricken with tuberculosis? Does the boss refuse to admit his own mortality until he sees himself as a victim, like the fly? At the very end, is he repressing such thoughts again? Critics are divided about this story, but what is clear is that its ambiguities raise a host of issues for consideration. “The Man Without a Temperament” • Another story that poses problems is “The Man Without a Temperament.” The reader has trouble establishing where the story is taking place and who are its characters. Gradually it can be determined that the story takes place at a continental hotel and that the central characters are, not the grotesque guests like The Two Topknots, but The Man (Robert Salesby) and his invalid wife (Jinnie—Mrs. Salesby). The Mansfield woman here is not only lonely but also sick—sick with something that resembles the author’s own tuberculosis. The reader’s difficulties are slightly compounded when Mansfield manipulates time; readers soon decide that the dislocations in the story are Robert’s memories of happier days in England. This story’s greatest problem, however, is what the reader is to think of Robert. At first glance, he seems without temperament; all his care is for his wife, her comfort, her health, and her whims. Soon, the tension that he is under becomes obvious. He is tortured by his memories. When his wife encourages him to take a walk by himself, he quickly agrees and almost forgets to return. The exquisite tact and humor that his wife loves so much ring hollow: Readers know that he suspects that she will not live much longer. Is he an icy, resentful, and disgusting hypocrite? Some readers may think so. Is he admirably patient and forbearing? Murry, who acknowledged that Robert was a portrait of himself, thought it was drawn with admiration. New Zealand Stories • Soon after her return to London, Mansfield wrote some stories based on her experiences among the common people of New Zealand. “The Woman at the Store” is a chilling and dramatic tale in which three travelers stop far from civilization at a dilapidated store run by a slatternly woman and her child. Although the travelers feel sympathy for the woman’s hard life, they also laugh at the woman and child—laugh until the child’s drawing makes clear that the woman has murdered her husband. The travelers leave quickly. “Ole Underwood,” a character sketch based on a real Wellington character, lets readers see into the mind of a deranged former convict as he makes his way around town, driven by memories of his wife’s infidelity. In both cases, Mansfield tries to get into the minds of lower-class people, people much different from those she usually depicts. Another story that deals sympathetically with the doomed struggles of a lower-class character is “The Life of Ma Parker.”

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When Mansfield returned in earnest to telling stories of the New Zealand life that she knew best, she produced her finest work. (The critic Rhoda B. Nathan thinks that the New Zealand stories, taken as a group, can be considered as a Bildungsroman, or story of an artist’s growth.) The family drama of her childhood provided material for many of these stories. Her mother was attractive but delicate. Her father was forceful and successful. They lived in a substantial house in Wellington just on the edge of a poor district, then in a nearby village, and later at the edge of the sea in Wellington harbor. She was the third of five surviving children living among a number of aunts and cousins, an uncle and a grandmother. “Prelude” • Mansfield’s two longest works of fiction, “Prelude” and “At the Bay,” are strikingly different from conventional short stories. Both take a slight narrative line and string on it a number of short episodes and intense renderings of the inner lives of members—mainly female—of an extended family. In both, readers are set down among these people without preparation; they must work out their relations for themselves. In both, readers must take time to discover the rich vision that Mansfield is giving them. In “Prelude,” the reader enters the consciousness of several members of the family as they adjust to a new house in the country. (The Beauchamps moved from Wellington to Karori in 1893.) The reader is led into the minds of the child Kezia (the character who resembles the author as a girl), her hearty father (Stanley), her pregnant mother (Linda), and her unfulfilled aunt (Beryl). Their relations are strained, and they reveal their hopes, loves, and anxieties. Gradually, Mansfield’s emphasis becomes clear. She gives most weight to Linda and Beryl, whose inner worlds invite a range of analysis. Analysis begins with the aloe tree. Mansfield had earlier prepared readers for this huge, ugly, ominous growth, which flowers only once every hundred years. Readers sense that the tree is somehow symbolic. Linda is fascinated by it. When she sees the tree by moonlight, its cruel thorns seem to embody the hate that she often feels, or do they embody the masculine force that she hates? Either way, the aloe tree brings out for the reader the secret that Linda keeps from everyone else: Alongside her other emotions (dislike for her children, love and concern for her husband) is pure hatred. She wonders what Stanley would think of that. Beryl, too, has her secret self. The story ends with her taking an inventory of her attractive qualities and wondering if she can ever get beyond her poses, her false life, to the warm authentic life that she thinks is still within her. Mansfield’s apparently haphazard plot has in fact been drawing the reader to two striking female visions. “At the Bay” • “At the Bay” tells about the same household perhaps a year later. Some characters, such as Kezia, appear to have changed. Mansfield’s methods, however, are much the same, though the sea that frames this story does not insist on its symbolic force so obviously as did the aloe tree. Stanley forges off to work. The women he leaves are happy that he is gone, especially Linda, his strangely passive wife, who still loves him but dislikes their children, including a new baby boy. The children and their cousins play games. Kezia almost faces death when she pleads with her grandmother not to leave them. Linda’s weak brother does face his failure. Beryl has a new friend, a vivid witchlike woman with an attractive younger husband. Though Linda briefly finds love with Stanley, this story, like “Prelude,” ends with two dissimilar kinds of unfulfilled love. Linda loves her baby only for a moment. Beryl yearns for sexual contact but is terrified and revolted when she finds the real thing.

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Perhaps at the end, the sea (as a possible symbol of female fecundity, time, and destruction) sympathizes with human desires, perhaps not. Mansfield’s way of presenting her incidents and structuring her story creates intense sympathy for her characters, yet simultaneously lets readers see them, without obviously judging them, from a distance. “The Doll’s House” • Two shorter New Zealand stories probably show Mansfield at her finest, and they show most clearly how her narrative surprises and moments of brilliant revelation of character and motive can be concentrated in a single phrase, in what might be called a domestic epiphany: a small moment of great importance not easily summarized. In “The Doll’s House,” Kezia and her sisters are given a vulgar plaything. The house is despised by Aunt Beryl but loved by the girls (Kezia is particularly enthralled by a tiny lamp in the diminutive dining room) and much admired by their schoolmates. The story seems to be about adult cruelty and juvenile snobbery. All along, however, there appear to be two social outcasts, Lil Kelvey and her silent little sister, Else, both daughters of a washerwoman and (perhaps) a criminal. When Kezia impulsively invites them to look at the house, Aunt Beryl orders them away. Lil says nothing, but her silent, wretched little sister had got one glimpse of the beautiful doll’s house and remembers, not her humiliation, but that she saw the house’s tiny lamp. A small human spirit asserts itself. “The Garden-Party” • “The Garden-Party” is based on what happened at a real party that the Beauchamps gave in Wellington in 1907. Part of its meaning concerns the relations between two social classes. The central character is Laura, clearly a Mansfield-like character, an adolescent Kezia. Laura is thrilled by the promise of festivity, but in the middle of the expensive preparations—canna lilies, dainty sandwiches, a small band to play under the marquee—she learns of the death of a poor man who lived close by in a wretched house. Readers see the clash of generations when Laura demands that the party be canceled, but her worldly mother says no. The party is a grand success. As usual in Mansfield, important matters slip the mind; Laura enjoys herself immensely, especially because her large new hat is widely admired. After the guests have left, her mother sends Laura with a basket of party food to the house of the dead man. Her journey at dusk is phantasmagoric. Her sympathies, forgotten at the party, return. She is shocked by the somber house of death and by the grieving wife, and overwhelmed by the stillness, even the beauty, of the corpse. Laura feels that she must say something: “Forgive my hat.” What she says is certainly inadequate, but it seems to signal a moment of understanding and growth—or does it? Laura has found a moment of beauty in death. Is that evasive or profound? She accepts the sympathy of her brother at the very end. He understands—or does he? George Soule Other major works nonfiction: Novels and Novelists, 1930 (J. M. Murry, editor); The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 1984-1996 (4 volumes); The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 1997 (2 volumes). poetry: Poems, 1923 (J. M. Murry, editor).

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Bibliography Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Rev. ed. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Standard biography, sensible, balanced, and detailed. Alpers draws on years of research and includes interviews with people who knew Mansfield, such as Murry and Ida Baker, and their comments on his earlier book, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (1953). He offers some analyses, including passages on “At the Bay,” “Prelude,” and “Je Ne Parle Pas Français.” Includes notes, illustrations, index, a detailed chronology, and a full bibliography. Daly, Saralyn R. Katherine Mansfield. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1994. Revision of Daly’s earlier Twayne study of Mansfield, based on the availability of Mansfield manuscripts and letters. Interweaves biographical information with discussions of individual stories, focusing on method of composition and typical themes. Darrohn, Christine. “‘Blown to Bits’: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden-Party’ and the Great War.” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (Fall, 1998): 514-539. Argues that in the story Mansfield tries to imagine a moment when class and gender do not matter; claims the story explores the conflicting demands of the postwar period, specifically, the painful task of mourning and recovery and the ways in which this task complicates the project of critiquing a society that is founded on the structures of exclusion, hierarchy, and dominance that foster wars. Hankin, C. A. Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Hankin’s thesis is that Mansfield’s stories are confessional, with the result that this book connects each story as precisely as possible to its sources in Mansfield’s life. The detailed analyses of each of the major stories are more valuable than the thesis suggests. Hankin’s readings are subtle and detailed, especially when they discuss the complexities of characters and symbols. Mansfield, Katherine. The Complete Stories of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Antony Alpers. Auckland: Golden Press/Whitcombe and Tombs, 1974. Not the complete short stories but a full and comprehensive collection of almost all of them, scrupulously edited and arranged chronologically in natural and instructive groups. Alpers’s notes provide basic facts about each story and much essential information about many of them. The notes also list all the stories not included in this collection, thus forming a complete catalog of Mansfield’s short fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eleven short stories by Mansfield: “At the Bay” and “Bliss” (vol. 1); “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” and “The Doll’s House” (vol. 2); “Her First Ball,” “The Fly,” and “The GardenParty” (vol. 3); “Marriage à la Mode” and “Miss Brill” (vol. 5); “Prelude” (vol. 6); and “The Woman at the Store” (vol. 8). Nathan, Rhoda B. Katherine Mansfield. New York: Continuum, 1988. Detailed and useful chapter on the New Zealand stories considered as a group. Includes comments on the “painterly” qualities of “Je Ne Parle Pas Français.” The final two chapters discuss Mansfield’s achievement with regard to other writers. _____________, ed. Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. Organizes previously published and new essays on Mansfield into three categories: “The New Zealand Experience,” “The Craft of the Story,” and “The Artist in Context.” Essays represent a variety of approaches: feminist, postcolonial, and historicist.

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New, W. H. “Mansfield in the Act of Writing.” Journal of Modern Literature 20 (Summer, 1996): 51-63. Argues that Mansfield’s notebooks are an active guide to the process of reading her stories; discusses three categories of manuscript commentary and revision: those that emphasize figure and performance, those that change lexicon and syntax, and those that deal with agency and other larger strategies of arrangement. Robinson, Roger, ed. Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Reprints papers from two Mansfield centenary conferences. Features essays on Mansfield’s feminine discourse, her interest in the cult of childhood, the narrative technique of her stories, and her position in the modernist tradition. Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Very readable biography, though without many critical comments, emphasizing the medical consequences of Mansfield’s sexual freedom and treating the question of her plagiarizing “The Child Who-Was-Tired.” An appendix gives The Times Literary Supplement correspondence on this topic.

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Born: Mayfield, Kentucky; May 1, 1940 Principal short fiction • Shiloh, and Other Stories, 1982; Love Life, 1989; Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason, 1998; Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, 2001; Nancy Culpepper, 2006. Other literary forms • Between 1985 and 2005, Bobbie Ann Mason published four novels: In Country (1985), Spence Lila (1988), Feather Crowns (1993), and An Atomic Romance (2005). Her nonfiction writings include Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to “Ada” (1974), The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters (1975 & 1995), Clear Springs: A Memoir (1999), and Elvis Presley (2002). Achievements • Bobbie Ann Mason has earned a place in American literature with her short stories. She won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction in 1983 for her first collection of short stories, Shiloh, and Other Stories. That collection also earned for Mason nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award (1982), the American Book Award (1982), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pennsylvania Arts Council grant (1983), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award (1984). Mason received the Appalachian Medallion Award (1991), and her novel Feather Crowns was cowinner of the Southern Book Award for fiction and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (1994). Mason’s writing for newspapers and magazines includes work as a society columnist for the Mayfield Messenger in Kentucky and as a writer of fan magazine stories for the Ideal Publishing Company in New York City. She has also written “Talk of the Town” columns and feature articles for The New Yorker. Mason’s novels have reinforced her reputation. The first of her novels, In Country (1985), was particularly well received, and a film (also titled In Country) based on the book was released by Warner Brothers in the fall of 1989. That year the Vietnam Veterans of America gave Mason its first President’s Citation, which honors a nonveteran who promotes public understanding of the war and its residual effects. Biography • Bobbie Ann Mason was born in rural Kentucky, and her southern background appears to have been a major force in shaping her fiction. She attended a country school through the eighth grade and then attended Mayfield High School. Her descriptions of country schools in “State Champions” certainly ring true, and apparently her novel Spence Lila (1988) fictionalizes a part of her parents’ experience. Another aspect of her high school life echoes in her fiction: her love of rock and roll. Mason majored in English at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where she wrote for the university paper, The Kernel. While in college, she also wrote the summer society column for the Mayfield Messenger. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1962, she spent fifteen months in New York City working for the Ideal Publishing Company writing for fan magazines such as Movie Life and TV Star Parade. In addition to her undergraduate degree, Mason earned a master’s degree in literature

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from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966, as well as a doctoral degree in literature from the University of Connecticut in 1972. In her doctoral dissertation, she analyzed the garden symbolism in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s artistry in presenting the details of his characters’ lives apparently touched a chord in Mason. While pursuing her Ph.D., she met Roger B. Rawlings at the University of Connecticut; they were married in 1969. From 1972 to 1979, Mason was an assistant professor of English at Mansfield State College (which later became Mansfield University) in Pennsylvania, where she taught journalism as well as other English courses. She had been writing short stories during this period and had received encouraging responses from editors who, nevertheless, rejected her stories for publication. In 1979, Mason stopped teaching to write fiction. She settled in rural Pennsylvania, sometimes giving readings and sometimes writing for The New Yorker. In 1990, she and her husband moved back to Kentucky. Her life, with its movement from rural to urban and back to rural living, mirrors a typical concern of her fiction: the tension between rural and urban life. Apparently her own feelings match those of many of her protagonists. Analysis • Often compared with Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, and Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason writes fiction that reads like life. Her characters struggle with jobs, family, and self-awareness, continually exuding a lively sense of being. Those who people her stories often transcend circumstance without losing their rootedness in place. Most often her characters struggle to live within a relationship, but are frequently alone. In fiction that resonates with rock-and-roll music and family conflicts, her descriptions leave a reader sometimes feeling uncomfortably aware of a truth about families: Caring does not guarantee understanding or communication. The short stories are for the most part set in small towns in Kentucky and explore the lives of lower-middle-class people from small towns or farms. Kentucky, a North/South border state, is emblematic of Mason’s concerns with borders, separations, and irrevocable decisions. Mason’s stories typically explore a conflict between the character’s past and future, a conflict that is often exemplified in a split between rural and urban leanings and a modern as opposed to a traditional life. Most often, the point of view in Mason’s short fiction is limited omniscient. She is, however, adept with first-person narration as well. Readers are most often left with a sense of her characters’ need to transcend their life scripts through action, frequently a quest. Her stories typically lack resolution, making them uncomfortably true to life. Shiloh, and Other Stories • “Shiloh,” the title story in Mason’s first collection, is a story about love, loss, and history. A couple, Leroy and Norma Jean, have been married for sixteen years. They married when Norma Jean was pregnant with their son Randy, a child who died as an infant. Leroy is home recuperating from an accident he had in his truck. His leg is healing, but he is afraid to go back to driving a truck long distances. He takes on traditionally feminine activities in the story: He starts doing crafts, watches birds at the feeder, and remains the passenger in the car even after his leg has healed enough for him to drive. The accident that forced Leroy to remain at home for months recuperating is the second crisis in the couple’s marriage. The earlier crisis had been their baby’s death. After the baby died, Leroy and Norma Jean remained married but emotionally isolated from each other:

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They never speak about their memories of Randy, which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home all the time, they sometimes feel awkward around each other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should mention the child. He has the feeling that they are waking up out of a dream together. Now that Leroy is at home, he “sees things about Norma Jean that he never realized before.” Leroy’s staying at home so much leads to several important changes for Norma Jean: She begins to lift weights, takes a writing course, and curses in front of her mother. In response to the repeated suggestion of Norma Jean’s mother, the couple drives to the Shiloh battleground for a second honeymoon trip. At Shiloh, Norma Jean tells Leroy that she wants to leave him. The history of Shiloh is significant to the story of this marriage. Shiloh, an early battle in the Civil War (1861-1865), proved that the Civil War would be a long and bloody one. The story concludes with Leroy merging family history with battleground history and Norma Jean literally flexing her muscles. Their civil war will be Leroy fighting for union and Norma Jean seeking her independent self. A contemporary history lesson on the fear of polio and communists, “Detroit Skyline, 1949” narrates in first person the summer spent by a nine-year-old girl, Peggy Jo, and her mother as they visit the mother’s sister and her family in Detroit. The story reveals the conflict between rural and city life through the perceptions and desires of Peggy Jo. Seeing her aunt’s neighborhood for the first time, Peggy Jo immediately knows that she wants to live ”in a place like this, with neighbors.” When she plays with the neighbor child, however, Peggy Jo is made to feel incompetent because she does not know how to roller-skate, so she instead spends her time watching television and examining newspaper articles and pictures in her aunt’s scrapbook. Peggy Jo feels isolated that summer. She observes the smoothness with which her mother and aunt converse, how natural their communication is. When she attends a birthday party for the neighbor child, Peggy Jo notes: I did not know what to say to the children. They all knew each other, and their screams and giggles had a natural continuity, something like the way my mother talked with her sister, and like the splendid houses of the neighborhood, all set so close together. For Peggy Jo there is little “natural continuity” of speech or gesture within her aunt’s household that summer. Her own comments are most often cut short, silenced, or discredited by the others. By the end of the summer, Peggy Jo realizes that her “own life [is] a curiosity, an item for a scrapbook.” Another of Mason’s stories concerning rural isolation is “Offerings,” in which the isolation is redemptive for Sandra, who stays in the couple’s country home instead of traveling with her husband, Jerry, to Louisville, “reluctant to spend her weekends with him watching go-go dancers in smoky bars.” She instead spends her time growing vegetables and tending her cats, ducks, and dogs. Her cobweb-strewn house is not her focus; the outdoors is. The offerings that Sandra makes are many: to her mother, tacit agreement to avoid discussing the separation from Jerry; to her grandmother, the fiction of Jerry’s presence; and to the forces of nature around her, her tamed and dependent ducks. Sandra finds grace through the natural world, exemplified within the final image of the story: dewy spiderwebs that, in the morning, are trampolines enabling her to “spring from web to web, all the way up the hill to the woods.” She cannot be honest with her grandmother and avoids truth in conversation with her

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mother, but she feels at peace and at home with her yard, the woods, and the wildlife there. In “Residents and Transients,” Mason’s narrator is also married to a man who has gone away to work in Louisville. Mary, the narrator, is finding her place within a relationship as well as a location. Several images in this story reinforce the theme of stability as opposed to movement. The cats Mary cares for on the farm represent her dilemma of moving to Louisville. To Stephen, her lover, she explains that she has read about two basic types of cats, residents and transients. She cites difference of opinion by researchers over which type is truly superior: those who establish territories and stay there or those who show the greatest curiosity by going from one place to another. Mary is drawn to the stability of her parents’ old farmhouse, feeling the pull of traditional value of place. The single image that most succinctly and horrifically mirrors her dilemma is a rabbit, seen in the headlights as she is driving home. The rabbit at first appears to be running in place, but she realizes that its forelegs are still moving despite the fact that its haunches have been run over. Throughout the story, Mary has been literally running in place, running from her relationship with her husband by taking a lover and running from her life with her husband by remaining in her parents’ old home. Mary’s position at the end of the story is mirrored by the image of the odd-eyed cat, whose eyes shine red and green. The narrator has been waiting for some signal to move. Her husband’s words do not convince; Mary thinks of them as words that are processed, computerized renderings. She needs more than words; she needs an integrated part of her world to spur her to act. Because her husband is no longer an integral part of her world, she listens and looks for other cues. Apparently, the dying rabbit has spurred her to action. The story ends with Mary “waiting for the light to change.” Love Life • Within Mason’s second collection of short fiction, Love Life, the reader sees continued the skillful treatment of people’s decisions and perceptions. “State Champions” is a reminiscence of twenty years past, so it offers a perspective different from that of other works. “State Champions” further explores Mason’s theme of rural versus urban experience by recounting the success of the Cuba Cubs, Kentucky state champions in basketball in 1952. The narrator, Peggy (who appeared earlier in “Detroit Skyline, 1949” but is three years older when this story begins), had seen the team as glamorous, certainly larger than life. As an adult in upstate New York, Peggy is surprised to hear the team referred to as “just a handful of country boys who could barely afford basketball shoes.” Although Peggy had shared in the excitement of the championship season, “State Champions” presents her perceptions of being different from the rest even at that time. She rebelled against authority at school by talking back to the history teacher. She surprised her friend Willowdean with the assertion that she did not want to get pregnant and get married, a normal pattern for the girls at the high school. From her adult perspective, Peggy ascribes her own struggle for words with Glenn, the boy she cared about in 1952, to her status as a “country kid”: I couldn’t say anything, for we weren’t raised to say things that were heartfelt and gracious. Country kids didn’t learn manners. Manners were too embarrassing. Learning not to run in the house was about the extent of what we knew about how to act. We didn’t learn to congratulate people; we didn’t wish people happy birthday. We didn’t even address each other by name.

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Ironically enough, what triggers Peggy’s recollection of the state championship year is the comment by The New Yorker about the poor country boys’ basketball team, certainly a comment not springing from a mannered upbringing. In “Coyotes,” Mason provides a third-person account from the perspective of a young man, Cobb, who embodies the ambivalence and sensitivity often seen in Mason’s characters. He has asked Lynnette Johnson to marry him, and he continues to look for signs and indications that marriage is the right thing to do. Cobb sees a young clerk in a drugstore showing her wedding ring to a young couple. Their conversation is flat: no congratulations, no excitement. The matter-of-fact nature of the exchange haunts Cobb. He wants his marriage to be the subject of excitement, hugs, celebration. Marriage in general presents itself as a risk, leading him to look further for signs that his own marriage will work. He wonders if Lynnette will find more and more things about him that will offend her. For example, he fails to tell her about having hunted after she tells him that his sweatshirt, on which is written “Paducah, the Flat Squirrel Capital of the World,” is in bad taste. He is reassured by their similarities—for example, the fact that they both pronounce “coyote” with an e sound at the end. Lynnette’s past, with a mother who had attempted suicide, is something he recognizes to be significant to them, but he nevertheless speaks confidently with Lynnette about their future. Lynnette fears that her past will somehow intrude on their future, and so, in fact, does Cobb. Their relationship is, as is typical of Mason’s fiction, freighted with all those tangled possibilities. Past and future as conflicting forces also form a theme of “Private Lies,” in which the male protagonist, Mickey, reestablishes his relationship with his former wife and decides to search for the child they gave up for adoption eighteen years earlier. Mickey’s wife, Tina, has compartmentalized their lives with a regular television schedule and planned activities for their children. Tina has forbidden him to tell their children about his daughter. Mickey, however, cannot ignore the eighteenth birthday of his daughter given up to adoption. The story concludes with Mickey and his former wife, Donna, on the beach in Florida, the state in which they gave up their daughter for adoption. Donna insists that she does not want to find their daughter and that searching is a mistake. She nevertheless accompanies him to Florida, where Mickey seeks to stop telling lies (by silence) and where Donna still seeks to avoid the search, exemplified by her refusal to look inside shells for fear of what she may find in them. Mickey seeks the daughter who will be his bridge between past and future. He seeks to make a new present for himself, a present free of Tina’s control. Midnight Magic • All of the stories in Midnight Magic appeared earlier in either Shiloh, and Other Stories or Love Life, but this collection provides a new arrangement and a new introduction by the author. The protagonist of the title story, Steve, is a young man whose personal power is no match for that of his showy “muscle” car. Like other Mason characters, he takes to the road in search of elusive secrets of life, but most of the time Steve merely drives in circles around his small hometown. When he finally heads for a specific destination (the Nashville airport to pick up his recently married friend), he is several hours late. His lateness for this appointment parallels his tardiness in maturing. After seeing a body lying beside the road, Steve tries to report it to a 911 emergency operator. Unfortunately, he cannot discover his specific geographic location just as he cannot define his place on the road of life. Steve’s girlfriend, Karen, finds guidance in the spiritual teachings of Sardo, an ancient Native American now reincarnated in the body of a teenager. Steve also “wants something

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miraculous” but simply “can’t believe in it.” Thus, his persistent hope outstrips his fleeting faith. Mason recalls that as a college student she associated late-night hours with a “mood of expectation”—“the sense that anything might happen.” Thus, the title “Midnight Magic” suggests sympathy for a feckless but engaging misfit. In her introduction Mason describes Steve as a “guy who keeps imagining he’ll get it together one day soon, who seeks transcendence and wants to believe in magic.” Another story with a confused male protagonist is “Big Bertha Stories.” Written while Mason was working on In Country, this story also dramatizes the lingering effects of the war in Vietnam. Donald has come back from war physically, but he cannot make it all the way home emotionally. He operates a huge machine in a strip mine, and his destruction of the land recalls the horrors of war. Attempting to create some order in his life, Donald makes up stories about powerful superheroes. These stories begin with humor and high hopes but break off in chaos. Just as Donald cannot complete his journey home, he can never bring his fictions to a suitable conclusion. Having lost his youth in Vietnam, he becomes old prematurely and can no longer function as husband and father. Still another story from Midnight Magic that tries to reconcile past with present is “Nancy Culpepper.” Here the title character is apparently based on Mason herself, and she reappears in the story “Lying Doggo” and the novel Spence Lila. The key symbols in “Nancy Culpepper” are photographs. Nancy recalls that the photographs from her wedding were fuzzy double exposures, just as the wedding itself was a superimposition of a strange new identity upon her southern rural past. Several years after the wedding she returns home to Kentucky to rescue old family pictures. She searches in particular for a likeness of her namesake, but this particular photograph is not found, just as her own sense of identity remains elusive. Janet Taylor Palmer With updates by Albert Wilhelm and the Editors Other major works novels: In Country, 1985; Spence Lila, 1988; Feather Crowns, 1993; An Atomic Romance, 2005. nonfiction: Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to “Ada,” 1974; The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters, 1975, 1995; Clear Springs: A Memoir, 1999; Elvis Presley, 2002. Bibliography Blythe, Hal, and Charlie Sweet. “The Ambiguous Grail Quest in ‘Shiloh.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Spring, 1995): 223-226. Examines the use of the Grail myth in “Shiloh”; claims the story is a contemporary version of Jessie Weston’s “Waste Land.” Argues that the myth lends universal significance to the minutiae-laden lives of a twentieth century western Kentucky couple in a troubled marriage. Eckard, Paula Gallant. Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Focusing on southern and African American women writers, Eckard explores the way female authorship subjectivizes the experience of motherhood, as opposed to the objectification of motherhood by male writers.

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Giannone, Richard. “Bobbie Ann Mason and the Recovery of Mystery.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall, 1990): 553-566. Claims that Mason’s rural characters are caught between an incomprehensible otherworldly force and the loss of their thisworld anguish; they are mystified by contemporary life while robbed of the mysteries of their lives. Discusses “Shiloh,” “Retreat,” and “Third Monday.” May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Mason: “Big Bertha Story” (vol. 1), “Graveyard Day” (vol. 3), and “Residents and Transients” and “Shiloh” (vol. 6). Pollack, Harriet. “From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns: Bobbie Ann Mason, Women’s History, and Southern Fiction.” The Southern Literary Journal 28 (Spring, 1996): 95-116. Argues that Mason’s fiction is representative of southern women authors who, without general recognition, have been transforming southern literature’s characteristic attention to official history. Price, Joanna. Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series, this study provides fairly comprehensive coverage of all Mason’s works. Rothstein, Mervyn. “Homegrown Fiction: Bobbie Ann Mason Blends Springsteen and Nabokov.” The New York Times Biographical Service 19 (May, 1988): 563-565. This essay reports Mason’s love of rhythm and blues in high school and notes the semiautobiographical details of Spence Lila. Ryan, Maureen. “Stopping Places: Bobbie Ann Mason’s Short Stories.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy W. Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. An overview of Mason’s themes and character portraits, this sampling provides a brief treatment of many different works. Thompson, Terry. “Mason’s ‘Shiloh.’” The Explicator 54 (Fall, 1995): 54-58. Claims that subdivisions play an important role in the story for gaining a full appreciation of the two main characters; argues that the subdivision is a metaphor for the marriage of the couple. Wilhelm, Albert E. Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. This critical study of Mason’s short fiction examines the influence of her femininity and her identity as a southerner on her writing. Includes such topics as the place that Kentucky plays in her work as well as a bibliography and index. ____________. “Bobbie Ann Mason: Searching for Home.” In Southern Writers at Century’s End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Discusses the effect of American involvement in Vietnam in “Big Bertha Stories” and In Country. Argues that these two stories of soldiers’ attempts to return home expand the theme of social dislocation to mythic proportions.

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W. Somerset Maugham Maugham, W. Somerset

Born: Paris, France; January 25, 1874 Died: Nice, France; December 16, 1965 Principal short fiction • Orientations, 1899; The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, 1921; The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories, 1926; Ashenden: Or, The British Agent, 1928; Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, 1931; Ah King: Six Stories, 1933; East and West: The Collected Short Stories, 1934; Cosmopolitans, 1936; The Favorite Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, 1937; The Round Dozen, 1939; The Mixture as Before: Short Stories, 1940; Creatures of Circumstances: Short Stories, 1947; East of Suez: Great Stories of the Tropics, 1948; Here and There: Selected Short Stories, 1948; The Complete Short Stories, 1951; The World Over, 1952; Seventeen Lost Stories, 1969. Other literary forms • A dedicated professional, W. Somerset Maugham earned more than three million dollars from his writing, a phenomenal amount for his day. Between 1897 and 1962, a career spanning eight decades, Maugham published twenty novels, four travel books, more than twenty stage plays, an autobiography of ideas, and innumerable essays, belles lettres, and introductions, in addition to more than one hundred short stories, of which about ninety are readily accessible in different editions. Much of his work has been adapted for use by television and cinema. Achievements • W. Somerset Maugham is best known for his urbanity, his wit, his controlled sense of writing, and his ability to describe not only objectively but also so realistically that he has been accused of lifting stories directly from life. Many of his stories do spring from real incidents or actual people, but the perceptions and surprise plot twists are always Maugham-inspired. In fact, Maugham is expressly known as a master of the surprise or twist ending to an inextricably woven plot in his short stories, many of which have been converted to film. His early work, under the influence of Oscar Wilde and his cult of aesthetes, shows a refined and civilized attitude toward life. Several of his novels illustrate the demanding sacrifices that art necessitates of life, or that life itself can become, in turn, an art form, thereby demonstrating the “art of living” (The Razor’s Edge, 1944). Maugham was curiously denied many conspicuous honors (such as knighthood) usually conferred on a man of letters of his distinction, but he was awarded by the Royal Society of Literature the title of Companion of Literature, an honor given to “authors who have brought exceptional distinction to English letters.” Furthermore, the occasion of his eightieth birthday was celebrated with a dinner at the Garrick Club, a distinction given to only three writers before him: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. Biography • When William Somerset Maugham was eight, his mother died, and his father, a solicitor for the British Embassy in Paris, died two years later. Shy and speaking little English, Maugham was sent to Whitstable in Kent to live with an uncle, the Reverend Henry MacDonald Maugham, and his German-born wife, and thence almost immediately to King’s School, Canterbury. These wretched and unhappy years

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were later detailed in Maugham’s first masterpiece, the novel Of Human Bondage (1915). A stammer, which stayed with him for life, seems to have originated about this time. At the age of seventeen, Maugham went to Heidelberg and attended lectures at the university. His first play, Schiffbrüchig (Marriages Are Made in Heaven), was written during this year abroad and first performed in Berlin in 1902. Returning to London, he began the study of medicine at St. Thomas’ Hospital, where the misery of the nearby Lambeth slums profoundly impressed him. He took his medical degree in 1897, the same year Liza of Lambeth, his first novel, was published, then abandoned medicine. By 1908, Maugham had an unprecedented four plays running simultaneously in London, and by 1911, he Library of Congress had become successful enough to buy a fashionable house in Mayfair. In 1915, he married Syrie Barnardo Wellcome. Divorced in 1927, they had one daughter, Liza, who became Lady Glendevon. During World War I, Maugham served as a medical officer in France and as an agent for the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia, where he was to prevent, if possible, the Bolshevik Revolution. During and after the war, he traveled extensively in Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, China, Malaysia, Indochina, Australia, the West Indies, various Central and South American countries, and the United States. In 1928, Maugham settled on the French Riviera, buying Villa Mauresque. Maugham died in Nice, France, on December 16, 1965. Analysis • W. Somerset Maugham first claimed fame as a playwright and novelist, but he became best known in the 1920’s and 1930’s the world over as an international traveler and short-story writer. Appearing in popular magazines such as Nash’s, Collier’s, Hearst’s International, The Smart Set, and Cosmopolitan, his stories reached hundreds of thousands of readers who had never attended a play and had seldom read a novel. This new public demanded simple, lucid, fast-moving prose, and Maugham’s realistic, well-defined narratives, often set amid the exotic flora of Oceania or Indochina, were among the most popular of the day. The Trembling of a Leaf • The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands collected six of these first “exotic stories” and assured Maugham fame as a short-story writer on equal footing with his established renown as novelist and dramatist. It was actually his second collection, coming twenty years after Orientations, whose title clearly bespeaks its purposes. Apparently, Maugham had found no suitable possibilities for short fiction in the meantime until, recuperating from a lung infection be-

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tween World War I assignments for the British Secret Service, he took a vacation to Samoa and Hawaii: I had always had a romantic notion of the South Seas. I had read of those magic islands in the books of Herman Melville, Pierre Loti, and Robert Louis Stevenson, but what I saw was very different from what I had read. Although Maugham clearly differentiates life as he saw it in the South Seas from life as he had read about it in the writings of his “romantic” predecessors, his stories of British Colonials, of natives and half-castes in exotic environments, are reminiscent of these authors and also of Rudyard Kipling. Maugham’s assessment of Kipling, the only British short-story writer he thought comparable to such greats as Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, neatly clarifies their similar subject, as well as their ultimate stylistic differences. Kipling, Maugham writes, opened a new and fruitful field to writers. This is the story, the scene of which is set in some country little known to the majority of readers, and which deals with the reactions upon the white man of his sojourn in an alien land and the effect which contact with peoples of another race has upon him. Subsequent writers have treated this subject in their different ways, but . . . no one has invested it with more romantic glamour, no one has made it more exciting and no one has presented it so vividly and with such a wealth of colour. Maugham’s first South Seas stories are essentially criticisms of the “romantic glamour” of Kipling and his predecessors, especially Stevenson, his most immediate literary forefather in terms of location. Rather than repeat their illusions, Maugham tries to see the “alien land” as it really is, without poetic frills. “Red,” which Maugham once chose as his best story, is a clear example of this process. “Red” • A worldly, gruff, and overweight skipper of a bedraggled seventy-ton schooner anchors off one of the Samoan Islands in order to trade with the local storekeeper. After rowing ashore to a small cove, the captain follows a tortuous path, eventually arriving at “a white man’s house” where he meets Neilson. Neilson seems a typical character out of Robert Louis Stevenson, a life deserter unable either to return to his homeland or to accommodate himself completely to his present situation. Twenty-five years ago he came to the island with tuberculosis, expecting to live only a year, but the mild climate has arrested his disease. He has married a native woman called Sally and built a European bungalow on the beautiful spot where a grass hut once stood. His walls are lined with books, which makes the skipper nervous but to which Neilson constantly and condescendingly alludes. Offering him whiskey and a cigar, Neilson decides to tell the skipper the story of Red. Red was Neilson’s romantic predecessor, Sally’s previous lover, an ingenuous Apollo whom Neilson likes to imagine “had no more soul than the creatures of the woods and forests who made pipes from reeds and bathed in the mountain streams when the world was young.” It was Red who had lived with Sally in the native hut, “with its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red flowers.” Glamorizing the young couple and the lush habitat, Neilson imagines them living on “delicious messes from coconuts,” by a sea “deep blue, wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece,” where “the hurrying fish were like butterflies,” and the “dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut” so that the lovers woke each morning and “smiled to welcome another day.”

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After a year of bliss, Red was shanghaied by a British whaler while trying to trade green oranges for tobacco. Sally was crestfallen and mourned him for three years, but finally, somewhat reluctantly, she acceded to the amorous overtures of the newcomer Neilson: And so the little wooden house was built in which he had now lived for many years, and Sally became his wife. But after the first few weeks of rapture, during which he was satisfied with what she gave him, he had known little happiness. She had yielded to him, through weariness, but she had only yielded what she set no store on. The soul which he had dimly glimpsed escaped him. He knew that she cared nothing for him. She still loved Red. . . . Neilson, admittedly “a sentimentalist,” is imprisoned by history. His books, a source of anxiety to the skipper, are a symbol of what Maugham believes he must himself avoid: useless repetition of and bondage to his forebears. As creation, Neilson does repeat Stevenson, but as character, he shows the absolute futility of this repetition. The dead romance assumes priority from the living one, and priority is everything. For the sentimentalist Neilson, tropical paradise has become living hell and the greatest obstacle preventing his own present happiness, the fulfillment of his own history, is his creation of an insurmountable predecessor, one whose “romantic glamour” is purer and simpler than his own reality. The final irony, that the skipper, now bloated and bleary-eyed, is in fact the magnificent Red of Neilson’s imagination and that when Sally and he meet they do not even recognize each other, snaps something in Neilson. The moment he had dreaded for twenty-five years has come and gone. His illusions disintegrate like gossamer; the “father” is not insurmountable: He had been cheated. They had seen each other at last and had not known it. He began to laugh, mirthlessly, and his laughter grew till it become hysterical. The Gods had played him a cruel trick. And he was old now. In “Red,” Neilson’s realization of failure and waste do prompt some action, possibly an escape from the cell of his past. Over dinner, he lies to Sally that his eldest brother is very ill and he must go home. “Will you be gone long?” she asks. His only answer is to shrug his shoulders. In its natural manner, Maugham’s prose in these stories never strains for effect; each could easily be retold over coffee or a drink. Like Maupassant, Maugham is a realist and a merciless ironist, but while his narrator observes and his readers chuckle, characters such as Neilson grapple in desperate roles against the onrushing determination of their lives. In the style of the best “magazine” stories, incidents in Maugham almost inevitably build one on top of the other, slowly constraining his protagonists until, like grillwork, these incidents all but completely bar the protagonists from realizing their individual potential and freedom. Maugham’s predilection for the surprise ending helps some find a final success, but not all; most end as we have believed they would—like the cuckolded Scotsman Lawson in “The Pool” who, after losing job, friends’ respect, wife, and self, is “set on making a good job of it” and commits suicide “with a great stone tied up in his coat and bound to his feet.” Lawson, another “great coward” in the Stevenson mold, has married a beautiful half-caste and, naïvely assuming human nature the same the world over, has treated her as he would a white woman. By providing primarily in terms of his own culture’s expectations, Lawson unwittingly shoulders “the white man’s burden,” that bequest

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of Kipling’s, until he becomes himself a burden. Maugham implies, with great irony, that if Lawson had been less “a gentleman” and had taken the girl as a mistress, his tragedy might have been averted. As the reader must see the “alien land” for what it really is, so must they see its peoples. “Rain” • “Rain,” Maugham’s best-known short story, develops many of these same themes. Pago Pago is unforgettably described, but no one could confuse it with the romanticized “loveliness” of Neilson’s island. When the rain is not falling in torrents, the sun is oppressive. Davidson, the missionary, and Sadie, the prostitute, act out their parts with the same furious intensity. Neither is banalized; Maugham neither approves nor condemns. Only the “mountains of Nebraska” dream foreshadows Davidson’s lust. (With its overtones of sexual repression, this dream makes “Rain” a notable pioneer in Freudian fiction.) Other than that, however, Davidson’s sincere religious fervor seems convincingly real, inspired though it is by his “mission,” yet another example of “the white man’s burden.” In the ensuing struggle between spiritual and “heathen” sensuality, the ironic stroke is that the prostitute wins; up to the last few pages, the story’s outcome looks otherwise. Finally, Davidson must admit that he cannot proscribe human nature, not even his own. Neither saint nor sinner, he is simply human. On a more universal level than either “The Pool” or “Red,” “Rain” shows that in human nature, only its unaccountability is predictable. Maugham’s detachment and moral tolerance, as well as assuring Davidson’s and Sadie’s vitality as characters, benefits his handling of the tale. The restraint exercised in not portraying for the reader either of the two “big scenes,” Sadie’s rape or Davidson’s suicide, gives Maugham’s story “Rain” an astounding dramatic power. The “real life” genesis of “Rain” is well known. Maugham jotted down his impressions of a few passengers aboard ship traveling with him in the winter of 1916 from Honolulu to Pago Pago; four years later he created a story from these notes. Of his prototype for Sadie Thompson he wrote: Plump, pretty in a coarse fashion perhaps not more than twenty-seven. She wore a white dress and a large white hat, long white boots from which the calves bulged in cotton stockings. Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular • This practice of taking characters and situations directly from life is nowhere better elaborated in Maugham than in the volume entitled Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular. The personal touch—clear in the book’s title—leaves a strong impression of reality. Whereas “Rain” seems a small classic in its theme, conflict, effective setting, and dramatic ending, it has one difficulty: The reader is unable to sympathize clearly with any one character, and this detracts from a greater, warmer effectiveness it might otherwise have. When the narrator-as-detached-observer is introduced as a character, however, there is no such problem with sympathy. This creation, the consistent and subsequently well-known cosmopolite, the storyteller for his stories, is one of Maugham’s finest achievements. In “Virtue” the narrator—here differentiated as “Maugham”—browses at Sotheby’s auction rooms, goes to the Haymarket, and dines at Ciro’s when he has a free morning; he was once a medical student and is now a novelist. In “The Round Dozen,” he is a well-known author whose portrait appears in the illustrated papers. He is at Elson, a tattered seaside resort “not very far from Brighton,” recovering from influenza. There, “Maugham” coincidentally observes a well-known bigamist—whose portrait

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at one time had also graced the pages of the press—capture his twelfth victim. In “Jane,” the versatile man-of-the-world is introduced as a writer of comedies, while in “The Alien Corn” he is a promising young novelist who has grown middle-aged, written books and plays, traveled and had experiences, fallen in and out of love. Throughout Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, “Maugham” is intermittently away from London, “once more in the Far East.” Such frank appeals to verisimilitude (in other words, that “Maugham” is in fact Maugham) succeed extremely well. “The Human Element” • In “The Human Element,” the narrator is a popular author who likes “a story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.” He meets Carruthers, whom he does not much like, one night at the Hotel Plaza in Rome during the late summer “dead season.” Carruthers is inhumanly depressed and tells Maugham why: He has found his life’s love, the woman he would make his wife, Betty Weldon-Burns, living in Rhodes “in domestic familiarity” with her chauffeur. Carruthers, also a short-story writer, has been praised by critics for “his style, his sense of beauty and his atmosphere,” but when “Maugham” suggests he make use of his experience for a story, Carruthers grows angry: “It would be monstrous. Betty was everything in the world to me. I couldn’t do anything so caddish.” Ironically, the story ends with Carruthers’s excuse that “there’s no story there.” That “Maugham” has in fact just made a story of it suggests that life can and does provide limitless possibilities for art if we are only ready to accept them. Maugham specifically delineates these dual creative principles, life and art, in his introduction to the six stories in the collection. Defending the practice of drawing fictional characters from personal experience, Maugham cites Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Renard. “I think indeed,” he writes, “that most novelists and surely the best, have worked from life.” The concern of Maugham’s South Seas stories, to convey what he “saw” rather than what he “had read,” is continued here on a higher plane. Maugham qualifies that there must also be art: A real person, however eminent, is for the most part too insignificant for the purposes of fiction. The complete character, the result of elaboration rather than of invention, is art, and life in the raw, as we know, is only its material. Illustrating the unaccountability of human behavior (for how could he endeavor to account for it?), “Maugham” remains a detached observer of life. Critics have wished for more poetry, loftier flights of imagination, more sympathy for his characters, and even occasional indirection; the lack of these things constitutes the limitation of Maugham’s style. Rejecting both the atmospheric romanticism of his predecessors and the exhaustive modernism of his contemporaries, Maugham’s short stories do not seek to penetrate either landscape or life. His reader, like his narrator, may experience admiration, annoyance, disgust, or pity for the characters, but he does not share or become immersed in their emotions. This point of view of a calm, ordinary man, so unusual for the twentieth century, is instructive, teaching careful and clear consideration of life’s possibilities, its casualties and successes, banalities, and gifts. In this way, objective understanding is increased by reading Maugham much as intersubjective facilities are by reading James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, or the other moderns. Kenneth Funsten With updates by Sherry Morton-Mollo

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Other major works plays: A Man of Honor, wr. 1898-1899, pr., pb. 1903; Loaves and Fishes, wr. 1903, pr. 1911, pb. 1924; Lady Frederick, pr. 1907, pb. 1912; Jack Straw, pr. 1908, pb. 1911; Mrs. Dot, pr. 1908, pb. 1912; The Explorer, pr. 1908, pb. 1912; Penelope, pr. 1909, pb. 1912; Smith, pr. 1909, pb. 1913; The Noble Spaniard, pr. 1909, pb. 1953; Landed Gentry, pr. 1910 (as Grace; pb. 1913); The Tenth Man, pr. 1910, pb. 1913; The Land of Promise, pr. 1913, pb. 1913, 1922; Caroline, pr. 1916, pb. 1923 (as The Unattainable); Our Betters, pr. 1917, pb. 1923; Caesar’s Wife, pr. 1919, pb. 1922; Home and Beauty, pr. 1919, pb. 1923 (also known as Too Many Husbands); The Unknown, pr., pb. 1920; The Circle, pr., pb. 1921; East of Suez, pr., pb. 1922; The Constant Wife, pr., pb. 1926; The Letter, pr., pb. 1927; The Sacred Flame, pr., pb. 1928; The Breadwinner, pr., pb. 1930; The Collected Plays of W. Somerset Maugham, pb. 1931-1934 (6 volumes; revised 1952, 3 volumes); For Services Rendered, pr., pb. 1932; Sheppey, pr., pb. 1933. novels: Liza of Lambeth, 1897; The Making of a Saint, 1898; The Hero, 1901; Mrs. Craddock, 1902; The Merry-Go-Round, 1904; The Bishop’s Apron, 1906; The Explorer, 1907; The Magician, 1908; Of Human Bondage, 1915; The Moon and Sixpence, 1919; The Painted Veil, 1925; Cakes and Ale, 1930; The Narrow Corner, 1932; Theatre, 1937; Christmas Holiday, 1939; Up at the Villa, 1941; The Hour Before Dawn, 1942; The Razor’s Edge, 1944; Then and Now, 1946; Catalina, 1948; Selected Novels, 1953. miscellaneous: The Great Exotic Novels and Short Stories of Somerset Maugham, 2001; The W. Somerset Maugham Reader: Novels, Stories, Travel Writing, 2004 (Jeffrey Meyers, editor). nonfiction: The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia, 1905 (also known as Andalusia, 1920); On a Chinese Screen, 1922; The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong, 1930; Don Fernando, 1935; The Summing Up, 1938; Books and You, 1940; France at War, 1940; Strictly Personal, 1941; Great Novelists and Their Novels, 1948; A Writer’s Notebook, 1949; The Writer’s Point of View, 1951; The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays, 1952; Ten Novels and Their Authors, 1954 (revision of Great Novelists and Their Novels); The Partial View, 1954 (includes The Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook); The Travel Books, 1955; Points of View, 1958; Looking Back, 1962; Purely for My Pleasure, 1962; Selected Prefaces and Introductions, 1963. screenplay: Trio, 1950 (with R. C. Sherriff and Noel Langley). Bibliography Archer, Stanley. W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Introductory survey of Maugham’s short fiction, focusing on style and technique of the stories and the frequent themes of how virtue ironically can cause unhappiness, how colonial officials come in conflict with their social and physical environment, and how people are often unable to escape their own cultural background. Reprints some of Maugham’s own comments on short fiction and three previously published critical excerpts. Connon, Bryan. Somerset Maugham and the Maugham Dynasty. London: SinclairStevenson, 1997. Connon examines the influence that the Maugham family had on the life and works of W. Somerset Maugham. Includes bibliography and index. Holden, Philip. Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham’s Exotic Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Examines the themes of homosexuality, gender identity, and race relations in Maugham’s works.

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____________. “W. Somerset Maugham’s Yellow Streak.” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (Fall, 1992): 575-582. Discusses Maugham’s story “The Yellow Streak” as a dialectical tale made up of the opposites of civilized/savage, male/female, and racial purity/miscegenation. Considers the treatment of the relationship between the two men in the story. Loss, Archie K. “Of Human Bondage”: Coming of Age in the Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1990. One of Twayne’s masterwork studies, this is an excellent analysis. ____________. W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1987. The chapter on short fiction in this general introduction to Maugham’s life and art focuses largely on his most familiar story, “Rain,” as the best example of his short-story technique and subject matter. Discusses Maugham as a tale-teller and argues that the voice of the narrator is the most important single element in a Maugham short story. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Maugham: “The Alien Corn” (vol. 1), “An Official Position” (vol. 5), “The Outstation,” and “Rain” (vol. 6). Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. This wellreviewed examination of Maugham’s life and work provides comprehensive detail and new insights. Rogal, Samuel J. A Companion to the Characters in the Fiction and Drama of W. Somerset Maugham. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Alphabetical listing of the characters—animal, human, unnamed, named—in Maugham’s drama and fiction. Each entry identifies the work in which a character appears and the character’s role in the overall work. ____________. A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Contains information on Maugham’s life as well as his works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

695

Guy de Maupassant Maupassant, Guy de

Born: Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France; August 5, 1850 Died: Passy, Paris, France; July 6, 1893 Principal short fiction • La Maison Tellier, 1881 (Madame Tellier’s Establishment, and Short Stories, 1910); Mademoiselle Fifi, 1882 (Mademoiselle Fifi, and Other Stories, 1922); Clair de lune, 1883; Contes de la bécasse, 1883; Les Sœurs Rondoli, 1884 (The Sisters Rondoli, and Other Stories, 1923); Miss Harriet, 1884 (Miss Harriet, and Other Stories, 1923); Contes du jour et de la nuit, 1885 (Day and Night Stories, 1924); Toine, 1885 (Toine, and Other Stories, 1922); Yvette, 1885 (Yvette, and Other Stories, 1905); La Petite Rogue, 1886 (Little Rogue, and Other Stories, 1924); Monsieur Parent, 1886 (Monsieur Parent, and Other Stories, 1909); Le Horla, 1887 (The Horla, and Other Stories, 1903); Le Rosier de Madame Husson, 1888; L’Inutile Beauté, 1890 (Useless Beauty, and Other Stories, 1911); Eighty-eight Short Stories, 1930; Eighty-eight More Stories, 1932; Complete Short Stories, 1955. Other literary forms • Although he became famous above all for his well-crafted short stories, Guy de Maupassant also wrote poems, plays, and three successful novels: Une Vie (1883; A Woman’s Life, 1888), Bel-Ami (1885; English translation, 1889), and Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean, 1890). His preface to Pierre and Jean has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the years because it reveals the profound influence that Gustave Flaubert exerted on Maupassant’s development as a writer. Maupassant was not, however, a major literary theoretician, and many critics have agreed with Henry James’s perceptive comment that Maupassant as a “philosopher in his composition is perceptibly inferior to the story-teller.” Maupassant also wrote several volumes of fascinating letters to such eminent writers as Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, and Émile Zola. Achievements • Guy de Maupassant is generally considered to be the most significant French short-story writer. Unlike other important nineteenth century French prose writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Flaubert, who are better known for their novels than for their short stories, Maupassant created an extensive corpus of short stories that reveals an aesthetically pleasing combination of wit, irony, social criticism, idealism, and psychological depth. Although his short stories deal with readily identifiable situations and character types in France during the 1870’s and 1880’s, they explore universal themes such as the horrors of war and the fear of death, hypocrisy, the search for happiness, the exploitation of women, and contrasts between appearance and reality. His characters illustrate the extraordinary diversity in modern society, from prostitutes to adulterous husbands and wives and from peasants to aristocrats. Even during his lifetime, his short stories were appreciated both within and beyond the borders of France. He had the special ability of conveying to readers the universal elements in everyday situations. He used wit and an understated style in order to create aesthetically pleasing dialogues. His work exerted a profound influence on many major short-story writers, including Thomas Mann, Katherine Mansfield, and Luigi Pirandello.

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Biography • Henri-René-Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850, in the Château de Miromesnil in the French province of Normandy. He was the first child of Gustave and Laure de Maupassant. Guy de Maupassant spent his childhood and adolescence in Normandy. His parents grew to dislike each other intensely, and they eventually separated. Laure did not want Gustave to play any role in rearing either Guy or their second son, Hervé. She was an overly protective mother, and she did not allow Guy to attend school until he was thirteen years old. Until he became a student in 1863 at a Roman Catholic seminary school, Guy’s only teacher was the local parish priest. Guy became indifferent to religion, and at the age of seventeen he was expelled from the seminary school because of behavior judged to be unacceptable by his teachers. He completed his secondary studies in 1869 at a boarding school in Rouen. In 1867, Maupassant met the celebrated novelist Flaubert, whom Laure had known for almost twenty years. Some fanciful critics have suggested that Flaubert was not only Maupassant’s literary mentor but also his biological father. Although there is no evidence to support this hypothesis, Maupassant did react with extreme displeasure and perhaps with excessive sensitivity to the frequently repeated remark that Flaubert was his father. Maupassant began his law studies at the University of Paris in 1869, but with the outbreak of hostilities in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he enlisted in the French army. He served in Normandy, where he experienced firsthand the humiliation of the French defeat and the severity of the Prussian occupation. After his return to civilian life, he became a clerk in the Naval Ministry. He remained in government service until 1880, when he resigned his position in the Ministry of Public Instruction so that he could dedicate all of his efforts to writing. Starting in 1875, Flaubert became Maupassant’s literary mentor. At first, Maupassant slavishly imitated his master’s style, but gradually he began to explore themes and situations such as the tragic effect of war and occupation on French society, which Flaubert had chosen not to treat. Maupassant received further intellectual stimulation by frequenting Flaubert’s weekly literary salon, which was attended at various times by such eminent writers as Turgenev, Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt. In late 1879, Maupassant and five other French authors agreed that each would write a short story on the Prussian occupation of France for a volume to be entitled Les Soirées de Médan (1880; the evenings in Médan). Maupassant’s contribution was “Boule de Suif.” The other contributors to this volume were Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Alexis, Henry Céard, and Léon Hennique. Almost all critics agreed with Flaubert’s assessment that “Boule de Suif” was “a masterpiece of composition and wit.” This extremely favorable reaction encouraged Maupassant to become a very prolific writer of short stories and novels. During the 1880’s, he earned a good living as a writer, but gradually his health began to deteriorate as a result of syphilis, which he had contracted in the 1870’s and which his doctors had failed to diagnose until it was too late for him to be cured. On January 2, 1892, Maupassant tried to kill himself. After this unsuccessful suicide attempt, he was committed to a psychiatric asylum at Passy, in Paris, France, where he died on July 6, 1893. Analysis • Although his active literary career began in 1880 and lasted only ten years, Guy de Maupassant was nevertheless an extraordinarily productive writer whose short stories dealt with such diverse themes as war, prostitution, marital infidelity, religion,

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madness, cultural misunderstanding between the French and the English, and life in the French provinces, especially his native Normandy. His short stories varied greatly in length from only a few pages to more than forty pages. His stories are extremely well organized, and there is much psychological depth in his insights into the complex motivations for his characters’ behavior. His work explores the full spectrum of French society. He describes characters from various professions and social classes with sensitivity and humor. Although Maupassant was himself very pessimistic, rather chauvinistic, and also distrustful of organized religions, his characters do not simply mirror his own philosophy. He wrote about topics of interest to his French readers in the 1880’s, but he also enriched his short stories with psychological and moral insights, which continue to fascinate readers born generations after his death. Maupassant examined Library of Congress how ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, with whom readers can readily identify, reacted to unexpected social, historical, moral, and business situations. His short stories mirror life because in fiction, as in life, things never turn out exactly as one thinks they will. Although Maupassant wrote on a wide variety of topics, the major recurring themes in his short stories are war, prostitution, and madness. Why Maupassant explored these themes instead of others is problematic. In their excellent biographies of Maupassant, Paul Ignotus and Francis Steegmuller showed that the Prussian occupation of France had been a traumatic experience for him. Even his mentor Flaubert realized that Maupassant was promiscuous, and he warned his disciple of the physical consequences of sleeping with prostitutes. By the middle of the 1880’s, Maupassant began to write very frequently about characters who fear losing their minds. This would, in fact, happen to Maupassant himself, but not until late 1891. Although it is tempting to interpret Maupassant’s short stories in the light of his personal experiences, such an approach is not very useful for literary criticism. Other Frenchmen of his day were scarred by the Prussian occupation of France or frequented houses of prostitution, but they did not possess his literary talents. His biography may well explain his preference for certain themes, but it does not enable readers to appreciate the true value of his short stories. Maupassant wrote more than two hundred short stories. Even in a relatively long essay, it would be impossible to do justice to all of his major works. This article will examine four representative short stories in order to give readers a sense of Mau-

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passant’s refined artistry. These works are “La Folle” (“The Madwoman”), “Boule de Suif,” “La Maison Tellier” (“Madame Tellier’s Establishment”), and “Le Horla” (“The Horla”). “The Madwoman” • “The Madwoman” and “Boule de Suif” both describe personal tragedies that can result from war and military occupation. These two short stories are significantly different in length. In Albert-Marie Schmidt’s 1973 edition of Maupassant’s short stories, “The Madwoman” is four pages long, whereas “Boule de Suif” fills forty pages. Both, however, describe women who are victimized by the arbitrary abuse of power during the Prussian occupation of France. The structure of “The Madwoman” consists of a story within a story. The narrator is an unnamed man from Normandy. He tells his listener, Mathieu d’Endolin, that hearing woodcocks reminds him of a terrible injustice that took place during the Prussian occupation of Normandy. This odd reference to woodcocks is explained only at the end of this short story. The narrator speaks of a woman who went mad from grief after her father, husband, and baby had all died within a month of one another in 1855. She went to bed, became delirious, and screamed whenever anyone tried to take her out of her bed. The narrator is a sensitive man who feels pity for this woman. He wonders if she still thinks about the dead or if her mind is now “motionless.” Her isolation from the world is absolute. She knows nothing about the world outside her room. During the Prussian occupation of the town in which the narrator and this madwoman live, German soldiers were assigned to the various houses. The madwoman and her maid had to receive twelve soldiers. For reasons that are totally incomprehensible to the narrator, the German officer in charge of the soldiers in this house convinces himself that the madwoman will not talk to him because she holds Germans in contempt. He orders her to come downstairs, but the madwoman cannot understand his demand. He interprets her silence as a personal insult, and he orders his soldiers to carry the woman in her bed toward a nearby forest. For nine months, the narrator learns nothing about the fate of this woman. During the fall hunting season, he goes to the forest and shoots a few woodcocks. When he goes to retrieve these woodcocks, he finds a human skeleton on a bed. The awful truth is revealed to him. The madwoman had died from exposure to the cold, and “the wolves had devoured her.” The narrator does not end this tale by denouncing the Germans but rather by praying that “our sons will never again see war” lest other innocent victims suffer similar tragedies. Readers from any country or generation can identify with the hopes of this narrator. Readers and the narrator know all too well that many innocent victims have been killed in war. “The Madwoman” is a powerful short story that expresses one’s revulsion over the death of any innocent victim of war. “Boule de Suif” • Although his most famous short story, “Boule de Suif,” also deals with the horrors of war, “Boule de Suif” is a much more complicated tale, and it has eleven major characters. At the beginning of “Boule de Suif,” Maupassant evokes the terror felt by many French citizens who came to fear the abuse of power by the occupying soldiers. This short story begins in the Norman city of Rouen. The Prussian general in Rouen grants ten inhabitants of this city special permission to travel by coach from Rouen to Dieppe. Their intention is to reach the port of Le Havre, from which they can leave France for safety in England. Their motivaton is clear. They hope to lead better lives in a free country.

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The ten travelers are from different social classes. There are three married couples. Mr. and Mrs. Loiseau are wine merchants whose integrity has been questioned by many of their customers. Mr. and Mrs. Carré-Lamodon are well-to-do owners of cotton mills, but Maupassant describes Mr. Carré-Lamodon as a hypocritical politician. The Count and Countess of Bréville are very rich, but their noble title is of questionable value. Rumor has it that King Henry IV of France had impregnated an ancestor of the Brévilles. In order to avoid an unpleasant situation, he made the lady’s husband a count and appointed him as the governor of Normandy. This placated the husband. In the coach, there are also two nuns, an inoffensive leftist named Cornudet who is more interested in drinking beer than in reforming society, and finally a prostitute named Boule de Suif. Her name, which means “ball of tallow,” evokes her rotund figure. Although the three respectable couples feel superior to Boule de Suif, they do not hesitate to accept food from her once they realize that she alone has brought food for this trip. When their coach stops in the village of Tôtes, a German officer orders the ten passengers to stay in the local inn until Boule de Suif agrees to sleep with him. As a patriotic Frenchwoman, she refuses to yield to this blackmail. The next day she goes to church and asks God to grant her the strength to remain faithful to her moral principles and to France. She assumes that the other passengers will support her, but she is wrong. The married couples and the two nuns conspire to put pressure on Boule de Suif. The elder of the two nuns is especially reprehensible because she distorts the clear meaning of several biblical passages in order to convince Boule de Suif that it would be praiseworthy for her to sleep with the Prussian officer. Boule de Suif feels abandoned by her fellow citizens and by two representatives of her church. In despair, she yields to the Prussian’s ultimatum. The three married couples and the two nuns celebrate this action by drinking champagne. Their insensitivity and general boorishness are obvious to the reader, who feels much sympathy for the victim. As they are traveling from Tôtes to Dieppe, Boule de Suif begins to weep, and the others take out their newly purchased picnic baskets filled with cheese, sausage, and bread, but they do not offer to share their food with Boule de Suif, who had been so generous during the earlier trip. A silent rage builds within her, but the proud Boule de Suif says nothing. She realizes that they are unworthy of her. Ever since its publication in 1880, “Boule de Suif” has been considered Maupassant’s masterpiece. Its structure is admirable, and the parallel scenes of eating in the coach serve to reinforce in the reader’s mind Boule de Suif’s alienation from the other passengers. Her patriotism causes her to sacrifice herself for them, but now they want nothing to do with her. Both “Boule de Suif” and “The Madwoman” reveal Maupassant’s artistry in describing the unpredictable and destructive effect of war and occupation on innocent victims. “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” • Although the title character in “Boule de Suif” is a prostitute, the story’s main theme is war and not prostitution. In Maupassant’s equally celebrated short story “Madame Tellier’s Establishment,” the principal theme is prostitution, but Maupassant develops this theme with much sensitivity and wit. Madame Tellier runs a bordello, but she is a shrewd businesswoman who does a fine job in marketing. She hires prostitutes representing the different types of feminine beauty “so that each customer could find there the satisfaction” of his sexual fantasies. The men in her town feel very much at ease in her bordello, and she treats her prostitutes and clients as members of her extended family. One Friday evening,

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however, the routine is disrupted when her customers see a sign with the words “Closed Because of First Communion” at the entrance of her business. Madame Tellier has decided to close her bordello for a day so that she and her five employees can attend the First Communion of her niece, who lives in the rural community of Virville. The train ride to Virville contains a marvelously comic scene. Seated with Madame Tellier and her five prostitutes are a traveling salesman and an elderly peasant couple, who are transporting three ducks not in cages. The husband and wife watch with disbelief as the five prostitutes take turns sitting on the salesman’s lap while playing with the ducks. The salesman then takes out brightly colored garters, and he cajoles the prostitutes and even Madame Tellier into allowing him to place the garters on their legs. All of this is accompanied by much laughter. The peasants cannot believe their eyes. As they get off the train with their ducks, the wife tells her husband: “They are sluts on their way to the wicked city of Paris.” She is partially correct, but their actual destination is the nearby village of Virville. After they have breakfast on her brother’s farm, Madame Tellier leads her prostitutes into the local church for the First Communion services. The parishioners have never before seen such gaudily dressed women. The worshipers find it difficult to concentrate on the Mass. The prostitute named Rosa thinks of her First Communion; she begins to cry, and her tears become contagious. First the other prostitutes, then Madame Tellier, and finally all the adults in the church begin to weep uncontrollably, and the tears do not end until the elderly priest has distributed Communion to the last child. He is so moved by their tears, which he interprets as the expression of profound religious emotion, that he decides to give a sermon. For him, this is “a sublime miracle” that has made him the “happiest priest in the diocese.” He speaks of the “visible faith” and “profound piety” of the out-of-town visitors. Although this priest would most probably have expressed himself differently had he known of their profession, readers cannot question his sincerity or the reality of the religious emotions experienced by the worshipers in this small church. After the Mass, life returns quickly to normal for the ever-practical Madame Tellier. She tells her brother that they must take the midafternoon train so that she can reopen her business within a few hours. That evening, there is a festive atmosphere in her bordello. Much champagne is drunk, and Madame Tellier is unusually generous. She charges her customers only six francs for a bottle of champagne instead of the normal rate of ten francs. This is a well-structured short story in which scenes in the bordello precede and follow the First Communion sequence. Maupassant describes characters from widely different professions and social classes in a nonjudgmental manner. The refined artistry and style of “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” may explain why Thomas Mann, who was himself renowned for his short prose works, concluded that Maupassant “would be regarded for centuries as one of the greatest masters of the short story.” “The Horla” • “The Madwoman,” “Boule de Suif,” and “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” are all effective third-person narratives, but Maupassant also experimented with other narrative techniques. In 1886, he wrote two versions of a short story that he entitled “The Horla.” Both versions describe the mental illness of a Frenchman who believes that an invisible being called “the Horla” has taken possession of his mind. In the first version, a psychiatrist named Dr. Marrande asks seven colleagues to listen to a patient who is sure that the Horla entered his locked bedroom, drank milk

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and water, and then took over his personality. The psychiatric patient assures his listeners that he “saw” the Horla: He looked in a mirror but did not see his own image. After the patient stops talking, Dr. Marrande makes a very strange remark for a psychiatrist: “I do not know if this man is mad or if we are both mad or if our successor has actually arrived.” The first version of “The Horla” is ineffective for several reasons. First, it lacks a clear focus because both Dr. Marrande and his patient speak of their reactions to the Horla. Second, Dr. Marrande’s comment that he may have gone mad does not inspire much confidence in him. Third, the very nature of this narration does not enable readers to experience the gradual development of the patient’s psychiatric problems. Maupassant wisely decided to revise this short story into a first-person narrative presented in the forms of diary entries written by the patient himself. In his first entry, dated May 8, the diarist seems to be a calm individual who mentions in passing that a Brazilian boat has just passed by his house, which overlooks the Seine. He soon develops a fever, has trouble sleeping, and writes of a recurring nightmare. He dreams that a being is on his bed and is trying to strangle him. This nightmare returns several nights in a row. For the month of June, he is on an extended vacation, and he considers himself cured. When he returns home, however, he has new nightmares. This time, a being is trying to stab him. Although he keeps his bedroom locked at night, a spirit always drinks the water and the milk left in carafes by his bed. Gradually, he comes to accept the presence of this thirsty spirit. By mid-August, however, he concludes that a spirit has taken over his mind. The spirit orders him to read a book and an article on invisible spirits from Brazil that like to drink water and milk. In a desperate effort to free himself from the Horla, he traps the Horla in his bedroom and then burns down his house. It does not occur to him to think of his servants, who are asleep in his house. They die in the fire, and the diary does not indicate what happened to the diarist. Has he been arrested for murder or has he been committed to an insane asylum? In his very last entry, the diarist assures the reader that if the Horla is still alive, he will have to commit suicide. The second version of “The Horla” is very effective because it enables the reader to experience the gradual transformation of the diarist from a sensible person into a terrified and selfdestructive individual who no longer appreciates the value of human life. Although some critics have hypothesized that the second version of “The Horla” somehow prefigures the serious psychological problems that Maupassant himself would develop five years later, this is a fanciful interpretation. Maupassant did not try to kill himself until January, 1892, and he was still perfectly lucid when he wrote “The Horla” in 1886. This first-person narrative is a powerful short story that enables readers to experience the process by which a person can develop a serious mental illness. “The Horla” had a profound effect on generations of readers. In 1938, Arnold Zweig wrote of his recollection of this short story, which he had read years earlier: I still remember my emotion and admiration. I do not even need to close my eyes to see the white ship passing his country-house from which the strange guest, the split ego, invaded the life of the sick person. Maupassant is still admired for his well-structured and beautifully written short stories. He is generally considered to be the best French short-story writer, although since the early years of the twentieth century, his works have been held in much higher esteem outside France (especially in England, the United States, and Germany) than in his homeland. It is not clear why so many French critics have been less

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than enthusiastic in their assessment of his short stories. Perhaps the critical standing of Maupassant would be higher than it is among modern French critics if he had explored a wider variety of themes. Readers should not forget that Maupassant died at the relatively young age of forty-two. His short literary career of only ten years did not give him sufficient time to develop the extraordinary breadth and diversity of a writer such as Victor Hugo, whose literary career spanned more than six decades. Despite the relatively limited number of themes that he explored in his short stories, Maupassant wrote short stories of such stylistic beauty and psychological depth that they still continue to please readers and to inspire creativity in short-story writers from many different countries. Edmund J. Campion Other major works novels: Une Vie, 1883 (A Woman’s Life, 1888); Bel-Ami, 1885 (English translation, 1889); Pierre et Jean, 1888 (Pierre and Jean, 1890); Forte comme la mort, 1889 (Strong as Death, 1899); Notre cœur, 1890 (The Human Heart, 1890). miscellaneous: The Life Work of Henri René Guy de Maupassant, 1903 (17 volumes); The Works of Guy de Maupassant, 1923-1929 (10 volumes). nonfiction: Au Soleil, 1884 (In the Sunlight, 1903); Sur l’eau, 1888 (Afloat, 1889); Le Vie errante, 1890 (In Vagabondia, 1903); Lettres de Guy de Maupassant à Gustave Flaubert, 1951. poetry: Des Vers, 1880 (Romance in Rhyme, 1903). Bibliography Artinian, Artine. Maupassant Criticism in France, 1880-1940. New York: Russell and Russell, 1969. First published in 1941, this important book explores critical reactions to Maupassant’s works both in France and outside France. Artinian also includes thoughtful comments on Maupassant by some of the most important American and European writers of the 1930’s. An essential work for all critics interested in Maupassant. Contains a thorough bibliography. Fusco, Richard. Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Argues that Maupassant was the most important influence on American short-story writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focuses on his effect on Kate Chopin, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, and O. Henry. Arranges Maupassant’s stories into seven categories based on narrative structure. Harris, Trevor A. Le V. Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors: Ironies and Repetition in the Work of Guy de Maupassant. Houndmills, England: Macmillan, 1990. Critical evaluation of Maupassant’s use of irony and repetition. Ignotus, Paul. The Paradox of Maupassant. London: University of London Press, 1966. In this fascinating but subjective interpretation of Maupassant’s genius, Ignotus believes that Maupassant was a paradoxical writer because he was obsessed with sex and was nevertheless a creative genius. At times, Ignotus’s arguments are not terribly convincing, but this book does discuss very well Maupassant’s ambivalent attitudes toward his literary mentor, Gustave Flaubert. Jobst, Jack W., and W. J. Williamson. “Hemingway and Maupassant: More Light on ‘The Light of the World.’” The Hemingway Review 13 (Spring, 1994): 52-61. A com-

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parison between Hemingway’s “The Light of the World” and Maupassant’s “La Maison Tellier.” Discusses how both stories focus on a single prostitute rising above stereotypes. Lloyd, Christopher, and Robert Lethbridge, eds. Maupassant: Conteur et romancer. Durham, England: University of Durham, 1994. Collection of papers, in both French and English, commemorating the centenary of Maupassant’s death in 1993. Papers in English on Maupassant’s short stories include an essay on “Mademoiselle Fifi,” David Bryant’s paper “Maupassant and the Writing Hand,” and Angela Moger’s essay “Kissing and Telling: Narrative Crimes in Maupassant.” May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of nine short stories by Maupassant: “Boule de Suif” (vol. 1); “A Family Affair” and “The Horla” (vol. 3); “Love: Three Pages from a Sportsman’s Notebook,” “Madame Tellier’s Establishment,” “Mademoiselle Fifi,” and “The Necklace” (vol. 5); “The Piece of String” (vol. 6); and “Two Little Soldiers” (vol. 8). Steegmuller, Francis. Maupassant: A Lion in the Path. New York: Random House, 1949. Well-documented biography that describes both the nature of Flaubert’s influence on Maupassant and the contacts of Maupassant with such major writers as Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Sullivan, Edward. Maupassant the Novelist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945. Thoughtful analysis of Maupassant’s novels. Sullivan argues persuasively that Maupassant’s novels do deserve as much critical attention as his more famous short stories have received over the years. Contains a solid bibliography. ____________. Maupassant: The Short Stories. Great Neck, N.Y.: Barron’s, 1962. Pamphlet-length introduction to some of Maupassant’s basic themes and story types. Particularly helpful are its attempts to place Maupassant’s short stories within their proper generic tradition. Wallace, Albert H. Guy de Maupassant. New York: Twayne, 1973. Excellent analysis of recurring themes in Maupassant’s major works that discusses with much subtlety Maupassant’s representations of war and madness. An essential introduction to the thematic study of Maupassant’s major works.

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Born: New York, New York; August 1, 1819 Died: New York, New York; September 28, 1891 Principal short fiction • The Piazza Tales, 1856; The Apple-Tree Table, and Other Sketches, 1922. Other literary forms • Herman Melville’s sixteen published books include novels, short stories, poetry, and sketches. He is best known for his novels, particularly Moby Dick (1851), The Confidence Man (1857), and Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924). Achievements • By the middle of the twentieth century, names such as Moby Dick and captain Ahab were well known in the popular culture of the United States. Yet one must look to the 1920’s and the revival of interest in Melville’s work (notably Moby Dick) to see the beginning of what came to be Melville’s immense stature in American literature. His most significant works received little popular or critical acclaim in his lifetime. One reason for this may have been friction with nineteenth century American tastes. Problems also stemmed, however, from Melville’s fascination with forces that seemed (to him) to lie below the placid optimism of his contemporary American culture. Readers were disturbed by the author’s tendency to view outward appearances as pasteboard masks that concealed a truer, darker reality. It should come as no surprise that modern students sense an invitation to allegorize Melville’s works. Many believe that Melville himself perceived life in a symbolic way. Many of the short pieces that Melville wrote for various magazines represent conscious attempts, through symbol and irony, to express disturbing layers of meaning beneath a calm surface. In 1855-1856, Melville finished a novel, The Confidence Man, rendering a bleak view of the possibility of faith in the world as he knew it. Although Melville openly wrote verse throughout his life, the manuscript that would become his novella, Billy Budd, Foretopman, was packed away by his widow and not discovered until the 1920’s. Melville completed Moby Dick some forty years before Sigmund Freud began to penetrate the veneer of conventional surfaces in his quest for the causes of hysteria— the salient behavioral aberration of repressive nineteenth century Europe. Yet, Melville (like his contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne) had already begun to probe beyond the level of mundane appearances in his fiction. Even though some of Melville’s stories are lengthy by modern standards, the finest of them exhibit exceptional merit in the short-story genre. “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” for example, reveal a rich complexity and density which rival those of modern masterpieces of the form. Biography • Herman Melville withdrew from school at the age of twelve after the death of his father. He worked in various jobs—in a fur and cap store (with his brother), in a bank, on a farm, and as a teacher in country schools. He made two early sea voyages, one on a merchant ship to Liverpool in 1839, and one to the South Seas aboard the whaler Acushnet, in 1841. After about eighteen months, Melville and

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a friend deserted the whaler, and Melville spent a month in the Taipi Valley on the island of Nuku Hiva. Melville escaped the island aboard an Australian whaler but was imprisoned when he and ten other crewmen refused service. Again he escaped, spent some time on the island of Mooréa, then several months in Hawaii. Eventually, he joined the U.S. Navy and returned home in 1844. Out of these early sea adventures came Melville’s two successful early novels, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). His experiences aboard the whaling ships led to a novel that was not to be successful in his lifetime, Moby Dick. The failure of Moby Dick and Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (1852) left Melville financially and morally drained, but he would continue to Library of Congress produce fiction for a while, including the short stories that were guardedly constructed to seem unruffling to the sensibilities of the time but which carried submerged patterns and disturbing undertones. While still in the limelight of his early success, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of a Massachusetts chief justice. They were to have four children; three died in young adulthood and the eldest son committed suicide in his eighteenth year (1867). Melville was continually plagued by doubt, unrest, and marital problems. His later years were spent trying to adjust to his decline in status and seeking a comfortable living. In 1856, his father-in-law subsidized Melville’s travels to the Mediterranean, the Holy Land, and England, where he visited Nathaniel Hawthorne. Unable to secure a naval commission during the Civil War (1861-1865), Melville sold his estate in Massachusetts and settled in New York. Finally, in 1866, he became an inspector in the New York Customs House until, some twenty years later, an inheritance enabled him to retire. He died September 28, 1891, at the age of seventy-two. Analysis • After the critical and commercial failure of Moby Dick and Pierre, Herman Melville, who was then supporting his wife and children, his mother, and his four sisters, was desperate for money. So when he received an invitation from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine to contribute short stories at the rate of five dollars a page, he accepted. He also sold short stories to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Both magazines, however, had very strict editorial policies banning any material which might conceivably offend even the most sensitive reader on moral, social, ethical, political, or religious grounds. This was a shattering limitation to Melville, whose deepest personal

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and artistic convictions were bound up in the defiant heroes and themes of highly unconventional metaphysical speculation of Mardi and a Voyage Thither, Moby Dick, and Pierre. He genuinely questioned many of the ideas which, although they came to be freely debated, were sacrosanct in the nineteenth century. These included the existence of a personal God outside the human spirit, the importance of material goods, the existence of absolute good and absolute evil, and the right of established civil and religious authorities to impose sanctions against those who expressed ideas that differed from the ideas of the majority. Obviously, neither Putnam’s Monthly Magazine nor Harper’s New Monthly Magazine would publish stories which dealt openly with opinions that would be objectionable to many of their readers. This left Melville in an apparently unresolvable dilemma: ignore his own strongest beliefs, or allow those dependent on him to live in poverty. Not only did Melville find a solution, but he also found one which, while not ideal from an artistic standpoint, gave him a great deal of rather diabolical satisfaction. Melville’s short stories—all of which were written during this period and under these conditions—present bland and apparently harmless surfaces under which boil the same rebellion and the same questioning of established ideas that characterize his most controversial novels. Furthermore, these stories reflect, in allegorical terms, the same dilemma that produced them. Beneath apparently innocuous surface plots, Melville’s short stories center on the image of an anguished human being who is cursed with the ability to see more than the world sees; faced with the hostility that results from his challenge to the established beliefs of a complacent majority, his protagonist either fights against, withdraws from, or surrenders to the world. “Bartleby the Scrivener” • One of the most effective devices that allowed Melville to achieve his artistic purpose was his use of reassuringly respectable elderly gentlemen as narrators. In the very act of allowing them to tell their own stories, Melville injected a subtle but savage mockery which both expressed and concealed his own attitudes. For example, the narrator of Melville’s best-known short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1856), which was collected in The Piazza Tales, is an elderly lawyer reminiscing about an incident which had occurred some time earlier. The lawyer’s own blindness to the deeper meanings of life is suggested in the first paragraph of the story, when Melville describes Bartleby as “one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable.” As the reader discovers, it is primarily the physical, external facts of Bartleby’s life that are unknown; but to the materialistic lawyer, these are everything. He sees only surface reality, never inner truth, a point which is underlined in the narrator’s next sentence: “What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him.” The lawyer begins his story by describing the office on Wall Street which he occupied at the time of Bartleby’s appearance. The significance of “Wall Street” becomes apparent immediately; the lawyer has surrounded himself with walls, and his windows command no other view. When the lawyer hires Bartleby as a scrivener, or copier of law documents, he assigns Bartleby a desk near a window which faces a wall only three feet away. On one side of Bartleby’s desk is a ground glass door separating him from the other two copyists, and on the other side, the lawyer places a folding screen. Having imposed upon Bartleby his own claustrophobic setting, the lawyer gives him law documents to copy. For a while all goes well; Bartleby copies documents neatly and efficiently. On the third day, however, the lawyer asks Bartleby to examine his writing.

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In ordering him to examine his writing, the lawyer means that Bartleby should read through the copy he has made while someone else reads aloud from the original. This is an extremely boring task, but an accepted part of every scrivener’s work. Bartleby replies, “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer reacts with characteristic indecision: He feels impelled to expel Bartleby from his office, but does nothing because he is unnerved by Bartleby’s total lack of expression, by the absence of “anything ordinarily human about him.” Several days later, when Bartleby again refuses to examine his copy, the lawyer appeals to him in the name of two ideals which are of great importance to the lawyer himself: common usage and common sense. Bartleby is unmoved. Instead of asserting his own authority, the lawyer appeals not only to his other two scriveners but also to his office boy. All these uphold the lawyer’s view. He then calls upon Bartleby in the name of “duty”; again, Bartleby fails to respond to the verbal cue. The lawyer’s inability to cope with Bartleby is anticipated in the story by his tolerance of the Dickensian eccentricities of his other two scriveners. The older one, Turkey, works well in the morning, but after a lunch which is implied to be mostly liquid, he becomes reckless, irascible, and messy. The younger copyist, Nippers, is dyspeptic. His irritability takes place in the morning, while the afternoons find him comparatively calm. Thus, the lawyer gets only one good day’s work between them. Nevertheless, he always finds some rationalization for his lack of decisiveness. The first rationalization he applies to his indecision regarding Bartleby is the difficulty of coping effectively with passive resistance. The lawyer feels that Bartleby’s unaccountable displays of perversity must be the result of some involuntary aberration, and he reflects that tolerating Bartleby “will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.” Even on the comparatively rare occasions when he is sufficiently irritated to confront Bartleby with a direct order to do something which Bartleby “would prefer not to,” the lawyer always retires with dire resolutions, but no action. One Sunday morning, as the lawyer walks toward Trinity Church “to hear a celebrated preacher,” he decides to stop at his office. There he finds Bartleby in his shirt sleeves, together with evidence that he has been using the office as his home. The lawyer feels at first a sense of melancholy and pity at Bartleby’s loneliness; but as the full realization of Bartleby’s isolation dawns on the lawyer, his feelings turn to fear and revulsion. He reflects that Bartleby never reads, never converses, but only works and stands for long periods staring out at the dead walls. Bartleby’s presence in the office at night and on Sunday, when the usually bustling Wall Street is silent and uninhabited, reminds the lawyer of Bartleby’s essential difference from his own concept of humanity, which revolves around surface society. The lawyer rationalizes his unsympathetic response to these circumstances by reflecting that such depths of soul-sickness as Bartleby’s repel the human heart because common sense rejects the idea of pity where there is no realistic hope of offering aid. The lawyer makes an attempt, on Monday morning, to bring Bartleby inside the narrow circle of external reality which is all the lawyer is capable of comprehending. He asks Bartleby for details of his life: place of birth, family, and the like. Bartleby refuses with his usual “I prefer not.” The lawyer notices that he and his other copyists have begun to use that expression, and he fears that the influence of Bartleby will spread throughout the office. Bartleby further irritates the lawyer the next day by refusing to do even the one task he had, until then, been willing to do: copying law documents. When the lawyer asks the reason, Bartleby replies, “Do you not see the rea-

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son for yourself?” The lawyer does not see; and ironically, he attributes Bartleby’s refusal to copy to trouble with his eyes. When Bartleby finally makes it clear, some days later, that his refusal is final, the lawyer decides to order him to leave. Yet he feels a sense of pity for the scrivener because “he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe.” The lawyer gives Bartleby six days in which to get ready to leave; at the end of that time, Bartleby is still there. The lawyer gives him money, and, ordering Bartleby to be gone by the next day, leaves the office assuming that he will obey. The lawyer’s selfcongratulations on his masterly application of the doctrine of assumption end abruptly the next day when the lawyer discovers the scrivener still in the office. Then the lawyer rationalizes that it is his predestined fate to harbor Bartleby, and that his charity will be amply repaid in the next world. The gibes of his friends and professional associates, however, undermine his resolve, and again he orders Bartleby to depart. When he does not, the lawyer finally takes decisive action. He packs up his own belongings and moves to a new office, leaving Bartleby alone in an empty room. The lawyer soon finds, however, that he is not yet free of Bartleby. The landlord of the lawyer’s former office, unable to move Bartleby from the building even after the new tenant has expelled him from the office itself, applies to the lawyer for help. The lawyer offers Bartleby several different jobs, and even suggests that he make his home with the lawyer for a time. Bartleby, however, replies that he “would prefer not to make any change at all.” The lawyer flees the building and stays incommunicado for several days. When he cautiously returns to his office, he finds that Bartleby has been removed to the Tombs, a prison in New York City. The lawyer visits the Tombs to offer comfort, but Bartleby will not speak to him. He adjures Bartleby to look at the blue sky and the green grass, but Bartleby replies, “I know where I am,” and refuses to speak again. The lawyer leaves Bartleby in the prison yard, and on his way out arranges for him to be well fed, but Bartleby refuses to eat. When the lawyer visits Bartleby again, several days later, he finds the scrivener curled up in a ball with his head against the prison wall, dead. The narrator concludes the story by relating a rumor he has heard to the effect that Bartleby was once employed in a Dead Letter Office. He reflects on the melancholy nature of such work, handling letters containing messages of charity and hope which arrived too late to relieve those to whom they had been sent. “On errands of life,” reflects the lawyer, “these letters speed to death.” The story ends with the line, “Ah Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Although the lawyer seems to be an honest and humane man, he is actually guilty of what Melville considers society’s most prevailing sin: self-deception. He labels his pusillanimity prudence, his indecisiveness tolerance, his curiosity concern, as if by doing so he can create a reality which corresponds to his own illusions. He goes to a fashionable church not to worship the God in whom he professes to believe, but “to hear a famous preacher.” When he is upset by Bartleby’s presence in his office on a Sunday, he does not turn to God for help. Rather, he stays away from church because his perturbation makes him unfit for the only function of church-going that he is aware of: the social function. He constantly thinks in terms of material entities, particularly money and food. Yet the lawyer is not an evil man. By the standards of the world, he is exceptionally charitable and forbearing. He feels for Bartleby’s suffering, even if he never understands it; and if the help he offers his scrivener is not what Bartleby needs, still it is all the lawyer has to give. That is Melville’s point: Even the

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best of those who think conventional thoughts, order their lives by conventional rules, and never question conventional commonplaces like “common sense” and “common usage,” are incapable of understanding a man like Bartleby. Bartleby is the only character in the story who makes a point of looking at the walls, who is actually aware of the limitations with which society, represented by the lawyer, has boxed him in. Bartleby’s refusal to value meaningless tasks simply because they are important to a shallow and materialistic society reflects Melville’s own rage at being ordered to produce literary pabulum by a society which will not even try to understand his ideas. Bartleby is placed in the same economic dilemma which produced the story in which he appears: Produce what society values, regardless of individual needs and beliefs, or die. The solitary Bartleby died; and Melville, equally oppressed by being tied down to a family of dependent women and children, wrote “Bartleby the Scrivener.” “The Fiddler” • Not all the protagonists of Melville’s short stories withdraw from the world. The narrator-protagonist of “The Fiddler,” for example, responds to the world’s contempt for his poetry by abandoning his art and attempting to become a happy failure. The story opens as the young poet, Helmstone, storms out of doors after reading an unfavorable review of his recently published work. He meets a friend, Standard, who introduces him to Hautboy. The three attend a circus, where Helmstone rages at seeing the applause which the world has denied to his poetry being awarded to the antics of a clown. He marvels at the evident enjoyment of Hautboy, whom Helmstone identifies as a man of taste and judgment. Helmstone and Standard later visit Hautboy’s home, where he entertains them by playing common tunes on a fiddle. Despite the simplicity of the tunes, Helmstone is struck by Hautboy’s style; and Standard finally explains that Hautboy is actually a musical genius who has given up the fame he once had and retired to happy obscurity. The poet, resolved to imitate him, tears up his manuscripts, buys a fiddle, and goes to take lessons from Hautboy. In “The Fiddler,” Hautboy serves as a lesson in the worthlessness of fame because, having had it and rejected it, he is so outstandingly happy. This allows the poet to rationalize his own failure into a deliberate choice to turn his back on the world’s opinion of his poetry. In this story, however, as in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the narrator’s conformity to the standards of the world (in this case, by ceasing to produce poetry which the world does not appreciate) is an act of self-deception. Either Helmstone’s poetry is meritorious but misunderstood by a world whose applause is reserved for clowns, in which case he has betrayed his art by abandoning it, or his poetry is genuinely inferior, in which case he has renounced nothing because he has had nothing, and his attitude of choice is a sham. This reflects another aspect of the situation that produced “The Fiddler.” If the kind of literature Melville would have preferred to write was in fact the truth, then in ceasing to write it he was betraying himself; if it was not the truth, he was deceiving himself. These two examples illustrate the complexity and depth which underlie the surface smoothness of Melville’s short tales. His stories are allegorical in nature, expressing his ideas as parables rather than as expositions. Melville often makes his points by means of emblematic symbols, such as the walls in “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the clown in “The Fiddler.” In his short stories, as in his novels, Melville emphasizes subjectivity, relativity, and ambiguity. Different characters see the same situation from different perspectives, and there is no omniscient force within the story which

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can resolve the resulting conflict. Reality is not static and absolute, but shifting and relative; ultimate truth, if it exists at all, is unattainable. Joan DelFattore With updates by Mary Rohrberger Other major works novels: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, 1846; Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, 1847; Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, 1849; Redburn: His First Voyage, 1849; White-Jacket: Or, The World in a Man-of-War, 1850; Moby Dick: Or, The Whale, 1851; Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, 1852; Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, 1855; The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, 1857; Billy Budd, Foretopman, 1924. miscellaneous: Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, 2001 (John Bryant, editor). nonfiction: Journal up the Straits, 1935; Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent, 1948; The Letters of Herman Melville, 1960 (Merrill R. Davis and William H. Gilman, editors). poetry: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866; Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, 1876; John Marr, and Other Sailors, 1888; Timoleon, 1891; The Works of Herman Melville, 1922-1924 (volumes 15 and 16); The Poems of Herman Melville, 1976 (revised, 2000). Bibliography Adams, Michael. “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Bartleby the Scrivener” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Bryant, John, ed. A Companion to Melville Studies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Articles contributed by various scholars compose this thorough volume, which includes a biography and discussions of the short stories and other works. Some articles give insight into Melville’s thought on religion and philosophy and discuss his impact on modern culture. Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. This biography places Melville in his time and discusses the significance of his works, then and now. Fisher, Marvin. Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850’s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Explores the short fiction works with Melville’s cultural milieu of the 1850’s as a backdrop. Fisher discusses “The Fiddler,” “The Lightning Rod Man,” and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” among other short works. Hardwick, Elizabeth. Herman Melville. New York: Viking Press, 2000. Short biographical study that hits all the high points and some low ones in Melville’s life, from his early seagoing expeditions to his settling down in middle age and finally his languishing in his job as a New York customs inspector. Levine, Robert S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Indispensable tool for the student of Melville. With bibliographical references and an index. Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Newman includes “The Encantadas.” Each chapter is divided into sections: publication history, circumstances of composition, relationship to other works, profile of interpretive criticism, and bibliography.

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Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1996. This biography includes personal, psychological, social, and intellectual aspects of Herman Melville’s life, as well as his travels and adventures in the South Seas and Europe. Rollyson, Carl E., and Lisa Paddock. Herman Melville A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. Comprehensive and encyclopedic coverage of Melville’s life, works, and times in 675 detailed entries. Rosenblum, Joseph. “Benito Cereno.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “Benito Cereno” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Updike, John. “The Appetite for Truth: On Melville’s Shorter Fiction.” The Yale Review 85 (October, 1997): 24-47. Discusses Melville’s magazine short fictions of the mid-1850’s, which Updike finds to be stiffer than Melville’s earlier novels; claims that as a novelist he was exalted by Shakespearean possibilities, but as a short-story writer he saw failure everywhere.

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Born: Paris, France; September 28, 1803 Died: Cannes, France; September 23, 1870 Principal short fiction • La Double Méprise, 1833 (A Slight Misunderstanding, 1905); Mosaïque, 1833 (The Mosaic, 1905); La Vénus d’Ille, 1837 (The Venus of Ille, 1903); Colomba, 1840 (English translation, 1853); Carmen, 1845 (English translation, 1878); Nouvelles, 1852 (Stories, 1905); “Lokis,” 1869; Dernières nouvelles, 1873 (Last Stories, 1905); Carmen, and Other Stories, 1998. Other literary forms • Although Prosper Mérimée is best remembered as an important innovator of the short-story form in France, he was, as befits a member of the French intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century, a contributor to all of the literary genres. He dabbled in poetry; wrote astonishing plays, romances, and a major novel; contributed as a journalist to the art and literary criticism of his time; distinguished himself as a translator of Russian literature into French; and is largely responsible for introducing Russian literature to the French reading public. Achievements • Prosper Mérimée may not have been the greatest French writer of his time, but he was certainly one of the most versatile. Ironically, it was his lack of dedication to his craft that gave him his importance. At a time when most French writers took themselves very seriously, and when Germanic Romanticism threatened to inundate the level plain of Gallic thought, Mérimée stood indifferently on his own personal promontory, observant, uncommitted, and completely dry. He began his literary career with two of the most thorough hoaxes ever perpetrated on a reading public and ended it with a tale designed to shock the ladies of Empress Eugénie’s court. Mérimée could afford to be indifferent. Despite his claim that he wrote Carmen because he needed new pants, he never had to rely on his pen for either financial support or prestige. His success in his fiction writing was but one of his many accomplishments. He was also a lawyer and a public official important enough in his position as inspector general of public monuments to be retained through the great changes in national political power in 1830 and 1848 and to be made a senator under Louis-Napoleon. Moreover, he was a painter of some talent, a lover of some notoriety, an authority on Russian literature, a member of the French Academy, and a mentor and friend of the empress of the French. Renowned as a writer of short fiction, Mérinée has also been praised for his painstakingly researched reconstruction of the past in his historical works and his innovations in dramatic theory and practice. Named to the French Academy in 1844, Mérimée was a cosmopolitan figure in the cultural life of Europe. His work was favorably reviewed by contemporary English periodicals. Biography • Prosper Mérimée was the son of a wealthy art professor and painter; his mother was well known for her own work in the arts as a child-portraitist. Therefore, early in his life, Mérimée was surrounded not only by the arts but also by the atmo-

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sphere in which art thrives: There were constant discussions and arguments among friends, an intermingling of art forms, and, above all, an acknowledgment of the art of living. Like his close friend Stendhal, he lived through the Romantic period in France without ever becoming too deeply involved himself, although some of his plays show discernible tendencies to cater to the public’s taste of the moment. For many Romantics, art was a game, and in this sense Mérimée excelled: His first publications were elaborate put-ons. Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul (1825; the theater of Clara Gazul) purported to be a collection of plays by a Spanish actor and enjoyed great success in Paris. Two years later, Mérimée published La Guzla (an anagram of Gazul), a collection purporting to be translations into French of Balkan ballads and Library of Congress folk songs; his techniques were so sophisticated that Alexander Pushkin translated the collection into Russian and published it in his own country before the hoax became known. The success of these anonymous works as well as of others confirmed to Mérimée that his true artistic talent lay in the development of shorter fiction since the genre permitted him to exploit his quick wit, cleverness, and extraordinary powers of observation. In 1829, at the age of twenty-six, Mérimée signed his real name to several short stories that took the reading public by storm: “Mateo Falcone,” “Tamango,” and “Le Vase étrusque.” Several plays were equally successful, bringing Mérimée more and more into the public eye, where his family, friends, and connections paid off with a series of political posts. In 1833, he was appointed chief inspector of historical monuments; the position provided his aesthetic preoccupations an outlet. Thanks to his energetic dedication to his task, which required him to sacrifice his own personal artistic ambitions, Mérimée was instrumental in helping to preserve and upgrade French treasures of Roman and gothic art. Mérimée’s life was filled with successes, including being elected a French senator, remaining close to the emperor Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie, and being elected early (1844) to the Académie Française. Although he was able to indulge himself in every way, his upbringing in the world of art helped guide him instinctively toward ventures that were both noble and aesthetic; he was a learned critic, linguist, and historian with many diverse interests. Although his detractors criticized his calm dispassion, contemporary critics, armed with Mérimée’s vast correspondence, perceive that this dispassion was also a pose, concealing an artfully nurtured sensitivity.

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Analysis • In Prosper Mérimée, readers encounter an amazingly versatile writer, scholar, and public official. Best known for his short stories, which, as Henry James once commented, are full of “pregnant brevity” and a “magical after-resonance,” Mérimée also belonged to the French Romantic generation. With the Romantics, he shared a taste for exoticism, folk culture, and local color, and he practiced unsparingly that uniquely Romantic form of irony, whereby writers distance themselves from their work, mocking themselves and their own creations. In his desire, however, to shock the bourgeoisie, indulge in complex wordplays, and mock Romantic conventions, he resembles the writers of the later Young France movement. Simultaneously, his objectivity and the concision of his narratives link him with realism. “Mateo Falcone” • Typical of Prosper Mérimée’s art is “Mateo Falcone,” first published in 1829, and included in the volume Mosaïque. Set in Corsica, it is a story of rigorous family pride and personal honor. While Mateo Falcone and his wife are away caring for their flocks, their ten-year-old son Fortunato remains at home alone. A bandit, however, pursued by soldiers, arrives and gives the young boy some coins in exchange for the latter’s promise to hide him. Moments later, the soldiers arrive and question Fortunato, who disavows any knowledge of the bandit. The captain, nevertheless, is a clever person; he shows the boy a lovely silver watch that will be his if he reveals the presence of the fugitive. Unable to resist, Fortunato grasps the watch and reveals the hiding place. Mateo and his wife return at this point and hear the bandit cursing the greedy child and his family. Profoundly shocked, Mateo asks his wife if Fortunato is truly his son, for if so, Fortunato is the first member of his race to have betrayed another. Consanguinity confirmed by the mother, father and son walk into the underbrush where Fortunato is ordered to pray and is shot. One of Mérimée’s first published works in prose, this short story is powerful precisely because of the author’s meticulous control of the material. There are no digressions, no self-serving descriptions, no gratuitous details. Mérimée’s sober and rigorous discipline is in marked contrast to the exuberant mood of Honoré de Balzac, his contemporary. The tone of detachment heightens the intensity of primitive passion, giving a mythical quality to the story. Colomba • Another tale of Corsican passion is Colomba, which deals with the notion of vengeance that overpowers all other considerations. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Lieutenant Orso returns to his native Corsica to learn that his father has been killed. Rumors suggest that the Barricini family is responsible, although the official accounts exonerate them. Because of his European experience and culture, and because his long absence from the island may have dulled his native instincts, Orso’s first response is to accept things as they are. His sister Colomba, however, has been eagerly awaiting his return to avenge her father, and she will not allow Orso’s complacency. Similar to Electra in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943; The Flies, 1946), Colomba drives her brother to action, and thus the cycle begins again. With all the classical intensity of such a work as Pierre Corneille’s Horace (1640), Mérimée’s story builds as the characters fall victim to a terrifying and overpowering thirst for blood. Carmen • Perhaps the best known of Mérimée’s short stories is Carmen, the story of the love of a soldier, Don José, for Carmen, the bohemian he is supposed to escort to prison. Infatuated, he allows her to escape and then suffers the humiliation of being

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demoted for his ineptitude. His love for Carmen prompts him to abandon his career and seek her out, join her, and earn his livelihood as a smuggler. Since he exults in his love for her, he can accept his new life, and he savors his exclusive possession of such a fascinating woman. She, on the other hand, is a bohemian, both capricious and willful, dominated by fate and tradition. When Carmen’s husband reappears unannounced, Don José kills him from jealousy since he cannot endure the sight of Carmen with another man. Later, when Carmen throws down her wedding ring in a temper, Don José kills her in a fit of jealous rage. Mérimée adopted for this story the point of view of a young archaeologist, whose scientific detachment makes these extraordinary characters more believable and the overpowering presence of fate in the story more compelling. Carmen had many imitators and served as the basis for Georges Bizet’s opera of the same name, presented in Paris in 1875. The Venus of Ille • The Venus of Ille develops Mérimée’s notions of the supernatural and marks an important step in the evolution of the genre toward its climax in the works of Guy de Maupassant. On the Spanish border in the foothills of the Pyrenees, a collector discovers a lovely statue of Venus, which he cherishes all the more strongly when the local townspeople express their fear of it as an omen of evil. The collector’s son is a devotee of the game of pelote; on his wedding day he joins some friends in a game, and in order not to be encumbered by the wedding ring which he will soon be placing on his bride’s hand, he places the ring on the hand of the statue, where it is forgotten. Later, at the wedding ceremony, another ring must be used. That same afternoon, he returns to the garden to attempt to recover the ring, but it will not come off the statue’s finger. In panic because he feels bewitched, the son joins his bride in their room, where he hopes to be comforted and distracted. Once in bed, however, he is kissed by the statue, whose embrace kills him in full view of his bride, who then goes mad. The dispassion of the author in leading the reader from the festive atmosphere of the opening pages to the horror of the conclusion, and his subtle foreshadowing of the hand of fate are excellent examples of Mérimée’s art. Contrary to Gustave Flaubert and his preoccupation with subject matter that could be considered normal, ordinary, or plausible, Mérimée was fascinated by the élan vital of the Mediterranean world. Strong, colorful people from Italy, Corsica, and Spain inhabit his universe; they have violent, primitive passions and are imbued with tradition and a keenly developed sense of honor. In contrast to his contemporaries, Mérimée applied to his prose that dispassionate artistic perspective that neither praises, condemns, nor judges. Robert W. Artinian With updates by Anna M. Wittman Other major works plays: Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul, pb. 1825 (The Plays of Clara Gazul, 1825); La Jaquerie, pb. 1828; L’Occasion, pb. 1829; La Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, pb. 1829; Les Deux Héritages, pb. 1850. novels: La Famille de Carçajal, 1828; Chronique du règne de Charles IX, 1829 (A Chronicle of the Times of Charles the Ninth, 1830). miscellaneous: The Writings of Prosper Mérimée, 1905 (8 volumes). nonfiction: Histoire de don Pedre Ier, roi de Castille, 1848 (The History of Peter the Cruel, 1849; 2 volumes); Les Faux Démétrius, 1852 (Demetrius, the Impostor, 1853); Lettres

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à une inconnue, 1874 (Letters to an Unknown, 1874); Correspondance générale, 1941-1964 (17 volumes). poetry: La Guzla, 1827. Bibliography Buller, Jeffrey L. “Mateo Falcone.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Mateo Falcone” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Cogman, P. W. M. “Cheating at Narrating: Back to Mérimée’s ‘La Partie de trictrac.’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 26 (Fall/Winter, 1997/1998): 80-90. Argues that the tale embodies a tension between psychological content and the narrative technique, which seems to mock storytelling and both exploit and subvert narrative expectations; claims the story has two centers. ____________. Merimée, Colomba, and Carmen. London: Grant and Cutler, 1992. Examination of the two stories. Gould, Evelyn. The Fate of Carmen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Thoughtful study of Carmen. Mickelsen, David. “Travel, Transgression, and Possession in Mérimée’s Carmen.” Romantic Review 87 (May, 1996): 329-344. Argues that the story should be viewed as an unequal meeting of cultures in which the central figure is not the Gypsy Carmen but the French narrator visiting Spain; claims that examining the role of the narrator helps reveal the cultural imperatives operating within the story, especially its hidden colonialist stance. Rigolot, François. “Ekphrasis and the Fantastic: Genesis of an Aberration.” Comparative Literature 49 (Spring, 1997): 97-112. Discusses “The Venus of Ille” as an illumination of the fantastic as a displaced mode of ekphrastic representation. Seidler-Golding, Marianne. “Destabilized Security in Mérimée’s Short Stories.” ParolesGelées 13 (1995): 63-73. Discusses the relationship between explicit violence in Mérimée’s stories and implicit violence in the ways the violent actions are depicted, with reference to “Mateo Falcone” and “The Venus of Ille.” Smith, Maxwell A. Prosper Mérimée. New York: Twayne, 1972. Readable introductory study of the author’s life and works. Especially relevant to the study of the short prose fiction are chapters 6 through 11. Biographical and critical material are supplemented by a chronology of Mérimée’s life, a select bibliography, and an index. Stowe, Richard. “Prosper Mérimée.” In European Writers. Vol. 6 in The Romantic Century, edited by Jacques Barzun and George Stade. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985. This brief study combines a biographical overview with a discussion of the style and content of Mérimée’s major works, including the short fiction. The select bibliography includes editions, collected works, bibliographies, translations, correspondence, and biographical critical studies. Tilby, Michael. “Languages and Sexuality in Mérimée’s Carmen.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 15, no. 3 (1979): 255-263. An analysis of the fictional world of Carmen, focusing on its tight and natural organization.

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Yukio Mishima Mishima, Yukio

Born: Tokyo, Japan; January 14, 1925 Died: Tokyo, Japan; November 25, 1970 Principal short fiction • Kaibutsu, 1950; Tfnorikai, 1951; Manatsu no shi, 1953 (Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories, 1966). Other literary forms • Yukio Mishima wrote more than eighty short stories; twenty novels; more than twenty plays, several in the manner of the classical Nf dramas, as well as plays for the Kabuki theater; several essay collections; two travel books; a bit of poetry; and a handful of works that defy clear-cut classification. Achievements • The collected works of Yukio Mishima form thirty-six volumes, more than the literary production of any other writer of his time. The Japanese writer best known outside Japan, from the viewpoint of Western critics he is the most gifted of the post-World War II writers. Mishima also combined his knowledge of classic Japanese literature and language with his wide knowledge of Western literature to produce plays for the Kabuki theater and the first truly successful modern Nf plays. Although uneven in some volumes, style is the most distinctive feature of Mishima’s work. His writing is characterized by beautiful but rarely lyric passages. Figures of speech, notable in his later works, are also present in his juvenilia. He consistently used ornate language, though he could also write realistic dialogue. A Nobel Prize hopeful at least two times, Mishima is among those Japanese writers closest to attaining the rank of master of twentieth century fiction. Biography • Kimitake Hiraoka, who began using the pseudonym Yukio Mishima in 1941, was the son of a middle-class government official who worked in Tokyo. When Mishima was less than two months old, his paternal grandmother, Natsu, took the boy to her living quarters; his mother, Shizue, felt helpless to protest, and his father, Azusa, appeared to be totally subjected to his mother’s will. In 1931, Mishima was enrolled in the Gakushnin (the Peer’s School), a school attended largely by young aristocrats. In due time, he graduated at the head of his class and received a silver watch from the emperor personally at the imperial palace. By this time, his literary gifts had already become evident, and “Hanazakari no mori” (“The Forest in Full Bloom”) was published in 1941. In 1946, Mishima entered the Tokyo Imperial University to study law. After being employed for a time at the Ministry of Finance, he resigned in 1948 to devote full time to writing. The publication of Kamen no kokuhaku (1949; Confessions of a Mask, 1958) established him as a literary figure. The 1950’s were eventful years in Mishima’s life. During this decade, he produced several novels, two of them major successes. He also traveled to the United States, Brazil, and Europe, and his visit to Greece in particular was a highlight because of its classical associations. During these years, Shiosai (1954; The Sound of Waves, 1956), a best-seller, was published and film rights were sold, and Shiroari no su (1956; the nest of the white ants) established his reputation as a playwright. He also began a body-

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building program (having been a spare, sickly child) and married Yoko Sugiyama in 1958. During the first half of the 1960’s, writing plays occupied Mishima’s time. He trained at the Jieitai (Self-Defense Forces) bases and traveled periodically. He was a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in 1968, the year that his mentor Yasunari Kawabata won. The short story “Yfkoku” (“Patriotism”), in which the hara-kiri (ritual suicide by disembowelment) of a young patriot is described, was published in 1961. He also acted in his first film, a gangster story. By this time, Mishima’s obsession with death was manifested both in word and in deed. He developed a plan for organizing a private army to be used somehow in his death, a step labeled foolish by his friends and ignored by others. During the final five months of his life, he completed the third and fourth books of his tetralogy Hfjf no umi (1969-1971; The Sea of Fertility, 1972-1974), and on November 25, 1970, he delivered the final volume to the magazine that was publishing it in installments. Later that day, following his plan and schedule implicitly, Mishima went to the Ichigaya Self-Defense headquarters with a group of his Shield Society (a private legion) and, following a nationalistic speech, committed ritual seppuku. Analysis • The world will never know what course the literary career of Yukio Mishima might have taken had he not died at the age of forty-five. Nevertheless, he was the best known of post-World War II writers among critics and readers outside Japan, and he received a fair share of attention within his own country. Not all of his work was of equal literary merit, but a certain unevenness is almost certain for a prolific writer. Apart from his style, usually ornate and meticulously wrought, Mishima’s success stemmed in part from his effectiveness in capturing the sense of void and despair that typified many Japanese during the postwar period. Another key to his success lay in his unusual interest in Japanese cultural tradition. His abilities, unique among his peers, enabled him to write in the genre of classical Kabuki and Nf plays. “The Forest in Full Bloom” • Mishima’s early works represent a period that both clarified the directions in which his talents would go and developed features that would become trademarks of his later works. He came to realize that poetry was not to be his major effort. In 1941, the year he graduated from the Peer’s School, he published his first long work, “The Forest in Full Bloom” in October, at the age of sixteen. The maturity of style in this juvenile work amazed his mentors and peers. The sophisticated word choice is noteworthy, but its maturity goes much further; it establishes the major theme of his life’s work, for he was well on his way to evolving the aesthetic formula that would distinguish his work: Longing leads to beauty; beauty generates ecstasy; ecstasy leads to death. Likewise, the sea, an important motif throughout his writing, is associated with death. Indeed, as Donald Keene has noted, Mishima seemed to be “intoxicated with the beauty of early death.” Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories • Preoccupation with death is obvious even in the title of the short-story collection that constitutes Mishima’s major short fiction, Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories. The title story, “Death in Midsummer,” takes an epigraph from one of Charles Baudelaire’s poems that translates as “Death affects us more deeply under the stately reign of summer.” The psychological realism of Mishima’s presentation of the family’s reactions to three deaths in the family is the

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focus of the story. Masaru and Tomoko Ikuta have two sons, Kiyoo and Katsuo, and a daughter, Keiko. Yasue, Tomoko’s sister-in-law, is baby-sitting the children while Tomoko takes an afternoon nap. Despite warnings to the children against wandering away, during a brief moment when Yasue is preoccupied with other thoughts, two of the children disappear, leaving the three-year-old Katsuo alone, crying. When Yasue realizes what has happened, she is stricken with a heart attack and dies. Informed of Yasue’s accident, Tomoko “felt a sort of sweet emptiness come over her. She was not sad.” (This is only one of several passages in which a dearth of feeling is expressed.) Only then does she inquire about the children; she finds Katsuo, who informs her that “Kiyoo . . . Keiko . . . all bubbles.” Tomoko is afraid; she sends her husband a telegram telling him that Yasue is dead and that the two children are missing, although by now it is clear that the children have drowned. Masaru prepares to go down to the resort where the family was vacationing. Devoid of any emotion, he feels more like a detective speculating on the circumstances of death than a distraught father. Intuitively, he senses that the children are dead, not simply missing. When he arrives at the resort, he hears that three people have died, and his thoughts turn to how to approach his wife. Funeral preparations are made. Tomoko is conscious of the incongruity of her almost insane grief alongside her businesslike attention to detail and her large appetite at such a time. She vacillates between a feeling of guilt and her knowledge that she did not cause the deaths. Dissatisfied, she believes that Yasue is lucky to be dead because she does not have to feel that she has been “demoted and condemned” by relatives. Mishima here intrudes to comment that although Tomoko does not know it, it is her “poverty of human emotions” that is most troubling her. On the surface, life returns to normal, but Tomoko associates almost everything with the tragic accident, while Masaru takes refuge in his work. Tomoko questions the fact that “she was living, the others were dead. That was the great evil. How cruel it was to have to be alive.” Autumn comes and goes; and life becomes more peaceful, but Tomoko comes to feel as if she is waiting for something. To try to assuage her empty feelings, Tomoko seeks outside activities. She asks herself why she had not “tried this mechanical cutting off of the emotions earlier.” Winter comes. Tomoko, who is to have another child, admits for the first time that the pain of the lost children was gone, but she cultivates forgetfulness in order not to have to deal with her feelings further. After two years, one summer day, Tomoko asks Masaru to return with her to the beach. Grudgingly, he consents. Tomoko is silent and spends much of her time gazing at the sea, as if she were waiting for something. Masaru wants to ask but then realizes that “he thought he knew without asking.” As with much Japanese literature, the cycle of the seasons is prominent. Deaths come in midsummer, when things should be flourishing and in full bloom. When winter comes, the final ritual of burying the ashes of the dead is completed. Tomoko becomes pregnant, and Momoko is born the following summer. Again, it is summer when she returns to the beach. The cryptic ending is typical of some, not all, of Mishima’s work. One may speculate that the return to the beach in the summer is a sign of acceptance or an effort by Tomoko to come to terms with her own identity. Possibly, her waiting represents some sense of communication with the spirits of the dead or even indicates a longing for her own death. A less gloomy interpretation of the return to the beach, however, may recall Baudelaire’s line suggesting that death in summer is out of place; death is for the winter, when nature, too, is desolate.

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“The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love” • More often anthologized, the story “Shigadera Shfnin no Koi” (“The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love”) manifests Mishima’s familiarity with classical Japanese literature. At the same time, the central theme of the story is one that is common in the West but relatively rare in Japanese literature: the inner conflict between worldly love and religious faith. A brief account in a fourteenth century war chronicle of an elderly priest falling in love with the imperial concubine provides the subject matter of the story. It is the motivation of the concubine and the priest—rather than the events—that is the focus of the story. The priest is an exemplar of virtue; he is old and doddering, physically a “bag of bones”; it is unlikely that he would become infatuated with a beautiful young woman. When the concubine comes to the area to view the springtime foliage, the priest “unwittingly” glances in her direction, not expecting to be overwhelmed by her beauty. He is, however, and he realizes that “what he had imagined to be completely safe had collapsed in ruins.” Never had he broken his vow of chastity, but he realizes that this new love has taken hold of him. The concubine, having forgotten their meeting, is reminded of it when she hears a rumor that an old priest has behaved as if he were crazed after having seen her. She, too, is without blemish in that, while she performed her duties to the emperor, she has never given her love to any suitor. The priest is now tormented by the implications of this love in relation to his attaining enlightenment. He longs to see the lady once more, confident in his delusion that this will provide escape from his present feelings. He goes to her garden, but when the concubine sees him, she orders that his presence be ignored; she is frightened when he continues to stand outside all night. The lady tells herself that this is a one-sided affair, that he can do nothing to her to threaten her security in the Pure Land. Finally, she admits him, and her white hand emerges from beneath the dividing blind that separates them, as custom decrees. She waits, but the priest says nothing. Finally, he releases her hand and departs. Rumor has it that a few days later, the priest “achieved his final liberation” and the concubine begins copying rolls of religious sutras. Thus, the love story between these two who both are faithful to the tenets of Jfdo Buddhism focuses on the point at which the ideal world structure that each one envisioned was in this incident “balanced between collapse and survival.” If nothing more, the story reflects the aesthetic formed early in Mishima’s life, which holds that beauty causes ecstasy which, in turn, causes death. “Patriotism” • The story “Yfkoku” (“Patriotism”), which was made into a film, is the first of several that focus on ideals of young military officers of the 1930’s. To understand this work, it is important to grasp the meaning of the translation of the word “patriotism.” The word yfkoku means grieving over a country rather than loving a country (aikoku), which is a positive emotion. Thus, it is autobiographical in that it expresses Mishima’s own grief over the country that he perceived to be in disorder. “Patriotism,” according to Mishima’s own evaluation, contains “both the best and the worst features” of his writing. The story concerns a young lieutenant, Shinji Takeyama, who commits seppuku because he feels that he cannot do what he has been ordered to do: lead an attack on the young rebels in the Ni Ni Roku Incident, an unsuccessful coup d’état that occurred on February 26, 1936, in Tokyo. Although Mishima was only eleven years old at the time of the incident, its influence on him provided the germ for two other works, a play Tfka no Kiku (1961; tenth-day chrysanthemums) and Eirei no Koe (voices of the heroic dead). These works confirm Mishima’s growing

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dedication to imperialism. The story contains what is possibly the most detailed account of the samurai rite of seppuku in all of Japanese literature. Almost everything spoken or written by Mishima fits into a personal cosmology that evolved and was refined throughout his life; the living out of this system led to his death: Beauty leads to ecstasy, ecstasy to death. Literature was central to Mishima’s cosmos and was virtually inseparable from it. To understand one is to comprehend the other. Mishima was obsessed with death, and to create beauty in his works, in his system, led almost inevitably to his death. Victoria Price Other major works plays: Kantan, wr. 1950, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1957); Dfjfji, pb. 1953 (English translation, 1966); Yoro no himawari, pr., pb. 1953 (Twilight Sunflower, 1958); Aya no tsuzumu, pr. 1955, pb. 1956 (The Damask Drum, 1957); Shiroari no su, pr., pb. 1955; Aoi no ue, pr., pb. 1956 (The Lady Aoi, 1957); Hanjo, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1957); Kindai nfgakushn, pb. 1956 (includes Kantan, The Damask Drum, The Lady Aoi, Hanjo, and Sotoba Komachi; Five Modern Nf Plays, 1957); Sotoba Komachi, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1957); Tfka no kiku, pr., pb. 1961; Sado kfshaku fujin, pr., pb. 1965 (Madame de Sade, 1967); Suzakuke no metsubf, pr., pb. 1967; Waga tomo Hittor3, pb. 1968, pr. 1969 (My Friend Hitler, 1977); Chinsetsu yumiharizuki, pr., pb. 1969. anthology: New Writing in Japan, 1972 (with Geoffrey Bownas). novels: Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949 (Confessions of a Mask, 1958); Ai no kawaki, 1950 (Thirst for Love, 1969); Shiosai, 1954 (The Sound of Waves, 1956); Kinkakuji, 1956 (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1959); Kyfko no ie, 1959; Utage no ato, 1960 (After the Banquet, 1963); Gogo no eikf, 1963 (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1965); Kinu to meisatsu, 1964 (Silk and Insight, 1998); Forbidden Colors, 1968 (includes Kinjiki); Hfjf no umi, 1969-1971 (collective title for the following 4 novels; The Sea of Fertility: A Cycle of Four Novels, 1972-1974); Haru no yuki, 1969 (Spring Snow, 1972); Homba, 1969 (Runaway Horses, 1973); Akatsuki no tera, 1970 (The Temple of Dawn, 1973); Tennin gosui, 1971 (The Decay of the Angel, 1974). miscellaneous: Hanazakari no mori, 1944 (short fiction and plays); Eirei no Koe, 1966 (short fiction and essays). nonfiction: Hagakure nyumfn, 1967 (The Way of the Samurai, 1977); Taiyf to tetsu, 1968 (Sun and Steel, 1970); Yukio Mishima on “Hagakure”: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, 1978. Bibliography Keene, Donald. “Mishima in 1958.” The Paris Review 37 (Spring, 1995): 140-160. Keene recalls his 1958 interview with Mishima, in which Mishima discussed influences, his delight in “cruel stories,” the importance of traditional Japanese theater for him, and his novels and his other writing. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Mishima: “Death in Midsummer” (vol. 2), “Patriotism” (vol. 6), and “Swaddling Clothes” (vol. 7). Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Chapter 6 in part 2, “Mute’s Rage,” provides studies of

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two of Mishima’s major novels, Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, as well as comments on works that Miyoshi considers to be important. Includes notes and an index. Napier, Susan J. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and be Kenzaburf. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Napier uncovers shocking similarities as well as insightful dissimilarities in the work of Mishima and be and ponders each writer’s place in the tradition of Japanese literature. Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography. 1974. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2000. The classic biography of Mishima, with a new preface by Nathan. Index. Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. Rev. ed. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. Following a personal impression of Mishima, Scott-Stokes presents a five-part account of Mishima’s life, beginning with the last day of his life. The author then returns to Mishima’s early life and the making of the young man as a writer. Part 4, “The Four Rivers,” identifies the rivers of writing, theater, body, and action, discussing in each subsection relevant events and works. Part 5 is a “Postmortem.” Supplemented by a glossary, chronology, bibliography, and index. Starrs, Roy. Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Critical and interpretive look at sex and violence in Mishima’s work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976. Mishima is one of eight Japanese writers treated in this volume. Although Ueda discusses certain novels in some detail, for the most part his discussion centers on philosophical and stylistic matters and suggests that Mishima’s pessimism derived more from his appraisal of the state of human civilization than from his views on the nature of literature. Includes a brief bibliography and an index. Wolfe, Peter. Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum, 1989. Wolfe asserts that common sense explains very little about motives in Mishima. “What makes him unusual is his belief that anything of value exists in close proximity to death.” Yourcenar, Marguerite. Mishima: A Vision of the Void. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. This edition of a biography of Mishima published in 1986 contains a foreword by Donald Richie, a well-known critic and Japan expert.

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Bharati Mukherjee Mukherjee, Bharati

Born: Calcutta, West Bengal, India; July 27, 1940 Principal short fiction • Darkness, 1985; The Middleman, and Other Stories, 1988; “The Management of Grief,” 1988. Other literary forms • In addition to several volumes of short fiction, Bharati Mukherjee has written seven novels, including The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), Wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), The Holder of the World (1993), Leave It to Me (1997); Desirable Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). Her nonfiction writings include a travel memoir, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977; with her husband Clark Blaise); a nonfiction critique of Canadian racism, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987; in collaboration with Blaise); a political treatise, Kautilya’s Concept of Diplomacy (1976); the nonfiction studies Political Culture and Leadership in India: A Study of West Bengal (1991) and Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992); and several essays and articles. Achievements • Bharati Mukherjee occupies a distinctive place among first-generation North American writers of Indian origin. She has received a number of grants from the Canada Arts Council (1973-1974, 1977), the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (1976-1977), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1978-1979), and the Canadian government (1982). In 1980, she won first prize from the Periodical Distribution Association for her short story “Isolated Incidents.” In 1981, she won the National Magazine Award’s second prize for her essay “An Invisible Woman.” Her story “Angela” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1985, and “The Tenant” was included in The Best American Short Stories 1987. Her second collection of short stories The Middleman, and Other Stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988. Biography • Bharati Mukherjee was born into a well-to-do, traditional Bengali Brahman family in the Calcutta suburb of Ballygunge on July 27, 1940. Her Hindu family’s affluence buffered them from the political crises of independence and partition that engulfed the Indian subcontinent in the 1940’s, and by the end of that troubled decade her father, Sudhir Lal Mukherjee, a chemist and the proprietor of a successful pharmaceutical company, had moved the family first to London (1948-1950) and then to Switzerland (1951) before returning them to India. Accordingly, Mukherjee explains, she and her two sisters (one older, one younger) “were born both too late and not late enough to be real Indians.” Her educational experiences abroad had made her fluent in English at an early age, so that once back in India she began attending Calcutta’s Loreto Convent School, an elite institution for girls run by Irish Catholic nuns, where she occasionally glimpsed Mother Teresa early in her ministry to the city’s poor. At the time, Mukherjee herself followed the habits of her caste and preferred to turn away from the misery on the streets around her rather than question or reflect upon it. Neither did she consciously plan to deviate very far from the traditional path of

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Indian womanhood expected of her; even her early interest in becoming a writer, fed by an ever-expanding fascination with the European novels to which her travels and education had exposed her, was tolerated because she was female—such impractical TO VIEW IMAGE, aspirations would have been quickly discouraged in a son, she believes. PLEASE SEE She has praised her mother for her PRINT EDITION courageous insistence that she reOF THIS BOOK. ceive a top-flight English education so that she “would not end up, she said, as chattel to a traditional Bengali husband.” Although her father intended to have his middle daughter marry a bridegroom of the family’s choosing from within their own strictly defined social class, he encouraged her intellectual aspirations in the meantime, and so Mukherjee Tom Victor earned an honors bachelor’s degree in English from Calcutta University in 1959 and a master’s degree in English and ancient Indian culture in 1961 from the University of Baroda. She then joined “the first generation of Indians who even thought of going to the United States rather than automatically to England” when she accepted a Philanthropic Educational Organization International Peace Scholarship to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, receiving a master of fine arts degree in 1963. During that time she also met Clark Blaise, an American writer of Canadian descent, whom she married on September 13, 1963, in an action that, she explains, “cut me off forever from the rules and ways of upper-middle-class life in Bengal, and hurled me into a New World life of scary improvisations and heady explorations.” The couple would have two sons, Bart and Bernard, and would, over the course of their long marriage, collaborate on a number of book projects, most strikingly Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), a travel journal of their respective observations during a trip together to India. Having already taught at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 1966 Mukherjee moved with Blaise to Montreal, Canada, where she assumed a teaching position at McGill University, which she held until 1978. She completed a doctoral degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1969 and published her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), soon thereafter. In 1972 Mukherjee became a Canadian citizen but quickly grew disenchanted with her new country as she experienced the persistent racial discrimination and harassment suffered by Indians and other immigrants of color; she registered her protest in a celebrated article entitled “An Invisible Woman” and in several short stories. After fourteen years in Canada, a period during which she published a second novel, Wife, along with Days and Nights in Calcutta, Mukherjee and Blaise brought their family to the United States and became permanent residents in 1980. In 19761977 she served as director of the Shastri Institute in New Delhi, India. She became

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writer-in-residence and distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In later years she and Blaise jointly published The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987), which pointedly documents what she regards as Canada’s refusal “to renovate its national self-image to include its changing complexion.” In 1987 Mukherjee became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Over the course of her career she has taught in numerous American universities, including Emory University, Skidmore College, Columbia University, Queens College, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since the 1980’s Mukherjee has regarded herself squarely as an “American” writer (categorically eschewing hyphenated Asianor Indian-American labels) and describes her geographic relocation as the seminal moment in her artistic maturation. In Canada she had come to view herself, for the first time in her life, as a late-blooming colonial who writes in a borrowed language (English), lives permanently in an alien country, and is read, when read at all, in another alien country, the United States. That multilayered dispossession ended in the United States as she found herself moving “away from the aloofness of expatriation to the exuberance of immigration.” The ideological legitimacy of the immigrant story in American culture has in fact become one of her central literary themes, one in which she explores “America” as “an idea” and “a stage for transformation.” Her impressive literary production since arriving in the United States has included a number of critically acclaimed novels centered on strong-willed American or Americanized heroines (Jasmine, The Holder of the World, and Leave It to Me) and several expansive short-story collections (Darkness in 1985 and The Middleman, and Other Stories in 1988, the latter the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award). Her enthusiasm has not blinded her to political backlash against America’s most recent newcomers; in 1997 she warned in Mother Jones magazine against a spreading “cultural crisis” wherein “questions such as who is an American and what is American culture are being posed with belligerence, and being answered with violence.” Because she sees such polarization as having “tragic” consequences not only for its victims but also for the unique “founding idea of ‘America’” itself, which rejected “easy homogeneity” for a “new version of utopia,” she urges instead, “We must think of American culture and nationhood as a constantly reforming, transmogrifying ‘we’ that works in the direction of both the newcomer and the culture receiving her.” Analysis • Bharati Mukherjee has herself become one of the literary voices whose skillful depictions of the contemporary non-European immigrant experience in the United States she credits with “subverting the very notion of what the American novel is and of what American culture is.” In Canada she kept her “Indianness” smugly intact despite—or because of—a painful awareness of her displacement in the West. She consciously regarded other immigrants, as she notes in the introduction to Darkness, as “lost souls, put upon and pathetic,” in contrast to the more ironically sophisticated postcolonials with whom she identified: people “who knew all too well who and what they were, and what foul fate had befallen them,” and who therefore escaped the emotional turmoil of divided loyalties or assimilationist incongruities. After arriving in the United States, Mukherjee found herself drawn toward those same immigrant “outcasts” she once pitied—and not just the ones from the subcontinent. In Mukherjee’s two critically acclaimed short-story collections she sets out to

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“present a full picture, a complicated picture of America,” one in which evil as well as good operates and where “we, the new pioneers, who are still thinking of America as a frontier country . . . are improvising morality as we go along.” Although she unblinkingly paints the bigotries that bedevil her protagonists, she resists casting them as victims because they don’t think of themselves as victims. On the contrary, they think of themselves as conquerors. We have come not to passively accommodate ourselves to someone else’s dream of what we should be. We’ve come to America, in a way, to take over. To help build a new culture . . . with the same guts and energy and feistiness that the original American Pilgrims had. Darkness • Mukherjee’s first collection of short fiction is something of a transitional work in documenting the shift in sensibility that occurred when she left Canada for the United States. Three of its twelve stories reveal a lingering bitterness about Canadian prejudice toward its Indian citizens and concern themselves with the problems that such prejudice generates in the lives of individuals still wrestling with the question of whether they believe themselves to be in voluntary exile or hopeful selftransformation. The stories set in the United States, by way of contrast, regard the immigrant experience more dynamically and offer “a set of fluid identities to be celebrated” as a result of Mukherjee’s having personally “joined imaginative forces with an anonymous, driven underclass of semi-assimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire for permanent return.” In this new context her own “Indianness” functions less “as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration” than as “a metaphor, a particular way of partially comprehending the world.” The U.S.-based Indian protagonists of Darkness generate stories “of broken identities and discarded languages, and the will to bond oneself to a new community, against the ever-present fear of failure or betrayal.” In an interview published in The Canadian Fiction Magazine, Mukherjee stated, “My stories center on a new breed and generation of North American pioneers.” The “new pioneers” inhabiting her fictional world include a wide variety of immigrant characters—most of them India-born and others, increasingly, from Third World countries—who pull up their traditional roots and arrive in the New World with dreams of wealth, success, and freedom. Her first collection of short stories, Darkness, focuses on immigrant Indians in North America and deals primarily with the problems of expatriation, immigration, and cross-cultural assimilation. Of the twelve stories in this collection, three reflect on the Canadian situation and the rest are set in the United States. Mukherjee calls the Canadian stories “uneasy stories about expatriation,” as they stem from the author’s personal encounters with racial prejudice in Canada. “The World According to Hsü” • Among the Canadian pieces in Darkness, a notably painful and uneasy story about expatriation and racial prejudice, “The World According to Hsü,” explores the diasporic consciousness of Ratna Clayton, an Indian woman married to a Canadian professor of psychology at McGill University, Montreal. Her husband, Graeme Clayton, has been offered the chair at the University of Toronto. Ratna dreads the thought of moving to Toronto: “In Toronto, she was not Canadian, not even Indian. She was something called, after the imported idiom of London, a Paki. And for Pakis, Toronto was hell.” Hoping that a vacation would be

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the ideal setting to persuade his wife to move, Graeme arranges a trip to a beautiful African island. Upon their arrival, they find themselves caught in the midst of a revolution and constrained by a night curfew. The threat of violence unleashes memories of Toronto in Ratna’s mind: A week before their flight, a Bengali woman was beaten and nearly blinded on the street. And the week before that an eight-year-old Punjabi boy was struck by a car announcing on its bumper: KEEP CANADA GREEN. PAINT A PAKI. At the dinner table, when her husband reads her an article by Kenneth J. Hsü about the geological collision of the continents, Ratna wonders why she had to move to Toronto to experience a different kind of collision—racial and cultural. Finally, she brings herself to accept her situation when she realizes that “no matter where she lived, she would never feel at home again.” “Tamurlane” • Another story in Darkness, “Tamurlane,” depicts the lives of Indian émigrés at the opposite end of the class hierarchy from the one Ratna occupies. It dramatizes the precarious situation of illegal aliens who, lured by the dream of a better life, are smuggled into Canada, where they are forced to lead an anonymous, subhuman, underground existence, sleeping in shifts and living in constant fear of being raided by immigration authorities. “Was this what I fled Ludhiana for?” poignantly asks the narrator, an illegal Indian working as a waiter at a dingy Indian restaurant in Toronto. The title of the story (alluding to Tamerlane, a lame Mongol warrior) refers to the restaurant’s chef Gupta, who had been maimed six years earlier when he was thrown on the subway tracks. During a raid on illegals at the restaurant, Gupta orders the Mounties to leave. When they refuse and threaten to use force against him, he picks up a cleaver and brings it down on the outstretched hand of one of the policemen. He then defiantly holds his Canadian passport in front of his face. “That way,” the story ends, “he never saw the drawn gun, nor did he try to dodge the single bullet.” “Nostalgia” • The immigrant experience dramatized in the American stories is less about the humiliations inflicted on the newcomer by New World intolerance than about the inner struggles of that newcomer in mediating between the pull of old cultural loyalties and the pressures to assimilate to the new context. Dr. Manny Patel, in “Nostalgia,” is an Indian psychiatrist working at a state hospital in Queens, New York. His American Dream has come true; he lives in an expensive home, drives a red Porsche sports car, is married to an American nurse, and sends his son to school at Andover. Counting his manifold acquisitions and blessings, he regards himself as “not an expatriate but a patriot.” Yet he knows that, despite becoming a U.S. citizen, he will forever continue to hover between the Old World and the New. Being the only child of his parents, he feels it is his duty to return to India and look after them in their old age. Caught in a mood of remorse and longing, he drives one day into Manhattan, is smitten by the beauty of an Indian saleswoman, Padma, and invites her on a date, which she readily accepts. They go to an Indian restaurant for dinner and then to bed at an expensive hotel. The whole experience makes him so nostalgic that he wishes “he had married an Indian woman” and “had any life but the one he had chosen.” At the end of their tryst, Padma’s uncle enters the hotel room with a passkey and accuses Dr. Manny of the rape of his minor niece. Shocked and humiliated, Dr. Manny discovers that “the goddess of his dreams” was nothing more than a common

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prostitute in collusion with her uncle-pimp to deceive him for profit. The uncle extorts not only seven hundred dollars but also a physician’s note on hospital stationery to secure immigration for a nephew. Afterward Dr. Manny defecates into the bathroom sink, squatting as he had done in his father’s home, and writes “WHORE” on the bathroom mirror and floor with his excrement, now become “an artist’s medium.” Just before dawn he drives home, doubly chastened by having succumbed so foolishly to the siren’s song of a culture to which he no longer truly belongs and whose gilded memories he now sees for what they are. As he approaches his home he finds the porch light still on, “glow[ing] pale in the brightening light of morning,” and he decides to take his wife on a second honeymoon to the Caribbean, in effect repledging his troth to the tangible reality of America itself. “A Father” • The conflict between Old World and New World takes a different form in “A Father.” Mr. Bhowmick, a traditional Bengali, works as a metallurgist with General Motors and lives in Detroit with his Americanized wife and a twenty-six-year-old engineer daughter. He worships the goddess Kali in his home shrine, believes in the sanctity of Hindu superstitions, and lives in constant awe of the unseen powers he believes govern his destiny. Every day he finds himself making frequent compromises between his beliefs and the American pragmatism that surrounds him. When he discovers, to his horror, that his unmarried daughter is pregnant, his first reaction is that she should get an abortion to save the family honor. He blames his wife for this unhappy situation because coming to the United States was her idea. Then he tries to be reasonable. He pities the double life between conflicting values that his daughter must live; he hopes that maybe she has already married secretly; he prays that his hypothetical son-in-law turns out to be a white American. He even secretly enjoys the thought of having a grandson (for he is sure, in this rosier scenario, that the child must be a male). Thus he reconciles himself to this new situation without resorting to the draconian measures a father in India would be expected to take, only to be confronted with an even more contemporary twist: His daughter reveals that she was impregnated by artificial insemination and with all the fury of Kali herself bluntly counters her parents’ revulsion at the “animality” of such calculated procreative behavior with assurances that she has secured a sperm donor who meets all the standard bourgeois criteria for a good mate, just as they would have done in arranging a “good” marriage for her were they still in India: “You should be happy—that’s what marriage is all about, isn’t it? Matching bloodlines, matching horoscopes, matching castes, matching, matching, matching.” Her caustic deflation of the traditions he still venerates defeats his effort to rise to the challenges of modernity, and he strikes out at her, hitting her swelling belly with the rolling pin he has just taken away from his wife. The story ends with Mrs. Bhowmick forced into an unthinkable violation of family honor: She calls the police, thus relying on outsiders to intervene publicly in the selfdestruction of her family. In the ways it pulls the reader’s sympathies back and forth inconclusively among its characters, “A Father” simulates the actual see-sawing of loyalties characteristic of the multigenerational acculturation process itself. The Middleman, and Other Stories • Although Darkness focuses primarily on the experience of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, Mukherjee’s second collection, The Middleman, and Other Stories, is broader in range and scope, as it explores the

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American experience of immigrants from across the developing world, including India, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Uganda, and Vietnam. Moreover, four of the eleven stories in this volume have white American protagonists who offer another perspective on the contemporary immigrant situation. (It is worth noting, however, that the concluding piece, “The Management of Grief,” once more returns to Mukherjee’s deep animus toward the special form of bigotry suffered by Asians in Canada; it renders fictively the same subject with which she and Blaise have dealt in The Sorrow and the Terror.) Virtually all of the stories examine the compromises, losses, and adjustments involved in the process of acculturating newcomers to American life and remaking American culture to reflect their presence: In fact, the volume virtually hums with the hustle of modern American cultural diversity played out across an equally various set of U.S. locations ranging from Atlanta to Detroit to Miami to Iowa. Most of the “new pioneers” in this collection are, in a metaphoric sense, middlemen and women caught between two worlds and cultures (and sometimes more), as even a brief sampling of the cast of characters suggests: an Amerasian child reunited with her veteran father; a Trinidadian “mother’s helper”; a fully assimilated third-generation Italian American and her Afghan lover; an Iraqi Jew being chased by police in Central America; a Filipino makeup girl. Such international pedigrees bespeak the widespread political breakdowns that on a shrinking planet increasingly link people who once inhabited completely different worlds. She consistently uses the cross-cultural romance as locus for the societal frictions and emotional barriers that exemplify and exacerbate the problems of communication across culturally constructed differences. The faith of the newest aspirants to the American Dream is frequently contrasted with the decadent malaise of “ugly Americans,” who no longer have to travel abroad to betray or defile peoples of other lands. The vigorous immediacy of the American vernacular (to which Mukherjee confesses a delighted addiction) penetrates the speech of these characters, many of whom speak directly to the reader in the first person, and conveys the volatile excitement of the dreams ignited in them by what Mukherjee calls “the idea of America.” The volume’s title story is narrated by Alfred Judah from Baghdad, an individual regularly mistakenly for an Arab or an Indian. When not on the job, he lives in Flushing, Queens, and he was once married to an American, but he nonetheless feels like an eternal outsider, for “there are aspects of American life I came too late for and will never understand.” As such he remains on the margins by working for an illicit border-jumper, gun smuggler Clovis T. Ransome. In this story Judah’s job is as middleman delivering contraband weapons, when the armed uprising in the Central American country where they had been operating in callous indifference to the politics of their customers violently ends their exploitative enterprise and leaves Judah (through the casual intervention of Ransome’s bloodthirsty mistress and his own recent lover Maria) to negotiate his way back to “civilization” by drawing yet again upon his basic repertoire of survival in the New World: “There must be something worth trading in the troubles I’ve seen.” The Middleman, and Other Stories, like Darkness before it, contains many melodramatic situations and a pronounced streak of violence. Mukherjee does not always provide sufficient context for the behaviors and attitudes of her characters. Nevertheless, she imparts a potent voice to these “new pioneers” and reveals the dynamic world of America’s newest wave of self-inventors—people often invisible to those in the mainstream. Many of them suffer from racism and prejudice; others seem wel-

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come only in the shady underworlds of sex, crime, and drugs; and some merely scramble for a living in their struggle for survival. To adapt to their new milieu, even professional men and women have to make compromises and trade-offs between their old belief systems and the New World ethos. In the process, many suffer cultural disorientation and alienation and undergo traumatic changes—psychological, cultural, linguistic. Yet Mukherjee appears to have no doubt that such a break is desirable. As she has told journalist Bill Moyers, America is a total and wondrous invention. Letting go of the old culture, allowing the roots to wither is natural; change is natural. But the unnatural thing is to hang on, to retain the old world . . . I think if you’ve made the decision to come to America, to be an American, you must be prepared to really, emotionally, become American and put down roots. . . . In doing that, we very painfully, sometimes violently, murder our old selves. . . . I want to think that it’s a freeing process. In spite of the pain, in spite of the violence, in spite of the bruising of the old self, to have that freedom to make mistakes, to choose a whole new history for oneself, is exciting. Admittedly, the new selves that emerge from her stories are not always models of virtue, but “pioneering does not necessarily equate with virtue. . . . I like to think my characters have that vigor for possessing the land,” with all the mother wit, ruthlessness, and tenacity of their predecessors. Yes, she admits, the immigrant’s soul is always at risk. . . . I have to make up the rules as I go along. No one has really experienced what the nonwhite, non-European immigrants are going through in the States. We can’t count on the wisdom and experience of the past of the old country; and we can’t quite fit into the traditional Eurocentric experiences of Americans. In telling their stories, then, she regards herself as “writing a fable for the times. I’m trying to create a mythology that we can live by as we negotiate our daily lives.” “Danny’s Girls” • In “Danny’s Girls,” a young Ugandan boy living in Flushing works as a middleman for a hustler, Danny Sahib (originally “Dinesh,” a Hindu from northern India), whom the boy calls “a merchant of opportunity.” Danny started out selling tickets for Indian concerts at Madison Square Garden, then for fixed beauty contests, and eventually went into the business of arranging green cards through proxy marriages for Indians aspiring to become permanent U.S. residents. The latter launched a business of mail-order brides, with Danny in partnership with the African boy’s aunt, Lini, in selling Indian and other Asian girls to American men eager for reputedly “compliant” wives. The young narrator has always looked up to Danny and has wanted, like his hero, to attain financial independence in the big world of the United States. When he falls in love with a Nepali girl for whom Danny had arranged a green card, however, he determines to liberate both of them from Danny’s clutches, accepting the challenge of becoming his own man by resisting Danny’s commodifying ethic—surely American opportunity should mean more. “Jasmine” • “Jasmine” is the story of an ambitious Trinidadian girl of that name, who, through a middleman, illegally enters Detroit over the Canadian border at Windsor. She finds a job cleaning and keeping the books at the Plantations Motel, a business run by the Daboo family, Trinidadian Indians also trying to remake their destinies in Michigan. In picaresque fashion Jasmine later goes to Ann Arbor and

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works as a live-in domestic with an easygoing American family: Bill Moffitt, a biology instructor, Lara Hatch-Moffitt, a performance artist, and their little girl, Muffin. When Lara goes on the road with her performing group, Jasmine is happily seduced by her boss, and as they make love on the Turkish carpet, she thinks of herself as literally reborn, “a bright, pretty girl with no visa, no papers, and no birth certificate. No nothing other than what she wanted to invent and tell. She was a girl rushing wildly into the future.” The story in many ways presages the improvisational Indian heroine of Mukherjee’s full-length novel Jasmine, published in 1989. “A Wife’s Story” • Not all of The Middleman, and Other Stories deals with characters struggling to move from the margins into the mainstream of American opportunity: “A Wife’s Story” and “The Tenant” focus on well-educated Indian women. In the first, Mrs. Panna Bhatt, married to the vice president of a textile mill in India, has come to New York on a two-year scholarship to get a doctoral degree in special education. Haunted by memories of the oppressive gender roles imposed on her mother and grandmother, she believes that she is making something new of her life; her choice of special education as a field of study provocatively mirrors the kind of intervention in her own constricted development that she is undertaking with her radical experiment abroad. She even develops a friendship with a married Hungarian man with whom she attends the theater. When an actor makes obscene jokes about Patel women, however, she feels insulted: It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me. First, you don’t exist. Then you are invisible. Then you are funny. Then you are disgusting. Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance. No instant dignity here. Yet when her husband comes for a short visit, as a reminder of the more decorous world she misses, she must feign enthusiasm for him. She tries to make up to him for her years away, pretending that nothing has changed, but finally she refuses to return to India with him. When forced to choose between the vulgar freedoms of the United States and the repressive if “safe” institutions of her homeland, she realizes she has already crossed over to another country psychologically. “The Tenant” • “The Tenant” goes to the other extreme by showing how an attractive, middle-class, young Bengali woman becomes vulnerable when she breaks with her traditional ways and tries to become part of mainstream America. Maya Sanyal from Calcutta came to the United States ten years earlier, at the age of nineteen. In smooth succession she received a doctoral degree, married an American, became a naturalized citizen, got divorced, and now teaches comparative literature in Cedar Falls, Iowa. During that time she has indiscriminately slept with all kinds of men, except Indians, in a seemingly ambivalent repudiation of the constrictive gender mores of her homeland. Now, afraid that her bachelor landlord might make sexual advances toward her, she calls the other Bengali professor on campus, Dr. Chatterji, and secures an invitation to tea. The traditional atmosphere of his life prompts a newly awakened longing for her homeland, even as his pathetic attempt at seduction leaves her embarrassed. Tired of the fact that her unattached status makes her vulnerable to the lust of every passing male and newly nostalgic for her homeland traditions, she responds to an India Abroad matrimonial advertisement from a countryman seeking “the new emancipated Indo-American woman” with “a zest for life,” “at ease in USA [sic],” but still holding on to values “rooted in Indian tradition.” To her

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surprise, as she meets Ashoke Mehta at the Chicago airport, she suddenly feels as if a “Hindu god” is descending to woo her—a handsome Indian man who has indeed merged his two cultures in ways that seem to make them destined for each other. Yet witnessing his seamless acculturation also erodes her own self-confidence: She feels ugly and unworthy. Her adult life no longer seems miraculously rebellious; it is grim, it is perverse. She has accomplished nothing. She has changed her citizenship but she hasn’t broken through into the light, the vigor, the hustle of the New World. She is stuck in dead space. More to the point is their mutual recognition that each carries a complicated romantic history to this moment—a history that makes each wary of the other and precludes Ashoke’s contacting her again for several months. During that time she resumes her life in Cedar Falls and, when her landlord abruptly marries, moves to a new room rented to her by an armless man named Fred, whose lover she soon becomes, “two wounded people” who “settle into companionship.” She also recognizes uncomfortably that this liaison speaks to some sense of her own deficiency as a rootless émigré in flight from her own past: “She knows she is strange, and lonely, but being Indian is not the same, she would have thought, as being a freak.” When at last Ashoke calls and obliquely concedes the entanglements that had kept him from committing to her, she knows she will accept his invitation to join him out East—each has made peace with the contradictory emotions about their shared legacy they arouse in each other. Chaman L. Sahni With updates by Barbara Kitt Seidman and the Editors Other major works novels: The Tiger’s Daughter, 1972; Wife, 1975; Jasmine, 1989; The Holder of the World, 1993; Leave It to Me, 1997; Desirable Daughters, 2002; The Tree Bride, 2004. nonfiction: Kautilya’s Concept of Diplomacy, 1976; Days and Nights in Calcutta, 1977 (with Clark Blaise); The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, 1987 (with Blaise); Political Culture and Leadership in India: A Study of West Bengal, 1991; Regionalism in Indian Perspective, 1992. Bibliography Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996. Looks at India, women, and East Indian Americans in literature. Includes a bibliography and index. Bowen, Deborah. “Spaces of Translation: Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief.’” Ariel 28 (July, 1997): 47-60. Argues that in the story, the assumption of moral universalism is a crucial precursor to the problems of negotiating social knowledge. Mukherjee addresses questions of cultural particularization by showing how inadequately translatable are institutionalized expressions of concern. Drake, Jennifer. “Looting American Culture: Bharati Mukherjee’s Immigrant Narratives.” Contemporary Literature 40 (Spring, 1999): 60-84. Argues that assimilation is portrayed as cultural looting, cultural exchange, or a willful and sometimes costly negotiation in her stories; notes that Mukherjee rejects the nostalgia of hyphenated “Americans” and their acceptable stories and portrays instead settlers, Americans who want to be American—not sojourners, tourists, guest workers, or foreigners.

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Ispahani, Mahnaz. “A Passage from India.” Review of Darkness, by Bharati Mukherjee. The New Republic 14 (April, 1986): 36-39. Ispahani believes that the short stories in this collection “treat the classical theme of diaspora—of exile and emigration.” She singles out five stories for analysis to demonstrate her point. The review includes a brief comment on Mukherjee’s style. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these four short stories by Mukherjee: “Jasmine” (vol. 4), “The Management of Grief” (vol. 5), and “A Wife’s Story” and “The World According to Hsü” (vol. 8). Mukherjee, Bharati. “American Dreamer.” Mother Jones, January/February, 1997. Depicted literally as wrapped in an American flag while standing in a cornfield, Mukherjee speaks to her passionate sense of herself as an American writer and citizen. ____________. “Interview.” In Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Mukherjee discusses the origins of her stories and the process by which they are composed. She criticizes Marxist and other social critics who reduce stories to sociology and anthropology. ____________. “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Interview by Geoff Hancock. The Canadian Fiction Magazine 59 (1987): 30-44. In this important interview, Mukherjee discusses her family background, formative influences, and work. She provides illuminating comments on her fictional characters, themes, and voice. Nazareth, Peter. “Total Vision.” Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 110 (1986): 184-191. Nazareth analyzes Mukherjee’s first collection of short stories, Darkness, to show how she has distinguished herself by becoming “a writer of the other America, the America ignored by the so-called mainstream: the America that embraces all the peoples of the world both because America is involved with the whole world and because the whole world is in America.” Sant-Wade, Arvindra, and Karen Marguerite Radell. “Refashioning the Self: Immigrant Women in Bharati Mukherjee’s New World.” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (Winter, 1992): 11-17. An analysis of “The Tenant,” “Jasmine,” and “A Wife’s Story” as stories in which immigrant women refashion themselves and are reborn. In each story the women’s sense of possibility clashes with a sense of loss, yet their exuberant determination attracts the reader to them and denies them the power of pity. Vignisson, Runar. “Bharati Mukherjee: An Interview.” Span 3-4 (1993). An expansive discussion covering Mukherjee’s childhood, her experiences in Canada and the United States, her evolution as a writer, her views on feminism, and some of the ideas informing her novel Jasmine.

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Alice Munro Munro, Alice

Born: Wingham, Ontario, Canada; July 10, 1931 Principal short fiction • Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories, 1974; Who Do You Think You Are?, 1978 (pb. in U.S. as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose, 1979); The Moons of Jupiter: Stories, 1982; The Progress of Love, 1986; Friend of My Youth: Stories, 1990; Open Secrets: Stories, 1994; Selected Stories, 1996; The Love of a Good Woman: Stories, 1998; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001; No Love Lost, 2003; Runaway: Stories, 2004; Vintage Munro, 2004; The View from Castle Rock, 2006. Other literary forms • Alice Munro is first and foremost a writer of short fiction. However, the line between long and short fiction is sometimes blurred in her writings. She has published one book that is generally classified as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), but she herself prefers to view it as a group of linked stories. On the other hand, some reviewers, including author John Gardner, have suggested that the stories in her collection published in the United States as The Beggar Maid are so intricately related that that book might be viewed as a novel. Most critics, however, treat it as short fiction. Achievements • Alice Munro has gained recognition as a consummate writer, principally of short, psychological fiction. She received the Governor General’s Award (Canada’s highest literary award) for Dance of the Happy Shades, The Beggar Maid, and The Progress of Love. Her novel Lives of Girls and Women won the Canadian Booksellers Association Award in 1972, as did Open Secrets in 1995. In 1990 the Canada Council awarded her the Molson Prize for her contribution to Canada’s cultural and intellectual life. In 1977 and 1994 she received the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, and in 1995 Open Secrets won the W. H. Smith and Son Literary Award for the best book published in the United Kingdom. Munro received the National Book Critics Circle Award from the United States in 1999 for The Love of a Good Woman. Biography • Alice Munro was born July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, where her father raised silver foxes. A scholarship covering the years 1949-1951 to the University of Western Ontario led to her bachelor’s degree in 1952. Her marriage to bookstore owner James Munro produced three daughters. After a 1976 divorce, Munro married geographer Gerald Fremlin; they established homes in Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia. Analysis • Alice Munro has been compared to Ernest Hemingway in the realism, economy, and lucidity of her style, to John Updike in her insights into the intricacies of social and sexual relationships, to Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty in her ability to create characters of eccentric individualism, and to Marcel Proust in the completeness and verisimilitude with which she evokes the past. She is an intuitive writer, who is less likely to be concerned with problems of form than with clarity and veracity. Some critics have faulted her for a tendency toward disorganization or

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diffusion—too many shifts in time and place within a single story, for example. On her strengths as a writer, however, critics generally agree: She has an unfailing particularity and naturalness of style, an ability to write vividly about ordinary life and its boredom without TO VIEW IMAGE, boring her readers, an ability to PLEASE SEE write about the past without being PRINT EDITION sentimental, a profound grasp of human emotion and psychology. OF THIS BOOK. Chief among her virtues is her great honesty: her refusal to oversimplify or falsify human beings, emotions, or experience. One of her characters states, “How to keep oneself from lying I see as the main problem everywhere.” Her awareness of this problem is everywhere Courtesy, Vancouver International Writers Festival evident in her writing, certainly in the distinctive voices of her narrator-protagonists, who are scrupulously concerned with truth. Finally, her themes—memory, love, transience, death—are significant. To explore such themes within the limitations of the short-story form with subtlety and depth is Munro’s achievement. “Dance of the Happy Shades” • One of Alice Munro’s recurring themes is “the pain of human contact . . . the fascinating pain; the humiliating necessity.” The phrase occurs in “The Stone in the Field” and refers to the narrator’s maiden aunts, who cringe from all human contact, but the emotional pain that human contact almost inevitably brings is a subject in all of her stories. It is evident in the title story of her first collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” in which an elderly, impoverished piano teacher, Miss Marsalles, has a “party” (her word for recital) for a dwindling number of her students and their mothers, an entertainment she can ill afford. The elaborate but nearly inedible refreshments, the ludicrous gifts, and the tedium of the recital pieces emphasize the incongruity between Miss Marsalles’s serene pleasure in the festivities and the grim suffering of her unwilling but outwardly polite guests. Their anxieties are intensified by the mid-party arrival of Miss Marsalles’s newest pupils, a group of mentally disabled children from a nearby institution. The other pupils and their mothers struggle to maintain well-bred composure, but inwardly they are repelled, particularly when one of the mentally disabled girls gives the only accomplished performance of a sprightly piece called “The Dance of the Happy Shades.” The snobbish mothers believe that the idea of a mentally disabled girl learning to play the piano is not in good taste; it is “useless, out-of-place,” in fact very much like Miss Marsalles herself. Clearly, this dismal affair will be Miss Marsalles’s last party, yet the narrator is unable at the end to pity her, to say, “Poor Miss Marsalles.” “It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is the one communiqué from the other country where she lives.” The unfortunate Miss Marsalles is happy; she has escaped the pain she would feel if she could know how others regard her,

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or care. She is living in another country, out of touch with reality; she has escaped into “the freedom of a great unemotional happiness.” “The Peace of Utrecht” • Few of Munro’s characters are so fortunate. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” for example, the inescapable emotional pain of human contact is the central problem. Helen, the narrator, makes a trip with her two children to Jubilee, the small town where she grew up, ostensibly to visit her sister Maddy, now living alone in their childhood home. The recent death of their mother is on their minds, but they cannot speak of it. Maddy, who stayed at home to look after their “Gothic Mother,” has forbidden all such talk: “No exorcising here,” she says. Yet exorcism is what Helen desperately needs as she struggles with the torment that she feels about her sister’s “sacrifice,” her mother’s life, and her own previous self, which this return home so vividly and strangely evokes. Mother was a town “character,” a misfit or oddity, even before the onset of her debilitating and disfiguring illness (she seems to have died of Parkinson’s disease). For Helen, she was a constant source of anxiety and shame, a threat to Helen’s own precarious adolescent identity. (Readers who know Munro’s novel Lives of Girls and Women will find a strong resemblance of Helen’s mother to Del Jordan’s bizarre mother. She also appears as recognizably the same character in the stories “The Ottawa Valley,” “Connection,” “The Stone in the Field,” and perhaps “The Progress of Love.”) Recalling the love and pity denied this ill but incorrigible woman, Helen experiences raging guilt, shame, and anger that she and her sister were forced into “parodies of love.” Egocentric, petulant, this mother demanded our love in every way she knew, without shame or sense, as a child will. And how could we have loved her, I say desperately to myself, the resources of love we had were not enough, the demand on us was too great. Finally, Helen and her sister withdrew even the pretense of love, withdrew all emotion: We took away from her our anger and impatience and disgust, took all emotion away from our dealings with her, as you might take away meat from a prisoner to weaken him, till he died. Still, the stubborn old woman survived and might have lived longer except that Maddy, left alone with her mother and wanting her own life, put her in the hospital. After she tried to run away, restraint became necessary; she did not survive long after that. Some critics believe that Munro’s strongest works are those which draw on her own small-town origins in western Ontario, stories of Jubilee, Tuppertown, Hanratty, Dalgleish. Munro has confessed in an interview that “The Peace of Utrecht” is her most autobiographical story and thus was difficult to write. Perhaps its emotional power derives in part from its closeness to her own experience, but it exhibits those qualities for which her writing has been praised: the effortless clarity of style, the psychological penetration of character, the evocation of time and place, the unfailing eye and ear which convey an impression of absolute authenticity—these are the hallmarks of Munro’s finest fiction, and they are evident even in her earliest stories. For example, in “The Peace of Utrecht,” Helen’s visit to two memorable residents of Jubilee, her mother’s sisters, Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou, demonstrates a deftness of characterization and a sureness of touch which are remarkable but typical of this writer at her best. Helen finds them

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spending the afternoon making rugs out of dyed rags. They are very old now. They sit in a hot little porch that is shaded by bamboo blinds; the rags and the halffinished rugs make an encouraging, domestic sort of disorder around them. They do not go out any more, but they get up early in the morning, wash and powder themselves, and put on their shapeless print dresses trimmed with rickrack and white braid. Later, after tea, Aunt Annie tries to press on Helen a box of her mother’s clothing (painstakingly cleaned and mended), seemingly oblivious to Helen’s alarm and pain at the sight of these all-too-tangible reminders of her mother. To Aunt Annie, things are to be used up; clothes are to be worn. Yet she is not insensitive, nor is she a fool. Revealing to Helen (who did not know) the shameful facts about her mother’s hospitalization against her will, her pitiful, frantic attempt to escape one snowy January night, the board that was subsequently nailed across the bed to immobilize her, and Maddy’s indifference to it all, Aunt Annie begins “crying distractedly as old people do, with miserable scanty tears.” Despite the tears, however, Aunt Annie is (as Helen is not), emotionally tough, “an old hand at grief and self-control.” Just how tough she is is conveyed by Aunt Annie’s final, quietly understated words: “‘We thought it was hard,’ she said finally. ‘Lou and I thought it was hard.’” Helen and Maddy, with less emotional resilience, try to come to terms with their own complex anguish through evasion, rationalization, and finally, admonishment— “don’t be guilty”—but Munro is too honest to imply that they can be successful. In the final lines of the story, Helen urges her sister to forget the past, to take hold of her own life at last. Maddy’s affirmation, “Yes I will,” soon slips into an agonized question: “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t I?” In the “dim world of continuing disaster, of home,” there is no peace of Utrecht, not for Munro’s characters, perhaps not for Munro. The preoccupation in Munro’s fiction with family, usually as a “continuing disaster,” is striking. Assorted eccentric aunts, uncles, and cousins appear and reappear; a somewhat miscreant brother appears in “Forgiveness in Families” and “Boys and Girls.” Sometimes the family portraits are warmly sympathetic, as in the case of the grandmother in “Winter Wind” or especially the gentle father who calmly prepared for his death in “The Moons of Jupiter.” Even the neurotic mother and father in “The Progress of Love” are treated sympathetically. There, the mother’s fanatical hatred of her own father leads her to burn the desperately needed money she inherits from him at his death. Clearly, for Munro, family origins matter, sometimes as the source of humor and delightful revelation but more dependably as the source of endless mystery and pain. This is particularly true of “the problem, the only problem,” as stated in “The Ottawa Valley”: mother. At the story’s conclusion, the narrator confesses that she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. . . . She has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same. Some relationships, some kinds of “fascinating pain,” can be recorded or analyzed but not exorcized. Clearly, these may become the inspiration for significant litera-

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ture. In Munro’s fiction, the view of the emotional entanglements called “family” is unflinchingly honest, unsentimental, but always humane, at times even humorous. “Bardon Bus” • Another important dimension of Munro’s short stories is sexual relationships, particularly in the “feelings that women have about men,” as she stated in an interview. In “Bardon Bus,” the narrator, a woman writer spending time in Australia, meets an anthropologist (known as “X”) and begins a deliberately limited affair, asking only that it last out their short time in Australia. Later, when both have returned to Canada, she is miserable, tortured by memory and need: “I can’t continue to move my body along the streets unless I exist in his mind and in his eyes.” Finally, she realizes her obsession is a threat to her sanity and that she has a choice of whether to be crazy or not. She decides she does not have the stamina or the will for “prolonged craziness,” and further that there is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this. She begins to let go of the relationship and finds “a queer kind of pleasure” in doing this, not a “self-wounding or malicious pleasure,” but pleasure in taking into account, all over again, everything that is contradictory and persistent and unaccommodating about life. . . . I think there’s something in us wanting to be reassured about all that, right alongside—and at war with—whatever there is that wants permanent vistas and a lot of fine talk. This seeming resolution, however, this salvation by knowing and understanding all, is subtly undercut by the conclusion of the story. The narrator’s much younger friend, Kay, happens to mention her involvement with a fascinating new “friend,” who turns out to be X. The story ends there but the pain (presumably) does not. “Tell Me Yes or No” • The female protagonist of “Tell Me Yes or No” is also sifting through the emotional rubble of an adulterous affair, which has ended, perhaps because of the death of her lover, or perhaps it has merely ended. In this story, it is difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy, and that may be the point. The other lives and other loves of her lover may be real, or they may be a fantasy (as defense mechanism) of the protagonist, but the central insight is the realization of how women build their castles on foundations hardly strong enough to support a night’s shelter; how women deceive themselves and uselessly suffer, being exploitable because of the emptiness of their lives and some deep—but indefinable, and not final!—flaw in themselves. For this woman, none of the remedies of her contemporaries works, not deep breathing, not macramé, and certainly not the esoteric advice of another desperate case: to live “every moment by itself,” a concept she finds impossible to comprehend, let alone practice. The irony of her difficulty is evident, considering Munro’s passionate concern throughout her fiction for “Connection” (the title of one of her stories). Here, it seems that there is some connection between past choice and present desolation:

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Love is not in the least unavoidable, there is a choice made. It is just that it is hard to know when the choice was made, or when, in spite of seeming frivolous, it became irreversible. There is no clear warning about that. “Labor Day Dinner” • Munro’s clear-eyed, self-aware narrators are never easy on themselves. They are constantly requiring themselves to face reality, to be aware of and responsible for the consequences of their own choices. In “Labor Day Dinner,” the narrator, forty-three-year-old Roberta, has for the past year been living on a rundown farm with George, a younger man and former art teacher. His ambitious plan is to restore the farm and create a studio in which do to his sculpture. Roberta’s daughters Angela, seventeen, and Eva, twelve, are spending the summer with her. The atmosphere is emotionally charged, prickly, and tense. George does not approve of the way Roberta indulges her daughters, allowing them to practice ballet instead of doing any work. George does not approve of Roberta, who seems to be indulging herself with tears and moody idleness. On the other hand, Roberta (weeping silently behind her sunglasses) does not approve of George’s cooling ardor, his ungallant awareness of her age as evidenced by his request that she not wear a halter top to his cousin’s Labor Day dinner because she has flabby armpits. So far, this sounds like the unpromising stuff of the afternoon soaps. (In fact, some of Munro’s short stories first were published in popular magazines.) The difference is in what Munro is able to do with her material, the way in which she prevents her characters from deteriorating into stereotypes or her theme into cliché. Roberta (who has reduced her waist only to discover that her face now looks haggard) reflects mournfully: How can you exercise the armpits? What is to be done? Now the payment is due, and what for? For vanity. . . . Just for having those pleasing surfaces once, and letting them speak for you; just for allowing an arrangement of hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You don’t stop in time, don’t know what to do instead; you lay yourself open to humiliation. So thinks Roberta, with self-pity—what she knows to be self-pity—rising and sloshing around in her like bitter bile. She must get away, live alone, wear sleeves. The self-awareness, the complex mingling of humor and pathos, the comic inadequacy of the solution, to wear sleeves (rivaling Prufrock’s momentous decision to wear his trousers rolled), these lend to the character and to the story a dimension which is generally missing in popular fiction. Roberta’s daughters are close observers of as well as participants in this somewhat lugubrious drama. Angela, watching the change in her mother from self-reliant woman to near wreck and viewing George as a despot who hopes to enslave them all, records in her journal, “If this is love I want no part of it.” On the other hand, sensitive Eva, watching her older sister develop the unpleasant traits of a typical adolescent, wants no part of that—“I don’t want it to happen to me.” The characters all nearly get what they want, a way out of the emotional trauma in which they find themselves. On the way home from the Labor Day dinner, the pickup truck in which they are riding (the girls asleep in the back) comes within inches of being hit broadside by a car that came out of nowhere traveling between eighty and ninety miles an hour, no lights, its driver drunk. George did not touch the brake, nor did Roberta scream; they continue in stunned silence, pull into their yard and sit, unable to move.

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What they feel is not terror or thanksgiving—not yet. What they feel is strangeness. They feel as strange, as flattened out and borne aloft, as unconnected with previous and future events as the ghost car was. The story ends with Eva, waking and calling to them, “Are you guys dead?” and “Aren’t we home?” The ending shocks everything in the story into a new perspective, making what went before seem irrelevant, especially Roberta’s and George’s halfhearted playing at love. For Munro, it seems that the thought of the nearness, the omnipresence, and the inevitability of death is the only thing which can put lives and relationships into true perspective, but this (as Munro states at the conclusion of “The Spanish Lady”) is a message which cannot be delivered, however true it may be. The Love of a Good Woman • Munro continues at the top of her form in The Love of a Good Woman, where the pain of human contact, in its various guises, remains her central theme. In the title novella, Enid, a middle-aged, practical nurse finds herself attending the dying Mrs. Quinn. Lonely, kind Enid strives to do good, resisting her dislike of the sick woman. As an intruder in a household that cannot function without her, she is unaware of her attraction to the husband, a former classmate, until his wife implicates him in the death of a local optometrist. If the dying woman’s story is true, Enid must decide whether to confront the husband or to believe in his innocence as she begins to lose hers. This complex, loosely structured work ends ambiguously, as do most of the stories, with Enid hesitating between motion and stillness. “Cortes Island” is the most troubling story of this group, perhaps because of its ambiguity, perhaps because human lives have gone terribly wrong. A newlywed couple rents a basement apartment from the elderly Gorries. When the young woman needs a job, Mrs. Gorrie asks her to sit with her wheelchair-bound husband. A stroke has rendered Mr. Gorrie virtually speechless, but by grunts he can make himself understood. He wants her to read scrapbook articles from Cortes Island, where long ago a house burned to the ground, a child escaped, and a man died. What happened on Cortes Island, where Mr. Gorrie operated a boat? Was the death an accident, suicide, murder? This story is so subtly written that events are not immediately clear. Typically, Munro offers only hints, although the young woman realizes that the Gorries once had an intense relationship. With harsh noises, the disabled Mr. Gorrie demands, “Did you ever think that people’s lives could be like that and end up like this? Well, they can.” This marriage is a wreck of love, a ruin. As always, Munro exhibits masterful use of irony. In “Jakarta,” two young wives argue over D. H. Lawrence’s assertion that a woman’s happiness lies in a man and that her consciousness must be submerged in his. Kath is a proper Canadian wife and mother, but Sonje, her pot-smoking, commune-dwelling friend, is an American. Over the years, conservative Kath breaks away from her stuffy marriage to become strong and self-reliant. Sonje, who has routinely accepted her husband’s wish to switch sexual partners, remains faithful to him even after he disappears in Jakarta. In other stories, a daughter seeks to ease a strained relationship with her abortionist father by revealing the birth of her child, but she is talking to a dead man. A young girl realizes that she is completely, utterly alone. In the best kind of horror story, one that will chill any parent’s blood, a woman tries to entertain her grandchildren with a

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game that turns sinister as she glimpses the danger, as well as the pain, implicit in any human contact. Munro has stated in an interview that her need and desire to write has something to do with the fight against death, the feeling that we lose everything every day, and writing is a way of convincing yourself perhaps that you’re doing something about this. Despite her characteristic concern for honesty and her determination to tell only the truth, it seems in this passage that she may be wrong about one thing: It seems clear that Alice Munro’s writing is destined to last for a very long time. Karen A. Kildahl With updates by Kenneth W. Meadwell and Joanne McCarthy Other major works novels: Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. Bibliography Canitz, A. E. Christa, and Roger Seamon. “The Rhetoric of Fictional Realism in the Stories of Alice Munro.” Canadian Literature, no. 150 (Autumn, 1996): 67-80. Examines how Munro’s stories portray and enact the dialectic between legendmaking and demythologizing; discusses techniques that Munro uses to adapt the opposition between fiction and reality to the expectations and ethical beliefs of her audience. Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. Good critical study of Munro’s fiction. Includes a bibliography. Clark, Miriam Marty. “Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro’s ‘Carried Away.’” Contemporary Literature 37 (Spring, 1996): 49-61. Shows how the stories in Munro’s Friend of My Youth and Open Secrets dismantle the foundations of realist narrative, figuring or disclosing the many texts in the one and so refiguring the linked practices of writing and reading; claims that “Carried Away” addresses allegorically the politics of the library and the ethics of reading. Crouse, David. “Resisting Reduction: Closure in Richard Ford’s ‘Rock Springs’ and Alice Munro’s ‘Friend of My Youth.’” Canadian Literature, no. 146 (Autumn, 1995): 51-64. Discusses how Ford and Munro deal with the problem of realistic closure and character growth in their short stories by manipulating time. Shows how they use various narrative devices to give more interpretive responsibility to the reader. Hiscock, Andrew. “‘Longing for a Human Climate’: Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth and the Culture of Loss.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32 (1997): 17-34. Claims that in this collection of stories, Munro creates complex fictional worlds in which character, narrator, and reader are involved in the business of interpreting versions of loss, tentatively attempting to understand their function and status in a mysteriously arranged reality. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eleven short stories by Munro: “The Beggar Maid” and “Boys and Girls” (vol. 1); “Floating Bridge”

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(vol. 3); “How I Met My Husband” (vol. 4); “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Meneseteung,” and “The Moons of Jupiter” (vol. 5); “Royal Beatings” and “Save the Reaper” (vol. 6); and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Wild Swans” (vol. 8). Mayberry, Katherine J. “‘Every Last Thing . . . Everlasting’: Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative.” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (Fall, 1992): 531-541. Discusses how Munro’s characters use narrative as a means of coming to terms with the past, how they manage their pain by telling. Argues that most of Munro’s narrators come to realize the imperfections of narrative because of the incongruence between experience and the story’s effort to render it. Rasporich, Beverly. Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990. Very interesting analysis focusing on male/female contrasts and relationships in Munro’s fiction. Augmented by a critical bibliography. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. Literary biography by a scholar who has written extensively on Munro’s fiction. Smythe, Karen E. Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. Generic study of Munro’s stories based on the premise that her fiction, with its emphasis on loss and the importance of story telling as a way of regaining knowledge of the past, enacts a poetics of elegy.

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Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov, Vladimir

Born: St. Petersburg, Russia; April 23, 1899 Died: Montreux, Switzerland; July 2, 1977 Principal short fiction • Vozrashchenie Chorba, 1930; Soglyadatay, 1938; Nine Stories, 1947; Vesna v Fialte i drugie rasskazy, 1956; Nabokov’s Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories, 1958; Nabokov’s Quartet, 1966; A Russian Beauty, and Other Stories, 1973; Tyrants Destroyed, and Other Stories, 1975; Details of a Sunset, and Other Stories, 1976. Other literary forms • Vladimir Nabokov’s fifty-year career as a writer includes— besides his short stories—novels, poetry, drama, memoirs, translations, reviews, letters, critical essays, literary criticism, and the screenplay of his most famous novel, Lolita (1955). After his death, three volumes of lectures on literature that he had delivered to students at Wellesley, Stanford, and Cornell were scrupulously edited by Fredson Bowers and published as Lectures on Literature: British, French, and German (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983). Achievements • Vladimir Nabokov occupies a unique niche in the annals of literature by having become a major author in both Russian and English. He wrote nine novels, about forty stories, and considerable poetry in Russian before migrating to the United States in 1940. Thereafter, he not only produced eight more novels and ten short stories in English but also translated into English the fiction that he had composed in his native language, sometimes with the collaboration of his son, Dmitri. Reversing his linguistic field, he translated his Lolita into Russian. Nabokov’s work has received considerable critical acclaim; a modern master, he has influenced such diverse literary figures as Anthony Burgess, John Barth, William H. Gass, Tom Stoppard, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Milan Kundera. Nabokov’s fiction is never intentionally didactic or sociological; he detested moralistic, message-ridden writing. Instead, he delighted in playing self-consciously with the reader’s credulity, regarding himself as a fantasist, a Prospero of artifice. He manipulates his characters as so many pieces on a chessboard, devising problems for absorbing, intricate games of which he and Jorge Luis Borges are the acknowledged modern masters. His precision of language, lexical command of multilingual allusions, and startling imagery have awed, delighted, but also sometimes irritated critics and readers. Few writers have practiced art for the sake of art with such talent and discipline. Nabokov’s advice to students suggests the best approach to his own fiction: In reading, one should notice and fondle details. . . . We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people . . . above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems. Biography • Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov’s life divides neatly into four phases, each lasting approximately twenty years. He was born on Shakespeare’s birthday in

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1899 to an aristocratic and wealthy family residing in St. Petersburg. His grandfather was State Minister of Justice for two czars; his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, a prominent liberal politician, married a woman from an extremely wealthy family. Vladimir Vladimirovich, the first of two sons, was reared with much parental love and care, eloquently evoked in his lyrical memoir, Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir (1951), later expanded and retitled Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966). In 1919, the October Revolution forced the Nabokovs to flee Russia. Vladimir, who had learned both French and English from governesses during his childhood, Library of Congress enrolled in the University of Cambridge, took a degree in foreign languages in 1923, and published two volumes of poetry the same year. Meanwhile, his father and the other family members settled in Berlin. There, Vladimir Dmitrievich was assassinated in 1922 by two right-wing extremist Russian expatriates who had intended their bullets for another victim. Vladimir took up residence in Berlin in 1923, and in 1925 he married a Jewish émigrée, Véra Slonim, with whom he maintained a harmonious union. Between 1924 and 1929, he published, in Russianlanguage exile newspapers and periodicals, twenty-two short stories. Many were collected in a 1930 book Vozvrashchenie Chorba (the return of Chorb), whose contents were later translated into English and distributed among several collections of Nabokov’s short stories. To avoid confusion with his well-known father, the younger Nabokov assumed the pen name “V. Sirin,” after a mythological, multicolored bird featured in ancient Russian literature; he used this name until leaving Europe in 1940. The Nabokovs stayed in Berlin until 1937, even though Vladimir never learned German and usually drew his German fictive personages unfavorably. In his writings during these years, he dramatized the autobiographical themes of political exile from Russia, nostalgia, grief, anguish, and other variations of vagrant rootlessness. His most important novels during the 1920’s and 1930’s are commonly judged to be Zashchita Luzhina (1929; The Defense, 1964) and Dar (1937-1938, 1952; The Gift, 1963). Nabokov’s third life-stage began in 1940, when, after a three-year stay in Paris, he was glad to escape the Nazi menace by emigrating to the United States. After a oneterm lectureship at Stanford University, he distributed his time for the next seven years between teaching at Wellesley College and working as a research fellow in entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, pursuing his passion for lepidoptera. During these years, he began to establish himself as an American writer of note and, in 1945, became a naturalized citizen. He published two novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947); a brilliant but eccentric study

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of the Russian writer who had most deeply influenced him, Nikolai Gogol (1944); a number of stories and poems; and sections of his first autobiography. In 1948, Cornell University lured him away from Wellesley by offering him a tenured professorship. He became a celebrated ornament of the Ithaca, New York, campus for ten years, specializing in a course called Masters of European Fiction, alternately charming and provoking his students with witty lectures and difficult examinations. Nabokov wrote Lolita during his summer vacations in the early 1950’s, but the book was refused publication by several American firms and was first issued in 1955 by Olympia Press, a Parisian English-language publisher that usually featured pornography. By 1958, the work had become celebrated as well as notorious, and Putnam’s issued it in New York. It became the year’s sensational best-seller, and Nabokov, taking an abrupt midyear leave from Cornell, thereupon moved to an elegant hotel on the banks of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva for what were to prove nineteen more fecund years. During this last arc of his career, Nabokov basked in the aura of worldwide recognition as an eminent writer yet continued to labor diligently: He revised his autobiography; resurrected his Russian long and short fiction in English translations; produced a four-volume translation of and commentary on Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin (1833; Nabokov’s English translation, Eugene Onegin, appeared in 1964); and wrote several new novels, including two–Pale Fire (1962) and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)—worthy of consideration among the twentieth century’s leading literary texts. Despite many losses and difficulties in his arduous life, Nabokov never yielded to self-pity, let alone despair. His career demonstrated not only artistic resourcefulness but also the personal virtues of resolution, resilience, and capacity for renewal. Analysis • Vladimir Nabokov’s early stories are set in the post-czarist, post-World War I era, with Germany the usual location, and sensitive, exiled Russian men the usual protagonists. Many are nascent artists: wistful, sorrowful, solitary, sometimes despairingly disheartened. Many evoke a Proustian recollection of their Russian pasts as they try, and often as not fail, to understand an existence filled with irony, absurdity, and fortuity. These tales display Nabokov’s abiding fascination with the interplay between reality and fantasy, between an outer world of tangs, scents, rain showers, sunsets, dawns, butterflies, flowers, forests, and urban asphalt, and an inner landscape of recondite, impenetrable, mysterious feelings. He loved to mix the disheveled externals of precisely described furnishings, trappings, and drab minutiae with memories, myths, fantasy, parody, grandeur, hilarity, masks, nostalgia, and, above all, the magic of artistic illusion. He celebrates the unpredictable permutations of the individual imagination over the massive constraints of the twentieth century’s sad history. He is the supreme stylist, dedicated to forging his vision in the most dazzling verbal smithy since James Joyce’s. “The Razor” • One of his first stories, “Britva” (“The Razor”), is a clever adaptation of motifs used in Nikolai Gogol’s “Nos” (“The Nose”) and Pushkin’s “Vystrel” (“The Shot”). A White Russian émigré, Colonel Ivanov, now a barber in Berlin, recognizes a customer as the Red officer who had condemned him to death six years before. He toys with his victim, terrorizing him with caustic, cruel remarks, comparing his open razor to the sharp end of a sword, inverting the menace of their previous confrontation in Russia. Yet he shaves his former captor gently and carefully and finally re-

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leases him unharmed. By doing so, Ivanov also releases himself from his burning desire for vengeance. Nabokov uses the multivalent symbol of the razor compactly and densely: The acerbic Ivanov both sharpens and encases his razorlike temperament. “The Doorbell” • In “Zvonok” (“The Doorbell”), Nabokov delineates a tragic encounter between past and present in a complex tale fusing realism and symbolism. A son, Galatov, has been separated from his mother for seven years, during which time he has fought in the post-1917 Russian Civil War and wandered over Africa, Europe, and the Canary Islands. He learns that his mother’s second husband has died and left her some real estate in Berlin. He searches for his mother there, meets her dentist, and through him obtains her address. Structurally, Galatov’s visits to the dentist, a Dr. Weiner, anticipate his reunion with his mother: This Weiner is not Galatov’s childhood dentist, yet he does happen to be his mother’s. When Galatov finally meets his mother, he learns that she, too, is not the mother of his childhood: He meets, in the Berlin apartment, not the faded, dark-haired woman he left seven years earlier but an aged courtesan awaiting the arrival of a lover who is three years younger than her son. Galatov realizes that her fervent greeting of him had been intended for her paramour. When the doorbell announces the latter’s arrival, Galatov learns, observing his mother’s distraction and nervousness, that her new déclassé circumstances leave no room for him. He hurriedly departs, vaguely promising to see her again in a year or thereabouts. He knows now that not only has the mistress supplanted the mother but also his mother may never have cherished him as dearly as his previous need for her had deluded him into believing. The story’s structural symmetry between memory and new reality is impressively achieved. “A Matter of Chance” • “Sluchainost” (“A Matter of Chance”) is one of Nabokov’s most poignant tales. Its protagonist, Aleksey Luzhin—whose surname reappears five years later as that of the hero of The Defense—is a Russian exile who, like Galatov, has traveled to many places and worked many jobs. Currently, he is a waiter on a German train; having had no news of his wife, Elena, for five years, he is deeply depressed and has become addicted to cocaine. He plans his suicide for the night of August 1, the ninth anniversary of his wedding and the day of this story. On this particular trip, an old Russian princess, Maria Ukhtomski, is joined in her compartment by a young woman who arrived in Berlin from St. Petersburg the previous day, Elena Luzhina, who is seeking her lost husband. The story’s rising action is full of suspense: Will the unsuspecting spouses find each other on the train? Luzhin sniffs cocaine in the toilet, on the day he has resolved to make his last. The princess has known the Luzhin family and recalls its former aristocratic opulence. Ironically, when the now plebeian Luzhin announces the first seating for dinner, his cocaine-rotted mind can only dimly note the princess; he cannot connect her to his elegant past. The links between the two plots never interlock. Elena, disturbed by a rudely aggressive fellow passenger, decides to forgo the dinner in the dining car where she would probably have met her husband. She loses her prized golden wedding ring in the vestibule of the train’s wagon; it is discovered by another waiter as Luzhin leaves the wagon and jumps to his death before another train: “The locomotive came at him in one hungry bound.” Missed chances abound—perhaps too many: Nabokov’s uses of coincidence and his insistence of the malignity of haphazard events strain credulity.

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“The Scoundrel” • Perhaps Nabokov’s most accomplished story of the 1920’s is “Podlets” (“The Scoundrel,” retitled by the author “An Affair of Honor” for its English publication). In his foreword to the English translation, Nabokov explains that “‘An Affair of Honor’ renders, in a drab expatriate setting, the degradation of a romantic theme whose decline had started with Anton Chekhov’s magnificent story ‘The Duel’ (1891).” Nabokov situates the duel within the traditional love triangle. The husband, an affluent banker named Anton Petrovich, returns home early from a business trip to find an arrogant acquaintance, Berg, nonchalantly getting dressed in his bedroom while his wife, Tanya, whom the reader never sees, is taking an interminable bath. Anton Petrovich challenges Berg to a duel. He pulls off his new glove and tries to throw it at Berg. Instead, it “slapped against the wall and dropped into the washstand pitcher.” The ludicrous failure of Anton Petrovich’s challenge sets the farcical, burlesque tone for the tale. Anton Petrovich is a loving, tender, hardworking, amiable fellow whose major fault—abject cowardice—becomes his undoing. Anton Chekhov would have treated him gently and compassionately; Nabokov handles him disdainfully and absurdly, emphasizing his fondness for his shiny fountain pen, expensive shoes and socks, and monocle which “would gleam like a foolish eye on his belly.” A duel is arranged but does not actually take place. Anton Petrovich, who has never fired a weapon, shakes with increasing fear at the prospect of confronting a former White Army officer who boasts of having killed hundreds. Before entering the woods where the combat is to occur, he and his caricatured seconds stop at a tavern for a round of beers. Anton Petrovich thereupon runs into the bar’s backyard, slides and slips ridiculously down a slope, stumbles his way back to a train, and thence rides back to Berlin. He fantasizes that his craven flight will have been overshadowed by Berg’s even earlier change of mind about dueling and that his wife will leave Berg and return to him, filled with love, delighted to satisfy him with an enormous ham sandwich. Abruptly, Anton Petrovich awakens from his fiction. “Such things don’t happen in real life,” he reflects. He realizes that his reputation, his career, and his marriage are now ruined. He orders a ham sandwich and, animalistically, “grabbed the sandwich with both hands, immediately soiled his fingers and chin with the hanging margin of fat, and grunting greedily, began to munch.” Nabokov has here begun to command the art of grotesquerie, precisely observed, relentlessly rendered, contemptuously concluded. Anton Petrovich would serve as a model for Albinus Kretschmar, cuckolded lover and failed artist in the novel Kamera obskura (1932; Camera Obscura, 1936; revised as Laughter in the Dark, 1938). Kretschmar in turn is a prototype for Lolita’s Humbert Humbert. “The Admiralty Spire” • An amusing as well as saddening early exercise in playing mirror games, which were to become more and more convoluted in Nabokov’s fiction, is his 1933 story “Admiralteyskaya Igla” (“The Admiralty Spire”). Its narrator addresses a trashy Soviet female writer who uses the pseudonymous male name Sergey Solntsev. He asserts that her cheap romantic novel, The Admiralty Spire, is a vulgar version of his first love affair, sixteen years earlier, with a young woman named Katya, whom the writer has renamed Olga. He accuses her of “pretentious fabrication” and of having “encroached with astonishing insolence on another person’s past!” The letter proceeds to lecture the writer on the correct, nostalgic use of the sentimental past, but in the process of recall, the writer admits his distaste for Katya’s “mendacity, her presumption, her vacuity” and deplores her “myopic soul” and the “triviality of

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[her] opinions.” He did, however, once love her. The narrator ends with the speculation that the mediocre novelist he is addressing is probably Katya herself, “who, out of silly coquetry, has concocted a worthless book.” He hopes against the odds that his presumption is erroneous. The atmosphere of overlapping dimensions of reality established here was to be splendidly employed in such later novels as Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor. “Cloud, Castle, Lake” • In “Oblako, ozero, bashnya” (“Cloud, Castle, Lake”), the protagonist, a timid, intellectual bachelor, Vasili Ivanovich, wins a pleasure trip at a charity ball for Russian expatriates in Berlin. He is the kind, meek, saintly soul familiar in Russian literature since Gogol’s stories. He does not really want to take the journey but is intimidated by bureaucratic mazes into doing so. Obstacles thwart him persistently: Trying to settle down with a volume of Russian poetry, Vasili is instead bullied by a squadron of husky German fellow travelers, with monstrous knapsacks and hobnailed boots, into forced communal games that prove witless and humiliating. When the group pairs off, no one wants to romance him: He is designated “the loser and was forced to eat a cigarette butt.” Unexpectedly, they come upon “a pure, blue lake,” reflecting a large cloud and adjoining “an ancient, black castle.” Overjoyed, Vasili wishes to surrender to the beautiful prospect and remain the rest of his life in the inn from which he can delight in this tableau. Unfortunately for Vasili, the group insists on dragging him back and beats him furiously during the return journey. The tale is manifestly an allegory mourning the defeat of individuality and privacy in an ugly world determined to enforce total conformity. “Oh, but this is nothing less than an invitation to a beheading,” protests Vasili as the group grimly denies him his room with a view. By no accident, Nabokov would soon write his novel, Priglashenie na kazn’ (1938, 1935-1936; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959), whose main character, Cincinnatus C., is condemned to death for not fitting into a totalitarian culture. Nabokov may have occasionally presented himself as an arrogant, coldhearted puppeteer lacking any world-mending concerns, but he does clearly condemn all cultures of regimentation and authoritarianism. “Spring in Fialta” • “Vesna v Fialte” (“Spring in Fialta”) was to become the title work of a collection of Nabokov’s short stories; some critics regard it as the masterpiece among his stories, although others prefer “Signs and Symbols.” The narrator of “Spring in Fialta,” Victor, is a Russian émigré businessman who, over the course of fifteen years, has had sporadic meetings with a charmingly casual, pretty, vital woman named Nina. These encounters are sometimes sexual but never last more than a few hours and occur outside their continuing lives and separate marriages. “Again and again,” Victor notes, “she hurriedly appeared in the margin of my life, without influencing in the least its basic text.” So, at least, he believes. He has his respectably bourgeois world “in which I sat for my portrait, with my wife, my young daughters, the Doberman pinscher.” Yet he finds himself also drawn to Nina’s world of carefree sexuality mixed with “lies . . . futility . . . gibberish.” This tension that Victor experiences is common in both life and literature, and Nabokov’s characters are not immune. Although Nabokov appears to admire uxoriousness, as in the marriages of the Shades in Pale Fire or the Krugs in Bend Sinister, his protagonists are also mesmerized by belles dames sans merci—Margot (renamed Magda) in Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, Ada, and many more.

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Nina is married to a gifted but repulsive Franco-Hungarian writer, Ferdinand; she also travels with the equally offensive but far less talented writer, Segur. Both men are artist figures: selfish, artificial, buoyant, heartless. Nina, while adaptable and “loyally sharing [Ferdinand’s] tastes,” is not really his muse: rather, she represents life’s vulnerability, and her attempt to imitate Ferdinand’s world proves fatal. When the car in which the three of them ride crashes into a truck, Ferdinand and Segur, “those invulnerable rogues, those salamanders of fate . . . had escaped with local and temporary injury . . . while Nina, in spite of her long-standing, faithful imitation of them, had turned out after all to be mortal.” Life can only copy art, not replace it. “Signs and Symbols” • In “Signs and Symbols,” Nabokov wrote his most sorrowful story. An elderly, poor Russian émigré couple intend to pay a birthday visit to their son, institutionalized in a sanatorium, afflicted with “referential mania,” in which “the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.” On their way to the sanatorium, the machinery of existence seems to malfunction: The subway loses its electric current between stations; the bus is late and crammed with noisy schoolchildren; they are pelted by pouring rain as they walk the last stretch of the way. Finally, instead of being able to see their son, they are informed that he has again attempted suicide and should not be disturbed. The couple return home with the present that they cannot give him, wordless with worry and defeat, the woman close to tears. On their way they see “a tiny, halfdead unfledged bird . . . helplessly twitching in a puddle.” After a somber supper, the husband goes to bed, and the wife reviews a family photo album filled with the faces of mostly suffering or dead relatives. One cousin is a “famous chess player”—Nabokov’s oblique reference to Luzhin of The Defense, who commits suicide. In his previous suicide attempt, the son had wanted “to tear a hole in his world and escape.” In the story’s last section, the time is past midnight, the husband is sleepless and in pain, and the couple decide to bring their boy home from the institution; each parent will need to spend part of each night with him. Then the phone rings: a wrong number. When it rings a second time, the wife carefully explains to the same caller how she must have misdialed. After a while the phone rings for the third time; the story ends. The signs and symbols in all likelihood suggest that the last call is from the sanatorium, to announce that the son has succeeded in escaping this world. Artistically, this story is virtually flawless: intricately patterned, densely textured, remarkably intense in tone and feeling. For once, Nabokov the literary jeweler has cut more deeply than his usual surfaces; for once, he has entered the frightening woods of tragic, unmitigated grief; for once, he has forsaken gamesmanship and mirror-play, punning and parody and other gambits of verbal artifice to face the grimmest horrors of a sometimes hopeless world. Gerhard Brand Other major works plays: Dedushka, pb. 1923; Smert’, pb. 1923; Polius, pb. 1924; Tragediya gospodina Morna, pb. 1924; Chelovek iz SSSR, pb. 1927; Izobretenie Val’sa, pb. 1938 (The Waltz Invention, 1966); Sobytiye, pr., pb. 1938. novels: Mashenka, 1926 (Mar y, 1970); Korol’, dama, valet, 1928 (King, Queen, Knave, 1968); Zashchita Luzhina, 1929 (serial), 1930 (book; The Defense, 1964);

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Kamera obskura, 1932 (Camera Obscura, 1936; revised as Laughter in the Dark, 1938); Podvig, 1932 (Glory, 1971); Otchayanie, 1934 (serial), 1936 (book; Despair, 1937; revised 1966); Priglashenie na kazn’, 1935-1936 (serial), 1938 (book; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959); Dar, 1937-1938 (serial), 1952 (book; The Gift, 1963); The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941; Bend Sinister, 1947; Lolita, 1955; Pnin, 1957; Pale Fire, 1962; Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 1969; Transparent Things, 1972; Look at the Harlequins!, 1974. nonfiction: Nikolai Gogol, 1944; Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir, 1951; Drugie berega, 1954; Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, 1966 (revision of Conclusive Evidence and Drugie berega); Strong Opinions, 1973; The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, 1979; Lectures on Literature: British, French, and German, 1980; Lectures on Russian Literature, 1981; Lectures on Don Quixote, 1983; Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940-1977, 1989. poetry: Stikhi, 1916; Dva puti, 1918; Gorny put, 1923; Grozd’, 1923; Stikhotvorenia, 1929-1951, 1952; Poems, 1959; Poems and Problems, 1970. screenplay: Lolita, 1962. translations: Anya v strane chudes, 1923 (of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland); Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev, 1944 (with Dmitri Nabokov); A Hero of Our Time, 1958 (of Mikhail Lermontov’s novel; with Dmitri Nabokov); The Song of Igor’s Campaign, 1960 (of the twelfth century epic Slovo o polki Igoreve); Eugene Onegin, 1964 (of Alexander Pushkin’s novel). Bibliography Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. ____________. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. In the course of the two volumes of this critical biography, Boyd discusses virtually all Nabokov’s stories. Boyd generally provides a brief summary of each story, relating it to Nabokov’s development as an artist and noting recurring themes. Each volume includes illustrations, extensive notes, and an exceptionally thorough index. Connolly, Julian W. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Concise introduction to Nabokov’s life and his writing. Grayson, Jane, Arnold B. McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer, eds. Nabokov’s World: Reading Nabokov. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Collection of fifteen essays focusing on intertextuality in Nabokov’s works and their literary reception. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Nabokov: “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (vol. 2); “The Return of Chorb” (vol. 6); “Signs and Symbols” and “That in Aleppo Once” (vol. 7); and “The Vane Sisters” (vol. 8). Nicol, Charles. “‘Ghastly Rich Glass’: A Double Essay on ‘Spring in Fialta.’” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 24 (1991): 173-184. One of two pieces devoted to Nabokov’s short fiction in this special Nabokov issue, Nicol’s article on “Spring in Fialta” has two concerns: “First, a consideration of the plot structure . . . and second, a further perspective on the vexed question of whether this story has any autobiographical relevance or personal reference to its author.”

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Nicol, Charles, and Gennady Barabtarlo, eds. A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction. New York: Garland, 1993. Contains sixteen essays on Nabokov’s stories from a variety of critical points of view. The essays discuss themes, sources, parallels, and symbols in such stories as “Spring in Fialta,” “Signs and Symbols,” and several others. Parker, Stephen Jan. “Vladimir Nabokov and the Short Story.” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 24 (1991): 63-72. Parker worked with Nabokov and Véra Nabokov in the early 1970’s to establish a precise chronology of Nabokov’s short stories in Russian and to discuss possible titles for the English translations. Listed here are the results of their conversation and correspondence. Also included is a previously unpublished interview (conducted by mail) centering on the short story as a genre, with some characteristically provocative responses from Nabokov. Shrayer, Maxim D. “Mapping Narrative Space in Nabokov’s Short Fiction.” The Slavonic and East European Review 75 (October, 1997): 624-641. Discusses the figurations of space in Nabokov’s stories; emphasizes rendering three-dimensional space on an atomistic scale and the way in which a whole narrative serves as a travel guide to its own space; compares Nabokov’s method of rendering the narrative space with that of his Russian predecessors. ____________. The World of Nabokov’s Stories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Detailed analysis of Nabokov’s mastery of the short-story form and his worldview. Traces Nabokov’s literary practice from the early 1920’s to the 1930’s; focuses on Russian stories, such as “The Return of Chorb” and “Cloud, Castle, Lake.” Also discusses Nabokov’s relationship to Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin.

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R. K. Narayan Narayan, R. K.

Born: Madras, India; October 10, 1906 Died: Madras, India; May 13, 2001 Principal short fiction • Malgudi Days, 1941 (expanded, 1982); Dodu, and Other Stories, 1943; Cyclone, and Other Stories, 1944; An Astrologer’s Day, and Other Stories, 1947; Lawley Road: Thirty-two Short Stories, 1956; Gods, Demons, and Others, 1964; A Horse and Two Goats, and Other Stories, 1970; Old and New, 1981; Under the Banyan Tree, and Other Stories, 1985; The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories, 1994. Other literary forms • A prolific writer, R. K. Narayan published—besides the collections of short stories cited above—more than a dozen novels, a shortened prose version of each of the two famous Indian epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, several travel books, volumes of essays and sketches, a volume of memoirs, and numerous critical essays. His novel The Guide (1958) was made into a successful motion picture, both in English and in Hindi. Achievements • R. K. Narayan, an internationally recognized novelist and the grand patriarch of Indo-Anglian writers (writers of India writing in English), received a number of awards and distinctions. In 1961, he received the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy (Sahitya Akademi), India’s highest literary honor, for his very popular novel The Guide. His other honors include India’s Padma Bhushan Award for distinguished service of a high order, 1964; the United States’ National Association of Independent Schools Award, 1965; the English-speaking Union Award, 1975; the Royal Society of Literature Benson Medal, 1980; and several honorary degrees. In 1982, Narayan was made an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was named a member of India’s nonelective House of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, in 1989. Narayan invented for his writings the town of Malgudi, considered by critics a literary amalgam of Mysore, where he lived for several decades, and Madras, the city of his birth. He gently asserted that “Malgudi has been only a concept but has proved good enough for my purposes.” In its imaginative scope, Narayan’s Malgudi is similar to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, but whereas Faulkner’s vision is complex and dark-hued, Narayan’s vision is simpler, ironic, sad at times, yet ultimately comic. Biography • Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan was born in Madras, South India, on October 10, 1906. Until the family moved to Mysore, he remained in Madras with his grandmother, who supervised his school and college education. In his autobiography, My Days (1974), Narayan admits his dislike of education: he “instinctively rejected both education and examinations with their unwarranted seriousness and esoteric suggestions.” Nevertheless, in 1930, he graduated from Maharaja’s College (now the University of Mysore). In 1933, he met a woman by the name of Rajam and immediately fell in love with her. In 1935, after overcoming almost insurmountable difficulties (to begin with,

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their horoscopes did not match), Narayan and Rajam were married. She was a great help in his creative work, but she lived to see publication of only three novels. She died of typhoid in 1939. Narayan’s fourth novel, Grateful to Life and Death (1953), dedicated to his dead wife, centers on the trauma of this loss and on a hard-won sense of reconciliation. Rajam is portrayed in some detail as Sushila in that novel and, later, as Srinivas’s wife in The Printer of Malgudi (1957). Narayan had not begun his career as a writer without some false starts. Indeed, only after having worked at a number of jobs without satisfaction and success—he worked for a time in the civil service in Mysore, taught for a while, and served as a correspondent for Madras Justice—did Narayan finally embark upon writing as a fulltime career. In the beginning, many of his writings were rejected—a traumatic experience which he bore with fortitude. He was firm in his resolve to make his living as a writer. Experiencing bitter dejection when several British publishers rejected his first novel, Swami and Friends (1935), Narayan instructed a friend not to mail the manuscript back to him in India but to throw it into the Thames. Instead, his friend took the manuscript to Graham Greene, who was successful in finding a publisher for the novel. Thus, from a frustrating experience began the literary career of an eminent Commonwealth writer whose books are known throughout the world. Narayan settled in Mysore, India, and his involvement with Indian Thought Publications led to the publication of several of his works. Narayan continued to write and publish well into his nineties, concentrating on short fiction and essays. He experimented with “table talk,” a new form of his own devising, which he described as a loosely structured reflection on any subject. Narayan died in Madras, India on May 13, 2001. Analysis • R. K. Narayan said that he found English the most rewarding medium to employ for his writing because it came to him very easily: “English is a very adaptable language. And it’s so transparent it can take on the tint of any country.” Critics frequently praise the unaffected standard English with which Narayan captures the Indian sensibility, particularly the South Indian ambience. His unpretentious style, his deliberate avoidance of convoluted expressions and complicated grammatical constructions, his gentle and subtle humor—all this gives his writing an elegant, unforced simplicity that is perfectly suited to the portrayal of ordinary life, of all classes and segments of Indian society—household servants, herdsmen, saints, crooks, merchants, beggars, thieves, hapless students. Narayan was essentially an old-fashioned storyteller. With Addisonian wit, Twainian humor, and Chekhovian irony, he depicted everyday occurrences, moments of insight; while some of his stories are essentially sketches, quite undramatic, others feature the ironic reversals associated with O. Henry. Although Narayan’s characters are imbued with distinctively Indian values, their dilemmas are universal. Malgudi Days • Among the nineteen stories in Narayan’s first collection, Malgudi Days, there are two stories, “Old Bones” and “Neighbours’ Help,” that are laced with supernatural elements. This volume includes such memorable stories as “The Gold Belt,” “The White Flower,” “An End of Trouble,” and “Under the Banyan Tree.” Some of the stories may be viewed as social criticism; Narayan looks with a satiric eye on various aspects of traditional South Indian society, particularly the dowry system and the powerful role of astrology and other forms of superstition. One of the finest stories in the collection, “The Mute Companions,” centers

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on the ubiquitous Indian monkey, asource of meager income for poor people and a source of delight for children. Adopting the omniscient point of view yet without moralizing or judging, Narayan portrays the life of Sami the dumb beggar, whose “very existence depended on the behavior of the monkey.” Having taught the monkey several tricks, Sami is able for a time to subsist on the earnings of the clever creature, who is his “only companion.” This brief story is an excellent specimen of Narayan’s art, revealing his ability to portray a segment of society that typically goes unnoticed. The story emphasizes the passiveness characteristic of the poor Indian, his acceptance of his Karma, or fate. Narayan’s gentle social criticism, too, emerges: “Usually [Sami] avoided those big places where people were haughty, aloof, and inaccessible, and kept formidable dogs and servants.” As in many of his stories, Narayan in “The Mute Companions” Library of Congress blends humor and sadness. Malgudi Days, it should be noted, is also the title of a later collection, published in the United States in 1982. Eight of the thirty-two stories in this collection—“Naga,” “Selvi,” “Second Opinion,” “Cat Within,” “The Edge,” “God and the Cobbler,” “Hungry Child,” and “Emden”— were previously uncollected; the remaining stories were selected from Narayan’s two earlier volumes, An Astrologer’s Day and Lawley Road. Dodu, and Other Stories • In his second collection, Dodu, and Other Stories, Narayan focused on themes related to motherly love, South Indian marriages, the financial and economic frustrations of the middle class, and childhood. Among the outstanding pieces in this volume of seventeen stories are “Dodu,” “Gandhi’s Appeal,” “Ranga,” “A Change,” “Forty-five a Month,” and “The One-Armed Giant.” (Originally published in The Hindu, a Madras newspaper, as most of his stories have been, “The OneArmed Giant” was the first story that Narayan wrote.) The title story, “Dodu,” satirically focuses on adult attitudes toward children. “Dodu was eight years old and wanted money badly. Since he was only eight, nobody took his financial worries seriously. . . . Dodu had no illusions about the generosity of his elders. They were notoriously deaf to requests.” One of the significant contributions of Narayan is his uncanny ability to portray children—their dreams, their mischief, their psychology. “Ranga,” an early tale, is a moving story of a motherless child developing into a disillusioned youth. “Forty-five a Month” is a simple and tender story of the relationship

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of a father and his family—his wife and their young daughter. The conflict between economic security and the little pleasures of life is evocatively and movingly delineated; indeed, this depiction of a white-collar worker eking out his dreary existence reflects the experience of an entire generation in modern India. Lawley Road • In Lawley Road, as in most of his fiction, Narayan is concerned more with character than with plot. He notes that he discovers “a story when a personality passes through a crisis of spirit or circumstances,” but some stories present flashes of significant moments in characters’ lives without any dramatic circumstances; others simply show “a pattern of existence brought to view.” Many of the pieces in this collection have a reportorial quality—there are sketches and vignettes, character studies and anecdotes. Of the twenty-eight stories gathered here, fourteen are reprinted from previous collections. The title story is delightful. Named after a typical thoroughfare in the fictitious city of Malgudi, the story recounts how Kabir Lane is renamed as Lawley Road. The narrator is one of Narayan’s most engaging recurring characters, whom the people of Malgudi have nicknamed the “Talkative Man,” or TM for short, who lends distance and historicity to the story. In another strong story, “The Martyr’s Corner,” the focus is on a humble seller of bondas, dosais (South Indian snacks), and chappatis (wheat-flour pancakes) rather than on the violent action. It is the character of the vendor—his dreary and drab life and his attitude toward existence—that holds the interest of the reader. A Horse and Two Goats, and Other Stories • A Horse and Two Goats, and Other Stories comprises five stories with illustrations by Narayan’s brother R. K. Laxman. The title story deals with Muni, a village peasant, and his meeting with a “red man” from the United States. The language barrier is responsible for confusion about a statue and a pair of goats, with hilarious results. The second story, “Uncle,” is a masterpiece; it slowly unfolds the mystery that teases a growing boy about his benevolent but inexplicably sinister “uncle.” “Annamalai” and “A Breath of Lucifer” deal with two simple, hardworking, faithful servants. Annamalai is an eccentric gardener who attaches himself to a reluctant master. Sam in “A Breath of Lucifer,” with an autobiographical preface, is a Christian male nurse. In the end, both Annamalai and Sam, governed by their own impulses, unceremoniously leave their masters. “Seventh House,” perhaps a continuation of “The White Flower” in Lawley Road, dealing in astrology and superstitions, touchingly explores a husband’s tender devotion to his sick wife. Each of the five stories is a character study; all the stories are embellished with picturesque native customs. The dominant tone throughout the collection is casual, understated. Under the Banyan Tree, and Other Stories • Under the Banyan Tree, and Other Stories is a superb retrospective collection of twenty-eight tales, published specifically for American readers; almost all the stories are drawn from earlier volumes. When the collection appeared on the American scene, several glowing reviews were published in the leading weeklies and periodicals. This collection further confirms Malgudi’s place as a great imaginary landscape. The title story, fittingly taken from Narayan’s first collection, reaffirms storytelling as a central human activity. The villagers of Somal “lived in a kind of perpetual enchantment. The enchanter was Nambi the storyteller.” Yet, having regaled his audience for several years with his tales, Nambi spends the rest of his life in “great consummate silence.”

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The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories • The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (titled The Grandmother’s Tale, and Other Stories in the paperback edition) was the first collection of Narayan’s fiction that attempted to give a comprehensive overview of his more than fifty years of productivity. Many of the stories, including “A Horse and Two Goats” and “Lawley Road,” have been widely anthologized for many years. Others, including “Salt and Sawdust” and the title story, make their first North American appearance in this collection. Many of the stories are based on humble but complex characters engaged in daily life in India. As a collection, they demonstrate the richness of Indian life, which blends ancient tradition with Western technological modernity, but Narayan’s stories do not call attention to the setting. Rather, they focus on the characters, showing with gentle humor the wonderful absurdity that makes one human and the ironic twists that shape one’s life. In “Salt and Sawdust,” for example, Narayan presents a childless housewife who cannot cook—her sense of taste is so bad that she cannot tell the difference between salt and sawdust. Her poor husband is forced to take over the cooking, while his wife occupies herself with writing a novel. However, when the novel is finally completed, the publisher advises the wife to turn it into a cookbook. Narayan was a master of the small details that make domestic scenes seem true and important. Although the wife is made fun of in “Salt and Sawdust,” she is a fully rounded character. The humor is good-natured, and Narayan’s respect for humans with all their flaws never wavers. “The Grandmother’s Tale” is adapted from a tale Narayan’s mother told him about his own great-grandmother. The story is narrated in a winding fashion by a young boy who is sent to live with his strict grandmother. Although he resents his new situation at first, he gradually comes under the spell of the story she tells him, in bits and pieces, about her own grandmother’s life. The grandmother’s story is set firmly in India. The heroine is married in a traditional ceremony at the age of seven, but her husband abandons her to take a new wife. The landscape she crosses to reclaim her husband is clearly the Indian subcontinent. Ironically, regaining her husband costs her her independence. “The Grandmother’s Tale” is unlike many of Narayan’s stories in having a strong and admirable central female character. The framing device of the boy narrator reinforces the timelessness and universality of the grandmother’s story, which is equally powerful to a young Indian boy in a small village and to adult readers around the world. As an old-fashioned storyteller, Narayan sought to convey the vitality of his native India, a land that is full of humanity, oddity, poverty, tradition, “inherited culture,” picturesqueness. Narayan realized that the short story is the best medium for utilizing the wealth of subjects available. A novel is a different proposition altogether, centralized as it is on a major theme, leaving out, necessarily, a great deal of the available material on the periphery. Short stories, on the other hand, can cover a wider field by presenting concentrated miniatures of human experience in all its opulence. Narayan’s concern was the heroic in the ordinary Indian. John Updike affirms that “all people are complex, surprising, and deserving of a break: this seems to me Narayan’s moral, and one hard to improve upon. His social range and his successful attempt to convey, in sum, an entire population shame most American authors, who also, it might be charged, ‘ignore too much of what could be seen.’” With dignified simplicity, honesty, and sincerity, Narayan infused his stories with charm and sponta-

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neous humor; his narrative voice guides the reader through his comic and ironic world with an unobtrusive wit. S. S. Moorty With updates by Chaman L. Sahni and Cynthia A. Bily Other major works novels: Swami and Friends, 1935; The Bachelor of Arts, 1937; The Dark Room, 1938; The English Teacher, 1945 (also known as Grateful to Life and Death, 1953); Mr. Sampath, 1949 (also known as The Printer of Malgudi, 1957); The Financial Expert, 1952; Waiting for the Mahatma, 1955; The Guide, 1958; The Man-Eater of Malgudi, 1961; The Sweet-Vendor, 1967 (also known as The Vendor of Sweets); The Painter of Signs, 1976; A Tiger for Malgudi, 1983; Talkative Man: A Novel of Malgudi, 1987; The World of Nagaraj, 1990. miscellaneous: A Story-Teller’s World, 1989 (stories, essays, and sketches); Salt and Sawdust: Stories and Table Talk, 1993. nonfiction: Mysore, 1944; My Dateless Diary, 1960; Next Sunday: Sketches and Essays, 1960; My Days, 1974; Reluctant Guru, 1974; The Emerald Route, 1977; A Writer’s Nightmare: Selected Essays, 1958-1988, 1988; The Writerly Life: Selected Nonfiction, 2001 (includes essays from My Dateless Diary, A Writer’s Nightmare, A Story-Teller’s World, and Salt and Sawdust; S. Krishnan, editor). translations: The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic, 1972 (of V3lmtki); The Mahabharata: A Shortened Prose Version of the Indian Epic, 1978. Bibliography Bery, Ashok. “‘Changing the Script’: R. K. Narayan and Hinduism.” Ariel 28 (April, 1997): 7-20. Argues that Narayan often probes limitations and contradictions in Hindu worldviews and identities; analyzes the ways Narayan challenges Hindu doctrines, particularly those that teach that the individual self and the phenomenal world are unimportant; although Hinduism is indispensable to Narayan, it is not unchallengeable. Jussawalla, Feroza, and Geralyn Strecker. “R. K. Narayan.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Narayan’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction. Kain, Geoffrey, ed. R. K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993. Collection of essays, mostly on the novels, including feminist, cultural, postcolonial, and other contemporary approaches. Other essays focus on irony, satire, transcendence, self-reflexivity, and mythmaking in Narayan’s fiction. Knippling, Alpana Sharma. “R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Modern English Discourse in Colonial India.” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (Spring, 1993): 169-186. Using Michel Foucault’s notion that discourse does not necessarily implicate human intention, Knippling contends that Narayan is not heavily influenced by English discourse and therefore not culpable in the whole Westernizing process. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Narayan: “An Astrologer’s Day” (vol. 1), “A Horse and Two Goats” and “House Opposite” (vol. 4), and “Uncle” and “Under the Banyan Tree” (vol. 8).

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Naik, M. K. The Ironic Vision: A Study of the Fiction of R. K. Narayan. New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1983. Perceptive study of Narayan’s fiction demonstrating his use of irony, in its various forms, to portray human character and situations and to project his total vision of life. Devotes a chapter to the short stories and contains references, a layout of Malgudi and its surroundings, a select bibliography, and an index. Ram, Susan, and N. Ram. R. K. Narayan: The Early Years, 1906-1945. New Delhi, India: Viking Press, 1996. Prepared with the cooperation of Narayan’s family and friends, the Rams’ biography of Narayan’s early years is excellent. Sundaram, P. S. R. K. Narayan. New Delhi, India: Arnold-Heinemann, 1973. This volume’s only aim, according to the author, “is to acquaint the Common Reader with the works of an outstanding writer and to suggest what makes the writing outstanding.” Contains a brief thematic study of Narayan’s short stories and notes the thematic connections between many of the stories and the novels. Supplemented by notes and references, a select bibliography, and an index. Urstad, Tone Sundt. “Symbolism in R. K. Narayan’s ‘Naga.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Summer, 1994): 425-432. Discusses Narayan’s basic technique of juxtaposing scenes from modern life with the exploits of gods, demons, and heroes in the short story “Naga.” Argues that in this story Narayan creates a mythic framework in which humans act out age-old patterns and conflicts. Venugopal, C. V. The Indian Short Story in English: A Survey. Bareilly, India: Prakash Book Depot, 1975. The chapter on R. K. Narayan provides a useful overview of his short fiction. Complemented by references, a select bibliography, and an index. Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan. London: Longman, 1971. Booklet in the British Council Writers and Their Work series, it gives a general critical appraisal of Narayan as a novelist. Walsh discusses Narayan’s novels as “comedies of sadness” and argues that “his work is an original blend of Western method and Eastern material.” Includes a select bibliography.

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Short Story Writers Revised Edition

Volume 3 Joyce Carol Oates — Richard Wright 759 – 1144 Index edited by

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach

SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California

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Copyright © 1993, 1997, 2008, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Some essays in these volumes originally appeared in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition, 2001. New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Short story writers / edited by Charles E. May. — Rev. ed. v. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58765-389-6 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-390-2 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-391-9 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-392-6 (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Short story. 2. Short stories—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 3. Novelists—Biography—Dictionaries. I. May, Charles E. (Charles Edward), 1941PN3373.S398 2008 809.3’1—dc22 2007032789

First printing

printed in canada

Contents – Volume 3 Contents

Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxv Oates, Joyce Carol . O’Brien, Edna . . . O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Frank . . O’Faoláin, Seán . . . O’Flaherty, Liam . . Olsen, Tillie . . . . . Ozick, Cynthia . . .

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Paley, Grace . . . . . . . Parker, Dorothy . . . . . Perelman, S. J. . . . . . Petry, Ann . . . . . . . . Pirandello, Luigi . . . . Poe, Edgar Allan . . . . Porter, Katherine Anne Powers, J. F. . . . . . . . Pritchett, V. S.. . . . . . Proulx, E. Annie . . . . Purdy, James . . . . . .

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Saki . . . . . . . . . . . Salinger, J. D. . . . . . . Saroyan, William . . . . Sillitoe, Alan . . . . . . Singer, Isaac Bashevis. . Spark, Muriel . . . . . . Steinbeck, John . . . . . Stevenson, Robert Louis

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Tan, Amy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 961 Taylor, Peter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 966 Thomas, Dylan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 973 Thurber, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 981 Tolstoy, Leo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 987 Trevor, William . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 998 Turgenev, Ivan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1006 Twain, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1015 Tyler, Anne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1022 xxxiii

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Updike, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1029 Viramontes, Helena María . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1042 Vonnegut, Kurt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1047 Walker, Alice . . . . . . . Warren, Robert Penn . . Welty, Eudora . . . . . . Wharton, Edith . . . . . Williams, Joy . . . . . . . Williams, Tennessee. . . Williams, William Carlos Wolff, Tobias. . . . . . . Woolf, Virginia . . . . . Wright, Richard . . . . .

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Terms and Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1129 Time Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1140 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1147

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Complete List of Contents Complete List of Contents

Volume 1 Achebe, Chinua, 1 Adams, Alice, 7 Aiken, Conrad, 13 Alexie, Sherman, 20 Allende, Isabel, 24 Andersen, Hans Christian, 28 Anderson, Sherwood, 35 Angelou, Maya, 43 Atwood, Margaret, 48 Babel, Isaac, 58 Baldwin, James, 66 Bambara, Toni Cade, 73 Banks, Russell, 79 Barthelme, Donald, 86 Beattie, Ann, 96 Bellow, Saul, 104 Bierce, Ambrose, 112 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 118 Borges, Jorge Luis, 125 Bowen, Elizabeth, 136 Boyle, Kay, 143 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 152 Bradbury, Ray, 160 Callaghan, Morley, 173 Capote, Truman, 182

Carver, Raymond, 188 Cather, Willa, 198 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 205 Cheever, John, 220 Chekhov, Anton, 231 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 242 Chesterton, G. K., 250 Chopin, Kate, 258 Cisneros, Sandra, 264 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 271 Clarke, Arthur C., 277 Conrad, Joseph, 285 Coover, Robert, 295 Coppard, A. E., 303 Cortázar, Julio, 310 Crane, Stephen, 317 De la Mare, Walter, 327 Dinesen, Isak, 333 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 342 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 348 Dubus, Andre, 358 Dybek, Stuart, 364 Ellison, Ralph, 368 Erdrich, Louise, 374

Volume 2 Faulkner, William, 379 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 388 Flaubert, Gustave, 397 Forster, E. M., 407 Gallant, Mavis, 413 García Márquez, Gabriel, 420 Garland, Hamlin, 428 Gogol, Nikolai, 435 Gordimer, Nadine, 444 Greene, Graham, 453 Grimm Brothers, 461

Harte, Bret, 469 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 475 Hemingway, Ernest, 486 Hempel, Amy, 495 Henry, O., 499 Hughes, Langston, 505 Hurston, Zora Neale, 512 Irving, Washington, 519 Jackson, Shirley, 526 James, Henry, 533 xxxv

Short Story Writers Jewett, Sarah Orne, 543 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 550 Joyce, James, 555 Kafka, Franz, 565 Kincaid, Jamaica, 576 Kingsolver, Barbara, 583 Kipling, Rudyard, 588 Lardner, Ring, 598 Lavin, Mary, 603 Lawrence, D. H., 611 Le Guin, Ursula K., 621 Lessing, Doris, 628 London, Jack, 636

McCullers, Carson, 641 Malamud, Bernard, 649 Mann, Thomas, 659 Mansfield, Katherine, 670 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 680 Maugham, W. Somerset, 687 Maupassant, Guy de, 695 Melville, Herman, 704 Mérimée, Prosper, 712 Mishima, Yukio, 717 Mukherjee, Bharati, 723 Munro, Alice, 734 Nabokov, Vladimir, 743 Narayan, R. K., 752

Volume 3 Oates, Joyce Carol, 759 O’Brien, Edna, 770 O’Connor, Flannery, 778 O’Connor, Frank, 788 O’Faoláin, Seán, 796 O’Flaherty, Liam, 803 Olsen, Tillie, 810 Ozick, Cynthia, 816 Paley, Grace, 823 Parker, Dorothy, 830 Perelman, S. J., 835 Petry, Ann, 841 Pirandello, Luigi, 850 Poe, Edgar Allan, 857 Porter, Katherine Anne, 867 Powers, J. F., 876 Pritchett, V. S., 881 Proulx, E. Annie, 891 Purdy, James, 896 Saki, 905 Salinger, J. D., 910 Saroyan, William, 919 Sillitoe, Alan, 925 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 931 Spark, Muriel, 941 Steinbeck, John, 948 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 954

Tan, Amy, 961 Taylor, Peter, 966 Thomas, Dylan, 973 Thurber, James, 981 Tolstoy, Leo, 987 Trevor, William, 998 Turgenev, Ivan, 1006 Twain, Mark, 1015 Tyler, Anne, 1022 Updike, John, 1029 Viramontes, Helena María, 1042 Vonnegut, Kurt, 1047 Walker, Alice, 1056 Warren, Robert Penn, 1066 Welty, Eudora, 1073 Wharton, Edith, 1083 Williams, Joy, 1090 Williams, Tennessee, 1095 Williams, William Carlos, 1103 Wolff, Tobias, 1109 Woolf, Virginia, 1116 Wright, Richard, 1123 Terms and Techniques, 1129 Time Line, 1140 Index, 1147 xxxvi

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Joyce Carol Oates Oates, Joyce Carol

Born: Lockport, New York; June 16, 1938 Principal short fiction • By the North Gate, 1963; Upon the Sweeping Flood, 1966; The Wheel of Love, 1970; Marriages and Infidelities, 1972; The Goddess and Other Women, 1974; The Hungry Ghosts, 1974; Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, 1974; The Seduction, 1975; The Poisoned Kiss, 1975; Crossing the Border, 1976; Night-Side, 1977; All the Good People I’ve Left Behind, 1978; The Lamb of Abyssalia, 1979; A Sentimental Education, 1980; Last Days, 1984; Raven’s Wing, 1986; The Assignation, 1988; Heat, and Other Stories, 1991; Where Is Here?, 1992; Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, 1994; Will You Always Love Me?, 1994; The Collector of Hearts, 1998; Faithless: Tales of Transgression, 2001; I Am No One You Know, 2004; The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2005; High Lonesome: Stories, 1966-2006, 2006. Other literary forms • Joyce Carol Oates is remarkable for both the volume and breadth of her literary output. In addition to hundreds of short stories published in more than two dozen collections and various literary journals and popular magazines, she has produced ten volumes of poetry, plays, more than four dozen novels, averaging at least one novel a year after reaching the age of sixty in 1998. Through her interviews, essays, editorship of anthologies and journals, and positions at the University of Windsor and then Princeton University, she has continuously engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the North American literary community. Oates has collected some of her literary criticism in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974), (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988), Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999), and Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005), and summed up some of her views in The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003). She has also edited several anthologies, including Night Walks (1982), First Person Singular (1983), The Best American Essays (1991), The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992) American Gothic Tales (1996), and The Best American Mystery Stories (2005). Her other nonfiction writings cover subjects as diverse as art and boxing. Achievements • Joyce Carol Oates received National Book Award nominations in 1968 and 1969; she won the award in 1970, for her novel them (1969). Other honors include O. Henry Awards in 1967, 1973, and 1983 for her short stories, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Rosenthal Fellowships, and election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She received the Alan Swallow award for her 1988 short-story collection The Assignation and the Heidemann Award for one-act plays and the Rea Award, both in 1990. She was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Black Water (1992) and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was a Pulitzer finalist again in 1995. In 1996 she won the Bram Stoker Award for Horror and the Fisk Fiction Prize for Zombie (1995). She continued her prolific output into the twenty-first century, with novels such as Blonde, for which she won her National Book Award in 2001; I’ll Take You There, and The Falls, as well as the short-story collections Faithless:

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Tales of Transgression (2001) and I Am No One You Know (2004). In 2003, she was honored with the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature. During that same year, the American Library Association named her Big Mouth and Ugly Girl (2002) as one of its Best Books for Young Adults

Biography • Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, a small city outside Buffalo. Her father was a tool and die designer, and her childhood was spent in a rural town where she attended a oneroom schoolhouse. From earliest memory, she wanted to be an author. As a small child, she drew pictures to tell stories; later, she wrote them, sometimes producing handwritten books of up to two hundred pages, with carefully © Norman Seeff designed covers. Her youth was simple and happy, and she developed a closeness to her parents that flourished in her adult years. In 1956, Oates graduated from Williamsville Central High School, where she had written for the school newspaper, and she entered Syracuse University under a New York State Regents Scholarship. During her freshman year, a tachycardiac seizure during a basketball game profoundly affected her view of life by bringing her face to face with her mortality. She continued writing and in 1959 was selected cowinner of the Mademoiselle college fiction award for “In the Old World.” An excellent student, she was elected Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1960 at the top of her class. Oates received a Knapp Fellowship to pursue graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where she met doctoral candidate Raymond Joseph Smith. She and Smith were married on January 23, 1961. After receiving her master’s degree, Oates and Smith moved to Texas, where he taught in Beaumont and she began doctoral work at William Marsh Rice University in Houston. With one of her stories appearing on the Honor Roll of Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories, however, Oates decided to devote herself to writing. Oates’s first collection of stories, By the North Gate, appeared in 1963, followed a year later by her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964). In 1967, A Garden of Earthly Delights appeared as the first novel in a thematic trilogy exploring the American obsession with money. The last of the trilogy, them (1969), earned Oates the 1970 National Book Award. Oates taught at the University of Detroit from 1961 to 1967; then she and Smith moved to the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. A prolific author, Oates con-

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tinued publishing stories in such periodicals as The Literary Review and Cosmopolitan and produced a steady flow of novels, stories, and poetry. Various other writings— essays, plays, reviews—add to the unusual breadth of her works. In 1978, Oates became the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey. From their home, she and Smith edited The Ontario Review and ran a small publishing company. As her body of work grew, so did its formal and thematic diversity. Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) are experimental ventures into the genres, respectively, of the family chronicle, the romance, and the gothic mystery. During the later 1980’s, her work turned toward a modern naturalism. Oates traveled and lectured widely, and in December, 1987, she was among a group of artists, writers, and intellectuals invited to greet Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. During the 1990’s, Oates produced a succession of works that were varied in format. From the novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), about the members of an adolescent girl gang, to the gothic short stories in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque and The Collector of Hearts, Oates continued to display her versatility and maintain her position as one of the world’s most eminent authors. In 1998, she moved into the children’s market with Come Meet Muffin, an imaginative tale of a brave, adventuresome cat. Her extensive expression as a writer, thinker, and teacher ensured Oates’s role as a respected and vigorous participant in the United States’ intellectual and literary life since the 1960’s. Analysis • Joyce Carol Oates is a very American writer. Early in her career, she drew comparisons with such predecessors as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. The chiefly rural and small-town milieu of her earlier work expanded over the years, as did her vision of passion and violence in the United States in the twentieth century. It is difficult to separate Oates’s short fiction from her novels, for she consistently produced volumes in both genres throughout her career. Unlike many writers who produce both long and short fiction, Oates never subordinated her stories to her novels: They represent in sum a no less considerable achievement, and Oates is by no means a novelist who sometimes writes stories, nor for that matter a storyteller who sometimes writes novels. Both forms figure centrally in her overall work. In many cases, her stories are crystallized versions of the types of characters and dramatic moments found in larger works; over the years, the themes and stylistic approaches in the two genres maintained a parallel progression. Oates concerns herself with the formulation of the American Dream and how it has changed and even soured through the decades of American prosperity and preeminence. Her characters are often prototypes of the nation, and their growth from naïveté to wisdom and pain reflect aspects of the national destiny that she sees in the evolving society around her. In her short stories, the naïveté is often the innocence of youth; many stories focus on adolescent girls becoming aware of the potential of their own sexuality and the dangers of the adult world. Like the United States, however, such characters retain an unbounded youthful enthusiasm, an arrogant challenge to the future and the outside world. Relationships of individuals to the world around them are keys to many of Oates’s stories. Her fascination with images of the American Dream and the power of belief and self-creation implied therein translates to an awareness of her characters’ selfperceptions, and, equally, their self-deceptions. Many of her characters have a builtin isolation: That is not to say that they are not involved with other people, but that

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their perceptions are necessarily limited, and that they are aware, though not always specifically, of those limits. Oates often establishes their subjectivity with remarkable clarity, allowing the reader to bring wider knowledge and perspective to the story to fill it out and complete the emotional impact. Isolation, detachment, and even alienation create the obstacles that her characters struggle to overcome, and while Oates has been criticized for the darkness of her writing, as often as not her characters find redemption, hope, and even happiness. Neither the joy, however, nor the tragedy is ever complete, for human experience as Oates sees it is always a complex and mixed phenomenon. Such complexity naturally emerges from human relationships, especially from those between the sexes. As a female writer, Oates had to deal with the “sexual question” merely in the act of sitting down at the typewriter, and her writing reveals a keen sensitivity to the interactions of men and women. Although some of her works toward the end of the 1980’s manifest a more explicitly feminist outlook, Oates has never been a feminist writer. Rather, her feminism—or humanism—is subsumed in her refusal to write the kind of stories and novels that women have traditionally written or to limit her male and female characters to typically male and female behaviors, attitudes, emotions, and actions. Oates does not make the sexes equivalent but celebrates the differences and examines feminine and masculine sexual and emotional life without preconceived assumptions. Thus, reading an Oates story is peering into a vision of the world where almost anything is possible between men and women. Although they are eminently recognizable as the men and women of the contemporary United States, at the same time they are wholly independent and capable of full response to their inner lives. Those inner lives often contain ugly possibilities. One of the major complaints that Oates faced, especially early in her career, regards the violence—often random, graphic, even obsessive—that characterizes much of her work. In 1981, in an essay in The New York Times Book Review entitled “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” Oates branded such criticism as blatantly sexist and asserted the female novelist’s right to depict nature as she knows it. She clearly sees the United States as a nation where violence is a fact of life. In her novels, such violence takes the form of assassinations, mass murders, rapes, suicides, arsons, autopsies, and automobile accidents. In her short stories, the same events are treated with greater economy and precision but with no less commitment to the vivid portrayal of truth. She shies away from neither the physical details of pain and atrocity nor the psychological realities that accompany them. Even when the violence of her stories is a psychological violence performed by one character upon another, with no effusion of blood and guts, the effects are no less visceral. Oates’s stories are deeply felt. Violence, however, is never the ultimate point of an Oates story. Rather, the violence acts as either catalyst or climax to a dramatic progression: Through violent events, characters undergo almost inevitable transformations, and the suddenness of violence or the sharpness of pain, either experienced or observed, jolts characters into a greater appreciation of life. Frequently, the violent event or action is very peripheral to the protagonist or prime action of the story. Rather, it is often anonymous, perpetrated by unseen hands for unknown reasons, presenting mysteries that will never be solved. Violence becomes an emphatic metaphor for the arbitrary hand of fate, destiny, chance, God—or whatever one wishes to call it. Oates generally portrays it without naming or quantifying it: For her, it is simply the way things are. Beneath the passion, deep feeling, and violence of her stories, there is a meticu-

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lously intellectual mind that is evident, looking at the larger picture, in the wide array of approaches and devices that Oates employs over the range of hundreds of stories. She uses first-, second-, and third-person viewpoints, both male and female. Sometimes dialogue predominates; at other times, the prose is richly descriptive. Some of her stories turn on the use of imagery, tone, or rhythm, and plot is all but nonexistent; others are journalistically rich in event and sparse in stylistic embellishment. Some stories approach the length of novels, others are mere brush strokes, several pages or even a single paragraph to express the crux of a character or dramatic situation. Some stories adhere to the traditional unity and structure of the short story, recounting a single event from beginning to end; others meander, circle in upon themselves, travel backward in time, or derive unity not from the narrative but from character or mood. In brief, Oates uses stories to explore the various tools available to her as a writer. As novelist John Barth noted, “Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map.” In addition, while each story has integrity as a complete work of fiction, Oates devoted great attention to the composition of her collections, and each is unified structurally or thematically and forms an artistic whole as well as an anthology of smaller parts. For example, the stories in Oates’s first collection, By the North Gate, are largely set in rural, small-town America and show individuals seeking to find order in their lives. The Wheel of Love consists of stories exploring varieties of love, and those in The Goddess and Other Women are all about women. The volume entitled Marriages and Infidelities contains reworkings of popular stories by such masters as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce; not only do the stories deal with married people and marital issues, but also the literary approach itself suggests a “marriage” between Oates’s tales and the originals on which they are modeled. The collection The Hungry Ghosts is unified by the stories’ academic settings (places not unlike Oates’s own University of Windsor and Princeton) and the vein of satire that runs throughout. The stories in The Poisoned Kiss were, according to a prefatory note by Oates, written by a certain Ferdinand de Briao and deal with the exotic, rustic, and more authentically European material that such a gentleman—Oates’s own imaginary creation—would naturally devise. Night-Side and The Seduction contain stories that involve darker, psychologically ambiguous, sometimes surrealistic situations, and the stories in Last Days focus on individuals in upheaval and crisis, on the verge of emotional or physical breakdown. Many of the pieces in Crossing the Border are linked together by characters—Renee, Evan, Karl, Jake, Cynthia—who appear throughout, and many of those in Raven’s Wing are set in small towns on the New Jersey coast. “The Census Taker” • A small rural town in mythical Eden County, based loosely on the region of western New York where Oates grew up, is the setting of “The Census Taker,” one of the notable stories from By the North Gate. It is a simple story involving four relatively anonymous characters—a census taker, a boy, a girl, and a mother— and it is told in simple prose against a hazy, fairy-tale-like landscape. A census taker comes to a remote home to ask questions, but instead of finding the father who can give him the facts that he needs and send him on his way, he is faced with a pair of relentlessly inquisitive children who peel away the layers of his protective delusion in an effort to bring order to their young existence. Eventually, they wear away his confidence in the meaning of any answers, factual or existential, and he leaves without having taken the simplest measure of their household. At heart is the profound mystery of life which, if not confronted with courage, will drive one to seek refuge in madness, blindness, or obsession.

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“In the Region of Ice” • One of Oates’s early triumphs in the short story, also dealing with obsession and madness, is a piece entitled “In the Region of Ice.” First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1965, and later in The Wheel of Love, it was an O. Henry Award-winner for 1967. The protagonist of “In the Region of Ice” is Sister Irene, a Shakespeare lecturer at a small Roman Catholic university. For all practical purposes, she lives “in the region of ice”—a region void of feeling and passion. Perfectly comfortable in front of a class, she is otherwise timid and essentially incapable of developing meaningful human contact. Into her insulated existence comes Allen Weinstein, a brilliant but emotionally disturbed Jewish student. Obsessed with the reality of ideas, he comes to dominate one of Irene’s classes, inspiring the hatred of his classmates but awakening intellectual and emotional life in the professor herself. The story, narrated through Irene’s viewpoint, charts the emotional journey that she travels in response to Allen’s erratic behavior. Their relationship, through her perception, becomes a dance of intellectual passion and spiritual magnetism. Allen, however, stops coming to class and, after a prolonged absence, contacts Irene from a sanatorium with a plea that she intervene with his father. The Christian awakening and power that Irene feels as she approaches the Weinstein home disappear when she is faced with Allen’s hateful, exasperated, unsympathetic father. Later, released from the sanatorium, Allen comes to Irene for emotional and financial support, but she painfully and inarticulately denies him, incapable of establishing a meaningful connection. Although Allen is clearly on the edge of sanity, Irene’s situation is more pathetic, for she is knowingly trapped within the trivial limits of her own selfhood. At the story’s end, even the almost inevitable news of Allen’s suicide provokes only a longing for feeling but no true emotional response. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” • Another story that details the effects of a male intruder into the life of a female protagonist and the difficulty of connection between two very different people is “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” one of Oates’s most anthologized early stories. This tale of confused adolescence, based on a true story of a serial killer in Tucson, Arizona, is about Connie, a fifteen-year-old who abhors her parents, haunts suburban malls, and passes the hot summer nights with her equally precocious girlfriends. Through it all, however, she privately harbors innocent dreams of ideal love. One day, while home alone, she is approached by a strange man ominously named Arnold Friend, who is determined to seduce her and take her away. Rather than use force, Friend insinuates his way into Connie’s mind and subdues her vulnerable and emerging sexuality. In the end, it is clear that he is leading her to some sort of death, spiritual or physical, and that his love is empty, but she is powerless against him. Oates tells the story naturalistically but includes dreamy and surrealistic passages that suggest allegorical interpretation. The title implies both the uncertainty of adolescence and the changelessness of feminine behavior, or, possibly, the slow pace of social progress in improving women’s lives. Subtly crafted and typically Oatesian, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is in some ways a precursor to many later Oates stories. “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again” is a first-person account of a wayward adolescent girl in search of love and self-definition; the much later “Testimony” portrays a teenage girl who is so devoted to her older boyfriend that she serves as his accomplice in the abduction, rape, and murder of her perceived “rival”; and “April” is a sim-

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ple sketch of two young adolescents rebelling against maternal authority. These four, and many others, portray moments in time when youth teeters on the brink of adulthood, when innocence is subtly transformed into sophistication, and when desire and love become stronger than life itself. “The Scream” • The struggles with desire, rebellion, and identity are subtler but no less intense in a story entitled “The Scream.” It is a mood piece, in which little happens; the emotional impact is found in the images and the tension of stillness. The protagonist is a woman named Renée who, like many of the characters in the volume Crossing the Border, is an American living across the border in Canada. Floundering in a loving but lifeless marriage, she has been having an affair with a man for whom she feels passion but little trust. The narrative of the story follows Renée as she wanders through an art museum, intentionally absent from an appointed rendezvous with her lover. An old man approaches her; she eavesdrops on talkative tourists; she peruses the art; she ruminates on her marriage, her affair, and her various uninteresting options. One photograph especially catches her attention: that of an Indian woman holding out a dead child, her face frozen in an anguished shriek. After gazing a long while at the photograph, losing herself in it, Renée swiftly leaves the museum and goes to meet her lover. The story ends as she stands outside their meeting place, no more determined to enter than when she started. The power of the story lies in the photograph as an image. On one hand, the Indian woman’s scream touches Renée’s own internal anguish, which is magnified by the relative paltriness of her particular discontent. On the other hand, the static quality of the photographic image—the scream does not vanish when Renée looks away and back again—figures her own emotional paralysis. She can see and feel the inherent contradiction of her quandary—frozen in anguish—and through the experience at the museum can only barely begin to take action for self-liberation. “In the Autumn of the Year” • An even more mature woman is at the center of “In the Autumn of the Year,” which received an O. Henry Award in 1979, a year after its first publication in The Bennington Review, and which is included in the collection A Sentimental Education. Eleanor Gerhardt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, an articulate spinster who has come to a small New England college to accept an award. Her host for the visit is Benjamin Holler, a man she knew when he was a boy in Boston when she was his father’s mistress. She was never married, and her passion for Edwin Holler and the dramatic dissolution of their relationship form a memory that she sustains, though she had not seen him in the decades before his death. Upon meeting Benjamin, her consciousness shifts back and forth from the uneventful present to the tumultuous and deeply felt past. Oates here uses balance to create powerful emotional dynamics. The juxtaposition of immediate experience and memory communicates the dislocation with which Eleanor perceives her existence in the “autumn” of her life. The second half of the story comes suddenly and unexpectedly. In a seemingly casual conversation, Benjamin expresses accumulated anger and hatred at Eleanor and his father. Confronted with the sordidness of their affair and their responsibility for the emotional misery of his childhood, Eleanor’s sentimental vision of the past is shattered. Benjamin offers her the love letters and suicide threats that she sent to Edwin upon their separation, but she cannot face them and denies their authenticity. In the end, alone, she tosses the unopened letters in the fire, as if so doing will allevi-

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ate her guilt and folly. Benjamin’s brutal honesty, however, has provided a missing piece to the puzzle of her life. Without the delusions by which her past drained her present of meaning, she is forced to face the past honestly and, recognizing its mixed qualities, to let go of it. Through this encounter, she can begin to take responsibility for her continued existence and her continued potential to think, feel, do, and live. As so often in Oates’s stories, small encounters bring great transformations, and in pain there is redemption. “Raven’s Wing” • “Raven’s Wing,” a story in the volume of the same title, first appeared in Esquire and was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1985. It is a subtle story that portrays a rather ordinary marriage and lacks the violence and passion of much of Oates’s other work. Billy and Linda have been married for barely a year. Though Linda is five months pregnant, Billy treats her with indifference; Linda, in turn, baits, teases, and spites him. A horse-racing enthusiast, Billy becomes fascinated with a prize horse named Raven’s Wing after it is crippled during a race. He finds a way to visit Raven’s Wing in Pennsylvania, where it is recovering from major surgery, and, eye to eye with the animal, feels a connection, an implicit mixture of awe, sympathy, and trust. The story ends soon thereafter in two brief scenes: Billy gives Linda a pair of delicate earrings and finds excitement in watching her put them on, and, weeks later, as he talks on the phone, Linda comes to him warmly, holding out a few strands of coarse black hair—a souvenir from Raven’s Wing—and presses close against him. In “Raven’s Wing,” rather than stating the characters’ true feelings, of which they themselves are only hazily aware, Oates suggests them through the details of external reality. This is a story about perception—about how things appear differently through the blurring lens of familiarity and routine. Billy’s fascination with the crippled horse betrays an unconscious awareness of his own crippled psyche, and the enormous, beautiful, and priceless creature’s almost inevitable consignment to a stud farm is an ironic reminder of Linda’s pregnancy and the very human power that a man and woman share to love, to support, and to create. The Assignation • The collection The Assignation is stylistically noteworthy, as Oates departs from standard forms and offers a variety of stories, character sketches, mood pieces, and other experiments in short fiction. Many of the pieces are deceptively short; lacking in plot information and often anonymous regarding character, they portray an emotional situation, interaction, or moment through the economic uses of detail and action. The first piece, “One Flesh,” is no more than a paragraph suggesting the richly sensual relationship shared by an old couple. In “Pinch,” a woman’s fleeting emotions during a breast examination create a tense picture. In “Maximum Security,” a woman’s tour of a prison invokes a disturbing sense of isolation while invigorating her appreciation of nature and freedom. “Quarrel” and “Ace” are about how events of random violence affect, respectively, a homosexual couple’s communication and a young street tough’s sense of identity. In all these pieces, Oates provides the essentials of a fuller story and invites the reader’s imagination to go beyond and within the story. The characters are no less unique, the prose no less picturesque, and the situations no less compelling; the economy with which Oates evokes these tales is testament to the depth of her craft.

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Will You Always Love Me? • Will You Always Love Me? is a collection of twenty-two narratives based upon childhood memories, suffering, and reason for hope. Oates cuts to the core of everyday life, revealing the truth about what people know but are not willing to admit. She portrays a profound commentary on the human condition by acting as a witness in describing the needs, cruelty, and violence displayed by humankind. Three of the stories, “You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home,” “The GooseGirl,” and “Mark of Satan,” won O. Henry Awards. A lost dog is a central figure in “You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home,” a story that first appeared in TriQuarterly. Dawn, who fears the erratic behavior and sudden violent acts of her husband, Vic, pets a little lost dog, which subsequently follows her and Vic home. Oates skillfully unveils how Dawn’s feelings of fear for what lies ahead—of betrayal by loved ones and a terrible sense of lost feeling—parallel the feelings of the dog. By treating the dog with care and kindness, Dawn relays to Vic the need for similar consideration. Oates examines some of the consequences that result from unbridled thoughts of passion in “The Goose-Girl,” which first appeared in Fiction. Lydia, a respected suburban mother, helps her son Barry humiliate their new neighbor, Phoebe Stone. Phoebe, who reminds Lydia of the goose-girl in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, propositions Barry at a neighborhood party. Struggling with deep feelings of guilt, Barry eventually reveals the incident to his mother and pleads with her to call Phoebe. After allowing Barry time to worry, Lydia finally makes the call and wittingly embarrasses Phoebe over the proposed sexual encounter with her son. In “Mark of Satan,” which first appeared in Antaeus, Oates brings protagonist Flash to a renewed definition of self, even a renewal of spirit. During a visit from Thelma, a female missionary, Flash attempts to seduce her by drugging her lemonade. Thelma instinctively avoids the ploy and tells Flash that Satan is present in his home. Ironically, after Thelma leaves, she returns and prays for Flash. Finally, he realizes that someone cares about him, even though he does not deserve it. Included in The Best American Stories, 1996, “Ghost Girls” emerged from Oates’s childhood image of a small country airport isolated between cornfields. Ingrid Boone, the child narrator, is intrigued by the mysterious lives led by her parents. Because Ingrid cannot fully comprehend or do anything about the strange adult world that surrounds her, her life, influenced by the example of her attractive mother and her frequently absent father, eventually spirals down into a tale of grotesque horrors. “Ghost Girls” is the seed of Oates’s Man Crazy (1997), a novel of many stark images. Perhaps the most concise articulation of the Oatesian aesthetic can be found in a story entitled “Love. Friendship” from The Assignation. In recollecting a friendship with a sensitive man who became obsessed with her marriage, the narrator Judith reflects: Our lives are narratives; they are experienced in the flesh, sometimes in flesh that comes alive only with pain, but they are recollected as poems, lyrics, condensed, illuminated by a few precise images. Such descriptive narratives—long, short, lyrical, violent, experienced, recollected, full of precise images portraying real-life situations filled with deep heartfelt emotions—form the bulk of Oates’s short fiction. Barry Mann With updates by Alvin K. Benson and the Editors

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Other major works children’s literature: Come Meet Muffin, 1998; Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, 2002; Freaky Green Eyes, 2003; Sexy, 2005. plays: Miracle Play, pr. 1974; Three Plays, pb. 1980; I Stand Before You Naked, pb. 1991; In Darkest America: Two Plays, pb. 1991; Twelve Plays, pb. 1991; The Perfectionist, and Other Plays, pb. 1995; New Plays, pb. 1998. anthologies: Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction, 1972; The Best American Short Stories 1979, 1979 (with Shannon Ravenel); Night Walks: A Bedside Companion, 1982; First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft, 1983; The Best American Essays, 1991; The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 1992; American Gothic Tales, 1996; Snapshots: Twentieth Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, 2000 (with Janet Berliner); The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (with Otto Penzler). novels: With Shuddering Fall, 1964; A Garden of Earthly Delights, 1967, revised 2003; Expensive People, 1968; them, 1969; Wonderland, 1971; Do with Me What You Will, 1973; The Assassins: A Book of Hours, 1975; Childwold, 1976; The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, 1976; Son of the Morning, 1978; Cybele, 1979; Unholy Loves, 1979; Bellefleur, 1980; Angel of Light, 1981; A Bloodsmoor Romance, 1982; Mysteries of Winterthurn, 1984; Solstice, 1985; Marya: A Life, 1986; Lives of the Twins, 1987 (as Rosamond Smith); You Must Remember This, 1987; American Appetites, 1989; Soul/Mate, 1989 (as Smith); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, 1990; I Lock My Door upon Myself, 1990; Nemesis, 1990 (as Smith); The Rise of Life on Earth, 1991; Black Water, 1992; Snake Eyes, 1992 (as Smith); Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, 1993; What I Lived For, 1994; You Can’t Catch Me, 1995 (as Smith); Zombie, 1995; First Love, 1996; We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996; Man Crazy, 1997; My Heart Laid Bare, 1998; Broke Heart Blues, 1999; Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon, 1999 (as Smith); Blonde, 2000; Middle Age: A Romance, 2001; The Barrens, 2001 (as Smith); Beasts, 2002; Rape: A Love Story, 2003; The Tattooed Girl, 2003; The Falls, 2004; Missing Mom, 2005; Black Girl/White Girl, 2006. nonfiction: The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature, 1972; The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, 1973; New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, 1974; Contraries: Essays, 1981; The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews, 1983; On Boxing, 1987; (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, 1988; George Bellows: American Artist, 1995; Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose, 1999; The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, 2003; Uncensored: Views and (Re)views, 2005. poetry: Women in Love, 1968; Anonymous Sins, and Other Poems, 1969; Love and Its Derangements, 1970; Angel Fire, 1973; The Fabulous Beasts, 1975; Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money, 1978; Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 19701982, 1982; The Luxury of Sin, 1984; The Time Traveler, 1989; Tenderness, 1996. Bibliography Bastian, Katherine. Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories: Between Tradition and Innovation. Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 1983. Bastian surveys the Oatesian short story, providing occasional insights into theme and character. The focus is to place Oates in the tradition of the genre and find her links with its other masters. Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1994. After a general introduction to Oates’s contribution to the short story, devotes separate chapters to feminism, the gothic, and postmodernism in several of Oates’s short-story collections. Includes a number of comments by Oates on the short story, as well as brief excerpts from seven other critics.

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____________. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Geared to the general reader, this volume examines both Oates’s major novels and some of her best-known stories. The focus is more on specific works than on Oates’s overarching concerns. Easy to read, with a biography and bibliography. Johnson, Greg. “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates’s First Collection.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Winter, 1993): 1-14. Discusses Oates’s By the North Gate as a microcosm of her entire career in fiction. Focuses on her Faulknerian mythmaking, her view of love as a violent force through which characters strive for power, and the similarity of her stories to those of Flannery O’Connor. ____________. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998. Johnson provides a thorough analysis of Oates’s work and life in this full-length authorized biography. Draws on a variety of sources, including Oates’s private letters and journals. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of thirteen short stories by Oates: “Heat” (vol. 3); “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again,” “In the Region of Ice,” and “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (vol. 4); “My Warszawa” and “Nairobi” (vol. 5); “Stalking” and “The Swimmers” (vol. 7); and “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters,” “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” “Waiting,” “What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?,” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (vol. 8). Oates, Joyce Carol. Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women. Interview by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Numerous interviews with Oates have been published, but this one reveals topics germane to the poetry: class relations, gender relations, and the vital role of memory in her creativity. Oates talks about the biographers (whom Oates labels “pathographers”) who ascribe sickness and deviance to women writers, conflating personal and professional lives in a very damaging way. Wagner, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Good collection of twenty-eight reviews and essays, some on particular works, others on general themes or stylistic considerations. The short stories receive less attention than the novels and even, surprisingly, the poetry. Extensive and evenhanded, with a chronology and bibliography, and a short but refreshing preface by Oates herself. Wesley, Marilyn. Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Feminist analysis, this work focuses on the family as portrayed in Oates’s fiction. Wesley contends that the young protagonists of many of Oates’s stories and novels commit acts of transgression that serve as critiques of the American family. Wesley maintains that the acts indict the society that produces and supports these unstable, dysfunctional, and often violent, families. Wyatt, Jennifer L.,Traci S. Smrcka, and Bill Delaney. “Joyce Carol Oates.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Oates’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into her short fiction.

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Born: Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland; December 15, 1930 Principal short fiction • The Love Object, 1968; A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories, 1974; Mrs. Reinhardt, 1978 (published in U.S. as A Rose in the Heart, 1979); Returning, 1982; A Fanatic Heart, 1984; Lantern Slides, 1990. Other literary forms • Besides short stories, Edna O’Brien has written dramas (including screenplays and teleplays), poetry (On the Bone, 1989), children’s literature (The Dazzle, 1981), and novels such as A Pagan Place (1970), Night (1972), The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1986), House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), Wild Decembers (1999), In the Forest (2001), and The Light of Evening (2006). She has also published nonfiction, including autobiographical travel books such as Mother Ireland (1976), newspaper articles, and biographical and literary criticism such as James and Nora (1981), and James Joyce (1999). She has also edited the anthology Some Irish Loving (1979). Achievements • After a strong start in the early 1960’s with three splendid short novels in the Bildungsroman tradition of maturation and escape (The Country Girls, 1960, winner of the Kingsley Amis Award; The Lonely Girl, 1962, reprinted as Girl with Green Eyes, 1964; and Girls in Their Married Bliss, 1964), Edna O’Brien established herself publicly in a variety of television appearances. She became a most articulate spokeswoman for a not overly romantic view of Ireland, for women trapped in an eternal mother-daughter conflict, and for some feminists. The last-mentioned achievement is reached paradoxically in O’Brien’s fictions by her frequent exploration and exploitation of an unsympathetic woman in the leading role—the Caithleen (Kate) of the early novels. O’Brien has very few male leads or narrators. Her Kate-women often are whiners and losers who make poor choices in their liaisons with men (often already married), which almost inevitably bring grief. Her depiction of character, setting (particularly in Ireland—Philip Roth has praised her sense of place), and conflict is, however, so strong, so graphic, and often in such memorable language, appealing to all the senses, that the negative point is made: This is not how a woman, or indeed any person, seeking happiness should go about the search “for love or connection.” At her best, O’Brien has another counterbalancing woman present as a foil, such as the ebullient Baba, the other heroine with Kate in her early novels; this confident voice is particularly strong in Girls in Their Married Bliss and Night, an extended “Baba” monologue in the fashion of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Ulysses (1922). O’Brien’s achievement is to take her readers some distance along the road to realizing what it is to be an integrated, and therefore a happy, person. She is at her best when the setting of her fictions is rural Ireland, not the jet-setters’ London or Mediterranean. O’Brien is most popular in the United States, where she gives frequent readings of her work. She is a gifted re-creator of the sights, smells, tastes, and feel of Ireland—with a vivid way of capturing what people might say, at their colorful best.

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Biography • As the youngest child in a Roman Catholic family that included a brother and two sisters, Josephine Edna O’Brien was born on December 15, 1930, and grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland. She was educated at the local parochial school in Scarriff and was a boarder in the Convent of TO VIEW IMAGE, Mercy, Loughrea, County Galway. She PLEASE SEE went to Dublin to study pharmacy in PRINT EDITION the apprentice system then in vogue OF THIS BOOK. and began contributing to the Irish Press. In 1954, O’Brien married writer Ernest Gebler, author of Plymouth Adventure (1950); they had two sons, Carlo and Sasha. The family moved to London, where O’Brien established her permanent residence and wrote The Country Girls in her first month there. She followed it quickly with the other parts of the trilogy, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss. Though O’Brien © Terry O’Neill and Gebler have argued in print over just how much help he gave her with the trilogy (the marriage was dissolved in 1964), O’Brien was launched on a successful, high-profile career. The Lonely Girl was made into a film, Girl with Green Eyes, starring Rita Tushingham. Based in London, very successfully bringing up her sons on her own, O’Brien had two most prolific decades of work, in a variety of genres. The novels accumulated: August Is a Wicked Month (1965); Casualties of Peace (1966); A Pagan Place, her favorite work; Zee and Co. (1971); Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977); and, after what was for O’Brien a long hiatus, The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1986), The High Road (1988), and other contemporary-setting novels including Wild Decembers (1999). Between novels, she published short stories in a variety of magazines (The New Yorker in particular), the best of which have been collected. Along with prose fiction, journalism, and travel books, O’Brien also continued her interest in drama: A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers (1962), Time Lost and Time Remembered (1966), X, Y, and Zee (1971), and Virginia (1980). O’Brien’s biography provides the raw material for her fictions. “All fiction is fantasized autobiography,” she affirms in the introduction to An Edna O’Brien Reader (1994). In 1984 and 1986, she published in New York a pair of matched volumes: A Fanatic Heart, largely from the best of her previously collected stories, and, what many would consider her best work, The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, of which a twenty-one-page last section is entirely new. For a while, it seemed that the well of inspiration was exhausted. In 1988, however, she was back again in New York with The High Road, published after a ten-year novel-writing hiatus. She also presented a reading in New York in 1990 of “Brother,” from her short-story collection Lantern Slides and autographed her poem On the Bone (1989).

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Analysis • Edna O’Brien has written short stories throughout her long career. “Come into the Drawing Room, Doris” (retitled “Irish Revel” in The Love Object collection) first appeared in The New Yorker on October 6, 1962. “Cords,” published as “Which of Those Two Ladies Is He Married To?” in The New Yorker, on April 25, 1964, deals with many of the aspects of loss and missed connections, which are O’Brien’s constant themes. The missed connections are most frequently between mothers and daughters, and between women and men. O’Brien is at her most persuasively graphic when her protagonists are clearly Irish women, at home, in a vanished Ireland whose society as a whole she re-creates and often increasingly indicts most convincingly. “Cords” • The question “Which of Those Two Ladies Is He Married To?,” which forms the original title of “Cords,” is posed in the story by Claire’s scandalized, rural, Irish mother on a London visit to her sexually active, editor, lapsed Catholic, poetdaughter. The dinner guests are a husband, his pregnant wife Marigold, and his mistress Pauline—which grouping elicits the mother’s question. The newer title, “Cords,” more aptly focuses attention on the constrictive mother-daughter bond, which is at the center of this story. The conflict is effectively rendered; no final judgment is made on who is to blame. The Catholic, self-sacrificing mother, who masochistically sews without a thimble, is a spunky traveler. The rather precious daughter, with her “social appendages” but no friends, “no one she could produce for her mother [or herself] and feel happy about,” for her part means well. The two women are deftly shown to be on a collision course, not just with their umbrellas or their differences over food. The detailed parts of the story all function smoothly. The mother looks at herself in a glass door; Claire sees herself reflected in a restaurant’s mirrors. Each woman is herself and an image projected elsewhere. The constraint between them is vividly rendered from their moment of meeting until they are at the airport again, where both “secretly feared the flight number would never be called.” In the background here, in Claire’s thoughts, is the father, “emaciated, crazed and bankrupted by drink,” with whom the mother’s unhealthy, symbiotic relationship continues: “She was nettled because Claire had not asked how he was.” In “Cords,” then, are many of the perennial, rush-of-memory themes: the family feuding, the malevolent Church influence, the searing, almost flawlessly detailed exposé of the tie that binds many mothers and daughters. All is rendered here with the saving grace of good humor, and even old jokes are recalled, such as those about good grazing on the Buckingham Palace lawns, about Irish planes being blessed and therefore never crashing, and about an overly heavy suitcase—“Have you stones in it?” Claire asks. “A Scandalous Woman” • “A Scandalous Woman” sets the tone for O’Brien’s second collection, named after it, and reveals an increasingly gloomy view of the female predicament, whether in Ireland or elsewhere. The story, published in 1974, concludes, “I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, [to which is added in the stronger A Fanatic Heart version, ‘throttled’] women.” Here is an indictment of a family, its church, and society, very like that in A Pagan Place, and to be seen again in “Savages.” The anonymous narrator leads the reader through Eily’s life from early courtship days until the moment when the narrator, now no longer a young girl but a mother herself, seeks out her childhood friend, to find her much changed: “My first thought was that they must have drugged

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the feelings out of her . . . taken her spark away.” “They” and their “strange brews” are part of the “scandalous” environment of this pagan place. The anonymous narrator graphically describes how, as a young girl, she admired and sought the company of Eily, who was a few years older and had the “face of a madonna.” The narrator tells how she loved Eily and visited her home each Tuesday, even though this meant that she had to play, in the hospital game, the patient to Eily’s sister’s surgeon. Lying on the kitchen table, she saw “the dresser upside down” in a world whose values are far from upright either. It is Eily, however, who is hollowed out at the story’s end: Her playing Juliet to her Protestant Romeo, a bank clerk named Jack, ends in Eily’s sniveling at a shotgun wedding. The young narrator had acted as lookout and cover so Eily could meet her lover, “Sunday after Sunday, with one holy day, Ascension Thursday, thrown in.” When Jack attempts to throw Eily over, the narrator reveals in herself the same confusion of pagan and Christian values of the others: I said . . . that instead of consulting a witch we ought first to resort to other things, such as novenas, putting wedding cake under our pillows, or gathering bottles of dew in the early morning and putting them in a certain fort to make a wish. The combined forces of the family, church, and community, in a profusion of animal imagery, move events along to the marriage solution. This is a dense, beautifully put together story, packed with details of the repressive effects of society on a lively girl, who is cowed into submission. From the symbolism of the upside-down world observed by the child on the kitchen table to the loaded “Matilda” term for the female genitalia (between “ma” and “da,” there “I” am), everything in this story contributes to the indictment and ironic redefinition of what is “scandalous.” Mrs. Reinhardt, and Other Stories • O’Brien’s pessimism about much of the female condition shows little alleviation in the Mrs. Reinhardt, and Other Stories collection, heavily though erratically edited and renamed A Rose in the Heart in the American edition. The stories overall continue to chronicle the depressing, unsuccessful search of O’Brien’s heroines for happiness in, but more often out of, marriage. Other perennial themes such as loss, isolation, motherhood, and bigotry are not neglected, especially when the setting is Ireland. The gothic story “Clara” has a rare male narrator. The stories “Number Ten” and “Mrs. Reinhardt” fit together and were in fact dramatized as a unit in a 1981 drama prepared for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Tilly, in a failing marriage with her art-dealer husband, Harold, sleepwalks her way into misery. For the normally self-centered O’Brien woman who lives, especially when in England, in an economic and social vacuum (very unlike O’Brien’s own successful career), Tilly’s two afternoons a week teaching autistic children is unusual and helps her credibility. In her dreams, she sees the perfect “nest”—an apartment, with one entire bedroom wall a mirror, where she and her husband can come together at night. The apartment, surreally, does exist, she discovers, and her husband uses it in the daytime with another woman. It is a rending, no-communication standoff; the unhappy O’Brien woman remains “an outsider looking in.” In the second tale, Mrs. Reinhardt heads off to color-splashed Brittany for a trial separation, determined to somnambulate no more. She resolves to forget the past and to “get even with life” by taking advantage of a brash Iowan in his mid-twenties whom she meets by the sea. It is an ugly picture that O’Brien paints of Tilly’s sexual

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conduct, which is as predatory as that of the lobsters she observes in their tank. In this bleak tale, neither the love of the old patron at the hotel nor the arrival of Tilly’s husband does much to alleviate the joyless atmosphere: “What then does a Mrs. Reinhardt do? . . . One reaches out to the face that is opposite . . . for the duration of a windy night. And by morning who knows? Who knows anything anyhow?” Such is the pessimistic conclusion to this fiction; O’Brien’s aging heroine’s search continues. Returning • O’Brien’s sharp study of a certain kind of female psychology continues in the collection Returning, where the external topography in all nine stories is the west of Ireland and the craggy community there. A young girl is present in all the collection’s stories, either as the ostensible narrator or as the subject of mature reflection on the part of the now-experienced woman. This then-and-now tension between the innocence of childhood and the experience of fifty years, Philip Roth, in his introduction to A Fanatic Heart, isolates as the spring for these stories’ “wounded vigor.” There is no title story of the same name, but in a very real sense each of the tales here represents a return for O’Brien, a going home. “Savages,” in this collection, represents O’Brien, often accused of careless, awkward, and too-rapid writing, at her careful, three-times-reworked best. The theme bears distinct similarities to “A Scandalous Woman” in its indictment of the community. The story deals with Mabel McCann’s search for love in her village community, her false pregnancy, and ostracism. The three published versions of the story that exist (the version published in The New Yorker, January 18, 1982; the English edition; and the version in A Fanatic Heart) help reveal O’Brien’s artistic development, which, though it is by no means a straight-line progression, nevertheless represents work and progress. A noticeable distancing and maturing in the narrator can be seen from the first version to the second one, where she is no longer a precocious twelve-yearold. The second version introduces the five-hundred-word addition of a lugubrious scene between a deaf-and-dumb brother and sister to underscore the gothic qualities of the environment. Although all is not unequivocal, there is artistic progress in this second version, where Mabel is called a “simpleton” in the conclusion. In the third and final version, this term, removing her from the world of choices, is wisely dropped; readers are left to work out for themselves what happened. This emendation is a final improvement in the best overall version of an excellent story. The collection also includes the sensory-rich “Sister Imelda,” which received the accolade of inclusion in the 1986 Norton Anthology of English Literature. A Fanatic Heart • A Fanatic Heart includes twenty-five O’Brien stories previously anthologized and a quartet of The New Yorker, heretofore uncollected works, in a splendidly produced volume introduced by Roth. The quartet is typical of O’Brien’s writing when she is on the brittle high road outside Ireland and is generally much less satisfactory. The shallow, codependent Irish woman of these stories moves in three of them through bitter, first-person musings on a current, seemingly doomed affair of the heart with a married family man. Only in the second story, “The Call,” is she looked at in the third person as she does not answer the ringing telephone. It is time to cease to be strangers, she muses in “The Plan.” In a later version of this tale, though, O’Brien cut the pessimistic note that follows immediately, “Though of course we would always be strangers.” The “blue” narrator takes a geographical cure to forget, but that does not work, and readers are left with her wondering in “The Return” how much longer she will be able to endure.

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“Another Time” • In “Another Time,” in the collection Lantern Slides, the narrator, a single parent and glamorous former television announcer, gets away to her home in the west of Ireland. After a series of sharply observed encounters with and flashbacks to places and people, Nelly Nugent comes to terms with the present: “She felt as if doors or windows were swinging open all around her and that she was letting go of some awful affliction.” At her best, O’Brien has the capacity in her fictions to give this release to her readers. The mirrors that appear so often in her work serve then to alert not only her recurring characters but also her readers to the roller-coaster realities of love, loss, and endurance. This work was selected for The Best New Yorker Stories of 1989, in which magazine four others of the dozen stories in this collection also appeared. “Love’s Lesson” • Whatever the question is, O’Brien’s answer is love; this story, then, which appeared in Zoetrope (Summer, 1998), closes out a decade in which no collection appeared after Lantern Slides. The varieties-of-love theme continued in the 1990’s to dominate O’Brien’s short fictions, beginning with “No Place” (The New Yorker, June 17, 1991) where her well-off, ageless, lonely, Irish protagonist, her two boys still in boarding school, waits “on love” in North Africa; her man fails to show up from London’s rougher-trade side. Still, in The New Yorker ( July 11, 1994), a now aging, lonely widow, the love of her children growing “fainter and fainter,” her husband’s “unloving love” now a memory, shows herself in “Sin” to be far from well as she pictures her paying guests’ incestuous relations with their daughter: “What reached her ears could not be called silence.” In “Love’s Lesson” a jagged, uneven, disconnected, at times overwritten letter from an Irish woman in New York City reviews the course of her affair with a celebrated architect. Her relationship with him has magnified her feeling of being an outsider. Cosmopolitan and international in her experiences and sympathies, she is yet setting out for home, the mysteries of love still mysterious: “Now we will never know for sure.” The lessons taught here by “love” in its various manifestations send the protagonist home to freedom, “to give up the habit of slavery.” Freedom has its costs, too. Nor is there any free love, as the narrator discovers, reviewing her violent relationship with the architect, which she wishes was just physical. She shares her lesbian relationship with her friend Clarissa, who is greatly troubled by thoughts of her dead mother, as is the nameless narrator. People she meets and observes, all with their “connection” problems, cause her to book her flight home. Given the personal-journal format here, reinforced by O’Brien’s ongoing admiration for and work on master wordsmith James Joyce, the stream-of-consciousness technique is to be expected. O’Brien’s best prior example of this technique is her Night. Here, in “Love’s Lesson,” she continues her alliterative reaching for metaphorical, verbal epiphanies through all the senses to establish the mood. Sometimes she is successful, sometimes not: “Skeins of sound sweetening the air.” Here then O’Brien’s Irish heroine, alone, courageously as ever, confronts life and the varieties and manifestations of love. The constraints of the Roman Catholic Church and rural society have no place here, but family pressures are not absent, nor is the gallant hope with which her secular heroines view life as they must live it. Archibald E. Irwin

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Other major works children’s literature: The Dazzle, 1981; A Christmas Treat, 1982; The Expedition, 1982; The Rescue, 1983; Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories, 1986. plays: A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers, pr. 1962; A Pagan Place, pr. 1972 (adaptation of her novel); The Gathering, pr. 1974; Virginia, pr. 1980; Flesh and Blood, pr. 1985; Iphigenia, pr., pb. 2003 (adaptation of Euripides’ play). anthology: Some Irish Loving, 1979. novels: The Country Girls, 1960; The Lonely Girl, 1962 (also known as Girl with Green Eyes, 1964); Girls in Their Married Bliss, 1964; August Is a Wicked Month, 1965; Casualties of Peace, 1966; A Pagan Place, 1970; Zee and Co., 1971; Night, 1972; Johnny I Hardly Knew You, 1977 (published in U.S. as I Hardly Knew You, 1978); The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, 1986 (includes The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss); The High Road, 1988; Time and Tide, 1992; An Edna O’Brien Reader, 1994; House of Splendid Isolation, 1994; Down by the River, 1996; Wild Decembers, 1999; In the Forest, 2001; The Light of Evening, 2006. nonfiction: Mother Ireland, 1976; Arabian Days, 1977; James and Nora: A Portrait of Joyce’s Marriage, 1981; Vanishing Ireland, 1986; James Joyce, 1999. poetry: On the Bone, 1989. screenplays: Girl with Green Eyes, 1964 (adaptation of her novel); Time Lost and Time Remembered, 1966 (with Desmond Davis; also known as I Was Happy Here); Three into Two Won’t Go, 1969; X, Y, and Zee, 1971 (also known as Zee and Company; adaptation of her novel). teleplays: The Wedding Dress, 1963; Nothing’s Ever Over, 1968; Mrs. Reinhardt, 1981 (adaptation of her short story); The Country Girls, 1983 (adaptation of her novel). Bibliography Guppy, Shusha. “The Art of Fiction: Edna O’Brien.” The Paris Review 26 (Summer, 1984): 22-50. The topics discussed include how O’Brien got started on her writing career; the writers, such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Anton Chekhov, whom she admires; feminism, into which O’Brien fits uneasily; religion; Ireland; and other areas, such as theater and film, in which O’Brien has worked. At the age of fifty-four, O’Brien affirms that she is putting the themes of love, loss, and loneliness behind her. She recommends A Pagan Place as her best book. Irwin, Archibald E., and Joanne McCarthy. “Edna O’Brien.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of O’Brien’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into her short fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by O’Brien: “Another Time” (vol. 1); “The Creature” (vol. 2); “Forgiveness” (vol. 3); and “Paradise,” “A Rose in the Heart of New York,” and “A Scandalous Woman” (vol. 6). O’Brien, Edna. “Interview.” Paris Review 26 (Summer, 1984): 22-50. O’Brien discusses the influence of Chekhov on her stories, the animosity of feminists to much of her writing, the theme of Ireland in her stories, and her focus on sexuality in many of her stories. ____________. “The Pleasure and the Pain.” Interview by Miriam Gross. The Observer (April 14, 1985): 17-18. A provocative interview, interesting also in that it draws

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from Ernest Gebler, O’Brien’s former husband, a detailed rebuttal of her statements about him (The Observer, April 28, 1985) and an incendiary interview with him (Sunday Independent, April 28, 1985, 7). ____________. Publishers Weekly 239 (May 18, 1992): 48-49. O’Brien discusses her relationship with her mother, her calling to become a writer, her interest in the Gospels and the writings of Catholic mystics, and her relationship with her editors. O’Brien, Peggy. “The Silly and the Serious: An Assessment of Edna O’Brien.” The Massachusetts Review 28 (Autumn, 1987): 474-488. An overview of O’Brien’s work, discussing her central themes and critiquing critical reception of her stories. Argues that her obsession with a father figure makes her portray sexually insatiable women in disastrous relationships with hurtful men. O’Hara, Kiera. “Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Stories of Edna O’Brien.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Summer, 1993): 317-326. Discusses O’Brien’s characters’ obsession with love, which stands in the way of love’s attainment. Discusses “Irish Revel” from her 1969 collection The Love Object as the birth of the obsession and the title story of her 1990 collection Lantern Slides as the epitome of it. Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. “Sacrificial Women in Short Stories by Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Spring, 1995): 185-197. Examines sacrificial women in two stories by Lavin and two by O’Brien; claims that in the stories, female martyrdom engendered by the Madonna myth takes different forms, from becoming a nun to becoming a wife, mother, or “fallen woman.” Woodward, Richard B. “Edna O’Brien: Reveling in the Heartbreak.” The New York Times Magazine (March 12, 1989): 42, 50, 52. An up-close and unsympathetic portrait, with a color photo, of O’Brien, whom Woodward, after several meetings and much research, calls “a poet of heartbreak.” This careful essay shows an offputting, publicity-hunting, and difficult side of the deliberately apolitical O’Brien. Woodward does not find that The High Road breaks any new ground, in contrast to the affirmation of Shusha Guppy; he finds her short fiction more accomplished.

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Flanner y O’Connor O’Connor, Flannery

Born: Savannah, Georgia; March 25, 1925 Died: Milledgeville, Georgia; August 3, 1964 Principal short fiction • A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1955; “Good Country People,” 1955; “Revelation,” 1964; Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965; The Complete Stories, 1971. Other literary forms • In addition to writing thirty-one short stories, Flannery O’Connor wrote two short novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). A collection of her essays and occasional prose entitled Mystery and Manners (1969) was edited by Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and a collection of letters entitled The Habit of Being (1979) was edited by Sally Fitzgerald. More correspondence is collected in The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and Brainard Cheneys (1986), edited by C. Ralph Stephens. O’Connor also wrote book reviews, largely for the Roman Catholic press; these are collected in The Presence of Grace (1983), which was compiled by Leo J. Zuber and edited by Carter W. Martin. Achievements • The fiction of Flannery O’Connor has been highly praised for its unrelenting irony, its symbolism, and its unique comedy. O’Connor is considered one of the most important American writers of the short story, and she is frequently compared with William Faulkner as a writer of short fiction. For an author with a relatively small literary output, O’Connor has received an enormous amount of attention. More than twenty-five books devoted to her have appeared beginning in the early 1960’s, when significant critics worldwide began to recognize O’Connor’s gifts as a fiction writer. Almost all critical works have emphasized the bizarre effects of reading O’Connor’s fiction, which, at its best, powerfully blends the elements of traditional southwestern humor, the southern grotesque, Catholic and Christian theology and philosophy, atheistic and Christian existentialism, realism, and romance. Most critics have praised and interpreted O’Connor from a theological perspective and noted how unusual her fiction is, as it unites the banal, the inane, and the trivial with Christian, though fundamentally humorous, tales of proud Georgians fighting battles with imaginary or real agents of God sent out to shake some sense into the heads of the protagonists. As an ironist with a satirical bent, O’Connor may be compared with some of the best in the English language, such as Jonathan Swift and George Gordon, Lord Byron. It is the comic irony of her stories that probably attracts most readers—from the orthodox and religious to the atheistic humanists whom she loves to ridicule in some of her best fiction. Thus, as a comedian, O’Connor’s achievements are phenomenal, since through her largely Christian stories, she is able to attract readers who consider her beliefs outdated and quaint. In her lifetime, O’Connor won recognition, but she would be surprised at the overwhelming response from literary critics that her fiction has received since her death. O’Connor won O. Henry Awards for her stories “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “A Circle in the Fire,” “Greenleaf,” “Everything That Rises Must Con-

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verge,” and “Revelation.” The Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1971, won the National Book Award for Fiction. O’Connor received many other honors, including several grants and two honorary degrees. Biography • Flannery O’Connor’s relatively short life was, superficially, rather uneventful. O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, to Regina Cline and Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr. She was their only child. O’Connor’s father worked in real estate and construction, and the family lived in Savannah until 1938, when they moved to Atlanta. In that year, Edward O’Connor became a zone real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Shortly thereafter, O’Connor and her mother moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, and her father became so ill that he had to resign from his job in Atlanta and move to Milledgeville. On February 1, 1941, Edward O’Connor died. From the fall of 1938 until her death, O’Connor spent most of her life in Milledgeville, except for brief hiatuses. After graduating from the experimental Peabody High School in 1942, O’Connor entered Georgia State College for Women (subsequently renamed Georgia College) in Milledgeville, where she majored in sociology and English and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in June, 1945. While in college, she was gifted both in drawing comic cartoons and in writing. In September, 1945, O’Connor enrolled at the State University of Iowa with a journalism scholarship, and in 1946, her first story, “The Geranium” (later revised several times until it became “Judgement Day,” her last story), was published in Accent. In 1947, she received the master of fine arts degree and enrolled for postgraduate work in the prestigious Writers’ Workshop. She was honored in 1948 by receiving a place at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Planning never to return to the South, O’Connor lived briefly in New York City in 1949 but later moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, to live with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. Robert Fitzgerald is best known as a classics scholar and a translator of such works as Homer’s Odyssey (c.725 b.c.e) and Sophocles’ The Theban Plays. City life was too much for O’Connor, but she became quickly acclimated to life in slower-paced Ridgefield. In January, 1950, she underwent an operation while visiting her mother during Christmas. She remained in Milledgeville until she returned to Ridgefield in March. In December, 1950, O’Connor became extremely ill en route to Milledgeville for Christmas. At first, it was believed that she was suffering from acute rheumatoid arthritis, but in February, after being taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, O’Connor was diagnosed with disseminated lupus erythematosus. As a result of her illness, O’Connor would remain under the care of her mother for the rest of her life, and in March, 1951, she and her mother moved from the former governor’s mansion in Milledgeville to Andalusia, the Cline family’s farm, which was on the outskirts of town. O’Connor’s mother, a Cline, was part of a family who had played a significant part in the history of the town of Milledgeville and the state of Georgia. Like many O’Connor protagonists, her mother, using hired help probably very often similar to the “white trash” and black field hands of O’Connor fiction, ran Andalusia as a dairy farm. Meanwhile, O’Connor continued to write when she was not too weak. During the rest of her lifetime, she wrote fiction and befriended many people, some, such as the woman referred to in the collected letters as “A,” through correspondence, others through frequent trips to college campuses for lectures, and still others

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through their visits to see her at Andalusia. Though her illness restricted her life considerably, she was able to achieve greatness as a writer, with a literary output that had already become a permanent part of the canon of American literature since World War II. Physicians were able to control the effects of lupus for years through the use of cortisone and other drugs, but in early 1964, O’Connor, suffering from anemia, was diagnosed with a fibroid tumor. The operation to rid her of the tumor reactivated the lupus, and O’Connor died of kidney failure in August, 1964. In her last months, most of which were spent in hospitals, O’Connor worked slowly but conscientiously on the fiction that was to appear in her second (and posthumous) collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Throughout her life, O’Connor remained faithful to her Catholic and Christian beliefs. Although her letters and fiction indicate frequent humor and self-mockery over her illness, it seems clear that O’Connor did not wish to be treated like an invalid. She did not fear death, because she held to the Christian belief in immortality. Although some critics recognize elements of anger, bitterness, and frustration in the fiction, perhaps it was through her craft that she was able to vent her feelings in a more fruitful way. Friends and acquaintances admired her for her wit, her intelligence, and her sharpness of tongue, but they also admired her for her courage. Analysis • Flannery O’Connor is uncharacteristic of her age. In writing about the pervasive disbelief in the Christian mysteries during modern times, O’Connor seems better suited to the Middle Ages in her rather old-fashioned and conventional Catholic and Christian conviction that the central issue in human existence is salvation through Christ. Perhaps the recognition that such conviction in the postmodern world is rapidly fading and may soon be lost makes O’Connor’s concerns for the spiritual realm, what she called the “added dimension” in her essay entitled “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” more attractive for a dubious audience. Although O’Connor completed thirty-one short stories and two novels, she is best remembered for nearly a dozen works of short fiction. These major stories may be classified as typical O’Connor short stories for a number of reasons. Each story concerns a proud protagonist, usually a woman, who considers herself beyond reproach and is boastful about her own abilities, her Christian goodness, and her property and possessions. Each central character has hidden fears that are brought to surface through an outsider figure, who serves as a catalyst to initiate a change in the protagonist’s perception. O’Connor’s primary theme, from her earliest to her last stories, is hubris—that is, overweening pride and arrogance—and the characters’ arrogance very often takes on a spiritual dimension. Closely connected with the theme of hubris is the enactment of God’s grace (or Christian salvation). In an essay entitled “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” O’Connor states that her stories are about “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil” and points out that the most significant part of her stories is the “moment” or “action of grace,” when the protagonist is confronted with her own humanity and offered, through an ironic agent of God (an outsider) and, usually through violence, one last chance at salvation. O’Connor’s protagonists think so highly of themselves that they are unable to recognize their own fallenness because of Original Sin, so the characters typically are brought to an awareness of their humanity (and their sinfulness) through violent confrontations with outsider figures.

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“The Geranium” • O’Connor’s six earliest stories first appeared in her thesis at the University of Iowa. The most memorable in terms of O’Connor’s later themes are “The Geranium,” her first published story, and “The Turkey.” “The Geranium,” an early version of O’Connor’s last story, “Judgement Day,” deals with the experience of a southerner living in the North. In the story, an old man is treated as an equal by a black man in his apartment building but longs to return home to the South. More modernist in its pessimistic outlook than the later, more characteristic (and religious) O’Connor works, “The Geranium” shows the effects of fading southern idealism and resembles O’Connor’s later stories concerned with home and displacement—other central themes of her fiction. “The Turkey” • “The Turkey” describes an encounter between a young boy named Ruller and a turkey. Receiving little recognition from home, Ruller manages to capture the turkey, only to be outwitted by a leathery confidence woman, a forerunner of O’Connor’s later outsider figures. Thematically, the story concerns the initiation of Ruller into adult consciousness and paves the way for O’Connor’s later concern with theological issues. Ruller, who resembles the prophetlike figures of the novels and several stories, blames God for allowing him to catch the turkey and then taking it away from him. A Good Man Is Hard to Find • The first collection of O’Connor’s fiction, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, consists mostly of previously published short stories and a short novella, The Displaced Person. The title story, which may be O’Connor’s most famous, deals with a Georgia family on its way to Florida for vacation. As the story opens, the main character, the grandmother, tries to persuade her son, Bailey, to go to east Tennessee because she has just read about an escaped convict, The Misfit, who is heading to Florida. The next day, the family, including the nondescript mother, a baby, the other children, John Wesley and June Star, and Pitty Sing, the grandmother’s cat, journeys to Florida. They stop at Red Sammy’s Famous Barbeque, where the proprietor discusses his views of the changing times, saying “A good man is hard to find” to the grandmother, who has similar views. The seemingly comic events of the day turn to disaster as the grandmother, upsetting the cat, causes a car wreck, and The Misfit and two men arrive on the scene. The grandmother recognizes The Misfit, and as a result, brings about the death of the entire family. Before she dies, however, the grandmother, who has been portrayed as a self-centered, judgmental, self-righteous, and hypocritical Protestant, sees the humanity of The Misfit and calls him “one of my babies.” This section of the story represents what O’Connor calls “the action or moment of grace” in her fiction. Thematically, the story concerns religious hypocrisy, faith and doubt, and social and spiritual arrogance. The Misfit, who strikes comparison with Hazel Motes of Wise Blood (1952), is a “prophet gone wrong” (from “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”), tormented by doubt over whether Christ was who he said he was. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” • Another important story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” portrays a drifter named Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed man who covets the automobile of a widow named Lucynell Crater and marries her daughter, a deaf-mute, in order to obtain it. He tells the mother that he is a man with “a moral intelligence.” Shiftlet, who is searching for some explanation for the mystery of human existence, which he cannot quite comprehend, reveals himself to

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be just the opposite: one with amoral intelligence. An outsider figure who becomes the story’s protagonist, Shiftlet leaves his wife, also named Lucynell, at a roadside restaurant, picks up a hitchhiker, and flies away to Mobile as a thunderstorm approaches. The story’s epiphany concerns the irony that Shiftlet considers the hitchhiker a “slime from this earth,” when in reality it is Shiftlet who fits this description. In rejecting his wife, he rejects God’s grace and, the story suggests, his mother’s valuation of Christianity.

“The Artificial Nigger” • The next major tale, “The Artificial Nigger,” is one of O’Connor’s most important and complex. It has been subjected to many interpretations, including the suggestion by some critics that it contains no moment of grace on Courtesy, Georgia College & State University, Special Collections the part of Mr. Head and Nelson, the two main characters. The most Dantesque of all O’Connor stories, “The Artificial Nigger” concerns a journey to the city (hell), where Nelson is to be introduced to his first black person. As O’Connor ridicules the bigotry of the countrified Mr. Head and his grandson, she also moves toward the theological and philosophical. When Nelson gets lost in the black section of Atlanta, he identifies with a big black woman and, comparable to Saint Peter’s denial of Christ, Mr. Head denies that he knows him. Nevertheless, they are reunited when they see a statue of an African American, which represents the redemptive quality of suffering and as a result serves to bring about a moment of grace in the racist Mr. Head. The difficulty of this story, other than the possibility that some may see it as racist itself, is that O’Connor’s narrative is so ironic that critics are unsure whether to read the story’s epiphany as a serious religious conversion or to assume that Mr. Head is still as arrogant and bigoted as ever. Of all O’Connor’s stories—with the possible exceptions of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Good Country People”—“The Artificial Nigger” most exemplifies the influence of the humor of the Old Southwest, a tradition that included authors such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and George Washington Harris. In “The Artificial Nigger,” the familiar motif of the country bumpkin going to the city, which is prevalent in southwestern humor in particular and folk tradition in general, is used. “Good Country People” • “Good Country People,” which is frequently anthologized, concerns another major target of O’Connor’s satirical fictions: the contemporary intellectual. O’Connor criticizes modern individuals who are educated and who believe that they are capable of achieving their own salvation through the pursuit of

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human knowledge. Hulga Hopewell, a doctor in philosophy and an atheistic existentialist, resides with her mother, a banal woman who cannot comprehend the complexity of her daughter, because Hulga has a weak heart and has had an accident that caused her to lose one leg. Believing herself to be of superior intellect, Hulga agrees to go on a picnic with a young Bible salesman and country bumpkin named Manley Pointer, hoping that she can seduce him, her intellectual inferior. Ironically, he is a confidence man with a peculiar affection for the grotesque comparable to characters in the humor of the Old Southwest. As he is about to seduce Hulga, he speeds away with her wooden leg and informs her, “I been believing in nothing since I was born,” shattering Hulga’s illusion that she is sophisticated and intelligent and that her atheism makes her special. As the story ends, Hulga is prepared for a spiritual recognition that her belief system is as weak and hollow as the wooden leg on which she has based her entire existence. Pointer, whose capacity for evil has been underestimated by the logical positivist Mrs. Hopewell but not by her neighbor Mrs. Freeman, crosses “the speckled lake” in an ironic allusion to Christ’s walking on water. The Displaced Person • The final piece in the collection, a novella entitled The Displaced Person, portrays the most positive of O’Connor’s outsider figures, Mr. Guizac, a Pole. The stor y is divided into two sections. In the first part, to escape incarceration in the refugee camps after World War II, Mr. Guizac agrees to work for Mrs. McIntyre, a widow who runs a dair y farm. Unknown to him, Mr. Guizac arouses jealousy and fear in the regular tenant farmers, the Shortleys, and the black field hands. Because Mr. Shortley is lazy and lackadaisical, he particularly resents the productivity of Mr. Guizac. The stor y moves toward the spiritual dimension when Mrs. Shortley, who considers herself a model Christian, begins to see Mr. Guizac and his family as agents of the devil. After Mrs. Shortley learns that her husband is to be fired the next morning, the Shortleys drive away, and Mrs. Shortley dies of a stroke and sees her “true countr y,” which is defined in one of O’Connor’s essays as “what is eternal and absolute” (“The Fiction Writer and His Countr y”). At the time of her death, Mrs. Shortley, displaced like the poor victims of the Holocaust, which she has witnessed in newsreels, is redeemed through displacement and enters her spiritual home. The story’s second part concerns Mrs. McIntyre’s growing fear of outsiders. Mr. Shortley reappears after his wife’s death and learns that Mr. Guizac is arranging a marriage for, and taking money from, Sulk, a Negro field hand, so that Mr. Guizac’s niece can earn passage to the United States. The southern racial taboos are portrayed as fundamentally inhumane when confronted with the reality of human suffering, as seen in the niece, who is in a refugee camp. Father Flynn, the priest who has arranged for Mr. Guizac and his family to come to the United States to work for Mrs. McIntyre, tries to teach Mrs. McIntyre the importance of Christian charity and the fine points of Catholic theology. Unconcerned with these matters, which she considers unimportant, Mrs. McIntyre becomes neurotic about Mr. Guizac’s inappropriateness and overlooks the spiritual for the material. Throughout the novella, O’Connor links the peacock, a symbol of Christ’s Transfiguration, with Mr. Guizac, and in the end, Mr. Shortley “accidentally” allows a tractor to run over Mr. Guizac while Mrs. McIntyre and the other field hands watch. As the human race is complicit in the persecution and crucifixion of Christ, so are Mrs. McIntyre and the others in the death of Mr. Guizac, a Christ figure. At the story’s end, Mrs. McIntyre, losing her dairy farm

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and all the material possessions in which she has put so much faith all of her life, becomes displaced, as do the others who have participated in the “crucifixion” of Mr. Guizac. Everything That Rises Must Converge • The second collection of O’Connor’s short fiction, Everything That Rises Must Converge, shows the author’s depth of vision as she moved away from stories rooted primarily in the tradition of southwestern humor to heavily philosophical, though still quite humorous, tales of individuals in need of a spiritual experience. Most apparent is the influence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French paleontologist and Catholic theologian, on the title story as well as the vision of the entire collection. Teilhard de Chardin argued that through the course of time, it was almost inevitable, even in the evolution of the species, that there was a process moving toward convergence with God. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” • This idea, though perhaps used ironically, appears as the basis for “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which is considered one of O’Connor’s greatest works. O’Connor once said that this story was her only one dealing with the racial issue; even so, the tale still transcends social and political commentary. The main character, Julian, is another typical O’Connor protagonist. Arrogant and unjust to his more conventional southern and racist mother, the adult college graduate Julian angrily hopes that his mother will be given a lesson in race relations by having to sit next to a black woman wearing the same hat that she is wearing. Outwardly friendly to the black woman’s child, Julian’s mother, with characteristic O’Connor violence, converges with the oppressed black race after she offers a penny to Carver, the child. After the black woman hits Julian’s mother with her purse, Julian is as helpless, lost, and innocent as Carver is. He recognizes that his mother is dying and enters the world of “guilt and sorrow.” Through this story, O’Connor reflects on the rising social status of blacks and connects this rise with a spiritual convergence between the two races. “Greenleaf” • “Greenleaf,” also a major work, portrays still another woman, Mrs. May, attempting to run a dairy farm. Her two ungrateful bachelor sons refuse to take her self-imposed martyrdom seriously when she complains of the Greenleafs and their bull, which, at the beginning of the story, is hanging around outside her window. The Greenleafs are lower-class tenant farmers whose grown children are far more productive and successful than the bourgeois Mrs. May’s. O’Connor moves to pagan mythology as she characterizes the bull as a god (compared to Zeus) and unites the Greenleaf bull symbolically with peculiarly Christian elements. The coming of grace in this story is characteristically violent. Mrs. May is gored by a bull, which, like the ancient Greek gods, is both pagan lover and deity (although a Christian deity). “The Lame Shall Enter First” • The next significant story in the collection, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” strikes comparison with the novel The Violent Bear It Away, for the main character, Rufus Johnson, a sociopathic teenage criminal, reminds readers of Francis Marion Tarwater, the hero of the novel. There is also Sheppard, the intellectual social worker who, like Tarwater’s Uncle Rayber, is a secular humanist and believes that if he takes away the biblical nonsense that the adolescent protagonist has been taught, he will be saved.

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Ironically, Sheppard spends all of his time trying to analyze and improve Rufus while at the same time neglecting his own son, Norton. Although Rufus is clearly a demonic figure, he nevertheless believes in God and the Devil and convinces the child that he can be with his dead mother through Christian conversion. The child, misunderstanding, kills himself, and Sheppard is left to recognize the emptiness of his materialist philosophy. O’Connor’s attitude toward the secular humanist is again satirical; without a divine source, there can be no salvation. “Revelation” • O’Connor’s last three stories, according to most critics, ended her career at the height of her powers. “Revelation,” one of the greatest pieces of short fiction in American literature, is O’Connor’s most complete statement concerning the plight of the oppressed. Although her fiction often uses outsiders, she seldom directly comments on her sympathies with them, but through Ruby Turpin’s confrontation with the fat girl “blue with acne,” who is named Mary Grace, O’Connor is able to demonstrate that in God’s Kingdom the last shall be first. Mary Grace calls Mrs. Turpin, who prides herself on being an outstanding Christian lady, a “wart hog from hell,” a phrase that Mrs. Turpin cannot get out of her mind. Later, Mrs. Turpin goes to “hose down” her hogs, symbols of unclean spirits, and has a vision of the oppressed souls entering heaven ahead of herself and her husband (Claud). Critical disagreement has centered largely on whether Mrs. Turpin is redeemed after her vision or whether she remains the same arrogant, self-righteous, bigoted woman she has been all of her life. “Parker’s Back” • “Parker’s Back” is one of the most mysterious of O’Connor’s stories. Obadiah Elihue Parker, a nonbeliever, marries Sarah Ruth, a fundamentalist bent on saving her husband’s soul. After a mysterious accident in which he hits a tree, Parker gradually experiences religious conversion and, though tattooed all over the front of his body, is drawn to having a Byzantine tattoo of Christ placed on his back, thinking that his wife will be pleased. She is not, however, accusing him instead of idolatry. In reality, she is the heretic, for she is incapable of recognizing that Christ was both human and divine. Beating welts into her husband’s back, Sarah Ruth fails to recognize the mystical connection between the suffering of her husband and that of the crucified Christ. By this point in her career, O’Connor was using unusual symbols to convey her sense of the mystery of God’s redemptive power. “Judgement Day” • O’Connor’s last completed story, “Judgement Day,” is a revised version of her first published story, “The Geranium.” The central character, a displaced southerner living with his daughter in New York City, wishes to return home to die. Tanner, while an old and somewhat bigoted man, remembers fondly his relationship with a black man and hopes to befriend a black tenant in his daughter’s apartment building. This story concerns Tanner’s inability to recognize differences in southern and northern attitudes toward race, and, as with earlier O’Connor stories, “home” has more than a literal meaning (a spiritual destiny or heaven). Unlike almost all other O’Connor works, this story portrays racial relations as based on mutual respect. Also, Tanner, while attacked violently by the black tenant, is portrayed as a genuine believer and is sent to his eternal resting place (heaven), the destiny of a Christian. By the end of her life, O’Connor considered a return to a heavenly home much more significant than any other subject. D. Dean Shackelford

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Other major works novels: Wise Blood, 1952; The Violent Bear It Away, 1960. miscellaneous: Collected Works, 1988. nonfiction: Mystery and Manners, 1969; The Habit of Being: Letters, 1979; The Presence of Grace, 1983; The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and Brainard Cheneys, 1986. Bibliography Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. In one of the best books on O’Connor’s fiction, Asals focuses on the use of the doppelgänger (double) motif in the novels and short fiction, the most thorough and intelligent treatment of this subject. Asals also concentrates on O’Connor’s religious extremity, which is evident in her fiction through her concern with polarities and extremes. Contains extensive endnotes and a good bibliography. ____________. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: Flannery O’Connor. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Critical essays on O’Connor’s story from a variety of perspectives. Critics discuss the pros and cons of O’Connor’s shift in point of view from the grandmother to The Misfit, the nature of grace in a materialistic world, and the theological significance of the story’s concluding confrontation. Bacon, Jon Lance. Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Reads O’Connor’s stories in relation to social issues of their milieu. Discusses the context of Cold War politics, popular culture, media, and consumerism that form the backdrop to O’Connor’s stories. Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2002. Painstakingly researched portrait of O’Connor. Includes a bibliography and index. Desmond, John F. Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Desmond’s argument is that O’Connor’s fictions reenact Christian history and Catholic theology through an art O’Connor herself saw as an “incarnational act.” Discussing several major stories and the two novels, the book focuses on the metaphysical and the Christian historical vision as observed through reading O’Connor’s fiction and emphasizes that The Violent Bear It Away represents the fullest development of her vision. Includes an extensive bibliography and useful endnotes. Enjolras, Laurence. Flannery O’Connor’s Characters. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. Chapters on O’Connor’s descriptions of the body, of wicked children, of “conceited, self-righteous Christians,” of “intellectuals and would-be artists.” Includes notes and bibliography. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eleven short stories by O’Connor: “The Artificial Nigger” (vol. 1); “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill” (vol. 2); “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Good Country People,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and “Greenleaf” (vol. 3); “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (vol. 4); and “Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” and and “The River” (vol. 6).

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Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. Flannery O’Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Useful resource for the beginner. Paulson’s book includes primary and secondary material on O’Connor’s fiction and concentrates on the predominant issues, themes, and approaches to O’Connor’s fiction. Paulson divides O’Connor’s stories into four categories: death-haunted questers, male/female conflicts, “The Mystery of Personality” and society, and good/evil conflicts. Supplemented by a chronology of O’Connor’s life and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. Rath, Sura P., and Mary Neff Shaw, eds. Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. The new perspectives illustrated in this collection of essays are primarily feminist and Bakhtinian, with one essay using discourse theory and one focusing on race and culture. Stories discussed include “A View from the Woods,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “The Crop.” Spivey, Ted R. Flannery O’Connor: The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995. Attempts to understand O’Connor first as a southerner, then as a modernist intellect, and finally as a visionary thinker. Argues that O’Connor reflects the personal and social issues of the twentieth century.

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Born: Cork City, Ireland; September 17, 1903 Died: Dublin, Ireland; March 10, 1966 Principal short fiction • Guests of the Nation, 1931; Bones of Contention, and Other Stories, 1936; Crab Apple Jelly, 1944; Selected Stories, 1946; The Common Chord, 1947; Traveller’s Samples, 1951; The Stories of Frank O’Connor, 1952; More Stories, 1954; Stories by Frank O’Connor, 1956; Domestic Relations, 1957; My Oedipus Complex, and Other Stories, 1963; Collection Two, 1964; A Set of Variations, 1969; Collection Three, 1969; Collected Stories, 1981. Other literary forms • Frank O’Connor was a prolific writer who wrote in nearly every literary genre. His published books include poems, translations of Irish poetry, plays, literary criticism, autobiographies, travel books, and essays. His two novels— The Saint and Mary Kate (1932) and Dutch Interior (1940)—are interesting complements to the many short-story collections, for which he is best known. Achievements • Frank O’Connor was a masterful short-story writer. He was a realist who closely observed his characters and their world. He was not a pitiless realist, however, but he always seemed to have great sympathy for his characters, even those who insisted on putting themselves in absurd situations. It follows that one of his major techniques was humor. There is a place for humor in nearly all of his works, including those that border on tragedy. His stories tend to deal with a domestic rather than a public world, and the characters make up what he has called a “submerged population.” Structurally, the stories are simple. O’Connor likes to use a sudden reversal to bring about the necessary change in the plot. The plots tend to be simple, and the reconciliation of the conflict is always very clear. One of the special devices he employed to give the stories some distinction is his use of a narrator. Whether the narrator is a child or an old priest, there is always a distinctive voice telling the reader the story. This voice has some of O’Connor’s special qualities: warmth, humor, sympathy, and a realistic appraisal of the circumstances. Biography • Educated at the Christian Brothers College, Cork, Frank O’Connor (Michael Francis O’Donovan) joined the Irish Volunteers and participated on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War (1922-1923), for which activity he was imprisoned. He supported himself as a librarian, first in Cork, and later in Dublin, where he met George (Æ) Russell and William Butler Yeats, and began his literary career on Æ’s Irish Statesman. He was until 1939 a member of the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre. From 1940 he coedited The Bell, a literary journal, with Seán O’Faoláin. In addition to his editorial work, O’Connor was writing the stories that ensured his fame. From Guests of the Nation on, O’Connor wrote a number of superb collections of short stories. In recognition of this feat, O’Connor was invited to teach at a number of prestigious American universities. In 1939 he married Evelyn Bowen, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. During part of World War II he lived in London, working for

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the Ministry of Information. In 1951 he took up a creative writing position at Harvard, was divorced in 1952, and remarried in 1953 (to Harriet Randolph Rich, with whom he had one daughter). He returned to Ireland permanently in 1961. He received a Litt.D. from Dublin University in 1962, where for a time he held a Special Lectureship. He died in Dublin on March 10, 1966. Analysis • Although widely read in Western literature, Frank O’Connor’s literary character is most profoundly influenced by tensions within the literature and life of Ireland, ancient and modern. He was a dedicated student of the literature of Ireland’s native language, a keen observer of the life of the folk, intimately familiar with Ireland’s topography, and an active participant in its revolutionary and literary politics. These interests shaped his art. His literary vocation, however, like so many others of his generation, begins with Yeats’s literary nationalism and continues through a dialectic between his perceptions of that poet’s idealism and James Joyce’s early naturalism. O’Connor’s predominantly realistic fiction attempts a fusion of these two influences, while also recalling the popular origin—in the oral art of the shanachie—of the short story. He found that Yeats and Joyce were too “elitist” for the “common reader”; and with O’Faoláin, he is associated with the development of the realistic Irish short story, the most representative art of the Irish Literary Revival. “Guests of the Nation” • “Guests of the Nation,” the title story of O’Connor’s first collection, is probably his single finest work. All the stories in this volume reflect his involvement in the War of Independence; and this one distinguishes itself by its austere transcendence of the immediate circumstances, which in the rest of the stories here trammel the subjects with excessive patriotic enthusiasm. During the War of Independence, the protagonist’s (Bonaparte’s) cadre of Volunteers has been charged with the task of holding hostage two British soldiers, Belcher and Hawkins; during their captivity, the forced intimacy of captors and hostages leads to a reluctantly admitted mutual respect which develops through their card-playing, arguments, and sharing of day-to-day chores. As the reader observes the exchanges of sympathy, idiom, and gesture between Irish and English soldiers, the two Englishmen become distinct from their roles, and from each other. The narrative develops the issues of religion, accent, and political allegiances as only superficially divisive, so that when the order arrives from headquarters to execute the hostages in military reprisal, the moral conflict is joined.

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The story nicely dramatizes the contrasting reactions to this order among the various figures, captors and hostages: Donovan’s giving grim precedence to national duty over “personal considerations”; Noble’s pious reflections, which short-circuit his comprehension of the enormity of his actions; and Bonaparte’s reflective agony. The change in the attitudes of the Englishmen, once they know the truth of the directive, poignantly reveals new dimensions in these men’s characters. The argument to the last of Hawkins, the intellectual, dramatizes the limitations of rational discussion; but the stoicism of the more effective Belcher, his unflappability in the face of his own annihilation, drives the story to its height of feeling, a height to which only Bonaparte is equal. Noble’s moral earnestness and Donovan’s objectivity provide contrasts and contexts for Bonaparte’s tragic anagnorisis. O’Connor achieves the inimitable effects of the fine conclusion by a combination of devices: the shreds of partisan argument about religion and politics, the range of attitudes embodied by the various characters, the carefully modulated speaking voice of the narrator—steady, intelligent, slightly uncouth, bitter—the spare use of images (ashes, spades, light and dark), and the figure of the old woman who observes the whole affair. This woman, at once a representative of the “hidden powers” of the universe, the irrationality behind the appearances of coherence, and also a representative of the affinity between such forces in the human psyche and the justifiable cause of Mother Ireland, gives the story both historical and universal resonances. Thus as one considers the story as a tragic examination of the theme of duty (to self, friends, institutions, nation, God), and of the tension between the claims of individual conscience and communal obligation, between commitments to the personal and the abstract, developed with psychological accuracy in a modern setting, one notes its roots in the soil of Irish literature and tradition. The political situation, the various elements of local color, the allusively named characters, the figure of the old woman, the precedence of the ancient Celtic ritual of bog-burial, and the echoes of the tension in Celtic society between the obligations to provide hospitality to strangers and at the same time to protect the clan’s rights through the insurance of hostage-taking: All these elements blend the modern with the archaic. Taken in combination, they achieve the result of casting these English soldiers as “guests” of the nation as an imaginative entity. The restrained lyricism of the last paragraph, coming as it does on the heels of a rather colloquial narrative, shows how moved is the storyteller by his recollections. The bathetic solecism of the summary comment, however—“And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again”—certifies that the narrator’s education is unfinished. This sentence mirrors the dislocation of his feelings, while it also nicely preserves the integrity of O’Connor’s characteristic fictional device, the speaking voice. “In the Train” • The story “In the Train” (Bones of Contention, and Other Stories) dramatizes the reactions of a group of South-of-Ireland villagers toward an accused murderer in their midst, as they all return homeward by train from the Dublin criminal court. They have all conspired to prevent the woman’s conviction, planning to punish her in their own manner when they return home. By a series of interconnected scenes, observed in a sequence of compartments of the train as it traverses the dark countryside, the story develops the theme of the villagers’ common opposition to the law of the state and, by implication, their allegiance to the devices of their ancient community. From the bourgeois pretensions of the sergeant’s wife to the dialogue

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that reveals the tensions and boredom among the policemen, to the stoicism of the peasants, to the huddled figure of the accused herself, the focus narrows from the humor of the opening scenes to the brooding interior monologue of the isolated woman in the final scene. The various parts of the story are interconnected by the characters’ common motion west, their agreed attitude toward the legal apparatus of the Free State, by the Chaplinesque rambling drunk, and by the fated, defiant pariah. The story proceeds by indirection: Its main action (the murder and trial) is over and revealed only in retrospect; and its focus (the accused) is not fully identified until the final section. O’Connor develops these suspensions, however, in a resourceful manner, by focusing on the secondary tension in the community occasioned by the presence of the sergeant’s carping wife, and by having the shambling drunk lead the reader to the transfixed woman. The apparent naïveté of the narrator’s voice—colloquial, amused, relishing the folksy scenes—is belied by the complex structure of the piece. Moreover, the narrative is rich with echoes of Anton Chekhov, touches of melodrama and vaudeville, devices from folktales and folkways, as it portrays the residue of the ancient legal unit of Celtic society, the derb-fine, persisting under the “foreign” order of the Irish Free State. In these contexts, the ambiguities of the sergeant’s position and that of the local poteen manufacturer are richly developed, while one discerns that the woman’s guilt is never firmly established. The story ends with a choric circle around the tragic complaint of the woman, whose community has preserved her only to impose their own severe penalty: ostracism from the only community she knows. O’Connor shares and enlarges her despair. The initial amusement of his story yields to chagrin at the loss both of the ideals of the Irish revolution in the Free State and of humaneness in the dying rural communities of Ireland. “The Long Road to Ummera” • “The Long Road to Ummera” concerns an old woman’s conflict with her son over her desire for burial in her ancestral ground in the remote West Cork village of Ummera. Abby, Batty Heig’s daughter, has followed her son Pat to the city of Cork, but feeling the approach of death, desires to be returned to Ummera, not by the modern highway but by the ancient “long road.” A tragicomic test of wills between mother and son ensues, pitting against each other the desires for established ritual against modern efficiency, uncouth rural mannerisms and polite town manners, homage to ancestors and modern progressivism. Because of her son’s insensitivity, the old woman is forced to engage in comic subterfuge to achieve her last wish, and by grotesque turns of events involving a cobbler, a jarvey, and a priest, she has her way in all its details: Her body is transported along the prescribed road and announced ritually to the desolate countryside. This is a moving portrait of an old woman, dignified by a lively sense of the presence of the dead and by lyrical evocations of the scenery of West Cork. In contrast to these qualities is the philistinism of her businessman son. The story itself has ritual quality, woven as it is with repeated phrases, scenes, arguments, events, recurrent images of death, various addictions, and the rehearsals of rituals themselves. The story represents O’Connor’s criticism of bourgeois Ireland and the triumph of profit and respectability, major themes of his sweet-and-sour stories from the 1930’s and 1940’s contained in this, perhaps his best collection, Crab Apple Jelly. Although the speaking voice remains the norm, the tone here is more knowing than in the earlier stories. O’Connor, like Abby, is keeping promises to ancient values, including the language, family loyalty, community, and rootedness. If the old

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woman’s loyalty to her circuitous way is bypassed by Ireland’s new one, however, the narrator’s sad lyricism suggests that he can tread neither. “First Confession” • Of O’Connor’s childhood stories, “First Confession,” “My Oedipus Complex,” and “The Drunkard,” developed over the 1940’s, are his most famous, although not his most distinguished, works. The much-anthologized “First Confession” humorously exploits the mildly exotic Roman Catholic rite, as the little boy finds that the image of religion fostered by his female educators is not borne out in the encounter with the priest-confessor. Hearing that the boy’s chief sin is his desire to murder his ill-mannered grandmother, the priest humors the impenitent child by having him articulate the fantasy and sends him back to the sunny street. The idiom of an Irish child carries the narration here, although with the injection of some adult irony directed at the boy’s naïve literalism. The story might be faulted for its slapstick and cuteness, as if O’Connor indulges too liberally in the mood of his creation. Many of O’Connor’s stories portray insensitive and repressive priests, but not this one. Rather, it is the women who are the agents of terrifying, dogmatic religiosity, in contrast with the priest’s personification of a paternal, forgiving, and humorous God. “My Oedipus Complex” and “The Drunkard” • “My Oedipus Complex” and “The Drunkard” are charming examples of O’Connor’s mastery of the narrator-as-child. In them, the themes of marital tension, domestic evasiveness, and the dependence of Irish men on their mothers are treated with light irony. By means of an unexpected turn of events, the severe social controls on incest and alcoholism are toyed with as the jealous conspiracies of women; thus moral awareness commences with male bonding. In each of these three childhood stories, the antagonist at first appears as male—priest, bed-rival, drunken father—until the possessiveness of women emerges as the substantial moral antagonist. In these much-revised stories, O’Connor has refined the instrument of the speaking voice to a point that is perhaps too ingratiating, too calculatedly smooth, so that the spontaneity of the “rough narrative voice” is lost, and with it, some of his cold and passionate isolation. The attraction of these stories, however, is readily apparent in their author’s recorded versions, which he narrates with considerable relish. “A Story by Maupassant” • O’Connor’s tendency to reread his own work with disapproval led to constant revisions, so that there are two, three, or more variants of many of his most popular works. A case in point is “A Story by Maupassant,” which first appeared in The Penguin New Writing (No. 24, 1945) and in a significantly revised version in A Set of Variations. This story of the corruption of an Irish intellectual, observed by his more concrete-minded friend, climaxes when Terry Coughlan admits to the narrator that his appreciation of Maupassant’s grasp of “what life can do to you” came during a sleepless night in the bed of a Parisian prostitute. A comparison of the two versions shows several changes: He expands the proportion of more precise and graphic details and reduces dialectal, self-conscious, and repetitive elements; he achieves a more complex ironic effect by a stronger investment in double perspective; he condemns more forthrightly the hypocrisy of the Catholic school, as he renders more deft the function of religious metaphor; he enlarges the sympathy for Terry Coughlan by an enlargement of oblique cultural references and a softening of the narrator’s moralizing. O’Connor’s own view of Maupassant—that the main-

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spring of his art lay in the mixture of creative and destructive tendencies interacting as perversity—is brought to bear on the bitter conclusion of the story: Maupassant, at least, has not abandoned these self-destructive characters. In his revisions, O’Connor strengthens Maupassant’s perspective, focusing in the end on the prostitute’s baby, a symbol of the naïveté of new life. O’Connor bitterly notes that nature, like Maupassant’s fiction, without an ideal that is informing, seeks the lowest level. Here is a story that, by the intervention of O’Connor’s matured hand, gains considerably in power and perspective, subtlety and professionalism. “Introverted” Ireland • The general subject of O’Connor’s fiction is a critique of the “introverted religion” and “introverted politics” of bourgeois Ireland—sectarian obscurantism, the abuses of clerical power, class snobbery, family rivalries, disingenuous piety, Anglophobia, and thwarted idealism—although these criticisms are usually modified by warm portraits of energetic children, humane clerics, and unpretentious peasants. His central object in these stories is “to stimulate the moral imagination” by separating his characters from their assumed social roles and having them stand, for a moment, alone. In many of his most distinguished works, and indeed throughout his whole career as a writer of short fiction, one may discern such a movement from the depiction of the comfortably communal to that of the isolated, enlightened individual. He proposes a nexus between such a contrast of perspectives and the short-story form. The Lonely Voice • In his study entitled The Lonely Voice (1963), O’Connor holds as central that “in the short story at its most characteristic [there is] something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.” This collection of essays on selected practitioners of the modern short story (Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, A. E. Coppard, Isaac Babel, and Mary Lavin) draws on seminar notes from O’Connor’s classes at various universities in the 1950’s. The discussions are genial, opinionated, and not academic, and afford brilliant comments on individual artists and works, although they suffer from diffuseness and overextension at certain points in the argument. The study rests on the theory that the distinction of the short story from the novel is less a formal than an ideological one: It is the expression of “an attitude of mind that is attracted by submerged population groups . . . tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers, and spoiled priests . . . remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.” From this position, O’Connor argues that “the conception of the short story as a miniature art is inherently false,” holding that, on the contrary, “the storyteller differs from the novelist in this: he must be much more of a writer, much more of an artist . . . more of a dramatist.” From the same vantage point he evaluates his selected authors as they severally identify with some “submerged population group,” finding that as each author compromised or found less compelling the vision of his subjects as outsiders or social or political minorities, he either failed as a short-story writer or found another form more expressive of his vision. Although O’Connor’s claims for these theories are maintained in the face of easily adduced contrary evidence, they have limited, and in some ways startling, application to certain authors and works. As a critic, O’Connor possessed brilliant intuitions, although he did not have the power to systematize. In The Lonely Voice his remarks on Joyce’s and Hemingway’s rhetorical styles, his contrasting Chekhov and

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Mansfield, his accounting for Kipling’s artistic failure, and, in The Mirror in the Roadway (1956), his discussion of Joyce’s “dissociated metaphor” have useful application to the contribution of each of these authors to the literature of the short story. From various accounts by former students and colleagues, as well as from these critical works, it is quite clear that O’Connor was a brilliantly successful teacher of fiction-writing. His seminars were guided with authority and seriousness, and he placed great emphasis on the perfection of technique. He trained his students to begin with a “prosaic kernel” which the “treatment” takes to its crisis. The finished work takes its power from the cumulation of the drama, poetry, and emotion developed throughout the narrative, finally resolving itself in universalizing mystery. The short story is not concerned with the passage of time or with particularities of character; ideally it is based on an incident and a briefly stated theme, which technique elaborates to the final formula; it should not proceed on technique alone (Hemingway’s fault) or follow a preconceived symbolic pattern (Joyce’s fault), but ideally it is a fusion of the opposites of naturalism and symbolism. Cóilín Owens With updates by James Sullivan Other major works plays: In the Train, pr. 1937 (with Hugh Hunt); The Invincibles: A Play in Seven Scenes, pr. 1937 (with Hunt); Moses’ Rock, pr. 1938 (with Hunt); The Statue’s Daughter: A Fantasy in a Prologue and Three Acts, pr. 1941. novels: The Saint and Mary Kate, 1932; Dutch Interior, 1940. miscellaneous: A Frank O’Connor Reader, 1994. nonfiction: Death in Dublin: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution, 1937; The Big Fellow, 1937; A Picture Book, 1943; Towards an Appreciation of Literature, 1945; Irish Miles, 1947; The Art of the Theatre, 1947; The Road to Stratford, 1948; Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, 1950; The Mirror in the Roadway, 1956; An Only Child, 1961; The Lonely Voice, 1963; The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature, 1967; My Father’s Son, 1968; The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell, 19451966., 1996. poetry: Three Old Brothers, and Other Poems, 1936. translations: The Wild Bird’s Nest, 1932 (of selected Irish poetry); Lords and Commons, 1938 (of selected Irish poetry); The Fountain of Magic, 1939 (of selected Irish poetry); Lament for Art O’Leary, 1940 (of Eileen O’Connell); The Midnight Court: A Rhythmical Bacchanalia from the Irish of Bryan Merryman, 1945 (of Brian Merriman’s Cuirt an mheadhoin oidhche); Kings, Lords, and Commons, 1959 (of selected Irish poetry); The Little Monasteries, 1963 (of selected Irish poetry); A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry, 1967 (with David Greene). Bibliography Alexander, James D. “Frank O’Connor in The New Yorker, 1945-1967.” Eire-Ireland 30 (1995): 130-144. Examines how O’Connor changed his narrative style during the twenty years he was writing for The New Yorker—contracting the presence of a narrator to a voice and developing a double-leveled view of “experienced innocence” in his young boy stories. Argues that O’Connor created a genial persona in his stories that diverted attention from his more serious subject matter of Irish social problems.

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Bordewyk, Gordon. “Quest for Meaning: The Stories of Frank O’Connor.” Illinois Quarterly 41 (Winter, 1978): 37-47. Discusses O’Connor’s concern with fundamental qualities of everyday life and his sense of wonder in the mundane in four major groups of stories of war, religion, youth, and marriage. Examines how the search for meaning changes the lives of characters in these four groups. Evans, Robert C., and Richard Harp, eds. Frank O’Connor: New Perspectives. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1998. Fresh, thoughtful interpretations of O’Connor’s works. McKeon, Jim. Frank O’Connor: A Life. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1998. Brief, readable life of O’Connor; comments on the biographical sources of some of the short stories; discusses O’Connor’s literary career. Matthews, James H. Frank O’Connor. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976. This book is an excellent introduction to O’Connor’s fiction since it deals with the social context of the stories and the critical theory underlying them. Part of the Irish Writers series. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of these nine short stories by O’Connor: “Christmas Morning” and “The Drunkard” (vol. 2), “First Confession” and “Guests of the Nation” (vol. 3), “Judas” and “Legal Aid” (vol. 4), “The Man of the World” and “My Oedipus Complex” (vol. 5), and “A Story by Maupassant” (vol. 7). Neary, Michael. “The Inside-Out World in Frank O’Connor’s Stories.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Summer, 1993): 327-336. Discusses O’Connor’s use of smallness to accent the collision between the world of the self and the vast world outside. Discusses “The Story Teller” as the most emphatic embodiment of this tension in O’Connor’s stories, for the protagonist confronts characters who refuse to take her quest for magic and meaning seriously. Renner, Stanley. “The Theme of Hidden Powers: Fate vs. Human Responsibility in ‘Guests of the Nation.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Summer, 1990): 371-378. Argues that the story’s moral design emphasizes the existence of mysterious “hidden powers” or forces of chance and fate that control human lives. Suggests that the moral judgment of the story is against the protagonist-teller Bonaparte, who contributes to the world’s brutality by mistakenly believing people have no choice. Steinman, Michael. Frank O’Connor at Work. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Study of O’Connor’s life and works. Tomory, William M. Frank O’Connor. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Introductory book on O’Connor that briefly sketches his life and then gives an overview of his work. Tomory touches on a few stories, but most of the analysis is on themes and character types. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. Frank O’Connor: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Full critical study on O’Connor’s fiction. The author is especially good at articulating O’Connor’s theory of the story and in applying those concepts to individual short stories.

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Born: Cork City, Ireland; February 22, 1900 Died: Dublin, Ireland; April 20, 1991 Principal short fiction • Midsummer Night’s Madness, and Other Stories, 1932; A Purse of Coppers, 1937; Teresa, and Other Stories, 1947; The Man Who Invented Sin, and Other Stories, 1948; The Finest Stories of Seán O’Faoláin, 1957; I Remember! I Remember!, 1961; The Heat of the Sun: Stories and Tales, 1966; The Talking Trees, and Other Stories, 1970; Foreign Affairs, and Other Stories, 1976; The Collected Stories of Seán O’Faoláin, 1980-1982 (3 volumes). Other literary forms • Seán O’Faoláin’s literary production includes novels, biographies, travel books, social analysis, and literary criticism. He wrote a number of wellreceived novels and several biographies of prominent Irish political figures. O’Faoláin’s most notable work of literary criticism is his study of the short story, The Short Story, published in 1948. O’Faoláin also wrote a memorable autobiography, Vive Moi! (1964). Achievements • Seán O’Faoláin is one of the acknowledged Irish masters of the short story. His stories are realistic and closely dissect the social world of the ordinary Irishman of the twentieth century. His protagonists are usually forced to accept the limitations and defeats that life in modern Ireland enforces. O’Faoláin, however, is not a social critic or satirist. Such an accommodation with society is often seen as welcome and necessary. The central theme in many of O’Faoláin’s stories is the defeat of rigid principle and idealism by social and individual compromise. O’Faoláin seems to resist any appeal to pure principle and to celebrate a healthy realism and recognition of the limits that life imposes. O’Faoláin’s most important structural device is the reversal, in which a character’s situation is suddenly altered. These reversals may be embarrassing or even humiliating, but O’Faoláin often softens the ending to show something human and positive even in the defeat that the reversal effects. O’Faoláin progressed as a writer of short fiction from his early autobiographical stories, focusing on the Irish troubles and civil war, to stories dealing with a variety of Irish people in different sections and social situations. The autobiography became a more flexible and distanced art as O’Faoláin approached the ideal of his master, Anton Chekhov. Biography • Seán O’Faoláin was born John Francis Whelan in the city of Cork, Ireland, in 1900. His parents led an untroubled conventional life; his father was a constable for the Royal Irish Constabulary and his mother a pious Roman Catholic. By the time that John grew up, however, the problems of Ireland and England were becoming acute. The 1916 uprising in Dublin declared an Irish Republic, and a war broke out between Irish revolutionaries and British soldiers. John Whelan knew on which side he had to be and joined the Irish Volunteers in 1918 and later the Irish Republican Army. He changed his name to its Gaelic form of Seán O’Faoláin in 1918 to signal his new identity.

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During the Irish troubles, O’Faoláin was educating himself; he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University College, Cork, and a fellowship to Harvard University in 1928. In 1932, he published his first collection of short stories, Midsummer Night’s Madness, and Other Stories. After that O’Faoláin became a prolific writer, as he produced novels, travel books, biographies, and studies of the national character of Ireland. Above all, however, he was a masterly writer of short stories. O’Faoláin’s Midsummer Night’s Madness, and Other Stories contains a number of stories dealing with the Irish Civil War. Most of these treat broken promises and the destruction of idealism and romantic dreams. The later collections contain a considerable amount of irony, as the ordinary Irishman, with little hope of engaging in a historic event, tries to find some distinction in a bleak society. O’Faoláin, however, often modulates his irony and finds some compensatory victory even in defeat. After having found his style and subject matter, O’Faoláin published a number of excellent collections of stories, culminating in The Collected Stories of Seán O’Faoláin. O’Faoláin became one of the finest Irish writers of the twentieth century and a master in his chosen genre, the short story. Analysis • Seán O’Faoláin’s stories are varied. The earliest ones deal with the immediate political concerns of the Irish Civil War. Others use irony, although the irony tends to be gentle rather than harsh. O’Faoláin never merely mocked or made fun of his characters; there is always affection and sympathy for those he created. Another group of stories expose idealism or abstract principles. O’Faoláin had little use for such general principles; he was consistently on the side of the specific case and the demands of realism and life. The later stories deal with sexuality and relationships between man and woman, especially the problems of husbands and wives. A few constants do exist, however, in the stories. O’Faoláin’s strength is in the portrayal and development of character and world. Each of his major characters fully exists in a well-defined environment. Ireland, as portrayed by O’Faoláin, is nearly a character in the story, and the limitations created by that world are significant. Whether it be religion or a narrow-minded social system, Ireland often restricts in various ways the opportunities for expression and a fuller and freer life. “The Old Master” • “The Old Master,” from A Purse of Coppers, is an early story that punctures the claims of a character to a privileged position; it uses a sudden and surprising reversal to bring about its resolution. The use of irony in this story is direct and amusing, if not very sophisticated. The protagonist, John Aloysius Gonzaga O’Sullivan, spends his time mocking the provincialism and lack of culture in his small Irish town. He has a sinecure as a law librarian and refuses to practice law; he spends his time, instead, berating the locals for their lack of sophistication. He is “the only man left in Ireland with a sense of beauty . . . the old master deserted in the abandoned house.” One day, the Russian Ballet comes to town, and he is ecstatic. A conflict arises, however, from the presence of the Russian Ballet. When O’Sullivan attempts to see a performance, he is stopped by men from the Catholic Church who oppose “Immoral Plays.” O’Sullivan holds his sinecure from the county council, and he can lose his job if he offends the Catholic Church. Therefore, he compromises and walks away from the door; he has apparently failed to live up to his ideals. He tries, however, to make amends by sneaking in the back way and reassuring the Russian performers that he is with them.

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O’Sullivan returns to the front of the theater and is immediately involved in a march against the ballet company. If he is seen by the people at the courthouse, he will be ruined, but if he is seen abandoning the march, he may lose his job. He tries to resolve his conflict by escaping to an outhouse and cursing the local leaders, as he has done so often in the past. He remains in the outhouse all night and catches pneumonia from this exposure and soon dies. The people in the town had seen him earlier as a “public show” and only at his death did they see him as a “human being.” “The Old Master” is a typical O’Faoláin story. The unnatural idealism and pomposity of the main character have to be exposed. He is not mocked, however, for his fall; he has instead joined a fallible human community and rid himself of false pretensions. “Childybawn” • “Childybawn” was published in The Finest Stories of Seán O’Faoláin, and it is a delightful study of the Irish character in which O’Faoláin reverses the usual view of the Irishman’s dominance by his mother. The story is simple in its structure, and its effect depends on a reversal of expectations. O’Faoláin is not really a comic writer in the traditional sense; in later stories, the humor is much more subtle and becomes a part of the story, not the only element as it is here. The plot begins when Benjy Spillane’s mother receives an anonymous note telling her that her son, fat and forty, is carrying on with a bank teller. Her strategy to retain the dedication and presence of her son is to remind him incessantly of Saint Augustine’s love for his mother, Monica. This has little effect until Benjy becomes seriously ill and begins to read religious texts and change his life. Suddenly the relationship is reversed; the religious Benjy begins complaining about the drinking and excessive betting of his mother. His mother now wishes that he would get married and leave her alone. The climax of the story is another reversal, as Benjy returns to his riotous ways and finally gains the promise of the bank clerk to wed him. There is a five-year engagement until his mother dies. After all, Benjy notes, “a fellow has to have some regard for his mother!” “Childybawn” is a comic story and plays on many Irish stereotypes. There is the dominating mother and the middle-aged son who worships his mother. O’Faoláin gives the story and the types an original twist when he shows what would happen if a middle-aged son actually behaved the way a mother wished him to behave. Mrs. Spillane realizes that she has not had a peaceful moment since her son took up religion; she longs for the old, irreverent, and natural relationship that works on conflict and confrontation. “The Fur Coat” • “The Fur Coat” is a poignant story taken from The Man Who Invented Sin, and Other Stories. It is concerned with social class, a somewhat unusual area for an O’Faoláin story. Most of his characters seem to live in a static environment, and such social change in Ireland is very different from that in the earlier stories. The plot is very simple, since it emphasizes character rather than action. Paddy Maguire receives an important promotion, so his wife, Molly, immediately determines that she must have a fur coat to go with her new status. She immediately becomes defensive over such a purchase, however, asking her husband if he thinks that she is “extravagant.” The conflict grows between husband and wife as they discuss the fur coat, but it is really within Molly. Her own doubts about such a purchase are projected onto her husband, and they end up fighting, with her accusing him of being “mean.” The climax of the story comes when Paddy gives Molly a check for £150 and she rips it up. She wants the coat desperately, but she cannot afford it. “I couldn’t,

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Paddy. I just couldn’t.” The story ends with Paddy asking her why she cannot purchase what she most desires and receiving the despairing answer, “I don’t know.” “The Fur Coat” is a social story as well as a character study. The sudden rise in class and position leaves Molly between the old ways that have sustained her and the new ones that she cannot embrace. O’Faoláin has found a new subject for Irish fiction. The focus is no longer the enduring and unchanging peasant but an urban middleclass character who must deal with changes in his or her social position and personal life. “The Sugawn Chair” • “The Sugawn Chair,” from I Remember! I Remember!, is a perfect example of O’Faoláin’s gentle irony; the story pokes fun at the illusions of an ideal rural life with economy and humor. O’Faoláin seems dedicated to exposing the various illusions that are endemic in Ireland. The chair, as the story opens, is abandoned and without a seat in the attic of the narrator. He associates the chair with memories of a yearly sack of apples that would be delivered, smelling of “dust, and hay, and apples.” The sack and the chair both signify another world, the country. The chair also has a history. It was an object of comfort in which “my da could tilt and squeak and rock to his behind’s content.” One night while rocking, his father went through the seat of the chair, where he remained stuck and cursing, much to the amusement of his wife and son. The father decides to repair his chair with some straw that he bought in a market. He enlists the aid of two of his country comrades. They soon, however, begin to argue about the different regions that they came from in rural Ireland. These arguments subside, but a new argument erupts about the type of straw needed to repair the chair. One claims that this straw is too moist, while another says that it is too short. Finally, they abandon the project and return to their earlier pursuits. The story ends with the father symbolically admitting defeat by throwing a potato back into the sack and sitting on one of the city-made “plush” chairs. The Sugawn chair remains as it had been, shattered without a seat. The narrator comes upon the chair one day when he is cleaning out the attic after his mother has died. It recalls to his mind not only the country smells but also his mother and father embracing and “laughing foolishly, and madly in love again.” “The Sugawn Chair” modulates its irony at the very end, so that the mocking at the illusions of an ideal rural life are tempered by the real feelings and memories that they share. O’Faoláin is by no means a James Joyce who fiercely indicts the false dreams of his Dubliners. O’Faoláin has a place even in his irony for true affections and relationships. “Dividends” • “Dividends,” from The Heat of the Sun: Stories and Tales, is a more ambitious story than many of the earlier ones, and it shows both a greater tolerance for the foibles of the characters and a subtlety in structure. Its primary subject is the clash between principle and reality, a favorite O’Faoláin theme. The story begins with the narrator’s Aunt Anna coming into a legacy of £750. The narrator advises her to invest her legacy in secure stocks, so that she will receive a steady income. An old friend of the narrator, Mel Meldrum, arranges the transaction. The conflict arises when Aunt Anna sells her shares and continues to demand her dividends from Mel. Mel finally gives in and pays her the money, even though it is against his principles. In order to resolve the dispute, the narrator is forced to return to Cork from Dublin. He finds that Mel is very well situated, with a country cottage and a beautiful young girl as a servant. Mel reveals that Aunt Anna has sold the shares not for a chair

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and some Masses for her soul but for a fancy fur coat. Mel now refuses to compromise and pay Anna her dividends. This intensifies the conflict as the narrator urges Mel to be his old self and take a chance on life, abandon his principles, pay Aunt Anna the dividends, and marry the young girl. Mel, however, is unable to change; if he marries the girl, he may be unhappy; if he pays the dividends, he is compromised and is no longer his ideal self. Mel resolves the problem by abandoning his relationship with the young girl and hiring Aunt Anna as a servant. He will remain logical and consistent. The ending of the story, however, is not an indictment of Mel’s principled consistency but a confession by the narrator that he has done something terrible by demanding that Mel remain the Mel that he had known as a boy at school. He had “uncovered his most secret dream and destroyed it by forcing him to bring it to the test of reality.” He also has been narrow-minded in demanding a consistency of character and exposed a life-giving illusion no less than Mel had. “Dividends” is a complex narrative and a psychological study of how characters live upon illusions rather than principles. There is no neat exposure of illusions as in “The Old Master” but instead an unmasking of those who are all too eager to uncover dreams. “Hymeneal” • “Hymeneal” is a story from O’Faoláin’s latest period, and it is one of the fullest explorations of marriage, as O’Faoláin scrutinizes the relationship between husband and wife. “Hymeneal” covers the many years of a couple’s marriage, but it focuses on the period of retirement. It is one of O’Faoláin’s best-plotted stories, with a sudden and surprising reversal. It begins peacefully, detailing the enduring relationship of a married couple, Phil and Abby Doyle, who have been rooted in one spot in the North Circular section of Dublin. They have lived in this section for some thirty-five years. Phil, however, is to retire in a year, and he knows that Abby needs some help with the house, but he cannot afford it on his pension. He then decides—without consulting his wife—to sell their house and move to West Clare, where he can hire a servant and have the peace and time to write the book that he has been planning to write for years, which will expose the Education Department and Ministry. The conflict between Phil and Abby develops quickly. She hates the isolation of West Clare, especially since it means moving away from her Dublin-based sister, Molly. Phil is also unhappy, although he refuses to admit it. He does none of the things that he has talked about for years; he does not fish or hunt, and he makes no progress on his book, although he continues to talk about it. Phil talks incessantly about exposing the department, where he has worked for such a long time, and the current minister, Phelim Quigley, the husband of Molly, Abby’s sister. He sees Phelim as the perfect example of a man who has sacrificed principle to sentiment and convenience. When Phelim refuses to fire a teacher who drinks and quarrels with his wife, Phil Doyle is outraged at this lack of action. The book will reveal all. The plot turns when Phelim Quigley suddenly dies in a car crash and Phil and Abby return to Dublin to console Molly and set her affairs in order. Phil assigns himself to work alone to sort out Phelim’s papers. In those papers, Phil finds a number of surprising documents that alter his life. First of all, he finds that Phelim has acquired a decent sum of money and has recently purchased Phil’s old house in Dublin. He then finds a sequence of poems that Phelim has written about his love for Abby rather than his wife, Molly. Phil is enraged at this soiling of his own love for Abby. Phil changes once more, however, when he comes upon some letters of Abby to Phelim

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that tell of Phelim’s advice to Abby to stick to Phil and not divorce or leave him. Phelim also praises Phil’s great ability as a civil servant; it is just those rigid qualities, however, that have made it so difficult to live with him. The whole tone and attitude of the last part of the story changes. The weather changes from stormy to sunny and clear. Molly announces that she would like to rent the Dublin house that she and Phelim had bought recently to Phil and Abby. Phil has become more accommodating. He will abandon his book and his inhuman principle for a fuller and less rigid life. “The Patriot” • O’Faoláin’s fiction shows clear lines of development. The early stories that focus on the Irish Civil War are filled with bitterness at the failure of leaders to live up to the republican ideal. They also tend to lack the smooth narrative surface, and some, such as “The Patriot,” are quite simple and undemanding in their structure. The collections that followed showed an increasing mastery of the shortstory form. They also avoid the simple structure and tiresome bitterness at the failures of ideals. “The Old Master,” for example, shows an exposure of ideals that can deepen a character’s humanity. By the time of I Remember! I Remember!, O’Faoláin had mastered the short story; the stories from this period demonstrate a subtlety of characterization, plot, and theme that was not found in the earlier works. In addition, O’Faoláin changes his attitude toward the world of his fiction. He now was able to distance himself and find amusement in the dreams of his characters, as “The Sugawn Chair” makes clear. The last phase of O’Faoláin’s development can be seen in the stories of The Heat of the Sun: Stories and Tales and The Talking Trees, and Other Stories. He began more fully to investigate the place and role of sexuality in Ireland. Stories such as “One Man, One Boat, One Girl” and “Falling Rocks, Narrowing Road, Cul-de-Sac Stop” are humorous explorations of human relationships. The Irishman’s fear of women is handled with grace and sympathy, while at the same time acknowledging its absurdity. One other aspect of human relationships in O’Faoláin’s fiction needs to be mentioned. “Hymeneal” is a haunting portrayal of marriage in which the main character’s illusions are punctured so that he might re-create and strengthen his relationship with his wife. James Sullivan Other major works play: She Had to Do Something, pr. 1937. anthology: The Silver Branch: A Collection of the Best Old Irish Lyrics Variously Translated, 1938. novels: A Nest of Simple Folk, 1933; Bird Alone, 1936; Come Back to Erin, 1940; And Again?, 1979. nonfiction: The Life Story of Eamon De Valera, 1933; Constance Markievicz: Or, The Average Revolutionary, 1934; King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, 1938; An Irish Journey, 1940; The Great O’Neill: A Biography of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 1550-1616, 1942; The Story of Ireland, 1943; The Irish: A Character Study, 1947; The Short Story, 1948; A Summer in Italy, 1949; Newman’s Way, 1952; South to Sicily, 1953 (pb. in U.S. as An Autumn in Italy, 1953); The Vanishing Hero, 1956; Vive Moi!, 1964.

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Bibliography Bonaccorso, Richard. Seán O’Faoláin’s Irish Vision. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Excellent study that places O’Faoláin and his work in a social and literary context. Bonaccorso’s readings of the stories are thorough and ingenious, if not always convincing. Butler, Pierce. Seán O’Faoláin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Introduction to O’Faoláin’s short fiction in which Butler claims that O’Faoláin shifts from an early focus on individuals in conflict with repressive Irish forces to more universal human conflicts. Examines O’Faoláin’s realistic style and narrative voice as it changes throughout his career. Includes O’Faoláin’s comments on the short story, some contemporary reviews, and three previously published critical studies. Davenport, Guy. “Fiction Chronicle.” The Hudson Review 32 (1979): 139-150. In a review article, Davenport has high praise for O’Faoláin’s ability as a writer of short fiction. He finds the central themes of the stories to be the Irish character and Irish Catholicism. Doyle, Paul A. Sean O’Faoláin. New York: Twayne, 1968. Life-and-works study of O’Faoláin in the Twayne series. It is good on the novels and the literary context in which O’Faoláin wrote but only adequate on the short fiction. Hanley, Katherine. “The Short Stories of Seán O’Faoláin: Theory and Practice.” EireIreland 6 (1971): 3-11. An excellent introduction to O’Faoláin’s stories. Hanley briefly sketches the theoretical base of the stories and then traces the development of O’Faoláin from the early romantic stories to the more sophisticated ones. Harmon, Maurice. Seán O’Faoláin. London: Constable, 1994. Harmon first analyzes O’Faoláin’s biographies on Irish figures to provide a social context and then examines briefly each book of short stories. Useful for an understanding of the Irish political and social scene. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of seven short stories by O’Faoláin: “Childybawn” (vol. 2), “The Fur Coat” (vol. 3), “Innocence” (vol. 4), “The Man Who Invented Sin” and “Midsummer Night Madness” (vol. 5), “The Trout” (vol. 7), and “Up the Bare Stairs” (vol. 8). Neary, Michael. “Whispered Presences in Seán O’Faoláin’s Stories.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Winter, 1995): 11-20. Argues that O’Faoláin confronts his Irishness in his stories in a way that refuses closure or the comfort of the telling detail. Asserts that many of his stories create a feeling of characters being haunted by some event from the past of which no sense can be made.

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Liam O’Flaherty O’Flaherty, Liam

Born: Gort na gCapell, Aran Islands, Ireland; August 28, 1896 Died: Dublin, Ireland; September 7, 1984 Principal short fiction • Spring Sowing, 1924; Civil War, 1925; Darkness, 1926; The Tent, and Other Stories, 1926; The Terrorist, 1926; The Mountain Tavern, and Other Stories, 1929; The Ecstasy of Angus, 1931; The Short Stories of Liam O’Flaherty, 1937; Two Lovely Beasts, and Other Stories, 1948; Dúil, 1953; The Stories of Liam O’Flaherty, 1956; The Pedlar’s Revenge, and Other Stories, 1976; The Wave, and Other Stories, 1980; Liam O’Flaherty: The Collected Stories, 1999 (A. A. Kelly, editor). Other literary forms • Liam O’Flaherty wrote four regional novels, of which Thy Neighbour’s Wife (1923), The Black Soul (1924), and Skerrett (1932) are set on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands; the fourth, The House of Gold (1929), is set in Galway City. Four novels of Dublin city life are The Informer (1925), Mr. Gilhooley (1926), The Assassin (1928), and The Puritan (1931). The Return of the Brute (1929) concerns O’Flaherty’s World War I experiences in trench warfare; The Martyr (1933), Famine (1937), Land (1946), and Insurrection (1950) are Irish historical novels for the years 1845-1922. O’Flaherty wrote three books of autobiography, The Life of Tim Healy (1927), several essays on social conditions and on literature, poems, and stories in Gaelic. Achievements • The source of many of Liam O’Flaherty’s achievements is his birthplace off the coast of the west of Ireland. The Aran Islands’ remoteness and stark natural beauty, the dependence of their scattered population on the vagaries of wind and sea, the inhabitants’ preservation of the Irish language as their primary means of communication, and the virtually mythological status accorded such phenomena by leading figures in the Irish Literary Revival such as William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge all exerted a crucial influence on the development of O’Flaherty’s work. Both his short fiction and novels are noteworthy for their unsentimental treatment of island life, the vivid directness of their style, and their attention to natural detail. Although by no means all, or even all the best, of O’Flaherty’s work draws on his Aran background, the marked degree to which all of his work emphasizes the spontaneity and volatility of all living things is the product of his formative exposure to the life forces of Aran. One of the consequences of this background’s influence is plots that deal with the problematical socialization of natural energy. These plots tend to take on a melodramatic or expressionistic coloration that can mar the overall balance and objectivity of the work. Such coloration also, however, unwittingly reveals O’Flaherty’s essential opposition to the aesthetic and cultural codes of the Irish Literary Revival and lends his work an often overlooked but crucial, critical dimension. O’Flaherty won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1926 for his novel The Informer. That same novel won him several other awards and honors in France and England, including two Academy Awards in 1935. O’Flaherty was honored with a doctorate in literature from the National University of Ireland in 1974, and with the Irish Academy of Letters Award for literature in 1979.

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Biography • Liam O’Flaherty was educated in seminaries and at University College, Dublin, from which in 1915 he joined the British army. He served in France and Belgium and, shell-shocked, became an invalid in 1918. He traveled to the United States and Canada and returned to Ireland in 1920 and became a Communist and Socialist activist. Forced to escape to England in 1922, he began writing steadily. He married Margaret Barrington in 1926, but they separated in 1932, the same year he helped to found the Irish Academy of Letters. During World War II he lived in Connecticut, the Caribbean region, and South America. Despite his controversial participation in the Irish struggle for independence and the general political militancy of his twenties, and despite his active contribution to the establishment of the Irish Academy of Letters, O’Flaherty absented himself from public involvement for virtually the last forty years of his life. Unlike most Irish writers of his generation, O’Flaherty did not continue to develop. The widespread public congratulations that greeted his eightieth birthday in 1976 and the republication of many of his best-known novels during the last decade of his life did nothing of significance to break the immense silence of his later years. Analysis • To experience the full range of Liam O’Flaherty’s stories, one must deal with the exceptions in the collection The Stories of Liam O’Flaherty, notably “The Mountain Tavern,” which, like his historical novels, treats the revolutionaries in the 1920’s, and “The Post Office,” a humorous account of visitors’ attempts to send a telegram from a small Irish town. The bulk of his stories, however, deal with nature and with people close to nature. In his publication entitled Joseph Conrad (1930), O’Flaherty distinguishes himself from Joseph Conrad and other novelists, saying, “I have seen the leaping salmon fly before the salmon whale, and I have seen the sated buck horn his mate and the wanderer leave his wife in search of fresh bosoms with the fire of joy in his eye.” Such firsthand observance characterizes twelve of the forty-two stories in the collection, for all twelve are animal stories with little or no intrusion of a human being. The raw guts of nature, its tenderness and its viciousness, appear in these stories, with both wild and domesticated animals. A cow follows the trail of its stillborn calf to where it has been thrown over a cliff, the maternal instinct so strong that, when a wave washes the calf’s body away, the cow plunges to her death in pursuit. A rockfish fights for its life against a fisherman’s hook, winning the battle by leaving behind a torn piece of its jaw. A proud black mare overruns a race and falls to her death; a huge conger eel tears up a fisherman’s net in making its escape; a wild goat, protecting its kid, attacks and kills a marauding dog. In “Birth,” the people watch through the night for a newborn calf. Among several bird stories, a blackbird, proud of its song, barely escapes the claws of a cat; a baby seagull conquers fear and learns to fly; a wild swan’s mate dies and, forlorn and desperate, he woos, fights for, and flies away with another mate. A wounded cormorant, outcast from its flock, tries to gain acceptance, but the others tear at it and destroy it. A hawk captures a lark to feed his mate and by his very presence drives peaceful birds out of the territory; but then the hawk loses his life in attacking a man climbing up to his nest, and the man captures the mate and takes the eggs. Yet the objective study of nature, impassioned alike with tenderness and viciousness, yields a delicate study of erotica. The laws of nature are so closely observed in primitive living conditions and so necessary to the barren efforts of survival that any slight aberration seems marked by a higher intelligence. In O’Flaherty’s stories, this phenomenon seems to take two directions. Ordinary living conditions become

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bound by rigid customs so that anything not traditional, the peasants say, has “the law of God” against it. Some creatures, however, respond to a different divinity. In these cases the law of nature may permit more individuality than does social custom or the Church. Caught between these baffling natural and socioreligious forces, the people may switch their allegiances with remarkable speed and use the same kind of logic to support two different kinds of action. Some of O’Flaherty’s best stories—“The Fairy Goose,” “The Child of God,” “Red Barbara,” “Two Lovely Beasts”—deal with the reaction of the people not so much to adversity as to difference. “The Red Petticoat” and “The Beggars” deal with people who are different. “The Fairy Goose” • The title creature of “The Fairy Goose” from before its birth evokes undue emotion; sitting on the egg with two others, an old woman’s pet hen dies. Of the three eggs, only one hatches, into a scrawny, sickly thing obviously better off dead. The woman’s husband intervenes with his admonition of “the law of God” not to kill anything born in a house. So unlike a goose is its subsequent behavior that the people begin to treat it as a fairy, adorn it with ribbons, and bestow other favors. Regarding it as sacred, O’Flaherty writes, “All the human beings in the village paid more respect to it than they did to one another.” On the basis of its supernatural powers, its owner becomes a wise woman sought far and near, but jealousy intervenes: A woman who herself casts spells informs the local priest. He destroys the goose’s nest and calls its admirers idolators. Confronted with the powers of the Church, the former adherents of the goose now denounce it and threaten to burn the old woman’s house. Only those villagers hitherto unconcerned manage to restrain the threatened violence, but eventually young men during the night approach and kill the goose. The old woman’s only defense, a traditional curse, seems to linger in the air, for thereafter the villagers become quarrelsome drunkards. “The Child of God” • No doubt based on his own disaffection with the Church, O’Flaherty’s stories do not present priests as dispensers of benevolence or wisdom. For the people themselves, religion, custom, and superstition equally make up the law of God. Tradition, moreover, curbs the active intelligence and promotes baleful ironies; a thing may be blessed and cursed in rapid succession. Such is the career of Peter O’Toole in “The Child of God.” The farmer O’Toole and his wife, in their forties, have an embarrassing “late from the womb” child. The baby’s uncommon ill health provokes the first accusation that he is a fairy child, but the mother maintains that he is a child of God. The wife’s unusual attention to the child seems in itself to be a miracle and alters the conduct of the father, who gives up his drinking bouts. The mother believes the child will bring prosperity to the house, and she makes the older children take jobs and save. At the age of ten, as if to confirm the mother’s faith, Peter announces his ambition to become a priest—an honor higher than his parents could have dreamed for him. After six years, however, with the family driven into debt to support his education, Peter is expelled because, as he explains later, he does not believe in God. Further, they learn upon his return home at the age of nineteen that he has become an artist. To their horror, his books of pictures show “naked women . . . like French postcards.” Peter’s difference becomes a threat, and the artist, like the satirists of old, becomes feared for his sketching the people in unflattering poses. After some six months, an “orgy” occurs at a wake. It would be bad enough for Peter as a participant, but it is much worse for him when the people discover that he is stone sober. As if spellbound, they watch while he sketches the entire shameful scene;

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afterward outraged, they call his art sacrilege and threaten to stone him. His mother now believes he has brought a curse with his birth, and his father believes God will strike all of the villagers dead for what Peter has done. The priest intervenes and dispels a stone-throwing mob; but, exhibiting no more compassion, benevolence, or enlightenment than do the people, he denounces Peter for having brought a curse on the parish and banishes him. The mother, left alone, weeps for her lost child, not aware of the irony that her son’s creativity indeed makes him a child close to God. “Red Barbara” • Between the alternatives of a blessing or a curse, one who thrives— provided he is not too different—surely must be blessed. So Barbara’s second husband in “Red Barbara,” although a weaver and a flower grower, gains acceptance until his marriage proves unfruitful; then he proves himself limited to the prevailing viewpoint. Barbara, accustomed to beatings and violent lovemaking by a frequently drunken husband, shrinks from Joseph’s gentle touch and soon despises him as a “priestly lecher.” Sharing the people’s belief in the importance of a family, he grows fearful of his own failure to father a child, becomes strange, solitary, and emaciated, and eventually dies deranged. Barbara returns to her wild ways with her third husband, and Joseph is remembered only as “a fable in the village.” “Two Lovely Beasts” • So closely knit is a small Aran community that the owner of a cow shares its milk, free, with his neighbors. Thus a crisis occurs in “Two Lovely Beasts” when Colm Derrane consents to buy a motherless calf from a poor widow and feed it alongside his own calf. The widow, Kate Higgins, assures Colm that he is different from everybody else. The difference in his decision to raise a calf on the people’s milk definitely breaks the law of God and of the community, and the family becomes outcast. Kate herself cannot find another cow to buy, uses the sale money to feed her children, and turns against Colm with the accusation that his money was cursed. Forcing his family to live frugally in order to feed both calves, Colm beats his wife into submission; this evidence of male sanity restores her confidence in him. Hereafter all the children work hard to save, the tide of public opinion turns as the family prospers, and now the people say that God has blessed the family’s efforts to rise in the world. Two of the Higgins children die without proper nourishment; the distraught mother, removed to an asylum, leaves behind a plot of grassland which Colm rents through a difficult winter. He demands of his starving and threadbare family another year of sacrifice while the two beasts grow into bullocks and he can save money to open a shop. At last, with the community’s belief that God blesses those who prosper, the shop brings financial success, and the calves become champions on fair day. Envy intrudes, also, but as Colm and his family drive away to open a shop in the town, he appears unaware of the people’s hostility and derision. “Two Lovely Beasts” in this way shows the possible rise of a merchant class, who as money lenders became known as the hated gombeen men—those who live off the peasants by buying their produce at low prices and selling it elsewhere for a profit, a topic O’Flaherty treated in The House of Gold. “The Red Petticoat” • Most of the stories, however, relate the peasants’ situation at home—their contention with the forces of nature, their primitive living conditions, and their sensitivity to social order and ideals. Often conditions seem to be fixed at the close of a story, but occasionally good wit or good fortune alters the circum-

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stances, at least temporarily, as in “The Red Petticoat” and “The Beggars.” The anklelength skirt of red or blue wool called a petticoat is a colorful part of the native costume of women of the Aran Islands. Often paired with a heavy, long shawl, it stands out against a somber background of rocks and grey houses. “The Red Petticoat” begins with Mrs. Mary Deignan and her four children, with no food in the house, trying to think of a way to obtain provisions. This unusual family does not work consistently, although all work valiantly when they have work; they enjoy laughing together and composing poems, some of them satires against their enemies. Unlike most residents of Aran, they can laugh in the midst of near-starvation. Out of such a background and the family’s rehearsals come the expediency that Mrs. Deignan contrives to relieve their want—a melodrama spawned in her own brain, using the stock character of a witch or “wise woman,” and acted out against the village storekeeper. Mrs. Deignan, known as “Mary of the bad verses” because her poems are “scurrilous and abusive, and at times even indecent and in a sense immoral,” is not powerless when she sets forth wearing her shawl and her new check apron to visit Mrs. Murtagh, the local storekeeper who has somewhat the character of a gombeen. In her “wise woman” role Mrs. Deignan terrifies Mrs. Murtagh with a hissing account of Mrs. Murtagh’s sins in the traditional style of name-calling, out of which eventually Mrs. Deignan shoots a question: “Where is the red petticoat you were wearing last Sunday night, when you went to visit the tailor?” Tricking Mrs. Murtagh into denying it was red and admitting it was a black skirt, Mrs. Deignan now has what she wanted— the means of blackmail. Mrs. Murtagh launches into a vicious battle with Mrs. Deignan and knocks her into a corner but attracts passersby. Mrs. Deignan only pretends to be unconscious and, at the propitious moment, she changes character and becomes a pitiful beggar, blessing Mrs. Murtagh for having agreed to provide whatever she wants on six-months’ credit. The neighbors understand that something is wrong, but they are totally mystified. Mrs. Deignan returns home with her shawl turned into a grocery sack slung over her shoulder; Mrs. Murtagh knows she will be subject to further blackmail but comforts herself with thoughts of spending more time with the tailor. “The Beggars” • “The Beggars” features as protagonist a blind man who with “priestly arrogance” exhorts people to beware the hour of their deaths, although he knows from experience that a church is not a place to beg alms; cemeteries and missions are better. His repeated cry, totally incongruous with his surroundings, earns him nothing near the gateway to a racetrack. Changing to angry curses when he thinks a man jeers at him, the beggar gains the sympathy and the aid of other beggars—a tipster, a singing woman, and an accordionist. The honor and generosity he finds among beggars seem sufficient to confirm his dream that he would find good fortune in a strange place on this day; but then the formerly cursed man returns to count into his hand five one-pound banknotes, part of two hundred pounds earned from an intuitive flash at the sight of the blind man and the memory of a horse named “Blind Barney.” “The Mountain Tavern” • In “The Mountain Tavern” O’Flaherty records some of the political upheaval caused by the Act of Partition in 1921. Three Republican revolutionaries trudge through a night snowstorm to reach a tavern and obtain aid for their wounded. When they arrive, the tavern is a smoking ruin, destroyed in a shootout between the Republicans and the Free Staters. Their incredulity on finding that

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the destitute survivors can do nothing for them parallels the anger of the tavern owner’s wife, who tongue-lashes them for the three years she has suffered in their war. The wounded man dies, and the other two are taken prisoner. “The Post Office” • In an opposite and humorous vein, O’Flaherty in “The Post Office” assembles on old-age pension day the most traditional elements of a small Gaelic town; to them, the telephone, a newfangled gadget, complicates former lives of simplicity which relied on donkeys, carts, and rowboats. Three tourists speaking French and arriving in a New York Cadillac have a tourist’s reason for sending a telegram to California—a friend’s ancestor is from this town—and create great humor and confusion because the postmaster considers telegrams the bane of his existence. Even a priest forgets to be scandalized by the two women’s clothing when he learns the visitors’ purpose. The local old people take the male visitor to be a government spy because of his fluent Gaelic, consider that the women’s painted toenails are a disease on their feet, believe the Spanish girl to be a duke’s daughter, and appraise the American girl for her obvious reproductive capacities. The postmaster refuses to send a telegram in Spanish because it may be obscene, relents upon a recitation of Lorca’s poetry, and tries to place the call to Galway; but he finds himself on the telephone at first cursed as a fishmonger, then receives news of a neighbor’s operation and death, and finally hears a wrong-number grievance from a schoolteacher. “We are all in it,” says one native upon pronunciation of the town’s name, Praiseach Gaelic for confusion, disorder, and shapelessness. The best character, the mocking young man who has graduated from his native background, lends himself to the confusion for the humor of it, reads a letter to oblige an old soldier, and with quick wit constructs tales appropriate for the native credulity. O’Flaherty’s depiction of the clash of two cultures, his ear for the local diction, and his intelligence for the local logic and laughter here show him at his very best. Grace Eckley With updates by George O’Brien Other major works children’s literature: All Things Come of Age and the Test of Courage, 1984. novels: Thy Neighbour’s Wife, 1923; The Black Soul, 1924; The Informer, 1925; Mr. Gilhooley, 1926; The Assassin, 1928; The House of Gold, 1929; The Return of the Brute, 1929; The Puritan, 1931; Skerrett, 1932; The Martyr, 1933; Hollywood Cemetery, 1935; Famine, 1937; Land, 1946; Insurrection, 1950. nonfiction: The Life of Tim Healy, 1927; Joseph Conrad, 1930; Two Years, 1930; I Went to Russia, 1931; Shame the Devil, 1934; The Letters of Liam O’Flaherty, 1996 (A. A. Kelly, editor). Bibliography Cahalan, James M. Liam O’Flaherty: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Introduction to O’Flaherty’s stories by an expert in Irish literature. Discusses the peasant consciousness in the stories, as well as the stories’ relationship to the Irish language. Comments on issues of gender and politics raised by the stories. Also includes many comments by O’Flaherty from letters and articles, as well as secondary sources.

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Costello, Peter. Liam O’Flaherty’s Ireland. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996. Explores O’Flaherty’s life and times, how his environment influenced his writings. Daniels, William. “Introduction to the Present State of Criticism of Liam O’Flaherty’s Collection of Short Stories: D il.” Eire-Ireland 23 (Summer, 1988): 122-134. A summary of criticism of O’Flaherty’s stories in D il. Takes issue with a number of criticisms of the stories, such as their lack of focus on setting, plot, and point of view. Argues that the stories deserve much better criticism than they have received from critics in both Irish and English. Doyle, Paul A. Liam O’Flaherty. Boston: Twayne, 1972. The first comprehensive overview of O’Flaherty’s life and work. The author’s reading of O’Flaherty’s short fiction tends to be more illuminating than that of the novels. Although superseded by later studies, this volume is still helpful as a means of orientating the newcomer to O’Flaherty’s work. Contains an extensive bibliography. Jefferson, George. Liam O’Flaherty: A Descriptive Bibliography of His Works. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1993. Useful tool for the student of O’Flaherty. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Kelly, A. A. Liam O’Flaherty: The Storyteller. London: Macmillan, 1976. Exhaustive treatment of the themes and techniques of O’Flaherty’s short fiction. Although somewhat disjointed in organization, this study ultimately makes a convincing case for the distinctiveness of O’Flaherty’s achievements in the form. Particular emphasis is placed on the range and variety of his stories. Supplemented by an excellent bibliography. Kilroy, James R. “Setting the Standards: Writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s.” In The Irish Short Story: A Critical History, edited by James F. Kilroy. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Introduction to O’Flaherty’s stories, emphasizing their ethical implications and naturalism. Discusses his simple narrative technique and style and how the short story suits his single-minded vision. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by O’Flaherty: “The Mountain Tavern” (vol. 5), “The Post Office” (vol. 6), “The Sniper” (vol. 7), and “Two Lovely Beasts” (vol. 8). O’Brien, James H. Liam O’Flaherty. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1973. Brief introduction to O’Flaherty’s life and work. Its longest chapter is devoted to O’Flaherty’s short stories, but the study also contains biographical information and analyses of the novels. O’Flaherty’s achievements as a short-story writer are considered in the context of those of his Irish contemporaries. The stories’ themes and motifs are also discussed. Thompson, Richard R. “The Sage Who Deep in Central Nature Delves: Liam O’Flaherty’s Short Stories.” Eire-Ireland 18 (Spring, 1983): 80-97. A discussion of the central themes in O’Flaherty’s stories, focusing primarily on the moral lessons inherent in his nature stories, which urge a turning away from intellectualism. Zneimer, John. The Literary Vision of Liam O’Flaherty. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1970. Ambitious approach to O’Flaherty’s work. The author sees a strong religious component in O’Flaherty’s novels and stories and a tension between the two forms. The novels are said to be despairing, while the stories are claimed to offer a redemptive alternative. Some important insights do not ultimately make the author’s argument persuasive.

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Tillie Olsen Olsen, Tillie

Born: Omaha, Nebraska; January 14, 1912 Died: Oakland, California; January 1, 2007 Principal short fiction • Tell Me a Riddle, 1961. Other literary forms • Besides her short stories and the novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974), Tillie Olsen was the author of “A Biographical Interpretation,” the afterword published in Rebecca Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1972), which she edited, and Silences (1978), a collection of essays about women and writing. She edited two books: Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: Mothers on Mothering—A Daybook and Reader (1984), a collection of excerpts, and Mothers and Daughters: That Special Quality—An Exploration in Photographs (1987). In addition, she wrote uncollected magazine articles on women and writing and many uncollected poems, several of which appeared in Partisan Review, Prairie Schooner, New World Writing, Ms., Harper’s, and College English. Achievements • Even though Olsen secured her literary reputation on the strength of one collection of short fiction, her voice as a humanist and feminist extended her influence beyond this small output. Olsen wrote about working-class people who, because of class, race, or sex, have been denied the opportunity to develop their talents. Frequently she focused on the obstacles women have experienced. She understood them well. She herself was exactly such a victim of poverty during the 1930’s, and then she worked and raised a family for more than twenty years until she could begin writing. Both her fiction and her nonfiction deal with the problem women face: developing individual talents while combating socially imposed views. Olsen was also known as a leading feminist educator. Her courses introduced students to forgotten writings, such as journals, to teach them about women’s lives. The reading lists she developed have provided models for other women’s studies courses throughout the United States. Besides the O. Henry Award for the best American short story of 1961 for “Tell Me a Riddle,” Olsen also won the Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her other awards included a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1975-1976, an honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska in 1979, a Ministry to Women Award from the Unitarian Women’s Federation in 1980, a Bunting Institute Fellowship from Radcliffe College in 1985, and a Rea Award for the short story in 1994. Her short fiction appears in more than one hundred anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories for 1957, 1961, and 1971, and Fifty Best American Stories, 1915-1965. Biography • The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Tillie L. Olsen spent her youth in Nebraska and Wyoming. Her parents were active union members, so political commitment as well as economic pressures accompanied her early years. Her father served as state secretary in the Socialist Party. In 1933, she moved to California, where, in 1936, she married printer Jack Olsen. Because she raised four

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daughters and worked at full-time clerical jobs, she did not publish her first book until she was in her late forties. She worked as a pork trimmer in meat-packing houses, a hotel maid, a jar-capper, and a waitress. Then, with the help of a Stanford University Creative Writing FellowTO VIEW IMAGE, ship and a Ford grant in literature she put together Tell Me a Riddle, the PLEASE SEE title story of which received the O. PRINT EDITION Henry Award for the best American OF THIS BOOK. short story of 1961. There followed a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A grant from the MacDowell Colony allowed her to complete Yonnondio: From the Thirties, a novel she began in the 1930’s which was originally published in 1934 in the Partisan Review. After its revision and publication in 1974, Olsen continued writing essays and articles as well as editing collections of women’s writings. In addition, she taught at AmLeonda Fiske herst College, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Minnesota, among others. In the introduction of her nonfiction book Silences (1978), Olsen wrote, “For our silenced people, century after century, their beings consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.” She was twice arrested for her activism. After experiencing years of deteriorating health, Olsen died on January 1, 2007, in Oakland, California. She was was two weeks shy of her ninety-fifth birthday. Analysis • Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle contains four stories arranged chronologically in the order in which they were written: “I Stand Here Ironing,” “Hey Sailor, What Ship?,” “O Yes,” and “Tell Me a Riddle.” All but the first story contain, as major or minor characters, members of the same family, whose parents emigrated from Russia. The characters in the first story could also belong to the same family, although there is no evidence to prove it and the names of the children are different; nevertheless in “I Stand Here Ironing” characters, situation, and tone are similar to those found in the other three stories. A difference between “I Stand Here Ironing” and the remaining stories in the volume is that the former story is told in the first person, being a kind of interior monologue (actually an imagined dialogue), whereas “Hey Sailor, What Ship?,” “O Yes,” and “Tell Me a Riddle” are told in varieties of the third person.

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“I Stand Here Ironing” • Exterior action in “I Stand Here Ironing” is practically nonexistent, consisting of a woman moving an iron across an ironing board. Interior action is much more complicated, being a montage of times, places, and movements involving a mother in interaction (or lack of interaction) with her firstborn, a daughter, Emily. Questions arise as to whether the montage can define or even begin to define the daughter; whether the mother or anyone else can help the daughter or whether such help is needed; whether the daughter will continue to be tormented like the mother, who identifies herself with the iron moving inexorably back and forth across the board; or whether, as the mother hopes, the daughter will be more than the dress on the ironing board, “helpless before the iron.” “She will leave her seal,” the mother says, the only words spoken aloud in the story; but the words could express only the mother’s fervent hope for the well-being of a daughter born to a mother of nineteen, impoverished, alone, distracted, in an age of depression, war, and fear. “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” • “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” introduces Lennie and Helen and their children, Jeannie, Carol, and Allie; but the story is not so much about them as it is about Whitey (Michael Jackson, a sailor and friend of the family who seems more lost at sea than at home in any port or ship). Filtering through Whitey’s consciousness, the story explores his frustrations and anger, pain and despair. At the same time, however, the living conditions of Lennie and Helen and their children and the relationships among the family and between various members of the family and Whitey are carefully delineated. Whitey is a mariner, a perpetual wanderer whose only contact with family life is with Lennie, a boyhood friend. As the story opens, Whitey is drunk, a condition he finds himself in more and more, and with almost nothing left of his pay. His anguish, born of his desire to be with Lennie and the family and his reluctance to bear the pain of such a visit, is evident from the beginning, as is also the shame and degradation he feels associated with his lifestyle. What had started out as a dream, a life of adventure on the sea, with comrades who shared the good and the bad, has become a parade of gin mills and cathouses, clip joints, hock shops, skid rows, and lately hospitals. Lennie’s dreams, however, have also been frustrated. Lennie is a worn likeness of his former self; Helen is graying and tired from holding a job as well as caring for house and home. They live in poverty in cramped quarters. Still, as Helen explains to her oldest daughter, Jeannie, this house is the only place in which Whitey does not have to buy his way. The tragedy is that he feels he does. He comes bearing presents, distributing dollars and at the same time too drunk to share in meaningful interaction with the family he loves, where he is brother, lover, and father to a family not his own. “O Yes” • “O Yes” picks up the family several years later when Carol, the second daughter, is twelve and about to experience the pain of parting with a close friend, Parry, a black girl. Carol and her mother, Helen, have accompanied Parry and her mother, Alva, to a black church to witness Parry’s baptism. Carol is uncomfortable, however, both with the surroundings and with Parry, who is growing away from her. As the services rise to a crescendo of passion, Carol asks her mother to take her home and then faints. Later Alva tries to explain to Carol that the religion is like a hope in the blood and bones and that the music offers a release to despair, but Carol will not listen.

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Later Jeannie tries to explain to her mother that Carol and Parry are undergoing an almost inevitable “sorting out” process, a sorting out demanded by the culture— their environment, their peers, their teachers—a sorting out that “they” demand. The separation is hard on both girls. Nevertheless, Parry seems better equipped to handle the crisis, while Carol continues to suffer and question. Helen knows that Carol, too, has been baptized, immersed in the seas of humankind, and she suffers with her daughter. The irony is that white people have no means of catharsis through their religion; they are unable to cry “O Yes.” “Tell Me a Riddle” • The most haunting story in the collection Tell Me a Riddle is the title story. Longer than the other stories, this one focuses on Lennie’s mother and father while at the same time it brings to a culmination themes Olsen explores in the other stories: the frustration of dreams unrealized; the despair of never having enough money; the anger and hostility of women who have had to cope with too much with too little and who have lost themselves in the process; the search for meaning and explanation; the continuing hope of the young in spite of the tensions around them; the pain of mortality. If the story has a fault, it may be that it is too painful as it grasps readers and pulls them too close to raw feeling. “Tell me a riddle, granny,” a grandchild demands. “I know no riddles, child,” the grandmother answers; but she knows, and the reader knows, that the riddle is of existence itself. Why claw and scratch; why hold on? Aged and consumed by cancer, the grandmother’s body will not let go. Russian emigrants of Jewish extraction who have fled persecution to come to the American land of promise, the grandfather and grandmother have been married forty-seven years and have reared seven children, all of whom are married and have families of their own. Now the grandfather wants to sell the house and move to The Haven, a retirement community, where he will have freedom from responsibility, from fretting over money, and will be able to share in communal living, to fish or play cards or make jokes with convivial companions. The grandmother refuses, however, countering every argument her husband puts forth. She was the one who worked eighteen hours a day without sufficient money to keep the house together. Not once did he scrape a carrot or lift a dish towel or stay with the children. He is the one who needs companions; she lived a life of isolation. “You trained me well,” she tells him. “I do not need others to enjoy.” She is adamant: “Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.” The argument between them erupts continually, fanned by his desires and her anger and resentment. The children do not understand. How can people married forty-seven years and now at a time of life when they should be happy get themselves into a power struggle that threatens to pull them apart? Unknowingly the children take their father’s side, considering their mother to be unreasonable or sick. They advise him to get her to a doctor. The doctor finds nothing seriously wrong and advises a diet and a change in lifestyle—“start living like a human being.” The grandmother continues to deteriorate; more and more she keeps to herself, stays in bed, and turns her face to the wall. One night she realizes that although the doctor said she was not sick, she feels sick, and she asks her husband to stay home with her. He refuses, once again bringing up the old argument, and as he leaves she sobs curses at him. When he returns he finds that she has left their bed and retired to a cot. They do not speak to each other for a week until one night he finds her outside in the rain singing a love song of fifty years ago. The husband and the children bring her to a son-in-law who is a physician, and

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during surgery he finds cancer. The children advise their father to travel with her and visit all the children; and now begins an exodus of pain. She does not yet realize she is terminally ill, and the constant movement causes her utter despair when all she wants is to be at home. From house to house they carry her and she refuses to participate, will not touch a baby grandchild, and retreats finally to sit in a closet when they believe she is napping. Once a granddaughter, herself upset, hauls her little body into the closet and finds her grandmother there—“Is this where you hide, too, Grammy?” Finally the grandfather brings her to a new apartment close to a seaside resort, dismal in the off-season and filled with the impoverished aged. The grandmother, ill in bed for several days, is tended by her granddaughter, Jeannie, daughter of Lennie and Helen, and now a visiting nurse. When she is better, the grandmother wants to go by the sea to sit in the sand. More and more now she loses control of her conscious self, sings snatches of songs, remembers pieces of quotations, tries in herself to find meaning while noticing that death, decay, and deterioration are all around her. Then she realizes that she, too, is dying and knows that she cannot tell her husband of her realization because a fiction is necessary to him; and she wants to go home. One day Jeannie brings her a cookie in the shape of a real little girl who has died and tells her of a Spanish custom of partying at funerals, singing songs, and picnicking by the graves. From this interaction Jeannie draws solace, from what she takes to be a promise from her grandmother that at death she will go back to when she first heard music, to a wedding dance, where the flutes “joyous and vibrant tremble in the air.” For the others there is no comfort. “Too late to ask: and what did you learn with your living, Mother, and what do we need to know?” Mary Rohrberger With updates by Louise M. Stone and Nika Hoffman Other major works anthologies: Life in the Iron Mills, 1972, revised 1984; Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: Mothers on Mothering—A Daybook and Reader, 1984; Mothers and Daughters: That Special Quality—An Exploration in Photographs, 1987 (with others). novels: Yonnondio: From the Thirties, 1974. nonfiction: “A Biographical Interpretation,” 1972; Silences, 1978. Bibliography Barstow, Jane M. “Tell Me a Riddle.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Tell Me a Riddle” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Bauer, Helen Pike. “‘A Child of Anxious, Not Proud, Love’: Mother and Daughter in Tillie Olsen’s ‘I Stand Here Ironing.’” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Analyzes the story as a dialogue between a number of opposites in which the basic issues are how much of the past determines the daughter’s future, how much of the mother is in the daughter, and how much responsibility the mother has for her daughter’s passivity and repression.

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Cardoni, Agnes Toloczko. Women’s Ethical Coming-of-Age: Adolescent Female Characters in the Prose Fiction of Tillie Olsen. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. Survey of Olsen’s adolescent female characters, comparing and contrasting their milieux. Includes a bibliography and an index. Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Compares these two authors’ activism and writing styles. Includes a bibliography and an index. Faulkner, Mara. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Examines the themes of motherhood, relationships between men and women, community, and language in Olsen’s fiction. Frye, Joanne S. Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1995. One of the most extensive discussions of the four stories in Tell Me a Riddle and “Requa.” Frye contends that Olsen’s readings are embedded in history—both cultural and personal. The book also contains a long conversation Frye had with Olsen about her five short stories. Gawthrop, Betty G. “I Stand Here Ironing.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 4. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “I Stand Here Ironing” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Jacobs, Naomi. “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water in Tell Me a Riddle.” Studies in Short Fiction 23 (Fall, 1986): 401-406. Jacobs analyzes the plot of Olsen’s story by showing the development of a series of images derived from the four basic elements. Jacobs then relates this interpretation to Olsen’s theme of spiritual rebirth. Nelson, Kay Hoyle, and Nancy Huse, eds. The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Collection of the most important articles, reviews, and parts of books about Olsen, arranged in chronological order; includes essays from a variety of approaches on the stories “I Stand Here Ironing,” “Tell Me a Riddle,” and “O Yes.” Niehus, Edward L., and Teresa Jackson. “Polar Stars, Pyramids, and Tell Me a Riddle.” American Notes and Queries 24 (January/February, 1986): 77-83. Niehus and Jackson analyze one incident recalled by Eva, the dying woman, by relating it to a pole or center of life, an idea that derives from basic astronomy and late nineteenth century pyramidology. The authors explore how Olsen handles this theme when circumstances change so that the pole does not remain stable. Pearlman, Mickey, and Abby H. P. Werlock. Tillie Olsen. Boston: Twayne, 1991. General introduction to Olsen’s life and work that tries to redress previous critical neglect and to suggest new directions for further study of her work. Includes an interview and extensive discussions of the four stories in Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, especially “I Stand Here Ironing” and the title story.

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Cynthia Ozick Ozick, Cynthia

Born: New York, New York; April 17, 1928 Principal short fiction • The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, 1971; Bloodshed and Three Novellas, 1976; Levitation: Five Fictions, 1982; The Shawl, 1989; The Puttermesser Papers, 1997. Other literary forms • Cynthia Ozick is the author of poems, articles, reviews, and essays, as well as short stories. She has also published several novels, including Trust (1966), The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), and Heir to the Glimmering World (2004; also known as The Bear Boy). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Epoch, Commentary, The Literary Review, and Judaism. Her other short works have been published frequently in journals such as those mentioned above and also in a wide variety of others. She also adapted her short story “The Shawl” to the stage as Blue Light, a play that was produced in 1994. In 1998, she edited the anthology The Best American Essays. Ozick’s criticism and nonfiction writings have been collected in more than a half-dozen volumes, including Art and Ardor (1983), Metaphor and Memory: Essays (1989), What Henry James Knew, and Other Essays on Writers (1993), Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character, and Other Essays on Writing (1996), Quarrel and Quandry: Essays (2000), and The Din in the Head (2006). Achievements • Often characterized as difficult and involved in syntax and idea, Cynthia Ozick’s works have, nevertheless, received many awards. The short fiction especially has been judged prizeworthy, winning for her such prestigious awards and honors as the Best American Short Stories award (several times), the National Book Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Jewish Book Council Award. Immediately consequent to the publication of “Rosa,” one of her prizewinning stories, Ozick was invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard University, and she became the first person to receive the Michael Rea Award for career contribution to the short story. She has received a number of honorary degrees from schools like Adelphi University, Williams College, Brandeis University, and Skidmore College as well as Yeshiva University, Hebrew Union College, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Biography • Born of Russian immigrants who took up residence in the Bronx borough of New York, Cynthia Ozick and her parents and siblings worked in the family drugstore, which kept them in comfort and relative prosperity even through the years of the Great Depression. As a female child, Ozick was not marked for extensive education by her family and community. Nevertheless, she was enrolled at the age of five and a half in a Yiddish-Hebrew school, so she could take religious instruction, and her family insisted that she be allowed to stay. The rabbi giving the instruction soon found that she had what he called a “golden head.” Successful as she was in religious instruction, however, her public school experiences were difficult and humiliating. It was not until her entrance into Hunter College High School in Manhattan that she was once again made to feel part of an intellectual elite. Her years at New York University,

Ozick, Cynthia where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949, were followed by attendance at Ohio State University, where she received her master’s degree in 1951. In 1952, she married Bernard Hallote. One daughter, Rachel, was born in 1965. Early in her career, Ozick became interested in the Jewish textual tradition, and over the years she became an expert in it. In fiction and nonfiction, she has argued with passion concerning the vital role Judaism has played in Western culture, and she has become for many a spokesperson for the importance of art and artists in the Jewish tradition and for the role of women in Jewish culture.

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Analysis • Cynthia Ozick’s thesis for her master’s degree was titled Julius Ozick “Parable in the Later Novels of Henry James,” an exercise that she later thought of as a first step in an act of devotion that resulted in her belief in the exclusivity of art. In effect, as a result of studying Henry James, she became, she believed, a worshiper at the altar of art, a devotee of the doctrine of art for art’s sake. This idea—one that many believe places art before life, form before content, beauty before truth, aesthetic enjoyment before moral behavior— became the belief system that led Ozick to conclude that to worship art is to worship idols—in effect, to break the Mosaic law. This kind of understanding led Ozick to study the Jewish textual tradition and the role of Judaism in Western culture. During the 1980’s, Ozick began to realize that creative writers needed to use the highest powers of imagination to posit an incorporeal god, as exists in the Jewish faith, and to put forth a vision of moral truth rooted in the history, traditions, and literature of the Jewish people. Ozick’s success in this endeavor is manifested not only in her identification as a Jewish American author but also in the number of awards she has received from representatives of the Jewish people. Perhaps most important, however, is her own satisfaction that in her writing she is serving and has continued to serve the cause of moral truth according to Mosaic law. A highly serious approach to art as embodying moral imperatives, however, is not necessarily one that eschews metafictional techniques, repetitions, reworkings, and story sequences. Happily, in her use of self-referential devices and other dazzling postmodern presentations of the fantastic, the irreverent, and the grotesque, Ozick’s techniques are relevant to the traditions and teachings of Judaism, where magic, dreams, and fantastic occurrences are ways to embody and convey truth. “The Pagan Rabbi” • “The Pagan Rabbi” is a case in point. It is the story of Isaac Kornfeld, a pious and intelligent man who one day hangs himself from the limb of a tree. Isaac’s story is told by a friend who has known Isaac since they were classmates in

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the rabbinical seminary and who is a parallel character to Isaac. In the same way that the narrator and Isaac are counterparts, the fathers of both men are set up as opposites who agree on one thing only—that philosophy is an abomination that must lead to idolatry (the worship of false gods). Though the fathers are rivals, the sons accept the apparent differences in their own personalities and remain friends. In time, their different ambitions and talents separate them. The narrator leaves the seminary, marries a Gentile, and becomes a furrier; Isaac continues his brilliant career in the seminary and achieves the peak of his renown at the time of his death, when he has almost reached the age of thirty-six. The narrator, now a bookseller separated from his wife, learns that Isaac has hanged himself with his prayer shawl from a tree in a distant park. Immediately, the narrator takes a subway to the site of the suicide; Isaac’s behavior seems totally alien to his character and personality. In the remainder of the story, Ozick attempts to explain the odd circumstances of Isaac’s death, and, by means of the parallelisms, inversions, and doublings, point to the ramifications of leaving the intellectual path for the mysteries and seductions of the unknown world of fantasy, magic, and dream. Apparently Isaac, shortly after his marriage, began to seek different kinds of pleasure than those associated with the marriage bed and the beautiful Scheindel. In line with marriage customs, Scheindel covers her lustrous black hair after the wedding ceremony and subsequently bears Isaac seven daughters, one after another. As he fathers each daughter, Isaac invents bedtime stories for each, relating to such aberrations as speaking clouds, stones that cry, and pigs with souls. At the same time, Isaac shows an inordinate interest in picnics in strange and remote places. As Isaac behaves in odder and odder ways for a rabbi, exhibiting unhealthy (because excessive) interest in the natural world, Scheindel becomes more and more puzzled and estranged, since she has no interest in old tales of sprites, nymphs, gods, or magic events. Scheindel’s refusal to countenance anything magical is in counterpoint to her escape from the electrified fences of the concentration camp, which seemed a miracle of chance. Isaac’s notebook offers little explanation for his behavior, though it is filled with romantic jottings, quotations from lyric poets, and a strange reference to his age, using the means of counting rings as for a tree. Below this unusual computation, Isaac has written a startling message: “Great Pan lives.” The narrator begins to understand more as Scheindel reads a letter written by Isaac and left tucked in his notebook. The letter makes clear that Isaac has eschewed deeply held Jewish beliefs to accept a kind of animism or pantheism, where all matter has life and, moreover, soul, although all matter except for human beings can live separate from their souls and thus are able to know everything around them. Humans cannot live separate from their souls and thus are cursed with the inability to escape from their bodies except through death. Isaac concludes that there may be another route to freedom—exaltation and ecstasy by means of coupling with a freed soul. The idea, once conceived, needs a trial, and Isaac’s efforts are subsequently rewarded by the appearance of a dryad, the soul of a tree. The dryad’s lovemaking brings Isaac to marvels and blisses that no man, it is said, has experienced since Adam. Isaac errs, however, in trying to trap the dryad into his own mortal condition. In so doing, he loses his own soul. His soul free, Isaac’s body is doomed to death. More important, however, the soul retains the visage of the rabbi, who has been and will be the one who walks indifferently through the beauties of the fields, declaring that the sound, smells, and tastes of the law are more beautiful than anything to be found in the natural world.

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Scheindel’s repugnance toward, and lack of charity for, her husband’s folly surprises the narrator and turns him away from her. The narrator is able to appreciate the subtlety of the rabbi’s thinking and the bravery of the pursuit, but Scheindel is one who guarded the Mosaic law with her own wasted body during the Holocaust, and Scheindel is the issue here—not intellectual subtlety—she who seemed doomed to death when she was seventeen years old, she who traded her youth and vitality for marriage to a Jewish rabbi. After his conversation with Scheindel, and as an ironic afterthought, the narrator goes home to clear his house of his three paltry houseplants. His gesture next to Isaac’s forthright penetration into the forest, however, indicates something of the struggle of every Jew seduced by the pleasures of the beautiful but charged to interpret and guard the laws instead. “The Shawl” • By the time of the publication of “The Shawl” in The New Yorker and “Rosa,” also in The New Yorker, Ozick had come to articulate fairly clearly her recognition that imagination need not be a negative, leading to idolatry, but a positive, allowing Jews to imagine a god without image. These stories are of exceptional importance and significance in the Ozick canon. In them, Ozick deals directly with the horror of the Holocaust. Rosa is the focal character of both stories, each of which exists as a separate entity coherent in itself, but also, when juxtaposed as in a diptych or modified story sequence, each takes on added significance as the two parts interact with each other. In “The Shawl,” Rosa is a young woman with a baby in her arms wrapped in a shawl that serves not only to shelter the child, called Magda, but also to hide it, to muffle its cries, and to succor it. With Rosa is her young niece, Stella, who is jealous of Magda and takes the shawl for her own comfort. Deprived of her shawl, the baby begins to cry and crawl around on the ground. Rosa’s dilemma must be excruciatingly painful. She understands that her adolescent niece took the shawl, trying to cling to her own life, and she understands that if she chances picking up the baby without the shawl to cover it up, she is likely to lose both her life and Magda’s. She chooses to go after the shawl first, and the fatal moment arrives too soon. A German officer finds the child wandering around and hurls her against the electrified fence. Complicating the issue is the question of who is Magda’s father. Early in the story, it is suggested that the father is no Jew, since Magda has blue eyes and blond hair and seems a pure Aryan, a situation that causes Stella to react even more bitterly. As in any nightmare, the dreaded occurs. Stella steals the shawl; the baby cries, wanders about, and is killed. Rosa survives the horrible ordeal as she has survived others, including repeated rapes by German soldiers. She knows that any action will result in her death, so she stuffs the shawl in her own mouth and drinks Magda’s saliva to sustain herself. “Rosa” • For “Rosa,” Ozick won four awards. On the basis of the story’s publication, she was named one of three best short-story writers in the United States. Because the story does not proceed chronologically, a brief plot summary is helpful. After Rosa and Stella are rescued from the camps, Rosa brings Stella to the United States, where Stella gets a job and Rosa opens an antique shop. The action takes place some thirtyfive years after the occurrences described in “The Shawl.” Rosa is still very angry with Stella for her role in Magda’s death, and she is able to get little personal satisfaction from her activities in the antique shop. Apparently, her customers do not want to listen to the stories she has to tell, and one day, extremely angry and apparently insane,

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Rosa destroys her shop. To escape institutionalization, she agrees to move to what appears to be a poverty-stricken retirement hotel in Miami Beach. Life is difficult for her. The intense heat makes it hard for her to get out into the sunlight in order to shop. When she does eat, she scavenges or makes do with tiny portions, such as a cracker with grape jelly or a single sardine. The condition of her clothes seems to indicate that she has nothing to wear. One morning, however, Rosa makes her way to a supermarket, and there, she meets Simon Persky. Persky is not a person in the ordinary mold. He notices Rosa on a personal level and insists that she respond to him. While Rosa’s relationship with Simon Persky is developing, Ozick establishes two parallel plot lines having to do with Rosa’s request of Stella that she send Magda’s shawl and a request from a Dr. Tree asking Stella to help him conduct research on Rosa’s reaction to her imprisonment and ill treatment. These three plot lines weave about one another, providing the matrices for the action. Rosa is responsible for saving Stella’s life in the concentration camp and bringing her to the United States, and Stella is indirectly responsible for Magda’s death, perhaps the single most horrible thing that happened to Rosa in a life full of horrors—the internment, the death of family and friends, assaults and rape by brutal Nazis, near starvation, and finally Magda’s execution by electric shock. Since Magda’s death, Rosa has teetered on the brink of insanity, managing to hold herself together by working and by the creative act of writing letters to an imaginary Magda who, in Rosa’s fantasy, has survived and become a professor of Greek philosophy at Columbia University. Stella too has survived in Rosa’s imagination in another guise. She is a thief, a bloodsucker, evil personified, and the Angel of Death. To Magda, Rosa writes letters in perfect Polish, literary and learned. To Stella, Rosa writes in crude English, a language she never bothered to learn. To Stella, Rosa admits that Magda is dead; to Magda, Rosa explains that Stella is unable to accept and cannot be told the truth. The shawl, which Stella agrees to send to Rosa and which finally arrives, acted in Poland during the worst years as an umbrella covering the three people—Rosa, prepubescent Stella, and baby Magda—and providing sustenance and security, even though illusionary. After Magda’s death, the shawl becomes for Rosa an icon; “idol,” “false god,” Stella says, since Rosa worships it and prays to it. Dr. Tree is another threat to Rosa; he is a kind of parasite, living to feed off the horrors attached to other people’s lives. He wants to interview Rosa for a book that he is writing on Holocaust survivors. His letter to Rosa calling her a survivor is replete with jargon, with clinical terms naming the horrible conditions with neutral language and hiding the grotesque reality under the name of his own Institute for Humanitarian Context. Rosa objects to being called a “survivor” because the word dehumanizes her and every other person on the planet. Persky, on the other hand, offers Rosa an actual friendship, a human relationship in concrete, not abstract, terms. Thus he emerges as winner of Rosa’s attention, with Dr. Tree dismissed and memories of Magda put on hold for a while. The Puttermesser Papers • The Puttermesser Papers consists of a series of five previously published short stories about Ruth Puttermesser. In the stories, it is often difficult to distinguish between what actually happens to her and what she fantasizes. In the first story, “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,” for example, she visits her Uncle Zindel for Hebrew lessons, but the narrator says that Uncle Zindel died before Puttermesser was born. In the second story, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” Puttermesser creates a female golem, a person made of clay, from the

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dirt in the flowerpots in her apartment. The golem, named Xanthippe, helps Puttermesser get elected mayor of New York City and helps Puttermesser transform New York into a kind of paradise. The golem discovers sex, however, and as a result destroys all of the wonderful things she has helped Puttermesser achieve. In each story, Puttermesser is a loser. She tries to achieve some kind of ideal and ends up with an unpleasant reality. In the long run, things never go right for her. In the third story, “Puttermesser Paired,” she finds someone she considers to be a true soul mate, Rupert Rubeeno, a copyist. Rubeeno and Puttermesser share a love of literature, especially an interest in the British authors and lovers George Eliot, the novelist, and George Lewes, the essayist. Eventually they marry, but Rubeeno leaves her on their wedding night, apparently without consummating the marriage. In the fourth story, “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” one of her relatives in the Soviet Union calls her and asks her to save the relative’s child. The child, Lidia Klavdia Girshengornova, turns out to be a grown woman interested in making a fortune in America. Eventually, she returns to the Soviet Union to rejoin her boyfriend. The final section, “Puttermesser in Paradise,” is probably the saddest of all. In it, Puttermesser is killed by a man who rapes her after she is dead. She enters a Paradise in which all things seem to go well for her, but in Paradise, she ultimately finds no happiness, for even there, “nothing is permanent.” She discovers the secret meaning of Paradise: “It too is hell.” Each thing she enjoys there disappears in turn, leaving her longing to be back on earth in spite of earth’s having also been in many ways unpleasant for her. Discussions of Cynthia Ozick’s fiction often include the descriptors “uncompromising,” “demanding,” “difficult”—characteristics that can diminish a writer’s popularity and, consequently, status. For Ozick, however, no such diminution has taken place. Indeed, her reputation has grown steadily and strongly, her writings gaining more attention and Ozick herself more recognition. The phenomenon is not, after all, that surprising. If her protestations are stronger than those of other Jewish American writers, her demands are based more clearly in moral imperatives of the Jewish tradition; yet there is another tradition as truly her own—one commentators sometimes forget—an American literary heritage, with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, those writers who clearly work like Ozick in a realm where the “power of blackness” wrestles with us all. Mary Rohrberger With updates by Richard Tuerk and the Editors Other major works play: Blue Light, pr. 1994 (adaptation of her short story “The Shawl”). anthology: The Best American Essays, 1998, 1998. novels: Trust, 1966; The Cannibal Galaxy, 1983; The Messiah of Stockholm, 1987; Heir to the Glimmering World, 2004 (also known as The Bear Boy). miscellaneous: A Cynthia Ozick Reader, 1996. nonfiction: Art and Ardor, 1983; Metaphor and Memory: Essays, 1989; What Henry James Knew, and Other Essays on Writers, 1993; Fame and Folly: Essays, 1996; Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character, and Other Essays on Writing, 1996; Quarrel and Quandry: Essays, 2000; The Din in the Head, 2006. poetry: Epodes: First Poems, 1992.

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Bibliography Alkana, Joseph. “‘Do We Not Know the Meaning of Aesthetic Gratification?’ Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, the Akedah, and the Ethics of Holocaust Literary Aesthetics.” Modern Fiction Studies 43 (Winter, 1997): 963-990. Argues that Ozick takes a stance against universalism in the two stories, the tendency to level human suffering under an all-inclusive existential or theological quandary. Bloom, Harold, ed. Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Excellent collection of essays, including brief book reviews as well as lengthy articles. Much of value for both the beginning student and a scholarly audience involved in an examination of complications of idea and form. Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Places Ozick in the context of the Jewish comic tradition but argues that levity in her fiction must serve a higher purpose than laughter for laughter’s sake, usually the satiric purpose of attacking vices, follies, and stupidities. Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Critical study of Ozick, which includes a bibliography and an index. Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Examines the sources and contexts of Ozick’s fiction, focusing on tensions between Hebraism and Hellenism, Western culture and Judaism, artistic imagination and moral responsibility; discusses Ozick’s relationship to psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism. Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. New York: Twayne, 1988. This excellent overview of Ozick’s canon includes an annotated bibliography and full notes. Most valuable for beginning students whose knowledge of Holocaust literature and Ozick is limited. Offers perceptive and lucid analyses of all the major works. ____________. “Cynthia Ozick, Rewriting Herself: The Road from ‘The Shawl’ to ‘Rosa.’” In Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, edited by Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1987. Contends Ozick paints not the thing itself but, like the French Symbolists, the effect produced by the thing; each of the three characters in the story uses the shawl as a life preserver. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Ozick: “Envy; Or, Yiddish in America” (vol. 2); and “The Pagan Rabbi,” “Puttermesser Paired,” “Rosa,” and “The Shawl” (vol. 6). Ozick, Cynthia. “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Interview by Elaine M. Kauvar. Contemporary Literature 26 (Winter, 1985): 375-401. Contains references to Ozick’s religion, history, intelligence, feminism, postmodern techniques, and philosophy of art. A good introduction to her views, personality, and level of intelligence. ____________. “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall, 1993): 359-394. Ozick discusses Jewish culture, other Jewish writers, her own fiction, and the Holocaust with her friend Elaine M. Kauvar. Pinsker, Sanford. The Uncompromising Fiction of Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Brief analysis of major works, including several of the more important short stories. Excellent for a reader new to Ozick’s fiction. Emphasizes postmodern aspects of Ozick’s work.

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Grace Paley Paley, Grace

Born: New York, New York; December 11, 1922 Principal short fiction • The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women in Love, 1959; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974; Later the Same Day, 1985; The Collected Stories, 1994; Here and Elsewhere, 2007 (with Robert Nichols). Other literary forms • In addition to her short fiction, Grace Paley has published the poetry collections Leaning Forward (1985), New and Collected Poems (1992), and Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000), the nonfiction works Conversations with Grace Paley (1997) and Just as I Thought (1998). She has also contributed essays on teaching to various journals. Achievements • Grace Paley received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Council on the Arts grant, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for short-story writing. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1988 and 1989 she received the Edith Wharton Award. In 1993, she was awarded the Michael Rea Award for the short story and the Vermont Governor’s Award for excellence in the arts. In 1994, she was a nominee for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997, she was awarded the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. Biography • The daughter of Russian immigrants, Grace Paley was born and raised in New York City. Both her parents, Mary (Ridnyik) Goodside and Isaac Goodside, M.D., were political exiles in their early years and passed on their political concerns to their daughter. At home they spoke Russian and Yiddish as well as English, exposing their daughter to both old and new cultures. She studied in city schools and attended Hunter College in 1938 and later New York University. Paley, however, was not interested in formal academic study and dropped out of college. She had begun to write poetry and in the early 1940’s studied with W. H. Auden at the New School for Social Research. In 1942 she married Jess Paley, a motion-picture cameraman. The couple had two children and then separated, although they were not legally divorced for twenty years. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Paley worked as a typist, while raising her children and continuing to write. At this time she began her lifelong political involvement by participating in New York City neighborhood action groups. After many rejections, her first collection of eleven stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, was published in 1959. Even though the book was not widely reviewed, critics admired her work, and Paley’s teaching career flourished. During the early 1960’s, she taught at Columbia University and Syracuse University and also presented summer workshops. She also began writing a novel, a project that she did not complete. She increased her political activism, participating in nonviolent protests against prison conditions in New York City and the government’s position on the war in Vietnam. A prominent member in the peace movement, she was a member of a 1969 mission that went to Hanoi to negotiate for the release of prisoners of war. In 1973, she was a delegate to the World Peace Conference in Moscow. In 1974, her second collec-

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tion of stories appeared. It received condemnation from reviewers, partially because of her political views but also because the writing was deemed uneven in quality. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, Paley continued her political activism as well as her writing and teaching. She joined with other activists TO VIEW IMAGE, in condemning Soviet repression of human rights, was a leader in the PLEASE SEE 1978 demonstrations in WashingPRINT EDITION ton, D.C., against nuclear weapons, OF THIS BOOK. and in 1985, along with campaigning against American government policy in Central America, visited Nicaragua and El Salvador. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Accent, and other magazines. Paley settled in Greenwich Village in New York City, with her second husband, poet, playwright, and landscape architect Robert Nichols. During the 1990’s Paley continued to teach in the New York City area, particularly at Sarah Lawrence College, but she retired by Courtesy, New York State Writers Institute, State University of New York the end of the decade. She divided her time between her place in Vermont and the Greenwich Village apartment that was so often a backdrop for her fiction. Analysis • Despite her small literary output, Grace Paley’s innovative style and the political and social concerns she advocates in her work have enabled her to generate significant critical attention. Her stories treat traditional themes, focusing on the lives of women and the experiences of love, motherhood, and companionship that bind them together. She presents these themes, however, in inventive rather than traditional structures. Her stories are frequently fragmented and open-ended, without conventional plot or character development, structural innovations that make her work more true to life. The stories gain their vitality by Paley’s use of distinctive language—the voice, idiom, tone, and rhythms of the New York City locale. She writes best when rendering the razor-tongued Jewish American urban female, with an ironic wit, who does not hesitate to voice her opinions. To speak out is a basic theme in Paley’s stories, and it reflects her own life and political principles. The women in her stories are like her; they are political activists who speak on nuclear energy, on the environment, and on all conditions that affect the world into which their children are born. This intermingling of politics and art brought Paley mixed reviews, but she has continued to stretch the limits of the short story, in both form and content.

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The Little Disturbances of Man • “Goodbye and Good Luck,” the first story in Grace Paley’s first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, shows her characteristic style and theme. The story begins, “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh.” Aunt Rose knows what her sister—Lillie’s “mama”—does not, that time rushes by relentlessly, that the old generation is quickly forgotten as the new generation supplants it, and that mama’s life of stodgy domesticity (the “spotless kitchen”) has meant little to her or anyone else as her life slips away. Mama, however, feels sorry for “poor Rosie” because Aunt Rose has not married or led a virtuous life. As a young girl, Rose cannot stand her safe but boring job in a garment factory and takes instead a job selling tickets at the Russian Art Theatre, which puts on Yiddish plays. The man who hires her says “Rosie Lieber, you surely got a build on you!” These attributes quickly gain the attention of the Yiddish matinee idol Volodya Vlashkin, “the Valentino of Second Avenue.” Although he is much older than she and has a wife and family elsewhere, he sets her up in an apartment. Their affair continues on—and off—over the years while he has many other lovers, but Rose is not lonely herself when he is gone. She never complains but worships him when she has him and is philosophical about his infidelities: An actor needs much practice if he is to be convincing on the stage. Although she never asks anything from him, “the actresses . . . were only interested in tomorrow,” sleeping lovelessly with wealthy producers for advancement. They get their advancement: Now they are old and forgotten. Vlashkin himself is old and retired, Aunt Rose fat and fifty, when his wife divorces him for all his past adulteries. He comes back to Rosie, the only woman who never asked anything of him, and they decide to get married. She has had her warm and love-filled life, and now she will have a bit of respectability, a husband—and, “as everybody knows, a woman should have at least one before the end of the story.” The theme is seen most clearly when Rose contrasts her life with her own mother’s. Her mother had upbraided her when she moved in with Vlashkin, but her mother had “married who she didn’t like. . . . He never washed. He had an unhappy smell . . . he got smaller, shriveled up little by little, till goodbye and good luck.” Rosie, therefore, “decided to live for love.” No amount of respectability, no husband, advancement, or wealth will save one from imminent change, decay, and death; so live for love, Aunt Rose would say, and you will have the last laugh. “The Pale Pink Roast” • The characters and tone may change in other stories, but the theme remains the same. In “The Pale Pink Roast” Anna sees her former husband and asks him to help her move into her new apartment. He is in “about the third flush of youth,” a handsome, charming, but “transient” man. In the midst of hanging her curtains, he stops and makes love to her. Then, admiring her fancy apartment and stylish clothes, he asks archly who is paying for it. “My husband is,” she responds. Her former husband is furious with her. The new husband, she tells him, is a “lovely” man, in the process of moving his business here. Why did you do it, then, her former husband wants to know: “Revenge? Meanness? Why?” “I did it for love,” she says. “An Interest in Life” • Over and over the female characters must choose between the safe but boring man and the charming but worthless lover. In “An Interest in Life,” the girl has her secure but dull boyfriend yet dreams of the husband who de-

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serted her. In “Distance,” Paley tells the same story over again, but this time from the point of view of another character in the story, a bitter old woman full of destructive meanness. She was wild in youth, but then opted for the safe, loveless marriage, and it has so soured her life that she has tried to force everyone else into the same wrong pattern. Her own very ordinary son is the analogue of the boring boyfriend from “An Interest in Life.” At heart, the bitter old woman understands the young girl, and this is her redeeming humanity. “Wants” and “Come On, Ye Sons of Art” • In a slight variation of theme, “Wants” demonstrates why the love relationship between man and woman must be transitory. The desirable man wants everything out of life; the loving woman wants only her man. “You’ll always want nothing,” the narrator’s former husband tells her bitterly, suggesting a sort of ultimate biological incompatibility between the sexes. The result assuredly is sadness and loneliness, but with islands of warmth to make it endurable. In “Come On, Ye Sons of Art,” Kitty is spending Sunday morning with her boyfriend (“Sunday was worth two weeks of waiting”). She is pregnant by him and already has a houseful of children by other fathers. She takes great pleasure in the fine morning she can give her boyfriend. The boyfriend, a traveling salesman, delights in his skill as a salesman. He only regrets he is not more dishonest, like his sister who, ignoring human relationships, has devoted herself to amassing an immense fortune by any means. Kitty’s boyfriend wistfully wishes he too were corrupt, high, and mighty. They are listening to a beautiful piece of music by English composer Henry Purcell on the radio, which the announcer says was written for the queen’s birthday; in reality, the music was not written for the queen but rather for Purcell’s own delight in his art, in the thing he did best, and no amount of wealth and power equals that pleasure. “In the Garden” • In her later stories, Paley struck out in new directions, away from the inner-city unwed mothers and the strongly vernacular idiom, to sparse, classical, universal stories. The theme, however, that there is no safe harbor against change and death, and that the only salvation is to live fully, realistically, and for the right things, has not changed. “In the Garden” has, essentially, four characters who appear to be in some country in the West Indies. Lush gardens of bright flowers and birds surround them, suggesting a particularly bountiful nature. One character is a beautiful young woman whose children were kidnapped eight months earlier and now are certainly dead, but she cannot face this fact, and her talk is constantly about “when they come home.” Her husband is a rich landlord, who did not give the kidnappers their ransom money; he shouts constantly in a loud voice that everything is well. There is a vacationing communist renting one of the landlord’s houses, who, out of curiosity, asks the neighbors about the case. He learns that the landlord had once been poor but now is rich and has a beautiful wife; he could not believe that anything had the power to hurt his luck, and he was too greedy to pay the ransom. It is known that it was “his friends who did it.” There is an elderly neighbor woman who is dying of a muscle-wasting disease. She had spent much time with the beautiful woman listening to her talk about when the children would return, but now she is fed up with her and cannot stand the husband’s shouting. For a while, since she is too wasted to do much more, she follows with her eyes the movements of the communist, but “sadly she had to admit that the eyes’ movement, even if minutely savored, was not such an adventurous journey.” Then “she had become interested in her own courage.”

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At first it may appear that nothing happens in the story, but it is all there. The garden is the world. The young woman with her beauty has won a rich husband; the landlord, through aggressiveness, has clawed his way to the top. Both these states of being—beauty and aggressiveness—have succeeded only for a while, but almost inevitably whatever is gained in the world is lost because human beings are all mortal. The communist—by being a communist, “a tenderhearted but relentless person”— suggests someone who will try to find a political way to stave off chance and mortality, but in fact he merely leaves, having done nothing. The old woman, who realizes the fecklessness of trying to help, and who has found mere observation of process insufficient, becomes more interested in the course of her own courage in facing up to almost inevitable change. She and her husband are the only ones who admit to change, and this seems the right position, the tragic sense of life which makes life supportable. The Collected Stories • The Collected Stories gathers over thirty years of stories from Paley’s previous collections, allowing the reader to track the development of Paley’s feminism and pacifism, as well as her depiction of urban family life. The Collected Stories also brings with it an opportunity to examine one of Paley’s most enduring fictional characters, a major figure in thirteen stories, and a minor figure in several more. This character, Faith Darwin, first appeared in the “The Used Boy-Raisers,” where it was clear that she served as her author’s alter ego, so that Faith, like Paley, is of Jewish descent, lives in Greenwich Village, has married, divorced and remarried, has two children, and is also a writer. In addition to paralleling Paley’s own life to some degree, the Faith Darwin stories track the various political movements in which Paley has been involved. For instance, in “Faith in a Tree,” Faith’s personal life is restrained in the light of her political principles, indicated by a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. In “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” Faith’s father, whom she had loved and admired uncritically, is critically reassessed in the light of her growing feminism. In later stories, however, Faith herself is subjected to criticism and revaluation. In “Listening,” Faith is confronted by her lesbian friend Cassie, who accuses her of ignoring her in her fiction. Faith is also criticized by other characters in “Friends,” “Zagrowsky Tells,” and “Love,” the latter story detailing the breaking up of friendships over disagreements concerning the Soviet Union. In these later stories, Faith must deal with changing times. In “The Long-Distance Runner” Faith faces her own aging process by returning to the old Jewish neighborhood in which she and her parents had once lived, and which is now populated by African Americans. When Faith decides to live in her old apartment for three weeks with four African American children and their mother, Mrs. Luddy, she discovers that, despite their differences, they share a sense of sisterhood because they are both women and mothers. The centrality of motherhood in the life of women is a continuing theme in the Faith Darwin stories, beginning with “The Used Boy Raisers” and emerging again in such stories as “The Long Distance Runner” and “The Exquisite Moment.” Stories such as “The Long-Distance Runner,” with its African American family, and “The Exquisite Moment,” involving a Chinese houseguest, also remind the reader of the multicultural element in Paley’s fiction. Faith’s own neighborhood—a Greenwich village community of artists, left-wing political activists, and people from minority ethnic and racial groups—is different from what is considered mainstream

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America, but at the same time it reminds the reader that this world, too, is part of the American scene. This urban community, which blends and mixes ethnicities, religions, and radical politics, along with her role as a fictional version of Paley herself, makes Faith Darwin’s stories a particularly representative aspect of Grace Paley’s collected work. Norman Lavers With updates by Louise M. Stone and Margaret Boe Birns Other major works miscellaneous: Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Stories and Poems, 1991 (with paintings by Vera Williams). nonfiction: Conversations with Grace Paley, 1997 (Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall, editors); Just as I Thought, 1998. poetry: Leaning Forward, 1985; New and Collected Poems, 1992; Begin Again: Collected Poems, 2000. Bibliography Aarons, Victoria. “Talking Lives: Storytelling and Renewal in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 9 (1990): 20-35. Asserts that Paley empowers her characters through their penchant for telling stories. In telling their stories, her characters try to gain some control over their lives, as if by telling they can reconstruct experience. Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Biography of Paley that includes a bibliography and an index. Bach, Gerhard, and Blaine Hall, eds. Conversations with Grace Paley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Collection of interviews with Paley from throughout her career as a writer, in which she comments on the sources of her stories, her political views, her feminism, and the influences on her writing. Iannone, Carol. “A Dissent on Grace Paley.” Commentary 80 (August, 1985): 54-58. Iannone states that Paley’s first collection of stories reveals talent. Her second, however, written when she was deeply involved in political activity, shows how a writer’s imagination can become trapped by ideologies, not able to rise above them to make sense of the world. Iannone’s comments on the intermingling of politics and art result in interesting interpretations of Paley’s stories. Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Introduction to Paley’s short fiction, strong on a summary and critique of previous criticism. Also contains a section of Paley quotations, in which she talks about the nature of her fiction, her social commitment, and the development of her narrative language. Emphasizes Paley’s focus on storytelling and narrative voice. Marchant, Peter, and Earl Ingersoll, eds. “A Conversation with Grace Paley.” The Massachusetts Review 26 (Winter, 1985): 606-614. A conversation with novelist Mary Elsie Robertson and writer Peter Marchant provides insights into Paley’s transition from poetry to short stories, her interest in the lives of women, and the connection between her subject matter and her politics. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of seven short stories by Paley:

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“A Conversation with My Father” and “Dreamers in a Dead Language” (vol. 2), “Faith in a Tree” (vol. 3), “An Interest in Life” and “The Long-Distance Runner” (vol. 4), “The Loudest Voice” (vol. 5), and “The Used-Boy Raisers” (vol. 8). Meyer, Adam. “Faith and the ‘Black Thing’: Political Action and Self-Questioning in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Winter, 1994): 79-89. Discusses how Paley, through the character of Faith, examines someone very much like herself while distancing herself from that person’s activities. Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Taylor focuses on what she calls Paley’s “woman centered” point of view. Asserts that “Conversation with My Father” allows discussion of many of the narrative conventions her fiction tries to subvert. The story reveals the connection between Paley’s recognition of the fluidity of life and her resistance to narrative resolution.

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Dorothy Parker Parker, Dorothy

Born: West End, New Jersey; August 22, 1893 Died: New York, New York; June 7, 1967 Principal short fiction • “Big Blonde,” 1929; Laments for the Living, 1930; After Such Pleasures, 1933; Here Lies: The Collected Stories, 1939; The Portable Dorothy Parker, 1944; The Penguin Dorothy Parker, 1977; Complete Stories, 1995. Other literary forms • Dorothy Parker’s principal writings, identified by Alexander Woolcott as “a potent distillation of nectar and wormwood,” are short stories and verse—not serious “poetry,” she claimed. Her poetic volumes include Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), and Death and Taxes (1931)—mostly lamentations for loves lost, never found, or gone awry. An edition of her complete poems was published in 1999. She also wrote witty drama reviews for Vanity Fair (1918-1920), Ainslee’s (19201933), and The New Yorker (1931); and terse, tart book reviews for The New Yorker (1927-1933) and Esquire (1959-1962). “Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up,” her provoked, personal reaction to A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928), typifies her “delicate claws of . . . superb viciousness” (Woolcott). Parker’s major plays are The Coast of Illyria (about Charles and Mary Lamb’s tortured lives) and The Ladies of the Corridor (1953; three case studies of death-in-life among elderly women). Achievements • Dorothy Parker’s career flashed brilliantly out in the 1920’s and early 1930’s and then faded equally quickly as the world she portrayed in her stories and poems disappeared into the hardships of the Depression. Her stories are sharp, witty portraits of an age when social and sexual conventions were changing rapidly. Her dramatic monologues, usually spoken by unselfconfident women, her sharp social satires, and her careful delineations of scenes and situations reveal the changing mores of the 1920’s. They also, however, portray the attendants of rapid social change: anxiety, lack of communication, and differing expectations of men and women on what social and sexual roles should be. These problems continue into contemporary times, and Parker’s incisive writing captures them well. Her writings are like herself—witty and sad. Parker’s stories, verse, and reviews appeared in, and helped to set the tone of, the newly founded The New Yorker, which began publication in 1925, and she remained an occasional contributor until 1955. Biography • Educated at Miss Dana’s School in Morristown, New Jersey, Dorothy Rothschild Parker wrote fashion blurbs and drama criticism for Vanity Fair, short stories for The New Yorker irregularly, Hollywood screenplays at intervals (1934-1954), and Esquire book reviews (1959-1962). Her marriage to Edwin Pond Parker (19171928) was succeeded by two marriages to bisexual actor-writer Alan Campbell (19341947; 1950-1963, when Campbell died). Campbell, Lillian Hellman, and others nurtured Parker, but they could not control her drinking and her worsening writer’s block that kept her from finishing many of her literary attempts during her last fifteen years.

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Analysis • Dorothy Parker’s bestknown stories are “The Waltz,” “A Telephone Call,” and her masterpiece, “Big Blonde,” winner of the O. Henry Memorial Prize for the best short story of 1929. “The Waltz” • “The Waltz” and “A Telephone Call,” both dramatic monologues, present typical Parker characters, insecure young women who derive their social and personal acceptance from the approval of men and who go to extremes, whether sincere or hypocritical, to maintain this approbation. The characters, anonymous and therefore legion, elicit from the readers a mixture of sympathy and ridicule. They evoke sympathy because each is agonizing in an uncomfortable situation which she believes herself powerless to control. The waltzer is stuck with a Library of Congress bad, boorish dancer—“two stumbles, slip, and a twenty-yard dash.” The other woman is longing for a telephone call from a man she loves who does not reciprocate her concern: “Please, God, let him telephone me now, Dear God, let him call me now. I won’t ask anything else of You. . . .” These predicaments are largely self-imposed as well as trivial, and so they are ludicrous, unwittingly burlesqued through the narrators’ hyperbolic perspectives. Both women are trapped in situations they have permitted to occur but from which they lack the resourcefulness or assertiveness to extricate themselves. The waltzer not only accepts the invitation to dance but also hypocritically flatters her partner: “Oh, they’re going to play another encore. Oh, goody. Oh, that’s lovely. Tired? I should say I’m not tired. I’d like to go on like this forever.” These cloying words mask the truth, which she utters only to herself and to the eavesdropping audience: “I should say I’m not tired. I’m dead, that’s all I am. Dead . . . and the music is never going to stop playing. . . .” Enslaved by an exaggerated code of politeness, therefore, she catches herself in the network of her own lies: “Oh, they’ve stopped, the mean things. They’re not going to play any more. Oh, darn.” Then she sets herself up for yet another round of hypocritical self-torture: “Do you really think so, if you gave them twenty dollars? . . . Do tell them to play this same thing. I’d simply adore to go on waltzing.” “A Telephone Call” • Like the waltzer, the narrator in “A Telephone Call” is her own worst enemy. Suffering from too much time on her hands—she is evidently not occupied with a job or responsibility for anyone but herself—she can afford the selfindulgence to spend hours focused exclusively on the dubious prospect of a phone

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call. She plays games with God; her catechism is a parody: “You see, God, if You would just let him telephone me, I wouldn’t have to ask You . . . for anything more.” She plays games with herself: “Maybe if I counted five hundred by fives, it might ring by that time. I’ll count slowly. I won’t cheat.” She is totally preoccupied with herself and her futile efforts to fan the embers of a dying love; having violated the social code by phoning her former admirer at his office, by the monologue’s end she is desperately preparing to violate it again by calling him at home. Nevertheless, she is ludicrous rather than pathetic because her concern is so superficial (although her concentration on the anticipated phone call is also a barrier against the more serious reality of the estrangement); her calculations so trivial (“I’ll count five hundred by fives, and if he hasn’t called me then, I will know God isn’t going to help me, ever again”); and the stakes for which she prays so low (attempting to manipulate God’s will in such a minor matter). She, like the waltzer, envisions a simplistic fairy-tale solution dependent on the agency of another. Thus the plots of these slight stories are as slender as the resources of the monologist narrators, for whom formulaic prayers or serial wisecracks (“I’d like to [dance] awfully, but I’m having labor pains. . . . It’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t a scaredycat about catching my beri-beri”) are inadequate to alter their situations. Such narratives, with their fixed perspectives, exploitation of a single, petty issue, and simple characters, have to be short. To be any longer would be to add redundance without complexity, to bore rather than to amuse with verbal pyrotechnics. “Big Blonde” • Although “Big Blonde” shares some of the features of the monologues, it is far more complex in narrative mode and in characterization. Rather than anatomizing a moment in time, as do the monologues, “Big Blonde” covers an indefinite span of years, perhaps a dozen. The story moves from comedy into pathos as its protagonist, Hazel Morse, moves from genuine gaiety to forced conviviality, undergirded by the hazy remorse that her name connotes. Hazel, “a large, fair,” unreflective, voluptuous blonde, has been, in her twenties, by day a “model in a wholesale dress establishment,” and for “a couple of thousand evenings . . . a good sport among her [numerous] male acquaintances.” Having “come to be more conscientious than spontaneous” about her enjoyment of men’s jokes and drunken antics, she escapes into what she unthinkingly assumes will be a stereotype of marriage, isolation from the outer world à deux, but what instead becomes a travesty. She revels in honesty—the freedom to stop being incessantly cheerful and to indulge in the other side of the conventional feminine role that is her life’s allotment, the freedom to weep sentimental tears over various manifestations, large and small, of “all the sadness there is in the world.” Hazel’s husband, Herbie, is “not amused” at her tears and impersonal sorrows: “crab, crab, crab, that was all she ever did.” To transform her from “a lousy sport” into her former jocular self he encourages her to drink, “Atta girl! . . . Let’s see you get boiled, baby.” Having neither the intellectual, imaginative, nor domestic resources to hold her marriage together any other way, Hazel acquiesces, even though she hates “the taste of liquor,” and soon begins to drink steadily. Herbie, however, is as barren of human resources as is his wife, and alcohol only ignites their smoldering anger, despite Hazel’s “thin and wordless idea that, maybe, this night, things would begin to be all right.” They are not; Herbie fades out of Hazel’s alcohol-blurred existence as Ed merges into it. He, too, insists “upon gaiety” and will not “listen to admissions of aches or weariness.” Nor will Ed’s successors, Charley, Sydney, Fred, Billy,

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and others, to whom Hazel responds with forced cordiality through her alcoholic haze in which the days and year lose “their individuality.” By now perpetually “tired and blue,” she becomes frightened when her “old friend” whiskey fails her, and she decides, having no ties, no talents, and no purpose in living, to commit suicide by taking twenty sleeping pills—“Well, here’s mud in your eye.” In her customary vagueness she fails again, however, causing the impersonal attendants, a reluctant doctor and housemaid, more annoyance than concern. She concludes that she might as well live, but with a paradoxical prayer of diabolic self-destructiveness: “Oh, please, please, let her be able to get drunk, please keep her always drunk.” Although in both “Big Blonde” and the monologues Parker satirizes vapid, unassertive women with empty lives, her work carries with it satire’s inevitable message of dissatisfaction with the status quo and an implicit plea for reform. For in subtle ways Parker makes a feminist plea even through her most passive, vacuous characters. Women ought to be open, assertive, independent; they should think for themselves and act on their own behalf, because men cannot be counted on to do it for them. They should be their own persons, like Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, “wel at ease,” instead of allowing their happiness to depend on the waxing and waning affections and attentions of inconstant men. To the extent that Dorothy Parker was a satirist she was also a moralist. In satirizing aimless, frivolous, or social-climbing lives, she implied a purposeful ideal. In ridiculing self-deception, hypocrisy, obsequiousness, and flattery, she advocated honesty in behavior and communication. In her epigrams, the moralist’s rapiers, she could hone a razor-edge with the best. In her portraits, cameos etched in acid, the touchstone of truth shines clear. Lynn Z. Bloom With updates by Karen M. Cleveland Marwick Other major works plays: Nero, pr. 1922 (with Robert Benchley); Close Harmony: Or, The Lady Next Door, pr. 1924 (with Elmer Rice); The Coast of Illyria, pr. 1949 (with Ross Evans); The Ladies of the Corridor, pr., pb. 1953 (with Arnaud d’Usseau). poetry: Enough Rope, 1926; Sunset Gun, 1928; Death and Taxes, 1931; Not So Deep as a Well, 1936; Not Much Fun, 1996; Complete Poems, 1999. screenplays: Business Is Business, 1925 (with George S. Kaufman); Here Is My Heart, 1934 (with Alan Campbell); Big Broadcast of 1936, 1935 (with Campbell); Hands Across the Table, 1935; Mary Burns, Fugitive, 1935; One Hour Late, 1935 (with Campbell); Paris in Spring, 1935; Lady Be Careful, 1936 (with Campbell and Harry Ruskin); Suzy, 1936 (with Campbell, Horace Jackson, and Lenore Coffee); The Moon’s Our Home, 1936; Three Married Men, 1936 (with Campbell); A Star Is Born, 1937 (with Campbell and Robert Carson); Woman Chases Man, 1937 (with Joe Bigelow); Crime Takes a Holiday, 1938; Flight into Nowhere, 1938; Sweethearts, 1938 (with Campbell); Trade Winds, 1938 (with Campbell and Frank R. Adams); Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, 1939; The Little Foxes, 1941; Weekend for Three, 1941 (with Campbell); Saboteur, 1942 (with Campbell, Peter Viertel, and Joan Harrison); A Gentle Gangster, 1943; Mr. Skeffington, 1944; Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, 1947 (with Frank Cavett); The Fan, 1949 (with Walter Reisch and Ross Evans); Queen for a Day, 1951; A Star Is Born, 1954.

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Bibliography Calhoun, Randall. Dorothy Parker: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Helpful guide for the student of Parker. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Edward, Ann. “Big Blonde.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Big Blonde” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Freibert, Lucy M. “Dorothy Parker.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Short Story Writers, 1910-1945, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel. Vol. 86. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. Freibert’s excellent entry on Dorothy Parker provides some general biographical information and close readings of some of her most important stories. Includes a bibliography of Parker’s work and a critical bibliography. Keats, John. You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Keats’s book was the first popular biography published on Parker, and it is quite thorough and readable. Supplemented by a bibliography and an index. Kinney, Arthur F. Dorothy Parker. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1998. In this excellent study of Parker’s life and work, Kinney incorporates facts recorded for the first time and provides the first full critical assessment of her writing. Kinney calls Parker the best epigrammatic American poet of her century. Contains a bibliography and extensive notes and references. Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? London: Heinemann, 1987. Meade has produced a good, thorough biography that relates events in Parker’s fiction to situations in her life. Nevertheless, Meade’s focus is biographical, and the discussion of Parker’s work is mostly in passing. Includes notes and an index. Melzer, Sondra. The Rhetoric of Rage: Women in Dorothy Parker. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Explores Parker’s representation of female characters in her works. Pettit, Rhonda S. A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Study that attempts to shift the focus of Parker criticism from the poet’s life to the wider literary environment. Simpson, Amelia. “Black on Blonde: The Africanist Presence in Dorothy Parker’s ‘Big Blonde.’” College Literature 23 (October, 1996): 105-116. Claims that “Big Blonde” exposes the way race and gender are mutually constitutive and how blackness contests and constructs the privilege of whiteness; argues that three seemingly unimportant African figures are the key to this narrative about the subjugation of white women in America. Walker, Nancy A. “The Remarkably Constant Reader: Dorothy Parker as Book Reviewer.” Studies in American Humor, n.s. 3, no. 4 (1997): 1-14. A discussion of Parker’s book reviews for The New Yorker from 1927 to 1933 and for Esquire from 1957 to 1962 as a reflection of her literary sensibility.

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S. J. Perelman Perelman, S. J.

Born: Brooklyn, New York; February 1, 1904 Died: New York, New York; October 17, 1979 Principal short fiction • Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge, 1929; Parlor, Bedlam, and Bath, 1930 (with Quentin J. Reynolds); Strictly from Hunger, 1937; Look Who’s Talking, 1940; The Dream Department, 1943; Crazy Like a Fox, 1944; Keep It Crisp, 1946; Acres and Pains, 1947; Westward Ha! Or, Around the World in Eighty Clichés, 1948; Listen to the Mocking Bird, 1949; The Swiss Family Perelman, 1950; A Child’s Garden of Curses, 1951; The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, 1952; Hold That Christmas Tiger!, 1954; Perelman’s Home Companion, 1955; The Road to Miltown: Or, Under the Spreading Atrophy, 1957; The Most of S. J. Perelman, 1958; The Rising Gorge, 1961; Chicken Inspector No. 23, 1966; Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970; Vinegar Puss, 1975; Eastward Ha!, 1977. Other literary forms • S. J. Perelman’s more than twenty-five books include essays, stories, plays, and an autobiography. He has also written screenplays for film and television, and he is best known for his work with the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Achievements • S. J. Perelman was a highly successful and well-loved humorist whose best writing appeared in The New Yorker and then was collected in popular books for five decades, from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. He wrote the book upon which the Broadway hit One Touch of Venus (1943) was based, and he wrote one other acclaimed Broadway comedy, The Beauty Part (1961). For his contribution to Around the World in Eighty Days, he shared an Academy Award in 1956 and also received a New York Film Critics Award. In 1978, he received the special National Book Award for his lifetime contribution to American literature. Perelman’s influence on other writers is difficult to measure because, although he was the leader of the “dementia praecox” school of humor closely associated with The New Yorker, he was not the inventor of the techniques of verbal humor he used so well, and his type of writing has been on the decline. There seem to be clear mutual influences between Perelman and several of his contemporaries: James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, and Nathanael West, his brother-in-law. French Surrealists admired his style, and contemporary black humorists often use the techniques he mastered; but one hesitates to assert direct influence on writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. Perelman’s type of writing seems to have been taken over by television, film, and perhaps the New Journalism. Woody Allen admired Perelman and is often mentioned as one of his disciples. In his critiques of American style, Perelman may be a predecessor of writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Terry Southern. Biography • Sidney Joseph Perelman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 1, 1904, the son of Sophia Charren and Joseph Perelman, a Jewish poultry farmer. He briefly attended Brown University, where he edited the College Humor magazine. After leaving the university in 1925, he began his career as a writer and cartoonist for Judge

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magazine. Following a brief time at College Humor and his marriage to Laura Weinstein on July 4, 1929, he began writing full-time and in 1931 became a regular contributor to The New Yorker and other major magazines. He and Laura had a son and a daughter. He worked occasionally in Hollywood, writing motion-picture screenplays, but he spent most of his life in New York City and on his Pennsylvania farm. He collaborated to write several successful plays; his usual collaborator on films as well as plays was his wife, although on One Touch of Venus, he worked with Ogden Nash, and for a television musical, Aladdin, with Cole Porter. After his wife’s death in 1970, Perelman lived for two years in England but then returned to Manhattan, where he remained until his death on October 17, 1979. Analysis • Parody, satire, and verbal wit characterize S. J. Perelman’s works. Most of them are very short and tend to begin as conversational essays that develop into narrative or mock dramatic episodes and sometimes return to essay. Perelman called them feuilletons (little leaves), “comic essays of a particular type.” They seem formally related to the earliest American forms of short story, Benjamin Franklin’s bagatelles and early American humor. Norris Yates best summarizes the worldview reflected in Perelman’s work: Perelman values normal life, “integrity, sincerity, skepticism, taste, a respect for competence, a striving after the golden mean, and a longing for better communication and understanding among men.” Yates sees Perelman’s typical persona (the “I” of the pieces) as a Little Man resisting the forces of American cultural life that would “invade and corrupt his personality and impel him toward neuroses,” the forces which seem determined to destroy the values Perelman holds. According to Yates, these forces manifest themselves for Perelman most decisively in “the mass media, which are, on the whole, the offspring of technology’s unconsecrated marriage with Big Business.” Perelman’s “autobiographical” work reveals his version of the Little Man. A favorite type of The New Yorker humorists, the Little Man is a caricature of a typical middleclass, early twentieth century American male, usually represented as helpless before the complexities of technological society, cowed by its crass commercialism, dominated by desperate, unfulfilled women, sustaining himself on heroic fantasies of a bygone or imaginary era. James Thurber’s Walter Mitty has become the classic presentation of this character type. Perelman’s personae seem related to the type, but vary in several significant ways. Acres and Pains • In Acres and Pains, the major collection of his adventures on his farm, he makes his persona into a city dweller who has naïvely tried to realize a romantic agrarian dream on his country estate but who has come to see the error of his ways. Perelman uses this reversal of the rube in the city to debunk a sentimental picture of country life by exaggerating his trials. Many episodes show good country people betraying the ideal with which they are associated. Contractors, antique dealers, and barn painters rob him of purse and peace. “Perelman” differs from the Little Man type in that, although he may at any time fall victim to another illusion, he knows and admits that country life is no romance. In these sketches, he also differs from the Little Man type in his relationship to wife and family. He is not dominated by a frustrated woman. He and his wife are usually mutual victims of pastoral illusion, although often she suffers more than he. This “Perelman” is most like the typical Little Man when he deals with machines. For example, when his water pump goes berserk during a dinner party, he handles

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the problem with successful incompetence: “By exerting a slight leverage, I succeeded in prying off the gasket or outer jacket of the pump, exactly as you would a baked potato. . . . This gave me room to poke around the innards with a sharp stick. I cleaned the pump thoroughly . . . and, as a final precaution, opened the windows to allow the water to drain down the slope.” The major difference between this persona and Walter Mitty is that the former is competent; he escapes neurosis and resists with some success his crazy world. By splitting the narrator into a present sophisticate (a mask that often slips) and a former fool, he tends to shift the butt of humor away from the Library of Congress present narrator and toward the man who believes in romantic ideals and toward the people who so completely fail to live up to any admirable ideals. The latter are typified by the contractor who digs “Perelman’s” pool in a bad place although he knows the best place for it. Asked why he offered his advice when the pool was dynamited rather than before it was begun, he virtuously replies. “It don’t pay to poke your nose in other people’s business.” Implied in these tall tales of mock pastoral life are criticisms of the values which oppose those Yates lists: dishonesty, hypocrisy, greed, naïveté, incompetence, overenthusiasm, deliberately created confusion, and lying. Looking over the full range of Perelman’s first-person sketches, one sees significant variation in the presentation of the persona. In Acres and Pains, the narrator is much more concrete than in many other sketches in which the “I” is virtually an empty mind waiting to take shape under the power of some absurd mass-media language. Perelman is acutely sensitive to this language as a kind of oppression. Many of his sketches explore “sub-dialects” of American English in order to expose and ridicule the values that underlie them. “Tomorrow—Fairly Cloudy” is a typical example of the author’s probing of a sample of American language. “Tomorrow—Fairly Cloudy” • In “Tomorrow—Fairly Cloudy,” Perelman notices a new advertisement for a toothpaste which promises its users rescue from humdrum ordinary life and elevation into romance and success. In his introduction, Perelman emphasizes the absurdity of taking such ads seriously, describes the ad in detail, then introduces a dramatic scenario by observing that this ad heralds the coming demise of a desperate industry: “So all the old tactics have finally broken down—wheedling, abuse, snobbery and terror. I look forward to the last great era in advertising, a period packed with gloom, defeatism, and frustration.” In the following spectacle, the children bubble excited “adese” while father despairs over his drab life:

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Bobby—Oh, Moms, I’m so glad you and Dads decided to install a Genfeedco automatic oil burner and air conditioner with the new self-ventilating screen flaps plus finger control! It is noiseless, cuts down heating bills, and makes the air we breathe richer in vita-ray particles. . . . Mr. Bradley (tonelessly)—Well, I suppose anything is better than a heap of slag at this end of the cellar. Soon the Fletchers arrive to sneer at their towels and to make the Bradleys aware of all the products they do not have. The sketch ends in apocalypse as their inferior plumbing gives way, and they all drown in their combination cellar and playroom. It remains unclear throughout whether this episode forecasts the forms of future advertising or its effects on the public. Perelman exposes the absurdity of this language of conspicuous consumption by imagining its literal acceptance. In the world this language implies, happiness is possessing the right gadgets. If sales are to continue, it must be impossible for most people ever to have all the right things, and so impossible ever to be happy. The Bradleys have the right oil burner, but their towels disintegrate in two days, and they failed to use Sumwenco Super-Annealed Brass Pipe. This last omission costs them their lives. Not only their happiness but also their very survival depend on their ability to possess the right new product. “Entered as Second-Class Matter” • Perelman’s many sketches of this type culminate perhaps in “Entered as Second-Class Matter,” which is apparently a montage of fragments lifted (and, one hopes, sometimes fabricated) from magazine fiction and advertising. The resulting silliness may be intended as a portrait of the mass feminine mind as perceived by American magazines, 1930-1944. It ends: We have scoured the fiction market to set before you Three Million Tiny Sweat Glands Functioning in that vibrant panorama of tomorrow so that Your Sensitive Bowel Muscles Can react to the almost inevitable realization that only by enrichment and guidance plus a soothing depilatory can America face its problems confidently, unafraid, well-groomed mouth-happy, breaking hair off at the roots without undue stench. Okay, Miss America! In such pieces, Perelman’s values are clearly those Yates names. Especially important in these works is the humorous attempt to clear away the garbage of American language culture through ridicule. This aim is central to the series “Cloudland Revisited,” in which he reexamines the popular literature of his youth. Perelman varies this formula with attacks on absurd fashion and the language of fashion, one of the best of which is “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer.” Verbal Wit • Perelman is deservedly most admired for his faculty of verbal wit. In several of his more conventional stories which seem less restrained by satiric ends, his playfulness dazzles. Among the best of these are “The Idol’s Eye,” “Seedlings of Desire,” and “The Love Decoy.” Based on the sensational plots of teen-romance, “The Love Decoy” is narrated by a coed who seeks revenge on an instructor who once failed to make a pass and who later humiliated her before her classmates by accusing her of “galvanizing around nights.” Her plan is to lure him to her room after hours, then expose him as a corrupter of undergraduates. This plan backfires in a non sequitur when a lecherous dean arrives to assault her. The reader expects the plot to

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complicate, but instead it is transformed when the dean is unmasked as Jim the Penman who framed the girl’s father and sent him to the pen. Other identities are revealed, and the reader arrives at the end of a detective thriller. Although there is parody here of sentimental language and plot, the story seems more intent on fun than ridicule. It contains a number of Perelman’s most celebrated witticisms. For example: He caught my arm in a vice-like grip and drew me to him, but with a blow I sent him groveling. In ten minutes he was back with a basket of appetizing fresh picked grovels. We squeezed them and drank the piquant juice thirstily. At the center of this wit is the double entendre. Multiple meanings of words suggest the multiple contexts in which they may apply. Perelman juxtaposes these contexts, makes rapid shifts between them, and sometimes uses a suggestion to imagine a new context. The effects are sometimes surreal. The double meaning of “sent” suggests a transformation from a blow to the groin to an activity such as berrying. “Groveling” gathers an imaginary context which generates a new noun, “grovels.” Although this reading seems most plausible, in another reading there are no transformations, and gathering grovels becomes a euphemistic way to describe the amorous instructor’s reaction to her literal attack or to her unusually expressed affection. Perelman creates this slipperiness of meaning and encourages it to reverberate in this passage and in the language and structure of the whole work. One result is a heightened alertness in the reader to the ambiguity of language and the elusiveness of meaning, a first but important step on the way to the sort of respect for language Perelman implies in his many critiques of its abuses. This concern connects Perelman most closely with James Joyce, whom he considered the greatest modern comic writer, with a number of his contemporaries, including William Faulkner and James Thurber. Although Perelman has not the stature of these great writers, he shares with them a consciousness of the peculiar problems of modern life and a belief that how one uses language is important to recognizing and dealing with those problems. Among The New Yorker humorists with whom S. J. Perelman is associated, he is probably one of the lesser lights, showing neither the versatility, the variety, nor the universality of Dorothy Parker or of Thurber. Although critical estimates of his achievement vary, there is general agreement that his best work, done mostly before 1950, shows a marvelous gift for verbal wit. Terry Heller Other major works plays: The Night Before Christmas, pr. 1941 (with Laura Perelman); One Touch of Venus, pr. 1943 (with Ogden Nash); The Beauty Part, pr. 1961. miscellaneous: That Old Gang o’ Mine: The Early and Essential S. J. Perelman, 1984 (Richard Marschall, editor). nonfiction: The Last Laugh, 1981; Don’t Tread on Me: Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman, 1987; Conversations with S. J. Perelman, 1995 (Tom Teicholz, editor). screenplays: Monkey Business, 1931; Horse Feathers, 1932; Around the World in Eighty Days, 1956.

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Bibliography Adams, Michael. “A Critical Introduction to The Best of S. J. Perelman by Sidney Namlerep.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 2. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “A Critical Introduction to The Best of S. J. Perelman by Sidney Namlerep” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Epstein, Joseph. “Sid, You Made the Prose Too Thin.” Commentary 84 (September, 1987): 53-60. A biographical sketch of Perelman, suggesting that his best writing occurred when he was angry, as in Acres and Pains, a collection of stories about an idealistic city man being taken advantage of by rural hustlers; claims that elsewhere his natural penchant for gloom, suspicion, and pessimism led him merely to make wisecracks about banal subjects or unpleasantly callous pokes at barely disguised real people. Fowler, Douglas. S. J. Perelman. Boston: Twayne, 1983. This critical study examines influences on Perelman, the development of his career, his relationships with his contemporaries, his technique, and his importance. Includes a chronology, a biographical sketch, and an annotated bibliography. Gale, Steven. S. J. Perelman: A Critical Study. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Gale examines Perelman’s prose, screenplays, and plays, then studies his themes and techniques. Gale gives special attention to Perelman’s background in Jewish humor and his use of clichés and allusions. The volume is supplemented by a chronology and a bibliographical essay. ____________. S. J. Perelman: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1985. This useful, annotated bibliography lists 650 Perelman publications and 380 items written about Perelman. Gale, Steven H., ed. S. J. Perelman: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1992. Includes two dozen essays, articles, and critiques of Perelman from academic studies, newspapers, and popular journals over a seventy-year period of his career. Gale’s introduction places Perelman in the tradition of such great humorists as Geoffrey Chaucer and Mark Twain. Herrmann, Dorothy. S. J. Perelman: A Life. New York: Putnam, 1986. This complete biography makes use of recollections of his acquaintances to shed light on the life of a very private man. It includes select bibliographies of writing by and about Perelman. Katona, Cynthia Lee. “The Love Decoy.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “The Love Decoy” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Perelman, S. J. Conversations with S. J. Perelman. Edited by Tom Teicholz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Collection of interviews with the author. Plimpton, George, ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series. New York: Viking Press, 1963. In an interview appearing on pages 241-256, Perelman offers glimpses into his creative process and his artistic purposes. Yates, Norris Wilson. “The Sane Psychoses of S. J. Perelman.” In The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964. Though this study has to some extent been superseded by more extensive and later works, it still provides a good, brief introduction to Perelman.

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Ann Petr y Petry, Ann

Born: Old Saybrook, Connecticut; October 12, 1908 Died: Old Saybrook, Connecticut; April 28, 1997 Principal short fiction • Miss Muriel, and Other Stories, 1971. Other literary forms • Ann Petry has received her greatest critical recognition for her adult novels: The Street (1946), Country Place (1947), and The Narrows (1953). In 1949 she began a distinguished career as a writer of children’s literature with the publication of The Drugstore Cat, to be followed by the now-classic biographical novels Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad (1955) and Tituba of Salem Village (1964). She also published a devotional work, Legends of the Saints (1970), in addition to various articles for small periodicals. Achievements • Ann Petry’s receipt of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1945 (and an award of twenty-five hundred dollars) enabled her to complete The Street, which went on to become the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than one million copies. In 1977 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and in 1983 received a D. Litt. from Boston’s Suffolk University. In 1992 the reissuing of The Street renewed Petry’s reputation as an important American writer and introduced a new generation to her work. Her death in April, 1997, was eulogized publicly by Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd, and the following year MacArthur Fellow Max Roach premiered “Theater Pieces” (December, 1998), an adaptation of Petry’s tale of a jazz love triangle, “Solo on the Drums,” featuring Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis along with Roach. Biography • Ann Lane Petry was born to Peter Clarke Lane and Bertha James Lane on October 12, 1908, joining a family that had lived for several generations as the only African American citizens of the resort community of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. The descendant of a runaway Virginian slave, Petry admitted to never having believed herself to be a true New Englander; her cultural legacy was not that of the typical Yankee, and as a small child she came to know the isolating effects of racism after being stoned by white children on her first day of school. Nevertheless, her family distinguished itself within the community and boasted numerous professionals: Her grandfather was a licensed chemist; her father, aunt, and uncle became pharmacists; and her mother worked as a chiropodist. In 1902 Peter Lane opened a pharmacy in Old Saybrook, for which Ann herself trained. Inspired by the example of her many independent female relatives—women who had, she explained, “abandoned the role of housewife in the early twentieth century”—in 1931 Ann secured a degree in pharmacology from the University of Connecticut, the only black graduate in her class. She worked in family-owned pharmacies until 1938, when she met and married Louisiana-born George D. Petry and moved with him to his home in Harlem. Petry had begun writing fiction seriously in high school after an antagonistic teacher grudgingly praised her work as having real potential, and she wrote steadily

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thereafter (although to no immediate success). With the move to New York City, her writing career began in earnest. She quickly secured jobs with various Harlem newspapers as a reporter, editor, and copywriter, working for the Amsterdam News and The People’s Voice (the latter a weekly begun by African American clergyman and politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.). She also briefly acted in the American Negro Theatre and worked on a study conducted by the New York Foundation investigating the effects of segregation on black children. Participation in a creative writing seminar at Columbia University greatly influenced Petry during this time. Her first published short story, “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon,” appeared in a 1943 issue of The Crisis (a magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and not only earned her twenty dollars but also led to her discovery by an editor at Houghton Mifflin. He encouraged her to submit preliminary work on what would become The Street, for which Petry received the 1945 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and a stipend of twenty-five hundred dollars. Thus she was able to complete her novel, translating nearly a decade spent observing the difficulties of aspiring African Americans in the urban North into the powerful story of single mother Lutie Johnson and her starcrossed eight-year-old, Bub. Although her trenchant insights into the play of race and class as conjoined factors stifling Lutie’s dreams recall Richard Wright’s landmark Native Son (1940), Petry’s recognition of the role of gender in the discriminatory equation made The Street a groundbreaking work on its own and another expression of the woman-centered ethic she had learned from her family. Published in 1946, The Street received both critical and popular acclaim and sold 1.5 million copies—at the time the largest audience ever reached by an African American woman. The fame accompanying that success overwhelmed Petry, however, and in 1948 she and George returned to the obscurity of Old Saybrook, where they bought the twohundred-year-old house of an old sea captain and reared their daughter, Elizabeth Ann. Petry’s subsequent fiction did not receive the same kind of praise accorded her first novel, despite her continued willingness to tackle difficult racial themes (The Narrows, 1953) and explore the terrain of small-town white America from its own assumed vantage point, a project seldom undertaken by black writers even today (Country Place, 1947). In 1971 she issued a collection of her short fiction, Miss Muriel, and Other Stories. She also contributed stories and essays to numerous magazines and journals. Perhaps in response to the indifference accorded her adult fiction, she began writing for children during the time she was raising Elizabeth and produced such classics as The Drugstore Cat, Harriet Tubman, and Tituba of Salem Village. The latter two novels, about actual historical personages, reflect her determination to place art in the service of an honest picture of American racial history; they have become young adult classics and are perhaps more widely read than the adult fiction on which her initial reputation was built. Petry spent the second half of her life away from the hurly-burly of publishing centers and for the most part outside the rarefied walls of the university; David Streitfeld of The Washington Post said that she “had little tolerance for fools or academics, two categories she regarded as essentially synonymous.” She did hold a visiting professorship at the University of Hawaii in 1974-1975 and in 1977 received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Boston’s Suffolk University awarded her a D.Litt. degree in 1983. She had the satisfaction of seeing her daughter continue the legacy of strong female achievement by becoming an attorney.

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Petry died at the age of eighty-eight in a convalescent home in the same community where she was born, still married to the man who had briefly taken her out of New England and made possible the launching of her lifelong career. Analysis • Although Ann Petry’s fiction typically involves African Americans struggling against the crippling impact of racism, her overarching theme involves a more broadly defined notion of prejudice that targets class and gender as well as race. Thus her aims are consistently broader than racial critique, since she regularly exposes the consequences of America’s hierarchical social systems and its capitalistic materialism. That vision explains what might otherwise seem to be inconsistencies of direction in Petry’s career: her decision, for example, following the potent racial protest of The Street to focus her next novel, Country Place, on a white community’s postwar crises of adjustment or her movement into the realm of children’s literature. Like her contemporaries, black and white alike, who came of age in the 1930’s, she adopted a social realist aesthetic committed to documenting the obstacles to human fulfillment imposed on those at the margins of American prosperity. As she explained, I find it difficult to subscribe to the idea that art exists for art’s sake. It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda . . . [and fiction], like all other forms of art, will always reflect the political, economic, and social structure of the period in which it was created. Her work also reveals an increasingly overt Christian existentialist vision celebrating the individual’s potential for spiritual liberation, through which an entire culture might come to relinquish its crippling prejudices. Rather than celebrating the American ideal of self-making with which her native New England is so closely associated, Petry exposes the illusions it has fostered and depicts their graphic costs to those relegated to the periphery of American possibility. Racism invites Petry’s most scathing attacks, not only for the material hardship it forces upon people of color but also for the psychological and cultural distortions it produces. At her most biting, Petry lampoons the absurdist systems of human classification into which racist societies ultimately fall. Generally, her perspective is a tragic one, however, grounded in the recognition that confronting racism necessitates confronting history itself. One of Petry’s most insistent indictments of America’s hypocrisy targets the class distinctions that parallel and overlap racism as forces negating individual hope for a better life, a more just world. Repeatedly she shows how Americans in quest of the material security, comfort, and status that propel middle-class striving acquiesce to soul-numbing labor and retreat into a moral inflexibility that blindly sanctions aggressive self-interest. In Petry’s fiction the culture’s high-flown rhetoric is belied by rigid social hierarchies that produce venal, grasping have-nots at the bottom, whose ambitions mimic the ruthless acquisitiveness of those at the top. Petry’s most important characters are those who reject the fallacy of the self-made individual existing independently of the world or the continuing legacy of the past. Though that perspective assumes certain mechanistic dimensions in her work, she does not concede full authority to deterministic necessity; the dice may be loaded against her protagonists, but the game is not inexorably mandated to play itself out to any single predetermined end. Her characters sometimes prove capable of personal growth that moves them toward a common humanity with the potential to fuel real and far-reaching change in the social order itself. Petry’s narratives of personal trans-

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formation often grow from characters’ chance movements across rigid cultural boundaries; the resulting crises test the spiritual flexibility of many others besides her protagonists. Overlooked by academic critics, Petry’s children’s books offer tantalizing clues to her larger agenda. Their emphasis upon personal fearlessness in rethinking entrenched assumptions and disengaging from unjust systems invites comparison with numerous figures from her adult fiction. Moreover, in applying their new insights, these characters undertake subtly revolutionary actions that defy the cultural boundaries that had previously defined their lives. It takes a saint, perhaps, to challenge a predatory universe with an alternative vision of love, but having told children in Legends of the Saints that true sanctity is a function of bravery, Petry seems to evaluate her other fictional characters on their receptivity to grace as an antidote to hate. Miss Muriel, and Other Stories • Although Petry’s reputation rests primarily on her novels, she saw herself quite differently at the start of her career: I set out to be a writer of short stories and somehow ended up as a novelist—possibly because there simply wasn’t room enough within the framework of the short story to do the sort of thing I wanted to do. Yet the pieces in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories, written over the course of several decades, provide a compact and provocative introduction to her imaginative concerns, chief among them her sensitivity to racism’s psychological as well as material consequences. “Like a Winding Sheet” • In the prizewinning story “Like a Winding Sheet,” she depicts the physical and mental toll exacted by the nature of work in an industrial society where laborers are treated as interchangeable machines. The story dramatizes how the corrosive humiliations of prejudice, when added to work stresses, can trigger blind and catastrophic violence. A husband’s inability to challenge the string of racist assaults on his dignity delivered both during and after his exhausting night shift at a World War II defense plant not only makes him incapable of imagining benign white behavior (even in the face of apologies) but also causes him to respond to his wife’s affectionate teasing with the beating he is forbidden to direct at his real oppressors. Although racism provides the context for his rage, however (her unwitting use of the word “nigger” echoing the hostile epithet regularly used against him by the outside world), his reaction exposes the starkness of the struggle between male and female in Petry’s world and the sobering betrayals it can provoke. The title image begins as the bedsheet in which he has tossed and turned all day in a futile effort to sleep, but his wife jokingly casts it as a burial linen—a reference ironically appropriate to his sense of himself as the walking dead. By story’s end that reference has assumed sinister dimensions as he feels trapped by the violence he is committing but cannot control, “and he thought it was like being enmeshed in a winding sheet.” “In Darkness and Confusion” • “In Darkness and Confusion” fictionalizes the Harlem Riot of 1943, an event sparked by the wounding of a black soldier whose uniform provided scant protection on his own home front. The story’s protagonist, William Jones, a drugstore porter who, despite endless humiliations, has worked hard all his life to secure a better world for his son Sam, suddenly loses that son to the wartime draft and the dangers of a Jim Crow world at the southern training camp to which he

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is sent. When Sam, who once aspired to college and his share of the American Dream, protests an order to move to the back of the bus and then shoots the aggressive military police officer who gave it, he is court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. As Jones broods over this news in a Harlem bar, he watches as another uniformed black G.I., this one standing in the supposedly more egalitarian North, tries to help a black woman being beaten by a white policeman, punches the lawman, runs, and is summarily gunned down. Jones erupts into a violence ignited by grief and rage and becomes the leader of a mob. When his churchgoing wife learns of their son’s fate, she too turns to retributive action with an explosive passion that kills her: Her religion proves unable to provide her with the strength to resume her burden and go on with her life. Nor is the mob’s looting of local merchants legitimized, for it is produced by the intoxicating siren song of white capitalist materialism, with which the culture regularly deflects attention from matters of real social justice. The riot leaves Jones more completely bereft than he had been before, for it literally costs him his heart and soul, even as it finally allows him to understand the anomie of his disaffected teenage niece, who has baldly scorned his lifetime of exhausting effort for the whites, who in the end allow them “only the nigger end of things.” “The New Mirror” • Petry as skillfully evokes the impact of racism on the black bourgeoisie as she does on the proletariat, and in several tales she demonstrates how a lifetime of belittlement and intimidation can erode one’s ability to act ethically in the world. In “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror,” Petry creates a black family much like her own—the Layens are professionals who own the pharmacy in a small New England town. The adolescent girl who narrates these tales speaks of “the training in issues of race” she has received over the years, not only through the casual bigotries she has witnessed but also through the painful self-consciousness of respectable people like her parents, whose behavior is a continual exercise in refuting cultural stereotypes while carefully preserving proudly held racial loyalties. In “The New Mirror” the ironies are more overt, cleaner. Mr. Layen’s decision to take a day off to outfit himself with a new pair of false teeth leads his unknowing wife to an excruciating encounter with police, from whom she withholds her fear that the absent Layen may have become another black man who deserts his family as a delayed response to a lifetime of indignities within the white patriarchal social order. Layen’s surprising secrecy leads his daughter to realize that even securing a new set of teeth subjects a black male to humiliation, in this case taking the form of the grinning Sambos and toothless Uncle Toms he fears his dental problems will call to mind. The child learns to use the codes by which the black middle class shields itself from white contempt— just as she shoulders her own share of the burden of always acting with an eye on the reputation of “the Race”: She thus learns why “all of us people with this dark skin must help hold the black island inviolate.” “Miss Muriel” • The title story of the volume, “Miss Muriel,” operates more subtly in its exploration of the racist preoccupations inculcated within and often unwillingly relinquished by its victims. The title itself refers to a white racist joke the young narrator innocently relates to one of Aunt Sophronia’s black suitors—a joke in which an African American trying to buy a Muriel cigar is upbraided for not showing the proper respect for white womanhood by asking instead for a “Miss” Muriel. The child is bluntly chastised for voicing such “nigger” put-downs in one of the many moments

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of confusion she suffers over the inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary management of prejudices operating among the adults around her: her aunt’s unpopular courtship by Bemish, a white member of their upstate New York community; the equal dismay with which Mr. Layen regards Sophronia’s other suitor, the “tramp piano player” Chink, who evokes the “low” culture of the black masses, from which the bourgeois Layen has distanced himself as part of his accommodation to a scornful white world; the contempt quietly directed against the homosexual partner of her cherished Uncle Johno; the colorist hierarchies of all the African Americans she knows (even when the lightest skinned among them eschew the opportunity to “pass”). At the end of the story, when the black men in her circle have effectively driven Bemish out of town for his persistent wooing of Sophronia, the narrator brokenheartedly confronts their hypocrisy, yelling, “You both stink. You stink like dead bats. You and your goddamn Miss Muriel.” Internalizing such divisiveness as they have just enforced directly clashes with the other set of values she has been taught, and the two are starkly juxtaposed early in the story when the child muses: If my objections to Mr. Bemish are because he’s white . . . then I have been ‘trained’ on the subject of race just as I have been trained to be a Christian. . . . It is one of the paradoxes of bigotry that its victims may become its emissaries, at the price of their most cherished beliefs. “The Witness” • Petry revisits this theme in a number of ways throughout the collection. Against the most aggressive forms of white hatred directed at her characters, there is no defense except a temporary abandonment of one’s human dignity. “The Witness” presents the case of a retired black college professor who takes a high school teaching position in a northern white community. Called upon to assist the local pastor in counseling delinquent adolescents, he finds himself their prey as they kidnap him and force him to watch their sexual abuse of a young white woman. Having at one point coerced him to place his hand on the girl, they effectively blackmail him into complicit silence about their crime, for he is paralyzed by the specter of being publicly accused of the ultimate racial taboo. His exemplary life and professional stature cannot protect him from such sordid insinuations, and he bitterly describes himself in his moral impotence as “another poor scared black bastard who was a witness.” “The Necessary Knocking on the Door” • In “The Necessary Knocking on the Door” a similar loss of agency is made bitingly ironic by the context in which Alice Knight’s dilemma unfolds: A participant at a conference about the role of Christianity in the modern world, she finds herself unable to master her dislike for a white woman dying in the hotel room across the hall from hers—a woman who had earlier in the day refused to be seated next to a “nigger” and had thus awakened in Alice the bitterness that a lifetime of such indignities has nurtured. Her hardened heart is jolted the next day by news of the woman’s death during the night—and her own guilty knowledge that she alone had heard the woman’s distress but had let the hated epithet reduce her to that “animal,” “outcast,” “obscene” state it implies—not because it had been leveled at her but because she had let it rob her of her Christian commitment to do good to those who harm her. Even her own dreams indict Alice: “The octopus moonlight” pitilessly asserts, “Yours is the greater crime. A crime. A very great crime. It was a crime. And we were the witnesses.” Like other African Amer-

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ican writers before and since, Petry warns that prejudice delivers its most sinister harm when it saps its victims’ capacity for decency and compassion and enlists them in the service of a gospel of irreparable division. In these stories Petry vividly captures the spiritual anguish of discovering that one’s own grievances can weaken rather than deepen one’s moral courage. “The Bones of Louella Brown” • Petry’s handling of white perspectives on racism is more unyielding. The absurdities into which segregationist practices lead multiracial societies (including the pseudosciences hunting frantically for physical evidence of racial “difference”) are lampooned in “The Bones of Louella Brown.” The most prestigious family in Massachusetts, the Bedfords, find their plans to build a chapel for its deceased members compromised when an undertaker’s assistant confuses the bones of an African American maid with the sole noblewoman in their clan and, because of the “shocking” similarities of hair, teeth, height, and bone mass between the two skeletons, cannot differentiate the two. That alone is newsworthy enough to attract a Boston reporter sniffing for scandal, but the story gets juicier when it becomes clear there is every likelihood that the segregation that has been a hallmark of the cemetery in question will be permanently breached once it can no longer guarantee that “black” bones will not commingle in the same park with “white” bones. After Mrs. Brown makes a series of ghostly visitations to principals in the story, they decide to acknowledge the truth with an epitaph explaining that either woman (or both) may lie in the crypt, along with the admission of their common humanity: “They both wore the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.” Here too Petry moves her reader beyond social contexts and into metaphysical ones by reminding readers that this story of dry bones (an unmistakable homage to a favorite trope of black oral tradition) is also a meditation on mortality itself, which exposes such preoccupation with earthly pecking orders for the consummate folly it is. “The Migraine Workers” • “The Migraine Workers” offers another example of white protagonists brought up short in the knowledge of their moral blindness in following the unquestioned attitudes of a lifetime. Pedro Gonzalez, proud owner of a successful truck stop, suddenly finds himself staring into a trailer full of migrant laborers exuding a human misery more palpable than anything he has ever encountered. Outraged by the black driver, who blithely explains how he usually hides such scenes from public scrutiny, Pedro feeds the people with the surplus food left on his premises by other haulers. When he later discovers that an elderly man from the crew has hidden himself in the area and is living off what he can scavenge from the truckstop, his first impulse is to have the man removed by the police. It is only when his longtime assistant challenges his callousness and points to the resources they could easily spare for the man’s upkeep that Pedro realizes how his own fleshy body indicts him of complicity in a system of polarized haves and have-nots: migraine-producing epiphanies indeed in the land of equal opportunity. “Mother Africa” • Other stories in the collection evoke the mysterious private centers of grief hidden in the human heart: “Olaf and His Girl Friend” and “Solo on the Drums” show Petry’s interest in African American music as an exquisite, untranslatable evocation of that pain. “Mother Africa” introduces Emanuel Turner, another of Petry’s junk men, whose business indicts the acquisitive mandate of American con-

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sumer culture. Years earlier, the loss of his wife and baby in childbirth had robbed him of any further desire for self-improvement; as a junk dealer he is free from anxious adherence to other people’s standards of worth or accomplishment, and because he is his own man, he is a welcome figure to those around him. All that changes when a friend blesses him with the huge sculpture of a female nude being discarded by a wealthy white woman. The statue seduces Turner back into a realm of selfconscious striving as he tries to live up to its grandeur; in the process he loses his liberty and the easy rapport he has had with his neighbors. Convinced that she is a mythic evocation of Africa itself, he resents the prudish efforts of others to clothe her as missionaries had once done to his ancestors. Thus he is stunned to learn that this dark madonna is not a black woman at all but a white woman—the oxidized metal had misled him. By parodying the assumed black male obsession with white women in this way, Petry implies that the real hunger at work is for authentic enunciation of the African American experience, a hunger left unsatisfied when Turner hurriedly rushes to sell the piece for scrap. In succumbing to the desire to make a world fit for his queenly companion, Turner submits himself for the first time in twenty-five years to the pressures of conformity and material acquisition. Is it love which so compromises him?— or are the statue’s racial associations Petry’s warnings against the lure of cultural standards derived from the spiritually bankrupt spheres of white consumer capitalism? Taken together, the stories in this collection offer tantalizing variations upon Petry’s most insistent themes. Barbara Kitt Seidman Other major works children’s literature: The Drugstore Cat, 1949; Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, 1955; Tituba of Salem Village, 1964; Legends of the Saints, 1970. novels: The Street, 1946; Country Place, 1947; The Narrows, 1953. Bibliography Bell, Bernard. “Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Argues that Petry should be moved out of the shadow of male contemporaries such as Richard Wright to permit her fiction the proper reevaluation it deserves. Clark, Keith. “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion.” African-American Review 26 (Fall, 1992): 495-505. A study of Petry’s interest in the ways black women respond to the American Dream while subverting it to their own ends. Ervin, Hazel Arnett, and Hilary Holladay, eds. Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Collection of essays addressing Petry’s less studied short stories, including issues of gender, race, and folklore. Gross, Theodore. “Ann Petry: The Novelist as Social Critic.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980. Discussion of Petry’s strong commitment to an aesthetic of social realism that puts art in the service of political, economic, and societal transformation and justice.

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Hernton, Calvin. “The Significance of Ann Petry.” In The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Analysis of the relationship between Petry’s fiction and that of contemporary black women writers, particularly in its wedding of social protest and violence. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Petry: “In Darkness and Confusion” and “Like a Winding Sheet” (vol. 4), “Solo on the Drums” (vol. 7), and “The Witness” (vol. 8). Washington, Gladys. “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry’s Short Fiction.” College Language Association Journal 30 (September, 1986): 14-29. A critical argument for tracing Petry’s important themes and their evolving nuances through her understudied short stories. Wilson, Mark. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry—The New England Connection.” MELUS 15 (Summer, 1988): 71-84. A discussion with Petry about her early life and the first decades of her writing career.

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Luigi Pirandello Pirandello, Luigi

Born: Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, Italy; June 28, 1867 Died: Rome, Italy; December 10, 1936 Principal short fiction • Amori senza amore, 1894; Beffe della morte e della vita, 19021903 (2 volumes); Quando’ero matto . . . , 1902; Bianche e nere, 1904; Erma bifronte, 1906; La vita nuda, 1910; Terzetti, 1912; Le due maschere, 1914; Erba del nostro orto, 1915; La trappola, 1915; E domani, lunedì, 1917; Un cavallo nella luna, 1918; Berecche e la guerra, 1919; Il carnevale dei morti, 1919; A Horse in the Moon and Twelve Short Stories, 1932; Better Think Twice About It! and Twelve Other Stories, 1933; The Naked Truth and Eleven Other Stories, 1934; Four Tales, 1939; The Medals, and Other Stories, 1939; Short Stories, 1959; Selected Stories, 1964; Short Stories, 1964; The Merry-Go-Round of Love and Selected Stories, 1964. Other literary forms • In addition to publishing 233 short stories, Luigi Pirandello produced several volumes of poetry, seven novels, and forty-four plays. Through his many essays, Pirandello established himself as an influential literary philosopher, commentator, and critic. Achievements • In 1934, Luigi Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his lifetime achievement in all the major literary genres. Pirandello was the preeminent figure in the European revolt against the pretentiousness and sentimentality of nineteenth century Romantic literature. With compassion for the reality of human misery, he labored through more than fifty years of creative activity to present one central thesis: the bittersweet comedy of life in which sorrow and joy are inextricably commingled, the absurd contradictoriness of the human condition. He appealed to generations disillusioned by the failure of numerous revolutions designed to bring harmony within countries terrorized by the chaos of a truly world war and confounded by their own inability to establish harmony even in their personal relationships with those they loved. His tragicomic view that the paradox of human reality could be resolved only in black laughter was masterfully presented in his seminal essay L’umorismo (1908, revised 1920; partial translation On Humour, 1966, complete translation, 1974), a view that caught the attention of the literary world and gave rise to the literary movements that coalesced by midtwentieth century as absurdism and existentialism. Pirandello is recognized as a key figure in the modern exploration of the crisis of the interior life. Biography • Born June 28, 1867, to wealthy parents in a small village on the island of Sicily, Luigi Pirandello was brought up with the expectation that he would work in the family sulfur-mining business. From an early age, however, he showed little interest or talent in business matters. Instead, he began writing poetry and short stories and, in 1886, persuaded his father to allow him to pursue a classical education at the University of Palermo. In 1887, he went on to the University of Rome, transferring from there to the University of Bonn, Germany, where he completed his doctorate in 1891 with a dissertation in philology: a rhetorical study of the dialect of his native Sicilian area.

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At the age of twenty-seven, he entered an arranged marriage with the daughter of his father’s business partner and settled in a career as a novelist and short-story writer, while teaching at a girls’ academy in order to support his growing family of three children. In 1903, the emotional trauma of the failure of the family’s sulfur business so affected Pirandello’s wife that she became mentally unstable. For more than a dozen years, she plagued him with paranoiac jealousy, spying on his movements and raging about his every relationship both within and without the home. Pirandello devoted himself at great sacrifice to caring for her personally until, in 1919, he finally conceded to placing her in a nursing institution, where she remained until 1959. During these same troubled years, Europe was enmeshed in the internecine destructiveness of World War I. Pirandello was torn between his dual allegiance to Germany as the land where he had so enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of his graduate studies, and his love for his homeland of Italy, which entered the war in support of France and England. His writings during the years 1903 to 1920 reflect the turmoil of his circumstances and establish his basal premise of the inability of persons to find truth and peace in an existence driven by appearances. Repeatedly, he delineated the hopelessness of his characters’ willing assumption of roles to be played—of masks to be worn and so cherished that they cease to be masks at all and become the very reality of the person within. Pirandello achieved international recognition primarily for his plays, a genre to which he turned most seriously after 1915, when a few of his earliest plays were first performed. He founded a theater company in Rome in 1925 and managed there a sort of national theater until its financial collapse in 1928. After this, he traveled and worked extensively in Europe and the United States, writing and producing drama and even spending some time in Hollywood studying cinematic form. In December, 1936, he died in Rome and was cremated, following the austere and simple service that he had requested. The world community mourned the loss of a truly great poet, painter, novelist, critical essayist, short-story writer, and dramatist. Analysis • Luigi Pirandello’s earliest short stories are tales of the insular environment of his native Sicily. Originally written in Sicilian dialect and later translated into Italian, they deal in naturalistic style with the traditions and customs of the peasant peoples. He admired the writings of the Italian Verists (realists) but moved beyond them in his view that reality is individual and psychologically determined. External realism was for Pirandello insufficient for the expression of internal states. He strove to transform naturalistic determinism into a broad philosophical commentary on the inner meaning of the human person, proclaiming that a single reality does not exist. All is illusion, experience is ambiguous, and each person lives behind a selfconstructed mask, concealing one’s essential nature and adapting to the environment for the protection of the fragile ego within. As his world experience grew, his stories, too, grew to be blends of philosophy and human emotion, brave attempts to express the inexpressible dilemma of humankind’s inability to communicate honestly in a world of false appearances and deceitful words. Pirandello’s characters are victims of insecurity and self-doubt, combined with a great capacity for love. They live their lives as in a mirror, reaching always from behind a mask of reality for elusive and illusionary happiness. His characters move out from a core of circumstantial suffering, attempting to discover meaning and truth in the very suffering itself and discovering instead the perverse comedy of decep-

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tion upon deception—of mask upon mask. Only through ironic laughter could humankind endure such contradiction. Humor, for Pirandello, is an amalgam of laughter and tears, a coming together of the power to mock with the power to sympathize. He treats his characters with pity rather than derision for their follies and with compassion for their inescapable miseries. Pirandello’s stories appeal to the intellect searching for answers to the puzzling contradictions of life. They contain frequent asides, some long disquisitions, and occasional intellectual debates with the self. Characters seem at times to be delivering speeches for the author rather than revealing themselves through action. The narrative line seems fragmented and convoluted, with the reader’s interest not drawn steadily along with the unfolding plot but instead concentrated on particular discrete moments of paradox and inversion of © The Nobel Foundation fortune. All of this comes to the non-Italian reader in translations that may seem tedious because of the double problem of language and cultural differences. Since he was chiefly known as a dramatist, Pirandello’s stories have been overlooked, many never translated, and often even these few translations are questionable renderings of his thought rather than of his rhetoric. Nevertheless, those few tales that are available will give the thoughtful reader a sampling of the philosophy and view of life of a writer whose works provide a bridge from nineteenth century Romanticism, on through realism, to twentieth century relativism. “Sunlight and Shadow” • Among Pirandello’s earliest short stories is “Sole e ombra” (“Sunlight and Shadow”), a tale of the suicide of an elderly gentleman, Ciunna, who has stolen money from the company for which he works in order to help his povertystricken son and his young family. On the day after the theft, Ciunna plans to journey to the nearby coastal town where he will throw himself into the sea, thereby escaping judgment and guaranteeing that his son may keep the stolen money. Here, Pirandello uses the unusual technique of extended “dialogue soliloquies.” Ciunna walks about the street of his village on the night of the theft, carrying on vocalized conversations with the inspector who will discover his crime the following day. He speaks also with his son, telling of his great happiness in being able to sacrifice his life for the boy. He chats also with the chemist from whom he has received a few crystals of arsenic in preparation for his suicide.

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For two weeks, Ciunna has been going about the streets muttering to himself as he formed his plan, but no one has bothered to ask what is disturbing him. He feels himself an outsider among his friends, a man alienated from others and even from himself. This sense of total alienation from life is a repeated theme in Pirandello’s stories and plays, and the response of suicide—or at least the contemplation of it as a possibility for escaping life’s harsh realities—is the basis of some two dozen of his betterknown tales. On the morning after the theft, Ciunna sets out by horse and carriage on his journey to the sea. As he goes through the countryside, he continues his “dialogue,” greeting in a whisper the peasants he sees laboring long hours for a few coins, inviting them to join him on his journey. He calls out within himself “Let’s be merry! Let’s all go and throw ourselves into the sea! . . . Life’s a beautiful thing and we shouldn’t trouble it with the sight of us.” The motif of life as a ridiculous journey of futility lived among strangers with whom one cannot communicate is a further common element of Pirandellian stories. Ciunna’s plan for death in the sea is foiled when he meets a young friend at the coast who spends the whole day with him. That evening, as he is returning to his village in the same carriage, he swallows the arsenic crystals and dies, alone and in agony, unnoticed even by the driver who is singing overhead. “Adrianna Takes a Trip” • A suicide tale of a different sort is “La viaggio” (“Adrianna Takes a Trip”). Adrianna, a widow of thirteen years, lives simply with her two teenage sons in the home of her brother-in-law Cesare. It is the custom in this Sicilian mountain village that mourning for a husband is perpetual, that all widows live in seclusion and in submisiveness to some male of her own or her deceased husband’s family. It was Adrianna’s accepted role to live this life of repression, this pinched and narrow existence in a barren, parched land, and it was a role that she carried well. Adrianna’s marriage to her husband had been an arranged, loveless affair. He had married her to spite his older brother, who truly loved her as she had come to love him in return through the years of her widowhood. Though neither, by custom, could express their true feelings in any way, each came to understand and accommodate the masks imposed upon them by circumstances and by village expectations. In time, Adrianna begins to experience some pain in her shoulder and chest. Local doctors advise Cesare to take her to Palermo for diagnosis. She resists the idea of such a journey, fearful of venturing beyond the village after thirty-five years of confinement there. The trip is arranged, however, and she must go despite her terror both at the newness of the experience and at the prospect of being alone with Cesare beyond the village for the first time. After the diagnosis of a fatal tumor and the procurement of a potentially lethal medicine for her pain, Cesare prevails on Adrianna to continue their trip to the mainland for a short holiday, as is his annual custom. They journey on to Naples, Rome, and finally Venice, each city another revelation to her of the fullness of life, which can never be hers. In the course of their journey, they are at last able to express and consummate their deep love for each other. Adrianna knows, however, that they can never return to Sicily as man and wife—an action considered sacrilegious there. After a day of surrender to perfect joy together in Venice, she sends Cesare on an errand and drinks the whole of her medicine in one draft, choosing an immediate death of the body over a return to Sicily and a lingering death of the heart.

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This tale shows clearly Pirandello’s insight concerning women such as Adrianna, the falseness of the life that they were forced to lead, the masks that they were required to wear to hide their true selves, the masks that in turn they forced upon those around them. Adrianna and Cesare were victims of what Pirandello frequently referred to as the “reciprocity of illusion,” the mutual life-lie that each human being must assume in order to survive within the black comedy of a world filled with deception and false expectations. “Signora Frola and Her Son-in-Law, Signor Ponza” • Adrianna’s refusal to continue the mutual deception required by her life circumstances stands in sharp contrast to the positions of the protagonists of “La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero” (“Signora Frola and Her Son-in-Law, Signor Ponza”). One of Pirandello’s most popular and typical tales, it is a highly compressed comic presentation of multiple planes of illusion and reality, a trenchant satire on pious busybodies and their rationalization of gross curiosity. More than that, however, it is his clearest statement of the ironic comedy of humankind’s search for the one truth among the many truths that make up the reality of interrelationships and of the compassionate necessity of supporting one another’s mutual deceits. The plot is both simple and complex: A husband, wife, and mother-in-law have come to a small town where their background is unknown. Local gossips are eager to solve the mystery of their past and to discover why the two women are maintained in separate households by the husband, Signor Ponza, and why he visits his motherin-law daily but apparently does not allow her to visit with her daughter except through shouted conversations from courtyard to a third-floor window and through occasional letters. First the husband and then the mother-in-law explain their unusual arrangement, each stating that the other is mad and under a delusion concerning the true identity of the wife: Signor Ponza declares her to be his second wife, taken after the death of Signora Frola’s daughter, who had been his first wife, a death that her mother has never accepted and has convinced herself never happened; Signora Frola maintains that the woman is her own daughter and Ponza’s only wife, though married to him in a second ceremony after a serious illness of a year’s duration during which time he convinced himself that she was dead. Strangely, each of these two is aware of the other’s version of the truth, and not only aware of it but also at pains to help maintain the other’s belief in order to preserve their carefully constructed arrangement for living with their mutual tragedy. To believe either of the stories would provide an adequate explanation of the mysterious relationship among the three. To have two apparently “real” explanations, however, is not acceptable to the townspeople, who are bent on discovering “the truth”—even though both the husband and the mother-in-law beseech them to drop their investigation, as further probing can only cause deeper suffering for the little family. Here, Pirandello illustrates the immutable failure of the desire for truth in a world where individuals know so little of themselves that they can never hope to know the full reality of others. He would have his reader accept the construziones, the masks that members of the family have created as a protection from the encroachment of a third reality too terrible to realize. This tale is a Pirandellian conundrum in which nothing is as it seems. Perceptions are not reality; apparent reality may be no more than perceptions. Here, as in all of his works, Pirandello holds that life itself strives to give the perfect illusion of reality. People are all make-believe. Their pretense is their

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reality, and that is the horror. Through such depiction of ordinary characters enmeshed in the chance circumstances of life and sharing compassionate, redeeming love, Pirandello accomplishes in his short fiction universal statements of lasting human value. Gabrielle Rowe Other major works plays: La morsa, pb. 1898 (as L’epilogo, pr. 1910; The Vise, 1928); Scamandro, pb. 1909, pr. 1928; Lumìe di Sicilia, pr. 1910, pb. 1911 (Sicilian Limes, 1921); Il dovere del medico, pb. 1912, pr. 1913 (The Doctor’s Duty, 1928); Se non così . . ., pr. 1915, pb. 1916; All’uscita, pr. 1916, pb. 1922 (At the Gate, 1928); Liolà, pr. 1916, pb. 1917 (English translation, 1952); Pensaci, Giacomino!, pr. 1916, pb. 1917; Così è (se vi pare), pr. 1917, pb. 1918 (Right You Are [If You Think So], 1922); Il berretto a sonagli, pr. 1917, pb. 1920 (Cap and Bells, 1957); Il piacere dell’onestà, pr. 1917, pb. 1918 (The Pleasure of Honesty, 1923); La giara, pr. 1917, pb. 1925 (The Jar, 1928); Il giuoco delle parti, pr. 1918, pb. 1919 (The Rules of the Game, 1959); La patente, pb. 1918, pr. 1919 (The License, 1964); Ma non è una cosa seria, pr. 1918, pb. 1919; L’innesto, pr. 1919, pb. 1921; L’uomo, la bestia, e la virtùgrave;, pr., pb. 1919 (Man, Beast, and Virtue, 1989); Come prima, meglio di prima, pr. 1920, pb. 1921; La Signora Morli, una e due, pr. 1920, pb. 1922; Tutto per bene, pr., pb. 1920 (All for the Best, 1960); Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, pr., pb. 1921 (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922); Enrico IV, pr., pb. 1922 (Henry IV, 1923); L’imbecille, pr. 1922, pb. 1926 (The Imbecile, 1928); Vestire gli ignudi, pr. 1922, pb. 1923 (Naked, 1924); L’altro figlio, pr. 1923, pb. 1925 (The House with the Column, 1928); L’uomo dal fiore in bocca, pr. 1923, pb. 1926 (The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, 1928); La vita che ti diedi, pr. 1923, pb. 1924 (The Life I Gave You, 1959); Ciascuno a suo modo, pr., pb. 1924 (Each in His Own Way, 1923); Sagra del Signore della nave, pb. 1924, pr. 1925 (Our Lord of the Ship, 1928); Diana e la Tuda, pr. 1926 (in Switzerland), pr., pb. 1927 (Diana and Tudo, 1950); Bellavita, pr. 1927, pb. 1928 (English translation, 1964); L’amica della mogli, pr., pb. 1927 (The Wives’ Friend, 1949); La nuova colonia, pr., pb. 1928 (The New Colony, 1958); The One-Act Plays of Luigi Pirandello, pb. 1928; Lazzaro, pr., pb. 1929 (Lazarus, 1952); O di uno o di nessuno, pr., pb. 1929; Sogno (ma forse no), pb. 1929, pr. 1936 (I’m Dreaming, but Am I?, 1964); Come tu mi vuoi, pr., pb. 1930 (As You Desire Me, 1931); Questa sera si recita a soggetto, pr., pb. 1930 (Tonight We Improvise, 1932); I giganti della montagna, act 1 pb. 1931, act 2 pb. 1934, act 3 pr. 1937 (The Mountain Giants, 1958); Trovarsi, pr., pb. 1932 (To Find Oneself, 1943); Quando si è qualcuno, pr. 1933 (When Someone Is Somebody, 1958); La favola del figlio cambiato, pr., pb. 1934; Non si sa come, pr. 1934, pb. 1935 (No One Knows How, 1960); Naked Masks: Five Plays, pb. 1952. novels: L’esclusa, 1901 (The Outcast, 1925); Il turno, 1902 (The Merry-Go-Round of Love, 1964); Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904 (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1923); Suo marito, 1911, revised 1941 (Her Husband, 2000); I vecchi e i giovani, 1913 (The Old and the Young, 1928); Si gira . . ., 1916 (Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1926); Uno, nessuno, centomila, 1925 (One, None and a Hundred Thousand, 1933); Tutti i romanzi, 1941 (collected novels). miscellaneous: Opere, 1966. nonfiction: Arte e scienze, 1908; L’umorismo, 1908, revised 1920 (partial translation On Humour, 1966; complete translation, 1974); Saggi, 1939.

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poetry: Mal giocondo, 1889; Pasqua di Gea, 1891; Pier Gudrò, 1894; Elegie renane, 1895; Elegie romane, 1896 (translation of Johann von Goethe’s Römische Elegien); Scamandro, 1909 (dramatic poem); Fuori de chiave, 1912; Saggi, 1939. Bibliography Alessio, A., D. Pietropaolo, and G. Sanguinetti-Katz, eds. Pirandello and the Modern Theatre. Ottawa, Ont.: Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 1992. Selection from the proceedings of the International Conference on Pirandello and the Modern Theatre, held in Toronto in November, 1990. Includes bibliography. Bassanese, Fiora A. “Luigi Pirandello.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Pirandello’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction. ____________. Understanding Luigi Pirandello. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Introduction to Pirandello’s work, focusing largely on his thought and the relationship of his life to his work. Biasin, Gian-Paolo, and Manuela Gieri, eds. Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. This collection of essays provides modern perspectives on the work of Pirandello, including his quest for truth, his use of theater-within-the-theater, and use of characters and actors on the stage. Caesar, Ann. Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1998. Good study focusing on Pirandello’s characters. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Dashwood, Julie, ed. Luigi Pirandello: The Theater of Paradox. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. This volume examines the works of Pirandello, particularly his creation of paradoxical scenes in his drama. Includes bibliography and index. DiGaetani, John Louis, ed. A Companion to Pirandello Studies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Comprehensive volume, twenty-seven essays on Pirandello’s biography and work, with an excellent introduction and several appendices, including production histories and an extensive bibliography. Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Wm. Laird. “War.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 8. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “War” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. O’Grady, Deidre. Piave, Boito, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. O’Grady traces the development of Italian literature, from romantic realism to modernism, examining the works of Pirandello, Arrigo Boito, and Francesco Maria Piave, among others. Includes bibliography and index. Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello’s Narrative Writing. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. The introductory segment on Pirandello’s philosophy of literature and its role in literary history is excellent. Of particular interest is the study of his short fiction complemented by a full treatment of his rhetorical style and themes. Extensive bibliography, index. Stella, M. John. Self and Self-Compromise in the Narratives of Pirandello and Moravia. New York: P. Lang, 2000. Stella examines the concept of self in literature, comparing and contrasting the works of Pirandello and Alberto Moravia.

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Born: Boston, Massachusetts; January 19, 1809 Died: Baltimore, Maryland; October 7, 1849 Principal short fiction • Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840; The Prose Romances of Edgar Allan Poe, 1843; Tales, 1845; The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 1976 (Stuart Levine and Susan Levine, editors). Other literary forms • During his short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe produced a large quantity of writing, most of which was not collected in book form during his lifetime. He published one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and several volumes of poetry, the most famous of which is The Raven, and Other Poems (1845). Poe earned his living mainly as a writer and as an editor of magazines. For magazines, he wrote reviews, occasional essays, meditations, literary criticism, and a variety of different kinds of journalism, as well as poetry and short fiction. Achievements • During his life, Edgar Allan Poe was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” and “The Gold-Bug.” “The Raven,” his most famous poem, created a sensation when it was published and became something of a best-seller. After his death, Poe’s reputation grew steadily—though in the United States opinion remained divided—until by the middle of the twentieth century he had clear status as an author of worldwide importance. Poe’s achievements may be measured in terms of what he has contributed to literature and of how his work influenced later culture. Poe was accomplished in fiction, poetry, and criticism, setting standards in all three that distinguish him from most of his American contemporaries. In fiction, he is credited with inventing the conventions of the classical detective story, beginning the modern genre of science fiction, and turning the conventions of gothic fiction to the uses of high art in stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He was also an accomplished humorist and satirist. In poetry, he produced a body of work that is respected throughout the world and a few poems that have endured as classics, notably “The Raven,” as well as several poems that, in part because of their sheer verbal beauty, have persistently appealed to the popular imagination, such as “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee.” In criticism, Poe is among the first to advocate and demonstrate methods of textual criticism that came into their own in the twentieth century, notably in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he analyzed with remarkable objectivity the process by which “The Raven” was built in order to produce a specified effect in its readers. Poe’s influence on later culture was pervasive. Nearly every important American writer after Poe shows signs of his influence, especially when working in the gothic mode or with grotesque humor. The French, Italians, and writers in Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas acknowledge and demonstrate their debts to Poe in technique and vision. Only to begin to explore Poe’s influence on twentieth century music and film would be a major undertaking. In terms of his world reputation, Poe stands

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Biography • Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. His parents, David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, were actors at a time when the profession was not widely respected in the United States. David was making a success in acting when alcohol addiction brought an end to his career. He deserted his family a year after Edgar’s birth; Elizabeth died a year later in 1811, leaving Edgar an orphan in Richmond, Virginia. There, he was taken in by John Allan, who educated him well in England and the United States. Poe was a sensitive and precocious child; during his teens, his relations Library of Congress with his foster father declined. Stormy relations continued until Allan’s first wife died and his second wife had children. Once it became unlikely that he would inherit anything significant from the wealthy Allan, Poe, at the age of twenty-one, having already published a volume of poetry, began a literary career. From 1831 to 1835, more or less dependent on his Poe relatives, he worked in Baltimore, writing stories and poems, a few of which were published. In 1835, he secretly married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, when she was thirteen. From 1835 to 1837, he was assistant editor of The Southern Literary Messenger, living on a meager salary, tending to drink enough to disappoint the editor, publishing his fiction, and making a national reputation as a reviewer of books. When he was fired, he moved with his wife (by then the marriage was publicly acknowledged) and her mother to New York City, where he lived in poverty, selling his writing for the next two years. Though he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1838, it brought him no income. He moved to Philadelphia that same year and for several months continued to live on only a small income from stories and other magazine pieces. In 1839, he became coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Before drinking led to his losing this job, he wrote and published some of his best fiction, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He took another editing position with Graham’s Magazine that lasted about a year. He then lived by writing and working at occasional jobs. In 1844, he went with his family back to New York City. His wife, Virginia, had been seriously ill, and her health was declining. In New York, he wrote for newspapers. In 1845, he published “The Raven” and Tales, both of which were well received (“The Raven” was a popular success), though again his income from them was small. During the early nineteenth century, an author could not easily earn a satisfactory income from writing alone, in part because of the lack of international copyright laws. He was able to purchase a new weekly, The Broadway Journal, but it failed in 1846.

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After 1845, Poe was famous, and his income, though unstable, was a little more dependable. His life, however, did not go smoothly. He was to some extent lionized in literary circles, but his combination of desperation for financial support with alcoholism and a combative temper kept him from dealing well with being a “star.” Virginia died in 1847, and Poe was seriously ill for much of the next year. In 1849, he found himself in Richmond, and for a few months he seemed quite well. His Richmond relatives received and cared for him kindly, and he stopped drinking. In October, however, while on a trip, he paused in Baltimore, became drunk, was found unconscious, and was carried to a local hospital, where he died on October 7, 1849. Analysis • The variety of Edgar Allan Poe’s short fiction cannot be conveyed fully in a short introduction. Though he is best known for his classics of gothic horror such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and his portraits of madmen and grotesques such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” he is also the author of detective stories, “The Purloined Letter”; science fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; parodies, “The Premature Burial”; satires, “The Man That Was Used Up”; social and political fiction, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether”; and a variety of kinds of humor, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” and “Hop-Frog.” Three stories that illustrate some of this variety while offering insight into Poe’s characteristic themes are “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Among Poe’s central themes is an emphasis on the mysteries of the self, of others, of nature, and of the universe. His stories usually function in part to undercut the kinds of easy optimism and certainty that were characteristic of popular thought in his time. “A Descent into the Maelström” • “A Descent into the Maelström,” which first appeared in Graham’s Magazine in May, 1841, and was collected in Tales, opens with a declaration of mystery: “The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.” In using this epigraph, slightly altered from the seventeenth century English essayist Joseph Glanvill, Poe announces several motifs for the story that follows. One of these is the mystery of how God acts and, therefore, may be revealed in nature. Another is inadequacy of humanly devised models for explaining nature or God’s presence in nature. Yet another is the idea of the multiple senses of depth, not merely the physical depth of a well or a maelstrom, but also the metaphorical depths of a mystery, of God, of nature, of God’s manifestation in nature. The story is relatively simple in its outline, though interestingly complicated by its frame. In the frame, the narrator visits a remote region of Norway to look upon the famous maelstrom, an actual phenomenon described in contemporary reference books that were Poe’s sources. There, he encounters an apparently retired fisherman, who guides him to a view of the whirlpool and who then tells the story of how he survived being caught in it. In the main body of the story, the guide explains how a sudden hurricane and a stopped watch caused him and his two brothers to be caught by the maelstrom as they attempted to return from a routine, if risky, fishing trip. He explains what the experience was like and how he managed to survive even though his boat and his brothers were lost. Poe carefully arranges the frame and the fisherman’s narration to emphasize his themes.

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The frame narrator is a somewhat comic character. The guide leads him to what he calls a little cliff and calmly leans over its edge to point out the sights, but the narrator is terrified by the cliff itself: “In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky—while I struggled in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger from the fury of the winds.” On one level this is high comedy. The narrator professes to be worried about his companion’s safety but cannot help revealing that he is personally terrified, and his resulting posture contrasts humorously with the equanimity of his guide. On another level, however, Poe is also suggesting at least two serious ideas. The narrator’s description of the cliff, with its sheer drop of sixteen hundred feet, should remind most readers that in a strong wind, they would feel and behave much the same as the narrator. This realization makes the next idea even more significant: The pose the narrator has adopted is pointedly a pose of worship drawn from the Old Testament of the Bible. The narrator abases himself full-length, not daring to look up while clinging to the earth. He behaves as if he is in the presence of God, and this is before the tide turns and the maelstrom forms. The tame scene evokes in the narrator the awe of a mortal in a god’s presence; when he sees the maelstrom, he feels he is looking into the heart of awesome, divine mystery. When the maelstrom forms, when the earth really trembles and the sea boils and the heavens shout and the guide asks him what he sees and hears, he replies, “this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström.” The narrator continues to see it as a more than natural phenomenon. Unable to accept the naturalistic account of it offered by the Encyclopædia Britannica, he is drawn instead by the power that it exerts over his imagination to see it as a manifestation of occult powers, an eruption of supernatural power into the natural world. This view forms the context within which the guide tells his tale. An important feature of the guide’s story is the contrast between his sense of chaotic threat and his repeated perceptions that suggest an ordered purpose within this chaos. It almost seems at times as if the episode were designed to teach the fisherman a lesson that he would then pass on through the narrator to the reader, though conveying a simple moral seems not to be the fisherman’s purpose. For the fisherman, it was good fortune, assisted perhaps by a kind Providence, that allowed him to find a means of escape once his fishing boat had been sucked into the gigantic whirlpool and had begun its gradual descent toward the rushing foam at the bottom of the funnel of water. The main sign of design in these events is that just as the boat is blown into the whirlpool by the sudden and violent hurricane, a circle opens in the black clouds, revealing a bright moon that illuminates the scene of terror. This event makes the weather into a symmetrical picture: An inverted funnel of clouds ascending to an opening where the moon appears, over a funnel of whirling seawater descending into an obscured opening where a rainbow appears, “like that narrow and tottering bridge which Musselmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity.” This view of a tremendous overarching cosmic order composing a scene of mortal chaos produces other kinds of order that help to save the fisherman. Bewitched by the beauty that he sees in this scene, the fisherman, like the narrator on the cliff-top, gains control of himself, loses his fear, and begins to look around, merely for the sake of enjoying it: “I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner . . . in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power.” Studying the beauty, he regains his self-possession, and in possession of his faculties,

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no longer terrified, he begins to understand how the whirlpool works, and he learns that different shapes and sizes of objects descend its sides at different rates. Attaching himself to a cylindrical barrel, he slows his descent enough that instead of going to the bottom and so across the mystical bridge he envisions there, he is borne up until the maelstrom stops and he finds himself again in comparatively calm water. For the fisherman, his narrow escape is a tale of wonder, luck, and divine mercy. For the reader, however, carefully prepared by the narrator and supported by elements in the fisherman’s story upon which he does not comment, the story also illustrates the inscrutability of the God that may be visible in nature. This is not a God who operates nature solely for human benefit, though he has given humanity reason, aesthetic sense, and the power of faith that can allow people to survive in, and even enjoy, the terrors of nature. The fisherman’s brother, who survives the onslaught of the storm to experience the maelstrom with him, is never able to move by means of faith or the appreciation of beauty beyond his terror; this makes his despair at impending death insuperable, so he cannot discover a way of escape or even attempt the one offered by the fisherman. Though not necessarily unique in this respect, the United States has throughout its history been a nation where large groups of people tended to assume that they had discovered the one truth that explained the universe and history and where it seemed easy to believe that a benevolent God had designed a manifest destiny for the nation and, perhaps, for humankind as a whole if led by American thought. Poe was among those who distrusted such thinking deeply. “A Descent into the Maelström” is one of many Poe stories in which part of the effect is to undercut such assumptions in his readers by emphasizing the mysteries of nature and the inadequacy of human ideas to encompass them, much less encompass the divinity of which nature might be a manifestation. “The Purloined Letter” • Although “A Descent into the Maelström” emphasizes the inadequacy of human intelligence to comprehend God’s purposes in the universe, it also emphasizes the crucial importance of people using what intelligence they have to find truth and beauty in nature and experience. “The Purloined Letter,” one of Poe’s best detective stories, places a greater emphasis on the nature and importance of intelligence, while still pointing at mysteries of human character. This story first appeared in two magazine versions in 1844: a shorter version in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal and what has become the final version in The Gift. It was then collected in Tales. The narrator and his friend C. Auguste Dupin are smoking and meditating in Dupin’s darkened library, when they are interrupted by the comical Monsieur G—, the prefect of the Paris police. The prefect tries to pretend that he is merely paying a friendly call, but he cannot help making it clear that he has come to Dupin with a troubling problem. He eventually explains that the Minister D— has managed, in the presence of an important lady, presumably the queen, to steal from her a compromising letter with which he might damage her severely by showing it to her husband. He has since been using the threat of revealing the letter to coerce the queen’s cooperation in influencing policy. As the prefect repeats, to Dupin’s delight, getting the letter back without publicity ought to be simple for an expert policeman. One merely finds where it is hidden and takes it back. The letter must be within easy reach of the minister to be useful, and so by minute searching of his home and by having a pretended thief waylay him, the letter should surely be found. All these things have been

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done with great care, and the letter has not been found. The prefect is stumped. Dupin’s advice is to search again. A few weeks later, the prefect returns, still without success. Dupin then manipulates the prefect into declaring what he would pay to regain the letter, instructs him to write Dupin a check for that amount, and gives him the letter. The prefect is so astonished and gratified that he runs from the house, not even bothering to ask how Dupin has managed this feat. The second half of the story consists of Dupin’s explanation to the narrator, with a joke or two at the prefect’s expense, of how he found and obtained the letter. As in Dupin’s other cases, notably the famous “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the solution involves a rigorous and seemingly miraculous application of rationality to the problem. Although in these stories Poe was establishing conventions for detection and stories about it that would flower richly in Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, the principles upon which Dupin works are slightly but significantly different from Holmes’s principles. One key difference is the importance of poetic imagination to the process. Most of Dupin’s explanation of his procedure has to do with how one goes about estimating the character and ability of one’s opponent, for understanding what the criminal may do is ultimately more important to a solution than successful deduction. It requires a kind of poet to penetrate the criminal’s mind; a “mere” mathematician can make competent deductions from given ideas, as the prefect has done. It takes a combination of poet and mathematician—in short, Dupin—to solve such a crime dependably. The prefect has greatly underestimated the minister because he is known to be a poet and the prefect believes poets are fools. Dupin says that the police often fail because they assume that the criminal’s intelligence mirrors their own, and therefore over- or underestimate the criminal’s ability. Having established that the minister is a very cunning opponent who will successfully imagine the police response to his theft, Dupin is able to deduce quite precisely how the minister will hide the letter, by placing it very conspicuously, so as not to appear hidden at all, and by disguising it. Dupin’s deduction proves exactly right, and by some careful plotting, he is able to locate and regain it. The two main portions of the story, presenting the problem and the solution, illustrate the nature and powers of human reason. The end of the story emphasizes mystery by raising questions about morality. Although reason is a powerful instrument for solving problems and bringing about actions in the world, and solving problems is a satisfying kind of activity that makes Dupin feel proud and virtuous, his detecting occurs in a morally ambiguous world. The end of the story calls attention repeatedly to the relationship between Dupin and the Minister D—, a final quotation from a play even hinting that they could be brothers, though there is no other evidence that this is the case. Dupin claims intimate acquaintance and frequent association with the minister; indeed, these are the foundation of his inferences about the man’s character and ability. They disagree, however, politically. The nature of this disagreement is not explained, but the story takes place in nineteenth century Paris, and Dupin’s actions seem to support the royal family against a rebellious politician. Dupin, in leaving a disguised substitute for the regained letter, has arranged for the minister’s fall from power and may even have endangered his life. By providing this kind of information at the end, Poe raises moral and political questions, encouraging the reader to wonder whether Dupin’s brilliant detection serves values of which the reader might approve. To those questions, the story offers no answers. In this way, Dupin’s demonstration of a magnificent human intellect is

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placed in the context of moral mystery, quite unlike the tales of Sherlock Holmes and related classical detectives. On a moral level, who are Dupin and the minister, and what are the meanings of their actions with regard to the well-being of French citizens? Although Poe invented what became major conventions in detective fiction— the rational detective, his less able associate, the somewhat ridiculous police force, the solution scene—his detective stories show greater moral complexity than those of his best-known followers. “The Fall of the House of Usher” • “The Fall of the House of Usher” has everything a Poe story is supposed to have according to the popular view of him: a gothic house, a terrified narrator, live burial, madness, and horrific catastrophe. One of his most popular and most discussed stories, this one has been variously interpreted by critics, provoking controversy about how to read it that remains unsettled. This story was first published in 1839, and it appeared in both of Poe’s fiction collections. The narrator journeys to the home of his boyhood chum, Roderick Usher, a man of artistic talent and generous reputation. Usher has been seriously ill and wishes the cheerful companionship of his old friend. The narrator arrives at the grimly oppressive house in its equally grim and oppressive setting, determined to be cheerful and helpful, but finds himself overmatched. The house and its environs radiate gloom, and though Usher alternates between a kind of creative mania and the blackest depression, he tends also on the whole to radiate gloom. Usher confides that he is upset in part because his twin sister, Madeline, is mortally ill. It develops, however, that the main reason Usher is depressed is that he has become in some way hypersensitive, and this sensitivity has revealed to him that his house is a living organism that is driving him toward madness. The narrator does not want to believe this, but the longer he stays in the house with Usher, the more powerfully Usher’s point of view dominates him. Madeline dies and, to discourage grave robbers, Usher and the narrator temporarily place her in a coffin in a vault beneath the house. Once Madeline is dead, Usher’s alternation of mood ceases, and he remains always deeply gloomy. On his last evening at Usher, the narrator witnesses several events that seem to confirm Usher’s view that the house is driving him mad. Furthermore, these confirmations seem to suggest that the house is just one in a nest of Chinese boxes, in a series of closed, walled-in enclosures that make up the physical and spiritual universe. This oft-repeated image is represented most vividly in one of Usher’s paintings, what appears to be a burial vault unnaturally lit from within. This image conveys the idea of the flame of human consciousness imprisoned, as if buried alive in an imprisoning universe. The terrifying conviction of this view is one of the causes of Usher’s growing madness. On the last evening, a storm seems to enclose the house as if it were inside a box of wind and cloud, on which the house itself casts an unnatural light. The narrator tries to comfort both himself and Usher by reading a story, but the sound effects described in the story are echoed in reality in the house. Usher, as his reason crumbles, interprets these sounds as Madeline, not really dead, breaking through various walls behind which she has been placed—her coffin and the vault—until finally, Usher claims, she is standing outside the door of the room where they are reading. The door opens, perhaps supernaturally, and there she stands. The narrator watches the twins fall against each other and collapse; he rushes outside only to see the house itself collapse into its reflection in the pool that stands before it, this last event taking place under the unnatural light of a blood-red moon.

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Such a summary helps to reveal one of the main sources of conflicting interpretation. How could such events really occur? Is not this a case of an unreliable narrator, driven toward a horrific vision by some internal conflicts that might be inferred from the content of the vision? This viewpoint has tended to dominate critical discussion of the story, provoking continuous opposition from more traditionally minded readers who argue that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a supernatural tale involving occult forces of some kind. Both modes of interpretation have their problems, and so neither has been able to establish itself as superior to the other. One of the main difficulties encountered by both sides is accounting for the way that the narrator tells his story. He seems involved in the same sort of problem that the community of literary critics experiences. He is represented as telling the story of this experience some time after the events took place. He insists that there are no supernatural elements in his story, that everything that happened at the House of Usher can be accounted for in a naturalistic way. In this respect, he is like the narrator of “A Descent into the Maelström.” He “knows” that the natural world operates according to regular “natural” laws, but when he actually sees the whirlpool, his imagination responds involuntarily with the conviction that this is something supernatural. Likewise, the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is convinced that the world can be understood in terms of natural law and, therefore, that what has happened to him at Usher either could not have happened or must have a natural explanation. Like the narrator of “The Black Cat,” another of Poe’s most famous stories, this narrator hopes that by telling the story, perhaps again, he will arrive at an acceptable explanation or that his listener will confirm his view of the events. Perhaps “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a kind of trap, set to enmesh readers in the same sort of difficulty in which the narrator finds himself. If this is the case, then the story functions in a way consistent with Poe’s theme of the inadequacy of models constructed by human intelligence to map the great mysteries of life and the universe. The narrator says he has had an experience that he cannot explain and that points toward an inscrutable universe, one that might be conceived as designed to drive humans mad if they find themselves compelled to comprehend it. Likewise, in reading the story, the reader has an experience that finally cannot be explained, that seems designed to drive readers mad if they insist upon achieving a final view of its wholeness. The story itself may provide an experience that demonstrates the ultimate inadequacy of human reason to understand the mysteries of creation. Although Poe wrote a variety of stories, he is best remembered for his tales of terror and madness. His popular literary reputation is probably a distorted view of Poe, both as person and as artist. Although he was tragically addicted to alcohol and while he did experience considerable difficulty in a milieu that was not particularly supportive, he was nevertheless an accomplished artist whose work, especially when viewed as a whole, is by no means the mere outpouring of a half-mad, anguished soul. To look closely at any of his best work is to see ample evidence of a writer in full artistic control of his materials, calculating his effects with a keen eye. Furthermore, to examine the range and quantity of his writing, to attend to the quantity of his humor—of which there are interesting examples even in “The Fall of the House of Usher”—to notice the beauty of his poetry, to study the learned intelligence of his best criticism—in short, to see Poe whole—must lead to the recognition that his accomplishments far exceed the narrow view implied by his popular reputation. Terry Heller

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Other major works play: Politian, pb. 1835-1836. novels: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838. miscellaneous: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1902 (17 volumes); Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1969, 1978 (3 volumes). nonfiction: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1948; Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, 1965; Essays and Reviews, 1984. poetry: Tamerlane, and Other Poems, 1827; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829; Poems, 1831; The Raven, and Other Poems, 1845; Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848; Poe: Complete Poems, 1959; Poems, 1969 (volume 1 of Collected Works). Bibliography Brown, Arthur A. “Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe’s ‘Berenice.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (March, 1996): 448-463. Argues that Poe’s stories of the dead coming back to life and of premature burial dramatize the horror of the impossibility of dying. Burluck, Michael L. Grim Phantasms: Fear in Poe’s Short Fiction. New York: Garland, 1993. Considers the question of why Poe focused primarily on portraying weird events in his stories. Discusses the gothic conventions Poe used to achieve his effects. Argues that neither drugs nor insanity are responsible for Poe’s gothic tales, but rather they were a carefully thought out literary tactic meant to appeal to current public taste and the general human reaction to fear. Carlson, Eric, ed. Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Offers a cross section of writing about Poe from the 1830’s to the 1980’s. Many of the essays deal with short stories, illustrating a variety of interpretive strategies. Crisman, William. “Poe’s Dupin as Professional, the Dupin Stories as Serial Text.” Studies in American Fiction 23 (Autumn, 1995): 215-229. Part of a special section on Poe. Argues that the Dupin stories bear out his mesmeric revelation that mind forms one continuum with inert substance. Frank, Lawrence. “‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (September, 1995): 168-188. Claims that Poe’s story explores the implications of the nebular hypothesis and did not reinforce the prevailing orthodoxy; rather it may have been in the service of an emerging Darwinian perspective. Kennedy, J. Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Considers the tensions between Poe’s otherworldly settings and his representations of violence, delivers a capsule biography situating Poe in his historical context, and addresses topics such as Poe and the American publishing industry, Poe’s sensationalism, his relationships to gender constructions, and Poe and American privacy. Includes bibliographical essay, chronology of Poe’s life, bibliography, illustrations, and index. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Introduction to Poe’s short stories that attempts to place them with the nineteenth century short narrative tradition and within the context of Poe’s aesthetic theory. Suggests Poe’s contributions to the short story in terms of his development of detective fiction, fantasy, satire, and self-reflexivity. Includes passages from Poe’s narrative theory and three essays by other critics illustrating a variety of critical approaches.

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____________, ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of thirteen short stories by Poe: “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” (vol. 1), “A Descent into the Maelström” (vol. 2), “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Gold-Bug” (vol. 3), “Ligeia” (vol. 4), “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (vol. 5), “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Purloined Letter” (vol. 6), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (vol. 7), and “William Wilson” (vol. 8). Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Introductory critical study of selected works and a short biography of Poe. Includes bibliographical references and index. Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allen Poe, A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2001. Thorough guide to the life and works of Poe. Thoms, Peter. Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. Study of early detective fiction from readings of Poe’s Dupin stories to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Whalen, Terence. Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Brilliant study of Poe that provides an inventive understanding of his works and his standing in American literature.

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Katherine Anne Porter Porter, Katherine Anne

Born: Indian Creek, Texas; May 15, 1890 Died: Silver Spring, Maryland; September 18, 1980 Principal short fiction • Flowering Judas, and Other Stories, 1930; Hacienda, 1934; Noon Wine, 1937; Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels, 1939; The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories, 1944; The Old Order, 1944; The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 1965. Other literary forms • Katherine Anne Porter wrote, in addition to short stories, one novel, Ship of Fools (1962), parts of which were published separately from 1947 to 1959, in such magazines and journals as The Sewanee Review, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle. She wrote essays of various kinds, some of which she published under the title of one of them, The Days Before (1952); these included critical analyses of Thomas Hardy’s fiction and biographical studies of Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. Porter was a reporter with unsigned journalism for the Fort Worth weekly newspaper The Critic in 1917 and the Denver Rocky Mountain News in 1918-1919. Early in her career, she worked on a critical biography of Cotton Mather, which she never finished; she did, however, publish parts in 1934, 1940, 1942, and 1946. Her few poems and most of her nonfictional prose have been collected in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1970) under the following headings: “Critical,” “Personal and Particular,” “Biographical,” “Cotton Mather,” “Mexican,” “On Writing,” and “Poems.” In 1967, she composed A Christmas Story, a personal reminiscence of her niece, who had died in 1919. Her memoir of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, The Never-Ending Wrong, was published in 1977 on the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths. She was a prodigious writer of personal letters; many have been published, first, by her friend Glenway Wescott, as The Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1970), and later by another friend, Isabel Bayley, as Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (1990). Achievements • Katherine Anne Porter is distinguished by her small literary production of exquisitely composed and highly praised short fiction. Although she lived to be ninety years old, she produced and published only some twenty-five short stories and one long novel. Nevertheless, her work was praised early and often from the start of her career; some of her stories, such as “Flowering Judas,” “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and “Old Mortality,” have been hailed as masterpieces. Sponsored by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Porter won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 and went to Berlin and Paris to live while she wrote such stories as “The Cracked Looking-Glass” and “Noon Wine,” for which she won a Book-of-the-Month Club award in 1937. After publication of the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels in 1939, she received a gold medal for literature from the Society of Libraries of New York University, in 1940. Elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1943, Porter was also appointed as writer-in-residence at Stanford University in 1949, and, in the same year, she received an honorary degree, doctor of letters, from the University of North Carolina. Such awards and honors continued, with writer-in-residence appointments at the University of Michigan in 1954 and the University of Virginia in 1958, honorary degrees at the University

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TO VIEW IMAGE, PLEASE SEE PRINT EDITION OF THIS BOOK.

of Michigan, Smith College, and La Salle College. In 1959, she received a Ford Foundation grant, in 1962 the Emerson-Thoreau gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1966-1967, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and the Gold Medal for fiction, National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Biography • There are conflicting reports of dates from Katherine Anne Porter’s life, partly because Porter herself was not consistent about her biography. Nevertheless, the main events are fairly clear. Her mother, Mary Alice, died fewer than two years after Katherine Anne’s birth. Subsequently, her grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, was the most important adult woman in her life, and after the death of her grandmother in 1901, Katherine Anne was sent away by her father to an Ursuline convent in New Orleans, then in 1904 to the Thomas School for Girls in San Antonio. She ran away Courtesy, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries from her school in 1906 to marry John Henry Kroontz, the twenty-year-old son of a Texas rancher. She remained with him seven years (some reports say her marriage lasted only three years), and in 1911 she went to Chicago to earn her own way as a reporter for a weekly newspaper and as a bit player for a film company. From 1914 to 1916, she traveled through Texas, earning her way as a ballad singer. Then she returned to journalism, joining the staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News in 1918. At about this time, Porter was gravely ill, and she thought she was going to die. Her illness was a turning point in the development of her character, and it was the basis for her story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” which she finished twenty years later. After she recovered her health, Porter lived briefly in New York and then Mexico, where she studied art while observing the Obregón revolution in 1920. Her experiences in Mexico provided material for her earliest published stories, “María Concepción” and “The Martyr” in 1922 and 1923. She married and promptly divorced Ernest Stock, a young English art student in New York, in 1925. Soon after, she participated in protests against the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and then, in 1928, she began work on her biography of Mather, which was never completed. Porter traveled often during these years, but she wrote some of her greatest stories at the same time, including “He,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “Theft,” and “Flowering Judas.” After publication of her collection Flowering Judas, and Other Stories in 1930, Porter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her while living in Berlin and

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Paris, from 1931 to 1937. While in Europe, she composed “The Leaning Tower” and “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” and she wrote an early draft of “Noon Wine.” In 1933, she married Eugene Pressly, whom she divorced to marry Albert Erskine in 1938, when she returned to the United States to live with her new husband in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At that time, she became a friend of Tate and his family. In 1941, Porter appeared on television with Mark Van Doren and Bertrand Russell; in 1944, she worked on films in Hollywood; and in 1947, she undertook a lecture tour of several southern universities. The novel that she began as a story, “Promised Land,” in 1936, was finally published in 1962 as Ship of Fools to mixed reviews. Apart from her work on this long fiction, Porter wrote little except for occasional essays and reviews, some of which she published as The Days Before in 1952. Porter spent most of her life after 1950 lecturing, traveling, buying and selling property, and slowly composing her novel along with her biography of Mather. In October, 1976, she read her essay “St. Augustine and the Bullfight” at the Poetry Center in New York City, and in 1977, she published a memoir of Sacco and Vanzetti, whose trials of injustice had haunted her for fifty years. When she died, in 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland, she left behind a small canon of fiction and a great achievement of literary art. Analysis • Katherine Anne Porter’s short fiction is noted for its sophisticated use of symbolism, complex exploitation of point of view, challenging variations of ambiguously ironic tones, and profound analyses of psychological and social themes. Her career can be divided into three main (overlapping) periods of work, marked by publications of her three collections: The first period, from 1922 to 1935, saw the publication of Flowering Judas, and Other Stories; the second, from 1930 to 1939, ended with the publication of Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels; and the third, from 1935 to 1942, shaped many of her characters that later appear in the collection The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories. Her one novel and two stories “The Fig Tree” and “Holiday” were published long after the last collection of short stories, in 1962 and 1960, respectively. These constitute a coda to the body of her work in fiction. From 1922 to 1935, Porter’s fiction is concerned with the attempts of women to accommodate themselves to, or to break the bounds of, socially approved sexual roles. They usually fail to achieve the identities that they seek; instead, they ironically become victims of their own or others’ ideas of what they ought to be. Violeta of “Virgin Violeta” fantasizes about her relationship with her cousin Carlos, trying to understand it according to the idealistic notions that she has learned from church and family; when Carlos responds to her sensual reality, she is shocked and disillusioned. The ironies of Violeta’s situation are exploited more fully, and more artfully, in “María Concepción,” “Magic,” and “He.” In the first, María manages, through violence, to assert her identity through the social roles that she is expected to play in her primitive society; she kills her sensual rival, María Rosa, seizes the baby of her victim, and retrieves her wandering husband. Social norms are also triumphant over poor Ninette, the brutalized prostitute of “Magic,” in which the narrator is implicated by her own ironic practice of distance from her story and her employer, Madame Blanchard. The mother of “He,” however, cannot maintain her distance from the image that she has projected of her mentally disabled son; she is willing to sacrifice him, as she had the suckling pig, to preserve the social image she values of herself toward others. In the end, however, Mrs. Whipple embraces, helplessly and hopelessly, the victim of her self-delusion: She holds her son in tragic recognition of her failures toward him, or she holds him out

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of ironic disregard for his essential need of her understanding. “He” does not resolve easily into reconciliation of tone and theme. Images of symbolic importance organize the ironies of such stories as “Rope,” “Flowering Judas,” “Theft,” and “The Cracked Looking-Glass.” In the first story, a husband and wife are brought to the edge of emotional chaos by a piece of rope that the husband brought home instead of coffee wanted by his wife. As a symbol, the rope ties them together, keeps them apart, and threatens to hang them both. “Flowering Judas,” one of Porter’s most famous stories, develops the alienated character of Laura from her resistance to the revolutionary hero Braggioni, to her refusal of the boy who sang to her from her garden, to her complicity in the death of Eugenio in prison. At the center of the story, in her garden and in her dream, Laura is linked with a Judas tree in powerfully mysterious ways: as a betrayer, as a rebellious and independent spirit. Readers will be divided on the meaning of the tree, as they will be on the virtue of Laura’s character. “The Cracked Looking-Glass” • The same ambivalence results from examining the symbolic function of a cracked mirror in the life of Rosaleen, the point-of-view character in “The Cracked Looking-Glass.” This middle-aged Irish beauty sees herself as a monster in her mirror, but she cannot replace the mirror with a new one any more than she can reconcile her sexual frustration with her maternal affection for her aged husband, Dennis. This story twists the May-December stereotype into a reverse fairy tale of beauty betrayed, self deceived, and love dissipated. Rosaleen treats young men as the sons she never had to rear, and she represses her youthful instincts to nurse her impotent husband in his old age. She does not like what she sees when she looks honestly at herself in the mirror, but she will not replace the mirror of reality, cracked as she sees it must be. “Theft” • More honest and more independent is the heroine of “Theft,” an artist who chooses her independence at the cost of sexual fulfillment and social gratification; she allows her possessions, material and emotional, to be taken from her, but she retains an integrity of honesty and spiritual independence that are unavailable to most of the other characters in these early stories. A similar strength of character underlies the dying monologue of Granny Weatherall, but her strength has purchased her very little certainty about meaning. When she confronts death as a second jilting, Granny condemns death’s cheat as a final insult to life; she seems ironically to make meaningful in her death the emptiness that she has struggled to deny in her life. “Old Mortality” • In the middle period of her short fiction, Porter’s characters confront powerful threats of illusion to shatter their tenuous holds on reality. Romantic ideals and family myths combine to shape the formative circumstances for Miranda in “Old Mortality.” Divided into three parts, this story follows the growth of the young heroine from 1885, when she is eight, to 1912, when she is recently married against her father’s wishes. Miranda and her older sister, Maria, are fascinated by tales of their legendary Aunt Amy, their father’s sister whose honor he had risked his life to defend in a duel, and who died soon after she married their Uncle Gabriel. The first part of the story narrates the family’s anecdotes about Aunt Amy and contrasts her with her cousin Eva, a plain woman who participated in movements for women’s rights. Part 2 of the story focuses on Miranda’s disillusionment with Uncle Gabriel, whom she meets at a racetrack while she is immured in a church school in New Or-

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leans; he is impoverished, fat, and alcoholic, remarried to a bitter woman who hates his family, and he is insensitive to the suffering of his winning racehorse. Part 3 describes Miranda’s encounter with cousin Eva on a train carrying them to the funeral of Uncle Gabriel. Here, Miranda’s romantic image of Aunt Amy is challenged by Eva’s skeptical memory, but Miranda refuses to yield her vision entirely to Eva’s scornful one. Miranda hopes that her father will embrace her when she returns home, but he remains detached and disapproving of her elopement. She realizes that from now on she must live alone, separate, and alienated from her family. She vows to herself that she will know the truth about herself, even if she can never know the truth about her family’s history. The story ends, however, on a note of critical skepticism about her vow, suggesting its hopefulness is based upon her ignorance. “Noon Wine” • Self-delusion and selfish pride assault Mr. Thompson in “Noon Wine” until he can no longer accept their terms of compromise with his life. A lazy man who lets his south Texas farm go to ruin, he is suddenly lifted to prosperity by the energetic, methodical work of a strangely quiet Swede, Mr. Helton. This man appears one day in 1896 to ask Mr. Thompson for work, and he remains there, keeping to himself and occasionally playing the tune of “Noon Wine” on his harmonica. The turn into failure and tragedy is more sudden than the turn to prosperity had been. Mr. Hatch, an obnoxious person, comes to Mr. Thompson looking for Helton, wanted for the killing of Helton’s brother in North Dakota. Thompson angrily attacks and kills Hatch, and Helton flees. Helton, however, is captured, beaten, and thrown in jail, where he dies. Thompson is acquitted of murder at his trial. Thompson, however, cannot accept his acquittal. He believes that his neighbors think that he is really guilty. His wife is uncertain about his guilt, and his two sons not only are troubled by his part in the deaths but also accuse him of mistreating their mother. Burdened by pains of conscience, Thompson spends his days after the trial visiting neighbors and retelling the story of Hatch’s visit. Thompson believes he saw Hatch knife Helton, but no one else saw it, and Helton had no knife wound. The problem for Thompson is that he cannot reconcile what he saw and what was real. All of his life has been spent in a state of delusion, and this crisis of conscience threatens to destroy his capacity to accept life on his own visionary terms. The irony of the story is that Thompson must kill himself to vindicate his innocence, but when he does so, he paradoxically accepts the consequences of his delusions even as he asserts his right to shape reality to fit his view of it. “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” • Love and death mix forces to press Miranda through a crisis of vision in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” This highly experimental story mixes dreams with waking consciousness, present with past, and illness with health. Set during World War I, it analyzes social consequences of a military milieu, and it uses that setting to suggest a symbolic projection of the pressures that build on the imagination and identity of the central character. Miranda is a writer of drama reviews for a newspaper; her small salary is barely enough to support her, and so when she balks at buying Liberty Bonds, she has her patriotism questioned. This worry preoccupies her thoughts and slips into her dreaming experience. In fact, the opening of the story seems to be an experience of a sleeper who is slowly coming awake from a dream of childhood in which the adult’s anxieties about money are mixed. Uncertainty about the mental state of Miranda grows as she mixes her memories of past with present, allowing past feelings to affect present judgments.

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Miranda meets a young soldier, Adam, who will soon be sent to battle. They both know that his fate is sealed, since they are both aware of the survival statistics for soldiers who make assaults from trenches. Miranda becomes gravely ill just before Adam leaves for the war front, and he nurses her through the earliest days of her sickness. Her delirium merges her doctor with Adam, with the German enemy, and with figures of her dreams. By this process, Miranda works through her attractions to Adam, to all men, and she survives to assert her independence as a professional artist. The climax of her dream, echoing certain features of Granny Weatherall’s, is her refusal to follow the pale rider, who is Death. This feature of her dream is present at the beginning of the story, to anticipate that Miranda will have to contend with this, resolve her inner battle, even before the illness that constitutes her physical struggle with death. The men of her waking life enter her dreams as Death, and so when Adam actually dies in battle, Miranda is symbolically assisted in winning her battle for life. The story makes it seem that her dreaming is the reality of the men, that their lives are figments of her imagination. Her recovery of health is a triumph, therefore, of her creative energies as well as an assertion of her independent feminine identity. In the final, sustained period of her work in short fiction, from 1935 to 1942, Porter subjects memories to the shaping power of creative imagination, as she searches out the episodes that connect to make the character of Miranda, from “The Source” to “The Grave,” and she traces the distorting effects of social pressures on children, wives, and artists in the remaining stories of the third collection. The crucial, shaping episodes of Miranda’s childhood constitute the core elements of several stories in the collection called The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories. Beginning with a sequence under the title “The Old Order,” Miranda’s growth is shaped by her changing perceptions of life around her. Helping her to interpret events are her grandmother, Sophia Jane, and her grandmother’s former black slave and lifetime companion, Aunt Nannie; in addition, Great-Aunt Eliza plays an important role in Miranda’s life in the story that was later added to the sequence, “The Fig Tree.” Two of the stories of this collection, “The Circus” and “The Grave,” are examples of remarkable compression and, particularly in “The Grave,” complex artistry. “The Circus” • Miranda cries when she sees a clown perform high-wire acrobatics in “The Circus.” Her fear is a child’s protest against the clown’s courtship with death. There is nothing pleasurable about it for Miranda. In fact, she seems to see through the act to recognize the threat of death itself, in the white, skull-like makeup of the clown’s face. The adults enjoy the spectacle, perhaps insensitive to its essential message or, on the other hand, capable of appreciating the artist’s defiance of death. In any event, young Miranda is such a problem that her father sends her home with one of the servants, Dicey. The point of poignancy is in Miranda’s discovery of Dicey’s warm regard for her despite the fact that Dicey had keenly wanted to stay at the circus. When Miranda screams in her sleep, Dicey lies beside her to comfort her, to protect her even from the dark forces of her nightmares. This sacrifice is not understood by the child Miranda, although it should be apparent to the adult who recalls it. “The Grave” • “The Grave” is more clear about the function of time in the process of understanding. Miranda and her brother Paul explore open graves of their family while hunting. They find and exchange a coffin screw and a ring, then skin a rabbit

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that Paul killed, only to find that the rabbit is pregnant with several young that are “born” dead. The experience of mixing birth with death, sexual awareness with marriage and death, is suddenly illuminated for Miranda years later when she recalls her brother on that day while she stands over a candy stand in faraway Mexico. “The Downward Path to Wisdom” • Other stories of The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories collection have disappointed readers, but they have virtues of art nevertheless. The strangely powerful story of little Stephen in “The Downward Path to Wisdom” has painful insights that may remind one of some of the stories by Flannery O’Connor, a friend of Porter. The little boy who is the object of concern to the family in this story grows to hate his father, mother, grandmother, and uncle; in fact, he sings of his hate for everyone at the end of the tale. His hatred is understandable, since no one genuinely reaches out to love him and help him with his very real problems of adjustment. His mother hears his song, but she shows no alarm; she may think that he does not “mean” what he sings, or she may not really “hear” what he is trying to say through his “art.” A similar theme of hatred and emotional violence is treated in the heartless marital problems of Mr. and Mrs. Halloran of “A Day’s Work.” Here, however, the violence is borne by physical as well as emotional events, as the story ends with a deadly battle between the aging husband and wife. First one, and then the other, believes the other one is dead. The reader is not sure if either is right. “The Leaning Tower” • Charles Upton, the artist hero of “The Leaning Tower,” encounters emotional and physical violence during his sojourn in Berlin in 1931. When he accidentally knocks down and breaks a replica of the Leaning Tower, Charles expresses in a symbolic way his objection to values that he finds in this alien city. He must endure challenges by various other people, with their lifestyles and their foreign values, to discover an underlying humanity that he shares with them. Although he is irritated when he finds that his landlady, Rosa, has repaired the Leaning Tower, he cannot say exactly why he should be so. German nationalism and decadent art have combined to shake Charles’s integrity, but he searches for inner resources to survive. The story concludes with a typically ambiguous gesture of Porter’s art: Charles falls into his bed, telling himself he needs to weep, but he cannot. The world is invulnerable to sorrow and pity. “The Fig Tree” • The coda of her work in short fiction, “The Fig Tree” and “Holiday,” are revisits to earlier stories, as Porter reexamines old themes and old subjects with new emphases: “The Fig Tree” relocates Miranda in the matriarchal setting of her childhood, and “Holiday” reviews ironies of misunderstanding alien visions. In “The Fig Tree,” young Miranda buries a dead baby chicken beneath a fig tree, and then thinks she hears it chirping from beneath the earth. Frantic with anxiety, she is unable to rescue it because her grandmother forces her to leave with the family for the country. Later, Miranda’s Great-Aunt Eliza, who constantly studies nature through telescopes and microscopes, explains to Miranda that she hears tree frogs when Miranda thinks she is hearing the weeping of the dead chicken. Her guilt is relieved by this, and since Miranda has emotionally mixed her burial of the chicken with burials of family members, resolution of guilt for one functions as resolution of guilt for the other.

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“Holiday” • The story of “Holiday” is much different in subject and setting, but its emotional profile is similar to “The Fig Tree.” The narrator spends a long holiday with German immigrants in the backlands of Texas. The hardworking Müllers challenge, by their lifestyle, the values of the narrator, who only gradually comes to understand them and their ways. The most difficult experience to understand, however, is the family’s attitude toward one of the daughters, Ottilie; at first, this girl seems to be only a crippled servant of the family. Gradually, however, the narrator understands that Ottilie is in fact a member of the family. She is mentally disabled and unable to communicate except in very primitive ways. Just when the narrator believes she can appreciate the seemingly heartless ways Ottilie is treated by her family, a great storm occurs and the mother dies. Most of the family follow their mother’s corpse to be buried, but Ottilie is left behind. The narrator thinks Ottilie is desperate to join the funeral train with her family, and so she helps Ottilie on board a wagon and desperately drives to catch up with the family. Suddenly, however, the narrator realizes that Ottilie simply wants to be in the sunshine and has no awareness of the death of her mother. The narrator accepts the radical difference that separates her from Ottilie, from all other human beings, and resigns herself, in freedom, to the universal condition of alienation. The critical mystery of Katherine Anne Porter’s work in short fiction is in the brevity of her canon. Readers who enjoy her writing must deplore the failure of the artist to produce more than she did, but they will nevertheless celebrate the achievements of her remarkable talent in the small number of stories that she published. Whatever line of analysis one pursues in reading her stories, Porter’s finest ones will repay repeated investments of reading them. They please with their subtleties of technique, from point of view to patterned images of symbolism; they inform with their syntheses of present feeling and past sensation; and they raise imaginative energy with their ambiguous presentations of alien vision. Porter’s stories educate the patiently naïve reader into paths of radical maturity. Richard D. McGhee Other major works novels: Ship of Fools, 1962. nonfiction: My Chinese Marriage, 1921; Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts, 1922; What Price Marriage, 1927; The Days Before, 1952; A Defence of Circe, 1954; A Christmas Story, 1967; The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, 1970; The Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, 1970; The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977; Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, 1990. poetry: Katherine Anne Porter’s Poetry, 1996 (Darlene Harbour Unrue, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Bloom introduces twelve classic essays, by Robert Penn Warren, Robert B. Heilman, Eudora Welty, and others. The symbolism of “Flowering Judas,” the ambiguities of “He,” and the dreams in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” are focuses of attention. Porter is compared with Flannery O’Connor. Includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

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1993. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic and monologic to Porter’s fiction, Brinkmeyer argues that when she created a memory-based dialogue with her southern past, she achieved her height as an artist, producing such important stories as “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and “Noon Wine.” Fornataro-Neil, M. K. “Constructed Narratives and Writing Identity in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter.” Twentieth Century Literature 44 (Fall, 1998): 349-361. Discusses “Old Mortality,” “He,” “Noon Wine,” and “Holiday” in terms of Porter’s fascination with characters who cannot or do not speak; claims that her silent characters are alienated because they communicate by a sign system that others cannot understand. Graham, Don. “Katherine Anne Porter’s Journey from Texas to the World.” Southwest Review 84 (1998): 140-153. Argues that because the dominant figure in Texas literary mythology was the heroic cowboy, Porter, who had nothing to say about cowboys in her writing, chose instead to identify herself as southerner. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eleven short stories by Porter: “The Downward Path to Wisdom” (vol. 2); “Flowering Judas” and “The Grave” (vol. 3); “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and “The Leaning Tower” (vol. 4); “María Concepción,” “Noon Wine,” and “Old Mortality” (vol. 5); “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and “Rope” (vol. 6); and “Theft” (vol. 7). Spencer, Virginia, ed. “Flowering Judas”: Katherine Anne Porter. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. A volume in the Women Writers: Texts and Contexts series, this collection of critical discussions of Porter’s most famous story features background material and important essays, from Ray B. West’s influential 1947 discussion of the story to debates about the character of Eugenio as Christ figure. Stout, Janis. Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Chapters on Porter’s background in Texas, her view of politics and art in the 1920’s, her writing and life between the two world wars, and her relationship with the southern agrarians. Also addresses the issue of gender, the problem of genre in Ship of Fools, and the quality of Porter’s “free, intransigent, dissenting mind.” Includes notes and bibliography. Titus, Mary. The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Look at the ways in which Porter confronted issues of gender in her work and her life, including a study of some of her unpublished papers. Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Comprehensive biography of Porter that offers insight into her turbulent personal life and her writing. Walsh, Thomas F. Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Chapters on Porter and Mexican politics, her different periods of residence in Mexico, and Ship of Fools. Includes notes and bibliography.

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J. F. Powers Powers, J. F.

Born: Jacksonville, Illinois; July 8, 1917 Died: Collegeville, Minnesota; June 12, 1999 Principal short fiction • Prince of Darkness, and Other Stories, 1947; The Presence of Grace, 1956; Lions, Harts, Leaping Does, and Other Stories, 1963; Look How the Fish Live, 1975; The Old Bird: A Love Story, 1991 (a short story, originally pb. in Prince of Darkness, and Other Stories); The Stories of J. F. Powers, 2000. Other literary forms • J. F. Powers is the author of two novels: Morte d’Urban, which received the National Book Award for fiction in 1962, and Wheat That Springeth Green (1988), a National Book Award nominee. In addition, he published essays and reviews. Achievements • Like Flannery O’Connor, a Roman Catholic writer with whom he is often compared, J. F. Powers is widely recognized as a distinctive figure in the modern American short story despite having produced only a small body of work. A master of comedy whose range encompasses cutting satire, broad farce, and gentle humor, Powers explores fundamental moral and theological issues as they are worked out in the most mundane situations. Although he is best known for stories centering on priests and parish life, Powers, in several early stories of the 1940’s, was among the first to portray the circumstances of black people who had migrated from the South to Chicago and other urban centers. Biography • John Farl Powers was born into a Catholic family in a town in which the “best” people were Protestant, a fact which he said “to some extent made a philosopher out of me.” He attended Quincy Academy, taught by Franciscan Fathers, and many of his closest friends there later went into the priesthood. Powers himself was not attracted to clerical life, principally because of the social responsibilities, although he has said the praying would have attracted him. After graduation he worked at Marshall Field and Co., sold insurance, became a chauffeur, and clerked in Brentano’s bookshop. During World War II, Powers was a conscientious objector; as a result, he spent more than a year in a federal prison. His first story was published in 1943. In 1946, he married Elizabeth Wahl, also a writer. They were to have five children; at the time of her death, in 1988, they had been married for forty-two years. After the war, Powers and his family lived in Ireland as well as in the United States. He supplemented income from writing by teaching at various colleges and universities; in addition, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1976, Powers settled in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he became Regents Professor of English at St. John’s University. Analysis • The most frequently reprinted of J. F. Powers’s short stories and therefore the best known are not the title stories of his two collections—“Prince of Darkness” and “The Presence of Grace”—but rather “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” “The Valiant Woman,” and “The Forks”—stories that are firmly rooted in social observation and realistic detail but have at their center specifically moral and theological issues. Powers

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is a Catholic writer, not a writer who happens to be a Catholic or one who proselytizes for the Church, but rather (as Evelyn Waugh has said) one whose “art is everywhere infused and directed by his Faith.” For Powers the central issue is how in the midst of a fallen world to live up to the high ideals of the Church. Since that issue is most sharply seen in the lives of those who have chosen the religious life as their vocation, parish priests, curates, friars, nuns, and archbishops dominate Powers’s stories. As might be expected of a religious writer who admires, as Powers does, the art of James Joyce and who learned the satiric mode from Sinclair Lewis and Evelyn Waugh, Powers’s stories are frequently ironic and often satiric portraits of clerics who fail to measure up to the ideals of their priestly vocation. Many are straightforward satires. “Prince of Darkness” • “Prince of Darkness,” for example, is the fictional portrait of a priest, Father Burner, who in his gluttony, his ambition for material rewards and professional success, and his lack of charity toward sinners in the confessional, reveals himself to be a modern incarnation of the devil himself. In opposition to Father Burner is the Archbishop, an elderly cleric in worn-out slippers who in the proper spirit of moral firmness and Christian compassion reassigns Father Burner not to the pastorate he covets but to another parish assistant’s role where, presumably, his power of darkness will be held in check. “The Devil Was the Joker” • “The Devil Was the Joker” from Powers’s second collection resembles “Prince of Darkness” in theme and conception, except here the satanic figure is a layman who has been hired by a religious order to sell its publication in Catholic parishes. Mac, the salesman—“Fat and fifty or so, with a candy-pink face, sparse orange hair, and popeyes”—hires a young former seminarian to travel about with him as his companion-driver. Myles Flynn, the former seminarian, also becomes the drinking companion and confidant of Mac, who gradually reveals himself to be totally cynical about the religious wares he is peddling, and who is, moreover, neither religious nor Catholic. Mac exploits the priests he encounters TO VIEW IMAGE, on his travels and attempts to use PLEASE SEE Myles to further his financial interPRINT EDITION ests. As a way of making a sale, for example, he will frequently “take the OF THIS BOOK. pledge,” that is, promise to refrain from alcohol. In return, he usually manages to extract from the priest to whom he made the pledge a large order for his wares. One day, after drunkenly confessing to Myles that he is not Catholic, he tries to repair the damage he imagines has been done to his position by trying to get Myles to baptize him, alleging that Hugh Powers

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Myles has been responsible for his sudden conversion. It is through Myles’s response that Powers provides the perspective for understanding and judging Mac. Myles perceives that Mac “was the serpent, the nice old serpent with Glen-plaid markings, who wasn’t very poisonous.” In conclusion, Myles not only refuses to baptize Mac but also leaves him and attempts once more to get back into the seminary. “Prince of Darkness” and “The Devil Was the Joker” are both loosely constructed revelations of character rather than stories of conflict and action. Powers’s two bestknown pieces are also among the best things he has done, including those in Look How the Fish Live. Both are told from the point of view of a priest caught in a moral dilemma. “The Forks” • In “The Forks,” a young curate, Father Eudex, assistant to a Monsignor in a middle-class parish, is presented with a check from a manufacturing company that has been having labor trouble. Father Eudex, born on a farm, a reader of the Catholic Worker, and a sympathizer with the strikers, regards the check as hush money and therefore finds it unacceptable. His superior, the Monsignor, who drives a long black car like a politician’s and is friendly with bankers and businessmen, suggests that Father Eudex use the check as down payment on a good car. The Monsignor is a man of impeccable manners, concerned with the appearance of things, with laying out a walled garden, with the perfection of his salad, and disturbed by the fact that Father Eudex strips off his shirt and helps the laborer spade up the garden, and that he uses the wrong fork at dinner. Quite clearly the Monsignor represents to Powers a modern version of the secularized church, Father Eudex, the traditional and, in this story, powerless Christian virtues. At the end of the story, Father Eudex, who has considered sending the check back to the company or giving it to the strikers’ fund, merely tears it up and flushes it down the toilet, aware that every other priest in town will find some “good” use for it. True goodness in Powers’s stories tends to be helpless in the face of such worldiness. “The Valiant Woman” • In “The Valiant Woman” the same issue is raised in the conflict between a priest and his housekeeper. The occasion in this story is the priest’s fifty-ninth birthday celebration, a dinner from which his one remaining friend and fellow priest is driven by the insistent and boorish presence of the housekeeper. The theological and moral issue is dramatized by the priest’s dilemma: According to church law he can rid himself of the housekeeper, but he can only do so by violating the spirit of Christian charity. The housekeeper, being totally unconscious of the moral implications of her acts, naturally has the advantage. Like the wily mosquito who bites the priest, her acts are of the flesh only, while his, being conscious and intellectual, are of the will. The priest cannot bring himself to fire her, and so in a helpless rage at being bitten by a mosquito (after having been, in effect, stung by the housekeeper), he wildly swings a rolled up newspaper at the mosquito and knocks over and breaks a bust of Saint Joseph. When summarized, Powers’s stories sound forbidding, when, in fact, they are— despite the underlying seriousness—delightfully humorous. About the housekeeper in “The Valiant Woman,” for instance, Powers has the priest think: [She] was clean. And though she cooked poorly, could not play the organ, would not take up the collection in an emergency and went to card parties, and told all— even so, she was clean. She washed everything. Sometimes her underwear hung down beneath her dress like a paratrooper’s pants, but it and everything she touched was clean. She washed constantly. She was clean.

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Not all of Powers’s stories have been about priests. Four of those in his first collection deal with racial and religious prejudice; three are about blacks (“The Trouble,” about a race riot, “He Don’t Plant Cotton,” in which black entertainers in a northern nightclub are badgered by a visitor from Mississippi and quit their jobs, and “The Eye,” about a lynching of an innocent black), and one about anti-Semitism (“Renner”). Two stories from The Presence of Grace are also not explicitly religious: “The Poor Thing” and “Blue Island.” Even these apparently secular stories arise out of the same moral concern that may be seen more clearly in the overtly religious ones. “The Poor Thing” • In “The Poor Thing” a disabled woman, Dolly, who goes through the motions of being religious, is revealed as a pious hypocrite when she slyly exploits an elderly spinster, forcing her to serve for little pay as her constant companion. The elderly woman had been talked into accepting the position in the first place and then, when she tried to leave, was falsely accused by Dolly of having stolen from her. The woman then has the choice of either returning to Dolly or having her reputation at the employment office ruined. “Blue Island” • In “Blue Island” the oppressor is a woman who sells pots and pans by arranging “coffees” in other women’s houses and then arriving to “demonstrate” her wares. Under the guise of neighborly concern for a young woman who has recently moved into the neighborhood and is unsure of herself (and ashamed of her origins), she persuades the young woman to have a coffee to which all of the important neighbor women are invited; then the saleswoman arrives with her wares, and the young woman, the victim, stricken by the deception practiced on her and on the neighbors she has tried to cultivate, rushes to her bedroom and weeps, while downstairs the neighbor women file out, leaving her alone with her oppressor. In both “The Poor Thing” and “Blue Island,” Powers also shows that the victims participate in their victimization, the spinster through her pride and the young woman in “Blue Island” by denying her past and attempting to be something she is not. “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” • Powers’s best stories are undoubtedly those that bring the moral and religious issue directly into the main action. The story still most widely admired is the one written when Powers was twenty-five that established his early reputation as a master of the short story: “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does.” The popularity of this story may result not only from the high level of its art but also from the way it deals so gently with the issues and creates in Father Didymus and in the simple Friar Titus two appealing characters. Indeed, one of Powers’s major achievements is his ability in many of his stories to create characters with the vividness and complexity one expects only from the longer novel. For this reason, if for no other, the stories of J. F. Powers will continue to engage the attention of discriminating readers. W. J. Stuckey Other major works novels: Morte d’Urban, 1962; Wheat That Springeth Green, 1988.

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Bibliography Evans, Fallon, ed. J. F. Powers. St. Louis: Herder, 1968. Collection of essays and appreciations emphasizing the Catholic context of Powers’s fiction. Among the contributors are Hayden Carruth, W. H. Gass (whose essay “Bingo Game at the Foot of the Cross” is a classic), Thomas Merton, and John Sisk. Also includes an interview with Powers and a bibliography. Gussow, Mel. “J. F. Powers, 81, Dies.” The New York Times, June 17, 1999, p. C23. In this tribute to Powers, Gussow traces his literary career, commenting on his first important story, “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” and his best-known collection, Prince of Darkness, and Other Stories, noting his frequent focus on priests. Hagopian, John V. J. F. Powers. New York: Twayne, 1968. The first book-length study of Powers, this overview comprises a biographical sketch and a survey of Powers’s work through Morte d’Urban. Gives extensive attention to Powers’s stories. Includes a useful bibliography. Long, J. V. “Clerical Character(s).” Commonweal, May 8, 1998, 11-14. Long offers a retrospective analysis of the leading characters in Morte d’Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green and the sacred-versus-secular issues confronting them. It is an interesting look back in the light of changes in American Catholicism since the 1950’s. McCarthy, Colman. “The Craft of J. F. Powers.” The Washington Post, June 12, 1993, p. A21. A brief tribute to Powers, commenting on his teaching and fiction, and recounting an interview, in which Powers laments the fact that college students do not read any more. McInerny, Dennis Q., and William Hoffman. “J. F. Powers.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Powers’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Powers: “The Forks” (vol. 3); “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” (vol. 4); “The Old Bird: A Love Story” (vol. 5); “Prince of Darkness” (vol. 6); and “The Valiant Woman” (vol. 8). Meyers, Jeffrey. “J. F. Powers: Uncollected Stories, Essays, and Interviews, 1943-1979.” Bulletin of Bibliography 44 (March, 1987): 38-39. Because Powers has published relatively little in his long career, it is particularly useful to have a list of his uncollected stories. The essays and interviews listed here provide valuable background. Powers, J. F. “The Alphabet God Uses.” Interview by Anthony Schmitz. Minnesota Monthly 22 (December, 1988): 34-39. At the time of this interview, occasioned by the publication of Powers’s novel Wheat That Springeth Green, Schmitz himself had just published his first novel, which also deals with the Catholic clergy. He makes an ideal interviewer, and his conversation with Powers provides an excellent introduction to the man and his works. Powers, Katherine A. “Reflections of J. F. Powers: Author, Father, Clear-Eyed Observer.” The Boston Globe, July 18, 1999, p. K4. A reminiscence of Powers by his daughter; discusses the writers who most influenced Powers, particularly his admiration for Evelyn Waugh, and comments on his writing and reading habits.

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V. S. Pritchett Pritchett, V. S.

Born: Ipswich, England; December 16, 1900 Died: London, England; March 20, 1997 Principal short fiction • The Spanish Virgin, and Other Stories, 1930; You Make Your Own Life, and Other Stories, 1938; It May Never Happen, and Other Stories, 1945; Collected Stories, 1956; The Sailor, the Sense of Humour, and Other Stories, 1956 (also known as The Saint, and Other Stories, 1966); When My Girl Comes Home, 1961; The Key to My Heart, 1963; Blind Love, and Other Stories, 1969; The Camberwell Beauty, and Other Stories, 1974; Selected Stories, 1978; The Fly in the Ointment, 1978; On the Edge of the Cliff, 1979; Collected Stories, 1982; More Collected Stories, 1983; A Careless Widow, and Other Stories, 1989; Complete Collected Stories, 1990. Other literary forms • V. S. Pritchett’s sixty-year career as a writer, apart from his many short stories, produced several novels (not well received), two autobiographies (A Cab at the Door, 1968, and Midnight Oil, 1972), several travel books (the noteworthy ones including The Spanish Temper, 1954, and The Offensive Traveller, 1964), volumes of literary criticism, literary biographies (George Meredith and English Comedy, 1970; Balzac, 1973; The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev, 1977), essays (among them New York Proclaimed, 1965, and The Working Novelist, 1965), and journalistic pieces from France, Spain, Ireland, and the United States that remain in the literary canon, so well are they written. Achievements • In his long and distinguished career, V. S. Pritchett, who preferred the abbreviation V. S. P., produced an impressive number of books in all genres— from novels and short stories, on which rests his fame, to literary criticism, travel books, and journalistic pieces written for The Christian Science Monitor when he covered Ireland, Spain, and France. His most successful genre was the short story, which resulted from his razor-sharp characterizations of all classes, both in England and on the Continent, his focus on the moment of epiphany, his graceful writing, and his ironic, bittersweet wit. Pritchett has the uncanny ability to select a commonplace moment and through imagery, wit, and irony lift it to a transfiguration. He focuses on the foibles of all people without malice, anger, or sentimentality but rather with humor, gentleness, and understanding. In his preface to Collected Stories, Pritchett states that although some people believe that the short story has lost some of its popularity, he does not think so: “[T]his is not my experience; thousands of addicts still delight in it because it is above all memorable and is not simply read, but re-read again and again. It is the glancing form of fiction that seems to be right for the nervousness and restlessness of contemporary life.” Biography • Victor Sawden Pritchett was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, of middleclass parents. His father, Walter, a Yorkshireman, espoused a strict Congregationalism. He married Beatrice of London, whom he had met when both worked in a draper’s shop. Enthralled by wild business schemes, Walter often left his family for months as he pursued dreams that shattered and left the family destitute, forcing it

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into innumerable moves and frequent sharing of flats with relatives. Often a traveling salesman, Pritchett’s father, despite his long absences, caused the family unmitigated misery when he returned. Pritchett’s dictatorial father is reflected in many of his stories and novTO VIEW IMAGE, els, and Pritchett is completely frank PLEASE SEE in his autobiography about his father’s brutality. PRINT EDITION Most remarkable, Pritchett received OF THIS BOOK. only the barest of formal training at Alleyn’s Grammar School, which he left when he was only sixteen to enter the leather trade. Clever with languages, he soon showed proficiency in French. He read omnivorously. In his stories, he reflects a cerebral ability, perceptiveness, and imagism. Despite his lack of formal © Nancy Crampton training in literature, he is considered to be one of the best writers of the short story in England. In 1975, he was knighted as Sir Victor for his contributions to literature. After working in the leather trade for several years as a tanner, he left for a twoyear interlude in Paris. Those years as a tanner were fruitful, he once declared, for he encountered all classes of people in England, a factor noted in his short stories, depicting the monied aristocrats and the working classes, together with the middle classes that he fixes in amber. In Paris, he worked in a photography shop as clerk and letter writer but soon wearied of the routines and determined to become a writer. His connection with The Christian Science Monitor became the key transitional phase, for he wrote and published for this newspaper a series of articles. When there was no longer a need for these articles written in Paris, The Christian Science Monitor sent him to Ireland, where the civil war raged. Pritchett soaked up experiences from his wide travels as he journeyed from Dublin to Cork, Limerick, and Enniskillen. A year later the newspaper editors informed him that they needed him in Spain, and he left for Iberia with Evelyn Maude Vigors, whom he married at the beginning of 1924. There are virtually no details about his first wife, except that she was an actor. Their marriage turned out not to be a happy one; the couple was divorced in 1936, and during that same year, Pritchett married Dorothy Roberts. His wife continued to assist him in his literary work, and he has invariably dedicated his work to her, one inscription reading “For Dorothy—always.” The years in Spain were productive, with Pritchett writing novels, short stories, travel books, and journalistic pieces. While there, he learned Spanish easily and immersed himself in its literature, especially being influenced by Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, whose philosophic themes often concern the intensity of living near the jaws of death, and by Pío Baroja, whose books often focus on atheism and pessimism. Pritchett especially was influenced by Baroja’s empathy for character. After two years in Spain, Pritchett visited Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, the United States, and Canada, travels that further shaped his contours of place and people. During the 1930’s, his

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writing approached the luminous. In the second volume of his autobiography, Midnight Oil, Pritchett wrote to this point: If I began to write better it was for two reasons: in my thirties I had found my contemporaries and had fallen happily and deeply in love. There is, I am sure, a direct connection between passionate love and the firing of the creative power of the mind. Critics agree that Pritchett reached a high level of achievement in the short story in the 1930’s. He continued writing on a high level until all was interrupted, as it was for many other writers, by the onset of World War II, during which he served in the Ministry of Information. Pritchett became literary editor of New Statesman in 1945, resigning this position in 1949 to become its director from 1951 to 1978. Along the way, he had been given lectureships at Princeton University (1953, Christian Gauss Lecturer) and the University of California at Berkeley (1962, Beckman Professor), and he was appointed as writer-in-residence at Smith College in 1966. Brandeis University, Columbia University, and the University of Cambridge also invited him to teach. Honors poured on Pritchett. He was elected fellow by the Royal Society of Literature, receiving a C.B.E. in 1969. Two years later he was elected president of the British PEN and was made honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1974, he was installed as international president of PEN for two years. One of his greatest honors came from Queen Elizabeth as she received him into knighthood in 1975 for his services to literature. Also, Pritchett through the years received academic honors from several universities in the Western world, including honorary D.Litt. degrees from Leeds (1972) and Columbia Universities (1978). Pritchett continued to contribute to journals in the United States and Europe and England. Not wishing to rest on his innumerable laurels, this grand master of the short story continued to write and to select stories for his collections. By many, he is thought to be a writer’s writer. He died on March 20, 1997, at the age of ninety-six, in London. Analysis • V. S. Pritchett writes in Midnight Oil, I have rarely been interested in what are called “characters,” i.e., eccentrics; reviewers are mistaken in saying I am. They misread me. I am interested in the revelations of nature and (rather in Ibsen’s fashion) of exposing the illusions or received ideas by which they live or protect their dignity. An approach to the short stories reveals that Pritchett is projecting comic incongruities. He captures the moment of revelation when his men and women recognize an awareness of their plight. His panoply of people ranges from sailors, divers, clerks, blind men, and shopgirls to piano accompanists, wastrels, and the penurious wealthy. Pritchett concentrates on selected details with tart wit and irony in dialogue that characterizes those who people his short stories. Two highly discrete characters often interrelate to their despair or to their joy. With such irony, the reader may conclude that in reading a Pritchett story, nothing is but what is not. One of the earliest collections of short stories by Pritchett, You Make Your Own Life, and Other Stories, already reflects the mature touch of the writer. Although showing some slight inconsistency, the tales attest variety in narrative, theme, tone, and style. Some stories are stark and Kafkaesque, especially “The Two Brothers,” in which a

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nightmarish suicide is the central concern. The longest story in this group is “Handsome Is as Handsome Does,” set on the French Mediterranean. “Handsome Is as Handsome Does” • The focus is on Mr. and Mrs. Coram, an English couple, both of whom are unusually ugly. Their ugliness is their only similarity. He is rude, inarticulate, and slow-witted, and he quarrels with everyone. He is especially rude to M. Pierre, the proprietor of the hotel, insulting him in English which he does not understand. Mrs. Coram is left to play the role of diplomat and apologist. Soon after the English couple’s arrival, Alex, whose forebears are flung throughout Europe, also vacations at the inn. He is young and handsome and delights in swimming. Childless, Mrs. Coram views Alex as the son she might have had. Yet one day, she attempts to seduce him while he watches unfeelingly, and she, scorned, feels ridiculous. One day, the Corams, Alex, and M. Pierre go to a deserted beach that is known for its dangerous undertow. M. Pierre dives in and before long, it is apparent to all that he is drowning. Alex rescues him while Mr. Coram looks on, never even thinking of saving the innkeeper. His wife is silently furious at him. Later, as M. Pierre brags at the hotel about his narrow escape, Mrs. Coram blandly tells some recent English arrivals that her husband saved M. Pierre’s life. Clearly, the Corams are loathsome people, but through Pritchett’s portrayal of them as wounded, frustrated, and vindictive, even grotesque, they emerge as human beings, capable of eliciting the reader’s empathy. Alex, protected by his “oily” youth, remains the catalyst, rather neutral and asexual. The aging couple, in Pritchett’s lightly satirical portraiture, in the end claim the reader’s sympathy. “Sense of Humour” • Another well-known and often-quoted story in this collection is “Sense of Humour.” Arthur Humphrey, a traveling salesman, is the narrator. On one of his trips, he meets Muriel MacFarlane, who is dating a local boy, Colin Mitchell, who always rides a motorcycle. Colin is obsessively in love with Muriel. Arthur courts Muriel, who stops dating Colin. Nevertheless, the motorcyclist compulsively follows the couple wherever they go. Muriel says that she is Irish, and she has a sense of humor. Yet she never exhibits this so-called Irish trait. When Colin, who is also an auto mechanic, announces that he cannot repair Humphrey’s car and thereby hopes to ruin the couple’s plan, they take the train to Humphrey’s parents’ house. Shortly after their arrival, Muriel receives a call from the police: Colin has been killed in a motorcycle crash nearby. That night, Muriel is overwhelmed with grief for Colin; Arthur begins to comfort her, and they eventually, for the first time, have sex. All the while, Muriel is crying out Colin’s name. To save Colin’s family the expense, Colin’s body is returned to his family in a hearse belonging to Arthur’s father. Both Muriel and the obtuse Arthur feel like royalty when the passing drivers and pedestrians doff their hats in respect. Arthur says, “I was proud of her, I was proud of Colin, and I was proud of myself and after what happened, I mean on the last two nights, it was like a wedding.” Colin is following them for the last time. When Arthur asks Muriel why she stopped seeing Colin, she answers that he never had a sense of humor. Critics believe that Pritchett in this story exerts complete control in keeping the reader on tenterhooks between crying and guffawing. The narrator, like the reader, never concludes whether Muriel is marrying Arthur for his money or for love or whether she loves Colin or Arthur, in the final analysis. The story underscores one of Pritchett’s favorite techniques: peeling away at the character with grim irony and even then not providing enough details to see the character’s inner self. As Pritchett

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declared, however, his interest is in the “happening,” not in overt characterization. Yet, in death, Colin after all does seem to win his love. Still, in the conclusion, it appears that all three people have been deluded. Some of the grim gallows humor in this story reminds the reader of Thomas Hardy, whom Pritchett acknowledged as an important influence. “When My Girl Comes Home” • More than a decade after the end of World War II, When My Girl Comes Home was published. The mature style of Pritchett is readily discernible in this collection. The stories become somewhat more complex and difficult in morality, in situations, and in the greater number of characters. The moral ambiguities are many. The title story, “When My Girl Comes Home,” is Pritchett’s favorite short story. Although World War II is over, the bankruptcy of the war ricochets on many levels. The “girl” coming home is Hilda Johnson, for whom her mother has been working and scrimping to save money. Residents of Hincham Street, where Mrs. Johnson lives, had for two years implored the bureaucracies of the world to obtain news about the whereabouts and the condition of Hilda, who was believed to be wasting away in a Japanese concentration camp. Now Hilda has come home, not pale and wan but sleek and relaxed. Only gradually does the story emerge, but never completely. In fact, because Hilda’s second husband was a Japanese officer, she survived the war comfortably. She does not need the money that her mother saved from years of sewing. En route home, Hilda met two men, one of whom, Gloster, a writer, wished to write Hilda’s story. The narrator observes, when he first sees her, that her face was vacant and plain. It was as vacant as a stone that has been smoothed for centuries in the sand of some hot country. It was the face of someone to whom nothing had happened; or, perhaps, so much had happened to her that each event wiped out what had happened before. I was disturbed by something in her—the lack of history, I think. We were worm-eaten by it. Hilda sleeps with her mother in a tiny bedroom while she waits for help from Gloster, who never appears. She seems to become involved with a real prisoner of the Japanese, Bill Williams, who survived through the war, as he terms it, with “a bit of trade.” Some of the neighbors begin to understand that Hilda, too, survived by trading as well. At one point in the tale, Hilda begs her friends to save her from Bill Williams, and she stays away from her apartment that night. When she returns to her flat, she discovers that Bill Williams has robbed her flat completely and has disappeared. Soon after, Hilda leaves London and surfaces only in a photograph with her two boyfriends, Gloster and someone else. Gloster does publish a book, not about Hilda’s war experiences but about the people on Hincham Street. The story’s subtext may suggest that it might have been better for Hincham Street had the “girl” not come home, for then they would have retained their illusions about her. The illusion versus reality theme is one often used by Pritchett. Mrs. Johnson, now dead, seemed to have kept the street together in a kind of moral order, now destroyed on Hincham Street. After her death, Hilda and Bill were involved in seamy happenings. In the Hincham Street pubs, the war is discussed but only fitfully and inconclusively because “sooner or later, it came to a closed door in everybody’s conscience.” Hilda and Bill, surviving the Japanese camps through moral bankruptcy, form a mirror image of those Englishman who became black marketers, malingerers, ration thieves, and hoodlums. Moral codes were shattered by Englishmen—whether

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at home or abroad. Pritchett is deliberately murky in theme and relationships, but the story suggests that just as the Japanese disturbed the civil and moral order thousands of miles away, the disruption caused a moral decay at home at the same time that the war was fought to reestablish the world order. Perhaps Pritchett is suggesting that England during the war and after was a microcosm. Despite the disillusionment that touches the entire street and the gravity of the theme, Pritchett never fails to use the restorative of humor and subtle satire, watchwords of the writer. At the end of the 1960’s, Blind Love, and Other Stories appeared. This collection reflects Pritchett’s admiration of Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev, whose bittersweet irony enfolds the characters as they experience, at the end, self-revelation. In his later years, Pritchett continued to grow as an artist in many ways. The story lines are compelling, and no matter what the theme, Pritchett’s wit provides humor and pathos. The transition between time present and time past is accomplished with laserbeam precision. “The Skeleton” • “The Skeleton,” concerning George Clark, fleshes out a skinny man who has never loved. Cantankerous, selfish, perfectionistic, and thoroughly narcissistic, George is painted to perfection with satirical brushes. His encounter with Gloria Archer, whom George accuses of corrupting his favorite painter, transforms him. The comic becomes almost caricature and is flawless. Pritchett shows him guarding his whiskey bottle like a Holy Grail, but his valet finds it mistakenly left on the table, drinks a bit, and then dilutes the bottle with water. Dean R. Baldwin, who wrote the excellent Twayne biography of Pritchett, wrote, “George is the skeleton, until Gloria puts a bit of meat on his emotional bare bones.” “Blind Love” • Like many of Pritchett’s best stories used as title stories, “Blind Love” is a masterful portrait of two people who are scarred by nature but who succumb to pride before their fall. Mr. Armitage, a wealthy lawyer living in the country and blind for twenty years, has been divorced because of his affliction. He interviews Mrs. Johnson by feeling her face and hands, and he hires her as a secretary/housekeeper. As Thomas Gray would say, nothing disturbed the even tenor of their ways for a few years. One day, Armitage, walking in his garden, loses his balance when a dog chases a rabbit, and he falls into his pool. Mrs. Johnson sees the fall but before she can rush out to help him, he is rescued. When Mrs. Johnson tries to help him change his clothes in his room, she breaks the cardinal rule of never changing the physical order of things because Armitage has memorized the place for every item. He screams at her to get out and leave him alone. This verbal attack stimulates a flashback that reveals that Mrs. Johnson had heard “almost exactly those words, before. Her husband had said them. A week after the wedding.” She recalls that he was shocked and disgusted at a great spreading ragged liver-coloured island of skin which spread under the tape of her slip and crossed her breast and seemed to end in a curdle of skin below it. She was stamped with an ineradicable bloody insult. After Armitage’s rudeness, Mrs. Johnson decides to leave, for, in addition to those scorching words, she disliked the country. Armitage apologizes and begs her to stay. Soon thereafter, he gropes toward her and kisses her, and they make love. Mrs. Johnson, initially motivated by the pleasure of revenge against her husband, begins in time to enjoy Armitage’s lovemaking. Religion is woven into the story when Armitage

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mocks Mrs. Johnson for going to church, and at one time, he insists that she use spittle and dirt on his eyes to mock a miracle of Christ: “Do as I tell you. It’s what your Jesus Christ did when he cured the blind man.” Armitage then goes to Mr. Smith, an expensive faith healer, actually a charlatan manqué, to regain his sight. Once, Mrs. Johnson accompanies him. As she leaves, Armitage hears her telling Smith that she loves Armitage as he is. Earlier, Smith appeared when Mrs. Johnson had been sunbathing nude at the pool. After wondering whether he saw her, Mrs. Johnson concludes that he did not. When Armitage later asks her whether Smith had seen her at the pool, Mrs. Johnson explodes and says that Smith saw everything. Unzipping her dress, she cries, “You can’t see it, you silly fool. The whole bloody Hebrides, the whole plate of liver.” Later, when Mrs. Johnson for some strange reason is found lying face down in the pool, she, like Armitage earlier, is rescued. Both have had their “fall.” This parallel happening seems to be a moment of epiphany, and the story ends with the couple living in Italy, where Mrs. Johnson describes churches and gallery pictures to her “perhaps” husband. In the last paragraph, Mrs. Johnson proclaims her love for her husband as she eyes the lovely Italian square below. She says that she feels “gaudy,” leaving the reader wrestling over her selection of the word. Long after the reading, the poignancy of the story resonates. This title story, an intensely poignant one, forthright and absorbing, shows the handicaps bringing people together and almost tearing them apart. They are both anointed by their “fall” from pride, and in their moment of epiphany, they see their need of each other and the love accompanying the need. Through each other and by self-analysis, they transcend their limitations and experience the joy of seeing themselves anew. Again, this revelatory process is a mainstay of Pritchett. “The Diver” • Five years later, Pritchett continued his consistent stream of productivity by publishing The Camberwell Beauty, and Other Stories. This volume particularly focuses on the eccentric foibles of the middle class. “The Diver,” set in Paris, is an enjoyable tale of a diver who is a metaphor for sexual encounters. This diver is sent to retrieve bundles of leather goods that a Dutch ship accidentally spews into the Seine. A young clerk for the leather tannery is assigned to count the sodden bales. Quite by chance, he himself falls into the Seine and is fished out by the onlookers. His boss takes him across the street to a bar and expects the lad to pay for his own brandy. Mme Chamson, feeling sorry for the youth, takes him to her shop for a change of clothing. As he disrobes, she notices his inflamed member and becomes furious at his disrespect. A few minutes later, she calls him into her bedroom, where he finds her nude, and she initiates a sexual encounter. The youth, yearning to become a writer, feels inarticulate. This encounter with Mme Chamson, his first sexual experience, has released his creative wellsprings. A simple tale, “The Diver” is rib-tickling in its theme of innocence lost and creativity gained. Pritchett elsewhere has written of the link between sexuality and creativity. “The Camberwell Beauty” • Again, the long title story, “The Camberwell Beauty,” is one of the most arresting. The ambience is that of the antique dealers of London, a cosmos of its own. Each antique dealer has his own specialty, and “within that specialty there is one object he broods on from one year to the next, most of his life; the thing a man would commit murder to get his hands on if he had the nerve.” The narrator is a former antique dealer. A current art dealer, Pliny, an elderly

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man, has married a beautiful woman, and the narrator is determined to get hold of the Camberwell beauty, who is essentially a work of art. Once more, Pritchett writes of illusion, this time using the art world and the gulf between the greed of the dealers and the loveliness of the art and the artifacts. Isabel, the Camberwell beauty, is exploited by being held captive, like any objet d’art. The narrator fails in his attempt at seduction, which might have replicated another sexual exploitation. Isabel insists that Pliny is a good lover, but Pritchett strongly suggests that there is no intimacy between them. She, like William Blake’s Thel, seems not to descend into generation (or sexuality). Remaining under the illusion that she is safe and protected in her innocence, and content to be in stasis and in asexuality, she never does reach a moment of self-awareness. She might just as well have been framed and hung on a wall. “The Accompanist” • The last collection of original stories, On the Edge of the Cliff, was published in 1979, and it contains stories wrought with a heightened sensibility and subtlety. The humor and technical brilliance are very much in evidence. Marital infidelity is the theme of several tales, especially in “The Fig Tree” and “A Family Man.” A well-carved cameo, “The Accompanist” also portrays an unfaithful mate. William, the narrator, on leave from his Singapore job, is having an affair with Joyce, a piano accompanist, married to Bertie, impotent but particularly likable by a circle of friends who gather for dinner in his flat. The furniture, Victorian monstrosity, obsesses Bertie, since it is a link to the past. For undisclosed reasons, the furniture may almost affirm his asexuality. Critics invariably remark on a Henry James-like subtlety of sensitivity and particularity of detail. This texture surfaces when Bertie, accompanied by his wife, sings a French bawdy song about a bride who was murdered on her wedding night. Despite Bertie’s problems with sex, he seems not to be aware of the irony in singing this song and in being anchored in the protected illusion of bygone Victorian days. His wife, Joyce, may emerge from the decadence of her marriage if, as the narrator says at the end, she will hear her tune: “And if she heard it, the bones in her legs, arms, her fingers, would wake up and she would be out of breath at my door without knowing it.” William is saying that if she arrives out of a sexual impulse, there will be hope for her liberation from Bertie and from the historical frost symbolized by the Victorian furnishings. “On the Edge of the Cliff” • The centerpiece story, “On the Edge of the Cliff,” unravels the tale of a May-December liaison. Harry, a botanist in his seventies, and Rowena, an artist and twenty-five, have a happy affair in his house on the edge of a cliff. Driving down to a nearby village fair, they engage in role playing. The omniscient narrator declares, “There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game.” The game stimulates the love affair. At the fair, Harry meets Daisy Pyke, who was a former mistress and who has a young man in tow, mistakenly thought by Harry and Rowena to be her son but actually her lover. Daisy subsequently visits Harry, not to resume any romance but to beg Harry to keep the two young people apart so that her own love life will not be jeopardized. She cries, “I mean it, Harry. I know what would happen and so do you and I don’t want to see it happen.” Ironically, both Harry and Rowena rarely venture into society. When Harry denies that Rowena is being kept prisoner, Daisy shrewdly insists, “You mean you are the prisoner. That is it! So am I!” Harry replies, “Love is always like that. I live only for her.” In this tale, as in many of Pritchett’s stories, there are contrasting sets of people who are

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often foils for each other. Both Daisy and Rowena are jealous of their lovers and want their May-December relationships to continue. Pritchett is undoubtedly concerned with the aging process and the capacity to sustain love. Both Daisy and Harry find their capacity to love undiminished with age. Yet, although their love affairs are alive, Pritchett’s metaphor of the house on the cliff may suggest that the lovers are aware of inherent dangers because of the differences in ages. At the same time, Pritchett may be implying that even with no age differences between lovers, there is an element of risk. Illusion in this and many other of Pritchett’s tales plays an important role. As Harry and Daisy discuss their younger lovers, illusion is implicit. Yet, in their confronting the reality of age differences, they become intensely aware of their predicament, and it is at this moment that they experience a Pritchett epiphany. This realization will help them to savor the time spent on the edge of the cliff. In his short fiction, Pritchett fashions a host of unique characters, uses witty and humorous dialogue, employs a variety of “happenings,” and leaves readers with the sense that they themselves have been mocked, not with bitterness or caustic wit but with gentleness and love. Julia B. Boken Other major works novels: Claire Drummer, 1929; Shirley Sanz, 1932 (also known as Elopement into Exile); Nothing Like Leather, 1935; Dead Man Leading, 1937; Mr. Beluncle, 1951. miscellaneous: The Pritchett Century, 1997. nonfiction: Marching Spain, 1928; In My Good Books, 1942; The Living Novel and Later Appreciations, 1946; Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett, 1948; Books in General, 1953; The Spanish Temper, 1954; London Perceived, 1962; The Offensive Traveller, 1964 (also known as Foreign Faces); New York Proclaimed, 1965; Shakespeare: The Comprehensive Soul, 1965; The Working Novelist, 1965; Dublin: A Portrait, 1967; A Cab at the Door, 1968; George Meredith and English Comedy, 1970; Midnight Oil, 1972; Balzac: A Biography, 1973; The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev, 1977; The Myth Makers: Literary Essays, 1979; The Tale Bearers: Literary Essays, 1980; The Other Side of the Frontier: A V. S. Pritchett Reader, 1984; A Man of Letters, 1985; Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, 1988; Lasting Impressions, 1990; The Complete Essays, 1991; Balzac, 1992. Bibliography Angell, Roger. “Marching Life.” The New Yorker 73 (December 22-29, 1997): 126-134. In this biographical sketch, Angell contends that although Pritchett was called First Man of Letters, the title never fit properly because he was neither literary nor stylist, and he liked to say he was a hack long before he was a critic. Baldwin, Dean. V. S. Pritchett. Boston: Twayne, 1987. This slim book of 133 pages contains a superb short biography of Pritchett, followed by a clear-cut analysis of his novels, short stories, and nonfiction. One caution is to be noted: Baldwin says there is no article analyzing any of Pritchett’s short stories, yet the Journal of the Short Story in English, an excellent journal published in Angers, France, devoted an entire volume to Pritchett. It may be that Baldwin’s book was already in the process of publication when the journal issue was completed. Johnson, Anne Janette. “V(ictor) S(awdon) Pritchett.” In Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, edited by James G. Lesniak. Vol. 31. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990.

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This article includes general material on Pritchett’s life and work, with a wide range of critical comments by magazines and literary journals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The New Republic. Contains a listing of Pritchett’s writings divided into genres and biographical and critical sources, especially those articles that appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. Geared for the general reader, with the variety of quotes appealing to a specialist. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Pritchett: “The Camberwell Beauty” (vol. 1), “It May Never Happen” (vol. 4), “Many Are Disappointed” (vol. 5), and “The Saint” and “Sense of Humour” (vol. 6). Oumhani, Cecile. “Water in V. S. Pritchett’s Art of Revealing.” Journal of the Short Story in English 6 (1986): 75-91. Oumhani probes the immersion motif in the pattern of water imagery in Pritchett’s short stories, especially in “On the Edge of a Cliff,” “The Diver,” “The Saint,” and “Handsome Is as Handsome Does.” Oumhani believes that Pritchett’s views about sensuality can be intuited from the stories she analyzes. Pritchett, V. S. “An Interview with V. S. Pritchett.” Interview by Ben Forkner and Philippe Sejourne. Journal of the Short Story in English 6 (1986): 11-38. Pritchett in this interview reveals a number of salient details about writing in general and the influences of people like H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. He talks at length about the Irish predilection for storytelling and the Irish ideas about morality and the art of concealment. Pritchett reveals his penchant for the ironic and pays homage to Anton Chekhov, one of his models. He believes that the comic is really a facet of the poetic. The interview is written in a question-answer style and is a straightforward record of Pritchett’s views. Stinson, John J. V. S. Pritchett: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Introduction to Pritchett’s short fiction. Suggests that Pritchett’s stories have been largely ignored by critics because they do not have the symbolic image pattern favored by formalist critics. Provides interpretations of a number of Pritchett’s stories. Includes Pritchett’s own comments on writers who have influenced him, as well as essays on his short fiction by Eudora Welty and William Trevor. Theroux, Paul. “V. S. Pritchett.” The New York Times Book Review 102 (May 25, 1997): 27. A biographical tribute, claiming that Pritchett was probably the last man who could be called a man of letters; notes that Pritchett worked slowly and with confidence. Treglown, Jeremy. V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life. New York: Random House, 2004. Admiring and engaging biography of Pritchett that examines both the breadth of Pritchett’s literary production and the highs and lows of his personal life. Tunick, Linda F. “V. S. Pritchett.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Pritchett’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction.

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E. Annie Proulx Proulx, E. Annie

Born: Norwich, Connecticut; August 22, 1935 Principal short fiction • Heart Songs, and Other Stories, 1988; Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999; Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, 2004. Other literary forms • E. Annie Proulx has published in many different genres. Early in her career, she was a freelance journalist, writing cookbooks, how-to manuals, and magazine articles on everything from making cider to building fences. During the 1980’s, she published eleven nonfiction books, ranging from Great Grapes! Grow the Best Ever in 1980 to The Gourmet Gardener: Growing Choice Fruits and Vegetables with Spectacular Results in 1987. During the 1990’s, she began publishing long fictional works. Her first novel, Postcards (1992), received good reviews. However, it was the enthusiastic reception of her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), that brought her international fame and popular success. The Pulitzer Prize-winner was made into a successful film in 2001. Her novel Accordion Crimes (1996) did not enjoy the same acclaim. Her fourth novel, That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) is about land swindlers in the Texas Panhandle. Proulx also shared screenwriting credit for the film adapted from her short story “Brokeback Mountain” that won multiple Academy Awards. She later contributed a chapter to Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (2006), which contains Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s complete screenplay. Achievements • For her Postcards, E. Annie Proulx was the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. In 1993, The Shipping News won many awards, including the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Four stories from her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories were selected for the 1998 and 1999 editions of The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. “The Half-Skinned Deer” was selected for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Proulx also shared several awards for the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. Biography • Edna Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1935, the oldest of five daughters. Her father worked his way up in the textile mills to the position of vice president; her mother painted landscapes in watercolors. Because her father was frequently transferred, the family moved several times when she was young. She entered Colby College in the 1950’s but dropped out to, as she says, “experience two terrible marriages, New York City, the Far East, and single-mother-with-two-children poverty.” She returned to school in 1963, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. She entered the graduate program at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), in Montreal, specializing in Renaissance economic history, and finished all the work for the doctoral degree except the dissertation. By this time Proulx had been married and divorced three times and was the mother of three sons. She worked as a freelance journalist from 1975 to 1988, writing books and articles on a wide range of subjects. During the mid-1990’s, Proulx moved from Vermont to Centennial, Wyoming (population 100), where she lives and writes

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in relative isolation. She travels part of the year to Australia and Ireland and across the United States. Analysis • Although E. Annie Proulx’s first collection, Heart Songs, and Other Stories, was relatively conventional in structure and language, her interest in what one of her characters calls the “rural downtrodden” is much in evidence here. The stories, featuring such quaintly named characters as Albro, Eno, and Snipe, take place in rural Vermont and New Hampshire. Without condescension, Proulx describes trailerdwelling men and women who drink, smoke, feud, and fornicate without much introspection or analysis. Close Range: Wyoming Stories • In Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx shifts her milieu to the rural West, where her characters are similarly ragged and rugged, but where, either because of her increased confidence as a writer or because she was inspired by the landscape and the fiercely independent populace, her characters are more compellingly caught in a world that is grittily real and magically mythical at once. Claiming that her stories gainsay the romantic myth of the West, Proulx admires the independence and self-reliance she has found there, noting that the people “fix things and get along without them if they can’t be fixed. They don’t whine.” Place is as important as the people who populate it in Close Range, for the Wyoming landscape is harsh yet beautiful, real yet magical, deadly yet sustaining. In such a world, social props are worthless and folks are thrown back on their most basic instincts, whether they be sexual, survival, or sacred. In such a world, as one character says in “Brokeback Mountain,” “It’s easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.” Proulx’s Wyoming is a heart of darkness both in place and personality. “Brokeback Mountain” • The most remarkable thing about “Brokeback Mountain” is that although it is about a sexual relationship between two men, it cannot be categorized as a homosexual story; it is rather a tragic love story that simply happens to involve two men. The fact that the men are Wyoming cowboys rather than San Francisco urbanites makes Proulx’s success in creating such a convincing and emotionally affecting story all the more wonderful. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are “high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects” who, while working alone at a sheep-herding operation on Brokeback Mountain, abruptly and silently engage in a sexual encounter, after which both immediately insist, “I’m not no queer.” Although the two get married to women and do not see each other for four years, when they meet again, they grab each other and hug in a gruff masculine way, and then, “as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together.” Neither has sex with other men, and both know the danger of their relationship. Twenty years pass, and their infrequent encounters are a combination of sexual passion and personal concern. The story comes to a climax when Jack, who unsuccessfully tries to convince Ennis they can make a life together, is mysteriously killed on the roadside. Although officially it was an accident, Ennis sorrowfully suspects that Jack has been murdered after approaching another man. Although “Brokeback Mountain” ends with Jack a victim of social homophobia, this is not a story about the social plight of the homosexual. The issues Proulx explores here are more basic and primal than that. Told in a straightforward, matter-of-fact style, the story elicits a genuine sympathy for a love that is utterly convincing.

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“The Half-Skinned Steer” • Chosen by writer John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century, this brief piece creates a hallucinatory world of shimmering significance out of common materials. The simple event on which the story is based is a cross-country drive made by Mero, a man in his eighties, to Wyoming for the funeral of his brother. The story alternates between the old man’s encounters on the road, including an accident, and his memories of his father and brother. The central metaphor of the piece is introduced in a story Mero recalls about a man who, while skinning a steer, stops for dinner, leaving the beast half skinned. When he returns, he sees the steer stumbling stiffly away, its head and shoulders raw meat, its staring eyes filled with hate. The man knows that he and his family are doomed. The story ends with Mero getting stuck in a snowstorm a few miles away from his destination and trying to walk back to the main highway. As he struggles through the wind and the drifts, he notices that one of the herd of cattle in the field next to the road has been keeping pace with him, and he realizes that the “half-skinned steer’s red eye had been watching for him all this time.” In its combination of stark realism and folktale myth, “The Half-Skinned Steer” is reminiscent of stories by Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, for Mero’s journey is an archetypal one toward the inevitable destiny of death. “The Mud Below” • Proulx has said that this is her favorite story in Close Range, for “on-the-edge situations” and the rodeo interest her. The title refers to the mud of the rodeo arena, and the main character is twenty-three-year-old Diamond Felts, who, at five foot three, has always been called “Shorty,” “Kid,” “Tiny,” and “Little Guy.” His father left when he was a child, telling him, “You ain’t no kid of mine.” His mother taunts him about his size more than anyone else, always calling him Shorty and telling him he is stupid for wanting to be a bull rider in the rodeo. The force of the story comes from Diamond’s identification with the bulls. The first time he rides one he gets such a feeling of power that he feels as though he were the bull and not the rider; even the fright seems to fulfill a “greedy physical hunger” in him. When one man tells him that the bull is not supposed to be his role model, Diamond says the bull is his partner. The story comes to a climax when Diamond is thrown and suffers a dislocated shoulder. Tormented by the pain, he calls his mother and demands to know who his father is. Getting no answer, Diamond drives away thinking that all of life is a “hard, fast ride that ended in the mud,” but he also feels the euphoric heat of the bull ride, or at least the memory of it, and realizes that if that is all there is, it must be enough. “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” • Like most of the stories in Close Range, “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” is about surviving. As Old Red, a ninety-six-year-old grandfather, says at the end, “The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough, you’d get to sit down.” Picked by Amy Tan to be included in The Best American Short Stories 1999, it is one of the most comic fictions in the collection. A story about a young woman named Ottaline, with a “physique approaching the size of a propane tank,” being wooed by a broken-down John Deere 4030 tractor could hardly be anything else. Ottaline’s only chance for a husband seems to be the semiliterate hired man, Hal Bloom, with whom she has silent sex, that is, until she is first approached by the talking tractor, who calls her “sweetheart, lady-girl.” Tired of the loneliness of listening to cellular phone conversations on a scanner, Ottaline spends more and more time with

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the tractor, gaining confidence until, when made to take on the responsibility of cattle trading by her ill father, she meets Flyby Amendinger, whom she soon marries. The story ends with Ottaline’s father getting killed in a small plane he is flying. The ninety-six-year-old grandfather, who sees how things had to go, has the powerfully uncomplicated final word—that the main thing in life is staying power. Charles E. May With updates by the Editors Other major works anthology: The Best American Short Stories, 1997: Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines, 1997 (with Katrina Kenison). novels: Postcards, 1992; The Shipping News, 1993; Accordion Crimes, 1996; That Old Ace in the Hole, 2002. miscellaneous; Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, 2006 (with Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) nonfiction: Great Grapes! Grow the Best Ever, 1980; Making the Best Apple Cider, 1980; Sweet and Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It, 1980 (also known as Cider: Making, Using, and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider, 1997; with Lew Nichols); “What’ll You Take for It?”: Back to Barter, 1981; Make Your Own Insulated Window Shutters, 1981; The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook: How to Make Everything from Cheese to Custard in Your Own Kitchen, 1982 (with Nichols); Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls, and Drives, 1983; The Gardener’s Journal and Record Book, 1983; The Fine Art of Salad Gardening, 1985; The Gourmet Gardener: Growing Choice Fruits and Vegetables with Spectacular Results, 1987. Bibliography Elder, Richard. “Don’t Fence Me In.” The New York Times, May 23, 1999, p. 8. An extended review of Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Says the strength of the collection is Proulx’s feeling for place and how it affects her characters. Claims Proulx’s extraordinary knowledge of male behavior is most remarkable in “Brokeback Mountain.” Argues that the best story in the collection is “The Mud Below.” Hustak, Alan. “An Uneasy Guest of Honor.” The Montreal Gazette, June 10, 1999, p. D10. An interview-story on the occasion of Proulx’s receiving an honorary degree from her alma mater, Concordia University. Provides biographical information about her education and her literary career. Proulx discusses her years as a freelance journalist, the film production based on The Shipping News, and the relationship of character to place in her fiction. Liss, Barbara. “Wild, Wearying Wyoming.” Review of Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by E. Annie Proulx. The Houston Chronicle, June 20, 1999, p. Z23. Praises the book’s Magical Realism, but suggests that its “downbeat weirdness” will not be to everyone’s taste. Says that “Brokeback Mountain” is the best story, with Proulx pouring a great deal of sympathy on the two young men and their passionate relationship. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Proulx: “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” (vol. 1), and “The Half-Skinned Steer” (vol. 3).

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Rood, Karen L. Understanding Annie Proulx. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Rood provides a biography, introduces the themes and techniques used in Proulx’s fiction, and discusses her early work as a nonfiction writer. Includes an annotated bibliography of writings by and about Proulx. See, Carolyn. “Proulx’s Wild West.” The Washington Post, July 2, 1999, p. C2. See says she is in awe of Close Range, claiming that Proulx has the most amazing combination of things working for her: an exquisite sense of place, a dead-on accurate sense of working class, hard-luck Americans, and a prose style that is the best in English today. Singleton, Janet. “Proulx’s Keen Insights Focus on Life, not Awards.” The Denver Post, June 6, 1999, p. F3. In this interview-based story, Proulx talks about her research, her nomadic lifestyle, and the stories in Close Range: Wyoming Stories; says she writes stories that question the romantic myth of the West. Singleton claims Proulx’s characters may live in God’s country, but they seem godforsaken. Steinbach, Alice. “E. Annie Proulx’s Novel Journey to Literary Celebrity Status.” The Baltimore Sun, May 15, 1994, p. 1K. An interview-based story that reveals Proulx’s lighter side. Provides biographical information about her education, marriages, divorces, and rise to fame. Proulx discusses her love of writing, her male characters, and feminism. Steinberg, Sybil. “E. Annie Proulx: An American Odyssey.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 23 (July, 1996): 57-58. Discusses how Proulx has been inspired by harsh landscapes and her development of Postcards, The Shipping News, and Accordion Crimes through meticulous research. Streitfeld, David. “The Stuff of a Writer.” The Washington Post, November 16, 1993, p. B1. A long, interview-based story on Proulx on the occasion of The Shipping News being nominated for the National Book Award. Provides much insight into Proulx’s life in rural Vermont, her preference for “the rough side of things” and her rugged independence.

896

James Purdy Purdy, James

Born: Fremont, Ohio; July 17, 1923 Principal short fiction • Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, and Other Stories, 1956; Sixtythree: Dream Palace, 1956; Color of Darkness: Eleven Stories and a Novella, 1957; The Candles of Your Eyes, 1985; The Candles of Your Eyes, and Thirteen Other Stories, 1987; Sixty-three: Dream Palace: Selected Stories, 1956-1987, 1991; Moe’s Villa, and Other Stories, 2000. Other literary forms • James Purdy, in more than four decades of literary work, beginning in the 1950’s, has written—besides his short fiction—a number of novels (including Malcolm, published in 1959, and In a Shallow Grave, published in 1976) several collections of poetry, and numerous plays, some of which have been staged in the United States as well as abroad. Achievements • James Purdy has received a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in literature (1958), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships (1958, 1962), and a Ford Foundation grant (1961). On Glory’s Course was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award (1985). He also received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993), and an Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood award for poetry and art (1995). Biography • James Otis Purdy was born near Fremont, Ohio, on July 14, 1923, the son of William and Vera Purdy, and he has told many interviewers that the exact location of his birthplace is now unknown, since the community no longer exists. Purdy’s parents were divorced when he was quite young. He lived, as he once said, with his father for a time in various locations and at other times with his mother and an aunt who had a farm, an experience which he has recalled favorably. Purdy has explained that his ethnic background was that of a very long line of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, but that most of his family is now deceased, as are many of his oldest friends. Purdy’s formal education began with his attendance at the University of Chicago, where he was to drop out during World War II to serve with the U.S. Air Corps. He has indicated that he was not the best of soldiers but that his military service gave him the necessary background for his later novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967). Purdy also attended for a time the University of Puebla, Mexico, and enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago. He taught from 1949 to 1953 at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and later worked as an interpreter in Latin America, France, and Spain. In 1953, however, he gave up other work to pursue a fulltime career as a writer. Although he has been a prolific writer throughout his career, Purdy’s fiction, while enjoying considerable critical success, has not been commercially successful, a fact that Purdy often attributes to a conspiratorial elite in New York that foists more commercial, but less substantive, literature on the American public. Purdy’s early work was rejected by most major American publishing houses,

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and his first fiction was published privately by friends in the United States and later through the help of writers such as Carl Van Vechten and, in Great Britain, Edith Sitwell. Both Purdy’s volumes Sixty-three: Dream Palace and Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, and Other Stories were printed privately in 1956, and in 1957, the novella Sixty-three: Dream Palace appeared with additional stories under the title Color of Darkness, published by Gollancz in London. These early works gained for Purdy a small, devoted following, and his allegorical novel Malcolm followed in 1959. In that work, Malcolm, a beautiful young man, is led by older persons through a wide range of experiences, until he finally dies of alcoholism and sexual hyperesthesia. In a way, Malcolm is a forerunner of many Purdy characters, whose Library of Congress driven states of being take them ultimately to disaster. (Malcolm was later adapted to play form by Edward Albee, an admirer of Purdy’s work. The 1966 New York production, however, was not successful.) Two Purdy novels of the 1960’s expanded the author’s literary audience: The Nephew (1960) explores small-town life in the American Midwest and centers on the attempt of an aunt to learn more about her nephew (killed in the Korean War) than she had known about him in his lifetime, and Cabot Wright Begins (1964) is a satirical attack on the totally materialistic American culture of consumers and competitors, where all love is either suppressed or commercialized. Cabot Wright Begins relates the comic adventures of a Wall Street broker-rapist who manages to seduce 366 women. The novel was sold to motion-picture firms, but the film version was never made. The inability of people to deal with their inner desires—a major theme of Purdy’s fiction—and the resultant violence provoked by that inability characterize Purdy’s next novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works. Another recurring Purdy theme is that of the self-destructive, cannibalistic American family, in which parents refuse to let go of their children and give them an independent life of their own. That self-destructive family theme and his earlier motif—the search for meaning in an unknown past—mark his trilogy of novels Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys, the first volume of which, Jeremy’s Version, appeared in 1970 to considerable critical acclaim. The second and third volumes of the trio of novels, however, The House of the Solitary Maggot (1974) and Mourners Below (1981), received little critical notice. Purdy once said that parts of the trilogy had come from stories that his grandmother had related to him as a child at a time when he was living with her. Perhaps the most bizarre of Purdy’s novels, I Am Elijah Thrush, was published in 1972. Set in New York, the novel deals with an aged male dancer (once a student of

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Isadora Duncan and known as “the most beautiful man in the world”) who becomes obsessed with a mysterious blond, angelic child known as Bird of Heaven, a mute who communicates by making peculiar kissing sounds. Purdy’s later works reinforce these themes of lost identity and obsessive but often suppressed loves: In a Shallow Grave concerns a disfigured Vietnam War veteran who has lost that most personal form of identity, his face; Narrow Rooms (1978) details the complex sexual relationships of four West Virginia boys who cannot cope with their emotional feelings for one another and who direct their feelings into garish violence. That novel, Purdy said, was partially derived from fact; Purdy said that he frequently ran into hillbilly types in New York who told him such terrible stories of their lives. Purdy’s later works include On Glory’s Course (1984), In the Hollow of His Hand (1986), and the 1989 novel dealing with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), Garments the Living Wear. His novel In a Shallow Grave was made into a motion picture in 1988. Analysis • James Purdy is one of the more independent, unusual, and stylistically unique of American writers, since his fiction—novels, plays, and short stories—maintains a dark vision of American life while stating that vision in a literary voice unlike any other American writer. In more than a dozen novels, several collections of short fiction, and volumes of poetry and plays, Purdy has created an unrelentingly tragic view of human existence, in which people invariably are unable to face their true natures and thus violate—mentally and physically—those around them. In an interview in 1978, Purdy said: I think that is the universal human tragedy. We never become what we could be. I believe life is tragic. It’s my view that nothing ever solves anything. Oh yes, life is full of many joys . . . but it’s essentially tragic because man is imperfect. He can’t find solutions by his very nature. As a result of his tragic view of humankind, Purdy’s fiction often contains unpleasant, violent, even repellent actions by his characters. The short fiction of James Purdy is marked—as are many of his novels—by the recurrence of several themes, among them the conflict in the American family unit caused by the parental inability to relinquish control over children and allow them to live their own lives, a control to which Purdy has often referred as the “cannibalization” present in the family. A second theme frequently found in Purdy’s short fiction is that of obsessive love that cannot be expressed, both heterosexual and homosexual. This inability of individuals to express their emotional yearning and longing often is turned into an expression of violence against those around them. The homoerotic element in Purdy’s fiction only accentuates this propensity to violence, since Purdy often sees the societal repression of the homosexual emotion of love as one of the more brutal forms of self-denial imposed on an individual. Thus, many of his stories deal with such a latent—and tension-strained—homoeroticism. These two themes are conjoined occasionally in many of his novels and short stories to produce the unspeakable sense of loss: the loss of self-identity, of a loved one, or of a wasted past. “Color of Darkness” • In “Color of Darkness,” the title story of the collection by the same name, a husband can no longer recall the color of the eyes of his wife, who has

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left him. As his young son struggles with the memory of his lost mother, he begins to suck regularly on the symbol of his parents’ union, their wedding ring. In a confrontation with his father—who is concerned for the boy’s safety because of the metal object in his mouth—the youngster suddenly kicks his father in the groin and reduces him to a suffering, writhing object at whom the boy hurls a crude epithet. This kind of terrible family situation, embodying as it does loss, alienation from both a mate and a parent, and violence, is typical of the kind of intense anguish that Purdy’s short stories often portray. In the world of Purdy, the American family involves a selfish, possessive, and obsessive struggle, which, over time, often becomes totally self-destructive, as individuals lash out at one another for hurts that they can no longer endure but that they cannot explain. “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name” • Elsewhere in the collection Color of Darkness, “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name” portrays a wife who has begun using her maiden name, Lois McBane, because after six months of marriage she finds that she has grown to hate her new name, Mrs. Klein. Her loss of name is, like many such minor events in Purdy’s fiction, simply a symbol for a larger loss, that of her self-identity, a theme that Purdy frequently invokes in his novels (as in his later novel In a Shallow Grave). The wife’s refusal to accept her husband’s name as her new label leads to a violent physical fight between them following a party which they both attend. “Why Can’t They Tell You Why?” • This potential for violence underlying the domestic surface of the American family is seen again in one of the author’s most terrifying early stories, “Why Can’t They Tell You Why?” A small child, Paul, who has never known his father, finds a box of photographs. These photographs become for the boy a substitute for the absent parent, but his mother, Ethel, who appears to hate her late soldier-husband’s memory, is determined to break the boy’s fascination with his lost father. In a final scene of real horror, she forces the child to watch as she burns the box of photographs in the furnace, an act that drives the boy into, first, a frenzy of despair and then into a state of physical and emotional breakdown, as she tries to force the child to care for her and not for his dead father. Again, Purdy has captured the awful hatreds that lie within a simple family unit and the extreme malice to which they can lead. “Sleep Tight” • A similar tale of near-gothic horror affecting children is found in Purdy’s story “Sleep Tight,” which appears in his 1985 collection, The Candles of Your Eyes. In it, a fatally wounded burglar enters the bedroom of a young child who has been taught to believe in the Sandman. The child, believing the man to be the Sandman whom his sister, Nelle, and his mother have told him about, does not report the presence of the bleeding man, who takes refuge in the child’s closet. After the police have come and gone, the child enters the closet where the now-dead man has bled profusely. He believes the blood to be watercolors and begins painting with the burglar’s blood, and he comes to believe that he has killed the Sandman with his gun. “Cutting Edge” • Domestic violence within the family unit is but one of Purdy’s terrible insights into family life in America. Subdued family tensions—beneath the surface of outright and tragic violence—appear in “Cutting Edge,” in which a domineering mother, her weak-willed husband, and their son (an artist home from New York wearing a beard) form a triangle of domestic hatred. The mother is determined that

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her son must shave off his beard while visiting, so as to emasculate her son symbolically, the way she has emasculated his father. The son is aware of his father’s reduced status at his mother’s hands and even suggests, at one point, that his father use physical violence against the woman to gain back some control over her unpleasant and demanding, dictatorial manner. Purdy directly states in the story that the three are truly prisoners of one another, seeking release but unable to find it. Purdy thus invokes once again the entrapment theme that he sees typical of American families. The father, in insisting on his son’s acquiescence to the mother’s demand for the removal of the beard, has lost all credibility with his son. (The father had told the son that if the offending beard was not shaved off, then the mother would mentally torture her husband for six months after their son had returned to New York.) The story’s resolution—when the son shaves off the beard and mutilates his face in the process as a rebuke to his parents—is both an act of defiance and an almost literal cutting of the umbilical cord with his family, since he tells his parents that he will not see them at Christmas and that they cannot see him in New York, since he will again have his beard. This story also introduces another theme upon which Purdy frequently touches: the contempt for artistic pursuit by the narrow and materialistic American middle class. The parents, for example, see art as causing their son’s defiance of their restrictive lives. “Dawn” • A similar mood is found in the story “Dawn,” from the collection The Candles of Your Eyes. Here, a father, outraged because his son has posed for an underwear advertisement, comes to New York, invades the apartment where his son Timmy lives with another actor, Freddy, and announces that he is taking Timmy home to the small town where the father still lives. The father, Mr. Jaqua, resents his son’s attempt to become an actor. He has urged the boy into a more respectable profession: the law. The story turns on Timmy’s inability to resist his father’s demands and his ultimate acquiescence to them. After Timmy has packed and left the apartment, Freddy is left alone, still loving Timmy but aware that he will never see him again. This inability of American middle-class culture to accept or deal logically with homosexual love as a valid expression in men’s emotional makeup is also found in Purdy’s novels and elsewhere in his short fiction. The theme occurs in Eustace Chisholm and the Works as well as in The Nephew, In a Shallow Grave, Malcolm, and Narrow Rooms, and this denial of one’s homosexual nature often leads Purdy’s characters to violent acts. “Everything Under the Sun” • A slightly suppressed homoeroticism is also found in “Everything Under the Sun,” in Purdy’s collection Children Is All. Two young men, Jesse and Cade, two of those flat-spoken country (or hillbilly) types who often appear in Purdy’s fiction, are living together in an apartment on the south end of State Street (Chicago possibly). Their basic conflict is whether Cade will work or not, which Jesse desires but which Cade is unwilling to do. Cade ultimately remains in full control of the tense erotic relationship by threatening to leave permanently if Jesse does not let him have his own way. Although there is talk of liquor and women, the real sexual tension is between the two men, who, when they bare their chests, have identical tattoos of black panthers. Although neither would acknowledge their true relationship, their sexual attraction is seen through their ungrammatically accurate speech patterns and the subtle erotic undertones to their pairing.

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“Some of These Days” • The stories in The Candles of Your Eyes exhibit a homoerotic yearning as part of their plot. In “Some of These Days,” a young man (the first-person narrator of the story) is engaged in a pathetic search for the man to whom he refers as his “landlord.” His quest for the elusive “landlord” (who comes to be known merely as “my lord”) takes him through a series of sexual encounters in pornographic motion-picture theaters as he tries desperately to find the man whose name has been obliterated from his memory. “Summer Tidings” • “Summer Tidings,” in the same collection, portrays a Jamaican working as a gardener on an estate, where he becomes obsessed with the young blond boy whose parents own the estate. In a subtle ending, the Jamaican fancies the ecstasy of the perfume of the blond boy’s shampooed hair. “Rapture” • In “Rapture,” an army officer visits his sister, who is fatally ill, and she introduces the man to her young son, Brice. The soldier develops a fetish for the boy’s golden hair, which he regularly removes from the boy’s comb. After the boy’s mother dies and her funeral is held, the uncle and his nephew are united in a wild love scene, a scene that the mother had foreseen when she thought of leaving her son to someone who would appreciate him as she had been appreciated and cared for by her bridegroom. “Lily’s Party” • “Lily’s Party,” in the same collection, is even more explicit in its homosexual statement. In this story, Hobart, a man obsessed with his brother’s wife, follows the woman to her rendezvous with a new lover, a young preacher. Hobart then watches as the woman, Lily, and the preacher make love. Then, the two men alternately make love with Lily and take occasional breaks to eat pies that Lily had cooked for a church social. Finally, the two men smear each other with pies and begin— much to Lily’s consternation—to nibble at each other. As their encounter becomes more explicitly sexual, Lily is left alone, weeping in the kitchen, eating the remains of her pies, and being ignored by the two men. Purdy’s fiction has a manic—almost surreal—quality, both in the short works and in the novels. In his emphasis on very ordinary individuals plunging headlong into their private hells and their nightmarish lives, Purdy achieves the same kind of juxtaposition of the commonplace, seen through warped configuration of the psyche, that one finds in surrealist art. Sixty-three: Dream Palace • Nowhere is that quality as clearly to be found as in Purdy’s most famous piece of short fiction, his early novella Sixty-three: Dream Palace, a work that, by its title, conveys the grotesque vision of shattered illusion and the desperation of its characters. Not only does Sixty-three: Dream Palace have the surreal quality of nightmare surrounding its action, but also it contains the latent homoeroticism of many of Purdy’s other works and the distinctive speech rhythms, this time in the conversation of its principal character, the West Virginia boy Fenton Riddleway. Fenton Riddleway, together with his sick younger brother Claire, has come from his native West Virginia to live in an abandoned house, on what he calls “sixty-three street,” in a large city. In a public park, Fenton encounters a wealthy, largely unproductive “writer” named Parkhearst Cratty. Parkhearst seeks to introduce the young man to a wealthy woman named Grainger (but who is referred to as “the great woman”). Ostensibly, both Parkhearst and Grainger are attracted to the youth, and it

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is suggested that he will be cared for if he will come and live in Grainger’s mansion. Fenton also likes to spend time in a film theater (somewhat like Purdy’s main character in “Some of These Days”). At one point in the story, Fenton is picked up by a handsome homosexual named Bruno Korsawski, who takes the boy to a production of William Shakespeare’s Othello, starring an actor named Hayden Banks. A violent scene with Bruno serves to let readers realize Fenton’s capability for violence, a potentiality that is revealed later when readers are told that he has killed his younger brother, who would not leave the abandoned house to go and live in the Grainger mansion. Faced with his younger brother’s reluctance, his own desire to escape from both his derelict life, and the burden of the child Claire, Fenton killed the child, and the story’s final scene has Fenton first trying to revive the dead child and then placing the child’s body in a chest in the abandoned house. Desperation, violence, an inability to deal with sexual longing, and the capacity to do harm even to ones who are loved are found in Sixty-three: Dream Palace, and it may be the most representative of Purdy’s short fiction in its use of these thematic elements, strands of which mark so many of his various short stories. The tragic vision of life that Purdy sees as the human condition thus haunts all of his short fiction, as it does his most famous story. In 1981 Purdy published Sixty-three: Dream Palace, Selected Stories, 1956-1987, a collection of reprints of twenty-six stories and one novella from the author’s earlier works, including Color of Darkness, Children Is All, and The Candles of Your Eyes. The collection provides readers the opportunity to reappraise the unconventional literary style and trademark blend of quirky characters and bizarre settings Purdy uses to confront racial and sexual stereotypes in American culture. “You May Safely Gaze” • In “You May Safely Gaze,” one of his less successful efforts, two narcissistic male exhibitionists put on an open display of affection at a beach, while a male colleague, obsessed with their behavior, complains to his disinterested female companion. Not only does the female companion appear detached, but also the author, who in an attempt to infuse a superficiality to the entire scene, never appears to rise above the surface level himself in constructing a meaningful framework that would help establish the motivations behind his characters’ actions. “Eventide” • Emotional voids, another favorite Purdy theme, is explored with more piercing insight in “Eventide,” the tale of two African American sisters grieving over lost young sons, one of whom simply disappeared, the other having died. Faced with a life without their offspring, the sisters seek their solace in the darkness that surrounds them, as if life beyond it is a threat to the memory of their sons, which represents the only security they have left. “Man and Wife” • Husbands and wives fare badly in Purdy’s America when faced with personal crises. In “Man and Wife,” a mentally disabled husband is fired from his job for an alleged sexual deviancy, prompting his wife to accuse him of having no character because “he had never found a character to have” and the husband to bemoan a marriage invaded by “something awful and permanent that comes to everybody.” Only the sense of hopelessness that pervades the marriage is left to bind them in the end. In “Sound of Talking,” the reality of a marriage turned sour becomes starkly evident when a wife’s patience in catering to the demands of a wheelchairbound husband runs dry. In both stories Purdy’s characters are only able to raise

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their voices in plaintive cries, unable to explain to their spouses or themselves the source of their discomfort and disdain for each other. Attempts at escape often appear feeble, as in the wife’s recommendation in “Sound of Talking” that she and her husband purchase a pet as a remedy for their trouble. If the promise of marriage seems a distant memory in “Man and Wife” and “Sound of Talking,” it becomes a cruel reality in the author’s “Ruthanna Elder” when a young man learns his prospective bride has been sexually violated by her uncle, causing the groom-to-be to suddenly take his own life. It is a tragic tale, simply told, yet one that illustrates perhaps Purdy’s most enduring theme, that of the human heart’s great potential for great good or great evil. Jere Real With updates by William Hoffman Other major works plays: Mr. Cough Syrup and the Phantom Sex, pb. 1960; Cracks, pb. 1962, pr. 1963; Wedding Finger, pb. 1974; Clearing in the Forest, pr. 1978, pb. 1980; True, pr. 1978, pb. 1979; A Day After the Fair, pb. 1979; Now, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Two Plays, pb. 1979 (includes A Day After the Fair and True); What Is It, Zach?, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Proud Flesh: Four Short Plays, pb. 1980; Strong, pb. 1980; Scrap of Paper, pb. 1981; The Berry-Picker, pb. 1981, pr. 1984; In the Night of Time, and Four Other Plays, pb. 1992 (includes In the Night of Time, Enduring Zeal, The Paradise Circus, The Rivalry of Dolls, and Ruthanna Elder); The Rivalry of Dolls, pr., pb. 1992. novels: Malcolm, 1959; The Nephew, 1960; Cabot Wright Begins, 1964; Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 1967; Jeremy’s Version, 1970; I Am Elijah Thrush, 1972; The House of the Solitary Maggot, 1974; In a Shallow Grave, 1976; Narrow Rooms, 1978; Mourners Below, 1981; On Glory’s Course, 1984; In the Hollow of His Hand, 1986; Garments the Living Wear, 1989; Out with the Stars, 1992; Gertrude of Sony Island Avenue, 1997. miscellaneous: Children Is All, 1961 (10 stories and 2 plays); An Oyster Is a Wealthy Beast, 1967 (story and poems); Mr. Evening: A Story and Nine Poems, 1968; On the Rebound: A Story and Nine Poems, 1970; A Day After the Fair: A Collection of Plays and Stories, 1977. poetry: The Running Sun, 1971; Sunshine Is an Only Child, 1973; She Came Out of the Mists of Morning, 1975; Lessons and Complaints, 1978; The Brooklyn Branding Parlors, 1986. Bibliography Adams, Stephen D. James Purdy. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976. Adams’s study covers Purdy’s major work from the early stories and Malcolm up through In a Shallow Grave. Of particular interest is his discussion of the first two novels in Purdy’s trilogy Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys. Ladd, Jay L. James Purdy: A Bibliography. Columbus: Ohio State University Libraries, 1999. Annotated bibliography of works by and about James Purdy. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Purdy: “Color of Darkness,” “Daddy Wolf” and “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name” (vol. 2); and “Why Can’t They Tell You Why?” (vol. 8).

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Peden, William. The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Peden discusses Purdy in comparison with some of the “southern gothic” writers, such as Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, and in relation to Purdy’s probing of themes about the strange and perverse in American life. Purdy, James. “Out with James Purdy: An Interview.” Interview by Christopher Lane. Critique 40 (Fall, 1998): 71-89. Evaluates reasons for critical hostility to Purdy’s writings. Presents Purdy’s views on racial and sexual stereotyping, violence in art, and the effect of political correctness. Analyzes theme and subject, presenting real-life counterparts to characters in several novels. Renner, Stanley. “‘Why Can’t They Tell You Why?’ A Clarifying Echo of The Turn of the Screw.” Studies in American Fiction 14 (1986): 205-213. Compares the story with Henry James’s famous tale; argues that both are about a female suppressing a male’s sexual identity. Schwarzchild, Bettina. The Not-Right House: Essays on James Purdy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968. Although the primary focus of these essays is on Purdy’s novels, there is some comparative discussion of such early works as Sixtythree: Dream Palace and “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name.” Skaggs, Calvin. “The Sexual Nightmare of ‘Why Can’t They Tell You Why?’” In The Process of Fiction, edited by Barbara McKenzie. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. Argues that the mother tries to destroy the boy’s masculine identification because of her own ambiguous sexual identity. Claims that in the final scene a strong female emasculates a weak male. Turnbaugh, Douglas Blair. “James Purdy: Playwright.” PAJ 20 (May, 1998): 73-75. Discusses Purdy’s international acclaim and publication history. Praises his uses of dialogue and vernacular in the novels. Critical evaluation of dramatizations of Purdy’s novels, specifically focusing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) distortion of In a Shallow Grave.

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Saki Saki

Born: Akyab, Burma (now Myanmar); December 18, 1870 Died: Beaumont Hamel, France; November 14, 1916 Principal short fiction • Reginald, 1904; Reginald in Russia, 1910; The Chronicles of Clovis, 1911; Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914; The Toys of Peace, 1919; The Square Egg, 1924; The Short Stories of Saki (H. H. Munro) Complete, 1930. Other literary forms • Saki’s fame rests on his short stories, but he also wrote novels, plays, political satires, a history of imperial Russia, and journalistic sketches. Achievements • The brilliant satirist of the mind and manners of an upper-crust Great Britain that World War I would obliterate, Saki operates within a rich national tradition that stretches from the towering figure of Jonathan Swift well into the present, in which fresh wits such as Douglas Adams have obtained a certain stature. An intelligent, perceptive, and uncannily unsentimental observer, Saki focuses many of his deeply sarcastic pieces, which fill six volumes, on the criminal impulses of a privileged humanity. In his tightly wrought stories, for which surprise endings, ironic reversals, and practical jokes are de rigeur, Saki’s mischievous protagonists thus arrive on the scene to wreak havoc on victims who have invited their tormentors out of folly or a streak of viciousness of their own. The frequent inclusion of intelligent, independent, and improbable animal characters further betrays Saki’s fondness for the supernatural as a powerful satirical device. Biography • Born in colonial Burma (now Myanmar) to a family that had for generations helped to rule the British Empire, Hector Hugh Munro grew up in a Devonshire country house where, reared along with his brother and sister by two formidable aunts, he had the secluded and strictly supervised sort of childhood typical of the Victorian rural gentry. This upbringing decisively shaped—or perhaps warped, as some sources suggest—his character. After finishing public school at Bedford, Munro spent several years studying in Devonshire and traveling on the Continent with his father and sister. In 1983, he went to Burma to accept a police post obtained through his father’s influence. Much weakened by recurrent malaria, he returned to Devonshire to convalesce and write. In the first years of the twentieth century he turned to journalism, wrote political satires, and served as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and Paris. At this time he adopted the pseudonym “Saki,” which may refer to the cupbearer in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) or may contract “Sakya Muni,” one of the epithets of the Buddha. After 1908, Saki lived and wrote in London. Despite being over-age and far from robust, he volunteered for active duty at the outbreak of World War I. Refusing to accept a commission, to which his social position entitled him, or a safe job in military intelligence, for which his education and experience equipped him, Munro fought as an enlisted man in the trenches of France. He died in action. Analysis • Saki is a writer whose great strength and great weakness lie in the limits he set for himself. Firmly rooted in the British ruling class that enjoyed “domin-

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ion over palm and pine,” Saki wrote about the prosperous Edwardians among whom he moved. His stories, comedies of manners, emphasize the social side of the human animal as they survey the amusements, plots, and skirmishes that staved off boredom for the overripe TO VIEW IMAGE, leisure class whose leisure ended PLEASE SEE in August, 1914, with the onset of PRINT EDITION World War I. OF THIS BOOK. Just as Saki wrote about a particular class, so he aimed his stories at a comparatively small and select readership. Although he was indifferent to wealth, Saki subsisted by his pen; he was, therefore, obliged to write stories that would sell. From the first, he succeeded in producing the “well-made” story savored by literate but not necessarily literary readers of such respected journals as the liberal Westminster Gazette and the conservative Morning Post. His debonair, carefully plotted stories full of dramatic reversals, ingenious endings, and quotable phrases do not experiment with new literary techniques but perfect existing conventions. Without seeming to strain for effect, they make of Hyde Park an enchanted forest or treat the forays of a werewolf as an ordinary country occurrence. Like the Paris gowns his fictional duchesses wear, Saki’s stories are frivolous, intricate, impeccable, and, to some eyes, obsolete. If Saki’s background, subjects, and techniques were conventional, however, his values and sympathies certainly were not. As a satirist, he mocked the people he entertained. His careful portraits of a complacent ruling class are by no means flattering: They reveal all the malice, pettiness, mediocrity, and self-interest of people intent on getting to the top or staying there. His heroes—Reginald, Clovis, Bertie, and the like—are aristocratic iconoclasts who share their creator’s distaste for “dreadful little everyday acts of pretended importance” and delight in tripping the fools and hypocrites who think themselves exceptional but walk the well-worn path upward. “Cousin Theresa,” a variation on the theme of the Prodigal Son, chronicles the frustration of one such self-deluder. “Cousin Theresa” • In Saki’s version of the parable, the wandering brother—as might be expected in an age of far-flung Empire—is the virtuous one. Bassett Harrowcluff, a young and successful bearer of the “white man’s burden,” returns from the colonies after having cheaply and efficiently “quieted a province, kept open a trade route, enforced the tradition of respect which is worth the ransom of many kings in out of the way regions.” These efforts, his proud father hopes, might earn Bassett a knighthood as well as a rest.

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The elder brother Lucas, however, a ne’er-do-well London bachelor, claims to have his own scheme for certain success—a refrain that, appended to a song and embodied in a musical revue, should catch the ear of all London: “Cousin Theresa takes out Caesar,/ Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.” Fate bears out Lucas’s prophecy. Theresa and her canine quartet enthrall the city. Orchestras acquire the four-legged accessories necessary for proper rendition of the much-demanded melody’s special effects. The double thump commemorating the borzoi rings throughout London: Diners pound tables, drunks reeling home pound doors, messenger boys pound smaller messenger boys. Preachers and lecturers discourse on the song’s “inner meaning.” In Society, the perennial mystifications of politics and polo give way to discussions of “Cousin Theresa.” When Colonel Harrowcluff’s son is knighted, the honor goes to Lucas. Saki’s parable offers two lessons: an obvious one for the “eminent,” a subtler one for the enlightened. If the reader takes the story as an indictment of a foolish society that venerates gimmicks and ignores achievements, that rewards notoriety rather than merit, he classes himself among the Bassett Harrowcluffs. For the same delicate irony colors Saki’s accounts of both brothers’ successes: Whether this treatment whimsically elevates the impresario or deftly undercuts the pillar of empire is problematic. As Saki sees it, administering the colonies and entertaining the populace are equally trivial occupations. To reward Lucas, the less self-righteous of two triflers, seems just after all. Saki, then, does not profess the creed of the society he describes; both the solid virtues and the fashionable attitudes of the adult world come off badly in his stories. In contrast to other adults, Saki’s dandy-heroes and debutante-heroines live in the spirit of the nursery romp; and when children and animals appear (as they often do) he invariably sides with them. “Laura,” a fantasy in which a mischievous lady dies young but returns to life first as an otter and then as a Nubian boy to continue teasing a pompous fool, is one of many stories demonstrating Saki’s allegiance to Beasts and Super-Beasts at the expense of men and supermen. Saki’s favorites are never sweetly pretty or coyly innocent. The children, as we see in “The Lumber-Room,” “The Penance,” and “Morlvera,” are cruel, implacable, the best of haters. The beasts, almost as fierce as the children, tend to be independent or predatory: wolves and guard dogs, cats great and small, elk, bulls, and boars figure in Saki’s menagerie. Embodied forces of nature, these animals right human wrongs or counterpoise by their example the mediocrity of man throughout Saki’s works, but nowhere more memorably than in the chilling tale of “Sredni Vashtar.” “Sredni Vashtar” • In “Sredni Vashtar,” Conradin, a rather sickly ten-year-old, suffers under the restrictive coddling of his cousin and guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, a pious hypocrite who “would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him ‘for his good’ was a duty which she did not find completely irksome.” Conradin’s one escape from her dull, spirit-sapping regime is the toolshed where he secretly cherishes Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret around whom he has fashioned a private religious cult. Offering gifts of red flowers, scarlet berries, and nutmeg that “had to be stolen,” Conradin prays that the god Sredni Vashtar, who embodies the rude animal vitality the boy lacks, will smite their common enemy the Woman. When Mrs. De Ropp, suspecting that the toolshed harbors something unsuitable for invalids, goes to investigate, Conradin fears that Sredni Vashtar will dwindle to a simple ferret

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and that he, deprived of his god, will grow ever weaker under the Woman’s tyranny. Eventually, however, Conradin sees Sredni Vashtar the Terrible, throat and jaws wet with a dark stain, stalk out of the shed to drink at the garden brook and slip away. Mrs. De Ropp does not return from the encounter, and Conradin, freed from his guardian angel, helps himself to the forbidden fruit of his paradise—a piece of toast, “usually banned on the ground that it was bad for him; also because the making of it ‘gave trouble,’ a deadly offense in the middle-class feminine eye.” “The Open Window” • The brutal vengeance of “Sredni Vashtar” demonstrates that Saki’s preference is not founded on the moral superiority of children and animals. “The Open Window,” probably Saki’s most popular story, makes the point in a more plausible situation, where a “self-possessed young lady of fifteen” spins from the most ordinary circumstances a tale of terror that drives her visitor, the nervous and hypochondriacal Mr. Frampton Nuttel, to distraction. In the Saki world the charm and talent of the liar makes up for the cruelty of her lie; the reader, cut adrift from his ordinary values, admires the unfeeling understatement of Saki’s summing up: “Romance at short notice was her specialty.” The reader joins in applauding at the story’s end not injustice—the whimpering Nuttel gets no worse than he deserves—but justice undiluted by mercy, a drink too strong for most adults most of the time. What Saki admires about the people and animals he portrays is their fidelity to absolutes. They follow their natures single-mindedly and unapologetically; they neither moralize nor compromise. Discussing the preferences of a character in his novel When William Came (1913), Saki indirectly explains his own austere code: “Animals . . . accepted the world as it was and made the best of it, and children, at least nice children, uncontaminated by grown-up influences, lived in worlds of their own making.” In this judgment the satirist becomes misanthrope. Saki endorses nature and art but rejects society. It is this moral narrowness, this refusal to accept compromise, that makes Saki, despite the brilliance of his artistry, an unsatisfying writer to read in large doses. His dated description of a vanished world is really no flaw, for he does not endorse the dying regime but clearly shows why it ought to die. His lack of sentiment is refreshing; his lack of emotion (only in such rare stories as “The Sheep,” “The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat,” and “The Penance” does Saki credibly present deep or complex feelings) does not offend present-day readers long inured to black comedy. Saki’s defect is sterility. He refuses to be generous or make allowances as he considers society, that creation of adults, and he sends readers back empty-handed to the world of compromise where they must live. Peter W. Graham With updates by R. C. Lutz Other major works plays: Karl-Ludwig’s Window, pb. 1924; The Death-Trap, pb. 1924; The Square Egg, and Other Sketches, with Three Plays, pb. 1924; The Watched Pot, pr., pb. 1924 (with Cyril Maude). novels: The Unbearable Bassington, 1912; When William Came, 1913. nonfiction: The Rise of the Russian Empire, 1900; The Westminster Alice, 1902.

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Bibliography Birden, Lorene M. “Saki’s ‘A Matter of Sentiment.’” Explicator 5 (Summer, 1998): 201-204. Discusses the Anglo-German relations in the story “A Matter of Sentiment” and argues that the story reflects a shift in Saki’s image of Germans. Gillen, Charles H. H. H. Munro (Saki). New York: Twayne, 1969. Comprehensive presentation of the life and work of Saki, with a critical discussion of his literary output in all of its forms. Balanced and readable, Gillen’s work also contains an annotated bibliography, which naturally does not include studies since then. Lambert, J. W. Introduction to The Bodley Head Saki. London: Bodley Head, 1963. Perceptive, concise, and persuasive review of Saki’s work. Written by a biographer who enjoyed a special and productive working relationship with Saki’s estate. Langguth, A. J. Saki. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. Probably the best biography, enriching an informed, analytical presentation of its subject with a fine understanding of Saki’s artistic achievement. Eight pages of photos help bring Saki and his world to life. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Saki: “The Interlopers” and “Laura” (vol. 4), “The Open Window” (vol. 5), “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” (vol. 6), and “Sredni Vashtar” (vol. 7). Munro, Ethel M. “Biography of Saki.” In The Square Egg and Other Sketches, with Three Plays. New York: Viking Press, 1929. Warm account of the author by his beloved sister, who shows herself deeply appreciative of his work. Valuable for its glimpses of the inner workings of Saki’s world and as a basis for late twentieth century evaluations. Salemi, Joseph S. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-Charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Fall, 1989): 423-430. Discusses the animal imagery in the collection, suggesting reasons for Saki’s obsessive interest in animals and analyzing the role animals play in a number of Saki’s major stories. Spears, George J. The Satire of Saki. New York: Exposition Press, 1963. Interesting and revealing study of Saki’s wit, which combines careful textual analysis with a clear interest in modern psychoanalysis. The appendix includes four letters by Ethel M. Munro to the author, and the bibliography lists many works that help to place Saki in the context of the satirical tradition.

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J. D. Salinger Salinger, J. D.

Born: New York, New York; January 1, 1919 Principal short fiction • Nine Stories, 1953; Franny and Zooey, 1961; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction, 1963. Other literary forms • Although J. D. Salinger has lived well into the twenty-first century, his literary reputation rests almost entirely on work he did many decades earlier. Indeed, much like novelist Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Salinger is known primarily for his single novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). That book influenced a generation of readers and is still considered a classic. Achievements • The precise and powerful creation of J. D. Salinger’s characters, especially The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield and the Glass family of his short fiction, has led them to become part of American folklore. Salinger’s ironic fiction and enigmatic personality captured the imagination of post-World War II critics and students. His authorized books were published over the course of twelve years, from 1951 to 1963, yet his works still remain steadily in print in many languages throughout the world. Salinger received a number of awards in his career. “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” was selected as one of the distinguished short stories published in American magazines for 1945 and was later included in The Best Short Stories 1946. “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” was reprinted in Prize Stories of 1949. “A Girl I Know” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1949. “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” was selected as one of the distinguished short stories published in American magazines in 1950 and is included in Prize Stories of 1950. The novel The Catcher in the Rye was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for 1951. Martin Green remarked that Salinger is not so much a writer who depicts life as one who celebrates it, an accurate characterization of the humor and love in his work. Ultimately, the most serious charge against him is that his output is too small. Ironically, Salinger’s small output and his extreme reclusiveness have enhanced his reputation by adding an aura of mystery. Both scholars and journalists have pursued him, trying—usually without success—to learn more about his mind and his thoughts on writing. Biography • Jerome David Salinger is the second child—his sister, Doris, was born eight years before him—and only son of Sol and Miriam Jillich Salinger, a Jewish father and a Christian mother. His father was a successful importer of hams and cheeses. Salinger was a serious child who kept mostly to himself. His IQ test score was above average, and his grades, at public schools in the upper West Side of Manhattan, were in the “B” range. Socially, his experiences at summer camp were more successful than in the Manhattan public schools. At Camp Wigwam, in Harrison, Maine, he was voted at the age of eleven “the most popular actor of 1930.” In 1934, Salinger entered Valley Forge Military Academy, in Pennsylvania, a school resembling Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger, however, was

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more successful at Valley Forge than Holden had been at Pencey, and in June, 1936, Valley Forge gave him his only diploma. He was literary editor of the school yearbook and wrote a poem that was set to music and sung at the school. In 1937, he enrolled in summer school at New York University but left for Austria and Poland to try working in his father’s meat importing business. In 1938, after returning to the United States, he briefly attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. There, he wrote a column, “Skipped Diploma,” which featured film reviews for the college newspaper. In 1939, he signed up for a shortstory course at Columbia University, given by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine. In 1940, his first short story, “The Young Folks,” was published in the March/April issue of Story, and he was paid twenty-five dollars for it. National Archives The story “Go See Eddie” was published in the December issue of the University of Kansas City Review. In 1941, “The Hang of It” appeared in Collier’s and “The Heart of a Broken Story” in Esquire. Salinger sold his first story about Holden Caulfield to The New Yorker, but publication was delayed until 1946 because of the United States’ entry into World War II. In 1942, Salinger was drafted. He used his weekend passes to hide in a hotel room and write. He attended Officers, First Sergeants, and Instructors School of the Signal Corps. He engaged in a brief romantic correspondence with Oona O’Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill and later to be the wife of Charles Chaplin. In 1943, he was stationed in Nashville, Tennessee, with the rank of staff sergeant and transferred to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. “The Varioni Brothers” was his first story in The Saturday Evening Post. He received counterintelligence training in Devonshire, England. During the war, he landed on Utah Beach in Normandy as part of the D-Day invasion force and participated in five campaigns. It was during this period that he met war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. In 1945, Salinger was discharged from the Army. He continued to publish stories, including two stories with material later to be used in The Catcher in the Rye. In 1948, he began a long, exclusive association with The New Yorker with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the first story about Seymour Glass. Early in 1950, Salinger began studying Advaita Vedanta, Eastern religious philosophy, in New York City. In 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was published, and in 1953, he moved to Cornish, New Hampshire. In the following years, several of his stories were published in The New Yorker, including “Franny,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Zooey,” “Seymour: An

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Introduction,” and “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Salinger married Claire Douglas on February 17, 1955. A daughter, Margaret Ann, was born in 1955, and a son, Matthew, in 1960. Salinger was divorced from his wife in 1967. In 1987, Matthew Salinger starred in a made-for-television film. During the mid-1980’s, Salinger, known to be a reclusive person, became the center of public attention when he protested the publication of an unauthorized biography by Ian Hamilton. The suit led to the rewriting of Hamilton’s biography, which was published in 1988. Salinger has continued to refuse all requests for interviews and has ignored correspondents. However, his daughter, Margaret Salinger, went against his wishes by publishing a book about her family, Dream Catcher: A Memoir in 2000. Meanwhile, Salinger has continued to comment publicly on his published work, saying, “The stuff’s all there in the stories; there’s no use talking about it.” Analysis • The main characters of J. D. Salinger, neurotic and sensitive people, search unsuccessfully for love in a metropolitan setting. They see the phoniness, egotism, and hypocrisy around them. There is a failure of communication between people: between husbands and wives, between soldiers in wartime, between roommates in schools. A sense of loss, especially the loss of a sibling, recurs frequently. Many of his stories have wartime settings and involve characters who have served in World War II. Some of these characters cannot adjust to the military, some have unhappy marital relationships, and others are unsuccessful in both areas. The love for children occurs frequently in his stories—for example, the love for Esmé, Phoebe, and Sybil. Like William Wordsworth, Salinger appreciates childhood innocence. Children have a wisdom and a spontaneity that is lost in the distractions and temptations of adult life. Salinger’s early stories contain elements foreshadowing his later work. Many of these stories are concerned with adolescents. In “The Young Folks,” however, the adolescents resemble the insensitive schoolmates of Holden Caulfield more than they resemble Holden himself. Salinger demonstrates his admirable ear for teenage dialogue in these stories. The reader sees how often members of the Glass family are present in the stories or novelettes. Looking back at Salinger’s early works, one sees how these selections can be related to events in the actual life of Salinger as well as how they contain characters who are part of the Glass family saga. “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” • An early example is the character of Sergeant X in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” from the collection Nine Stories. The time and setting of this story tie it into the experiences of Salinger abroad during World War II. At the same time, Sergeant X is Seymour Glass. The reader is shown the egotism of the wife and mother-in-law of Sergeant X, who write selfish civilian letters to the American soldier about to be landed in France, requesting German knitting wool and complaining about the service at Shrafft’s restaurant in Manhattan. This behavior is the same as that of the insensitive wife of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and that of the wife and mother-in-law of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” The only person who offers love to Sergeant X is the brave British orphan Esmé, who sings with a voice like a bird and offers him the wristwatch of her deceased father. Esmé is too proper a British noblewoman to kiss Sergeant X, but she drags her five-year-old brother, Charles, back into the tearoom to kiss the soldier good-bye and even invites him to her wedding, five years later. Esmé’s love restores Sergeant X from the breakdown that he suffered from the war. The gestures of love

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from Esmé lead to Sergeant X finally being able to go to sleep, a sign of recovery in the Glass family. The love of Esmé is contrasted to the squalor of the other people around Seymour. His wife, “a breathtakingly levelheaded girl,” discourages Sergeant X from attending the wedding of Esmé because his mother-in-law will be visiting at the same time (another selfish reason). The “squalor” that is contrasted to the pure, noble love of Esmé is also exemplified in the letter of the older brother of Sergeant X, who requests “a couple of bayonets or swastikas” as souvenirs for his children. Sergeant X tears up his brother’s letter and throws the pieces into a wastebasket into which he later vomits. He cannot so easily escape the squalor of the “photogenic” Corporal Z, from whom readers learn that Sergeant X had been released from a hospital after a nervous breakdown. Corporal Clay, the jeep-mate of Sergeant X, personifies even more the squalor that Sergeant X is “getting better acquainted with,” in one form or another. Clay has been “brutal,” “cruel,” and “dirty” by unnecessarily shooting a cat and constantly dwelling upon the incident. Clay has a name that represents earth and dirt. He is obtuse and insensitive. He is contrasted to the spirituality, sensitivity, and love expressed by Esmé. Clay brings news of the officious character Bulling, who forces underlings to travel at inconvenient hours to impress them with his authority, and of Clay’s girlfriend Loretta, a psychology major who blames the breakdown of Sergeant X not on wartime experiences but on lifelong instability, yet excuses Clay’s sadistic killing of the cat as “temporary insanity.” The killing of the cat is similar to Hemingway’s killing a chicken in the presence of Salinger when the two men met overseas. The love of Esmé redeems and rejuvenates Sergeant X from his private hell in this well-written and moving story. “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” • References to other members of the Glass family tie other stories to the saga of the Glass children. Eloise, the Connecticut housewife in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” had been in love with a soldier named “Walt.” Walt was one of the twin brothers in the Glass family. He had been killed during the war not in battle but in a senseless accident. The central characters in the story are Eloise, a frustrated housewife, living trapped in a wealthy Connecticut home with a man she does not love and her memories of the soldier Walt whom she had loved dearly; and Ramona, her young daughter. Salinger himself was living in Connecticut at the time he wrote this story. Ramona may lack the nobility and capacity to show affection that Esmé had, yet she is an imaginative child, with abilities that her mother does not understand or appreciate. Ramona compensates for her loneliness by creating imaginary friends, such as “Jimmy Jimmereeno.” This imaginative spontaneity in Ramona is in danger of being stifled by Eloise. Once when drunk, Eloise frightens her daughter by waking her up during the night after seeing her sleeping on one side of the bed to leave space for her new playmate, “Mickey Mickeranno.” Eloise herself was comforted by memories of her old beloved Walt but did not permit Ramona also to have an imaginary companion. The suburban mother suddenly realizes what has happened to her and begins to cry, as does her frightened daughter. All Eloise has left is the small comfort of her memories of Walt. She now realizes that she had been trying to force Ramona to give up her fantasies about imaginary boyfriends too. In this Salinger story, again there is a contrast between the “nice” world of love that Eloise remembers she once had and the rude, “squalid” Connecticut world in which she is currently living.

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The Glass Family Cycle • The writings of Salinger can be best discussed by dividing them into three sections: his early writings, his great classic works, and the Glass family cycle. The later works of Salinger are more concerned with religion than the earlier ones. Most of these later works deal with members of the Glass family, characters who have elements in common with Salinger himself. They are sensitive and introspective, they hate phoniness, and they have great verbal skill. They are also interested in mystical religion. “Glass” is an appropriate name for the family. Glass is a clear substance through which a person can see to acquire further knowledge and enlightenment, yet glass is also extremely fragile and breakable and therefore could apply to the nervous breakdowns or near breakdowns of members of the family. The Glass family also attempts to reach enlightenment through the methods of Zen Buddhism. Professor Daisetz Suzuki of Columbia University, whose work is said to have influenced Salinger, commented that “the basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded. . . . Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion.” What Seymour, Zooey, and Franny Glass want to do is to come in touch with the inner workings of their being in order to achieve nonintellectual enlightenment. With all religions at their fingertips, the Glass siblings utilize anything Zen-like, and it is their comparative success or failure in this enterprise that forms the basic conflict in their stories. In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” the point made is that Seymour, who has achieved the satori, or Zen enlightenment, is considered abnormal by the world and loved and admired only by his siblings. He is despised by other people who cannot comprehend his behavior. The maid of honor at the wedding that Seymour failed to attend describes him as a schizoid and latent homosexual. His brother Buddy, the only Glass family member attending the wedding, is forced to defend his brother by himself. After enduring all the misinformed verbal attacks on his brother, Buddy replies: “I said that not one God-damn person, of all the patronizing, fourthrate critics and column writers, had ever seen him for what he really was. A poet, for God’s sake. And I mean a poet.” The central figure around whom all the stories of the Glass family revolve is Seymour, Seymour alive, Seymour quoted by Zooey, and the memory of Seymour when he is no longer physically alive. Once the Zen experience is understood by the reader, the meaning of earlier stories about the Glass siblings becomes more intelligible as contributing to Salinger’s goal in his later stories. Zen is a process of reduction and emptying of all the opinions and values that one has learned and has been conditioned to that interfere with one’s perceptions. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” • The first Glass story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” is a kind of koan, or paradox, one whose meaning the Glass children will be mediating upon for years to come. Seymour is the Bananafish. He has taken in so much from outside himself, knowledge and sensations, and he is so stuffed that he cannot free himself and climb out of the banana hole. Seymour, in this first story, is married to Muriel and is in a world of martinis and phony conversations in Miami Beach. He discovers that Muriel looks like Charlotte, the girl at whom he threw a stone in his earlier life because her physical loveliness was distracting him from his spiritual quest. He cannot communicate with his wife either. Muriel Fedder was aptly named because her presence serves as a “fetter” to Seymour. The only one with whom he can communicate is Sybil, the young child who is still so

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uncorrupted by the opinions and values of the world that her clear perceptions give her the status of the mythological Sybil. Seymour has found, unfortunately, that Muriel Fedder Glass will not serve, teach, or strengthen him, as Seymour’s diary entry before his marriage had indicated: “Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve.” Boo Boo Glass wrote a more admiring tribute to Seymour on the bathroom mirror than one senses from Muriel. Muriel is found reading a Reader’s Digest article, “Sex Is Fun—or Hell.” Marriage to Muriel has turned out not to be a spiritually enlightening experience. The only move that Seymour can make in his spiritual quest is to empty himself totally of all the opinions, values, and drives, of all sensations that distract and hinder him in achieving his spiritual goal. He is best able to move forward in his search by committing suicide and becoming pure spirit. Warren French wrote, “When Muriel then subsequently fails to live up to his expectations of a spouse, he realizes the futility of continuing a life that promises no further spiritual development.” The critic Ann Marple noted that “Salinger’s first full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, emerged after scattered fragments concerning his characters appeared over a seven-year span. For some time now it has been evident that Salinger’s second novel may be developing in the same way.” Salinger wrote of Franny and Zooey: “Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I am doing about a family of settlers in 20th Century New York, the Glasses.” The remaining stories deal with Zen Buddhism and the effort to achieve a Zen-inspired awakening. They continue to deal with Seymour Glass and his influence on his siblings. In addition, the work of Salinger becomes increasingly experimental as he continues to write. Franny and Zooey • When “Franny” was first published in the January 29, 1955, issue of The New Yorker, no mention was made that Franny was a member of the Glass family. All the reader knows is that Franny is visiting her boyfriend Lane for a football weekend at an Ivy League college. Lane is an insensitive pseudointellectual who brags about his successful term paper on Gustave Flaubert as he consumes frogs’ legs. Lane is not interested in the religious book The Way of the Pilgrim that Franny describes to him or in hearing about the Jesus prayer that has a tremendous mystical effect on the whole outlook of the person who is praying. The luncheon continues, with Lane finishing the snails and frogs’ legs that he had ordered. The contrast has deepened between the mystical spirituality of Franny and Lane’s interest in satisfying his physical appetites. The reader is shocked at the part of the story when Franny faints. She is apparently suffering from morning sickness. The implication is that Lane is the father of her unborn child. Almost two and a half years pass before the title character is identified as Franny Glass. “Zooey” was published in the May 4, 1957, issue of The New Yorker. It continued the story of Franny Glass, the youngest of the siblings of Seymour Glass. It is made clear in this story that Franny was not pregnant in the earlier story but was suffering from a nervous breakdown as a result of her unsuccessful attempt to achieve spiritual enlightenment. In “Zooey,” her brother identifies the book that Franny is carrying to their mother as The Pilgrim Continues His Way, a sequel to the other book, both of which she had gotten from the old room of Seymour. Zooey cannot console his sister at first. Franny is crying uncontrollably. Zooey finally goes into the room that had been occupied previously by Seymour and Buddy. Zooey attempts to impersonate Buddy when he calls Franny on the telephone, but Franny eventually recognizes the

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voice of the caller. Zooey is finally able to convince his sister that the mystical experience she should strive for is not of seeing Christ directly but that of seeing Christ through ordinary people. “There isn’t anyone anywhere who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady,” who is really “Christ himself, buddy.” Reassured by the words of her brother, Franny can finally fall asleep. In “Franny,” as in many other Salinger short stories, character is revealed through a series of actions under stress, and the purpose of the story is reached at the moment of epiphany, an artistic technique formulated by James Joyce, in which a character achieves a sudden perception of truth. In “Franny,” Salinger uses the theatrical tricks of a telephone in an empty room and of one person impersonating another. He often uses the bathroom of the Glass apartment as a place where important messages are left, important discussions are conducted, important documents are read. It is on the bathroom cabinet mirror that Boo Boo Glass leaves the epithalamium prayer for her brother on his wedding day, from which the title of the story “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters” is taken. The Glass bathroom is almost a sacred temple. Bessie Glass, in the “Zooey” portion of Franny and Zooey, goes in there to discuss with Zooey how to deal with Franny’s nervous breakdown. Buddy closes the bathroom door of the apartment he had shared with Seymour to read the diary of Seymour on his wedding day. He reads that Seymour is so happy that he cannot attend his wedding on that date (although he subsequently elopes with Muriel Fedder). The reader sees in Franny and Zooey the role Seymour played in the lives of his youngest brother and sister, the influence he had over them and their religious education. The reader sees in “Franny” a spiritual crisis in her efforts to retain her spiritual integrity, to live a spiritual life in an egotistical, materialistic society, a society personified by Lane Coutell. “Franny” can be considered as a prologue to “Zooey,” which carries the reader deeply into the history of the Glass family. The last five pieces that Salinger published in The New Yorker could constitute some form of a larger whole. The narrative possibly could constitute parts of two uncompleted chronicles. One order in which the stories could be read is with Buddy as the narrator, the order in which they were published (this is the order in which Buddy claims to have written them); the other order is the one suggested by the chronology of events in the stories. Arranged one way, the stories focus on Buddy and his struggle to understand Seymour by writing about him; arranged the other way, the stories focus on the quest of Seymour for God. J. D. Salinger has for some years been a devoted student of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, and the teachings of Seymour Glass reflect this study. If one focuses on Seymour Glass, his spiritual quest, and how this quest is reflected in the behavior and beliefs of his siblings, one sees as a result an unfinished history of the Glass family. Salinger announced, in one of his rare statements about his intentions, on the dust jacket of a later book, that he had “several new Glass family stories coming along,” but, by the close of the century, only “Hapworth 16, 1924” had appeared, in 1965. Readers see in this story the presence of Seymour, a presence that is evident in the four stories published after that time. These four stories became more experimental in literary technique and are also involved with the Eastern mystical religious beliefs studied by Salinger and promoted by his character Seymour Glass. One interpretation of the stories that deal with Seymour (that of Eberhard Alsen) is that together these selections constitute a modernist hagiography, the account of the life and martyrdom of a churchless saint. “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is the first story to be published after “Franny” and the first to introduce all the members of the Glass family. “Zooey” continues the ac-

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count of specific events introduced in “Franny,” and the reader learns that the behavior of Franny is influenced by two books of Eastern religion that she found in the old room of Seymour. In “Zooey” the name of Seymour is evoked when Franny wants to talk to him. In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” the reader learns what Seymour has written in his diary, although Seymour is not physically present. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” the reader is offered a much wider range of what he said and wrote, conveyed by his brother Buddy. In “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965, Buddy, now at the age of forty-six, tries to trace the origins of the saintliness of his older brother in a letter that Seymour wrote home from Camp Simon Hapworth in Maine when he was seven. In giving the reader the exact letter, Buddy provides one with a full example of how things are seen from the point of view of Seymour and introduces the reader to the sensitivity and psychic powers that foreshadow his spirituality. The reader sees the incredibly precocious mind of Seymour, who reflects on the nature of pain and asks his parents to send him some books by Leo Tolstoy, Swami Vivekananda of India, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, and Frederick Porter Smith. “Seymour: An Introduction” and “Hapworth 16, 1924” • In these last two works, “Seymour: An Introduction” and “Hapworth 16, 1924,” the reader sees Seymour Glass more closely than anywhere before. The reader sees the brilliance of Seymour, his spirituality, his poetic ability, and his capacity for love. With the character of Seymour, Salinger is trying to create a modern-day saint. Salinger’s last works received mixed critical reception. Some critics believe that Salinger has lost the artistic ability he had showed during his classic period. His characters write, and others subsequently read, long, tedious letters filled with phrases in parentheses and attempts at wit. Buddy describes “Zooey” as “a sort of prose home movie.” Some critics criticize these last works, calling “Zooey” the longest and dullest short story ever to appear in The New Yorker, but others recognize that Salinger is no longer trying to please conventional readers but, influenced by his many years of study of Eastern religious philosophy, is ridding himself of conventional forms and methods accepted by Western society. In his later years, Salinger has continued to become increasingly innovative and experimental in his writing techniques. Linda S. Gordon With updates by the Editors Other major works novels: The Catcher in the Rye, 1951. Bibliography Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. New York: Renaissance Books, 2000. Attempt to explain Salinger’s reclusiveness, which the author relates to themes in Salinger’s fiction. Alsen, Eberhard. A Reader’s Guide to J. D. Salinger. Greenwood, 2003. Offers an insightful analysis of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as useful indexes and appendices covering all of Salinger’s fiction. Bloom, Harold, ed. J. D. Salinger. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999. Nine original essays on Salinger by prominent writers.

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____________. J. D. Salinger: Modern Critical Views: New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Collection of criticism by respected critics who deal with topics ranging from Salinger and Zen Buddhism to Salinger’s heroes and love ethic. Includes an introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Bruni, Domenic, and James Norman O’Neill. “J. D. Salinger.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Salinger’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into his short fiction. Kotzen, Kip, and Thomas Beller, eds. With Love and Squalor: Fourteen Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger. New York: Broadway, 2001. Collection of essays by contemporary writers on their personal first impressions of Salinger’s work. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Salinger: “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” (vol. 2), “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (vol. 3), “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (vol. 6), and “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (vol. 8). Purcell, William F. “Narrative Voice in J. D. Salinger’s ‘Both Parties Concerned’ and ‘I’m Crazy.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Spring, 1996): 278-280. Argues that “I’m Crazy” lacks the essential characteristic of skaz narrative that communicates the illusion of spontaneous speech. Silverberg, Mark. “A Bouquet of Empty Brackets: Author-Function and the Search for J. D. Salinger.” Dalhousie Review 75 (Summer/Fall, 1995): 222-246. Examines the consequences of J. D. Salinger’s “disappearance” from the literary scene and looks at the obsessive desire to find him; explores how Salinger’s characters and name have been freed from his person and re-created in various fictional and nonfictional contexts, concluding that while Salinger may have disappeared, his name and creations remain. Steinle, Pamela Hunt. In Cold Fear: “The Catcher in the Rye” Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Study of the impact of the novel on its release during a nervous period in American social history.

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William Saroyan Saroyan, William

Born: Fresno, California; August 31, 1908 Died: Fresno, California; May 18, 1981 Principal short fiction • The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories, 1934; Inhale and Exhale, 1936; Three Times Three, 1936; Little Children, 1937; The Gay and Melancholy Flux: Short Stories, 1937; Love, Here Is My Hat, and Other Short Romances, 1938; The Trouble with Tigers, 1938; Peace, It’s Wonderful, 1939; Three Fragments and a Story, 1939; My Name Is Aram, 1940; Saroyan’s Fables, 1941; The Insurance Salesman, and Other Stories, 1941; Forty-eight Saroyan Stories, 1942; Dear Baby, 1944; Some Day I’ll Be a Millionaire: Thirty-four More Great Stories, 1944; The Saroyan Special: Selected Stories, 1948; The Fiscal Hoboes, 1949; The Assyrian, and Other Stories, 1950; The Whole Voyald, and Other Stories, 1956; William Saroyan Reader, 1958; Love, 1959; After Thirty Years: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1964; Best Stories of William Saroyan, 1964; The Tooth and My Father, 1974; The Man with the Heart in the Highlands, and Other Early Stories, 1989. Other literary forms • William Saroyan published almost fifty books, including novels, plays, and several autobiographical memoirs. Among his most famous plays are My Heart’s in the Highlands (pr., pb. 1939) and The Time of Your Life (pr., pb. 1939). The latter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, but Saroyan rejected it because he “did not believe in official patronage of art.” His screenplay, The Human Comedy (1943), was one of the most popular wartime films and was later revised into a successful novel. Saroyan’s talents also extended to songwriting, his most famous song being “Come Ona My House.” His last work, My Name Is Saroyan, a potpourri of stories, verse, play fragments, and memoirs, was published posthumously in 1983. Achievements • William Saroyan’s reputation rests mainly on his pre-World War II plays and fictional sketches that embraced an upbeat, optimistic, and happy view of people during a period of deep economic depression and increasing political upheaval. His immense popularity and critical acclaim in the United States declined after the war, though in Europe, notably France and Italy, his reputation has remained high. His plays and fiction have been translated into several languages. Although highly diversified in technique, Saroyan’s best works all bear an irrepressible faith in the goodness of the human spirit. His unique, multifaceted style has been emulated by other writers who lack his sanguine outlook and control of craft. Occasional flashes of brilliance partially restored Saroyan’s reputation after World War II, and his memoir, Obituaries (1979), was nominated for the American Book Award. Saroyan’s greatest and most influential works, however, belong to his early, experimental period. Biography • William Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, in 1908. His father, who died when William was two, was a minister turned grape farmer; upon his death, young Saroyan spent seven years in an orphanage, after which his family was reunited. He worked at many odd jobs, including a stint as a telegraph operator, spending most of his time in Fresno and San Francisco. His first short stories began to appear in 1934

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and found instant success. In his first year as a writer his work appeared in the O’Brien volume of The Best Short Stories, and he published what is still his best-received volume of short stories, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Thereafter he produced an amazingly prolific stream of short stories, plays, novels, and memoirs. Saroyan was twice married to Carol Marcus, with whom he had two children. In 1959, after his second divorce, he declared himself a tax exile and went to live in Europe. He returned in 1961 to teach at Purdue University and later returned to live in Fresno. He was actively writing right up to his death from cancer in 1981. Analysis • Although William Saroyan cultivated his prose to evoke the effect of a “tradition of carelessness,” of effortless and sometimes apparently formless ruminations and evocations, he was in reality an accomplished and conscious stylist whose influences are varied and whose total effect is far more subtle than the seemingly “breezy” surface might at first suggest. His concern for the lonely and poor—ethnic outsiders, barflies, working girls, children—and their need for love and connectedness in the face of real privation recalls Sherwood Anderson. All of Saroyan’s best work was drawn from his own life (although the central character must be regarded as a persona, no matter how apparently connected to the author). In this aspect, and in his powerful and economical capacity to evoke locale and mood, Saroyan is in the tradition of Thomas Wolfe. The empathetic controlling consciousness and adventurous experiments with “formless form” also place Saroyan in the tradition that includes Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein. It might also be noted that Saroyan’s work shows the influence of Anton Chekhov in his use of seemingly “plotless” situations which nevertheless reveal some essential moment in the characters’ lives and philosophical insight into the human condition. Certainly, while the tone of Saroyan’s stories evolves from the comic to the stoical to the sadly elegiac mood of his later work, his ethos stands counter to the naturalists and the ideologically programmatic writers of the 1930’s, the period during which he produced some of his best work. Often his stories portray the world from the perspective of children, whose instinctual embrace of life echoes the author’s philosophy. Saroyan wrote, “If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.” Both the tone and outlook of that Courtesy, D.C. Public Library statement are paradigmatic.

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“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” • The title story of his first and most enduring collection, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” is still one of the most ambitious stylistic exercises of the Saroyan canon and an embodiment of the first phase of his career. The impressionistic style uses a welter of literary allusions in a stream-of-consciousness technique to portray the inner mind of an educated but destitute writer during the Depression who is literally starving to death as his mind remains lucid and aggressively inquiring. The poignant contrast between the failing body and the illuminated mind might evoke pity and compassion on the part of the reader, but somehow Saroyan invokes respect and acceptance as well. The story begins with the random associated thoughts of the half-dreaming writer which reveal both the chaos of the present era—“hush the queen, the king, Karl Franz, black Titanic, Mr. Chaplin weeping, Stalin, Hitler, a multitude of Jews . . .”— and the young protagonist’s literary erudition: “Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, a wordless rhyme of early meaning, Finlandia, mathematics highly polished and slick as green onions to the teeth, Jerusalem, the path to paradox.” Upon awakening, the writer plunges into “the trivial truth of reality.” He is starving, and there is no work. He ironically contemplates starvation as he combines the food in a restaurant into a mental still life; yet without a shred of self-pity, and with great dignity in spite of a clerk’s philistine and patronizing attitude, he attempts to obtain a job at an employment agency where the only skill which the writer can offer to a pragmatic world is the ability to type. He is relieved when there is no work because he can now devote his remaining energies to writing a literary last will and testament, an “Apology for Permission to Live.” The writer drinks copious amounts of water to fill his empty belly, steals some writing paper from the Y.M.C.A., and repairs to his empty apartment to compose his manifesto. Before beginning to write, he polishes his last remaining coin—a penny (he has sold his books for food, an act of which he feels ashamed)—and savors the “absurd act.” As he contemplates the words on the coin which boast of unity, trust in God, and liberty, he becomes drowsy, and he takes final leave of the world with an inner act of grace and dignity reminiscent of the daring young man of the title. His last conscious act of thought is the notion that he ought to have given the coin to a child. A child could buy any number of things with a penny. Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze he was gone from his body. . . . The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect. The story embodies Saroyan’s control of his materials and the sensitive and ironic understatement for which he is famous. Although the stories written during the Depression express bitterness about the situation, Saroyan eschews political solutions of any particular stripe and emphasizes the dignity of the individual and his tenacious connection to the forces of life and survival with grace and good humor. My Name Is Aram • A second collection which gained worldwide fame is the series of interconnected stories which form the book My Name is Aram. Told through the eyes of the title character, a young boy in the milieu of Armenian Fresno, the collection reveals the characteristics of the stories of the middle part of Saroyan’s career and

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foreshadows the direction taken in his later work. The reader sees childlike adults and children imbued with the burdens of adulthood. Throughout, the collection explores the often contradictory claims of emotional, poetic, and instinctive needs and the claims of reality. The author’s vision is dualistic. Some of the stories show a happy symbiosis between the poetic and the rational needs of his characters; others portray the conflicting demands unresolved. Even in the latter case, however, his characters cheerfully accept their fate, not with a stoicism so much as with a recognition that such a condition is a necessity to life and does not preclude savoring the moments of beauty which occur even in the midst of squalor or hardship. “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” • The first aspect of the mature and late phase of Saroyan’s writing is aptly illustrated by the story “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse.” Typical of Saroyan’s boyhood reminiscences, this tale concerns the seven-year-old Aram Garoghlanian and his slightly older cousin Mourad, who “borrow” a horse from their neighbor’s barn and keep him for months at an abandoned farm, enjoying clandestine early morning rides. The owner of the horse, John Byro, complains to the boys’ uncle Khosrove, a Saroyan eccentric who responds, “It’s no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven’t we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?” When the owner complains that he must walk, the uncle reminds him that he has two legs. When Byro laments that the horse had cost him sixty dollars, the uncle retorts, “I spit on money.” Byro’s loss of an agent to pull his surrey brings a roar of “Pay no attention to it!” Uncle Khosrove’s attitude is typical of the charming impracticality of many of Saroyan’s characters. When the boys at last secretly return the animal, the farmer is merely thankful that it has been returned and makes no attempt to find out who had stolen it. He marvels that the horse is in better condition than when it had been stolen. The story charmingly resolves the conflicting demands of the poetic and the practical (in favor of the poetic). “Pomegranate Trees” • “Pomegranate Trees” illustrates the darker and more elegiac side of the later Saroyan canon. Uncle Melik purchases some arid desert land which he intends to farm. The land is obviously impossible to render productive; yet the uncle persists in tilling the soil, planting his crops, and beating back the encroaching cactus while holding little dialogues with Aram and the prairie dogs. He decides against all reason to produce pomegranate trees, since he associates the fruit with his Assyrian past, but the trees are stunted, and the fruit yield is merely enough to fill a few boxes. When the meager harvest fails to bring a high enough price to suit Melik, he has the fruit sent back to him at still more expense. For the uncle, the enterprise has nothing to do with agriculture. “It was all pure aesthetics. . . . My uncle just liked the idea of planting trees and watching them grow.” The real world of unpaid bills intrudes, however, and the man loses the land. Three years later Aram and his uncle revisit the land which had given Melik such quixotic pleasure. The trees have died and the desert has reclaimed the land. “The place was exactly the way it had been all the years of the world.” Aram and his uncle walk around the dead orchard and drive back to town. “We didn’t say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.” There is nominal defeat, yet the still wistfully remembered joy in attempting the impossible for its own sake is a counterweight to the sadness of the finality of the experience. Such a resonance is at the heart of Saroyan’s ethos, expressed

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in countless stories which have made him a popular favorite, and which are beginning to elicit a high critical acclaim as well. David Sadkin With updates by John W. Fiero Other major works children’s literature: Me, 1963; Horsey Gorsey and the Frog, 1968; The Circus, 1986. plays: My Heart’s in the Highlands, pr., pb. 1939; The Hungerers: A Short Play, pb. 1939, pr. 1945; The Time of Your Life, pr., pb. 1939; Love’s Old Sweet Song, pr., pb. 1940; Subway Circus, pb. 1940; The Beautiful People, pr. 1940, pb. 1941; The Great American Goof, pr. 1940, pb. 1942; The Ping-Pong Game, pb. 1940 (one act); Three Plays: My Heart’s in the Highlands, The Time of Your Life, Love’s Old Sweet Song, pb. 1940; Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning, pr., pb. 1941; Hello Out There, pr. 1941, pb. 1942 (one act); Jim Dandy, pr., pb. 1941; Three Plays: The Beautiful People, Sweeney in the Trees, Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning, pb. 1941; Razzle Dazzle, pb. 1942 (collection); Talking to You, pr., pb. 1942; Get Away Old Man, pr. 1943, pb. 1944; Sam Ego’s House, pr. 1947, pb. 1949; A Decent Birth, a Happy Funeral, pb. 1949; Don’t Go Away Mad, pr., pb. 1949; The Slaughter of the Innocents, pb. 1952, pr. 1957; The Cave Dwellers, pr. 1957, pb. 1958; Once Around the Block, pb. 1959; Sam the Highest Jumper of Them All: Or, The London Comedy, pr. 1960, pb. 1961; Settled Out of Court, pr. 1960, pb. 1962; The Dogs: Or, The Paris Comedy, and Two Other Plays, pb. 1969; An Armenian Trilogy, pb. 1986 (includes Armenians, Bitlis, and Haratch); Warsaw Visitor and Tales from the Vienna Streets: The Last Two Plays of William Saroyan, pb. 1991. novels: The Human Comedy, 1943; The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, 1946; Rock Wagram, 1951; Tracy’s Tiger, 1951; The Laughing Matter, 1953 (reprinted as The Secret Story, 1954); Mama I Love You, 1956; Papa You’re Crazy, 1957; Boys and Girls Together, 1963; One Day in the Afternoon of the World, 1964. miscellaneous: My Name Is Saroyan, 1983 (stories, verse, play fragments, and memoirs); The New Saroyan Reader, 1984 (Brian Darwent, editor). nonfiction: Harlem as Seen by Hirschfield, 1941; Hilltop Russians in San Francisco, 1941; Why Abstract?, 1945 (with Henry Miller and Hilaire Hiler); The Twin Adventures: The Adventures of William Saroyan, 1950; The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, 1952; Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who, 1961; A Note on Hilaire Hiler, 1962; Not Dying, 1963; Short Drive, Sweet Chariot, 1966; Look at Us, 1967; I Used to Believe I Had Forever: Now I’m Not So Sure, 1968; Letters from 74 Rue Taitbout, 1969; Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon, 1970; Places Where I’ve Done Time, 1972; Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever, 1976; Chance Meetings, 1978; Obituaries, 1979; Births, 1983. screenplay: The Human Comedy, 1943. Bibliography Balakian, Nona. The World of William Saroyan. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998. Balakian, formerly a staff writer for The New York Times Book Review, knew Saroyan personally in his last years, and her observations of him color her assessment of his later works. She viewed it as her mission to resurrect his reputation and restore him to his place among the finest of twentieth century American writers. Traces his evolution from ethnic writer to master of the short story, to playwright, and finally to existentialist.

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Dyer, Brenda. “Stories About Stories: Teaching Narrative Using William Saroyan’s ‘My Grandmother Lucy Tells a Story Without a Beginning, a Middle, or an End.’” In Short Stories in the Classroom, edited by Carole L. Hamilton and Peter Kratzke. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. Offers some suggestions for teaching Saroyan’s story as a story about storytelling; argues that the story provides tools that empower and enrich when taught this way. Floan, Howard R. William Saroyan. New York: Twayne, 1966. Floan’s study remains one of the best extensive critical monographs on Saroyan’s work. It focuses on Saroyan’s early literature, glossing over the post-World War II period as less productive and durable. Contains a valuable annotated bibliography through 1964. Foster, Edward Halsey. William Saroyan: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991. Introduction to Saroyan’s short stories that discusses his use of the oral tradition, his Armenian heritage, and his usual themes and experimental techniques. Includes Saroyan’s own comments on his fiction as well as previously published essays by other critics. Haslam, Gerald W. “William Saroyan and San Francisco: Emergence of a Genius (Self-Proclaimed).” In San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature, edited by David Fine and Paul Skenazy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Discusses the influence of San Francisco in a number of Saroyan’s stories. Suggests that his stylistic triumph in “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” is to force the readers to become co-creators in the story. Keyishian, Harry, ed. Critical Essays on William Saroyan. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Collection of essays on Saroyan, from early reviews to critical articles. Helpful essays to a study of Saroyan’s short stories are Edward Halsey Foster’s discussion of Saroyan’s relationship to Gertrude Stein and Walter Shear’s essay on Saroyan’s ethnicity. Lee, Lawrence, and Barry Gifford. Saroyan: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Lee and Gifford’s study is rich with anecdotes and segments of interviews with Saroyan’s family, friends, and associates. Supplemented by a chronology and a bibliography. Leggett, John. A Daring Young Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Leggett relies heavily on Saroyan’s journals to produce a sustained glimpse of the author that is neither admiring nor forgiving. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Saroyan: “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” (vol. 2), “The Parsley Garden” (vol. 6), and “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” (vol. 7). Whitmore, Jon. William Saroyan: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Whitmore provides a bibliography citing resources to help determine how Saroyan’s plays were staged and produced. Indexes.

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Alan Sillitoe Sillitoe, Alan

Born: Nottingham, England; March 4, 1928 Principal short fiction • The Ragman’s Daughter, 1963; A Sillitoe Selection, 1968; Guzman Go Home, and Other Stories, 1968; Men, Women, and Children, 1973; The Second Chance, and Other Stories, 1981; The Far Side of the Street, 1988; Collected Stories, 1995; Alligator Playground: A Collection of Short Stories, 1997; New and Collected Stories, 2003. Other literary forms • Alan Sillitoe’s more than five dozen published books include nearly two dozen novels, more than a dozen collections of poetry, five books for children, and volumes of travel literature, essays, and plays. Four of his books, including The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and The Ragman’s Daughter, have been made into films. His first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), was also produced in a stage adaptation, and his second, The General (1960), carried the film title Counterpoint. Athough he wrote his best-known novels during the late 1950’s and 1960’s, he continued writing long fiction into his seventies, producing such novels as The Broken Chariot (1998), The German Numbers Woman (1999), and Birthday (2001). Achievements • Alan Sillitoe’s early novels and stories fall within the tradition of British working-class fiction established by Charles Dickens and Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell in the 1840’s and carried on by George Gissing, Arthur Morrison, and Walter Greenwood. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning won the Author’s Club Prize as the best English novel in 1958, and Sillitoe’s best-known story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959 and is widely accepted as a modern classic on proletarian life. The General, which began as a short story in 1950, won the Nottingham Writers’ Club competition in 1960. Believing the concept of class is a degradation, Sillitoe is not so political in his later work, which shows a willingness to experiment in form and style. His stories have been frequently anthologized and have been translated into more than twenty languages. Biography • Born into a working-class family in the English industrial city of Nottingham, Alan Sillitoe was educated to the age of fourteen at Radford Boulevard School for Boys and worked in local factories until he joined the Royal Air Force in 1946. He served in Malaya for two years, followed by sixteen months spent in an English sanatorium recuperating from tuberculosis. During this period he read voraciously and began to write. From 1952 to 1958, he lived in France and Spain, where he became friends with Robert Graves. On the publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, he returned to England, and he settled in Kent. He has traveled frequently and widely and has made extended visits to North Africa, Israel, and the Soviet Union. He married the poet Ruth Fainlight in 1959 and has one son, David. His avocations are wireless telegraphy and collecting maps. Analysis • “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” the title story of Alan Sillitoe’s first collection of short fiction, quickly became one of the most widely read stories of modern times. Its basic theme, that one must be true to one’s own instincts

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and beliefs despite intense social pressure to go against them, is echoed in many of his best-known stories, including “On Saturday Afternoon,” “The Ragman’s Daughter,” “The Good Women,” and “Pit Strike.” Such an attitude strikes a responsive chord in modern readers who feel hemmed in by the dictates of “official” bureaucracies and by government interference in their personal lives. It is important for Sillitoe’s characters to establish their independence in a conformist world, yet at the same time they often subscribe to a class-oriented code of values which pits the disadvantaged working class against the rest of society. “Uncle Ernest” • Many of Sillitoe’s stories are located in urban working-class slums and reflect the environment he knew himself. In story after story these ghetto-dwellers are seen as society’s underdogs, as victims of a series of injustices, real or imagined, which undermine their sense of personal dignity and self-esteem. Ernest Brown, for example, the protagonist in “Uncle Ernest,” is a lonely, aging upholsterer who befriends Alma and Joan, two young schoolgirls he meets at a local café. In a series of encounters, always at the café and in public view, he buys them food and small gifts and takes pleasure in learning something of their lives. He asks nothing of the girls in return, and they come to think of him affectionately as “Uncle Ernest.” After a few weeks, however, he is accosted by two detectives who accuse him of leading the girls “the wrong way” and forbid him to see them again. Unable to cope with this “official” harassment, Ernest Brown retreats into alcohol and despair. In one sense “Uncle Ernest” is an anomaly in Sillitoe’s short fiction, for although it illustrates the victimization his characters often face, it chronicles a too-ready acceptance of the larger society’s interference and power. For the most part his characters remain defiant in the face of directives from those in positions of authority. “On Saturday Afternoon” • “On Saturday Afternoon,” the story of an unnamed working-class man’s attempt to commit suicide, offers a sardonic example of this defiance. The man first tries to hang himself from a light fixture, but before he can succeed the police arrive and arrest him. In response to his bitter comment, “It’s a fine thing if a bloke can’t tek his own life,” the police tell him “it ain’t your life.” They take him to a psychiatric hospital and unwittingly put him in a sixth floor room and fail to restrain him. That night he jumps from the window and succeeds in killing himself. “On Saturday Afternoon” is typical of Sillitoe’s stories in its assumed attitude to social authority: Although “they” interfere and place controls on an individual’s right to act as he pleases, they can usually be outwitted. Here and in other stories Sillitoe’s workers place great stress on “cunning,” the ability to preserve individual freedom of action in a restrictive or oppressive social environment. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” • This attitude of cunning is well illustrated in Sillitoe’s best-known story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” The protagonist in this story is simply called Smith, the modern equivalent of Everyman. He is a seventeen-year-old boy who has been put in a Borstal, a reform school, for theft from a baker’s shop. He is also an accomplished long-distance runner and has been chosen by the governor, or warden, to represent the Borstal in a competition for the All-England Championship. As the reader meets Smith, he is running alone over the early-morning countryside, and as he runs he considers his situation. It soon becomes apparent that he has rejected the warden’s platitudes (“if you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you”) and has seen through the hypocrisy of

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his promises as well. He recognizes the difference between his own brand of honesty, which allows him to be true to his own instincts, and the warden’s, which rejects the needs of the individual in favor of social expediency. Smith’s only counter to the warden’s attempt to use him for his own ends is cunning. As he sees it, the warden is “dead from the toenails up,” living as he does in fear of social disapproval and manipulating the inmates of his Borstal to gain social prestige. Smith, however, resolves to fight against becoming swallowed up in social convention, to be true to his own concept of honesty. Adopting such a stance means recognizing “that it’s war between me and them” and leads to his decision to lose the upcoming race. In the second part of his three-part story the reader shares Smith’s reminiscences about his boyhood in a Nottingham slum. He first engages sympathy by telling how he impulsively took part in the theft for which he was sent to Borstal, and then moves quickly to describe the confrontations with police who investigated the robbery. In this section Sillitoe manages a difficult feat by maintaining support for his protagonist even though readers know the boy is guilty of theft. He does this by turning the investigation into a series of skirmishes between Smith and the authorities which allow the reader to be caught up in admiration of the boy’s ability to outwit for a time a vindictive, slow-thinking policeman. Not unexpectedly, persistence pays off for the investigators, and in a highly original and amusing climax the stolen money is found and Smith is taken into custody. The facts are less important here, however, than Sillitoe’s narrative skill in sustaining the reader’s sympathetic involvement with his protagonist. Having manipulated the reader into becoming Smith’s ally by allowing conventional notions of right and wrong to be suspended, he also paves the way for the acceptance of Smith’s dramatic gesture in the final section of the story. The third part brings the reader back to time present and the day of the race. The warden, anticipating Smith’s win and the reflected glory it will bring to him, has invited numbers of influential friends to witness the competition. Ironically, none of the boys’ parents is present, their invitations having been worded so that they would be likely to mistrust or misunderstand them. Details such as this add to the impression of the callousness of the Borstal authorities and help to confirm Smith’s conviction that they are using the boys as pawns in a selfish social game. The purity of Smith’s intentions, however, is underscored during the race by his sense of communication with the natural surroundings through which he runs and his Edenic perception of himself as “the first man ever to be dropped into this world.” As he runs, his thoughts alternate between lyrical commentary on the physical satisfaction of running well and consideration of his decision to lose the race and the punitive consequences this will bring him. Nevertheless he remains firm in his decision, committed to showing the warden “what honesty means if it’s the last thing I do.” In the end he does lose the race and makes his point, but in much more dramatic manner than he had foreseen. Arriving at the finish line well in advance of the other runners, he is virtually forced to mark time in front of the grandstand until one of his competitors passes him and crosses the line. Smith has made his point: Like so many other of Sillitoe’s protagonists, he refuses to be manipulated. “The Good Women” • The fierce independence espoused by Sillitoe’s workingclass characters, and the rejection of what they see as unwarranted interference by society’s authority figures in their personal affairs, is also evident in “The Good Women.” The heroine of this story is Liza Atkin, a vital and earthy woman whom one critic called “a Nottingham Mother Courage.” Liza’s life, like that of Bertolt Brecht’s

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protagonist, is plagued by economic hardship and marked by injustice and the stupidity of war. Although the story has no real plot—readers are shown a series of disconnected events which take place over a period of years—they are caught up in the problems of Liza’s life and come to applaud her feisty, tough-minded manner of coping with them. Dogged by poverty, she ekes out a precarious existence supporting her out-ofwork husband and two young boys by filling a decrepit baby carriage with old rags and bits of metal from local dumps and selling them to scrap dealers, and by taking in washing from troops stationed nearby. When the means-test man attempts to deny her welfare payments because of her “business,” she shouts him down so the whole street can hear. She makes her gesture of protest against war by harboring a deserter; and standing up for workers’ rights in the factory where she eventually finds work, she quickly becomes known to management as “the apostle of industrial unrest.” Later, when her son dies because Allied planes bombed his unit by mistake, she is devastated. She recovers, however, to become a passionate advocate of violent revolution at a time in life when most women would be settling into comfortable grandmother roles. “The Good Women,” like many of Sillitoe’s stories, has strong didactic overtones. Liza Atkin, along with Smith, Ernest Brown, and the unnamed protagonist in “On Saturday Afternoon,” finds herself in a world in which the dictates of society at large often contradict her personal convictions. Yet she is able to resist the pressure to conform, partly because of her strong belief in what is right (harboring the deserter to protest against war, for example), partly because she shares the habitual workingclass mistrust of “them” (the authority figures who come from outside and above her own social station) and their motives. From her perspective, and from Sillitoe’s, society is badly flawed, and it is up to the individual to strive for a new order in which the unjust exercise of power and the suffering it can cause are eliminated. Memorable characters such as Liza Atkin are meant to show the reader how to begin. “Pit Strike” • In “Pit Strike,” which was filmed for British Broadcasting Corporation Television, Sillitoe offers yet another working-class hero, a champion of fairness and integrity. Joshua, a fifty-year-old Nottingham miner, journeys to the south of England with a number of his friends to support a strike by fellow colliers. In a well-organized program of action, the men race from one coal-powered generating station to another to form picket lines and halt deliveries of coal. In a number of cases they are confronted by policemen whose job it is to see that deliveries are uninterrupted. Clashes between the workers, who feel they are being treated unjustly, and the police, representing the power of society as a whole, are almost inevitable in such circumstances. Although Joshua acts to restrain his more belligerent companions in these confrontations, he makes his own mark in a dramatic and courageous manner. When a fully loaded coal truck is seen crawling up an incline away from a picketed power station to make its delivery at another, Joshua daringly and at great personal risk runs after it and forces open the rear gate safety catches, allowing tons of coal to fall on the highway. Although he narrowly escapes death, the gesture seems worth making, and soon after this the strike is settled in the miners’ favor. Like Joshua, the characters in Sillitoe’s other stories are usually agitators, passionately and defiantly reaffirming the value of the individual spirit in a world that too often encourages unthinking conformity to social norms. Sillitoe’s audience may not always concur with the views his characters express, nor wish to accept the methods

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they use to further their aims, but their stories nevertheless touch readers and stay tenaciously with them disturbing, provoking, and making them more aware of the imperfect world and of themselves. Stanley S. Atherton With updates by Jerry Bradley and the Editors Other major works children’s literature: The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim, 1967; Big John and the Stars, 1977; The Incredible Fencing Fleas, 1978; Marmalade Jim at the Farm, 1980; Marmalade Jim and the Fox, 1984. plays: All Citizens Are Soldiers, pr. 1967 (adaptation of Lope de Vega; with Ruth Fainlight); Three Plays, pb. 1978. novels: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958; The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1959 (novella); The General, 1960; Key to the Door, 1961; The Death of William Posters, 1965; A Tree on Fire, 1967; A Start in Life, 1970; Travels in Nihilon, 1971; The Flame of Life, 1974; The Widower’s Son, 1976; The Storyteller, 1979; Her Victory, 1982; The Lost Flying Boat, 1983; Down from the Hill, 1984; Life Goes On, 1985; Out of the Whirlpool, 1987; The Open Door, 1989; Last Loves, 1990; Leonard’s War, 1991; Snowstop, 1993; The Broken Chariot, 1998; The German Numbers Woman, 1999; Birthday, 2001. nonfiction: The Road to Volgograd, 1964; Raw Material, 1972; Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays, 1975; The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, 1983 (with Fay Weldon); Nottinghamshire, 1986 (with David Sillitoe); Every Day of the Week, 1987; Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel, 1815-1914, 1996; Life Without Armor, 1996. poetry: Without Beer or Bread, 1957; The Rats, and Other Poems, 1960; A Falling out of Love, and Other Poems, 1964; Love in the Environs of Voronezh, and Other Poems, 1968; Shaman, and Other Poems, 1968; Poems, 1971 (with Ted Hughes and Ruth Fainlight); Barbarians, and Other Poems, 1974; Storm: New Poems, 1974; Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979; More Lucifer, 1980; Sun Before Departure, 1984; Tides and Stone Walls, 1986; Collected Poems, 1993. screenplays: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960 (adaptation of his novel); The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1961 (adaptation of his novella); Che Guevara, 1968; The Ragman’s Daughter, 1974 (adaptation of his novel). Bibliography Atherton, Stanley S. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment. London: W. H. Allen, 1979. This study primarily emphasizes the revolutionary spirit of Sillitoe’s first novels, but it deals with short fiction and lesser works as well. Hanson, Gillian Mary. Understanding Alan Sillitoe. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Useful volume of Sillitoe criticism and appreciation. Hensher, Philip. “Radical Sentiments.” Sunday Telegraph, July 23, 1995, p. B9. A discussion of the life and works of Sillitoe, focusing on his autobiography Life Without Armour and his The Collected Stories; discusses briefly “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and the political nature of some of Sillitoe’s short stories. Hitchcock, Peter. Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Good examination of the writer’s themes and execution.

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Kalliney, Peter. “Cities of Affluence: Masculinity, Class, and the Angry Young Man.” Modern Fiction Studies 47 (Spring, 2001): 92-117. Studies the class element in Sillitoe’s work and the way in which gender dynamics illustrate class dynamics. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Sillitoe: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (vol. 4), “The Ragman’s Daughter” (vol. 6), and “The Sniper” (vol. 7). Penner, Allen Richard. Alan Sillitoe. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Useful midcareer overview of Sillitoe’s work. Penner offers a short biography and a helpful bibliography. The discussion covers Sillitoe’s poetry and fiction. Sawkins, John. The Long Apprenticeship: Alienation in the Early Work of Alan Sillitoe. New York: P. Lang, 2001. Semiotic reading of Sillitoe’s work that looks for symbols and explores Sillitoe’s semantics. Sillitoe, Alan. “The Growth of a Writer: An Interview with Alan Sillitoe.” Interview by Joyce Rothschild. Southern Humanities Review 20 (Spring, 1986): 127-140. This interview reveals Sillitoe’s career and the irrelevance of class on his artistic sensibility. Sillitoe stresses the importance of character in his fiction. Skovmand, Michael, and Steffen Skovmand, eds. The Angry Young Men. Aarhus, Denmark: Akademisk Forlag, 1975. Hans Hauge’s essay on Sillitoe considers Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as a representative novel from an angry generation of young writers that included John Osborne, John Wain, John Braine, and Kingsley Amis.

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Isaac Bashevis Singer Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Born: Leoncin, Poland; July 14 or November 21, 1904 Died: Surfside, Florida; July 24, 1991 Principal short fiction • Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961; Short Friday, and Other Stories, 1964; The Séance, and Other Stories, 1968; A Friend of Kafka, and Other Stories, 1970; A Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories, 1973; Passions, and Other Stories, 1975; Old Love, 1979; The Collected Stories, 1982; The Image, and Other Stories, 1985; The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, 1988. Other literary forms • Among Isaac Bashevis Singer’s prodigious output are several translations; numerous novels, including Der Sotn in Gorey (1935; Satan in Goray, 1955), Der Knekht (1961; The Slave, 1962), and Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Liebe (1966; Enemies: A Love Story, 1972); several volumes of memoirs and autobiographical stories; more than a dozen collections of children’s stories; and a variety of adaptations of his stories or novels for other media, including opera, stage, and film. Achievements • Isaac Bashevis Singer, more than any other writer in the twentieth century, kept alive the rich traditions of a vanishing language and culture. Born into Eastern European Orthodox Judaism, Singer witnessed both the gradual assimilation of his generation into Gentile culture and the tragic Nazi Holocaust that ravaged Eastern Europe’s Jewish populations. Yiddish, a language written in Hebrew characters and derived from German, with borrowings from Polish, Lithuanian, and other languages, was spoken by millions of Jews. Inextricably connected to it are centuries of traditional beliefs and customs, as well as fascinating folklore, demonology, and mysticism that evolved from religious teaching. Writing exclusively in Yiddish (though translating much of his work into English himself) and mining both the language and the culture, Singer nourished a population stricken with tragedy and dispersed by exile. Singer’s greatest achievement, however, lay in expressing the universality of that very particular milieu. Never did Singer cater to audiences unfamiliar with Yiddish culture, yet, by finding the truly human aspects of the people and conflicts in his stories, he earned impressive popularity among a wide and varied audience. It is no doubt the profound universality of his vision that earned for Singer election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964, as the only member writing in a language other than English, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Biography • Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, on either July 14 or November 21, 1904. His grandfathers had been rabbis, and his father was a Hasidic scholar, whom Singer’s mother chose over other suitors for his scholarly excellence. The Singers moved to Warsaw in 1908, and the young Bashevis (a name adapted from his mother’s name Bathsheba) grew up with his sister and two brothers in a ghetto tenement at 10 Krochmalna Street, which was his father’s rabbinical court. Rabbi Pinchos-Mendel Singer was a warm, mystical, and deeply spiritual man who was loved and revered by the entire community. Bathsheba Singer was a cool, sharp,

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practical, and rational woman who in many ways held the family together. The young Singer grew up among parental balances and contrasts that inform much of his writing. Singer read widely, including Fyodor Dostoevski’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886) in Yiddish at the age of nine, and studied languages. In addition, his older brother, Israel Joshua, eleven years his senior, was an intelligent and rebellious spirit who very early began to influence Singer’s intellectual development. In 1917, Singer accompanied his mother to her native Bilgoray, where they lived for four years. There, he taught Hebrew—considered an affront to tradition, as the language of the Scriptures was not to be used for mundane purposes. In 1921, Singer’s © The Nobel Foundation father took a rabbinical post in a small town in Galicia; Singer, then seventeen, refused to follow, and instead stayed in Warsaw to study at the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary. He later characterized his stay in Warsaw as the worst year of his life: Undernourished and ill fit to follow in his forefathers’ footsteps, Singer left the seminary after a year to rejoin his family, only to return to Warsaw in 1923. He would never see his parents and younger brother, Moishe, again. Singer’s father wrote religious tracts, and Israel Joshua wrote secular pieces: It was almost inevitable that Singer too would write. During his year at the seminary, he had translated Knut Hamsun’s novel Sult (1890; Hunger, 1899). In 1923 he became a proofreader for six dollars a week at the Literarische Bletter, a Yiddish literary magazine. He translated popular novels into Yiddish for newspaper serialization and experimented with writing in both Hebrew and Yiddish. During the late 1920’s, the Literarische Bletter and Warshaver Shriften began accepting his Yiddish stories, such as “Women,” “Grandchildren,” and “The Village Gravedigger” for publication; meanwhile, his brother Israel Joshua’s first novel, Blood Harvest, appeared in 1927. Singer became involved with a young Communist woman, Runia; they lived in common-law marriage, and in 1929 they had a son, Israel. They became estranged, however, and Runia and the child left for Russia, then Turkey and Palestine. Singer would not meet his son again for decades. During the 1930’s, the Singer brothers’ lives and careers became interwoven. In 1932, Isaac Bashevis became the editor of Globus, another literary magazine, and Israel Joshua published Yoshe Kalb, the popularity of which led to serial publication in the Jewish Daily Forward in New York. Isaac Bashevis’s first novel, Satan in Goray, was serialized in Globus in 1933; in 1934, the older brother left for New York to escape the rise of European Nazism and to find success in the thriving Yiddish American community; and in 1935 the younger brother followed.

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Singer moved into the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn. The poverty and hunger that he met there were not new to him, but exile brought on an unprecedented spiritual collapse. He felt isolated from his family in Poland, his wife and child in Palestine, and his beloved culture devastated by war and genocide across Europe. He could not write, virtually forgot Yiddish, despaired for the future of Yiddish literature, and even at times became suicidal. In 1937, Singer met Alma, a married German Jew with a son and daughter, who captured his mind and heart. She was divorced from her husband in 1939, and the following year they married. He was freelancing for the Forward, which continually encouraged him to resume his writing, in Yiddish. In 1943, he became an American citizen, and in 1944, with World War II raging, Singer was struck by a personal tragedy: His brother Israel Joshua, to whom he was devoted personally and artistically, died suddenly at the age of fifty-one. The following year, the war ended and Singer began work on a novel, Di Familye Muskat (1950; The Family Moskat, 1950), which was serialized in the Forward over the next three years, broadcast on a Jewish radio station, chosen by publisher Alfred A. Knopf for translation into English, and awarded the Louis Lamed Prize in 1950. He began to write steadily, and in the early 1950’s, nearing the age of fifty himself, Singer came to the attention of the American literary community. Editor Cecil Hemley and his wife Elaine Gottlieb helped Singer in several ways: They translated his stories, got them placed in major periodicals such as Commentary and Partisan Review, and published his novels through their Noonday Press, which in 1960 became part of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Singer produced a steady stream of stories and novels. His stories were published in numerous magazines as well as collections; some collections included reissues of much older pieces; translations appeared under his own hand or those of his nephew Joseph, Hemley, Gottlieb, writer Saul Bellow, or others. During the late 1960’s, well past his sixtieth birthday, Singer took the suggestion of a friend and began writing stories for children as well. He also taught widely, serving as writer-in-residence at such institutions as Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin. Ironically, though well known in Yiddish and literary circles, Singer did not enjoy mass popularity and recognition until the 1983 release of the film Yentl, featuring Barbra Streisand, based on Singer’s 1952 story “Yentl der Yeshive Bucher” (“Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”). A similar success was enjoyed by the 1989 film Enemies: A Love Story, based on Singer’s 1972 novel. For much of his later life, Singer lived with his wife Alma on West Eighty-sixth Street in New York; he later divided his time between New York and Miami Beach, where he ultimately retired. He died of a stroke on July 24, 1991, ten days after his eighty-seventh birthday. Analysis • Isaac Bashevis Singer relished the short story; he believed that it offered, much more than the novel, the possibility of perfection. His stories, however, seldom reveal signs of a painstaking artisan conscious of form; rather, they flow naturally, even mindlessly, without any sense of manipulation. Indeed, Singer’s art grows out of a thriving tradition of oral storytelling that had been fermenting through Eastern Europe for centuries. Like many authors, Singer writes about the places and lives he knows. He sets most of his stories in pre-World War II Poland, in the small villages (Shtetlach) or the ur-

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ban ghettoes of his childhood and youth. In his stories, these places are the Polish cities of Warsaw and Kraków, or semifictional towns such as Goray and Frampol; they appear over and over again with recurring motifs and character types, until most of Singer’s tales seem to happen in the same prototypical settings. Given the specificity of Singer’s cultural milieu, the individual’s relationship to his or her community becomes important, whether that relationship focuses on the collective attitude toward unusual characters and behavior or the individual’s dislocation from family, community, and nation. Singer spent most of his life with such dislocation; it is not surprising that many of his characters are in some sort of exile. That exile can involve a new country, a new language, a new culture, or a new identity. Later in his career, Singer set stories among the expatriate Yiddish communities of New York or Israel and dealt explicitly with issues faced by an aging writer in exile. As de facto chronicler of twentieth century Jewish experience, Singer chooses to leave untouched its central event: the Holocaust and the slaughter of six million European Jews under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Believing that a simple storyteller could never tell such an incomprehensible and horrific story, he rather evokes it through the richness with which he portrays the culture that it eradicated and the scattered pathos that it left in its wake. Like the Jewish people as a whole, Singer’s characters struggle with identity in a changing world, they confront incomprehensible horrors and either surrender or survive. The individual in his community and his world is ultimately the individual in his universe, often alone with the supernatural powers that govern it. Singer borrows from and embellishes on the wide array of Jewish mysticism and demonology to personify such powers and their involvement in the human condition. Sometimes the result is explicitly mythological; sometimes it explores the depths of possibility in very real circumstances. Whatever the form, Singer never hesitates to explore life and death, sin and redemption, good and evil, and heaven and hell in broad, literal terms. For him, imagination is paramount, and there are never any limits to what is possible. Much of the charm in his stories comes from the striking juxtaposition of the astoundingly cosmic with the laughably trivial, the apocalyptic with the quotidian, the macabre with the sentimental. Nowhere is this approach more successful than in Singer’s treatment of human sexuality. He never takes for granted the difficulties that sex engenders or the social rules and taboos that it confronts; at the same time, however, he consistently attributes to it its role as a driving force, and a truly beautiful one, in human affairs. His characters—be they rabbis, devils, simpletons, maidens, or whores—are all of flesh and blood, and they act accordingly. Singer portrays violence, rape, and hatred as unflinchingly as he portrays the deepest romantic love or most spiritual piety, never with judgment or disapproval, always striving to plumb the depths of the human heart. “Two Corpses Go Dancing” • One of Singer’s early stories shows the playfulness with which he treats death, demons, and infidelity. “Two Corpses Go Dancing,” first published in The Jewish Daily Forward in 1943, is told from the point of view of the socalled Evil One, a device Singer also employs in such stories as “The Destruction of Kreshev” and “The Unseen.” In “Two Corpses Go Dancing,” the Evil One amuses himself by reinvigorating the corpse of a forgotten pauper named Itche-Godl, who “had been a corpse even when alive.” Itche-Godl returns to his home, only to find his

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widow remarried to a more substantial man. His two appearances at her door inspire terror, but, believing himself to be alive, Itche-Godl cannot understand her behavior. Itche-Godl soon encounters Finkle Rappaport, a widow who had gone to Vienna with a serious illness a year before and had long been believed dead but had recently reappeared in Warsaw. Finkle and Itche-Godl soon become betrothed; the couple’s mysterious romance and macabre appearance astonish those around them. After the wedding, they retire to their wedding chamber only to find themselves transformed into corpses again and to realize that their return to life was only an illusion. In “Two Corpses Go Dancing,” Singer avoids all pretense of realism and rather depicts a surreal universe where no assumptions are valid. The physical and spiritual worlds are interwoven: Corpses are visible to the outside world but lack self-knowledge; they possess desire but are ultimately incapable of consummating it; they have superhuman powers but are essentially powerless. “Taibele and Her Demon” • A story that similarly plays on the border between the real and spiritual realms but does not in the end sacrifice literal plausibility is “Taibele and Her Demon.” Taibele is an abandoned wife in the shtetl of Frampol. Forbidden to remarry until her husband is proven dead, she is sentenced to a life of solitude. The village prankster Alchonon one day overhears Taibele’s fascination with a story of a woman seduced by a demon, and he devises a scheme to take advantage of her credulity. One night he appears naked in her bedroom claiming to be the demon Hurmizah. He testifies that her husband is dead, charms her with tales of the demon world, and is welcomed into her bed. Though at first fearful and ashamed, Taibele gradually becomes dependent on Hurmizah’s biweekly visits. Winter comes, however, and with it the inescapable truth of Alchonon’s humanity. His naked body cannot tolerate the cold during his nocturnal visits; he is taken ill and stops coming to see Taibele. She despairs at Hurmizah’s absence and takes it as a pronouncement on her. Then one day, she sees a modest funeral procession on the snowy village street. When she realizes that the deceased is the idler Alchonon, whom she often mocked at the well, she feels a deep sympathy and accompanies him to the cemetery. She lives the rest of her life alone and carries her secret to the grave. The power of this story lies in the irony of Taibele’s passion for the demon Hurmizah. Here, the surreal world exists only in the minds of the characters: So long as people believe in demons, their existence is real enough. Singer is suggesting the unseen and unknown connections that can be forged between individuals when the imagination is free. At the same time, the love that results is not without its price. For Alchonon, that price is untimely death; for Taibele, it is the burden of sin, mystery, and desertion. “Gimpel the Fool” • One of Singer’s most celebrated stories, “Gimpel the Fool,” also locates the individual’s happiness in his or her power to believe. This, however, is a lighthearted tale where the willingness to let go of belief, to distrust one’s senses and logic, defines the shape of the story. Gimpel the baker is known throughout Frampol for his gullibility. He recounts the nicknames that people have given him and the tricks that they have played on him but does not regret his simpleness, for he feels that he must always be open to all possibilities. As such, he allows himself to be prodded into marrying an unprincipled woman named Elka. He accepts her bastard son as her little brother and believes her explanation of a premature birth when she bears another son seventeen weeks after their

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wedding night. She is repeatedly unfaithful to him; he accuses and even catches her but always eventually accepts her explanations and returns to his natural state of contentment. They live in this way for twenty years. Finally, on her deathbed, Elka confesses that she has lived sinfully and deceived him constantly. Soon after her death, Gimpel is tempted by the Evil Angel to have revenge on the scornful townsfolk by baking urine into their bread, but a vision of Elka returns and stops him. With his innocence restored, he leaves Frampol and travels the world, witnessing falsehood and truth in people. At the story’s end, he is old, wise, accepting, prepared for death, free of regret, and full of love. Throughout the story, Gimpel knows that the true factuality of events is less important than their effect on people’s minds and hearts. He knows that he is incapable of skepticism but that his innocence and belief are his strength. Though Singer makes it clear that Gimpel is indeed a gullible fool, the simple joy with which he approaches life ultimately reveals itself to be a subversive wisdom. “Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night,” he says. “It happens to one if it doesn’t happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make?” Gimpel’s doctrine is essentially Singer’s affirmation of the power and validity of creating and telling stories. “The Spinoza of Market Street” • “The Spinoza of Market Street” is another of Singer’s most popular and most often reprinted tales. It is the story of Dr. Nahum Fischelson, a librarian, teacher, and revered philosopher who has devoted his life to studying the ideas of the seventeenth century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s Ethics dictates a rigid rational philosophy that Fischelson strives to embody. He contemplates the heavens and the mysteries of astronomy and contrasts them with the world below, in which the mindless rabble represents the antithesis of reason. Then, as World War I descends on Warsaw, Fischelson’s bitterness and stomach problems worsen, and he takes to a sickbed, where he has a stunning apocalyptic dream that he immediately dismisses as irrational. He seems to be on the verge of death, but a grotesque old spinster neighbor named Black Dobbe comes to take care of him. She nurses him back to health with simple attention and conversation, and soon Fischelson’s study of Spinoza begins to seem less relevant. Before long, Black Dobbe announces to the rabbi that she and Fischelson will wed, and the story ends with their wedding night. When Black Dobbe comes to the so-called Spinoza of Market Street, he drops the Ethics to which he has devoted his life, and in his new wife’s arms miraculously regains his health, his youth, and his passion for living. “Zeitl and Rickel” • In “Zeitl and Rickel,” Singer again focuses on an unpredictable relationship and the depth of human love and obsession, this time setting it more firmly in a context of social attitudes. The narrator says that the incredible tale she is about to relate demonstrates that anything is possible. She tells of two women, Zeitl and Rickel, one the daughter of a follower of the false Messiah, and the other an abandoned wife and the daughter of the town’s ritual slaughterer. Rickel comes to attend on Zeitl’s dying father, and the two women become absorbed in each other. Their relationship becomes steady and secretive, as seen from outside by the women of the community. They are overheard one day in a seeming catechism regarding hell and their shared future and eventually commit suicide in succession by throwing themselves into the well.

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On one level, this is a story about an obsessive love shared by two women (with the suggestion, though never explicit, of lesbianism) and the mystical and eventually self-destructive form it assumes. On another level, it is about community perception: As told by one of Rickel’s former students, the tale is an accumulation of gossip ennobled into spiritual mystery. Implicit in the story is a view of the place of women as daughters and wives in shtetl society, and the unorthodoxy of two women forging a spiritual connection and devoting their lives to each other. Although Singer has never been accused of feminism, he is sometimes keenly aware, and even in awe, of the shape and power of the female psyche. “Grandfather and Grandson” • “Grandfather and Grandson” powerfully reflects the tension between the old insularity of Yiddish culture and the new worldliness that comes with greater exposure and assimilation. Reb Mordecai Meir is a widowed Hasid who devotes his life to his study of Judaism. He abhors everything worldly, including newspapers, theater, atheism, religious reform, and even the integration of the sexes. Having disowned his liberal-minded daughter, he is surprised when his long-forgotten grandson Fulie shows up on his Warsaw doorstep. Fulie, dressed like a Gentile, is a Communist sought by the authorities for political subversion. Though his presence and beliefs threaten Reb Mordecai Meir, blood flows deep, and the grandfather welcomes the fugitive into his home. Their shared life is precarious: Each wants to convert the other, each has guarded distrust, and ultimately they find a silent and respectful balance. When Fulie announces that he must leave, possibly never to return, and asks his grandfather to keep an envelope to be passed on to a contact from the movement, Reb Mordecai Meir is put to a test of faith and conscience. He begrudgingly complies, and even when he later sees his grandson’s revolver, accepts with silence the world’s intrusion into his life. Finally, Fulie’s dead body is returned to his bewildered grandfather, who utters prayers over the slain youth as best he can, finding reaffirmation of his faith and identity in their tragic blood connection. “Grandfather and Grandson” reflects a larger awareness of the political events that shook European Jewry through the twentieth century. Though still set in prewar Poland, it is a story that reaches beyond to a universal experience of the painful changes that mark the passage of generations. “The Manuscript” • “The Manuscript” also reflects larger historical realities and creates a sense of political urgency. Set at the outbreak of World War II, it is a story, retold much later in a café in Tel Aviv, of a woman’s sacrifice for the man she loves and her response to his betrayal. Shibtah is an actor married to a writer and womanizer named Menasha. When war comes to Warsaw, they flee to Biauystok, leaving behind all Menasha’s writing except a promising novel called Rungs. When a Biauystok publisher expresses interest in the piece, they discover that they have someone else’s manuscript; Rungs was left in Warsaw. Seeing no other option, and against Menasha’s wishes, Shibtah undertakes a perilous ten-day journey back to Warsaw to retrieve it. On her return to Biauystok, however, she finds Menasha in bed with another woman. She impulsively tosses the manuscript in the stove and leaves Biauystok alone the following day. Shibtah was never obsessively jealous; it is the particular infidelity, set against her journey and the backdrop of war, that constitutes a deception she cannot tolerate. Singer is not telling a simple story of broken vows; rather, he portrays the response of

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the human heart to a unique and complex set of circumstances, where love, sex, art, politics, and history find dramatic junction in a particular moment of time. As in much of his later work, the world of all possibility becomes a world where the individual can depend on nobody and nothing but his or her own heart and will to act. “Schloimele” • Many of Singer’s stories are loosely biographical, drawn from specific people and events from his own experience. “Schloimele,” written during the period that the adaptation was being done for the film Yentl, is about a virtually unknown Yiddish writer in New York and a fast-talking aspiring stage producer whose perennial promise of a lucrative deal for the narrator dissolves into a humorous and pathetic refrain. In a series of vignettes tracing the two men’s encounters over the course of several years, the pretentious Schloimele becomes a symbol first for the artifice of “showbiz” and ultimately for the narrator’s own idleness, professional failure, mediocre love life, and general discontent. At the story’s end, the two men escape the city on a bus to bucolic Monticello, but their departure is more like a funeral than a vacation. “Schloimele” no doubt draws on both the despair that Singer felt at times in his career and the type of ambitious businessman that he knew well. Although free of the tortures of demons or melodrama of lost worlds, straightforward, unsensational narratives such as “Schloimele” evoke, in their understated realism, an amazingly strong and personal sense of tragedy and longing. “The Smuggler” • There are certainly links from Taibele to Rickel to Shibtah, from Dr. Fischelson to Reb Mordecai Meir, or from Alchonon to Gimpel to Schloimele, and while no story can be said to sum up Singer’s vision, some come strikingly close to a clear articulation of deep existential belief. An example is “The Smuggler,” published three years before the author’s death. It is a simple tale, most certainly based in truth (if only loosely), about a stranger’s visit to the narrator (an author himself, living in a small New York apartment), seeking autographs for a cartload of his books. The man is a gentle old bum who met the narrator years before at a speech in Philadelphia; he does not want to intrude, only to get his books signed and leave. During his short visit, however, he offers samples of the wisdom by which he has lived. Born to a family of Polish Jews, he learned to smuggle for a living, until he eventually realized that he survived by smuggling himself. He has come to recognize the intrinsic corruptibility of human beings, that power breeds wickedness, and that victims who overcome tyrants become tyrants themselves. He knows that evil and good are not mutually exclusive opposites, that there is nothing strange or inhuman about a Nazi leaving a concentration camp, where humans are systematically killed, and returning home to write heartfelt poetry. Finding security in this knowledge, the smuggler is at peace. Although the message is harsh, it is for Singer, as for the smuggler of the story, only a starting point. Beyond it is a world of possibilities—for goodness and evil, love and violence, sex and piety—in which the human heart and mind rule. In his clever and paradoxical way, Singer affirms, “We must believe in free will. We have no choice.” Barry Mann

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Other major works children’s literature: Zlateh the Goat, and Other Stories, 1966; Mazel and Shlimazel: Or, The Milk of a Lioness, 1967; The Fearsome Inn, 1967; When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, and Other Stories, 1968; A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, 1969; Elijah the Slave, 1970; Joseph and Koza: Or, The Sacrifice to the Vistula, 1970; Alone in the Wild Forest, 1971; The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China, 1971; The Wicked City, 1972; The Fools of Chelm and Their History, 1973; Why Noah Chose the Dove, 1974; A Tale of Three Wishes, 1975; Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Other Stories, 1976; The Power of Light: Eight Stories, 1980; The Golem, 1982; Stories for Children, 1984. plays: The Mirror, pr. 1973; Shlemiel the First, pr. 1974; Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, pr. 1974 (with Leah Napolin); Teibele and Her Demon, pr. 1978. novels: Der Sotn in Gorey, 1935 (Satan in Goray, 1955); Di Familye Mushkat, 1950 (The Family Moskat, 1950); Der Hoyf, 1953-1955 (The Manor, 1967, and The Estate, 1969); Shotns baym Hodson, 1957-1958 (Shadows on the Hudson, 1998); Der Kuntsnmakher fun Lublin, 1958-1959 (The Magician of Lublin, 1960); Der Knekht, 1961 (The Slave, 1962); Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Liebe, 1966 (Enemies: A Love Story, 1972); Der BalTshuve, 1974 (The Penitent, 1983); Neshome Ekspeditsyes, 1974 (Shosha, 1978); Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov, 1980; Der Kenig vun di Felder, 1988 (The King of the Fields, 1988); Scum, 1991; The Certificate, 1992; Meshugah, 1994. nonfiction: Mayn Tatn’s Bes-din Shtub, 1956 (In My Father’s Court, 1966); The Hasidim, 1973 (with Ira Moskowitz); A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light, 1976; A Young Man in Search of Love, 1978; Isaac Bashevis Singer on Literature and Life, 1979 (with Paul Rosenblatt and Gene Koppel); Lost in America, 1980; Love and Exile, 1984; Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1985 (with Richard Burgin); More Stories from My Father’s Court, 2000. translations: Romain Rolland, 1927 (of Stefan Zweig); Die Volger, 1928 (of Knut Hamsun); Victoria, 1929 (of Hamsun); All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930 (of Erich Remarque); Pan, 1931 (of Hamsun); The Way Back, 1931 (of Remarque); The Magic Mountain, 1932 (of Thomas Mann); From Moscow to Jerusalem, 1938 (of Leon Glaser). Bibliography Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Introduction to Singer’s stories in terms of their themes, types, and motifs, for example: moral tales, holocaust stories, supernatural tales, tales of apocalypse and politics, stories of faith and doubt. Focuses on Singer’s universal appeal rather than his Jewish appeal. Includes a section of quotations from Singer about his work, as well as essays on Singer by Irving Howe and two other critics. Buchen, Irving H. Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Buchen provides an interesting though not painstakingly detailed look at Singer’s early career. Although his efforts to relate the author to other contemporary writers and the overall tradition of English and American literature are excessive, he explores and understands the balances of Singer’s writing. Includes a chapter on selected early stories and a good bibliography. Farrell, Grace, ed. Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Extensive introduction on Singer’s critical reception and the issues that have preoccupied him and his critics. Collects both contemporary reviews and a wide range of essays, including Leslie Fiedler’s “I. B. Singer: Or, The American-ness of the American Jewish Writer.”

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____________. Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Collection of interviews with Singer that reveal the connections among his philosophy of life, his perspective on literature, and his mode of living. Guzlowski, John. “Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Satan in Goray’ and Bakhtin’s Vision of the Carnivalesque.” Critique 39 (Winter, 1998): 167-175. Argues that Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque illuminates Singer’s and that Wolfgang Kayser’s theories of the grotesque oversimplify his message; concludes, however, that Singer departs from Bakhtin is in his less hopeful belief about society’s ability to build a new order out of carnival. Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Focusing on both the forces of family and that social environment that influenced Singer, Hadda uncovers the public persona to reveal a more complex man than heretofore understood. ____________. “Isaac Bashevis Singer in New York.” Judaism 46 (Summer, 1997): 346363. Discusses the transformation of Singer from Bashevis, the sharp-witted, conflicted, occasionally harsh, literary genius, to Isaac Bashevis Singer—and even Isaac Singer—the quaint, pigeon-feeding vegetarian, the serene and gentle embodiment of the timeless values of Eastern European Jews. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eight short stories by Singer: “The Admirer” (vol. 1); “A Friend of Kafka,” “The Gentleman from Cracow,” and “Gimpel the Fool” (vol. 3); “Moon and Madness” (vol. 5); “Short Friday” (vol. 6); “The Spinoza of Market Street” (vol. 7); and “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” (vol. 8). Sinclair, Clive. The Brothers Singer. London: Allison and Busby, 1983. Fascinating examination of Singer and his work in the context of one of the most important personal and literary relationships of the author’s life. Sinclair effectively interweaves biography and literary analysis, conveying a deep understanding of the lives and works of Isaac and Joshua Singer. Wolitz, Seth L., ed. The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Collection of essays focusing on Singer’s use of Yiddish language and cultural experience, themes that persist through his writing, his interface with other times and cultures, his autobiographical work, and a translation of a previously unpublished “gangster” novel.

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Muriel Spark Spark, Muriel

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; February 1, 1918 Died: Florence, Italy; April 13, 2006 Principal short fiction • The Go-Away Bird, and Other Stories, 1958; Voices at Play, 1961 (with radio plays); Collected Stories I, 1967; Bang-Bang You’re Dead, and Other Stories, 1981; The Stories of Muriel Spark, 1985; Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories, 1997; All the Stories, 2001 (also pb. as The Complete Short Stories). Other literary forms • Muriel Spark is known primarily for her novels and short fiction, but her body of work also includes works of nonfiction, children’s literature, poetry, film adaptations, and radio plays. She began her career writing news articles as a press agent. Later she expanded her range to include works of poetry and literary criticism, contributing poems, articles, and reviews to magazines and newspapers, occasionally using the pseudonym Evelyn Cavallo. Spark published her first short story in 1951. In 1954, she began writing novels, her best known being The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She eventually published two dozen novels, including two that she wrote after she reached the age of eighty: Aiding and Abetting (2000) and The Finishing School (2004). Achievements • Muriel Spark’s honors and awards include the Prix Italia (1962) for her radio play adaptation of The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960); the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award (1965) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1966), both for The Mandelbaum Gate (1965); Commander, Order of the British Empire (1967); the Booker McConnell Prize nomination (1981) for Loitering with Intent (1981); the Scottish Book of the Year Award (1987) for The Stories of Muriel Spark; Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1988); the Ingersoll T. S. Elliot Award (1992); Dame, Order of the British Empire (1993); and the David Cohen British Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement (1997). Biography • Muriel Sarah Spark, née Camberg, was born and educated in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1937, she went to Rhodesia. During her stay in Africa, she married S. O. Spark but was divorced a short time later. She had one child, her son Robin. Spark’s parents, Bernard and Sarah Elizabeth Camberg, held diverse religious faiths; her father was Jewish, while her mother was Presbyterian. Spark practiced the Anglican faith until her interest in the writings of John Henry Newman, a nineteenth century Roman Catholic theologian, persuaded her to convert to Catholicism in 1954. Her personal search for spiritual belief is reflected in many of the themes of her fiction. Consequently her works often express some moral or spiritual truth. Spark spent several years living in British colonies in Central Africa. In 1944, she returned to England. During World War II, she wrote news articles for the political intelligence department of the British government. After the war, she held various posts in the publishing field, including a position as founder of the short-lived literary magazine The Forum. During the early 1950’s, Spark began to produce serious work in literary criticism and poetry. Hand and Flower Press published her first vol-

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ume of poetry in 1952. At the same time, she was involved in editing and researching critical and biographical work on several nineteenth century literary figures, including William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Emily Brontë. Spark’s initial attempt at fiction writing received considerable attention when her short story “The Seraph and the Zambesi” won top honors in a writing contest in 1951. She was encouraged to expand the scope of her fiction in 1954, when Macmillan, Spark’s publisher, persuaded her to write a full-length novel. At the same time that Spark began to develop a technique for composing a novel, she was also struggling with her religious beliefs and her decision to convert to Catholicism. Consequently, her first novel, The Comforters, completed in 1957, examines theological issues, reflecting Spark’s own private search for a belief that was consistent with her personal need for an adequate faith during the time that she was writing the novel. The link between her conception of the world, both physically and spiritually, and the subjects of her fiction is evident in her later novels as well. Spark presented facts about her life and the beginnings of her writing career in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992). She lived in Italy from the late 1960’s until her death in Florence on April 13, 2006. Analysis • Muriel Spark was an adept storyteller with a narrative voice that was often distant or aloof. Her tales are psychologically interesting because Spark was reluctant to reveal all that her characters think and feel; in consequence, readers are forced to evaluate the stories, think about issues from a different perspective, and try to fill in the gaps. Critics regard Spark’s novels as her strongest genre, but her short stories are also well constructed and intriguing. Her volumes of short stories, published over four decades, contain many of the same stories reprinted, with new stories added to each new edition. Spark’s tales are often set in England, British colonies in Africa, or European locations. Her works reflect a sense of moral truth, which some critics view as the influence of her conversion to Catholicism in 1954. Her narrative is rarely wordy. The story line relies on the impressions and dialogue of the characters or narrator to convey the plot. She made frequent use of first-person narrative, but none of her voices “tells all.” One of the distinguishing elements in Spark’s style was her penchant for leaving gaps that her readers must fill for themselves. “The Seraph and the Zambesi” • Spark’s first short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” won an award in a Christmas contest sponsored by The Observer in 1951. In characteristic Spark style, this story does not mince words but focuses on action and sparse dialogue. Set in Africa at Christmastime, the story portrays the events surrounding preparations for a Christmas pageant. Besides sweltering temperatures, curious natives, and preoccupied performers, the presentation is “hindered” by the presence of a heavenly Seraph, complete with six wings and a heat-producing glow. The writer of the nativity play is incensed when a real angel appears. He expresses rage rather than awe and destroys the stage in his attempts to banish the Seraph. Though Spark refuses to offer a moral at the close of “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” the story resembles a parable, illustrating the egocentrism of human beings, especially “artists.” The narrative also serves as a metaphor for the definition of genuine “art.” A related story dealing with art and creativity is entitled “The Playhouse Called Remarkable.” This story, published several years after “The Seraph and the Zambesi,”

Spark, Muriel features a character named Moon Biglow. Moon confesses to the narrator that he is really a native of the moon who migrated to Earth on the “Downfall of [the] Uprise” some time in the distant past. His primary mission was to save earth’s residents from suffocating aesthetic boredom. It seems human beings had no form of recreation other than that of gathering in groups to chant “Tum tum ya” each evening. The moon migrants organize the “playhouse called Remarkable” to offer alternative entertainment and also to give earthlings a creative outlet for their imaginations.

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“The Pawnbroker’s Wife” • Often Spark’s short fiction depicts varied types of female personalities. These stories, narrated in first person and set in Africa, tell little about the © Jerry Bauer narrators themselves but focus on the manipulative power of the central female characters. In “The Pawnbroker’s Wife,” the narrator tells the story of Mrs. Jan Cloote, who is never identified by her first name. Her pawnbroker husband has disappeared, and Mrs. Cloote carries on the business herself but denies the slightly sordid reputation of her vocation by claiming that she is only the pawnbroker’s wife. Thus, in her name and her speech, she tries the separate her actions from her image. Such “distancing” allows Mrs. Cloote freedom in refusing to accept responsibility for her conduct, no matter how cruel or petty, as she performs the duties of a pawnbroker (and ironically she is far more successful in business than her husband had been). She uses a show of politeness to remain corrupt without having to admit fault or make concessions. She breaks her promises to customers and sells the pawned items of her friends at the first opportunity. Mrs. Cloote’s poor taste, grasping manipulation, and innocent pretense give her character an insidious cast. Yet the narrator who reveals these facts refuses to pass judgment regarding Mrs. Cloote’s morality. That matter is left to the reader. “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze” • In a similar story, Sonia Van der Merwe, the female protagonist in “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze,” gains power over her domain in the absence of her husband. Mr. Van der Merwe, who lives in the remote territory of Fort Beit, is imprisoned for fatally shooting a young native boy who was a Peeping Tom. Although her husband’s conviction and imprisonment might have prompted a feeling of tragedy, the opposite occurs. Sonia finds that she has considerable financial resources at her disposal with her husband gone. Like Mrs. Cloote, Sonia takes charge, encouraged on by the British medical women serving in the colony. She soon learns to use her feminine wiles to access power and control in Fort

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Beit. The male British medical workers seek her attention, captivated by her “eccentric grandeur.” Much to the chagrin of the British women who helped to create the “new Sonia,” Sonia gains influence even over government officials. Just as the English nurse, however, who narrates the story can never truly decide what she wants, the same applies to Sonia. At the close of the story, Mr. Van der Merwe returns from prison unexpectedly. When he discovers his wife, Sonia, in the company of another man, he shoots them both. Thus, Sonia and her image are quickly eliminated. In her stories, Spark explores the roles of greedily ambitious women, the irony of their plight, and their cloaks of politeness. Often Spark deals with themes of childhood or adolescent memories in her short fiction. She may contrast the innocent but terrifyingly real fears of children with the more serious cruelty of adults or reverse the irony and explore the cruelty of “devilish” children, who are shielded by a guise of adult politeness. For example, “The Twins” is a story about two seemingly polite children who exercise some invisible but insidious control over their parents and other adults who enter their household. “The Portobello Road” and “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” • “The Portobello Road” and “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” juxtapose the childhood memories of two young girls with their lives as “grown-ups.” These stories explore the serious ramifications of situations in which childish conceptions or antagonisms are transferred into adulthood. Both stories are examples of Muriel Spark’s ability to create unique narrative forms. “The Portobello Road” is narrated by Needle, a young girl whose childhood nickname was given to her because she found a needle in a haystack. When the story opens, Needle is dead and her ghostly voice chronicles the events that led to her murder—when she becomes the “Needle” who is murdered and buried in a haystack by a childhood friend. “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” connects the present and the past in a complex narrative using a series of flashbacks. In the present, represented in the story’s opening scene, a group of Sybil’s friends gather to view four reels of eighteen-year-old films from Sybil’s past years spent in Africa. As the group views the “silent movies,” the third-person narrative reveals Sybil’s memories—not those seen by the spectators of the film but as Sybil remembers them. As each reel ends, Sybil’s mental narrative is interrupted by the surface chatter of her friends, who are impressed by the appearance of the people and exotic scenes revealed in the film. When the final reel ends, the reader finds, through Sybil’s mental recollections, that two murders were committed shortly after the scenes were recorded on film. As the acquaintances agree to view the last reel again because it is their “favorite,” Sybil remains stoically unmoved by the memories of the tragedy. Her indifference and objectivity regarding the memories of her deceased friends reveal a chilling aspect of her personality. Coldly intellectual and detached, Sybil remains indifferent and unmoved by the recorded memories even though she was largely responsible for the murders. “The Go-Away Bird” and “The First Year of My Life” • “The Go-Away Bird” is one of the longest of Spark’s stories. It is also about a woman and murder. Daphne, the central female figure, is reared in a British colony in Africa. Caught between two cultures, that of the Dutch Afrikaners and the English colonists, Daphne searches for her identity—for a world in which she can not only belong but also find safety. Set in Africa and England during World War II, “The Go-Away Bird” presents characters who reflect diverse backgrounds, personalities, motivations, and societies. Daphne’s

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struggles and her relationship with the African Go-Away Bird illustrate an individual’s difficulty in trying to fulfill one’s need for love and identity within diverse cultural and social structures. At the opposite end of the spectrum, “The First Year of My Life” does not struggle with maturing in society but presents the first-person commentary of an infant, born during World War I. The adults who care for the baby treat the child as an “innocent infant,” unaware of the newborn’s ability to grasp the tragedy of war. Such diversity in narrative voice, subject, and style is a trademark of Muriel Spark. As a writer, she avoided classification and was unafraid of experimentation. Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories • Spark’s collection Open to the Public contains ten stories not included in the previous volume, The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985). The title story “Open to the Public” is a sequel to “The Fathers’ Daughters.” “The Fathers’ Daughters” centers on a thirty-year-old intellectual, Ben, who pursues the daughters of famous writers in order to meet the authors themselves. When the young, beautiful Carmelita is unable to gain an audience for Ben with her father, a successful novelist, Ben abandons her to marry Dora, the forty-six-year-old daughter of an aged author whose popularity has faded. Spark creates an ironic situation in which the characters use one another for their own purposes. Ben wants to write essays based on another author’s work; Dora’s father craves an audience for his forgotten books; and Dora needs someone to provide income for their impoverished household. The sequel “Open to the Public” presents Ben and Dora five years later. Dora’s father dies, but Ben’s promotion of his works restores the family’s fortune. However, the dead man’s memory is not enough to sustain the relationship; the couple separate. Their plans to open the writer’s house and personal documents to the public are abandoned when both Ben and Dora realize that museums “have no heart.” In a humorous turn, they burn the father’s archives instead. The story demonstrates the hopelessness of trying to maintain perpetual fame, and the futility of attempting to build one’s future on another’s achievements. In a story with similar elements, “The Executor,” the protagonist Susan, who is a middle-aged spinster like Dora, must dispose of her uncle’s literary estate. She sells his papers to a university foundation but retains an unfinished manuscript which she hopes to complete and publish as her own. However, her plans are thwarted when her uncle’s ghost returns to write warning messages to her. Thus Susan, like the women in “The Father’s Daughters,” must abandon her schemes to find success vicariously and learn to build her own future. The remaining additions in the Open to the Public collection are stylized and brief. Some plots turn on a single ironic twist as in “The Girl I Left Behind Me” when the narrator finds her own body “lying strangled on the floor.” Other stories feature the troubling imposition of the supernatural into the natural world. For example, in “The Pearly Shadow” a shady specter haunts the staff and patients in a medical clinic. The specter finally disappears when doctors begin dispensing sedatives to his “stressed-out” victims. “Going Up and Coming Down” is a poetic vignette about a man and woman who ride to work in the same elevator every day. Once the couple actually meet, their speculations about each other disappear in the face of “plain real facts.” The stories included in Open to the Public demonstrate Spark’s mastery of the short-story form. Her plots expose human foibles with an ironic, mysterious, or sar-

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castic tone. She was adept at illustrating the slightly macabre or deceitful nature of human actions. Her characters may be subtly malevolent or sinisterly civilized, but evil is punished and hypocrisy exposed in Spark’s comic tales. Paula M. Miller With updates by the Editors Other major works children’s literature: The Very Fine Clock, 1968; The Small Telephone, 1993. play: Doctors of Philosophy, pr. 1962. anthologies: Tribute to Wordsworth, 1950 (with Derek Stanford); My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Shelley, 1953 (with Stanford); The Brontë Letters, 1954 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of the Brontës: A Selection, 1954); Letters of John Henry Newman, 1957 (with Stanford). novels: The Comforters, 1957; Robinson, 1958; Memento Mori, 1959; The Bachelors, 1960; The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961; A Muriel Spark Trio, 1962 (contains The Comforters, Memento Mori, and The Ballad of Peckham Rye); The Girls of Slender Means, 1963; The Mandelbaum Gate, 1965; The Public Image, 1968; The Driver’s Seat, 1970; Not to Disturb, 1971; The Hothouse by the East River, 1973; The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale, 1974; The Takeover, 1976; Territorial Rights, 1979; Loitering with Intent, 1981; The Only Problem, 1984; A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988; Symposium, 1990; The Novels of Muriel Spark, 1995; Reality and Dreams, 1996; Aiding and Abetting, 2000; The Finishing School, 2004. nonfiction: Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1951 (revised as Mary Shelley, 1987); Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, 1953 (with Derek Stanford); John Masefield, 1953; Curriculum Vitae, 1992 (autobiography); The Essence of the Brontës: A Compilation with Essays, 1993. poetry: The Fanfarlo, and Other Verse, 1952; Collected Poems I, 1967; Going Up to Sotheby’s, and Other Poems, 1982; All of the Poems of Muriel Spark, 2004. Bibliography Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984. Bold has compiled a collection of nine essays from different contributors, regarding various aspects of Spark’s fiction. The volume is organized into two sections. The first four essays explore Spark’s background and the content of her work. The remaining chapters contain critical articles centered on the diverse forms of Spark’s writings, including discussions of her use of satire, her poetry, and an essay by Tom Hubbard that deals exclusively with her short stories. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Critical and historical study of the psychological in Scottish literature. Includes a bibliography and index. Hague, Angela, and Isabel Bonnyman Stanley. “Muriel Spark.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Spark’s longer fictional works that may offer insights into her short fiction. Hynes, Joseph, ed. Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Comprehensive collection of reviews, essays, and excerpts from books on Spark’s fiction, by both her detractors and her admirers. Includes autobiographical essays and a survey and critique of past criticism.

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May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of three short stories by Spark: “The Black Madonna” (vol. 1), “The Father’s Daughters” (vol. 3), and “The Portobello Road” (vol. 6). Randisi, Jennifer Lynn. On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Argues that Spark’s vision is metaphysical, combining piety and satire, deception and anagogical truth. Discusses the tension between mysticism and satire in Spark’s novels and stories. Richmond, Velma B. Muriel Spark. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Richmond explores Spark’s writing in terms of content and emphasis. Spark’s novels, poetry, and short stories are discussed in relation to their themes rather than their chronology. The closing chapter includes a discussion of Spark’s “comic vision.” Richmond includes biographical material along with a detailed chronology, a bibliography, and an extensive index. Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Spark examines her life and literary career. Walker, Dorothea. Muriel Spark. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Informative study on the main themes of Spark’s work, with emphasis given to the wit and humor of her characters. The extensive bibliography is particularly helpful. Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Whittaker’s work elaborates on the diversity of Spark’s themes, meanings, and purpose. The chapter divisions are organized according to topics—religion, style, structure, and form. The book is limited primarily to a discussion of Spark’s novels. Whittaker includes a biographical section as well as an extensive bibliography, notes, and an index.

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John Steinbeck Steinbeck, John

Born: Salinas, California; February 27, 1902 Died: New York, New York; December 20, 1968 Principal short fiction • Saint Katy the Virgin, 1936; The Long Valley, 1938. Other literary forms • Besides two volumes of short fiction, John Steinbeck produced numerous novels, among which is his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). He also authored several screenplays and three dramas, two of which were based on his novels Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Moon Is Down (1942). Among his nonfiction are several travel books and a collection of war sketches. His last work was a translation of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthurian stories. A volume of letters was published posthumously. Achievements • John Steinbeck assumes an important place in American literature chiefly for his powerful and deft portrayal of the common people—the migrant worker, the ranch hand, and the laborer—whose capacity for survival surpassed the attempts of economic and corporate forces to defeat them. His novels, especially, render the human condition with sensitivity and lyrical grace. His work often shows a versatility unrivaled among his contemporaries. The comic, the tragic, the whimsical, and the naturalistic all merge in such a way as to make Steinbeck one of the United States’ most popular writers, one whose art form is particularly suited to the cinema. Many of his books have been turned into successful films. Though much of Steinbeck’s best work was written in the 1930’s, he is not only a propagandist of the Great Depression era but also a writer who is deeply concerned with the dignity of human beings. A human being as an individual may pass away, but the human being as a group, humankind as a species, is immortal. As Ma Joad remarked in the final pages of The Grapes of Wrath: “We’re the people. We go on.” Biography • The Salinas Valley, where John Steinbeck was born, lies about a hundred miles south of San Francisco. It is a fertile, temperate trough between two mountain ranges and encompasses some of central California’s most picturesque areas, notably Pacific Grove and the serenity of Monterey Bay. Such a landscape was at the heart of Steinbeck’s boyhood experience and forms a crucial link with the characteristics of the writer’s work. The son of a mill owner and a schoolteacher, Steinbeck grew up in the small railroad town just entering the twentieth century, a town not quite pastoral yet not quite industrial, whose people were farmers and ranchers and shopkeepers but whose location and natural resources were quickly making it an agricultural and mercantile hub. This unique duality of the Salinas Valley—the long valley of Steinbeck’s fiction—became a formative agent in the quality of Steinbeck’s work, stories at once gently romantic and mythic as they were also realistic and proletarian. His early reading was evidence of his growing dualism. The realistic novels of Gustave Flaubert and Thomas Hardy were supplemented by his readings in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and especially Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1469, printed 1485), the first book given to him as a child and the last to serve as a source for his fiction.

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(A retelling of the King Arthur stories was published posthumously in 1976). By the time Steinbeck entered Salinas High School in 1915, he was a widely read young man, tall, with rugged good looks and a desire to write. At the age of seventeen, he entered Stanford University, already convinced that he was going to be a writer. Like many creative artists before and since, Steinbeck found the discipline of the college curriculum too irksome. Though he enjoyed reading contemporary European and American writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, he was uninterested in much else and took a leave of absence after two years. For the next few years, he worked in the San Francisco area as a clerk and a field hand on a ranch, gaining the invaluable experience of ranch life and ranch hands that was to figure in such works as Of Mice and Men and The Long Valley. © The Nobel Foundation Steinbeck returned to Stanford University briefly as an English major but finally left in 1925 without a degree. He had written two stories for the Stanford Spectator, one a satire on college life and the other a bizarre tale about a strangely inarticulate woman and her marriage to a migrant worker who kept horses’ heads in a rain barrel. The story is insignificant but interesting for its odd mixture of the real and the whimsical, a characteristic typical of much of Steinbeck’s mature work. Steinbeck was in New York during the late 1920’s, working as a construction worker on the original Madison Square Garden by day and writing stories by night. Unsuccessful, he returned to California, married, and settled in his family’s cottage in Pacific Grove. He wrote constantly, and in 1929, his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published. This thinly fictionalized account of the pirate Henry Morgan was both an artistic and a financial failure. The Pastures of Heaven (1932), Steinbeck’s second book, was a collection of short stories about the people of an almost mythically beautiful valley. Influenced by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), published a decade earlier, neither it nor his next novel, To a God Unknown (1933), brought Steinbeck much critical or popular success. Steinbeck’s apprenticeship, however, was over. Beginning in 1935 with the publication of Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck was to produce half a dozen books over the next ten years, works that were to establish his reputation as a writer of power and versatility. Tortilla Flat was followed by In Dubious Battle (1936), regarded by some as one of the

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best strike novels ever written. Of Mice and Men was followed by The Long Valley, containing his best short stories. His masterpiece, on which he had been working for three years, was published as The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. During World War II, Steinbeck wrote propaganda scripts for the U.S. Army and published The Moon Is Down, a short novel set in Nazi-occupied Norway. His postwar work shows a marked decline. Aside from the massive East of Eden (1952), the works of this period are marked by a bland whimsy. Cannery Row (1945) is generally recognized as the novel that signaled the beginning of Steinbeck’s decline. Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, Steinbeck, then a national celebrity, continued to produce a variety of fiction, novels such as Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippen IV (1957), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). They are works of minor importance and show little of the narrative strength that won for Steinbeck the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Steinbeck’s last years were spent quietly in New York City and on Long Island. By then he had become an honored American writer. In 1963, he was selected as honorary consultant in American literature for the Library of Congress. He was elected to the National Arts Council in 1966. Steinbeck died peacefully in his sleep on December 20, 1968. Analysis • The qualities that most characterize the work of John Steinbeck are a supple narrative style, a versatility of subject matter, and an almost mystical sympathy for the common human being. His fiction is peopled with men and women somehow shoaled from society’s mainstream yet possessed of a vision that is itself a source of strength. His characteristic narrative method is to portray these people with an unerring mixture of realism and romance. Although the Great Depression is the central social focus of Steinbeck’s best work, his characters respond to those social forces not only in terms of realistic confrontation but also in the form of a romantic, intuitive escape. His characters become not so much victims of social or economic failure but celebrants of a life-force beyond society and economics. The best of Steinbeck’s work maintains this tension— developed by a narrative tone—between the world of harsh reality and the world of animal-like freedom. Even in a late novel such as East of Eden, his best books behind him, Steinbeck symbolically construed this duality in the reference to the two mountain ranges that defined the territory of his narrator’s childhood, the “sunny” flowered slopes of the Gabilans to the east and the dark, brooding peaks of the Santa Lucias to the west. The Pastures of Heaven • Nowhere is this duality—the tension between realism and romance—more evident than in Steinbeck’s earliest short stories, those forming his first major work, The Pastures of Heaven. Structurally the book shows the influence of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a series of short stories, each independent but each connected by the locale and the theme of psychic isolation. Using the frame narrative of Winesburg as a model, The Pastures of Heaven deals with the lives of a number of characters living in the peaceful, idyllic valley in the hills beyond Monterey. Secluded like some medieval bower or enchanted castle, the place evokes images of romance and peace. Yet for all the outward tranquillity, the valley cannot remain isolated from the real world of economic hardship and violence. The Munroe farm, for example, is cursed, and the curse executes itself on all the characters who come into contact with the Munroes. The theme of this collection of

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short stories is the conflict inherent in the tension between the characters’ desire to live in the peaceful valley and their own human weaknesses, which prevent them from fulfilling their desires. Put in another way, the stories form a latter-day Garden of Eden myth. The land is beautiful, fruitful, prosperous; but the people of the land are thwarted by the serpent of human frailty. Though some of the characters are spiritual kin to the “grotesques of Anderson’s famous collection,” they are markedly different in their attempts to reconcile their romantic intuition with the reality of social convention. Tularecito, for example, is all instinct. Though an idiot, he possesses great strength and an intuitive ability to draw. The title of the story, “The Legend of Tularecito,” suggests that, like a legend, Tularecito is a child of romance. In his contradictory nature, he is the archetype of all the characters in the collection. Foreshadowing the half-witted giant, Lenny, in Of Mice and Men, Tularecito brings destruction on himself when he attacks Bert Munroe and is sent to a state asylum outside the valley. His punishment is not physical death, as in Lenny’s case, but banishment from the valley, from Eden. Tularecito has come into contact with the reality of social convention and is defeated. Intuition is thwarted in the interest of social stability. The conflict between an idyllic life, communing with nature, and the demands of middle-class respectability is the focus of another story, “Junius Maltby.” Like prelapsarian man, Junius lives innocently off the land. Reminiscent of the paisanos, such as Danny and Mac in later novels such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Junius is shiftless and, by society’s standards, an irresponsible dreamer. Like Tularecito, Junius is intuitive, instinctual, indifferent to the economic imperatives of being a farmer, and casually indecorous in his personal appearance. To Mrs. Munroe, Junius’s life of the imagination is a threat. Junius is forced to abandon his farm and to leave the valley. There is no place for the poor and the romantic in Eden. “The Chrysanthemums” • The garden as instinct, as the life of the spirit, is a prominent image in two stories in a later collection. Published in 1938, The Long Valley contains some of Steinbeck’s most brilliant work in the genre of short fiction. In “The Chrysanthemums,” Steinbeck presents the figure of Eliza Allen, a woman whose romantic gentleness conflicts with the brusque matter-of-factness of her husband and the deceitful cunning of a tinker. The story reveals a skillful meshing of character and setting, of symbol and theme. The garden is at once the chief setting and abiding symbol that define Eliza’s character and her predicament as a woman. Dressed in a man’s clothing, Eliza is working in her garden when the story opens. Already the contrast is clear between Eliza’s sensitive nature and the manlike indifference of her dress, her husband and life on the ranch, bathed in “the cold greyflannel fog of winter.” Eliza’s only emotional outlet, her only contact with a deeper life-pulse, is her growing of chrysanthemums, symbolic of both her sexual need and her recognition of the dominance in her nature of the life of the instinct. Like the virgin queen Elizabeth, Eliza has no children and her mannish ways merely disguise her sensitivity, a sensitivity that her husband, Henry, does not understand. When a tinker stops his wagon at the ranch, looking for pots to repair, Eliza at first has no work for him, but when he praises her chrysanthemums, implying an understanding of her nature, Eliza gives him the flowers in a pot. That night, on their way to town for dinner and—the husband teases—to the prizefights, Eliza sees the discarded flowers on the road and realizes that the tinker had deceived her. Like her

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husband, the tinker did not really understand her; he had merely used her to his own advantage. At the end of the story, Eliza cries quietly, “like an old woman.” “The White Quail” • Still another story in the collection presents the image of the garden as both physical and psychic landscape. The garden that Mary Tiller tends in “The White Quail,” however, is symbolic not of a healthy life of the spirit but of selflove and egotism. Mary’s happiness with her garden, complete when she sees a white quail in it one night, is at the expense of her love for her husband. Harry is shut out of her love, often forced to sleep alone, though he virtually idolizes her. Mary’s garden is her dream of an ordered, nonthreatening, and nonsexual existence. In a sense, Mary “quails” before a life of passion or the body. When a cat one day wanders into the garden, Mary is fearful of its potential as a predator and demands that Harry shoot it. Inexplicably, he shoots the quail; in destroying Mary’s dream, he has brought his wife back to the real world, to a sexuality that she had refused to admit. “Flight” • A story of maturity and death is the much-praised “Flight.” Opening amid the rocky crags of the Torres farm, the story centers on Pepe, the oldest son of the widow Torres. A tall, lazy youth, Pepe has inherited his father’s knife and yearns for the day when he will become, like his father, a man. Sent into Monterey on an errand, Pepe is insulted by a townsman and kills the man with his knife. Returning, he bids his mother good-bye and, armed with his father’s rifle and horse, leaves his home to flee into the mountains. Gradually, he loses his rifle, then his horse. Now alone, he faces the threat of natural forces and the human pursuers. In the end, he is shot by one of the unseen “dark watchers.” Significantly, Pepe relies more on his own strength and courage as he flees deeper into the wild mountain passes; as he leaves his childhood behind, however, he also approaches his own death. Pepe’s journey has become not only a physical escape from society’s retribution but also a symbolic pilgrimage toward manhood and a redemptive death. Edward Fiorelli Other major works plays: Of Mice and Men, pr., pb. 1937; The Moon Is Down, pr. 1942; Burning Bright, pb. 1951. novels: Cup of Gold, 1929; The Pastures of Heaven, 1932; To a God Unknown, 1933; Tortilla Flat, 1935; In Dubious Battle, 1936; Of Mice and Men, 1937; The Red Pony, 1937, 1945; The Grapes of Wrath, 1939; The Moon Is Down, 1942; Cannery Row, 1945; The Pearl, 1945 (serial), 1947 (book); The Wayward Bus, 1947; Burning Bright, 1950; East of Eden, 1952; Sweet Thursday, 1954; The Short Reign of Pippen IV, 1957; The Winter of Our Discontent, 1961. nonfiction: Their Blood Is Strong, 1938; Sea of Cortez, 1941 (with Edward F. Ricketts); The Forgotten Village, 1941; Bombs Away, 1942; A Russian Journal, 1948 (with Robert Capa); Once There Was a War, 1958; Travels with Charley: In Search of America, 1962; Letters to Alicia, 1965; America and Americans, 1966; Journal of a Novel, 1969; Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 1975 (Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, editors); America and Americans, and Selected Nonfiction, 2002 (Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, editors).

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screenplays: The Forgotten Village, 1941; Lifeboat, 1944; A Medal for Benny, 1945; The Pearl, 1945; The Red Pony, 1949; Viva Zapata!, 1952. translation: The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, 1976. Bibliography DeMott, Robert J., ed. Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Art. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1996. Good collection of criticism of Steinbeck. Includes bibliographical references and an index. French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. The chapter on The Long Valley in this revision of French’s earlier Twayne book on Steinbeck provides brief discussions of the major stories, including “Flight” and “Chrysanthemums.” George, Stephen K., ed. John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tribute. New York: Praeger, 2002. Collection of reminiscences from Steinbeck’s family and friends as well as wideranging critical assessments of his works. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. Steinbeck’s Short Stories in “The Long Valley”: Essays in Criticism. Muncie, Ind.: Steinbeck Research Institution, 1991. Collection of new critical essays on the stories in The Long Valley (excluding The Red Pony), from a variety of critical perspectives. Hughes, R. S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1989. General introduction to Steinbeck’s short fiction, focusing primarily on critical reception to the stories. Also includes some autobiographical statements on short-story writing, as well as four essays on Steinbeck’s stories by other critics. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., Jesse S. Crisler, and Susan Shillinglaw, eds. John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Fine selection of reviews of Steinbeck’s work. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Steinbeck: “The Chrysanthemums” (vol. 2), “Flight” and “The Gift” (vol. 3), “The Leader of the People” (vol. 4), “The Pearl” (vol. 6), and “The Snake” (vol. 7). Noble, Donald R. The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1993. Collection of essays on most of Steinbeck’s work; most important for a study of the short story is the essay by Robert S. Hughes, Jr., on “The Art of Story Writing,” Charlotte Hadella’s “Steinbeck’s Cloistered Women,” and Michael J. Meyer’s “The Snake.” Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. This biography suggests psychological interpretations of the effect of Steinbeck’s childhood and sociological interpretations of his fiction. Criticizes Steinbeck for his politically incorrect gender and social views; also takes Steinbeck to task to what he calls his blindness to the political reality of the Vietnam War. Timmerman, John H. The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Formalist interpretation of Steinbeck’s stories, focusing on style, tone, imagery, and character. Provides close readings of such frequently anthologized stories as “The Chrysanthemums” and “Flight,” as well as such stories as “Johnny Bear” and “The Short-Short Story of Mankind.”

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Robert Louis Stevenson Stevenson, Robert Louis

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; November 13, 1850 Died: Vailima, near Apia, Samoa; December 3, 1894 Principal short fiction • The New Arabian Nights, 1882; More New Arabian Nights, 1885; The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables, 1887; Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893. Other literary forms • Despite poor health, Robert Louis Stevenson was a prolific writer, not only of juvenile fiction but also of poetry, plays, and essays. He is best known for adventure romances such as Treasure Island (1881-1882, serial; 1883, book), Kidnapped (1886), and the horror-suspense novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), works that appeal principally to youthful readers. A habitual voyager, Stevenson also wrote travelogues and sketches recounting his personal experiences. His children’s poems, published in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), remain perennial favorites, as do several of his beautiful family prayers. Achievements • For clarity and suspense, Robert Louis Stevenson is a rarely equaled raconteur. He reveals his mastery of narrative in his economical presentation of incident and atmosphere. Yet, despite his sparse, concise style, many of his tales are notable for dealing with complex moral ambiguities and their diagnoses. Although influenced by a host of romantic writers, including Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stevenson’s theories of prose fiction were most directly provoked by Henry James’s The Art of Fiction (1884). Stevenson placed himself in literary opposition to James and the “statics of character,” favoring instead an action-fiction whose clear antecedents are allegory, fable, and romance. His tales of adventure and intrigue, outdoor life and old-time romance, avidly read by children and young adults, have had a continuous and incalculable influence since their first publication in the 1880’s. Biography • The only child of a prosperous civil engineer and his wife, Robert Louis Stevenson was a sickly youth, causing his formal education to be haphazard. He reacted early against his parents’ orthodox Presbyterianism, donning the mask of a liberated Bohemian who abhorred the hypocrisies of bourgeois respectability. As a compromise with his father, Stevenson did study law at Edinburgh University in lieu of the traditional family vocation of lighthouse engineer. In 1873, however, he suffered a severe respiratory illness, and, although he completed his studies and was admitted to the Scottish bar in July, 1875, he never practiced. In May, 1880, Stevenson married Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a divorcé from San Francisco and ten years his senior. The couple spent most of the next decade in health resorts for Stevenson’s tuberculosis: Davos in the Swiss Alps, Hyéres on the French Riviera, and Bournemouth in England. After his father’s death, Stevenson felt able to go farther from Scotland and so went to Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where treatment arrested his disease. In June, 1888, Stevenson, his wife, mother, and stepson sailed for the South Seas. During the next eighteen months they saw the Marquesas, Tahiti, Australia, the Gilberts, Hawaii, and Samoa. In late 1889, Stevenson decided to

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settle and bought “Vailima,” three miles from the town of Apia, Upolu, Samoa, and his home until his death. His vigorous crusading there against the white exploitation of native Samoans almost led to expulsion by both German and English authorities. Stevenson’s tuberculosis remained quiescent, but he suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 3, 1894, while working on the novel Weir of Hermiston (1896), a fragment which many modern readers think to be his best writing. Known to the natives as “Tusitala,” the Storyteller, Stevenson was buried on the summit of Mount Vaea. Analysis • Robert Louis Stevenson has long been relegated to either the nursery or the juvenile section in most libraries, and his mixture of romance, horror, and allegory Library of Congress seems jejune. In times narrative and well-ordered structure have become the facile tools of Harlequin paperbacks and irrelevant to high-quality “literature,” Stevenson’s achievement goes quietly unnoticed. To confine this technique of “Tusitala” solely to nursery and supermarket, however, is to confuse Stevenson’s talents with his present audience. Stevenson’s crucial problem is the basic one of joining form to idea, made more difficult because he was not only an excellent romancer but also a persuasive essayist. In Stevenson, however, these two talents seem to be of different roots, and their combination was for him a lifelong work. The aim of his narratives becomes not only to tell a good story, constructing something of interest, but also to ensure that all the materials of that story (such as structure, atmosphere, and character motivation) contribute to a clear thematic concern. Often Stevenson’s fictional talents alone cannot accomplish this for him, and this accounts—depending in each instance on whether he drops his theme or attempts to push it through—for both the “pulp” feel of some stories and the “directed” feel of others. “A Lodging for the Night” • Appearing in the Cornhill Magazine for May, 1874, an essay on Victor Hugo was Stevenson’s very first publication. The short stories he began writing soon after demonstrate a strong tendency to lapse into the more familiar expository techniques either as a solution to fictional problems or merely to bolster a sagging theme. A blatant example of this stylistic ambiguity is the early story “A Lodging for the Night.” The atmosphere of the first part of the story is deftly handled. It is winter, and its buffets upon the poor are reemphasized in every descriptive detail. Paris is “sheeted

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up” like a body ready for burial. The only light is from a tiny shack “backed up against the cemetery wall.” Inside, “dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks,” the medieval poet François Villon composes “The Ballade of Roast Fish” while Guy Tabard, one of his cronies, sputters admiringly over his shoulder. Straddling before the fire is a portly, purple-veined Picardy monk, Dom Nicolas. Also in the small room are two more villains, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete, playing “a game of chance.” Villon cracks a few pleasantries, quite literally gallows humor, and begins to read aloud his new poem. Suddenly, between the two gamesters: The round was complete, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and Thevenin Pensete’s spirit had returned to Him who made it. Tabard begins praying in Latin, Villon breaks into hysterics, Montigny recovers “his composure first” and picks the dead man’s pockets. Naturally, they must all leave the scene of the murder to escape implication, and Villon departs first. Outside, in the bitter cold, two things preoccupy the poet as he walks: the gallows and “the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland of red curls,” as neat a symbol as could be for the fiery pit of hell where Villon eventually expects to find himself. Theme has been handled well, Stevenson’s fiction giving one the feeling of a single man thrown by existence into infernal and unfavorable circumstances, being pursued by elements beyond his control, the gallows and Death, survival itself weaving a noose for him with his own trail in the snow, irrevocably connecting him to “the house by the cemetery of St. John.” The plot is clear and the situation interesting. On this cold and windy night, after many rebuffs, Villon finally finds food and shelter with a “refined,” “muscular and spare,” “resonant, courteous,” “honorable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and righteous” old knight. Here, the structure of “A Lodging for the Night” abruptly breaks down from fiction, from atmospheric detail, plot development, and character enlargement, to debate. What Stevenson implied in the first part of his story, he reasserts here in expository dialogue, apparently losing faith in his fictional abilities as he resorts back to the directness of the essay. Villon takes the side of duty to one’s own survival; he is the first modern skeptic, the prophet of expediency. In contrast, the knight stands for honor, bonne noblesse, with allegiance always to something greater than himself. The moral code of the criminal is pitted against the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. One’s chances in life are determined by birth and social standing, says Villon. There is always the chance for change, implores the knight. In comparison to Stevenson’s carefully built atmosphere and plot, this expository “solution” to his story is extremely crude. “Markheim” • “Markheim,” a ghost story that deals with a disturbing problem of conscience, also contains a dialogue in its latter half. This dialogue, however, is a just continuation of the previous action. Different from “crawlers” such as “The BodySnatcher,” “Markheim” reinforces horror with moral investigation. Initial atmospherics contribute directly to Stevenson’s pursuit of his thematic concern, and the later debate with the “visitant” becomes an entirely fitting expression for Markheim’s own madness.

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An allegory of the awakening conscience, “Markheim” also has the limits of allegory, one of which is meaning. For readers to understand, or find meaning in, an allegory, characters (or actors) must be clearly identified. In “Markheim” this presents major difficulties. Not only is an exact identity (or role) for the visitant finally in doubt, but also the identity of the dealer is unclear. It can be said that he usually buys from Markheim, not sells to him, but exactly what the dealer buys or sells is a good question. Whatever, on this particular occasion (Christmas Day), Markheim will have to pay the dealer extra “for a kind of manner that I remark in you today very strongly.” Amid the “ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber” of the dealer’s shop, a strange pantomime ensues. Markheim says he needs a present for a lady, and the dealer shows him a hand mirror. Markheim grows angry: “A glass,” he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not!” “And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?” Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask me why not?” he said. “Why, look here—look at it—look at yourself! Do you like to see it? No! nor I—nor any man.” After damning the mirror as the “reminder of years, and sins, and follies—this handconscience,” Markheim asks the dealer to tell something of himself, his secret life. The dealer puts Markheim off with a chuckle, but as he turns around for something more to show, Markheim lunges at him, stabbing him with a “long, skewerlike dagger.” The dealer struggles “like a hen” and then dies. The murder seems completely gratuitous until Markheim remembers that he had come to rob the shop: “To have done the deed and yet not to reap the profit would be too abhorrent a failure.” Time, “which had closed for the victim,” now becomes “instant and momenteous for the slayer.” Like Villon, Markheim feels pursued by Death, haunted by “the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.” The blood at his feet begins “to find eloquent voices.” The dead dealer extracts his extra payment, becoming the enemy who would “lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit.” Talking to himself, Markheim denies that this evil murder indicates an equally evil nature, but his guilt troubles him. Not only pursued by Death, Markheim is pursued by Life as well. He sees his own face “repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies”; his own eyes meet and detect him. Although alone, he feels the inexplicable consciousness of another presence: Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again beheld the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred. Eventually, Markheim must project an imaginary double, a doppelgänger or exteriorized voice with which to debate his troubles. Here, action passes from the stylized antique shop of the murdered to the frenzied mind of the murderer. The visitant, or double, is a product of this mind. Mad and guilty as Markheim appears to be, his double emerges as a calm-sounding sanity who will reason with him to commit further evil. Thus, the mysterious personification of drives buried deep within Markheim’s

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psyche exteriorizes evil as an alter ego and allows Markheim the chance to act against it, against the evil in his own nature. Stevenson’s sane, expository technique of debate erects a perfect foil for Markheim’s true madness. In the end, although Markheim thinks himself victorious over what seems the devil, it is actually this exteriorized aspect of Markheim’s unknown self that conquers, tricking him into willing surrender and then revealing itself as a kind of redemptive angel: The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change; they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. Material and intention are artistically intertwined in “Markheim,” but the moral ambiguities of Stevenson’s theme remain complex, prompting various questions: is Markheim’s martyrdom a victory over evil or merely a personal cessation from action? Set on Christmas Day, with its obvious reversal of that setting’s usual significance, is “Markheim” a portrayal of Christian resignation as a purely negative force, a justification for suicide, or as the only modern solution against evil? What is the true nature and identity of the visitant? Finally, can the visitant have an identity apart from Markheim’s own? Even answers to these questions, like Markheim’s final surrender, offer only partial consolation to the reader of this strange and complex story of psychological sickness. “The Beach of Falesá” • With Stevenson’s improved health and his move to the South Seas, a new type of story began to emerge, a kind of exotic realism to which the author brought his mature talents. “The Bottle Imp,” for example, juxtaposes the occult of an old German fairy tale (interestingly enough, acquired by Stevenson through Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son) with factual details about San Francisco, Honolulu, and Papeete. These settings, however, seem used more for convenience than out of necessity. The long story “The Beach of Falesá” fulfills Stevenson’s promise and gives evidence of his whole talents as a writer of short fiction. Similar to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Stevenson’s story deals with a person’s ability or inability to remain decent and law-abiding when the external restraints of civilization have been removed. Action follows simply and naturally a line laid down by atmosphere. Stevenson himself called it “the first realistic South Sea story,” while Henry James wrote in a letter the year before Stevenson’s death, “The art of ‘The Beach of Falesá’ seems to me an art brought to a perfection and I delight in the observed truth, the modesty of nature, of the narrator.” In this adventure of wills between two traders on a tiny island, Stevenson is able to unify fitting exposition with restrained description through the voice of first-person narrator John Wiltshire. Three decades later, using Stevenson as one of his models, W. Somerset Maugham would further perfect this technique using the same exotic South Sea setting. Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá,” along with the incomplete Weir of Hermiston and perhaps the first part of The Master of Ballantrae (1888), rests as his best work, the final integration of the divergent roots of his talents. If he had lived longer than forty-four years, “Tusitala” might have become one of the great English prose writers.

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As history stands, however, Stevenson’s small achievement of clear narrative, his victory of joining form to idea, remains of unforgettable importance to students and practitioners of the short-story genre. Kenneth Funsten With updates by John W. Fiero Other major works plays: Deacon Brodie, pb. 1880 (with William Ernest Henley); Admiral Guinea, pb. 1884 (with Henley); Beau Austin, pb. 1884 (with Henley); Macaire, pb. 1885 (with Henley); The Hanging Judge, pb. 1887 (with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson). novels: Treasure Island, 1881-1882 (serial), 1883 (book); Prince Otto, 1885; Kidnapped, 1886; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886; The Black Arrow, 1888; The Master of Ballantrae, 1889; The Wrong Box, 1889; The Wrecker, 1892 (with Lloyd Osbourne); Catriona, 1893; The Ebb-Tide, 1894 (with Osbourne); Weir of Hermiston, 1896 (unfinished); St. Ives, 1897 (completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch). nonfiction: An Inland Voyage, 1878; Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, 1878; Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1879; Virginibus Puerisque, 1881; Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882; The Silverado Squatters: Sketches from a Californian Mountain, 1883; Memories and Portraits, 1887; The South Seas: A Record of Three Cruises, 1890; A Footnote to History, 1892; Across the Plains, 1892; Amateur Emigrant, 1895; Vailima Letters, 1895; In the South Seas, 1896; The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends, 1899 (2 volumes), 1911 (4 volumes); The Lantern-Bearers, and Other Essays, 1988; The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1994-1995 (8 volumes); R. L. Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays, 1999 (Glenda Norquay, editor). poetry: Moral Emblems, 1882; A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885; Underwoods, 1887; Ballads, 1890; Songs of Travel, and Other Verses, 1896. Bibliography Bell, Ian. Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. Bell, a journalist rather than an academic, writes evocatively of Stevenson the dreamer and exile. This brief study of Stevenson’s brief but dramatic life does a fine job of evoking the man and the places he inhabited. It is less accomplished in its approach to the work. Bevan, Bryan. “The Versatility of Robert Louis Stevenson.” Contemporary Review 264 (June, 1994): 316-319. A general discussion of Stevenson’s work, focusing on his versatility in a number of genres; discusses early influences on his writing, and comments on his essays and his fiction. Calder, Jenni. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. This excellent study, by the daughter of literary historian David Daiches, is richly documented with Stevenson’s letters. Less a biography than a study of the writer’s mind, it focuses on the personal values and attitudes informing Stevenson’s work. Callow, Philip. Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Engaging biography that draws on the work of other biographers to present for the general reader a cohesive life of the novelist. Chesterton, G. K. Robert Louis Stevenson. Poughkeepsie, N.J.: House of Stratus, 2001. First published in 1927, this distinguished critical study of Stevenson is still highly regarded for its insights as well as for its wit and lucidity.

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Hammond, J. R. A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Essays, and Short Stories. London: Macmillan, 1984. The first three sections cover the life and literary achievements of Stevenson and contain a brief dictionary which lists and describes his short stories, essays, and smaller works. The fourth section critiques his novels and romances, and the fifth is a key to the people and places of Stevenson’s novels and stories. McLaughlin, Kevin. “The Financial Imp: Ethics and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Novel 29 (Winter, 1996): 165-183. Examines the key issue of finance that can be found at the center of some works of British fiction during this time, focusing particularly on Stevenson’s treatment of these issues in his short story “The Bottle Imp.” McLynn, Frank. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1993. The author traces Robert Louis Stevenson’s career, noting the malignant influence of his wife and stepson and concluding that Stevenson “is Scotland’s greatest writer of English prose.” May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Stevenson: “The Bottle Imp” (vol. 1), “A Lodging for the Night” (vol. 4), “Markheim” (vol. 5), and “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” and “The Suicide Club” (vol. 7).

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Amy Tan Tan, Amy

Born: Oakland, California; February 19, 1952 Principal short fiction • The Joy Luck Club, 1989. Other literary forms • Amy Tan’s most important volume of short fiction, The Joy Luck Club, is also often categorized as a novel. That book has been translated into twenty languages. Her second novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife, was a Booklist editor’s choice. Her later novels include The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005). Tan has also written two children’s books, The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). Her essays include “The Language of Discretion” and “Mother Tongue.” Her first nonfiction work, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003), collects her casual writings that supplement her fiction and her life. Achievements • One of the most important works of modern fiction by an Asian American writer, Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Tan also cowrote, with Ronald Bass, the screenplay for a film based on the novel that was released in 1993. Her essay “Mother Tongue” was included in Best American Essays of 1991, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. She received an honorary doctorate from Dominican College in 1991. Biography • Amy Ruth Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952, the middle child and only daughter of John Yuehhan and Daisy Tu Ching Tan, who had emigrated from China. Her father was an electrical engineer in China, but he became a minister in the United States. The family moved frequently, finally settling in Santa Clara, California. After the death of her husband and older son when Amy was fifteen years old, Daisy took the family to Switzerland and enrolled her children in schools there, but she returned to California in 1969. Tan’s parents hoped she would become a physician and concert pianist. She began a premedical course of study but switched to English and linguistics, much to her mother’s dismay. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1973 and her master’s degree in 1974 from San Jose State University. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 1974 to 1976, beginning studies toward a doctorate. In 1974, she married Louis M. DeMattei, a tax attorney; they settled in San Francisco. Tan was a language consultant, a reporter, a managing editor, and a freelance technical writer before she turned to fiction writing. She joined a writing workshop in 1985 and submitted a story about a Chinese American chess prodigy. The revised version was first published in a small literary magazine and reprinted in Seventeen magazine as “Rules of the Game.” When Tan learned that the story had appeared in Italy and had been translated without her knowledge, she obtained an agent, Sandra Dijkstra, to help handle publication. Although Tan had written only three stories at that time, Dijkstra encouraged her to write a book. At her suggestion, Tan submitted an outline for a book of stories and then went on a trip to China with her mother. On her return, she learned that her proposal had been accepted by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

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Analysis • Amy Tan’s voice is an important one among a group of “hyphenated Americans” (such as African Americans and Asian Americans) who describe the experiences of members of ethnic minority groups. Her short fiction is grounded in a Chinese tradition of “talk story” (gong gu tsai), a folk art form by which characters pass on values and teach important lessons through narrative. Other writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, employ a similar narrative strategy. A central theme of Tan’s stories is the conflict faced by Chinese Americans who find themselves alienated both from their American milieu and from their Chinese parents and heritage. Other themes include storytelling, memory, and the complex relationships between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and sisters. By using narrators from two generations, Tan explores the relationships between past and present. Her stories juxtapose the points of view of characters (husband and wife, mother and daughter, sisters) who struggle with each other, misunderstand each other, and grow distant from each other. Like Tan, other ethnic writers such as Louise Erdrich use multiple voices to retell stories describing the evolution of a cultural history. Tan’s stories derive from her own experience as a Chinese American and from stories of Chinese life her mother told her. They reflect her early conflicts with her strongly opinionated mother and her growing understanding and appreciation of her mother’s past and her strength in adapting to her new country. Daisy’s early life, about which Tan gradually learned, was difficult and dramatic. Daisy’s mother, Jingmei (Amy Tan’s maternal grandmother), was forced to become the concubine of a wealthy man after her husband’s death. Spurned by her family and treated cruelly by the man’s wives, she committed suicide. Her tragic life became the basis of Tan’s story “Magpies,” retold by An-mei Hsu in The Joy Luck Club. Daisy was raised by relatives and married to a brutal man. After her father’s death, Tan learned that her mother had been married in China and left behind three daughters. This story became part of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Tan insists that, like all writers, she writes from her own experienceand is not representative of any ethnic group. She acknowledges her rich Chinese background and combines it with typically American themes of love, marriage, and freedom of choice. Her first-person style is also an American feature. The Joy Luck Club • Although critics call it a novel, Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club as a collection of sixteen short stories told by the club members and their daughters. Each chapter is a complete unit, and five of them have been published separately in short-story anthologies. Other writers, such as the American authors Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) and Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place), and the Canadian Margaret Laurence (A Bird in the House), have also built linked story collections around themes or groups of characters. The framework for The Joy Luck Club is formed by members of a mah-jongg club, immigrants from China, who tell stories of their lives in China and their families in the United States. The first and fourth sections are the mothers’ stories; the second and third are the daughters’ stories. Through this device of multiple narrators, the conflicts and struggles of the two generations are presented through the contrasting stories. The mothers wish their daughters to succeed in American terms (to have professional careers, wealth, and status), but they expect them to retain Chinese values (filial piety, cooking skills, family loyalty) as well. When the daughters become Americanized, they are embarrassed by their mothers’ old-fashioned ways, and their moth-

Tan, Amy ers are disappointed at the daughters’ dismissal of tradition. Chasms of misunderstanding deepen between them. Jing-mei (June) Woo forms a bridge between the generations; she tells her own stories in the daughters’ sections and attempts to take her mother’s part in the mothers’ sections. Additionally, her trip to China forms a bridge between her family’s past and present, and between China and America.

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“The Joy Luck Club” • The first stor y, “The Joy Luck Club,” describes the founding of the club by Suyuan Woo to find comfort during the privations suffered in China during World War II. When the Japanese invaders approached, she fled, abandoning her twin daughters when she was too exhausted to travel any farther. She continued the Joy Luck Club in her new life in San Francisco, forming close friendships with three other women. Robert Foothorap After Suyuan’s death, her daughter Jing-mei, “June,” is invited to take her place. June’s uncertainty of how to behave there and her sketchy knowledge of her family histor y exemplify the tensions experienced by an American daughter of Chinese parents. The other women surprise June by revealing that news has finally arrived from the twin daughters Suyuan left in China. They present June with two plane tickets so that she and her father can visit her half-sisters and tell them her mother’s stor y. She is unsure of what to say, believing now that she really did not know her mother. The others are aghast, because in her they see the reflection of their daughters, who are also ignorant of their mothers’ stories, their past histories, their hopes and fears. They hasten to tell June what to praise about their mother: her kindness, intelligence, mindfulness of family, “the excellent dishes she cooked.” In the book’s concluding chapter, June recounts her trip to China. “Rules of the Game” • One of the daughters’ stories, “Rules of the Game,” describes the ambivalent relationship of Lindo Jong and her six-year-old daughter. Waverly Place Jong (named after the street on which the family lives) learns from her mother’s “rules,” or codes of behavior, to succeed as a competitive chess player. Her mother teaches her to “bite back your tongue” and to learn to bend with the wind. These techniques help her persuade her mother to let her play in chess tournaments and then help her to win games and advance in rank. However, her proud mother embarrasses Waverly by showing her off to the local shopkeepers. The tensions between mother and daughter are like another kind of chess game, a give and take, where the two struggle for power. The two are playing by different rules, Lindo

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by Chinese rules of behavior and filial obedience, Waverly by American rules of selfexpression and independence. “Two Kinds” • Another daughter’s story, “Two Kinds,” is June’s story of her mother’s great expectations for her. Suyuan was certain that June could be anything she wanted to be; it was only a matter of discovering what it was. She decided that June would be a prodigy piano player, and outdo Waverly Jong, but June rebelled against her mother and never paid attention to her lessons. After a disastrous recital, she stops playing the piano, which becomes a sore point between mother and daughter. On her thirtieth birthday, the piano becomes a symbol of her reconciliation with her mother, when Suyuan offers it to her. “Best Quality” • “Best Quality” is June’s story of a dinner party her mother gives. The old rivalries between June and Waverly continue, and Waverly’s daughter and American fiancé behave in ways that are impolite in Chinese eyes. After the dinner Suyuan gives her daughter a jade necklace she has worn in the hope that it will guide her to find her “life’s importance.” “A Pair of Tickets” • This is the concluding story of The Joy Luck Club. It recounts Jing-mei (June) Woo’s trip to China to meet her half-sisters, thus fulfilling the wish of her mother and the Joy Luck mothers and bringing the story cycle to a close, completing the themes of the first story. June learns from her father how Suyuan’s twin daughters were found by an old school friend. He explains that her mother’s name means “long-cherished wish” and that her own name Jing-mei means “something pure, essential, the best quality.” When at last they meet the sisters, she acknowledges her Chinese lineage: “I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” Karen F. Stein Other major works novels: The Kitchen God’s Wife, 1991; The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995; The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 2001; Saving Fish from Drowning, 2005. children’s literature: The Moon Lady, 1992; The Chinese Siamese Cat, 1994. nonfiction: “The Language of Discretion,” 1990 (in The State of the Language, Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, editors); The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, 2003. Bibliography Becerra, Cynthia S. “Two Kinds.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 8. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Two Kinds” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Bloom, Harold, ed. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Bloom also provides an introduction to the installment in the Modern Critical Views series. Pulls together the comments of contemporary critics. Chua, C. L., and Ka Ying Vu. “Rules of the Game.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series,

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edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “Rules of the Game” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Cooperman, Jeannette Batz. The Broom Closet: Secret Meanings of Domesticity in Postfeminist Novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Study of the role of traditionally feminine concerns, such as marriage and family, in the works of these postfeminist writers. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1999. Includes two chapters dedicated specifically to Tan, “Losing Your Innocence But Not Your Hope: Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Mothers and Coca-Cola Daughters,” and “The Heart Never Travels: The Incorporation of Fathers in the Mother-Daughter Stories of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Fae Myenne Ng.” Huh, Joonok. Interconnected Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s ‘The Joy Luck Club.’ Tucson, Ariz.: Southwest Institute for Research on Women, 1992. Examines the mother and adult child relationship in Tan’s novel. Includes a bibliography. ____________. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Discusses Tan’s biography and analyzes her novels in the context of Asian American literature. Analyzes major themes such as the crone figure, food, clothing, language, biculturalism, mothers and daughters. Includes useful bibliography. Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson. “Amy Tan.” Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Provides biographical information on Tan, revealing the sources of some of the stories in The Joy Luck Club. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Amy Tan: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Replete with tools for further research, including study questions, an extensive bibliography, and a glossary of Chinese terms found in Tan’s works, Snodgrass presents a readable, engaging introduction to both Tan’s life and works. Tan, Amy. “Amy Tan.” Interview by Barbara Somogyi and David Stanton. Poets and Writers 19, no. 5 (September 1, 1991): 24-32. One of the best interviews with Tan. Tan speaks about her childhood and her early career as a business writer, her decision to write fiction, her success with The Joy Luck Club, and some of its autobiographical elements.

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Peter Taylor Taylor, Peter

Born: Trenton, Tennessee; January 8, 1917 Died: Charlottesville, Virginia; November 2, 1994 Principal short fiction • A Long Fourth, and Other Stories, 1948; The Widows of Thornton, 1954; Happy Families Are All Alike, 1959; Miss Leonora When Last Seen, and Fifteen Other Stories, 1963; The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, 1968; In the Miro District, and Other Stories, 1977; The Old Forest, and Other Stories, 1985; The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, 1993. Other literary forms • In addition to his short fiction, Peter Taylor published the novels A Woman of Means (1950), A Summons to Memphis (1986), and In the Tennessee Country (1994), as well as plays. Several of his plays were performed at Kenyon College, and three of them have been published separately; a collection of seven dramas was also published in 1973. Taylor was one of three editors of a memorial volume, Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 (1967). Achievements • The publication of The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor brought general acknowledgment that he was one of the most skillful practitioners of the modern short story in the United States. Although his reputation prior to that volume had for the most part been limited to a fairly small circle of enthusiastic readers, the list of his awards indicates the respect in which he was always held by his peers. Taylor was honored twelve different times by inclusion in the annual volume of The Best American Short Stories and was included six times in the O. Henry Award Stories. Taylor was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1950), a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1952), a Fulbright Fellowship (1955), first prize from the O. Henry Memorial Awards (1959), an Ohioan Book Award (1960), a Ford Foundation Fellowship (1961), a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1964), second prize from the Partisan Review-Dial and a National Institute of Arts and Letters gold medal (1979), a Ritz Paris Hemingway Award and the PEN/ Faulkner Award (1986), and a Pulitzer Prize (1987). Although acknowledging his admiration for the work of Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James, Taylor has put his own unique mark on the short story. Much of his fiction is set in the South, recalling the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, but he is less concerned with violence and moral themes than either of those writers, concentrating instead on social relationships and the inevitability of betrayal in the interactions between men and women. Biography • Peter Hillsman Taylor grew up in middle-class circumstances in border states. His family moved to Nashville when he was seven, spent several years in St. Louis, and settled in Memphis when he was fifteen. Expected to follow his father and older brother into the practice of law, Taylor chose early to try to make his career as a writer. He studied with the poet Allen Tate. After a brief enrollment at Vanderbilt University, he preferred to follow the poet, editor, and teacher John Crowe Ransom to Kenyon College in Ohio. At Kenyon College, he was befriended by the poet and critic Randall Jarrell and shared a room with the poet Robert Lowell.

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After service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Taylor took up teaching as a profession. Between 1945 and 1963, he held faculty appointments at Indiana State University and Ohio State University, and on three different occasions he was appointed to teaching positions at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 1967, he accepted a professorship at the University of Virginia, where he remained until his retirement in 1984. Success as a short-story writer came fairly early in his career. Prestigious magazines such as The Southern Review and The New Republic published some of his stories written while he was still in college, and his first recognition in Best American Short Stories came in 1941, just after his graduation from Kenyon College. By 1948, his work was appearing in The New Yorker, which over the next three decades would publish more than two dozen of his works. Popular success, however, waited until the publication of A Summons to Memphis in 1986. The novel was a best-seller and won for Taylor the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. One scholar has hypothesized that Taylor saw this as a means of gaining validation for his short stories, the genre he considered more demanding of real artistry. Taylor died on November 2, 1994, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Analysis • The art of Peter Taylor is ironic and subtle. In a typical story, the narrator or point-of-view character is an observer, perhaps a member of a community who remembers someone or something in the town’s past that is puzzling or strange, or a character whose understanding of his or her life falls short of reality. In tone, the stories are deceptively simple and straightforward, masking their complex ironies in seemingly ordinary actions. Taylor does not experiment with form or structure in the manner of a Jorge Luis Borges or a Robert Coover, but his stories are not always about commonplace experience; the grotesque plays a major role in such stories as “The Fancy Woman” and “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.” Low-keyed and rarely involving violent action, the stories are more complex in their effect than at first appears, often revealing more about the narrator or the society than about the character being described. Their settings are often in small towns or minor cities in the upper South, Tennessee or Missouri, places such as those where Taylor lived as a boy and young man. Familial relationships, including those between husband and wife, are often central. Racial and economic matters enter into many of the stories, but such major social issues are generally depicted in the context of the social interactions of ordinary people. Nevertheless, Taylor provides considerable insight into the effects of the radical changes that affected the South in the 1960’s and 1970’s. “Dean of Men” • Betrayal is a recurrent theme in Taylor’s short fiction, and it is no accident that the story he chose to place first in The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor is the relatively late “Dean of Men,” a recital of the history of the men in a family. The narrator, an older man and a successful academic, tries in the story to explain to his son the background of his career and his divorce from his first wife, the son’s mother. The story unfolds by an examination of the past, in which the narrator’s grandfather was a successful politician, governor of his state, and then U.S. senator. Younger men in his party persuaded him to give up his Senate seat and run for governor again to save the party from a man he despised, and he agreed. It turned out that the plan was intended to get him out of his Senate seat. As a result, he gave up politics in disgust and lived out his life an embittered man.

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The narrator’s father was similarly betrayed by a man he had known all his life, who had installed the father on the board of a bank. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the friend promised to come from New York to explain doubtful investments he had made, but he never arrived, and the father was left holding the bag. In his turn, the narrator, as a young instructor in a small college, was used by other faculty members to block an appointment they all feared, but when the move was avenged by its target, the young man was left to suffer the consequences alone. In the aftermath, he left to take another job, but his wife did not go with him; both later remarried. The story is the narrator’s attempt to explain his life to the son who grew up without him. What the narrator is unaware of is the decline in the importance and stature of his family through the generations; his achievements and his place in life, of which he is unduly proud, are notably less important than those of his father, which were in turn significantly less than those of the grandfather. The entire family’s history is flawed by the men’s lack of initiative, their acceptance of what others do to them. This lack of self-knowledge on the part of a narrator will characterize Taylor’s first-person fictions as late as “The Captain’s Son.” “A Spinster’s Tale” • The narrator’s or central figure’s ignorance of her or his own attitudes is present from the beginning of Taylor’s career, in his first published story, “A Spinster’s Tale,” a study of sexual repression. Taylor’s only explicit investigation of sexual deviance would come much later, in “The Instruction of a Mistress,” although “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” contains strong overtones of incest. In “A Spinster’s Tale,” the narrator, the spinster of the title, is a woman whose youth was blighted by her fear of an old drunk who often passed the house in which she lived with her father and brother. As she tells the story, it is clear that her fear of “Mr. Speed” is a transference of her inadmissible attraction to her older brother, who also drinks, often and to excess. She is unaware that her irrational fear is really fear of any kind of departure from the most repressed kinds of behavior. In the old man, drunkenness is revolting; in her brother, she fears it only because her dead mother had told the young man that he would go to hell if he continued, but her brother’s antic behavior when drunk exercises an attraction on her that she struggles to deny. In her old age, she still has revealing dreams laden with sexual implications. The betrayal in this story, of which she is only dimly aware, is the narrator’s calling the police to haul away Mr. Speed when he stumbles onto their lawn during a driving rainstorm. She acknowledges late in life that she had acted “with courage, but without wisdom.” “What You Hear from ’Em?” • Betrayal of one kind or another seems to be almost inevitable in the relations between races, especially as those relations undergo the changes brought about by the Civil Rights movement and the push for integration. Since most of Taylor’s stories are set in the South of the 1930’s and 1940’s, those relations are often between masters and servants, but that will change in the later tales. “What You Hear from ’Em?” is written from the point of view of an old black servant, Aunt Munsie, who lives in retirement, raising pigs and dogs and a few chickens. Her only real interest is in the lives of the two white men she reared when their mother died, and the question she addresses to people she meets in her daily rounds asks when they will return to the small town where she still lives. Their visits to her, bringing wives and children and eventually grandchildren, do not matter to Aunt Munsie; things will not be right until they again live in Thornton, a Nashville suburb. The be-

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trayal is by the two men. Worried by her refusal to acknowledge automobiles or traffic rules as she goes through town collecting slop for her pigs, they arrange for an ordinance to be enacted that will forbid pig farming within the town limits. Aunt Munsie knows what they have done; she sells her pigs and loses her individuality, becoming a kind of parody of an old former servant. “A Wife of Nashville” • A different kind of betrayal and a different kind of response occur in another early story, “A Wife of Nashville.” On the surface, this is a story about a marriage between John R. and Helen Ruth Lovell, in some ways a typical southern couple. He has succeeded in the insurance business, but he has spent much of his time over the years with other businessmen, hunting and traveling. Helen Ruth, as a result, has been occupied with rearing her children, and her chief companions over the years have been the black women who have cooked and cleaned for her: Jane Blackemore, when they were first married; Carrie, during the time their two younger boys were born; Sarah, who at the age of sixty-eight left for Chicago and a new marriage; and Jess, hired during the Depression and the most durable and helpful of them all. “A Wife of Nashville,” however, is only partly about the marriage and the rearing of a family. It becomes clear as the story develops that Helen Ruth’s genuine emotional life has increasingly been centered on her relationships with her servants and that they have been an integral part of the family. Jess, who does not drive a car herself, is essential to the boys’ learning to drive, a symbol of their adulthood. In the end, she concocts a scene to explain her leaving the family; Helen Ruth knows that the explanation is false and that Jess and a friend are leaving Nashville for what they think is a more glamorous life in California. The husband and sons are shocked and resentful at the way they think Helen Ruth has been treated by Jess; Helen Ruth herself, however, rejects their sympathy and refuses to share their anger. It is clear that she wishes she had a means of escape, even one as improbable as that taken by Jess and her friend. On another level, it is clear also that she, unlike the men in the family, recognizes the social changes that are under way, changes that will alter the ways in which the races will survive. Other stories having to do with difficult marital relations were written throughout Taylor’s career and include the early “Cookie,” “Reservations,” and “The Elect.” “Miss Leonora When Last Seen” • Perhaps the story most typical of Taylor’s work, and one of the most powerful, is the one he chose to conclude The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, “Miss Leonora When Last Seen.” Narrated by one of the middlingsuccessful men who populate this fiction, a small-town druggist, the story operates on several levels. It encompasses the narrator’s sadness at having to carry bad news to the woman who was his teacher and who had encouraged him to aspire to greater things than he was able to achieve. At the same time, it is a story about a town’s revenge on Miss Leonora’s family, the wealthiest and most powerful residents of the town; over the years, they had prevented every “improvement” that might have brought business and “progress” to Thomasville, using their influence to keep out the railroad, the asylum, and other projects that would have changed the town. Most of them moved away, but they retained the home place, and they continued to exercise their influence. Now the town has decided to condemn the old manor house in which Miss Leonora lives in order to build a new high school. The irony that Miss Leonora had been a superb teacher in the old school is not lost on the narrator.

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More important, “Miss Leonora When Last Seen” shows the mixed blessings and curses of the old ways and of the changes that are coming to the “New South.” The old ways were autocratic and sometimes unfair, and they depended upon a servant class descended from slaves, such as the blacks who still live on Miss Leonora’s place. Modernity, however, may not be much of an improvement; the new high school is being pushed as a final attempt to avoid the supposed horrors of racial integration. The narrator is caught between these times and has nothing to look to for support. While these elements are at work, and the narrator is showing his own lack of understanding of Miss Leonora, the story is presenting a picture of an eccentric but fascinating individual who has lived in Thomasville all her life, teaching, trying to inspire the young men who were her favorites to achievement, and living close to the blacks who still reside on the family property, which she has inherited. In her retirement, she has taken to traveling by car, driving always at night in an open convertible, wearing one of two strange costumes, and stopping at “tourist homes,” which were the motels of the time. Informed of the town’s decision, she has taken to the road. Postcards come from surrounding states, but “She seems to be orbiting her native state of Tennessee.” There is no sign that she will ever return; the old ways are indeed dead, and those who lived in the old way are anachronisms. “The Old Forest” • “The Old Forest” is a good example of Taylor’s interest in the tensions between the Old and New South. The story’s action takes place in Memphis in 1937, although the story is told more than forty years later by Nat, the central character. Nat relates how in the 1930’s a young man in Memphis, even if he was engaged, might continue to go out with the bright young women he and his friends jokingly called demimondaines. These were intelligent young women who had good jobs, read good books, and attended concerts and plays. Nevertheless, they were not quite in the social class of Nat and his friends. The two groups went out for their mutual amusement without expecting long-term commitments, either sexual or matrimonial. Young men like Nat intended to marry duller girls of their own class who lived by the standards of the Memphis Country Club. Nat says that the demimondaines were at least two generations ahead of themselves in their sexual freedom, for although they did not usually sleep with Nat and his friends, they often entered sexual relationships with men they truly loved. Although Nat is already working for his father’s cotton firm, he is also studying Latin in a lackadaisical way at the local college. His family ridicules his interest in Horace’s Odes, but he enjoys the distinction it brings him among his friends, even though he is nearly failing the course. This particular Saturday, about a week before Nat’s December wedding to Caroline Braxton, he invites Lee Ann Deehart, his “other” girl, to come out to the college with him while he studies for a test. On snowpacked roads in the primeval forest near the Mississippi, they have a car accident. Nat is slightly hurt and hardly notices that Lee Ann has climbed out of the car and disappeared in the snow and virgin forest. When she does not return to her boardinghouse that evening, Nat knows he must confess the affair to Caroline, who is surprisingly understanding and agrees that he must find her. Lee Ann’s friends know where she is, but Nat soon realizes that she is deliberately hiding from him, and he fears the scandal when the story hits the newspapers. Especially he fears that Caroline will break off their engagement. In the end, Caroline is the one who finds Lee Ann and discovers her motives for hiding, motives which ironically involve her own fear of publicity and the identification of her family.

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Throughout, Nat contrasts the Memphis of 1937 with the present Memphis and the two sorts of girls represented by Lee Ann and Caroline. Typically, Taylor invites the reader to take a slightly different view from Nat’s. For all her supposed dullness, Caroline uses real intelligence in finding Lee Ann and real compassion in responding to her crisis. Moreover, ten years later she supports Nat’s decision to leave cotton for a career teaching college. Caroline’s own analysis of what happened, however, is straight from the old forest of Memphis convention. She has not set herself free, she says, like Lee Ann, so in protecting Nat she has protected for herself “the power of a woman in a man’s world,” the only power she can claim. John M. Muste With updates by Ann D. Garbett Other major works plays: Tennessee Day in Saint Louis: A Comedy, pr. 1956; A Stand in the Mountains, pb. 1965; Presences: Seven Dramatic Pieces, pb. 1973. anthology: Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, 1967 (with Robert Lowell and Robert Penn Warren). novels: A Woman of Means, 1950; A Summons to Memphis, 1986; In the Tennessee Country, 1994. nonfiction: Conversations with Peter Taylor, 1987 (Hubert H. McAlexander, editor). Bibliography Graham, Catherine Clark. Southern Accents: The Fiction of Peter Taylor. New York: P. Lang, 1994. Insightful study. Includes bibliographical references. Griffith, Albert J. Peter Taylor. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Excellent introductory study. Kramer, Victor A., Patricia A. Bailey, Carol G. Dana, and Carl H. Griffin. Andrew Lytle, Walker Percy, Peter Taylor: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. One of the later and most complete bibliographies of Taylor’s work and the reviews and criticism. McAlexander, Hubert H. Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Biography written with the close cooperation of its subject. In fact, McAlexander, who edited Conversations with Peter Taylor and a collection of essays on the writer, was hand-picked by Taylor, and his portrait is admiring. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Taylor: “The Fancy Woman” (vol. 3); “Miss Leonora When Last Seen” and “The Old Forest” (vol. 5); “Reservations: A Love Story” (vol. 6); and “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” and “What You Hear from ’Em?” (vol. 8). Oates, Joyce Carol. “Realism of Distance, Realism of Immediacy.” The Southern Review 7 (Winter, 1971): 295-313. A novelist’s sensitive appreciation of other writers, including Taylor. Robison, James C. Peter Taylor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1987. This volume not only is the sole extended study of Taylor’s short stories but also contains two interviews with the author as well as essays by a number of critics. Robison’s comments are occasionally wide of the mark, but he is an earnest and generally intelligent reader of Taylor’s work. Essential reading.

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Samarco, C. Vincent. “Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest.’” The Explicator 57 (Fall, 1998): 5153. Argues that the car accident represents a collision between Nat Ramsey’s pursuit of knowledge and the history of his upbringing within the narrow walls of privilege. Stephens, C. Ralph, and Lynda B. Salamon, eds. The Craft of Peter Taylor. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Collection of essays on Taylor’s work, including discussions of his poetics, his focus on place, his relationship to the Agrarians, his treatment of absence, his role in American pastoralism, and such stories as “The Other Times,” “The Old Forest,” and “The Hand of Emmagene.” Taylor, Peter. “Interview with Peter Taylor.” Interview by J. H. E. Paine. Journal of the Short Story in English 9 (Fall, 1987): 14-35. The most extended interview with Taylor, dealing with his techniques and influences.

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Dylan Thomas Thomas, Dylan

Born: Swansea, Wales; October 27, 1914 Died: New York, New York; November 9, 1953 Principal short fiction • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, 1940; Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas, 1946; A Child’s Christmas in Wales, 1954; A Prospect of the Sea, and Other Stories, 1955; Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories, 1955; Early Prose Writings, 1971; The Followers, 1976; The Collected Stories, 1984. Other literary forms • In addition to his short fiction, Dylan Thomas published several collections of poetry, including Eighteen Poems (1934), Twenty-five Poems (1936), New Poems (1943), and Collected Poems: 1934-1952 (1952). Under Milk Wood (1954) is a verse drama that affectionately portrays a day in the life of the inhabitants of a tiny Welsh fishing village. Thomas also wrote many screenplays, most notably The Doctor and the Devils (1953) and a comic detective novel The Death of the King’s Canary (1976). Achievements • The lyricism of Dylan Thomas’s poetry probably constitutes his most powerful contribution to twentieth-century verse and is also a notable characteristic of his prose. One source of that lyric quality is surely Thomas’s Welsh origins and his awareness of the depth and richness of Welsh poetic traditions. He also paid homage to Wales in his short fiction, lovingly (if sometimes satirically) describing it in works such as A Child’s Christmas in Wales and in the stories that make up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and Adventures in the Skin Trade. In those works appear characters and events from his childhood in Swansea and his early work as a news reporter. Thomas’s poetry won the “Poet’s Corner” Prize of the Sunday Referee in 1934, the Blumenthal Poetry Prize in 1938, the Levinson Poetry Prize in 1945, and Foyle’s Poetry Prize (for Collected Poems: 1934-1952) in 1952. Thomas also received a grant from The Authors’ Society Traveling Scholarship Fund in 1947. Biography • Dylan Marlais Thomas’s father, John David Thomas, was an embittered schoolmaster, emotionally remote from his son, but he possessed a fine library of contemporary fiction and poetry which his son was free to read. His father’s distance and unhappiness may have made Thomas more susceptible to the indulgences of his mother, Florence Williams Thomas. It is her family who appears in Thomas’s work as the chapel-going farmers, and it is her oldest sister whose husband owned the farm near Llangain where the young Thomas often spent summer vacations. Thomas also had a sister, Nancy, nine years older than he. The family home at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, was across the street from the park which sometimes appears in his poems (“The Hunchback in the Park,” for example). Likewise the beautiful Gower peninsula and his aunt’s farm appeared in his adult work as subjects for his poetry and memoirs (most notably in “Fern Hill”). Thomas’s early life in Wales furnished him with material that surfaced in his work for the rest of his life. Thomas was a lackadaisical student at Swansea Grammar School. Talented in English, he edited the school magazine while he was there, and he began to keep the notebooks that reveal his early attempts to form his style, but he gave little attention

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to subjects that did not interest him. It was at school that he began his friendship with Dan Jones, with whom he composed poems and played elaborate word games. In adulthood, Jones became Dr. Daniel Jones, musical composer and editor of Thomas’s work. Thomas left school in 1931 to work—not very successfully—as a reporter for the South Wales Evening Post, a job which gave him material for many of his stories. During the next three years, he also experienced a period of exciting poetic growth, learning about Welsh poets of the past and producing much work of his own. Late in 1934, he moved to London where he cultivated a conscious bohemianism and began to Library of Congress gain a reputation as drinker, brilliant conversationalist, and poet of merit. Through the rest of his life, the two parts of his personality—the serious poet who cared about his craft and the hard-drinking bohemian—were at odds in dominating his behavior. In 1937, he married Caitlin Macnamara, a strong-willed, passionate dancer with whom he was intensely in love. They had three children—Llewelyn, Aeron, and Colm. During the war, Thomas, a conscientious objector, wrote mostly prose. Afterward, his life alternated between London and the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne, where he lived with his family and did his most profitable work. In London, when he was in need of money (as he usually was), he often worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation, but there, too, his drinking began to cause him more and more troubles. In 1950, he made the first of four tours to the United States, reading his work at colleges and universities. It was an enormous success, but it documented his reputation as an “outlaw” poet—a hard drinker and womanizer who spent the proceeds of his readings on women and whiskey while his family went without necessities. The subsequent tours intensified that legend. He died of alcohol poisoning in St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City in 1953. Analysis • Dylan Thomas’s ten stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog are charming reminiscences of his relatives, school friends, and neighbors in the town where he grew up. Their wit and accessibility made them immediately popular, in contrast to the dark, subjective stories he had written prior to 1938, for which he had difficulty finding a publisher. In March, 1938, he wrote to Vernon Watkins that “A Visit to Grandpa’s” was “the first of a series of short, straightforward stories about Swansea.” Published on March 10, 1939, in the New English Weekly, it told of a boy’s waking up on a mild summer night to the sounds of “gee-up and whoa” in the next room where his

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grandfather, wearing his red waistcoat with its brass buttons, is reining invisible horses. On their morning walks, the grandfather has expressed his wish not to be buried in the nearby churchyard. When he is missing a few days later, the entire village is summoned to go in search of him, and they find him on Carmarthen Bridge in his Sunday trousers and dusty tall hat on his way to Llangadock to be buried. They try to persuade him to come home to tea instead. “The Peaches” • In “The Peaches,” first published in the October, 1938, issue of Life and Letters Today, the naïve narrator tells of his spring holiday on a farm in Gorsehill. His uncle Jim drives him there in a green cart late one April evening, stopping for a drink at a public house. The squeal coming from the wicker basket he takes inside with him prepares the reader for the fact that cousin Gwilym will note that one of the pigs is missing the next day. The terror of being abandoned in a dark alley is assuaged by Aunt Annie’s warm welcome of him later that night at the farmhouse. He enters, small, cold, and scared, as the clock strikes midnight, and is made to feel “among the shining and striking like a prince taking off his disguise.” Next morning, Gwilym takes him to see the sow, who has only four pigs left. “He sold it to go on the drink,” whispers Gwilym rebukingly. The boy imagines Jim transformed into a hungry fox: “I could see uncle, tall and sly and red, holding the writhing pig in his two hairy hands, sinking his teeth in its thigh, crunching its trotters up; I could see him leaning over the wall of the sty with the pig’s legs sticking out of his mouth.” Gwilym, who is studying to be a minister, takes him to the barn which he pretends is his chapel and preaches a thunderous sermon at him, after which he takes up a collection. Next, the complication begins. Gwilym and Jim are told to dress up for Jack Williams, whose rich mother will bring him in an automobile from Swansea for a fortnight’s visit. A tin of peaches has been saved from Christmas; “Mother’s been keeping it for a day like this.” Mrs. Williams, “with a jutting bosom and thick legs, her ankles swollen over her pointed shoes,” sways into the parlor like a ship. Annie precedes her, anxiously tidying her hair, “clucking, fidgeting, excusing.” (The string of participles is typical of Thomas’s prose style; one sentence [in “Return Journey”] contains fifteen.) The rich guest declines refreshments. “I don’t mind pears or chunks, but I can’t bear peaches.” The boys run out to frolic, climb trees, and play Indians in the bushes. After supper, in the barn, Gwilym demands confessions from them, and Jack begins to cry that he wants to go home. That night in bed, they hear Uncle Jim come in drunk and Annie quietly relating the events of the day, at which he explodes into thunderous anger: “Aren’t peaches good enough for her!” At this, Jack sobs into his pillow. The next day Mrs. Williams arrives, sends the chauffeur for Jack’s luggage, and drives off with him, as the departing car scatters the hens and the narrator waves good-bye. Two aspects of the point of view are significant. The first, its tone, is what made all the stories so immediately beloved. The genial Chaucerian stance, which perceives and accepts eccentricities, which notes and blesses all the peculiarities of humanity, is endearing without being sentimental, because the acuteness of the observations stays in significant tension with the nonjudgmental way in which they are recorded. This combination of acuity and benevolence, of sharpness and radiance, is the special quality of Thomas’s humor. The second aspect of the author’s style is its expansion and contraction, which indicates the view of a visionary poet. The narrator is both a homesick, cold, tired little boy, and “a royal nephew in smart town clothes, embraced and welcomed.” The uncle is both a predatory fox and an impoverished

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farmer, as he sits in “the broken throne of a bankrupt bard.” The splendid paradise where the narrator romps is simultaneously a poor, dirty “square of mud and rubbish and bad wood and falling stone, where a bucketful of old and bedraggled hens scratched and laid small eggs.” The “pulpit” where Gwilym’s inspired sermon is “cried to the heavens” in his deepest voice is a dusty, broken cart in an abandoned barn overrun with mice; but this decrepit building on a mucky hill becomes “a chapel shafted with sunlight,” awesome with reverence as the “preacher’s” voice becomes “Welsh and singing.” The alternate aggrandizement and diminution of the perceptions energize the style as the lyric impulse wars with the satiric impulse in the narrator’s voice. “Patricia, Edith and Arnold” • The naïve narrator of the third of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog stories, entitled “Patricia, Edith and Arnold,” is totally engrossed in his imaginary engine, whose brake is “a hammer in his pocket” and whose fuel is replenished by invisible engineers. As he drives it about the garden, however, he is aware of his maid, Patricia, plotting with the neighbor’s servant, Edith, to confront Arnold with the identical letters he wrote to both of them. The girls take the child to the park as it begins to snow; Arnold has been meeting Edith there on Fridays, and Patricia on Wednesdays. As the girls wait for Arnold in the shelter, the boy, disowning them, pretends he is a baker, molding loaves of bread out of snow. Arnold Matthews, his hands blue with cold, wearing a checked cap but no overcoat, appears and tries to bluff it out. Loudly he says, “Fancy you two knowing each other.” The boy rolls a snowman “with a lop-sided dirty head” smoking a pencil, as the situation grows more tense. When Arnold claims that he loves them both, Edith shakes her purse at him, the letters fall out all over the snow, and the snowman collapses. As the boy searches for his pencil, the girls insist that Arnold choose between them. Patricia turns her back, indignantly. Arnold gestures and whispers to Edith behind Patricia’s back and then, out loud, chooses Patricia. The boy, bending over his snowman, finds his pencil driven through its head. Later, during a discussion of lying, the boy tells Patricia that he saw Arnold lying to both of them, and the momentary truce, during which Patricia and Arnold have been walking arm in arm, is over. She smacks and pummels him as he staggers backward and falls. The boy says he has to retrieve the cap that he left near his snowman. He finds Arnold there, rereading the letters that Edith dropped, but does not tell Patricia this. Later, as his frozen hands tingle and his face feels on fire, she comforts him until “the hurting is gone.” She acknowledges his pain and her own by saying, “Now we’ve all had a good cry today.” The story achieves its effects through the child’s detachment. Totally absorbed in his play, he registers the behavior of the adults, participating in their sorrows without fully comprehending them. In spite of his ageappropriate egocentricity and his critical remarks about her girth (her footprints as large as a horse’s), he expresses deep affection for her and such concern as he is capable of, given the puzzling circumstances. “The Fight” • The narrator of “The Fight” is an exuberant adolescent. Although he is fourteen, he deliberately adds a year to his age, lying for the thrill of having to be on guard to avoid detection. The self-conscious teenager is continually inventing scenarios in which he assumes various heroic postures. The story tells of his finding an alter ego, as gifted as he, through whom he can confirm his existence, with whom he can share his anxieties, collaborate imaginatively, and play duets. The opening inci-

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dent illustrates Dylan’s testing himself against the adults about him. He is engaged in a staring contest with a cranky old man who lives beside the schoolyard when a strange boy pushes him down. They fight. Dylan gives Dan a bloody nose and gets a black eye in return. Admiring each other’s injuries as evidence of their own manliness, they become fast friends. Dylan postures, first as a prizefighter, then as a pirate. When a boy ridicules him at school the next day, he has a revenge fantasy of breaking his leg, then of being a famous surgeon who sets it with “a rapid manipulation, the click of a bone,” while the grateful mother, on her knees, tearfully thanks him. Assigned a vase to draw in art class, the boys sketch inaccurate versions of naked girls instead. “I drew a wild guess below the waist.” This boyish sexual curiosity leads him mentally to undress even Mrs. Bevan, the minister’s wife, whom he meets later at supper at Dan’s house, but he gets frightened when he gets as far as the petticoats. Dan shows Dylan the seven historical novels he wrote before he was twelve, plays the piano for him, and lets him make a cat’s noise on his violin; Dylan reads Dan his poems out of his exercise book. They share feelings, such as their ambivalences toward their mothers, a love tinged with embarrassment. They decide to edit a paper. Back upstairs, after supper, they imitate the self-important Mr. Bevan and discuss the time Mrs. Bevan tried to fling herself out the window. When she joins them later, they try to induce her to repeat this by pointedly opening the window and inviting her to admire the view. When he has to leave at 9:30, Dan announces that he “must finish a string trio tonight,” and Dylan counters that he is “working on a long poem about the princes of Wales.” On these bravura promises, the story closes. “A Prospect of the Sea” • Thomas called these luminous remembrances of his youth “portions of a provincial autobiography.” The stories he wrote earlier, drafts of which exist in “The Red Notebook,” which he kept from December, 1933, to October, 1934, were not published until later. Considered obscure, violent, and surrealistic, the stories are difficult because of the use of narrative devices borrowed from lyric poetry. In “A Prospect of the Sea,” for example, the scenery seems to contract and expand. A boy lying in a cornfield on a summer day sees a country girl with berrystained mouth, scratched legs, and dirty fingernails jump down from a tree, startling the birds. The landscape shrinks, the trees dwindle, the river is compressed into a drop, and the yellow field diminishes into a square “he could cover with his hand.” As he masters his fear and sees she is only “a girl in a torn cotton frock” sitting crosslegged on the grass, things assume their proper size. As she makes erotic advances, his terror rises again, and everything becomes magnified. Each leaf becomes as large as a man, every trough in the bark of the tree seems as vast as a channel, every blade of grass looks as high as a house. This apparent contraction and expansion of the external world is dependent upon the protagonist’s internal state. Thomas uses another device commonly employed in lyric poetry, the literalized metaphor. Because a thing seems like another, it is depicted as having been transformed into that other thing. For example, the “sunburned country girl” frightens the lonely boy as if she were a witch; thus, in his eyes, she becomes one. “The stain on her lips was blood, not berries; and her nails were not broken but sharpened sideways, ten black scissorblades ready to snip off his tongue.” Finally, not only space and character are subject to transformations but also time. As the narrator fantasizes union with this girl, he attains a mystical vision of history unrolling back to Eden. The story ends as it began; she disappears into the sea. He had imagined, at the be-

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ginning, as he dabbled his fingers in the water, that a drowned storybook princess would emerge from the waves. The apparent obscurities are resolved by seeing the plot of this story as simply the daydreams of a lonely boy on a summer’s day. “The Orchards” • “The Orchards” is another prose-poem about a man’s attempt to record a vision in words. Marlais has a repetitive dream about blazing apple trees guarded by two female figures who change from scarecrows to women. He tries and fails to shape this into a story, and finally sets out on a quest. Striding through eleven valleys, he reaches the scene he has dreamed of, where he reenacts the kissing of the maiden as the orchard catches fire, the fruit falls as cinders, and she and her sister change to scarecrows. These smoldering trees may be related to the sacrificial fires of the Welsh druids on Midsummer Day. The woman figure might be connected with Olwedd, the Welsh Venus, associated with the wild apple. Marlais’s adventure, however, is a mental journey undertaken by the creative writer through the landscape of his mind, and the temporal and spatial fluctuations are the projections of that mind, mythicized. “The Tree” • “The Tree” illustrates this same process. A gardener tells a boy the story of Jesus, reading the Bible in his shed by candlelight. While he is mending a rake with wire, he relates the twelve stages of the cross. The boy wants to know the secrets inside the locked tower to which the bearded gardener has the key. On Christmas Eve, the gardener unlocks the room through whose windows the boy can see the Jarvis Hills to the east. The gardener says of this “Christmas present” in a tone which seems prophetic: “It is enough that I have given you the key.” On Christmas morning, an idiot with ragged shoes wanders into the garden, “bearing the torture of the weather with a divine patience.” Enduring the rain and the wind, he sits down under the elder tree. The boy, concluding that the gardener had not lied and that the secret of the tower was true, runs to get the wire to reenact the crucifixion. The old man’s obsessive religiosity has been transmitted to the boy, who takes it literally: “A tree” has become “The Tree,” “a key” has become “The Key,” and a passive beggar stumbling from the east has become Christ inviting his martyrdom. “The Visitor” • “The Visitor” is the story of a dying poet, Peter, tended lovingly by Rhiannon, who brings him warm milk, reads to him from William Blake, and at the end pulls the sheet over his face. Death is personified as Callaghan, whose visit he anticipates as his limbs grow numb and his heart slows. Callaghan blows out the candles with his gray mouth, and, lifting Peter in his arms, flies with him to the Jarvis Valley where they watch worms and death-beetles undoing “brightly and minutely” the animal tissues on the shining bones through whose sockets flowers sprout, the blood seeping through the earth to fountain forth in springs of water. “Peter, in his ghost, cried with joy.” This is the same assurance found in Thomas’s great elegies: Death is but the reentry of the body into the processes of nature. Matter is not extinguished, but transformed into other shapes whose joyous energies flourish forever. Ruth Rosenberg With updates by Ann D. Garbett

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Other major works play: Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices, pr. 1953 (public reading), pr. 1954 (radio play), pb. 1954, pr. 1956 (staged; musical settings by Daniel Jones). novels: The Death of the King’s Canary, 1976 (with John Davenport). miscellaneous: “The Doctor and the Devils,” and Other Scripts, 1966 (two screenplays and one radio play). nonfiction: Letters to Vernon Watkins, 1957 (Vernon Watkins, editor); Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, 1966 (Constantine FitzGibbon, editor); Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, 1968 (Ralph Maud, editor); Twelve More Letters by Dylan Thomas, 1969 (FitzGibbon, editor); The Collected Letters, 1985 (Paul Ferris, editor). poetry: Eighteen Poems, 1934; Twenty-five Poems, 1936; The Map of Love, 1939; New Poems, 1943; Deaths and Entrances, 1946; Twenty-six Poems, 1950; Collected Poems, 19341952, 1952; In Country Sleep, 1952; The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971 (Daniel Jones, editor). radio plays: Quite Early One Morning, 1944; The Londoner, 1946; Return Journey, 1947; Quite Early One Morning, 1954 (twenty-two radio plays). screenplays: No Room at the Inn, 1948 (with Ivan Foxwell); Three Weird Sisters, 1948 (with Louise Birt and David Evans); The Doctor and the Devils, 1953; The Beach at Falesá, 1963; Twenty Years A’Growing, 1964; Me and My Bike, 1965; Rebecca’s Daughters, 1965. Bibliography Ackerman, John. Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Biography describing the life and writings of Thomas. ____________. Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomas’s Life, Writing, and His Wales. 2d ed. Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1998. This biography of Dylan looks at his homeland, Wales, and shows how the area influenced his writings. Davies, Walford. Dylan Thomas. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986. Biography and an introduction are followed by several chapters on the poems: poems on poetry, early poetry, comparisons of early and late poems, “Fern Hill,” and the last poems. The final chapter attempts to put Thomas’s work in context and to draw some conclusions regarding the poet in relationship to society, his style, and the way he uses language. Good notes contain bibliographical references. ____________. A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Valuable aid to understanding Thomas’s troubled life and enduring body of work. Begins with an insightful biography that provides a useful context for studying his writings. The second section provides a systematic overview of his works, while the third section summarizes the critical and scholarly response to his writings. The volume concludes with a bibliography of the most helpful general studies. Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas: The Biography. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. This excellent biography contains material found in American archives and also those of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Ferris interviewed more than two hundred people who either knew Thomas or worked with him. He attempts to separate the facts from the legendary reputation of Thomas. This book elaborates on, and enhances, the “approved” biography by Constantine FitzGibbon (The Life of Dylan Thomas, 1965), the personal memoirs by Caitlin Thomas (Leftover Life to Kill, 1957), and John Malcolm Brinnin (Dylan Thomas in America, 1955).

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Hardy, Barbara Nathan. Dylan Thomas: An Original Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Hardy looks at Thomas’s use of language in his writings, including his use of Welsh-derived terms. Includes bibliography and index. Jones, R. F. G. Time Passes: Dylan Thomas’s Journey to “Under Milk Wood.” Sydney: Woodworm Press, 1994. Account of the literary development of Thomas, including analysis of Under Milk Wood. Includes bibliography and index. Korg, Jacob. Dylan Thomas. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1992. Basic biography of Thomas that covers his life and works. Includes bibliography and index. Lycett, Andrew. Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2004. Major new Thomas biography that is well researched and much acclaimed. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Thomas: “After the Fair” (vol. 1), “The Enemies” (vol. 2), “The Fight” (vol. 3), “The Peaches” (vol. 6), and “A Story” (vol. 7). Sinclair, Andrew. Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000. Sinclair provides the story of Thomas’s life as a poet and writer. Includes bibliography and index.

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James Thurber Thurber, James

Born: Columbus, Ohio; December 8, 1894 Died: New York, New York; November 2, 1961 Principal short fiction • Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why We Feel the Way We Do, 1929 (with E. B. White); The Owl in the Attic, and Other Perplexities, 1931; The Seal in the Bedroom, and Other Predicaments, 1932; My Life and Hard Times, 1933; The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1935; Let Your Mind Alone!, and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces, 1937; The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures, 1939; Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, 1940; My World—And Welcome to It!, 1942; The Great Quillow, 1944; The Thurber Carnival, 1945; The White Deer, 1945; The Beast in Me, and Other Animals: A New Collection of Pieces and Drawings About Human Beings and Less Alarming Creatures, 1948; The Thirteen Clocks, 1950; Thurber Country: A New Collection of Pieces About Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species, 1953; Further Fables for Our Time, 1956; Alarms and Diversions, 1957; The Wonderful O, 1957; Lanterns and Lances, 1961; Credos and Curios, 1962. Other literary forms • James Thurber’s more than twenty published volumes include plays, stories, sketches, essays, verse, fables, fairy tales for adults, reminiscences, biography, drawings, and cartoons. Achievements • James Thurber’s writings are widely known and admired in Englishspeaking countries, and his drawings have a world following. He has been compared with James Joyce in his command of and playfulness with English, and he invites comparison with most of his contemporaries, many of whom he parodies at least once in his works. He greatly admired Henry James, referring to him often in his works and parodying him masterfully several times, for example, in “Something to Say.” Although Thurber is best known as a humorist (often with the implication that he need not be taken seriously as an artist), his literary reputation has grown steadily. His short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” became an instant classic after it appeared in 1939 and was subsequently reprinted in Reader’s Digest. After his death in 1961, several major studies and a volume in the Twentieth Century Views series have appeared, all arguing that Thurber should rank with the best American artists in several fields, including the short story. In 1980, “The Greatest Man in the World” was chosen for dramatization in the American Short Story series of the Public Broadcasting Service. Thurber received numerous awards for his work, including honorary degrees from Kenyon College (1950), Williams College (1957), and Yale University (1953), as well as the Antoinette Perry Award for the revue, A Thurber Carnival (1960). His drawings were included in art shows worldwide. He was the first American after Mark Twain to be invited to Punch’s Wednesday Luncheon (1958). Biography • On December 8, 1894, James Grover Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, where he spent his childhood except for a two-year stay in Washington, D.C. In Columbus, he absorbed the midwestern regional values that remained important to him all of his life: a liberal idealism, a conservative respect for the family, a belief in the agrarian virtues of industry and independence, and a healthy skepticism about

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the human potential for perfecting anything. He lost his left eye in a childhood accident that eventually led to almost complete blindness forty years later. He attended but did not graduate from Ohio State University, where he met Elliott Nugent, who was crucial in helping and encouraging Thurber to write. Thurber began his writing career as a journalist, earning his living primarily as a reporter in Ohio and France before he joined The New Yorker in 1927. There his friendship with E. B. White provided opportunities for him to perfect and publish the stories he had been working on since college. Within five years of beginning at The New Yorker, he became one of the best-known humorists in Library of Congress America. He married Althea Adams on May 20, 1922, and they had one daughter before their divorce in 1935. He married Helen Wismer on June 25, 1935. Despite impaired vision that seriously interfered with his work, beginning in the early 1940’s, Thurber nevertheless continued writing, though he gave up drawing in 1951. He published more than twenty volumes in his lifetime and left many works uncollected at his death. He died of pneumonia on November 2, 1961, a month after suffering a stroke. Analysis • James Thurber is best known as the author of humorous sketches, stories, and reminiscences dealing with urban bourgeois American life. To discuss Thurber as an artist in the short-story form is difficult, however, because of the variety of things he did that might legitimately be labeled short stories. His essays frequently employ stories and are “fictional” in recognizable ways. His “memoirs” in My Life and Hard Times are clearly fictionalized. Many of his first-person autobiographical sketches are known to be “fact” rather than fiction only through careful biographical research. As a result, most of his writings can be treated as short fiction. Thurber seemed to prefer to work on the borderlines between conventional forms. There is disagreement among critics as to the drift of the attitudes and themes reflected in James Thurber’s work. The poles are well represented by Richard C. Tobias on the one hand and the team of Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill on the other. Tobias argues that Thurber comically celebrates the life of the mind: “Thurber’s victory is a freedom within law that delights and surprises.” Blair and Hill, in America’s Humor (1978), see Thurber as a sort of black humorist laughing at his own destruction, “a humorist bedeviled by neuroses, cowed before the insignificant things in his world, and indifferent to the cosmic ones. He loses and loses and loses his combats with machines, women, and animals until defeat becomes permanent.” Although Tobias sees women as vital forces in Thurber’s work, Hill and Blair see Thurber as essentially a

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misogynist bewailing the end of the ideal of male freedom best portrayed in 1950’s Western film and pathetically reflected in the fantasies of Walter Mitty. In fact, it seems that critics’ opinions regarding Thurber’s attitudes about most subjects vary from one text to the next, but certain themes seem to remain consistent. His weak male characters do hate strong women, but the men are often weak because they accept the world in which their secret fantasies are necessary and, therefore, leave their women no choice but to try to hold things together. When a woman’s strength becomes arrogance as in “The Catbird Seat” and “The Unicorn in the Garden,” the man often defeats her with the active power of his imagination. Characterizing Thurber as a Romantic, Robert Morsberger lists some themes he sees pervading Thurber’s writing: a perception of the oppression of technocracy and of the arrogance of popular scientism especially in their hostility to imagination; an antirational but not anti-intellectual approach to modern life; a belief in the power of the imagination to preserve human value in the face of contemporary forms of alienation; and a frequent use of fear and fantasy to overcome the dullness of his characters’ (and readers’) lives. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” • “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is Thurber’s best-known work of short fiction. Its protagonist, the milquetoast Walter Mitty, lives in a reverie consisting of situations in which he is a hero: commander of a navy hydroplane, surgeon, trial witness, bomber pilot, and condemned martyr. The dream is clearly an escape from the external life which humiliatingly interrupts it: his wife’s mothering, the arrogant competence of a parking attendant and policeman, the humiliating errands of removing tire chains, buying overshoes, and asking for puppy biscuits. In his dreams, he is Lord Jim, the misunderstood hero, “inscrutable to the last”; in his daily life he is a middle-aged husband enmeshed in a web of the humdrum. Tobias sees Mitty as ultimately triumphant over dreary reality. Blair and Hill see Mitty as gradually losing grip of the real world and slipping into psychosis. Whether liberated or defeated by his imagination, Mitty is clearly incompetent and needs the mothering his wife gives him. Often described as an immoral and malicious woman, she is actually just the wife he needs and deserves; she seems to exist as a replacement ego to keep him from catching his death of cold as he somnambulates. The story’s artfulness is readily apparent in the precise choice and arrangement of details such as sounds, objects, and images that connect fantasy and reality. The technical devices are virtually the same as those used by William Faulkner and Joyce to indicate shifts in levels of awareness in their “free-association internal monologues.” Mitty has become a representative figure in modern culture like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, although perhaps more widely known. Although many of Thurber’s stories are similar to this one in theme and form, they are astonishingly diverse in subject, situation, and range of technique. “The Black Magic of Barney Haller” • Another large group of Thurber stories might be characterized as fictionalized autobiography. One of the best of these sketches is “The Black Magic of Barney Haller” in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. In this story, “Thurber” exorcises his hired man, a Teuton whom lightning and thunder always follow and who mutters imprecations such as “Bime by I go hunt grotches in de voods,” and “We go to the garrick now and become warbs.” The narrator becomes convinced that despite his stable and solid appearance, Barney is a necromancer who will transform reality with his incantations. At any moment, Barney

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will reveal his true devilish form and change “Thurber” into a warb or conjure up a grotch. It does not comfort him to learn the probable prosaic meanings of Haller’s spells, even to see the crotches under the heavy peach tree branches. At the end of the story, he feels regret that the only man he knows who could remove the wasps from his garret has departed. The humor of these incidents is clear, and a humorous meaning emerges from them. The narrator would rather hide in Swann’s Way, reading of a man who makes himself in his book, but he feels threatened by the external supernatural power of another’s language to re-create the world. He first attempts exorcism with Robert Frost, well-known for having successfully disposed of a hired man. He quotes “The Pasture” in an attempt to make the obscure clear, but succeeds only in throwing a fear that mirrors his own into Barney. This gives “Thurber” his clue; in the next attempt he borrows from Lewis Carroll and the American braggart tradition, asserting his own superior power as a magician of words, “Did you happen to know that the mome rath never lived that could outgrabe me?” The man with the superior control of language, the man of superior imagination, really is in control; he can become a playing card at will to frighten off black magicians. This story is typical of Thurber in its revelation of the fantastic in the commonplace, its flights of language play, and its concern for the relations among reality, self, imagination, and language. My Life and Hard Times is the best-known collection of fictional/autobiographical sketches. “The Moth and the Star” • Also an author of fables, Thurber published two collections of fables. “The Moth and the Star” is a typical and often anthologized example. A moth spends a long life trying to reach a star, defying his disappointed parents’ wish that he aspire normally to get himself scorched on a street lamp. Having outlived his family, he gains in old age “a deep and lasting pleasure” from the illusion that he has actually reached the distant star: “Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.” The moth and the star suggest images in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), one of Thurber’s favorite books, but in partial contrast to that book, this story echoes the import of the great artist of the “Conclusion” of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). The aspiring idealist who rejects the suicidal life of material accumulation and devotes himself to some perfect work ultimately conquers time and enriches life whether or not he produces any valuable object. Because the moth, like the artist of Kouroo, succeeds and is happy, this story seems more optimistic than The Great Gatsby. Many of the fables are more cynical or more whimsical, but all are rich in meaning and pleasure like “The Moth and the Star.” Critics and scholars have noted ways in which Thurber’s career and writings parallel Mark Twain’s. For example, both, as they grew older, grew more interested in fables and fairy tales. In the latter, Thurber was perhaps the more successful, publishing four fantasy stories for adults in the last twenty years of his life. Completed while blindness was descending upon him, these stories are characterized by heightened poetic language, highly original variations on the fairy formulae, sparkling humor, and a common theme: in the words of Prince Jorn, hero of The White Deer, “Love’s miracle enough.” Love is the key that frees imagination by giving it strength to do, and strength of imagination makes the wasteland fertile. The fairy tales may be seen as intentional responses to Eliot’s vision of the wasteland in his famous poem of 1922, perhaps from a point of view similar to that of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry

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(1840). Although “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and Further Fables for Our Time may be seen as affirming the view of modern life as a wasteland, the fairy tales suggest that the ash heap of modern culture is escapable. It seems especially significant that the mode of escape is represented in tales of magic in remote settings. The White Deer • The White Deer opens in the third period in King Clode’s memory of waiting for the depleted game of his hunting grounds to replenish. The story develops in triads, the central one being the three perilous tasks set for the three sons of King Clode to determine which shall claim the hand of the fair princess who materializes when the king and his sons corner the fleet white deer in the enchanted forest. The sons complete their tasks simultaneously, but, in the meantime, King Clode determines that the nameless Princess is not a disenchanted woman but an enchanted deer. When the returned sons are told of this, Thag and Gallow refuse her. If denied love three times, she would be a deer forever, but Jorn accepts her: “What you have been, you are not, and what you are, you will forever be. I place this trophy in the hands of love. . . . You hold my heart.” This acceptance transforms her into a new and lovelier princess, Rosanore of the Northland, and the April fragrance of lilacs fills the air suggesting direct opposition to the opening of Eliot’s The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land.” As King Clode later sees the full wisdom and beauty of Rosanore, he repeats, “I blow my horn in waste land.” Echoes of Eliot show up repeatedly in the fairy tales, but the greater emphasis falls on the powers of love and imagination, which in this fairy world almost inevitably blossom in beauty and happiness. The cast of secondary characters and the perilous labors provide opportunities to characterize wittily the world in need of magic. There are an incompetent palace wizard as opposed to the true wizards of the forest, an astronomer-turned-clockmaker who envisions encroaching darkness (“It’s darker than you think”), and a royal recorder who descends into mad legalese when the Princess’s spell proves to be without precedent. Gallow’s labor is especially interesting because he must make his way through a vanity fair bureaucracy in order to conquer a sham dragon, a task that tests his purse and persistence more than his love. This task allows a satire of the commercial values of modern culture. Each of the fairy tales contains similar delights as well as bizarre and beautiful flights of language: the Sphinz asks Jorn, “What is whirly?/ What is curly?/Tell me, what is pearly early?” and in a trice, Jorn replies, “Gigs are whirly,/ Cues are curly/ and the dew is pearly early.” Terry Heller Other major works plays: The Male Animal, pr., pb. 1940 (with Elliott Nugent); Many Moons, pb. 1943; A Thurber Carnival, pr. 1960 (revue). nonfiction: The Thurber Album, 1952; The Years with Ross, 1959; Selected Letters of James Thurber, 1982; The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber, 2003 (Harrison Kinney and Rosemary A. Thurber, editors). Bibliography Grauer, Neil A. Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Biography that examines the context of Thurber’s work. Provides an interesting discussion of the background to the writing of “The Secret

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Life of Walter Mitty” and its reception when first published in The New Yorker. Holmes, Charles S., ed. Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. This useful collection includes twenty-five critical and biographical essays, as well as a chronology and a brief annotated bibliography. Kaufman, Anthony. “‘Things Close In’: Dissolution and Misanthropy in ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’” Studies in American Fiction 22 (Spring, 1994): 93-104. Discusses dissolution and misanthropy in the story; argues that Mitty’s withdrawal is symptomatic not of mild-mannered exasperation with a trivial world but of anger; concludes that Mitty is the misanthrope demystified and made middle-class—the suburban man who, unable to imagine or afford the drama of a retreat into the wilderness, retreats inward. Kenney, Catherine McGehee. Thurber’s Anatomy of Confusion. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984. Survey of Thurber’s creative world, including discussions of his most characteristic works. Discusses Fables for Our Time and such stories as “The Greatest Man in the World” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Argues that the latter examines the impotent world of modern urban America, embodying all of the elements of Thurber’s fictional world. Kinney, Harrison. James Thurber: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Biography that focuses largely on Thurber’s relationship to the development of The New Yorker magazine. Discusses how Thurber made use of overheard conversation, wordplay, and literary allusions in his stories. Discusses Thurber’s obsession with the war between the sexes in his prose and cartoons. Long, Robert Emmet. James Thurber. New York: Continuum, 1988. This biographical and critical study divides Thurber’s works into drawings, fiction, autobiography, fables, fairy tales, and occasional pieces, giving each a chapter. Complemented by a bibliography. Morsberger, Robert E. James Thurber. New York: Twayne, 1964. Morsberger sketches Thurber’s life and then analyzes his works, looking at his contributions to various art forms and his characteristic themes. Contains a chronology of Thurber’s life and a brief annotated bibliography. Prinsky, Norman. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Reisman, Rosemary M. Canfield. “The Catbird Seat.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “The Catbird Seat” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Thurber, James. My Life and Hard Times. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. First published in 1933, this amusing, semifictional collection of autobiographical essays focuses on Thurber’s early life and his eccentric relatives. Columnist Russell Baker called it “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Tobias, Richard Clark. The Art of James Thurber. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970. Tobias studies Thurber’s themes and worldview, with special attention to his methods and techniques in creating humor.

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Born: Yasnaya Polyana, Russia; September 9, 1828 Died: Astapovo, Russia; November 20, 1910 Principal short fiction • Sevastopolskiye rasskazy, 1855-1856 (Sebastopol, 1887); The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, and Other Tales, 1940; Notes of a Madman, and Other Stories, 1943; Tolstoy Tales, 1947; Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, 1991; Divine and Human, and Other Stories, 2000. Other literary forms • Leo Tolstoy is most famous as the author of two superb novels, Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886) and Anna Karenina (1875-1878; English translation, 1886). He wrote one other full-length novel, Voskreseniye (1899; Resurrection, 1899), and a number of novellas, such as Destvo (1852; Childhood, 1862), Otrochestvo (1854; Boyhood, 1886), Yunost’ (1857; Youth, 1886), Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks, 1872), and Khadzi-Murat (1911; Hadji Murad, 1911). His fiction tends to overshadow his achievement as a dramatist; his plays include Vlast tmy (1887; The Power of Darkness, 1888) and Plody prosveshcheniya (1889; The Fruits of Enlightenment, 1891). Achievements • Leo Tolstoy is one of the undisputed titans of fiction, recognized by friend and foe alike as a great artist and man. He is Homeric in the epic sweep of War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in his stress on the primacy of human beings’ senses and physical acts; in the clarity, freshness, and gusto with which he presents his world; in his celebration of nature’s processes, from brute matter to the stars; in his union of an omniscient perspective with a detached vision. Unlike Homer, however, he often shows war as wanton carnage resulting from the vainglory and stupidity of a nation’s leaders. Although most critical evaluations of Tolstoy’s writings are highly laudatory, he has been reproached by some interpreters for his disparagement of science, technology, and formal education, his hostility to aesthetics and the life of the mind, and most of all for his insistence, in his later works, on dictating programs of moral and religious belief to his readers. As a writer, his greatest achievement is to convey an insight into the living moment that renders with unequaled verisimilitude the course of human passions and the pattern of ordinary actions, enabling him to present a comprehensive, coherent, and usually convincing sense of life. His influence, while not as pervasive as that of his rival Fyodor Dostoevski, is evident in the works of Maxim Gorky, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Ignazio Silone, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Sholokhov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Boris Pasternak when he composed his novel, Doktor Zhivago (1957; Doctor Zhivago, 1958). Biography • Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, to a retired army officer, Count Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy, and a wealthy princess, Maria Nikolaevna Bolkonskaya, who was descended from Russia’s first ruling dynasty. His birthplace was a magnificent estate 130 miles south of Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana (serene meadow). Throughout his life, particularly from the late 1850’s, when he settled there, this beautiful manorial land, featuring an avenue of lime trees and several lakes, was a

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romance he kept reinventing, lodged at the center of his self. He disliked urban civilization and industrialization, instead preferring with increasing fidelity the rural simplicities and patriarchal order that had governed the lives of his ancestors and that gave him commanding knowledge of the ways of the landowners and peasants who dominate his writings. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine. He was lovingly brought up by an aunt, Tatyana, who became the model for Sonya in War and Peace, just as his parents sat for the portraits of Nicholas Rostov and Princess Maria in that novel. Aunt Tatyana both built the boy’s confidence and indulged all his wishes, inclining him to extremes beginning in childhood. He largely wasted several years at the University of Kazan in drinking, gambling, and wenching, then joined an artillery unit in the Caucasus in 1851. That same year, he began working on his first short novel, Childhood, to be followed by Boyhood and Youth. These works are thinly disguised autobiographical novellas, which unfold a highly complicated moral consciousness. As a writer, Tolstoy is an inspired solipsist, identifying all other humans in examining his flesh and spirit. His art is essentially confessional, representing the strenuous attempt of a complex and exacting man to reconcile himself with himself. His diary, which he began in 1845, reveals what was to be an inveterate thirst for rational and moral justification of his life. It includes a list of puritanical Rules of Life, which he would update during the tormented periods of guilt that followed his lapses. The biographer Henri Troyat called him “a billy-goat pining for purity.” The demands of his senses, mind, and spirit were to contest one another in his character as long as he lived. Tolstoy served bravely in the Crimean War until 1856, also writing his Sebastopol stories as well as a number of other military tales. When he returned to European Russia, he found himself lionized as his country’s most promising young author. He passed the years 1856-1861 shuttling between St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana, and foreign countries. His two trips abroad disgusted him with what he considered the selfishness and materialism of European bourgeois civilization. In 1859, he founded a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana; in 1862, he launched a pedagogical periodical there; both followed a Rousseauistic model that glorified children’s instincts, ignored their discipline, and insisted that intellectuals should learn from the common people, instead of vice versa. In 1862, the thirty-four-year-old Tolstoy married the eighteen-year-old Sonya Andreyevna Behrs. Family life became his religion, and the union was happy for its first fifteen years, producing thirteen children. He dramatized the stability of marriage and family life in War and Peace (written 1863-1869), which his wife was to copy out seven times. Sonya efficiently managed Yasnaya Polyana, often served as Tolstoy’s secretary, and nursed him through illnesses. She never recovered from the shock she received, however, a week before their wedding, when he insisted she read every entry of his diary, which recorded not only his moral struggles but also seventeen years of libidinous conduct. Unhappy times followed the composition of War and Peace: the deaths of Aunt Tatyana, a favorite son, and several other relatives; quarrels with Sonya; illness; and depression. Anna Karenina (written 1873-1877) is a more somber and moralizing book, with the certainty of death hovering over it, and with sexual passion both given its due and dramatized as destructive to happiness. The male protagonist Levin’s search for faith is a pale outline of Tolstoy’s own spiritual journey, which next led

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him to write, between 1879 and 1882, an account of his emotional and ethical pilgrimage entitled Ispoved (1884; A Confession, 1885). Shortly after finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy suffered a shattering midlife crisis that brought him close to suicide. Even though he had much to value—good health, a loving wife, family, fame, wealth, genius—life nevertheless seemed to him a cruel lie, purposeless, fraudulent, empty. For answers, he turned to philosophers, to educated people, and finally to the uneducated but religious peasants whose faith made their lives possible, and he decided to become a religious believer, although rejecting most ecclesiastical dogma. A Confession is the best introduction to the spiritual struggle that Library of Congress Tolstoy was to wage for his remaining thirty years, which he spent in a glaringly public retirement. Trying to live up to his principles of purity and simplicity, he stripped his personal demands to the barest necessities, dressed and often worked as a peasant, published doctrines of moral improvement in both tracts and tales, signed over to his wife the right to manage his copyrights as well as his property, and renounced (not always successfully) almost all institutions, his title, concert- and theater-going, meat, alcohol, tobacco, hunting, and even sex. He became the high priest of a cult of Christian anarchy, professing the moral teachings of the Gospel and Sermon on the Mount while rejecting the divinity of Christ and the authority of the Church, which excommunicated him for blasphemy in 1901. Some typical titles of Tolstoy’s didactic last years are V chom moya vera (1884; What I Believe, 1885), “Gde lyubov’, tam i Bog” (“Where Love Is, God Is”) and “Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno?” (“How Much Land Does a Man Need?”). His best-known narrative was the tendentious three-part novel Resurrection, which is as long as, but far inferior to, Anna Karenina. Its protagonist, Nekhlyudov, experiences remorse after having seduced a peasant woman and expiates his transgression by adopting a moral life. Of greatest interest to literary critics is the book-length essay, Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What Is Art?, 1898), in which Tolstoy rejects all art based on other than gospel ethics and concludes that only the Old Testament’s story of Joseph and primitive popular art will satisfy his standards. Even in his doctrinaire phase, however, Tolstoy managed to produce great stories and novellas, particularly The Death of Ivan Ilyich, “Khozyain i rabotnik” (“Master and Man”), The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote a powerful naturalistic tragedy, The Power of Darkness, which featured adultery and infanticide in a somber peasant setting. By contrast, The Fruits of Enlightenment is a satiric, farcical comedy revolving around the foibles of the gentry and the land hunger of the peasantry.

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Tolstoy’s last years were often mired in squabbles with his wife and some of his children, intrigues concerning his legacy, and bitter enmity between Sonya Tolstoy and his chief disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, who became Tolstoy’s close confidant. By 1909, the marriage had become extremely stressful, with Countess Tolstoy repeatedly threatening suicide. On November 9, 1910, Leo Tolstoy, driven to distraction, fled his wife and family; on November 13, he was taken ill with what became pneumonia, at the rail junction of nearby Astapovo, and died in the stationmaster’s bed there on November 20. His death was mourned as a loss in every Russian family. Analysis • Leo Tolstoy’s ego embraces the world, so that he is always at the center of his fictive creation, filling his books with his struggles, personae, problems, questions, and quests for answers, and above all with his notion of life as an ethical search as strenuous as the pursuit of the Holy Grail. He does not try to puzzle or dazzle; his work is not a clever riddle to be solved or a game to be played but a rich realm to be explored. He disdains the kind of exterior purism practiced by Gustave Flaubert and Henry James among others, which concentrates on the inner lives of individuals— although he is superbly skilled at psychological perception. His aim, rather, is to discover, as far as he can, the essential truth of life’s meaning, the revelation to be gained at the core of the vast mesh of human relations. What energizes his work is his conviction that this truth is good, and that, once discovered, it will resolve the discords and conflicts that plague humanity. In Tolstoy’s art, the natural, simple, and true is always pitted against the artificial, elaborate, and false, the particular against the general, knowledge gained from observation against assertions of borrowed faiths. His is the gift of direct vision, of fundamental questions and of magical simplicity—perhaps too simple, as a distinguished historian of ideas has indicated. Isaiah Berlin, in a famous essay titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” sees Tolstoy as torn between his pluralism (the fox, perceiving reality as varied, complex, and multiple) and monism (the hedgehog, reducing life’s fullness to one single truth, the infinity of sensory data to the finite limits of a single mind). Tolstoy, Berlin concludes, was a pluralist in his practice but a monist in his theory, who found himself unable to reconcile the foxiness of his multifarious awareness with his hedgehoglike need to discover one all-embracing answer to its myriad problems. “The Raid” • Tolstoy’s first stories are set in the Caucasus, where he spent the years 1851 to 1854, with many of the officers and soldiers who he met serving as thinly disguised models. In “Nabeg: Razskaz volontera” (“The Raid: A Volunteer’s Story”), he poses several problems: What is the nature of courage? By what tests does one determine bravery or cowardice? What feelings cause a man to kill his fellow? The firstperson narrator discusses these questions with a Captain Khlopov (derived from a Captain Khilkovsky in Tolstoy’s diary) and illustrates different types of courage among the military characters. Tolstoy deflates warfare, emphasizing ordinary details and casual, matter-of-fact fortitude rather than dashingly proud heroism. His descriptions of nature are simple, concrete, and expert. The story’s most powerful scene has a dying young ensign pass from carefree bravado to dignified resignation as he encounters his end. Sebastopol Sketches • The element of eyewitness reportage is carried over from the Caucasian tales to the three Sebastopol sketches, which are fiction passing as war dis-

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patches. Tolstoy took part in the Crimean War (1854-1856) as a sublieutenant, with Russia fighting a complex series of actions against a multiple enemy composed of not only Turkish but also some British, French, and Sardinian troops. Although aggressively patriotic, he was appalled by the disorganization of his country’s military forces, with the average Russian peasant soldier poorly armed, trained, and led, while many company commanders nearly starved their men by pocketing much of the money allocated for their food. “Sevastopol v dekabre” (“Sebastopol in December”) has no characters and no particular topography. The first-person narrator constructs a guidebook homily out of lived experience, familiarly addressing readers, inviting them to listen to his frontline experiences as he wanders from Sebastopol’s bay and dockside to a military hospital filled with shrieking, often multilated soldiers. Says the speaker, . . . you will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression—as blood, suffering and death. Tolstoy concludes this sketch with a stirring salute to the epic heroism of Sebastopol’s residents and Russian defenders. Yet a somber awareness of death’s imminence, as the surgeon’s sharp knife slices into his patients’ flesh, pervades the sketch. In “Sevastopol v mae” (“Sebastopol in May”), Tolstoy sharply denounces the vainglory of militarism, stressing the futility of the fighting and the madness of celebrating war as a glorious adventure. The passage describing the death by shellfire of an officer is a superb tour de force, with the author using interior monologue to have the lieutenant crowd his many hopes, fears, memories, and fantasies into a few seconds. The speaker comes to consider war as senseless, horrifying, but also—given human nature—almost inevitable. He concludes that the only hero he can find is the truth. This is perhaps the finest of Tolstoy’s military tales, anticipating the battle and death scenes of War and Peace. In the third narrative, “Sebastopol in August,” Tolstoy uses well-developed characters to unify an episodic plot. He focuses on two brothers whose personalities contrast but who are both killed in action. He also strikes a note of shame and anger at Russia’s abandonment of the city and the consequent waste of many thousands of lives. He celebrates, however, the quiet heroism of countless common soldiers who risked and often met death with calm nobility. “Two Hussars” • Before Tolstoy began War and Peace in 1863, he wrote a number of long stories or novellas, which he called povesti, defined as “A literary narrative of lesser size than a novel.” Their compass is usually too small to accommodate the didacticism that his longer works absorb painlessly. One successful story that avoids moralizing is “Dva gusara” (“Two Hussars”). Its first half is devoted to the officerfather, the second to his son. Twenty years apart, they enact the same sequence of card playing, drinking, and philandering, in the same small town, meeting the same people. Their characters, however, differ drastically. The father is gallant, generous, honorable, charming. The son is mean, cold, calculating, cowardly. The father’s temperament is natural and open. The son’s is contrived and devious, corrupted by decadent society. As always with Tolstoy, he gives his allegiance to the authentic and intuitive, while sardonically scorning the artificial and scheming.

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Family Happiness • In Family Happiness, Tolstoy treats a problem to which he was to return throughout his career: the place of women, both at home and in society. He had courted a much younger and very pretty girl, Valerya Arseneva, but had become irritated by her fondness for high society and had broken off the relationship. He transforms the experience into a narrative by the young woman, Masha, in the fashion of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), which he had read and admired. Now married and a mother, Masha recalls, in the story’s first half, her courtship by a man who knew her dead father, considered himself her guardian as she grew up, and was thirty-five to her seventeen when they married. Tolstoy magnificently captures the rapturous chemistry of first love as the girl awakens to womanhood. By the story’s second half, however, he undermines her dreams of romantic happiness as she becomes addicted to the whirl of urban high society, driving her husband into rural retreat and seclusion. Toward the end, at home in the country after disillusionments in the city, she and he agree to a different sort of marriage than they envisioned at its start, basing it not on passion but on companionship and parenthood. Tolstoy has here sounded some of his most pervasive notes: Sophistication is evil, simplicity is good; the city is decadent, the country is healthy; and romance is dangerous, often a “charming nonsense,” while marriage, though a necessary institution, should never be sentimentalized. “Strider” • The story now called “Kholstomer” (“Strider”) was originally translated into English as “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse,” because Tolstoy modeled his equine, first-person narrator on a horse by that name celebrated for his enormous stride and speed. The author humanizes his outcast animal, which is consistently stigmatized as a piebald and a gelding, in a keenly compassionate manner, with Strider’s sorrowful life made a parable of protest against unjust punishment of those who are somehow different. “He was old, they were young. He was lean, they were sleek; he was miserable, they were gay; and so he was quite alien to them, an outsider, an utterly different creature whom it was impossible for them to pity.” Strider’s victimization by greedy, selfish owners enables Tolstoy to lash the evils of private property, using an equine perspective to expose its immorality. The second phase of Tolstoy’s production of short fiction follows his two great novels and the tremendous spiritual crisis chronicled in A Confession. It was an extremely profound change for an author. The sublime artist comes to repudiate almost all art; the nobleman now lives like a peasant; the wealthy, titled country gentleman seeks to abandon his property, preaching humility and asceticism; the marvelous novelist and story writer prefers the roles of educational reformer, religious leader, social sage, cultural prophet. Yet Tolstoy’s artistic instincts refuse to atrophy, and he manages to create different yet also masterful works, less happy and conventional, uncompromising, sometimes perverse, always powerful, preoccupied with purity, corruption, sin, sex, and death. His late stories express his Rousseauistic hostility to such institutions as the state, which forces citizens to pay taxes and serve in the military; the church, which coerces its communicants by fear and superstition; private property, whereby one person owns another; and modern art, which is elitist. The creative gold nevertheless continues to flow from Tolstoy’s pen, despite his moralistic resistance to aesthetics, in such novellas as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and the story “Master and Man.”

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich • The Death of Ivan Ilyich, perhaps his finest story, was Tolstoy’s first published work after his conversion. It is more schematic and deliberate than the earlier tales, more selective and condensed in the choice of descriptive and analytic detail. It is a parable of a life badly lived, with Tolstoy here allying his highest art with an exigent passion for establishing the most profound and encompassing truths. Ivan Ilyich is a cautious, correct, typical representative of his social class. He has achieved success in his profession of judge, in love, in marriage, in his family, and in his friendships, or so appearances indicate. Yet when he reviews his past, confronted with the inescapability of a cancer-ridden death, he slowly arrives at the realization that he has led a life of selfishness, shallowness, smugness, and hypocrisy. Significantly, his surname, Golovin, is derived from the Russian word for “head.” He has excluded any deep feelings, as he has lived according to principles of pleasantness and propriety, conforming to the values of his upper-middle-class social sphere in his striving for status, materialism, bureaucratic impersonality and power, decorous appearance, and pleasure. In part 1, which begins with the announcement of Ivan Ilyich’s death, Tolstoy’s tone is caustically satiric. Ivan’s wife/widow, Praskovya Fedorovna, defines the nature of his loveless home life, grieving formally for her loss and accepting colleagues’ condolences while really concerned with the cost of the grave site and the possibility of increasing her widow’s pension. Ivan Ilyich, however, deserves no better. He is shown as a prisoner of his cherished possessions who wanted Praskovya primarily for her property, secondarily for her correct social position and good looks. The density of things dominates Ivan Ilyich’s feelings and conduct, pain and pleasure, happiness and misery. His highest moment comes with the furnishing of a new house; and his fall comes from reaching to hang a drape when he is on a ladder. Symbolically, his fall is one from pride and vanity. The physicians enter to examine Ivan Ilyich’s bruised side. They pursue their profession much as he does, from behind well-mannered, ritualistic masks. Ivan Ilyich soon discovers that not only his doctors but also his wife, daughter, colleagues, and friends all refuse him the empathy and compassion that he increasingly needs; they act on the same principle of self-interested pleasure that he has followed. As his physical suffering grows, he experiences the emotional stages that modern psychology accepts as characteristic of responses to lingering terminal illness: denial, loneliness, anger, despondency, and, finally, acceptance. He begins to drop his protective disguises and to realize that his existence has consisted of evasions of self-knowledge, of love, of awareness of the deepest needs of others. His fall into the abyss of death thus brings him to spiritual birth. At the nadir of Ivan Ilyich’s suffering, partial grace comes to him through the care of his servant, Gerasim. He is, like Platon Karataev in War and Peace, one of those simple, spontaneous, kindly souls whom Tolstoy venerates. In contrast to the sterile pretensions of Ivan Ilyich’s social circle, Gerasim, modest and strong, personifies the Tolstoyan principle of living for others. He is in every sense a “breath of fresh air,” showing his master unstinting compassion as he exemplifies the health of youth and naturally loving behavior. Inspired by Gerasim’s devotion, Ivan Ilyich becomes capable of extending compassion to his wife and son. When his condition takes a final, fatal turn, as he feels himself slowly sucked into the bottom of death’s sack, he comes to the realization that his life has been trivial, empty, worthless. Two hours before his death, he stops

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trying to justify it and instead takes pity on his wife, son, and himself. He dies loving rather than hating, forgiving rather than whining, at last surrendering his egoism. Both the story and Ivan Ilyich’s life thus end on a note of serenity and joyous illumination. Tolstoy shows that profound consciousness of death can bring one to the communion of true brotherhood. Through his relentless pain, Ivan Ilyich discovers the truth about himself, akin to Prince Andrey in War and Peace. The Kreutzer Sonata • The Kreutzer Sonata, like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is a condensed masterpiece of harrowing intensity, a poem of the poignant pains of the flesh. Tolstoy presents the nature of marriage more directly and comprehensively than any other writer. In Family Happiness, he tries to define its benefits and banes; in War and Peace, he celebrates it; in Anna Karenina, he upholds yet also questions it; in The Kreutzer Sonata, he denounces it vehemently. Though he previously advocated marriage as the morally and socially legitimate release for sexual needs, by the late 1880’s, his new views on morality, as well as his own increasingly burdensome marriage, caused him to equate sexuality with hostility and sinfulness and to regard sexual passion as degrading, undermining human beings’ spiritual self. The novella’s protagonist, Pozdnyshev, confesses on a train journey that he murdered his wife on suspicion—groundless, as circumstances indicate—of her adultery with an amateur violinist with whom she, a pianist, enjoyed playing duets—such as Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” In the spring of 1888, a performance of this work did take place in Tolstoy’s Moscow residence. He proposed to the great realistic painter also present, Ilya Repin, that the artist should paint a canvas, while he would write a story, on the theme of marital jealousy. Although Tolstoy fulfilled the bargain, Repin did not. The tale was submitted to the state censor in 1888; Czar Alexander III, who read a copy, issued an imperial banning order. Sonya Tolstoy thereupon removed some of the story’s sexual explicitness, and the czar permitted its publication, in bowdlerized form, in 1891. Not until the 1933 Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy’s works was the text issued in its original form. Yet even in its toned-down version, it aroused a storm of controversy among readers. Pozdnyshev relates his conduct to a lightly sketched narrator. His dramatic monologue is powerful and polemical, although his arguments are often exaggerated and inconsistent. The point of his narrative is that sex is sinful, that those who submit to its drives often become vicious and, in Pozdnyshev’s case, murderous. Even in marriage, the protagonist insists, sex is ugly, repulsive, and destructive. Despite the deranged character of Pozdnyshev and the manifest injustice of many of his views, the story is disturbing, forceful, and gripping, as he shows how his sexual lust degraded his character and ruined his marriage. Some critics have interpreted the structure of the tale as equivalent to the sonata form, falling into three movements with a slow introduction and the final chapter as a coda. Tolstoy was himself an accomplished pianist. In a long, uncompromising afterword to the story, Tolstoy addresses the controversy it caused and clearly links Pozdnyshev’s views—but not his pathological personality—to his. He argues that carnal love lowers human beings to animalistic conduct, advocates chastity within as well as outside marriage, denounces society for featuring erotic allure, and dismisses marriage itself as a trap for humanity’s finest energies. Men and women should replace conjugal relations “with the pure relations that exist between a brother and a sister.” Only thus would they behave as true Christians. Tolstoy thus dismisses sex as relevant—let alone fundamental—to human behavior.

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Rather, he regards it as a diabolic temptation sent to divert human beings’ purpose from seeking the kingdom of God on earth. “Master and Man” • In his moralistic monograph, What Is Art?, Tolstoy asks for writing that is easily understandable, whose subject matter is religious, situations universal, style simple, and technique accessible. None of his successful works embodies these criteria more faithfully than “Master and Man,” which is essentially a morality play based on the New Testament. The master is Vasíli Andréevich Brekhunov: selfish, overbearing, coarse, rich, rapacious, the biblical gatherer of wealth who neglects his soul. The servant is Nikíta, a reformed drunkard, who is humane, sensitive, skilled in his work, strong, meek, kindly, rich in spirit though poor in pocket. The contrast between them is stark, with Tolstoy stressing the unambiguous and heavily symbolic nature of the novella: two opposed sorts of men, two opposed sets of moral values, and the conversion of the master to the ethics of his man. The man of flesh and the man of spirit join in the journey of life and the confrontation with death. Brekhunov, a merchant proud of his ability to drive a hard bargain, sets off with Nikíta on a business trip to make a down payment on a grove. He can consider nothing but his possessions and how to increase them; his relationships to others are governed by materialistic calculations. On their trip, the pair find themselves immersed in a raging snowstorm, which obliterates all landmarks and turns the landscape into a perilous Wood of Error, a moral Wasteland, through which they must make life’s passage. Tolstoy masterfully uses the storm for its emblematic qualities. It “buries” the travelers in snowdrifts, is cold like death, turns the substantial into the spectral and vice versa. They lose their way as Brekhunov insists on movements to the left, since men find their reward only on the right hand of God. As Brekhunov urges his horse away from the sled, after having (temporarily) deserted Nikíta, he can only come around in a circle to the same spot, marked by wormwood stalks—wormwood being identified with sin and punishment in Revelation. He is ritualistically confronted with himself in the person of a horse thief, for Brekhunov has been cheating Nikíta of his wages and has stolen a large sum of money from his church to buy the grove. Nikíta accepts his master’s wrong turns without anger or reproof, resigns himself to the snowstorm, and patiently prepares to wait it out when they are forced to settle down for the night in their sled. Around midnight, ill-clad and half-frozen, meekly awaiting likely death before morning, Nikíta asks his master to give the wages owed him to his family and to “Forgive me for Christ’s sake!” Finally, moved to pity by Nikíta’s words, Brekhunov opens his heavy fur coat and lies down on top of his servant, covering Nikíta with both his coat and body as he sobs. Just before dawn Brekhunov has a visionary dream, in which “it seemed to him that he was Nikíta and Nikíta was he, and that his life was not in himself but in Nikíta.” He wonders why he used to trouble himself so greatly to accumulate money and possessions. At noon the next day, peasants drag both men out of the snow. Brekhunov is frozen to death; Nikíta, though chilled, is alive. Some critics have faulted the story’s ending because Tolstoy has inadequately prepared the reader for Brekhunov’s sudden adoption of Christian humility, brotherhood, and self-sacrifice, since he has previously shown not the slightest inclination toward moral regeneration. Be that as it may, most of the tale is enormously impressive in the power of its sensuous description as the snowstorm isolates the couple

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from ordinary existence, strips them of external comforts, exposes them to the presence of death, forces them to encounter their inmost selves. Tolstoy’s celebration of Brekhunov’s redemption through fellowship is his answer to a universe that he has feared all of his life as he confronts the horror of nonexistence conveyed by death. Master and man—or man and man, or man and woman— should cling to each other, love each other, forgive each other. Will such conduct vault their souls into immortality? Tolstoy desperately hopes so. Gerhard Brand Other major works children’s literature: Azbuka, 1872; Novaya azbuka, 1875 (Stories for My Children, 1988); Russkie knigi dlya chteniya, 1875; Classic Tales and Fables for Children, 2002 (includes selections from Azbuka and Novaya azbuka). plays: Vlast tmy, pb. 1887 (The Power of Darkness, 1888); Plody prosveshcheniya, pr. 1889 (The Fruits of Enlightenment, 1891); I svet vo tme svetit, pb. 1911 (The Light Shines in Darkness, 1923); Zhivoy trup, pr., pb. 1911 (The Live Corpse, 1919); The Dramatic Works, pb. 1923. novels: Detstvo, 1852 (Childhood, 1862); Otrochestvo, 1854 (Boyhood, 1886); Yunost’, 1857 (Youth, 1886); Semeynoye schast’ye, 1859 (Family Happiness, 1888); Kazaki, 1863 (The Cossacks, 1872); Voyna i mir, 1865-1869 (War and Peace, 1886); Anna Karenina, 1875-1877 (English translation, 1886); Smert’ Ivana Il’icha, 1886 (The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1887); Kreytserova sonata, 1889 (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1890); Voskreseniye, 1899 (Resurrection, 1899); Khadzi-Murat, wr. 1904, pb. 1911 (Hadji Murad, 1911). miscellaneous: The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, 1904-1905 (24 volumes); Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii, 1928-1958 (90 volumes); Tolstoy Centenary Edition, 19281937 (21 volumes). nonfiction: Ispoved’, 1884 (A Confession, 1885); V chom moya vera, 1884 (What I Believe, 1885); O zhizni, 1888 (Life, 1888); Kritika dogmaticheskogo bogosloviya, 1891 (A Critique of Dogmatic Theology, 1904); Soedinenie i perevod chetyrekh evangeliy, 1892-1894 (The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated, 1895-1896); Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas, 1893 (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1894); Chto takoye iskusstvo?, 1898 (What Is Art?, 1898); Tak chto zhe nam delat?, 1902 (What to Do?, 1887); O Shekspire i o drame, 1906 (Shakespeare and the Drama, 1906); The Diaries of Leo Tolstoy, 1847-1852, 1917; The Journal of Leo Tolstoy, 1895-1899, 1917; Tolstoi’s Love Letters, 1923; The Private Diary of Leo Tolstoy, 1853-1857, 1927; “What Is Art?” and Essays on Art, 1929; L. N. Tolstoy o literature: Stati, pisma, dnevniki, 1955; Lev Tolstoy ob iskusstve i literature, 1958; Last Diaries, 1960. Bibliography Bayley, John. Leo Tolstoy. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1997. Criticism and interpretation of Tolstoy’s work. Bloom, Harold, ed. Leo Tolstoy. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Collection of critical essays. The views expressed give a good sampling of the wide range of opinions about Tolstoy prevalent among Western critics. Many of these critics assign a prominent place in literary history to Tolstoy, comparing him to, among others, Homer and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Includes bibliography. Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Gustafson seeks to rescue Tolstoy from those who would classify him solely as a realist. By focusing on what he sees as

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the inherently and uniquely Russian attributes of Tolstoy’s writing, Gustafson reunites the preconversion artist and the postconversion religious thinker and prophet. The study’s bibliography is divided between books devoted to Tolstoy and those focusing on Eastern Christian thought. Jahn, Gary R. The Death of Ivan Ilich: An Interpretation. New York: Twayne, 1993. After providing a summary and critique of previous criticism on Tolstoy’s most famous story, Jahn examines the context of the story within other works by Tolstoy to argue that the story is an affirmation of life rather than a document of despair. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of eight short stories by Tolstoy: “Alyosha the Pot” (vol. 1); “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (vol. 2); “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (vol. 4); “Master and Man” (vol. 5); “The Raid: A Volunteer’s Story” (vol. 6); and “The Snow-Storm,” “Three Deaths,” and “The Three Hermits” (vol. 7). Orwin, Donna Tussig. Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847-1880. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Divided into three parts, which coincide with the first three decades of Tolstoy’s literary career, Orwin’s study attempts to trace the origins and growth of the Russian master’s ideas. After focusing on Tolstoy’s initial creative vision, Orwin goes on to analyze, in depth, his principal works. Seifrid, Thomas. “Gazing on Life’s Page: Perspectival Vision in Tolstoy.” PMLA 113 (May, 1998): 436-448. Suggests that the typical visual situation in Tolstoy’s fiction is perspectival; argues that Tolstoy’s impulse can be linked with the material nature of books and that this linkage has implications for Russian culture as well as for the relation between the verbal and the visual in general. Smoluchowski, Louise. Lev and Sonya: The Story of the Tolstoy Marriage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987. With the publication of Sonya Tolstoy’s diaries it became apparent that in order to understand Tolstoy, it is necessary to understand his marriage to the extraordinary Sonya. Smoluchowski does a good job of retelling the story, relying mainly on the words of the principals themselves. Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. This welcome reappearance of a classic study of the epic versus the dramatic, first published in 1959, carries only a new preface. In it, however, Steiner makes a compelling case for the reprinting, in the age of deconstructionism, of this wide-ranging study not just of individual texts, but of contrasting worldviews. Wasiolek, Edward. Tolstoy’s Major Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Having written a superb study of Fyodor Dostoevski’s fiction, Wasiolek has composed an equally first-rate critique of Tolstoy’s. He concentrates on thorough analyses of ten Tolstoyan works, including Family Happiness, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and “Master and Man.” His is a close and acute reading, influenced by Russian Formalists and by Roland Barthes. A twenty-page chronicle of Tolstoy’s life and work is illuminating.

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Born: Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland; May 24, 1928 Principal short fiction • The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, and Other Stories, 1967; The Ballroom of Romance, and Other Stories, 1972; The Last Lunch of the Season, 1973; Angels at the Ritz, and Other Stories, 1975; Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories, 1978; Beyond the Pale, and Other Stories, 1981; The Stories of William Trevor, 1983; The News from Ireland, and Other Stories, 1986; Family Sins, and Other Stories, 1990; Collected Stories, 1992; Ireland: Selected Stories, 1995; Marrying Damian, 1995 (limited edition); Outside Ireland: Selected Stories, 1995; After Rain, 1996; The Hill Bachelors, 2000; A Bit on the Side, 2004; Dressmaker’s Child, 2005; Cheating at Canasta, 2007. Other literary forms • Though probably best known as a writer of short stories, William Trevor has also written television and radio scripts, plays, and numerous novels. Among his novels, The Old Boys, Miss Gomez and the Brethren, Elizabeth Alone (1973), The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983), Felicia’s Journey (1994), and Death in Summer (1998) have been particularly praised. He has also written two nonfiction works, A Writer’s Ireland: Landscape in Literature (1984) and Excursions in the Real World (1993). His productivity has continued, unabated, into his seventies. In addition to publishing four new collections of short stories after reaching that age, he has published three more novels: Death in Summer (1998), The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), and My House in Umbria (2003). Achievements • William Trevor is widely regarded as one of the finest storytellers and craftsmen writing in English. In Great Britain, his work has long been widely and favorably reviewed and has frequently been adapted for radio and television broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In 1964, Trevor’s second novel, The Old Boys, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize; his fourth collection, Angels at the Ritz, and Other Stories, was hailed by writer Graham Greene as “one of the finest collections, if not the best, since James Joyce’s Dubliners.” In addition, Trevor has won the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Allied Irish Banks’ Prize for Literature, and the Whitbread Literary Award; he is also a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. In 1979, “in recognition for his valuable services to literature,” Trevor was named an honorary Commander, Order of the British Empire and in the same year received the Irish Community Prize. In 1980 and 1982, he received the Giles Cooper Award for radio plays; in 1983, he received a Jacob Award for a teleplay. He received D.Litt. degrees from the University of Exeter, Trinity College in Dublin, the University of Belfast, and the National University of Ireland in Cork. Trevor received the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1994 for Felicia’s Journey. In the United States, knowledge of Trevor’s work increased markedly when The Stories of William Trevor, an omnibus collection, was published in 1983 and received wide and highly enthusiastic reviews. Biography • The son of a bank manager, William Trevor was born William Trevor Cox in Ireland’s County Cork. He spent much of his childhood living in small Irish towns and attending a series of boarding and day schools that included St. Columba’s

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in Dublin. After earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Dublin’s Trinity College, Trevor, a Protestant, began work as a sculptor and schoolmaster, taking his first job as an instructor of history in Armagh, Northern Ireland. In 1952, Trevor married Jane Ryan and moved to England, where he spent the next eight years teaching art at two prestigious public schools—first at Rugby and then at Taunton. Between 1960 and 1965, Trevor worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency in London; he simultaneously began devoting an increasing portion of his free time to the writing of fiction. By the early 1970’s, following the appearance of several novels and a steady stream of stories in such publications as Encounter, The New Yorker, and London Magazine, Trevor’s reputation was secure. The father of two sons, Trevor settled in Devon and continued to write full time. Analysis • Like his novels, William Trevor’s short stories generally take place in either England or the Republic of Ireland. For the most part, Trevor focuses on middleclass or lower-middle-class figures whose lives have been characterized by loneliness, disappointment, and pain. His stories feature tight organization and lean but detailed prose. Their very “average” characters are made interesting by Trevor’s careful attention to the traits and quirks that make them individuals, to the memories and regrets they have of the past. Trevor, often wry and always detached, refuses to sentimentalize any of them; he does not, however, subject them to ridicule. Their struggles reveal the author’s deep curiosity about the manifold means by which people foil themselves or, more rarely, manage not to do so. Many of Trevor’s characters are trapped in jobs or familial circumstances that are dull or oppressive or both; many retreat frequently to fond memories or romantic fantasies. Trevor rarely mocks the men and women who inhabit his fiction, nor does he treat them as mere ciphers or automatons. In fact, like James Joyce, to whom he is often compared, Trevor assumes a detached authorial stance, but occasionally and subtly he makes it clear that he is highly sympathetic to the plight of underdogs, self-deluders, and the victims of abuse and deceit. Invariably, his principal characters are carefully and completely drawn—and so are the worlds they inhabit. Few contemporary writers of short fiction can render atmosphere and the subtleties of personality as precisely and as tellingly as William Trevor. Few can capture so accurately and wittily the rhythms and nuances of everyday speech. Though its themes can be somber and settings quite bleak, Trevor’s brilliantly paced and carefully sculpted fiction consistently moves, amuses, and invigorates. “The General’s Day” • One of Trevor’s earliest stories, “The General’s Day,” illustrates with particular clarity the darkest side of his artistic vision. Contained in The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, and Other Stories, “The General’s Day” centers on a decorated and now-retired military man who, at the age of seventy-eight, has never quite come to grips with his retirement and so spends his days wandering around the local village looking for something to do. On the day of the story, a sunny Saturday in June, General Suffolk greets the day with energy and resolution but ends by simply killing time in the local tea shop, where he musters what is left of his once-celebrated charm and manages to persuade a woman—“a thin, middle-aged person with a face like a faded photograph”—to join him for drinks at the local hotel. There, fueled by gin, General Suffolk flirts so blatantly and clumsily with the woman that she flees, “her face like a beetroot.” Fueled by more gin, the lonely man becomes increasingly obnoxious. After suffering a few more rejections and humiliations, he finally stumbles back home, where he is mocked further by his “unreliable servant,” Mrs. Hinch, a

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crude woman who habitually cuts corners and treats herself to secretive swigs of the general’s expensive South African sherry. In the story’s final scene, General Suffolk, “the hero of Roeux and Monchy-le-Preux,” is shown leaning and weeping on his cleaning woman’s fat arm as she laughingly helps him back to his cottage. “My God Almighty,” General Suffolk, deflated, mutters, “I could live for twenty years.” “An Evening with John Joe Dempsey” • Trevor often portrays older men and women who make stoic adjustments to the present while living principally in the past. He also sometimes focuses on children and adolescents who use vividly constructed daydreams as a means of escaping dreary surroundings or obtuse parents who are themselves sunk in the deadness of their cramped and predictable lives. In “An Evening with John Joe Dempsey,” from The Ballroom of Romance, and Other Stories, Trevor’s central figure is a boy of fifteen who lives in a small house in a small Irish town where, daily, he sits in a dull classroom in preparation for a dead-end job at the nearby sawmills. John Joe lives with his widowed mother, a wiry, chronically worried woman, whose principal interest in life is to hover protectively about her only son. John Joe escapes his mother’s smothering solicitations by wandering about the town with Quigley, a rather elderly dwarf reputed to be, as one local puts it, “away in the head.” Quigley likes to fire John Joe’s already active imagination by regaling the boy with detailed descriptions of the sexual vignettes he claims to have witnessed while peeping through area windows. In his own daydreams, John Joe dallies with many of the same sizable matrons whom Quigley likes to portray in compromising positions. One of them, Mrs. Taggart, “the wife of a postman,” is a tall, “well-built” woman who in John Joe’s fantasies requires repeated rescuing from a locked bathroom in which she stands unblushingly nude. Like many of Trevor’s characters, John Joe is thus a convincing mix of the comic and the pathetic. If his incongruous sexual fantasies are humorous, the rest of his life looks decidedly grim. In the story’s particularly effective closing scene, Trevor portrays John Joe in his bed, in the dark, thinking again of impossible erotic romps with wholly unobtainable women, feeling more alive than ever he was at the Christian Brothers’ School . . . or his mother’s kitchen, more alive than ever he would be at the sawmills. In his bed he entered a paradise: it was grand being alone. “Nice Day at School” • In “Nice Day at School,” from the same collection, Trevor’s principal character is a girl of fourteen, Eleanor, who lives on a housing estate with her cranky, chain-smoking mother and her father, a former professional wrestler who now works as a nightclub bouncer and likes to claim that his work has made him the trusted friend of many celebrities, including Rex Harrison, Mia Farrow, Princess Margaret, and Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Though Eleanor is embarrassed by her father’s obviously exaggerated accounts of his encounters with the rich and famous, she is much given to vivid imaginings of her own. Bombarded daily by saccharine pop songs and the more blatantly sexual chatter of her friends, Eleanor thinks obsessively of her ideal lover: a man whose fingers were long and thin and gentle, who’d hold her hand in the aeroplane. Air France to Biarritz. And afterwards she’d come back to a flat where the curtains were the colour of lavender, the same as the walls, where gas fires glowed and there were rugs on natural-wood floors, and the telephone was pale blue.

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Subtly, however, Trevor indicates that Eleanor is not likely to find a lover so wealthy and suave. Like her friends and most girls of the same social class, this daughter of a bloated bouncer and a bored, gin-sipping housewife will instead settle for someone like Denny Price, the young butcher’s apprentice with “blubbery” lips, who once moved his rough hand up and down her body “like an animal, a rat gnawing at her, prodding her and poking.” “Office Romances” • Trevor often focuses on women who find themselves pursued by or entangled with insensitive or calculating men. In “Office Romances,” from Angels at the Ritz, and Other Stories, Trevor’s central character is Angela Hosford, a typist who works quite anonymously in a large London office appointed with “steel-framed reproductions” and “ersatz leather” sofas and chairs. At the age of twenty-six, Angela is pleasant but plain and myopic: She wears contact lenses that give her eyes a slightly “bulgy look.” Her pursuer, Gordon Spelle, is, at thirty-eight, tall and “sleek,” but his left eyelid droops a bit, and the eye it covers is badly glazed. While watching old films on television when she was fourteen, Angela developed a crush on the American actor Don Ameche and had imagined “a life with him in a cliff-top home she’d invented, in California.” Now, she finds herself drawn to the deliberately “old fashioned” Spelle and at one point imagines herself “stroking his face and comforting him because of his bad eye.” One day, after his flatteries succeed in rendering Angela both “generous and euphoric,” Spelle manages to lure her into a dark and empty office, where—muttering “I love you,” repeatedly—he makes love to her, inelegantly, on the floor. Angela finds this experience “not even momentarily pleasurable, not once,” but afterward she basks in the memory of Spelle’s heated professions of love. Angela eventually takes a job elsewhere, convinced that Spelle’s passion for her “put him under a strain, he being married to a wife who was ill.” Like many of Trevor’s characters, she understandably decides not to look past her comforting delusions; she refuses to accept the well-known fact that Spelle was “notorious” and “chose girls who were unattractive because he believed such girls, deprived of sex for long periods of time, were an easier bet.” “Lovers of Their Time” • The vast gulf that often separates romantic fantasy from unsavory fact is similarly revealed in the title story of Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories. In this piece, set in the 1960’s, Trevor’s lovers are Norman Britt, a mildmannered travel agent with “a David Niven moustache,” and a young woman, Marie, who tends the counter at Green’s the Chemist’s. Norman and Marie meet regularly in one of Trevor’s favorite fictional locations—a dark pub filled with a wide array of drinkers, talkers, and dreamers. “The Drummer Boy” • In that same place, in “The Drummer Boy,” the two listen to Beatles songs and talk of running away with each other to some romantic foreign country—an event they realize is not likely to materialize. Marie is single, but Norman is married to the loud and bawdy Hilda, who spends the better part of her life sipping cheap wine and watching police dramas on the television and who has previously hinted that she is quite content in the odd marital arrangement that Norman loathes. Thus, at Norman’s instigation, the two lovers begin to rendezvous more intimately at the nearby hotel, the Great Western Royal. More specifically, they begin to sneak into a large, infrequently used bathroom, “done up in marble,” on the hotel’s second floor. Here, luxuriating in an enormous tub, they talk hopefully of happier

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days that, unfortunately, never arrive. Hilda dismisses her husband’s request for a divorce by telling him, “You’ve gone barmy, Norman”; Marie, tired of waiting, weds “a man in a brewery.” Thus, as the years pass, Norman is left with a nostalgic longing not only for Marie but also for that brief period in the 1960’s when playful risk-taking was much in the air. Often, while riding “the tube” to work, Norman would close his eyes and with the greatest pleasure that remained to him he would recall the delicately veined marble and the great brass taps, and the bath that was big enough for two. And now and again he heard what happened to be the sound of distant music, and the voices of the Beatles celebrating a bathroom love, as they had celebrated Eleanor Rigby and other people of that time. “Flights of Fancy” • This allusion to a popular and bittersweet Beatles song is especially appropriate in yet another Trevor story about two thoroughly average and lonely people whose lives have not often been marked by episodes of great passion. In “Flights of Fancy,” also from Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories, Trevor’s principal character, Sarah Machaen, is yet another Rigby-like character destined, one assumes, to spend the rest of her life uneasily alone. Sarah, a clergyman’s daughter, is an executive secretary in a large London firm that manufactures lamps; she visits museums, sings in a Bach choir, and is “a popular choice as a godmother.” Well into middle age, Sarah is quite content with the externals of her life and gradually has become “reconciled to the fact that her plainness wasn’t going to go away.” Sometimes, however, she gets lonely enough to daydream of marriage—perhaps to an elderly widower or a blind man. Ironically, the one person who does express a romantic interest in Sarah is another woman, a young and pretty but unschooled factory worker called Sandra Pond. Sarah is shocked at the very idea of lesbianism, yet she cannot stop her mind from “throwing up flights of fancy” in which she pictures herself sharing her flat with Sandra and introducing her to London’s many cultural delights. Though her shyness and acute sense of propriety prompt her to reject Sandra’s clumsy but clearly genuine professions of love, Sarah is haunted by the sense that she has perhaps passed up her last chance for passion and romance. “Broken Homes” • “Broken Homes,” also from Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories, is one of Trevor’s most powerful stories. Its principal character, Mrs. Malby, lives with her two budgerigars in a little flat that is scrupulously neat and prettily painted. Mrs. Malby, a widow, lost both of her sons thirty years earlier during World War II; now, at the age of eighty-seven, she has come to terms with her own impending death and wants nothing more than to spend her remaining days in familiar surroundings, her faculties intact. Unfortunately, Mrs. Malby’s flat is destroyed and her serenity threatened by a squad of loud and insensitive teenagers from a nearby comprehensive school—“an ugly sprawl of glass and concrete buildings,” Mrs. Malby recalls, full of “children swinging along the pavements, shouting obscenities.” As part of a community relations scheme, the teenagers have been equipped with mops and sponges and brushes and sent out into the neighborhood in search of good deeds to perform. Mrs. Malby politely asks these obnoxious adolescents to do nothing more than wash her walls, but they treat her with condescension and contempt, and while she is out, they proceed to make a complete mess of her apartment, splattering its walls and floors with bright yellow paint. The students’ “teacher,” an obtuse and “untidily dressed” bureaucrat, patronizingly assures Mrs. Malby that the damage is slight.

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He reminds her that, in any event, one must make allowances for the children of “broken homes.” Perhaps more than any of his other stories, “Broken Homes” reveals Trevor’s sympathy for the plight of the elderly and his acute awareness of the infirmities and insecurities that accompany old age. The story certainly reveals a strong suspicion that, by the mid-1970’s, the British welfare state had become both inefficient and rudely intrusive. Indeed, “Broken Homes” is informed by the subtly expressed sense—not uncommon in Trevor’s later fiction—that contemporary Great Britain and Ireland have grown increasingly crass and tacky and that the old social fabric is rapidly unraveling. “The Paradise Lounge” • Arguably, “The Paradise Lounge,” from Beyond the Pale, and Other Stories, is Trevor’s most representative story. Set principally in the small bar of Keegan’s Railway hotel, in “a hilly provincial town” in the Republic of Ireland, “The Paradise Lounge” shifts its focus between two recognizably Trevoresque figures. One of them, Beatrice, is thirty-two; the other, Miss Doheny, is in her eighties. Beatrice—who wanted to be an actor once—drives often to Keegan’s and its adjoining Paradise Lounge to rendezvous with her lover, a middle-aged businessman already married. Miss Doheny, one of the locals, goes regularly to the lounge for a bit of company and several good, stiff drinks. The two have never formally met. Yet Beatrice—observing Miss Doheny from across the room—is convinced that the old woman is an intriguing figure with a fascinating and no doubt satisfyingly romantic past; she does not realize that Miss Doheny is not only lonely but also full of anger and regret. Miss Doheny, in turn, envies Beatrice’s freedom—her ability, in a more liberated and enlightened age, to enter into a friendly sexual affair without running the risk of paralyzing guilt and ostracism. She does not realize that the younger woman’s affair has grown stale and mechanical and that by her own estimation Beatrice is about to engage in nothing more than a “mess of deception and lies.” After Rain • The twelve stories of After Rain concern how marriage and family ties constrain, bewilder, confound, or, occasionally, help their characters. For instance, a woman’s attempt to invigorate the life of her best friend by encouraging an affair ends the friendship; a young man refuses to visit his parents for his birthday because he is jealous of their deep love for each other; a pregnant young woman is forced to marry a man she hardly knows to save the family reputation; a barren wife spends her days drinking herself insensate while fantasizing about her husband’s mistress; a Protestant family shrinks in shame when one son claims that a dead Roman Catholic saint has visited him; a retired couple is helpless and dismayed when an old friend, a hopeless reprobate, courts their daughter. As in Trevor’s earlier volumes, the central characters, however muddled in their behavior, usually learn some truth about themselves or recognize a fundamental change in their lives. The tone is taut but not judgmental; the reader is invited to share their emotions rather than laugh at or deplore their plight. The imagery of home, religion, and occupation frequently invests commonplace dramas with broad moral power. In “The Piano Tuner’s Wife,” the opening story, a blind piano tuner remarries after his first wife dies. Violet, the second wife, was rejected decades earlier when the piano tuner married her rival, Belle. Now Violet at last succeeds but finds that Belle’s memory and style of managing the husband’s affairs haunts the marriage at every turn. Violet sets out to efface Belle by contradicting many of the things the first wife

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told their husband about the countryside and people around them. The piano tuner recognizes her conduct for what it is, self-assertion, and accepts it calmly. In his marriages, as in his work, he seeks harmony. In the title story, “After Rain,” Harriet has fled to an Italian resort because of a failed love affair, the same resort that her parents took her to as a child. In the sweltering heat, she feels oppressed by her life. The reader learns of her astonished shock, still disturbing her more than a decade later, at her parents’ divorce; she has had previous promising love affairs that all fizzled inexplicably; she cannot be other than distant to her fellow vacationers. To relieve her tedium, she visits a nearby church. There a painting of the Annunciation, vividly colored and showing a rain-swept landscape in the background, lifts her out of her selfabsorption. Meanwhile, a hard rain has broken the afternoon heat. Returning to the resort in the refreshing coolness, she suddenly sees her life in a new light, as if she has had an annunciation of her own. She realizes that she has frightened away her lovers by needing too much from love, a reaction to her parents’ failed marriage. The annunciation is of her own solitude. Brian Murray With updates by Roger Smith, Eugene S. Larson, and the Editors Other major works plays: The Elephant’s Foot, pr. 1965; The Girl, pr. 1967 (televised), pr., pb. 1968 (staged); A Night Mrs. da Tanka, pr. 1968 (televised), pr., pb. 1972 (staged); Going Home, pr. 1970 (radio play), pr., pb. 1972 (staged); The Old Boys, pr., pb. 1971; A Perfect Relationship, pr. 1973; Marriages, pr. 1973; The Fifty-seventh Saturday, pr. 1973; Scenes from an Album, pr. 1975 (radio play), pr., pb. 1981 (staged). anthology: The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, 1989. novels: A Standard of Behaviour, 1958; The Old Boys, 1964; The Boarding-House, 1965; The Love Department, 1966; Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neil’s Hotel, 1969; Miss Gomez and the Brethren, 1971; Elizabeth Alone, 1973; The Children of Dynmouth, 1976; Other People’s Worlds, 1980; Fools of Fortune, 1983; Nights at the Alexandra, 1987; The Silence in the Garden, 1988; Juliet’s Story, 1991; Two Lives, 1991; Felicia’s Journey, 1994; Death in Summer, 1998; The Story of Lucy Gault, 2002; My House in Umbria, 2003. nonfiction: A Writer’s Ireland: Landscape in Literature, 1984; Excursions in the Real World, 1993. radio plays: Beyond the Pale, 1980; Autumn Sunshine, 1982. Bibliography Bonaccorso, Richard. “William Trevor’s Martyrs for Truth.” Studies in Short Fiction 34 (Winter, 1997): 113-118. Discusses two types of Trevor characters: those who try to evade the truth and those who gravitate, often in spite of themselves, toward it; argues that the best indicators of the consistency of Trevor’s moral vision may be his significant minority, those characters who find themselves pursuing rather than fleeing truth. Gitzen, Julian. “The Truth-Tellers of William Trevor.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21, no. 1 (1979): 59-72. Gitzen claims that most critics of Trevor’s work have found it in the comedic tradition, sometimes dark and at other times more compassionate in its humor, but he argues that, if it is comic, it is also melancholic in its journey from “psychological truth” to “metaphysical mystery.”

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Haughey, Jim. “Joyce and Trevor’s Dubliners: The Legacy of Colonialism.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Summer, 1995): 355-365. Compares how James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” and Trevor’s “Two More Gallants” explore the complexities of Irish identity; argues that Trevor’s story provides an updated commentary on the legacy of Ireland’s colonial experience. Both stories reveal how Irish men, conditioned by colonization, are partly responsible for their sense of cultural alienation and inferiority. MacKenna, Dolores. William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dublin: New Island, 1999. Offers some interesting biographical details; includes a bibliography and an index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Trevor: “Angels at the Ritz,” “The Ballroom of Romance,” and “Beyond the Pale” (vol. 1); “Death in Jerusalem” (vol. 2); and “Going Home” (vol. 3). Morrison, Kristin. William Trevor. New York: Twayne, 1993. General introduction to Trevor’s fiction, focusing on a conceptual “system of correspondences” often manifested in Trevor’s work by a rhetorical strategy of “significant simultaneity” and a central metaphor of the Edenic garden. Through close readings of Trevor’s major works, including such short stories as “Beyond the Pale” and “The News from Ireland,” Morrison examines the overall unity of his fiction. Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. This introduction to Trevor’s stories examines four common themes from Freudianism to feminism: psychological shock, failed child/parent relationships, patriarchal repressiveness, and materialism in the modern world. Also contains an interview with Trevor and a number of short reviews of his stories. Schiff, Stephen. “The Shadows of William Trevor.” The New Yorker 68, no. 45 (December 28, 1992/January 4, 1993): 158-163. A profile of the writer and his works. Emphasizes Trevor’s Irish heritage. Schirmer, Gregory A. William Trevor: A Study in His Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990. One of the first full-length studies of Trevor’s fictional writings. Schirmer notes the tension in Trevor’s works between morality and the elements in contemporary society that make morality almost an impossibility, with lonely alienation the result. He also discusses Trevor as an outsider, both in Ireland and in England. An excellent study. Includes bibliographical references.

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Born: Orel, Russia; November 9, 1818 Died: Bougival, France; September 3, 1883 Principal short fiction • Zapiski okhotnika, 1852 (Russian Life in the Interior, 1855; better known as A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1932); Povesti i rasskazy, 1856; First Love, and Other Stories, 1989. Other literary forms • In addition to A Sportsman’s Sketches, Ivan Turgenev published several other short stories and novellas individually. His main contribution, however, was six novels, some of which are among the best written in Russian, especially Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons, 1867). He also wrote poems, poems in prose, and plays, one of which, Mesyats v derevne (1855; A Month in the Country, 1924), is still staged regularly in Russian theaters. Achievements • Ivan Turgenev’s opus is not particularly large, yet with about four dozen stories and novellas and his brief novels, he became one of the best writers not only in Russian but also in world literature. Turgenev was a leading force in the Russian realistic movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. Together with Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevski, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov, he built the reputation that Russian literature enjoys in the world. Perhaps more than other writers, he was responsible for acquainting foreign readers with Russian literature, and because he spent most of his adult life abroad, he was an esteemed figure in the international literary life. Turgenev was also instrumental in arousing the sensitivity and consciousness of his compatriots, because he dealt with such burning social issues as the plight of Russian peasantry, in A Sportsman’s Sketches; the “superfluous man” in Russian society, in “The Diary of a Superfluous Man”; the fixation of Russians with revolution, in Rudin (1856; English translation, 1947); the decaying nobility in Dvoryanskoye gnezdo (1859; Liza, 1869; better known as A House of Gentlefolk, 1894); and the age-old conflict between generations, in Fathers and Sons. Turgenev also excelled in his style, especially in the use of the language. Albert Jay Nock called him “incomparably the greatest of artists in fiction,” and Virginia Woolf termed his works as being “curiously of our own time, undecayed and complete in themselves.” His reputation, despite some fluctuations, endures. Biography • Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born on November 9, 1818, in the central Russian town of Orel, into a small gentry family. His father was a loving, easygoing country squire, while his mother was an overbearing woman of whom Turgenev had many unpleasant memories. He spent his childhood at the family estate, Spasskoe, which he visited every summer even after the family moved to Moscow. He received tutoring at home and later graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1837. He continued his studies in Berlin, acquiring a master’s degree in philosophy. His stay in Berlin marks the beginning of a lifelong shuffle between his homeland and the European countries, especially France, Germany, England, and Italy. On one visit to

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France, he met a French woman, Pauline Viardot, with whom he had a close relationship the rest of his life despite her being married. After serving briefly in the Ministry of Interior, he lived the remainder of his life off his estate income following his parents’ death. Turgenev started to write early, and in 1843, at the age of twenty-five, he published a long narrative poem, Parasha, written in imitation of Alexander Pushkin. He soon abandoned poetry for prose, although his reverence for Pushkin and the poetic slant remained constant in his writings. His stories about the dismal life of Russian peasants were much more successful, attracting the attention of readers and critics alike. When the collection of those stories, A Sportsman’s Sketches, was published in 1852, his reputation as a promising young writer was firmly established. A successful play, A Month in the Country, added to his reputation. As his reputation grew, he became friends with many leading writers and critics—Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Aleksandr Herzen, Dostoevski, and others—but these friendships were often interspersed with heated arguments and enmity. Because of his connections in Europe and a pronounced liberal outlook, he was summoned on several occasions before the investigation committees back in Russia. He was always exonerated, however, and he continued to travel between Russia and Europe. Turgenev never married, but he had several affairs, while Viardot remained the love of his life, and he was thought to have been the father of a son born to her. The steady stream of successful novels and stories enhanced the esteem in which he was held both at home and abroad. At the same time, he carried on a spirited debate with Russian intellectuals, advocating liberal reforms in Russian society, especially those concerning the plight of peasants, many of whom were still kept as serfs. When they were liberated in 1861, it was believed that not a small merit belonged to Turgenev and his efforts toward their emancipation. Toward the end of his life, Turgenev kept writing and publishing, though at a slower pace. He also worked on the preparation of his collected works and continued to live in a ménage à trois with Viardot and her husband. During his last visit to Russia in the summer of 1881, he visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. His health began to deteriorate in 1882, and, after several months of a serious illness, he died at the Viardots’ estate in Bougival, near Paris, on September 3, 1883. As his friend Henry James wrote, “his end was not serene and propitious, but dark and almost violent.” Turgenev’s body was taken to Russia, where he was buried with great honors in St. Petersburg. Analysis • The reputation of Ivan Turgenev as a short-story writer is based in equal measure on his stories about Russian peasant life and on stories about other segments of society. Although differing greatly in subject matter and emphasis, they nevertheless share the same mastery of storytelling and style and language. Turgenev wrote stories about the peasants early in his career, revealing his familiarity with life in the countryside and his preoccupation with liberal causes. As he grew older and traveled to Europe, his horizons expanded, and he became more interested in topics transcending his provincial outlook. His acquired cosmopolitanism was also reflected in his turning toward personal concerns of love, alienation, and psychological illumination of his characters. The last story that he wrote, “Klara Milich” (“Clara Milich”), takes him to the realm of the fantastic and supernatural, to life after death, and even to the bizarre twists of the human mind.

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A Sportsman’s Sketches • Turgenev’s stories about Russian peasants are contained primarily in his collection A Sportsman’s Sketches. As the title implies (the accurate translation is “notes of a hunter”), the twenty-five tales are more like notes and sketches than full-blown stories with plot and characterization. It is one of the few examples in world literature where the entire collection of separate and independent stories has a thematic unity; another example of this unity is Isaac Babel’s Konormiia (1926; Red Cavalry, 1929). The unifying theme is the hard life of Russian peasants— many generations of whom had lived as serfs for centuries—and the neglect of their well-being on the part of their owners. Despite its innocuous title, chosen to mislead the censors, the collection provoked admiration as well as heated debates. It is credLibrary of Congress ited with speeding up the process of the serfs’ emancipation. The stories are set in the countryside around Turgenev’s family estate at the middle of the nineteenth century. They are told by the same narrator, a landowner, in fact the thinly disguised author himself. During his tireless hunting trips, Turgenev met various characters, mostly peasants, many of whom told stories worth listening to. The authentic human quality of the settings and marvelous characterization, rather than the social message, make the stories enduring literature. The author approaches his characters with an open mind. He observes their demeanor “with curiosity and sympathy” and listens to their concerns and complaints without much comment, with a few questions for his own clarification. He refrains from passing judgment and avoids social criticism or satire. Through such unobtrusiveness, he gains the characters’ confidence and allows them to talk freely, making the stories more believable. More important, he does not idealize the peasants; instead, he attempts to penetrate the crust of everyday appearances. The woman in the story “Ermolai i mel’nichikha” (“Yermolai and the Miller’s Wife”), whose freedom had been bought by her husband, talks nonchalantly about her hard lot and the lack of love in her life. Yet beneath her story, the reader senses deep melancholy and hopelessness, reinforced by the author’s remark to his hunting companion, “It seems she is ailing,” and by the companion’s retort, “What else should she be?” The burly, taciturn forest warden in the story “Biriuk” (“The Wolf”), who lives alone, excels in protecting the forest from the poachers, and is feared and hated by the peasants, who are not above stealing wood from the landowner. He cannot be bribed and plays no favorites, finding the only pleasure in doing his job. Yet when he catches a poor peasant trying to fell a tree, he lets him go because it is hunger that drove him to thievery. In one of Turgenev’s best stories, “Zhivye Moshchi”

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(“A Living Relic”), a young woman, dying of a fatal illness, gives the impression of total helplessness, yet she is nourished until her untimely death by her naïve religion and love of life. In all these stories, appearances are deceiving and the observernarrator is able to get to the core of his characters. Not all characters have an adversarial relationship with their fate. The two friends in “Khor’i Kalynich” (“Khor and Kalynich”) epitomize the two halves of a Russian character. Khor is a practical, down-to-earth man who has found success in life. Kalynich is a sensitive soul living in unison with nature, a dreamer who revels in simple pleasures, without worrying about more complex aspects of life. The doctor in “Uezdnyi lekar” (“The Country Doctor”), called to the sickbed of a young girl, falls in love with her, and his love is returned, but he realizes that he cannot save the young girl. He finds solace in the discovery that the girl has satisfied her own craving for love in the last moments of her life. Thus, the results are not as important as the efforts to avoid or alleviate the blows, no matter how unsuccessful the efforts may be. Peasants are not the only characters drawing the author’s attention. The landowners, who wield the power of life and death over their serfs, also appear in several stories. For the most part, they are depicted with much less sympathy and understanding, despite the author’s own social origin. In “Dva pomeshchika” (“Two Landowners”), both characters show negative traits: One, a major-general, is a social clown; the other is an insensitive brute, who thinks that a peasant will always be a peasant and who uses a homespun “philosophy” that “if the father’s a thief, the son’s a thief too . . . it’s blood that counts.” The author seems to be saying that, with such a negative attitude, no improvement of the peasants’ lot is possible. “Gamlet Shchigrovskogo uezda” (“Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District”) offers an even stronger castigation of the serf-owning class. Here, an intelligent and sensitive landowner fails to find understanding among his peers for his attempts to improve the lot of everybody. In a Dostoevskian fashion, he is forced to act like a buffoon in hopes of gaining attention that way. Turgenev’s position here sounds very much like a sharp satire against the existing state of affairs, but, as mentioned, he abstains from open and direct criticism, thus making his points even more effective. Not all of the stories in A Sportsman’s Sketches are bleak or hopeless. The two best stories of the collection are also the most positive. In “Bezhin lug” (“Bezhin Meadow”), Turgenev relates his evening encounter with five young boys taking care of the horses in the countryside. Sitting by the fire in the evening, they tell one another fantastic stories, to amuse and even frighten one another. The narrator is impressed by the boys’ natural demeanor, straightforwardness, bravery, and, above all, rich imagination of which folktales are spun. The author seems to imply that the future of the country is secure if judged by the young who are to inherit it. The second story, “Pevtsy” (“The Singers”), is even more uplifting. In another chance encounter, the narrator stumbles across an inn in the barely accessible backwoods. He is treated with a singing competition among the inn patrons unlike any other he had experienced. Turgenev uses the diamond-in-the-rough theme to show where the real talent can be found. As the narrator leaves the inn, he hears the people’s voices calling each other from one hill to another—a possible explanation of where the marvelous singers learn how to sing. These stories, along with a few others, strike a balance between the negative and the positive aspects of the life depicted in the book. Surrounded and suffused by nature, Turgenev reacts to it by stating his position concerning human beings in nature. He expresses his admiration for nature by using

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strikingly detailed descriptions, emphasizing colors, sounds, and scents. His subtlety of observation is complemented by genuine lyricism and careful use of a melodic, rhythmical language. Despite these ornamental features, however, the reader is tempted to view the author’s notion of nature as being rather unfeeling and indifferent toward humankind, in the best tradition of Georg Brandes’ theory of la grande indifférent. A closer look, however, reveals that nature in Turgenev’s works shows the difference in degree, not in kind, and that for him, humankind is a part of nature, not outside it. Only in unison with nature can human beings fulfill their potential, in which case nature is not indifferent but, on the contrary, very helpful, as seen in the example of the singers in the aforementioned story. Other artistic merits of these stories (which Turgenev was able to maintain throughout his writing career) can be found in his careful and delicate choice of suggestive and descriptive words; in the sketchy but pithy psychological portraiture; in the uncomplicated plot structure, consisting usually of an anecdote or episode; in the natural, calm, matter-of-fact narration; and in the effective imagery that is not strained or artificial. Superior craftsmanship goes hand in hand with the “social message” here, preventing the stories from being dated or used for inartistic purposes. “The Diary of a Superfluous Man” • The second group of Turgenev’s tales strikes an altogether different path, although a kinship with his earlier stories can be easily detected. Among many stories outside the cycle of A Sportsman’s Sketches, eight deserve to be singled out, either for the significance of their contents or for their artistic merit, or both. An early story, “Dnevnik lishnega cheloveka” (“The Diary of a Superfluous Man”), despite its relative immaturity, has a significance that surpasses its artistic quality. It is here that Turgenev coined the phrase “a superfluous man,” which would reverberate throughout Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even though the superfluous man theme had been used before Turgenev by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in the novel in verse by the same name and by Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin in Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Times, 1854), it was Turgenev who made the phrase a literary byword. The story presages Dostoevski’s Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Letters from the Underworld, 1913; better known as Notes from the Underground, 1918). Turgenev’s “superfluous man” is a young scion of erstwhile wealthy landowners, who writes a diary knowing that he will soon die of a disease. To compound his misery, he is rejected in his love for a beautiful neighbor. The excessive introspection of the “hero” and his inability to cope with reality make this story primarily a psychological character study and not a social statement, as some of Turgenev’s works of the same kind would become later. “Mumu” • Perhaps the best known of Turgenev’s stories, “Mumu” comes the closest in spirit to the collection A Sportsman’s Sketches. A deaf-mute servant loses the girl he loves when he is forced into marrying another woman. Later, he is ordered to kill his beloved dog because its barking is disturbing his mistress’s sleep. Drawing the character of the insensitive mistress after his mother, Turgenev castigates the insensitivity of the entire serf-owning class. The story does not sink into sentimental bathos primarily because of the remarkable characterization of the servant as an ultimate sufferer, underscoring the proverbial capacity for suffering of an entire nation. Moreover, by arousing overwhelming pity for the deaf-mute, Turgenev clearly places the blame for this human and social injustice at the door of the unfeeling gentry.

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“King Lear of the Steppes” • “Stepnoi Korol’ Lir” (“King Lear of the Steppes”) is another story that in its countryside setting shows kinship with A Sportsman’s Sketches. Yet it is entirely different in the subject matter, spirit, and atmosphere. In a takeoff on William Shakespeare’s tragedy, the story shows children behaving toward their father in a similar manner. The atmosphere here, however, is typically Russian. Harlov, a descendant of a Russianized Swedish family, suffers the same indignity and ingratitude at the hands of his daughters, and he takes similar revenge upon them, but the tragedy is not relieved or ennobled. Turgenev shows a fine sense for plot, and the dialogues—more excessive than usual for him—are in line with the dramatic nature of its model. Artistically, this story is almost a masterpiece, keeping the reader in suspense until the end. “Asya” • Love is an overriding theme in Turgenev’s later stories. “Asya” (“Asya”) and “Pervaya lyubov” (“First Love”) are the best representatives of Turgenev’s love stories. Both are told in the first person, tempting one to attribute to them autobiographical character, which may not be totally unjustified. “Asya” is set in a German town where the narrator (perhaps Turgenev) comes across two compatriots, a brother and a sister. As the story unfolds, the narrator is increasingly attracted to the woman and develops genuine love feelings, yet he is unable to declare his love openly, vacillating constantly until every chance for consummation is lost. Turgenev was known to have been indecisive in his love affairs, as illustrated by his strange attachment to the Viardot couple. Seen from that angle, the autobiographical element becomes very plausible, but there is more to the story than simply Turgenev’s indecisiveness. At this stage of his development, Turgenev had published only one book of short stories and one novel, and he was beset by doubts and indecision, not only in his love relationships but also in his literary aspirations, all too similar to those of the narrator in “Asya.” As he himself said, There are turning points in life, points when the past dies and something new is born; woe to the man who doesn’t know how to sense these turning points and either holds on stubbornly to a dead past or seeks prematurely to summon to life what has not yet fully ripened. The story reflects the wrenching doubts and soul-searching of the protagonist, which did not enable him to take a resolute stance toward the young woman, who herself was searching for a more assuring love. Thus, the love between Asya and the narrator was doomed to failure almost before it began. The two part, and the only thing left is a bittersweet memory of what might have been. Perhaps Turgenev was not yet ready to give the story the adequate treatment that it deserves. This is evidenced in the fact that Asya, wistful and charming though she may be, is not developed fully as a character. Turgenev will return soon to a similar theme and develop it to the fullest in his novel A House of Gentlefolk. It is also worth mentioning that “Asya” is another example of the theme of the superfluous man, which started with “The Diary of a Superfluous Man.” “First Love” • “First Love” is a better love story because both the plot and the characters are more fully developed. It involves a rivalry between a young man and his father, vying for the affection of the same woman, Zinaida. In Turgenev’s own admission, the story is autobiographical; as he wrote about it in a letter, “It is the only thing

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that still gives me pleasure, because it is life itself, it was not made up. . . . ‘First Love’ is part of my experience.” Aside from this candid admission, the story has a wide appeal to all, both young and old; to the young because the first love is always cherished the most (the only true love, according to Turgenev), and to the old because it offers a vicarious pleasure of a last triumph. It invariably evokes a bittersweet nostalgia in everyone. It also presents a plausible, even if not too common, situation. Turgenev controls with a sure hand the delicate relationships between the three partners in this emotional drama fraught with the awakening of manhood in an adolescent, with the amorous playfulness of a young woman who is both a temptress and a victim, and with the satisfaction of a conquest by a man entering the autumn of his life. Similarly, the author handles tactfully a potentially explosive situation between the loving father and adoring son, producing no rancor in aftermath. The story is a throwback to Romanticism, which had already passed in Russian literature and elsewhere at the time of the story’s publication. The story ends in a Turgenev fashion—unhappily for everyone concerned. All these attributes make “First Love” one of the best love stories in world literature. “The Song of Triumphant Love” • Twenty years later, Turgenev would write another love story, “Pesn’ torzhestvuiushchei liubvi” (“The Song of Triumphant Love”), which differs from “First Love” in many respects. It again deals with a love relationship in a ménage à trois (it seems that Turgenev was constantly reliving his own predicament with the Viardot couple), but the similarities stop there. The setting is in sixteenth-century Ferrara, and the male players—members of ancient patrician families—are on equal footing, even if one is a husband and the other a suitor. The ending is much more than unhappy: It is downright tragic. What makes this story decisively different from other love stories by Turgenev is the introduction of a supernatural element manifesting itself in the woman’s conceiving, not by intercourse, but by the platonic desire and the singing of a song by the unsuccessful suitor. “The Song of Triumphant Love” marks the transition to a more esoteric subject matter in Turgenev’s writing. He had written fantastic stories before (“Prizraki,” or “Phantoms”), but in the last decade of his life, he employed the supernatural with increasing frequency. In “Stuk . . . stuk . . . stuk . . .” (“Knock . . . Knock . . . Knock . . .”), he deals with a suicidal urge that borders on the supernatural. In his last story, “Clara Milich,” he tells of a man who has fallen in love with a woman after her death. Turgenev believed that there is a thin line dividing the real and the fantastic and that the fantastic stories people tell have happened in real life. As he said, “Wherever you look, there is the drama in life, and there are still writers who complain that all subjects have been exhausted.” Had he lived longer, most likely he would have tried to reconcile real life with so-called fantasy and the supernatural. Vasa D. Mihailovich Other major works plays: Neostorozhnost, pb. 1843 (Carelessness, 1924); Bezdenezhe, pb. 1846, pr. 1852 (A Poor Gentleman, 1924); Kholostyak, pr. 1849 (The Bachelor, 1924); Nakhlebnik, wr. 1849, pb. 1857, pr. 1862 (The Family Charge, 1924); Zavtrak u predvoditelya, pr. 1849, pb. 1856 (An Amicable Settlement, 1924); Mesyats v derevne, wr. 1850, pb. 1855, pr. 1872 (A Month in the Country, 1924); Razgovor na bolshoy doroge, pr. 1850, pb. 1851 (A Conversation on the Highway, 1924); Gde tonko, tam i rvyotsya, wr. 1851, pr. 1912 (Where It Is

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Thin, There It Breaks, 1924); Provintsialka, pr. 1851 (A Provincial Lady, 1934); Vecher v Sorrente, wr. 1852, pr. 1884, pb. 1891 (An Evening in Sorrento, 1924); The Plays of Ivan Turgenev, pb. 1924; Three Plays, pb. 1934. novels: Rudin, 1856 (Dimitri Roudine, 1873; better known as Rudin, 1947); Asya, 1858 (English translation, 1877); Dvoryanskoye gnezdo, 1859 (Liza, 1869; also as A Nobleman’s Nest, 1903; better known as A House of Gentlefolk, 1894); Nakanune, 1860 (On the Eve, 1871); Pervaya lyubov, 1860 (First Love, 1884); Ottsy i deti, 1862 (Fathers and Sons, 1867); Dym, 1867 (Smoke, 1868); Veshniye vody, 1872 (Spring Floods, 1874; better known as The Torrents of Spring, 1897); Nov, 1877 (Virgin Soil, 1877); The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 1894-1899 (15 volumes). miscellaneous: The Works of Iván Turgenieff, 1903-1904 (6 volumes); The Essential Turgenev, 1994. nonfiction: “Gamlet i Don Kikhot,” 1860 (“Hamlet and Don Quixote,” 1930); Literaturnya i zhiteyskiya vospominaniya, 1880 (Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, 1958); Letters, 1983 (David Lowe, editor); Turgenev’s Letters, 1983 (A. V. Knowles, editor). poetry: Parasha, 1843; Senilia, 1882, 1930 (better known as Stikhotvoreniya v proze; Poems in Prose, 1883, 1945). Bibliography Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh. Beyond Realism: Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Argues that readers should not turn to Turgenev merely for transparent narratives of nineteenth-century Russian life; attempts to expose the unique imaginative vision and literary patterns in Turgenev’s work. Discusses Turgenev’s development of narrative techniques in A Sportsman’s Sketches, analyzing several of the major stories, such as “Bezhin Meadow” and “The Singers.” Brodianski, Nina. “Turgenev’s Short Stories: A Reevaluation.” Slavonic and East European Review 32, no. 78 (1953): 70-91. In this brief but thorough and stimulating study, Brodianski examines Turgenev’s short stories in general, their themes, structure, and psychological illumination of characters, as well as his philosophy (as much as there is of it) and his literary theories about the short story. Inasmuch as it reevaluates some long-standing opinions about Turgenev, it serves a good purpose. Brouwer, Sander. Character in the Short Prose of Ivan Sergeevic Turgenev. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. Excellent look at Turgenev’s characters in the short fiction. Gregg, Richard. “Turgenev and Hawthorne: The Life-Giving Satyr and the Fallen Faun.” Slavic and East European Journal 41 (Summer, 1997): 258-270. Discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence on Turgenev and comments on the common motif that their “mysterious” stories shared (the uncanny spell, curse, or blight). Claims that Turgenev’s explicit admiration for those works of Hawthorne in which that motif is to be found attests a bond of sympathy between the two writers. Kagan-Kans, Eva. “Fate and Fantasy: A Study of Turgenev’s Fantastic Stories.” Slavic Review 18 (1969): 543-560. Kagan-Kans traces Turgenev’s treatment of fantasy and supernatural elements in his stories, as well as the role of fate and dreams. She also examines Turgenev’s relationship with other writers, especially the Romanticists, and their influence on him as evidenced in individual stories, especially those dealing with fantasy and the supernatural.

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Lowe, David A., ed. Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Collection of essays on Turgenev’s literary works. Bibliography and index. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Turgenev: “Bezhin Meadow” (vol. 1), “The District Doctor” (vol. 2), “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District” (vol. 3), “A Living Relic” (vol. 4), and “Yermolai and the Miller’s Wife” (vol. 8). Seeley, Frank Friedeberg. Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Seeley prefaces his thorough study of Turgenev’s fiction with an outline of Turgenev’s life and a survey of his poetry and plays. This volume incorporates later findings and challenges some established views, especially the traditional notion of the “simplicity” of Turgenev’s works. Seeley stresses the psychological treatment that Turgenev allotted to his characters. Sheidley, William E. “‘Born in Imitation of Someone Else’: Reading Turgenev’s ‘Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District’ as a Version of Hamlet.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Summer, 1990): 391-398. Discusses the character Vasily Vasilyevych as the most emphatic and the most pathetic of the Hamlet types in A Sportsman’s Sketches. Contends that in a striking flash of metafictional irony, Vasily recognizes himself as the walking embodiment of the Hamlet stereotype. Sheidley points out the different implications of the Hamlet character in Elizabethan tragedy and nineteenth century character sketch. Woodward, James B. Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.” London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996. Part of the Critical Studies in Russian Literature series, this is an excellent study of the novel. Provides bibliographical references and an index.

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Mark Twain Twain, Mark

Born: Florida, Missouri; November 30, 1835 Died: Redding, Connecticut; April 21, 1910 Principal short fiction • The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, 1867; Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, 1871; Mark Twain’s Sketches: New and Old, 1875; Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches, 1878; The Stolen White Elephant, and Other Stories, 1882; Merry Tales, 1892; The £1,000,000 BankNote, and Other New Stories, 1893; The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories and Essays, 1900; King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule, 1905; The $30,000 Bequest, and Other Stories, 1906; The Curious Republic of Gondour, and Other Whimsical Sketches, 1919; The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, 1957 (Charles Neider, editor); Letters from the Earth, 1962; Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain, 1962; Mark Twain’s Satires and Burlesques, 1967 (Franklin R. Rogers, editor); Mark Twains’s Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, 1967 (John S. Tuckey, editor); Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck and Tom, 1969 (Walter Blair, editor); Mark Twain’s Fables of Man, 1972 (Tuckey, editor); Life as I Find It, 1977 (Neider, editor); Early Tales and Sketches, 1979-1981 (2 volumes; Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, editors); A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, 2001 (Roy Blount, Jr., editor). Other literary forms • As a professional writer who felt the need for a large income, Mark Twain published more than thirty books and left many uncollected pieces and manuscripts. He tried every genre, including drama, and even wrote some poetry that is seldom read. His royalties came mostly from subscription books sold door to door, especially five travel volumes. For more than forty years, he occasionally sold material, usually humorous sketches, to magazines and newspapers. He also composed novels, philosophical dialogues, moral fables, and maxims, as well as essays on a range of subjects which were weighted more toward the social and cultural than the belletristic but which were nevertheless often controversial. Achievements • Certainly one of the most beloved and most frequently quoted American writers, Mark Twain earned that honor by creating an original and nearly inimitable style that is thoroughly American. Although he tried nearly every genre from historical fiction to poetry to quasi-scientific fantasy, his novels about boyhood on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are the works that permanently wove his celebrity status into the fabric of American culture. During his own lifetime, he received numerous honors including honorary degrees from Yale University and the University of Missouri. His proudest moment, however, was in 1907, when Oxford University awarded him an honorary LL.D. He was so proud of his scarlet doctor’s gown that he wore it to his daughter’s wedding. Biography • Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Missouri in 1835, Mark Twain adopted his famous pen name twenty-seven years later, while working as a reporter in western Nevada. Throughout the rest of his life, he signed his pen name to virtually all his writings but never hid the fact that his real name was Clemens.

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After his education was cut short by the death of a stern father who had more ambition than success, at the age of eleven Mark Twain was apprenticed to a newspaper office, which, except for the money earned from four years of piloting on the Mississippi, supplied most of his income until 1868. Then, he quickly won eminence as a lecturer and author before his marriage to wealthy Olivia Langdon in 1870 led to a memorably comfortable and active family life which included three daughters. Although always looking to his writing for income, he increasingly devoted energy to business affairs and investments until his publishing house declared bankruptcy in 1894. After his world lecture tour of 1895-1896, he became one of the most admired figures of his time and continued to earn honors until his death in 1910. Analysis • Many readers find Mark Twain most successful in briefer works, including his narratives, because they were not padded to fit some extraneous standard of length. His best stories are narrated by first-person speakers who are seemingly artless, often so convincingly that critics cannot agree concerning the extent to which their ingenuousness is the result of Twain’s self-conscious craft. Although deeply divided himself, Twain seldom created introspectively complex characters or narrators who are unreliable in the Conradian manner. Rather, just as Twain alternated between polarities of attitude, his characters tend to embody some extreme unitary state either of villainy or (especially with young women) of unshakable virtue. Therefore, they too seldom interact effectively. Except when adapting a plot taken from oral tradition, Twain does better with patently artificial situations, which his genius for suggesting authentic speech makes plausible enough. In spite of their faults, Twain’s stories captivate the reader with their irresistible humor, their unique style, and their spirited characters who transfigure the humdrum with striking perceptions. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” • “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is generally regarded as Twain’s most distinctive story, although some readers may prefer Jim Baker’s bluejay yarn, which turns subtly on the psyche of its narrator, or Jim Blaine’s digressions from his grandfather’s old ram, which reach a more physical comedy while evolving into an absurdly tall tale. In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Jim Smiley’s eagerness to bet on anything in the mining camp may strain belief, but it is relatively plausible that another gambler could weigh down Smiley’s frog, Daniel Webster, with quailshot and thus win forty dollars with an untrained frog. Most attempts to find profundity in this folk anecdote involve the few enveloping sentences attributed to an outsider, who may represent the literate easterner being gulled by Simon Wheeler’s seeming inability to stick to his point. The skill of the story can be more conclusively identified, from the deft humanizing of animals to the rising power and aptness of the imagery. Especially adroit is the deadpan manner of Wheeler, who never betrays whether he himself appreciates the humor and the symmetry of his meanderings. Twain’s use of the oral style is nowhere better represented than in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which exemplifies the principles of the author’s essay “How to Tell a Story.” “A True Story” • In 1874, Twain assured the sober Atlantic Monthly that his short story “A True Story” was not humorous, although in fact it has his characteristic sparkle and hearty tone. Having been encouraged by the contemporary appeal for local color, Twain quickly developed a narrator with a heavy dialect and a favorite folk-

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saying that allows a now-grown son to recognize his mother after a separation of thirteen years. While she, in turn, finds scars confirming their relationship on his wrist and head, this conventional plot gains resonance from Rachel’s report of how her husband and seven children had once been separated at a slave auction in Richmond. Contemporaries praised “A True Story” for its naturalness, testimony that Twain was creating more lifelike blacks than any other author by allowing them greater dignity, and Rachel is quick to insist that slave families cared for one another just as deeply as any white families. Her stirringly recounted memories challenged the legend of the Old South even before that legend reached its widest vogue, and her spirit matched Library of Congress her “mighty” body so graphically that “A True Story” must get credit for much more craftsmanship than is admitted by its subtitle, “Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” • In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” in which Twain again uses first-person narration with a flawless touch for emphasizing the right word or syllable, the main character closely resembles the author in age, experience, habits, and tastes. Of more significance is the fact that the story projects Twain’s lifelong struggles with, and even against, his conscience. Here the conscience admits to being the “most pitiless enemy” of its host, whom it is supposed to “improve” but only tyrannizes with gusto while refusing to praise the host for anything. It makes the blunder, however, of materializing as a two-foot dwarf covered with “fuzzy greenish mold” who torments the narrator with intimate knowledge of and contemptuous judgments on his behavior. When beloved Aunty Mary arrives to scold him once more for his addiction to tobacco, his conscience grows so torpid that he can gleefully seize and destroy it beyond any chance of rebirth. Through vivid yet realistic detail, “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” dramatizes common musings about shame and guilt along with the yearnings some persons feel for release from them. If it maintains too comic a tone to preach nihilism or amorality, it leaves readers inclined to view conscience less as a divine agent than as part of psychic dynamics. “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note” • The shopworn texture of “The £1,000,000 BankNote” reveals Twain’s genius for using the vernacular at a low ebb. Narrated by the protagonist, this improbable tale is set in motion by two brothers who disagree over what would happen if some penniless individual were lent a one-million-pound bill

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(then the equivalent of five million U.S. dollars) for thirty days. To solve their argument, they engage in an experiment with a Yankee, Henry Adams, a stockbroker’s clerk stranded in London. Coincidence thickens when, having managed by the tenth day of the experiment to get invited to dinner by an American minister, Adams unknowingly meets the stepdaughter of one of the brothers and woos and wins her that very night. Having just as nimbly gained a celebrity that makes every merchant eager to extend unlimited credit, he endorses a sale of Nevada stocks that enables him to show his future father-in-law that he has banked a million pounds of his own. The overall effect is cheerfully melodramatic and appeals to fantasies about windfalls of money; the reader can share Adams’s pleasure in the surprise and awe he arouses by pulling his banknote out of a tattered pocket. It can be argued that the story indicts a society in which the mere show of wealth can so quickly raise one’s standing, but Twain probably meant Adams to deserve respect for his enterprise and shrewdness when his chance came. “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” • “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is one of the most penetrating of Twain’s stories. It achieves unusual depth of character and, perhaps by giving up the first-person narrator, a firm objectivity that lets theme develop through dialogue and incident. It proceeds with such flair that only a third or fourth reading uncovers thin links in a supposedly inescapable chain of events planned for revenge by an outsider who had been insulted in Hadleyburg, a town smugly proud of its reputation for honesty. Stealthily he leaves a sack of counterfeit gold coins which are to be handed over to the fictitious resident who once gave a needy stranger twenty dollars and can prove it by recalling his words at the time. Next, the avenger sends nineteen leading citizens a letter which tells each of them how to claim the gold, supposedly amounting to forty thousand dollars. During an uproarious town meeting studded with vignettes of local characters, both starchy and plebeian, eighteen identical claims are read aloud; the nineteenth, however, from elderly Edward Richards, is suppressed by the chairman, who overestimates how Richards once saved him from the community’s unjust anger. Rewarded by the stranger and made a hero, Richards is actually tormented to death, both by pangs of conscience and by fear of exposure. Hadleyburg, however, has learned a lesson in humility and moral realism and shortens its motto from the Lord’s Prayer to run: “Lead Us into Temptation.” “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” exhibits Twain’s narrative and stylistic strengths and also dramatizes several of his persistent themes, such as skepticism about orthodox religion, ambivalence toward the conscience but contempt for rationalizing away deserved guilt, and attraction to mechanistic ideas. The story raises profound questions which can never be settled. The most useful criticism asks whether the story’s determinism is kept consistent and uppermost—or, more specifically, whether the reform of Hadleyburg can follow within the patterns already laid out. The ethical values behind the story’s action and ironical tone imply that people can in fact choose to behave more admirably. In printing the story, Harper’s Monthly may well have seen a Christian meliorism, a lesson against self-righteous piety that abandons true charity. The revised motto may warn that the young, instead of being sheltered, should be educated to cope with fallible human nature. More broadly, the story seems to show that the conscience can be trained into a constructive force by honestly confronting the drives for pleasure and self-approval that sway everyone.

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Many of these same themes reappear in quasi-supernatural sketches such as “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Twain never tired of toying with biblical characters, particularly Adam and Eve, or with parodies of Sunday-school lessons. He likewise parodied most other genres, even those which he himself used seriously. In his most serious moods he preached openly against cruelty to animals in “A Dog’s Tale” and “A Horse’s Tale,” supported social or political causes, and always came back to moral choices, as in “Was It Heaven or Hell?” or “The $30,000 Bequest.” Notably weak in self-criticism, he had a tireless imagination capable of daringly unusual perspectives, a supreme gift of humor darkened by brooding over the enigmas of life, and an ethical habit of thought that expressed itself most tellingly through character and narrative. Louis J. Budd With updates by Leslie A. Pearl and the Editors Other major works novels: The Gilded Age, 1873 (with Charles Dudley Warner); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876; The Prince and the Pauper, 1881; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889; The American Claimant, 1892; The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896; Tom Sawyer, Detective, 1896; A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, 1902; Extracts from Adam’s Diary, 1904; A Horse’s Tale, 1906; Eve’s Diary, Translated from the Original Ms, 1906; Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 1909; The Mysterious Stranger, 1916 (revised as The Chronicle of Young Satan, 1969, by Albert Bigelow Paine and Frederick A. Duneka); Report from Paradise, 1952 (Dixon Wecter, editor); Simon Wheeler, Detective, 1963; Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, 1969 (William M. Gibson, editor). plays: Colonel Sellers, pr., pb. 1874 (adaptation of his novel The Gilded Age); Ah Sin, pr. 1877 (with Bret Harte); Is He Dead?: A Comedy in Three Acts, pb. 2003 (Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor). nonfiction: The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; A Tramp Abroad, 1880; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; Following the Equator, 1897 (also known as More Tramp Abroad); How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays, 1897; My Début as a Literary Person, 1903; What Is Man?, 1906; Christian Science, 1907; Is Shakespeare Dead?, 1909; Mark Twain’s Speeches, 1910 (Albert Bigelow Paine, editor); Europe and Elsewhere, 1923 (Paine, editor); Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1924 (2 volumes; Paine, editor); Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1935 (Paine, editor); Letters from the Sandwich Islands, Written for the Sacramento Union, 1937 (G. Ezra Dane, editor); Mark Twain in Eruption, 1940 (Bernard DeVoto, editor); Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, 1940 (Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane, editors); Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, 1949 (Dixon Wecter, editor); The Love Letters of Mark Twain, 1949 (Wecter, editor); Mark Twain of the Enterprise: Newspaper Articles and Other Documents, 1862-1864, 1957 (Henry Nash Smith and Frederick Anderson, editors); Traveling with the Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain’s Original Reports from Europe and the Holy Land, 1958 (Daniel Morley McKeithan, editor; letters); Mark TwainHowells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 18721910, 1960 (Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, editors); The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 1961 (Charles Neider, editor); Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 18671894, 1967 (Hamlin Hill, editor); Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco, 1969 (Edgar M. Branch, editor); Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers,

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1893-1909, 1969 (Lewis Leary, editor); A Pen Warmed-Up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest, 1972; Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, 1975-1979 (3 volumes); Mark Twain Speaking, 1976 (Paul Fatout, editor); Mark Twain Speaks for Himself, 1978 (Fatout, editor); Mark Twain’s Letters, 1988-2002 (6 volumes; Edgar Marquess Branch, et al., editors); Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the “North American Review,” 1990 (Michael J. Kiskis, editor); Mark Twain’s Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens Angelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910, 1991 (John Cooley, editor); Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, 2006. miscellaneous: The Writings of Mark Twain, 1922-1925 (37 volumes); The Portable Mark Twain, 1946 (Bernard De Voto, editor); Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1853-1891, 1992 (Louis J. Budd, editor); Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1891-1910, 1992 (Budd, editor). Bibliography Briden, Earl F. “Twainian Pedagogy and the No-Account Lessons of ‘Hadleyburg.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Spring, 1991): 125-234. Argues that within the context of Twain’s skepticism about man’s capacity for moral education, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is not a story about a town’s redemptive lessons of sin but rather an exposé about humanity’s inability to learn morality from either theory or practice, abstract principle or moral pedagogy. Camfield, Gregg. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Collection of original essays, including several by other scholars, on diverse aspects of Twain’s life and writing, with encyclopedia reference features. Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Complete revision of Emerson’s The Authentic Mark Twain (1984), this masterful study traces the development of Twain’s writing against the events in his life and provides illuminating discussions of many individual works. LeMaster, J. R., and James D. Wilson, eds. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1993. Comprehensive reference work broadly similar in organization to Rasmussen’s Mark Twain A to Z, differing in devoting most of its space to literary analysis. Very useful for studying aspects of Twain’s writing. Leonard, James S., ed. Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Collection of essays by leading Twain scholars designed for students and teachers. Special attention is given to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Joan of Arc, Innocents Abroad, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Twain: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (vol. 1), “The Chronicle of Young Satan” (vol. 2), “Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn” (vol. 4), “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note” (vol. 5), and “A True Story: Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (vol. 7). Messent, Peter B. The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Detailed exploration of Twain’s shorter works that takes the innovative approach of examining how Twain planned the individual collections in which they were first published in book form. Rasmussen, R. Kent. Bloom’s How to Write About Mark Twain. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. Practical guide to writing student essays on Mark Twain, with several hundred general and specific suggestions on ten major works, including the

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jumping frog story, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleburg,” and “The War Prayer.” Includes a general introduction to writing on Mark Twain. Each chapter has a lengthy bibliography. ____________. Critical Companion to Mark Twain: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. 2 vols. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Greatly expanded revision of Mark Twain A to Z (1995), which has been hailed as the most impressive reference tool on Mark Twain available. Virtually every character, theme, place, and biographical fact can be researched in these compendious volumes. Contains the most complete chronology ever compiled. Among the new features in this edition are lengthy analytical essays on individual works, a glossary of unusual words used by Twain, and a greatly expanded and annotated bibliography. Sloane, David E. E. Student Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Greenwood Press, 2001. Essays on aspects of Twain’s life, with special chapters on individual books. Wilson, James D. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Mark Twain. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Detailed summaries and analyses of sixty-five stories, including several stories that appear within Twain’s travel books. Perhaps the best single-volume work on Mark Twain’s short fiction. Wonham, Henry B. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Discusses how Twain used the tall-tale conventions of interpretive play, dramatic encounters, and the folk community. Focuses on the relationship between storyteller and audience in Twain’s canon.

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Anne Tyler Tyler, Anne

Born: Minneapolis, Minnesota; October 25, 1941 Principal short fiction • “The Common Courtesies,” 1968; “Who Would Want a Little Boy?,” 1968; “With All Flags Flying,” 1971; “The Bride in the Boatyard,” 1972; “Spending,” 1973; “The Base-Metal Egg,” 1973; “Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles,” 1974; “A Knack for Languages,” 1975; “Some Sign That I Ever Made You Happy,” 1975; “The Geologist’s Maid,” 1975; “Your Place Is Empty,” 1976; “Average Waves in Unprotected Waters,” 1977; “Foot-Footing On,” 1977; “Holding Things Together,” 1977; “Uncle Ahmad,” 1977; “Under the Bosom Tree,” 1977; “Linguistics,” 1978; “Laps,” 1981; “The Country Cook,” 1982; “Teenage Wasteland,” 1983; “Rerun,” 1988; “A Woman Like a Fieldstone House,” 1989; “People Who Don’t Know the Answers,” 1991. Other literary forms • Anne Tyler published the first novel of seventeen novels, If Morning Ever Comes, in 1964. Later titles include Searching for Caleb (1976), Earthly Possessions (1977), Morgan’s Passing (1980), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), Saint Maybe (1991), Ladder of Years (1995), A Patchwork Planet (1998), Back When We Were Grownups (2001), The Amateur Marriage (2004), and Digging to America (2006). Tyler has also published many nonfiction articles and essays about writing and writers. Hundreds of her book reviews have appeared in national periodicals. She has also written a children’s book, Tumble Tower (1993), which was illustrated by her daughter Mitra Modarressi. Achievements • At Duke University, Anne Tyler won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing. In 1966, she won the Mademoiselle magazine award for showing promise as a writer. In 1969 and 1972, she won O. Henry Awards for the short stories “Common Courtesies” and “With All Flags Flying.” In 1977, she received a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her novel Earthly Possessions. In 1980, Morgan’s Passing won her the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. In 1982, Tyler was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which won a PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. In 1985, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist, and in 1988, the film version won four Academy Award nominations. That same year Tyler was a National Book Award finalist for Breathing Lessons, the novel for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1989. Breathing Lessons, Saint Maybe, and Ladder of Years were Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Tyler’s novel The Accidental Tourist was adapted for the screen in 1988, as was her 1970 novel A Slipping-Down Life in 1999. Earthly Possessions, Saint Maybe, and Breathing Lessons were all adapted to television dramas. Biography • When Anne Tyler was seven, her parents moved to Celo, a Quaker commune in North Carolina, to raise their family in a quiet, isolated environment. Anne and her two brothers were schooled at home. Tyler became an avid reader, and her favorite book was The Little House (1942) by Virginia Lee Burton. Unable to support the family adequately at Celo, Tyler’s parents moved to Raleigh in 1952, where her father

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worked as a research chemist, and her mother became a social worker. The Tylers were activists in the Civil Rights movement, opposed the death penalty, and, as Quaker pacifists, opposed U.S. involvement in war. With this background, it is surprising that Tyler’s writing reveals no political or social ideology, other than her portrayal of the family as a basic unit in society. Tyler attended high school in Raleigh, where Mrs. Peacock, her English teacher, taught literature with a dramatic flair and inspired Anne’s desire to become a writer. At the age of sixteen, she entered Duke University on scholarship, majoring in Russian studies and literature, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1961. At Duke, Professors Reynolds Price and William Blackburn recognized her talent. Eudora Welty’s conversational dialogue, southern settings, and gentle satire also influenced Tyler. Tyler attended Columbia University but did not finish her master’s degree. While working in the library at Duke University, she met Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian medical student, and married him in 1963. After he completed his residency in child psychiatry at McGill University in Canada, the couple moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where they established a permanent home and produced two daughters, Tezh and Mitra. After Taghi Modarressi died there of lymphoma in April, 1997, Tyler continued to reside in, and set her fiction in, Baltimore. As a full-time wife and mother, Tyler wrote and published many short stories and book reviews. Always time-oriented and well organized, she wrote when the children were napping or at school. She has said that her early novels are flawed because normal family distractions interfered with her concentration while she was writing them. In 1970, her novels began to attract readers and critics, and by 1980, her reputation as a mature writer was secure. Tyler maintains disciplined work methods. She begins writing after breakfast and continues for seven hours daily until late afternoon. She keeps a file of ideas, interesting people, and newspaper articles. Then she plans a story, using charts, pictures, and doodles. She imagines life inside her characters’ skins, until they come alive for her. Tyler writes early drafts in longhand because the flow of her pen stimulates creativity; then she writes final drafts on a word processor. When she finishes a project, she rests and enjoys gardening and her family. Her two greatest fears are blindness and arthritis, diseases affecting the senses of sight and touch. As Tyler’s skill and success as a novelist has grown, her prolific production of short stories and articles has declined. Analysis • Classified by critics as a southern writer, Anne Tyler focuses on modern families and their unique relationships. Her underlying theme is that time inexorably changes the direction of people’s lives. The past determines the present and the present determines the future. Her stories show that life moves in generational cycles and that conflicts almost inevitably arise as time passes and settings change. Within families, the perspective of love evolves, children grow up and leave home, and death and grief sever connections. When a character’s freedom is restricted by too many demands on energy or resources, the individual must make choices, adapt to changing circumstances, and endure insecurity and hardship before reaching a temporary equilibrium. Tyler says that life is a “web, crisscrossed by strings of love and need and worry.” Her humanistic worldview focuses on individuals, isolated and unable to communicate complex emotions such as love, grief, despair, or guilt. Missed connections, language, social class, age, religious beliefs, ethnicity, and other barriers prevent communication.

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Tyler is always aware of the writer/reader connection. What draws a reader are “concrete details, carefully layered to create complexity and depth, like real life.” Characters must be individuals with unique qualities, and their dialogue must flow like conversation. Tyler often uses multiple points of view as a third-person observer. She says she is able to assume a convincing masculine persona in her narrative because most human experience has no particular gender. She makes effective use of flashbacks, in which a character’s memory travels to the past and links it to the present and future. “Your Place Is Empty” • The idea for this story occurred when Tyler accompanied her husband, Taghi Modarressi, to Iran to meet his large family. Before the journey, Tyler, like the character Elizabeth, taught herself Persian and spoke it well enough to communicate on a surface level, but she soon discovered that mere words could not express complex emotions or overcome her feelings of being an outsider in a foreign culture. The situation is reversed in “Your Place Is Empty.” Mrs. Ardavi arrives in the United States for a six-month visit with her son Hassan, his American wife Elizabeth, and their small daughter. Hassan has lived in the United States for twelve years and is a successful doctor. Upon arrival at the airport, his mother does not recognize him. She reminds him that his place at home is still empty and urges him to return to Iran. Hassan has not forgotten his heritage, but he has changed, an underlying theme of the story. Another theme shows how conflicts arise when people from different cultures cannot adapt. At first Elizabeth tries to make Mrs. Ardavi welcome, but soon language and culture become barriers to communication. As Mrs. Ardavi attempts to express her personality and infuse her son’s home with Iranian customs, Elizabeth feels resentful and isolated, as if her freedom within her own home is restricted. Food preparation symbolizes their conflict. Elizabeth serves bacon, a taboo food for Mrs. Ardavi, who clutters Elizabeth’s kitchen with spices and herbs, pots and pans, as she prepares Hassan’s favorite lamb stew. She thinks that Elizabeth’s meals are inadequate and that she is a negligent mother. Like an unsuccessful arbiter, Hassan stands between his mother and Elizabeth. Tyler uses a narrative point of view that shifts between Mrs. Ardavi and Elizabeth. Insight into both women’s personalities evokes reader sympathy, especially for Mrs. Ardavi. In flashbacks, she recalls her traditional Muslim girlhood; an arranged marriage to a man she never loved; his prolonged illness and death; grief over her oldest son’s unhappy marriage and his untimely death; problems with the spoiled and pregnant wife of her youngest son; and the small comfort of “knowing her place” within the family circle of thirteen sisters who gossip and drink tea each afternoon. Elizabeth expresses resentment at her mother-in-law’s interference with icy silence, zealous housecleaning, and private complaints to Hassan. Realizing that the situation has reached an impasse, Hassan suggests that for the duration of her visit, Mrs. Ardavi move to a nearby apartment, away from the intimacy of his family. Unable to find “her place” in her son’s American home, Mrs. Ardavi returns to Iran. “Average Waves in Unprotected Waters” • This story shows how the passage of time causes physical and emotional changes for Bet, a single mother, and Arnold, her mentally disabled son. Avery Blevins, Bet’s “grim and cranky” husband, deserts her after a doctor diagnoses their baby as mentally disabled, the result of a fateful genetic

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error. Without family (her parents are dead), Bet supports herself and her child at a low-paying job. Arnold’s increasingly wild tantrums force her to place him in a state hospital. Bet’s landlady and longtime baby-sitter is a kindly woman, who has grown too old to control ArTO VIEW IMAGE, nold’s aggressive behavior. His lack PLEASE SEE of response to her tears and special PRINT EDITION gift of cookies when he leaves indiOF THIS BOOK. cates his infantile emotional level. On the train he enjoys watching the conductor scold a black woman for trying to ride without a ticket and cheers loudly as if they are actors in a television comedy. Arnold ignores the hospital setting and the nurse until his mother leaves. Then, like a small child, he screams loudly enough for Bet to hear him in the driveway as she climbs into a taxi. The train is late; so Bet dries her tears and watches strangers draping © Diana Walker bunting on a speaker’s stand in preparation for a ceremony dedicating the antiquated depot’s restoration. She observes their actions while she waits for the train to take her life in a new direction. Tyler describes how the passage of time erodes concrete objects and compares it to changing human relationships. The shabby boardinghouse has peeling layers of wallpaper, symbolic of passing time and the people who once lived there. Bet is worn down physically and emotionally by Arnold’s hyperactive behavior, his short attention span, and his loud, incoherent speech. Marble steps at the mental hospital are worn down by the feet of care-givers and patients who have climbed them. The hospital dormitory is stripped of color and warmth. Only a small, crooked clown picture indicates that children might live there. The nurse disengages emotionally when Bet tries to tell her about Arnold’s unique qualities. The train conductor, taxi driver, and station attendant are coldly impersonal, showing lack of empathy for Bet and Arnold. In the past, they have witnessed many arrivals and departures like Bet’s and no longer respond to them. The title “Average Waves in Unprotected Waters” indicates how the main characters, Bet and Arnold, adapt to “waves” in their lives. Bet faces disappointments and griefs, just as she once allowed “ordinary” breakers in the ocean to slam against her body, “as if staunchness were a virtue.” The waves are not life-threatening; they are unhappy experiences to which she and Arnold must adapt in environments of “unprotected waters.” Bet must endure life without family, goals, or resources, and Arnold must endure life in an impersonal mental hospital without his mother’s love and protection.

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“Teenage Wasteland” • Originally published in Seventeen magazine, this story shows how lack of communication between a troubled adolescent and his parents results in tragedy. Tyler’s title, “Teenage Wasteland,” comes from a popular song by the musical group the Who. Contributing factors to fifteen-year-old Donnie’s “wasted” life include Daisy and Matt’s inept parenting skills, a tutor’s destructive influence, and Donnie’s changing needs as an adolescent. Poor grades, petty thefts, smoking and drinking, and truancy are symptoms of Donnie’s low self-esteem. Tyler tells the story from a third-person point of view, limited to Daisy, a mother who agonizes over her guilt and inadequacies as a parent. Significantly, Matt, the father, does not get directly involved in guiding or disciplining his son. Neither parent is able to talk to Donnie about his personal problems. They focus on academic performance. At first, the parents make strict rules, and Daisy helps Donnie complete his assignments. However, her best efforts result in minimal improvement and cause major emotional storms. Humiliated and unable to cope, Daisy takes Donnie to see Cal, a young counselor and tutor whose office is in his house, where other students lounge around, playing basketball and listening to rock music by the Who. Cal “marches to a different drummer” and encourages Donnie and other adolescents under his tutelage to rebel from “controlling” adults, like parents and school authorities. Accepting responsibility for one’s actions, setting goals, and studying are not part of Cal’s agenda. Donnie gradually withdraws from his family in favor of “hanging out” at Cal’s with teenagers like himself. Donnie is expelled from the private school he attends after authorities find beer and cigarettes in his locker, and his academic performance drops even lower. Instead of going home, he runs to Cal’s. Donnie claims it was a “frame up,” and Cal excuses the boy by saying that the school violated his civil rights. Angry and frustrated, Daisy takes Donnie home and enrolls him in public school, where he finishes the semester. Miserable and friendless, Donnie runs away, his youth wasted, and Daisy wonders what went wrong. “People Who Don’t Know the Answers” • This story, published in The New Yorker, is a revised chapter from Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe. Doug Bedloe, a recently retired schoolteacher, realizes that nobody has the final answers to life’s mysteries. The passage of time changes everything. To fill the void in his life, he tries several boring and unproductive hobbies. Then he becomes interested in some foreign students who live across the street. Like actors in a comedy, they enjoy a casual lifestyle and are fascinated by American gadgets, music, language, and clothing, far different from the “real” life and family responsibilities they have known in distant lands. Doug compares their experimental lifestyle to his own static existence. Seen through the foreigners’ window screen, his house reminds him of a framed needlepoint picture, something “cozy, old-fashioned, stitched in place forever.” Yet Doug’s family has changed. His wife Bee has become disabled with arthritis. Death has taken their oldest son Danny, whose children now live with them. Beastie, Doug’s old dog and companion, is buried under the azalea. Adult siblings, Ian and Claudia, have gradually assumed family authority. Doug feels physically fit, but his life has no anchor. His past is gone, and he must somehow endure the present. Ian invites his family to a picnic sponsored by the Church of the Second Chance, viewed by some as a cult, or “alternative religion.” Brother Emmett and church members have helped Ian endure his overwhelming sense of guilt over Danny’s accidental

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death and support his role as surrogate father to Danny’s children. Doug acknowledges that sharing one’s joys and sorrows would benefit him, but Bee remains cynical. Doug’s past and the present reality make him feel split, like the foreigners’ old car, parked half inside their garage with the faulty automatic door bisecting it. Martha E. Rhynes With updates by the Editors Other major works children’s literature: Tumble Tower, 1993 (illustrations by Mitra Modarressi). novels: If Morning Ever Comes, 1964; The Tin Can Tree, 1965; A Slipping-Down Life, 1970; The Clock Winder, 1972; Celestial Navigation, 1974; Searching for Caleb, 1976; Earthly Possessions, 1977; Morgan’s Passing, 1980; Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 1982; The Accidental Tourist, 1985; Breathing Lessons, 1988; Saint Maybe, 1991; Ladder of Years, 1995; A Patchwork Planet, 1998; Back When We Were Grownups, 2001; The Amateur Marriage, 2004; Digging to America, 2006. Bibliography Bail, Paul. Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Part of a series of reference books about popular contemporary writers, this book contains a biography, literary influences on Anne Tyler, and individual chapters that discuss twelve of Tyler’s novels. General analysis includes how her novels fit into southern regional literature, women’s literature, and popular culture, as well as critiques from feminist and multicultural points of view. Bail also discusses plot, characters, themes, literary devices, historical settings, and narrative points of view as they apply to individual novels. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography. Croft, Robert W. Anne Tyler: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Part of a series focusing on American authors, this book is divided into two parts: a biography which includes four chapters, each followed by endnotes. It concludes with an extensive bibliography, divided into primary and secondary sources, with a list of Anne Tyler’s papers at Duke University. “A Setting Apart” concerns her childhood in a commune, teen years in Raleigh, college at Duke, and early writing. “The Only Way Out” refers to her feelings of isolation during her early marriage and motherhood and how writing her first novels and short stories kept her in touch with the real world. “Rich with Possibilities” refers to her life in Baltimore, the setting of most of her stories, her book reviews, and discussion of her middle-period novels. “A Border Crossing” deals with Tyler’s fame and recurring themes in her novels. Harper, Natalie. “Teenage Wasteland.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Teenage Wasteland” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Robertson, Mary F. “Anne Tyler: Medusa Points and Contact Points.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Discussion of the narrative form of Tyler’s novels, focusing on her disruption of the conventional expectations of family novels.

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Salwak, Dale, ed. Anne Tyler as Novelist. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Collection of essays addressing Tyler’s development, attainments, and literary reputation. Stephens, C. Ralph, ed. The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Collection of essays selected from papers given in 1989 at the Anne Tyler Symposium in Baltimore and representing a range of interests and approaches. Thorndike, Jonathan L. “The Artificial Family.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “The Artificial Family” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Tyler, Anne. “Still Just Writing.” In The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Writers Reflect on Their Art and Situation. Edited by Janet Sternberg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. Tyler’s personal essay explains how she keeps her life balanced. Writing fiction draws her into an imaginary world, but being a wife and mother keeps her anchored to the real world of home and family. Writing novels takes much time and concentration, so she has gradually given up writing short stories. Revised chapters from some of her novels appear in periodicals as short stories. She has reduced the number of book reviews she writes because she fears her lack of enthusiasm will not give books and authors a fair analysis. Voelker, Joseph C. Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. The first book-length study of Anne Tyler’s fiction, this volume focuses on the development of Tyler’s aesthetics and her treatment of character, particularly her view of selfhood as mystery and of experience as accidental.

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John Updike Updike, John

Born: Shillington, Pennsylvania; March 18, 1932 Principal short fiction • The Same Door, 1959; Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories, 1962; Olinger Stories: A Selection, 1964; The Music School, 1966; Museums and Women, and Other Stories, 1972; Problems, and Other Stories, 1979; Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author, 1979; Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories, 1979; The Chaste Planet, 1980; Bech Is Back, 1982; The Beloved, 1982; Trust Me, 1987; Brother Grasshopper, 1990 (limited edition); The Afterlife, and Other Stories, 1994; Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, “Rabbit Remembered,” 2000; The Complete Henry Bech: Twenty Stories, 2001; The Early Stories, 19531975, 2003. Other literary forms • A prolific and versatile writer, John Updike is an accomplished novelist, best known for his “Rabbit” tetralogy, but he is also the author of The Centaur (1963), which fuses myth and realism in middle-class America; Couples (1968), which examines the social and sexual mores of a modern American town; The Coup (1978), in which the narrator is writing, in memoirs, the history of an imaginary African nation; and Roger’s Version (1986) and S (1988), which are creative reworkings of the situation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). His later novels include Brazil (1994), Toward the End of Time (1997), Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998), Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Seek My Face (2002), Villages (2004), and Terrorist (2006). Updike has also published many books of verse, including Americana, and Other Poems (2001); a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and scores of reviews and critical essays on literature, music, and painting. His nonfiction books include Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996), More Matter: Essays and Criticism (1999), and Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2005). Achievements • The Centaur won for John Updike the National Book Award in 1964. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the youngest man to receive the honor at that time. “The Bulgarian Poetess” won an O. Henry Award in 1966. Rabbit Is Rich (1981) won an American Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, while Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (1983), a nine-hundred-page volume, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1991, Rabbit at Rest won a Pulitzer Prize, and in 1995, it received the Howells Medal. In 1996, Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) won the Ambassador Book Award, and the next year Updike received the Campion Award. In 1998, he earned the Harvard Arts First Medal and the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Biography • John Updike was born in 1932, the only child of Wesley Updike, a cable splicer who lost his job in the Depression and had to support his family on a meager teacher’s salary ($1,740 per year), and Linda Grace Updike, an aspiring writer. The family moved to Plowville from Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1945 to live on the farm of Updike’s maternal grandparents. Updike recalls that a gift subscription at that time to The New Yorker, a Christmas present from an aunt, was a significant factor in his decision to become an artist. In high school, he drew for the school paper, wrote

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articles and poems, and demonstrated sufficient academic gifts to be awarded a full scholarship to Harvard University, which he entered in 1950. At college, Updike majored in English, became editor of the prestigious Harvard Lampoon, and graduated with honors in 1954. That year, The New Yorker accepted a poem and a story, an event that Updike remembered as “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.” After graduation, Updike and his wife of one year, Mary Pennington, a fine arts major from Radcliffe, spent 1955 in Oxford, where Updike held a Knox Fellowship. When E. B. White offered him a job as a staff writer with The New Yorker, Updike accepted and spent the next two years contributing brief, witty pieces to the “Talk of the Town” section at the front of the magazine. During this time, he worked on the manuscript of a six-hundred-page book, which he decided not to publish because it had “too many of the traits of a first novel.” When his second child was born, he believed that he needed a different setting in which to live and work (the literary world in New York seemed “unnutritious and interfering”) and moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he found “the space” to write “the Pennsylvania thing,” which became the novel The Poorhouse Fair (1959), and his first collection of short stories, The Same Door. Choosing to work in a rented office in downtown Ipswich, Updike began an extremely active literary career that would continue for several decades. The first book in the Rabbit series, Rabbit, Run, was published in 1960, the same year in which the last of Updike’s four children was born. Rabbit, Run caught the attention of the reading public with its combination of sexual candor and social insight, but The Centaur was Updike’s first real success with serious critics, winning the National Book Award in 1964. That same year, Updike was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During 1964 and 1965, Updike traveled in Eastern Europe, the source for his first story about Henry Bech (“The Bulgarian Poetess”), who became a kind of slightly displaced version of himself in the guise of a Jewish writer from New York. Further travels to Africa led to other Bech stories as well as The Coup, but Updike generally remained in Ipswich, involved in local affairs, writing constantly, and using the beach to find the sun, which was the only cure at that time for a serious case of psoriasis. The second Rabbit book, Rabbit Redux, was published in 1971, and short-story collections appeared regularly. During the late 1960’s, Updike sold the screen rights to his novel Couples for a half-million dollars (the film was not produced). After fifteen years, Updike and his wife ended their marriage, and in 1974 he moved to Boston, returning to the North Shore area in 1976, the year before he married Martha Bernhard. In 1977, Updike published his fifth volume of verse, Tossing and Turning, from a major press, and in 1979, two collections of short stories that he had written during the emotional turmoil of the last years of his marriage and its conclusion were issued as Problems, and Other Stories and Too Far to Go. The latter volume included all the stories about a couple named Maples whose lives were a literary transmutation of aspects of Updike’s first marriage. Updike continued his energetic and inventive career through the 1980’s, writing two novels imaginatively derived from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, possibly completing the Rabbit series with Rabbit at Rest (1990) and collecting another nine hundred pages of essays in Odd Jobs (1991). In 1991, Rabbit at Rest won a Pulitzer Prize, and Updike continued to garner awards throughout the 1990’s. He is known as one of the United States’ leading writers.

Updike, John Analysis • From the beginning of his career as a writer, John Updike demonstrated his strengths as a brilliant stylist and a master of mood and tone whose linguistic facility has sometimes overshadowed the dimensions of his vision of existence in the twentieth century. His treatment of some of the central themes of modern times—sexual and social politics, the nature of intimate relationships, the collapse of traditional values, the uncertainty of the human condition as the twentieth century drew to a close—is as revealing and compelling as that of any of his contemporaries. Although he is regarded mainly as a novelist, the short story may well be his true métier, and his ability to use its compressed structure to generate intensity and to offer succinct insight has made his work a measure of success for writers of short fiction, an evolving example of the possibilities of innovation and invention in a traditional narrative form.

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The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories • Always eloquent about his aspirations and intentions—as he is about almost everything he observes—John Updike remarked to Charles Thomas Samuels in an interview in 1968 that some of the themes of his work are “domestic fierceness within the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind of evolution,” and that his work is “meditation, not pontification.” In his short fiction, his meditations have followed an arc of human development from the exuberance of youth to the unsettling revelations of maturity and on toward the uncertainties of old age, a “curve of sad time” (as he ruefully described the years from 1971 to 1978, when his first marriage failed), which contains the range of experience of an extremely incisive, very well-educated, and stylistically brilliant man who has been able to reach beyond the limits of his own interesting life to capture the ethos of an era. Updike’s artistic inclinations were nurtured by his sensitive, supportive parents, who recognized his gifts and his needs, while the struggles of his neighbors in rural Pennsylvania during the Depression left him with a strong sense of the value of community and the basis for communal cohesion in a reliable, loving family. At Harvard, his intellectual capabilities were celebrated and encouraged, and in his first job with The New Yorker, his ability to earn a living through his writing endowed his entire existence with an exhilaration that demanded expression in a kind of linguistic rapture. The 1950’s marked the steepest incline in time’s curve, and his first two collections, The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories, while primarily covering his youth

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and adolescence in the town of Shillington (which he calls Olinger), are written from the perspective of the young man who overcame the limitations of an economically strained and culturally depleted milieu to marry happily, begin a family, and capitalize on his talents in the profession that he adored. There is no false sentimentality about Olinger or the narrowness of some its citizens. Updike always saw right through the fakery of the chamber of commerce manipulators who disguised their bigotry and anti-intellectualism with pitches to patriotism, but the young men in these stories often seem destined to overcome whatever obstacles they face to move toward the promise of some artistic or social reward. In “Flight,” a high school senior is forced to relinquish his interest in a classmate because of his mother’s pressures and his social status, but the loss is balanced by his initial venture into individual freedom. “The Alligators” depicts a moment of embarrassed misperception, but in the context of the other stories, it is only a temporary setback, an example of awkwardness that might, upon reflection, contribute to the cultivation of a subtler sensibility. “The Happiest I’ve Been” epitomizes the author’s attitude at a pivotal point in his life, poised between the familiar if mundane streets of his childhood and the infinite expanse of a world beyond, enjoying the lingering nostalgia he feels for home ground, which he can carry in memory as he moves on to a wider sphere of experience. These themes are rendered with a particular power in the often-anthologized “A&P” and in “Wife-Wooing,” both from Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories. “A&P” • As in many of his most effective stories, in “A&P” Updike found a voice of singular appropriateness for his narrative consciousness—a boy of nineteen from a working-class background who is working as a checkout clerk at the local A&P grocery store. The store stands for the assembly-line numbness that is a part of the lockstep life that seems to be the likely destiny of all the young men in the town, and it serves as a means of supply for a nearby resort area. When three young women pass the boy’s register, he is enchanted by “the queen,” a girl who appears “more than pretty,” and when she is ordered to dress properly by the store manager on her next visit (“Girls, this isn’t the beach”), Sammy feels compelled to deliver a declaration of passionate defense of their innocence. Frustrated by the incipient stodginess and puritanical repression of the entire town and moved by his heart-driven need to make some kind of chivalrous gesture, he finds that his only recourse is to mumble “I quit” as the girls leave the store. Lengel, the aptly named manager-curmudgeon, speaking for unreasoning minor authority, uses several power trips to maintain his petty tyranny, but Sammy refuses to back down, even when Lengel presents the ultimate guilt ploy, “You don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad.” This is an appeal to conformist quiescence, and Sammy, like most of Updike’s protagonists, is susceptible to the possibility of hurting or disgracing his family in a small, gossip-ridden community. When Lengel warns him, “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Sammy recognizes the validity of his threat but realizes that, if he backs down now, he will always back down in similar situations. Frightened and uncertain, he finds the resolve to maintain his integrity by carrying through his gesture of defiance. He knows that he will have to accept the consequences of his actions, but this is the true source of his real strength. Acknowledging that now “he felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter,” his acceptance of the struggle is at the root of his ability to face challenges in the future. As if to ratify his decision, Lengel is described in the last paragraph reduced to Sammy’s slot,

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“checking the sheep through,” his visage “dark gray and his back stiff.” If the reward for selling out is a life like Lengel’s, then even an act that no one but its agent appreciates (the girls never notice their champion) is better than the defeat of submerging the self in the despair of denial. “Wife-Wooing” • “Wife-Wooing” is the real reward for acting according to principle. If the A&P is the symbol of enclosure and the girl a figure for the wonder of the cosmos beyond, then marriage to a woman who incarnates the spirit of wonder contains the possibilities for paradise. The mood of ecstasy is established immediately by the narrator’s declaration of devotion, “OH MY LOVE. Yes. Here we sit, on warm broad floor-boards, before a fire. . . .” He is a man whose marriage, in its initial stages, is informed by what seems like an exponential progression of promise. Thus, although he has “won” his mate, he is impelled to continue to woo her as a testament to his continuing condition of bliss, of his exultation in the sensuality of the body’s familiar but still mysterious terrain—its “absolute geography.” The evocative description of the couple together—framed in images of light and warmth—is sufficient to convey the delight they share, but what makes the story noteworthy is Updike’s employment and investigation of the erotics of language as a register of feeling. The mood of arousal becomes a kind of celebration of the words that describe it, so that it is the “irrefutably magical life language leads with itself” that becomes the substance of erotic interest. Updike, typically, recalls James Joyce, using Blazes Boylan’s word “smackwarm” from “the legendary, imperfectly explored grottoes of Ulysses” to let loose a chain of linguistic associations beginning with a consideration of the root etymology of “woman”—the “wide w, the receptive o. Womb.” Located in a characteristically masculine perspective (almost inevitable considering Updike’s background and the historical context), the narrator envisions himself as a warrior/hunter in prehistoric times, and in a brilliantly imaginative, affectionate parody of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, Updike continues to express the husband’s exultation through the kind of linguistic overdrive that makes his mastery of styles the focus of admiration (and envy) of many of his peers. Beneath the wordplay and the almost self-congratulatory cleverness, however, there is still another level of intent. Once the element of erotic power in language itself has been introduced, Updike is free to employ that language in an investigation of sensuality that strains at the bounds of what was acceptable in 1960. His purpose is to examine a marriage at the potentially dangerous seven-year point, to recall the sexual history of the couple, and to show how the lessons of mutual experience have enabled them to deepen their erotic understanding as the marriage progressed. Continuing to use language to chart the erogenous regions of the mind and body, Updike arranges a series of puns (“Oh cunning trick”) so that the dual fascination of love—for wife, words—is expressed in intertwined images of passion. The story concludes with the husband leaving for work in the cold stone of a city of “heartless things,” then returning to the eternal mystery of woman/wooing, where, as Robert Creeley’s poem “The Wife” expresses it, he knows “two women/ and the one/ is tangible substance,/ flesh and bone,” while “the other in my mind/ occurs.” The Henry Bech stories • Updike’s energetic involvement with the dimensions of life—the domestic and the artistic—crested on a curve of satisfaction for him as the 1950’s drew to a close. The chaotic explosion of countercultural diversity that took

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place in the 1960’s fractured the comforting coordinates of a world with which Updike had grown very familiar, and he began to find himself in an adversary position both toward the confines of bourgeois social values and toward the sprawling uncertainty of a country in entropic transition. As a means of confronting this situation at a remove that would permit some aesthetic distance from his displeasure, Updike created Henry Bech, an urban, blocked Jewish writer seemingly the polar opposite of the now urbane Updike but actually only a slight transmutation of his own sensibility. Bech is much more successful in managing the perils of the age than Harry Angstrom, who represents Updike’s peevish squareness in Rabbit Redux, and the “interview” “Bech Meets Me” (November, 1971) is a jovial display of Updike’s witty assessment of his problems and goals. The individual Bech stories, beginning with “The Bulgarian Poetess” (from The Music School), which covers Updike’s experiences on a trip to Eastern Europe sponsored by the State Department, generally work as separate entities, but they are linked sufficiently that there is a clear progression in Bech: A Book, while Bech Is Back is closer to a novel than a collection of short fiction and Bech at Bay is classified as long fiction. Through the personae of Henry Bech and Rabbit Angstrom, among others, Updike maintained a distinct distance from the political and incipient personal turmoil that he was experiencing. The Music School • In The Music School, the stories include fond recollections of a positive, recent past, as in “The Christian Roommates” (which “preserved” aspects of his Harvard experience), or tentative excursions into the malaise of the times, as in the fascinating dissection of psychoanalytic methods offered by “My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails” and in the unusual venture into the possibilities of renewal in a natural setting of “The Hermit.” In this story, the prickly, idiosyncratic spirit of the New England individualist and environmentalist Henry David Thoreau is expressed as an urge to escape from the social realities of success—an essentially forlorn quest for a larger sense of life than “they” will permit and an attempt to explore the possibility of a mystical essence beyond the attainment of intellectual power. Museums and Women, and Other Stories • Although Updike spoke admiringly of the “splendid leafiness” of Pennsylvania and could evoke the mood of Scotland’s highland moors (as in “Macbech”) with typical facility, his central subject has always been the nature of relationships. In Museums and Women, and Other Stories, he returned to the consequences of marked changes in the social climate and his personal life that could not be avoided by fictional explorations of subsidiary concerns. The story “When Everyone Was Pregnant” is a paean to an old order passing into history, a celebration of years of relative pleasure and satisfaction that he calls “the Fifties” but which actually encompass the first half of the century. “My Fifties,” he labels them, positioning himself at the center of a benign cosmos, where tests were passed (“Entered them poor and left them comfortable. Entered them chaste and left them a father”) and life was relatively uncomplicated. The paragraphs of the story are like a shorthand list of bounty (“Jobs, houses, spouses of our own”), and the entire era is cast in an aura of innocence, a prelude to a sudden shock of consciousness that utterly changed everything. The factors that caused the shift are never identified, leaving the narrator bewildered (“Now: our babies drive cars, push pot, shave, menstruate, riot for peace, eat macrobiotic”), but the alteration in perception is palpable and its ramifications (“Sarah looks away” after fifteen shared years) unavoidable.

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The last section of Museums and Women, and Other Stories contains five stories under the subhead “The Maples.” Updike eventually published seventeen stories about Richard and Joan Maple, a family with four children that might be said to approximate Updike’s first marriage, in Too Far to Go, and the narrative thread that becomes apparent in the full collection is the transition from optimism and contentment to uncertainty and fracture. A story that registers the process of psychological displacement particularly well is the last one in Museums and Women, and Other Stories, “Sublimating,” in which the Maples have decided to give up sex, which they have mistakenly identified as the “only sore point” in their marriage. Since nearly all that Updike has written on the subject indicates that sex is at the heart of everything that matters in a relationship, the decision—as Updike assumed would be obvious to everyone but the parties involved—was a false solution that could only aggravate the problem. What becomes apparent as the story progresses is that everything in the relationship has become a pretext for disguising true feeling, but the desperation of the participants makes their methods of camouflage sympathetic and understandable. Unable to accept that change in both parties has permanently altered their position, Richard and Joan repeat strategies that have previously revitalized their marriage, but nothing can be successful, since the actors no longer fit their roles. The procedures of the past cannot be recapitulated, and their efforts produce a series of empty rituals that leave the Maples exhausted and angry. Using external remedies for internal maladies (the purchase of an old farmhouse, impulsive acquisition of trivia), bantering about each other’s lovers to reignite passion, turning their children into would-be allies, exchanging barbed, bitchy, and self-regarding comments, the Maples are more baffled than destructive, but both of them are aware that they will eventually have to confront the fact that they have no solution. Sublimation is ultimately suppression of truth, and Richard Maple’s description of the people in a pornographic film house on Forty-second Street in Manhattan as perpetual spectators, who watch unseeing while meaningless acts of obscenity occur in the distance, stands as an emblem of stasis and nullity, a corollary to the paralysis that engulfs the couple. Joan Maple’s final comment on their current state, a pathetic observation about the “cleansing” aspects of their nonsensual behavior, brings the story to a conclusion that is warped with tension, a situation that Richard Maple’s comment, “we may be on to something,” does nothing to relieve. Problems, and Other Stories • Updike’s next collection, Problems, and Other Stories, contains a prefatory note that begins, “Seven years since my last short story collection? There must have been problems.” The central problem has been the end of Updike’s first marriage and the removal of the core of certainty that the domestic structure of his family provided. The unraveling of the threads that were woven through a lifetime of intelligent analysis and instinctual response called everything into question and opened a void that had been lurking near the surface of Updike’s work. Updike was far too perceptive ever to assume that a stable family was possible for everyone or that it would provide answers for everything. From the start of the Rabbit tetralogy, the strains inherent in an ongoing marital arrangement were examined closely, but the dissolution of his own primary household drew several specific responses that expanded the range and depth of his short fiction. First, the sad facts of the separation and divorce were handled in the last Maple stories. “Separating” recounts the parents’ attempts to explain the situation to their children. It is written in bursts of lacerating dialogue, a conversation wrought in pain

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and doubt that concludes with a child posing the tormenting, unanswerable query “Why?” to Richard Maple. “Here Come the Maples” presents the ceremony of the divorce as a reverse marriage, complete with programmed statements forcing the couple to agree by saying “I do.” The jaunty tone of the proceedings does not totally mask the looming cloud of uncertainty that covers the future. Then, the artist turned toward his work for sustenance. In “From the Journal of a Leper,” Updike projects his psychic condition into the life of a potter who is afflicted with a serious skin disease akin to his own. The fear of leprosy stands for all of his doubts before an unknown universe no longer relatively benign; his work provides some compensation but is intricately connected to his psychological stability; a woman with whom he is developing a relationship improves and complicates the situation. The story is open-ended, but in a forecast of the direction Updike has begun to chart for his protagonists, the artist recognizes the necessity of standing alone, dependent ultimately on his own strength. The final words may be more of a self-directed exhortation than a summary of actuality, but they represent a discernible goal: “I am free, as other men. I am whole.” “Transaction” • The difficulties of freedom and the elusiveness of wholeness are explored in “Transaction,” one of Updike’s most powerful stories. In The Paris Review interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, Updike said: About sex in general, by all means let’s have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let’s take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior. The transaction of the title involves a man in his middle years, married but alone in a city labeled “N—,” in December at a conference, who somewhat impulsively picks up a prostitute and takes her to his hotel room. What exactly he is seeking is not entirely clear, because the cold, mechanical city and the “raffish army of females” occupying the streets are as much threat as promise and his temporary liberty to act as he chooses is undercut by his feelings of isolation and loneliness. Regarding his actions as a version of an exploratory adventure in which he is curious about how he will react and tempted not only by lust but also by the desire to test his virility and validity in establishing a human connection with the girl, he is moving into unknown country, where his usual persuasive strategies have no relevance. The “odorless metal” of the room mocks his efforts to re-create the warmth of a home in an anonymous city, and the false bravado of other men around him reminds him of the insecurity that lies beneath the bluster. Even what he calls the “paid moral agent” of his imagination—that is, his mostly vestigial conscience—is summoned briefly only as a source of comforting certainty in the uncharted, shifting landscape he has entered. The man’s initial investment in the room and in purchasing some aspect of the girl’s time does not permit him to exercise any influence on their transaction, a reminder that his generally successful life (marriage, money, status) counts for less than he had thought. The language of commerce that he has mastered does not contain a vocabulary for expressing his current feelings. Ruled by old habits, the preliminary stages of the transaction are a capsule courtship, but he finds that his solicitations are subject to scorn or rebuke. The girl wavers in his imagination between alluring innocence and forbidding authority, an amalgam of a dream lover who accepts him and an indifferent critic who reinforces the mechanical motif by calling his genitals “them” and prepares for their assignation “with the deliberateness of an in-

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sult or the routine of marriage.” Although Updike uses his extensive abilities of description to render the physical attributes of the girl in vivid detail, she does not seem sexually attractive—an implicit comment on the failure of erotic potential when it is restricted to the external surface, as well as a subtle dig at the magazine Oui (a Playboy clone), where the story originally appeared. Without the spontaneity of mutual discovery, the transaction becomes clinical and antierotic, an unnatural or perverse use of human capability. The man is aware of the inadequacy of his supplications. He has been using the strategies of commerce—a mix of supposedly ingratiating self-pity and cold calculation—and when these fail he tries false compliance, then bogus amiability. In desperation, because of a severe reduction in sexual potence, he begins to “make love” to her, and in a shift in tone that Updike handles with characteristic smoothness, the writing becomes lyrical as the man becomes fully involved, and the woman finally responds freely and openly. Old habits intrude, however, and the man’s heightened virility causes a reversion to his familiar self. He stops producing pleasure and seeks it again as his due. His excitement has been transformed from authentic passion to calculation, the transaction back on its original terms. Both parties to the agreement have reached a level of satisfaction (he is a successful sexual athlete, and she has met the terms of the contract), and, when she offers to alter the original bargain in a mixture of self-interest and genuine generosity, he is unable to make a further break away from a lifetime of monetary measure. He contents himself with small gestures of quasi gallantry that carry things back toward the original situation of customer and salesperson. Thus, the true cost of real freedom is gradually becoming apparent. He feels an urge to go beyond the transactional to the honestly emotional, but he is hindered by fear, and his instincts are frozen. The residue of the encounter is a dreadful shrinking of his sense of the universe. “She had made sex finite,” he thinks, but in actuality, it is only his cramped view of his own possibilities that he sees. “Trust Me” • “Transaction” marks the beginning of a phase of maturity in Updike’s work in which recollection of an earlier time of certitude, confidence, and optimism is still possible, but in which a search for new modes of meaning is gradually taking precedence. “Deaths of Distant Friends,” from Trust Me, which appeared in an anthology of Best American Short Stories, is a finely wrought philosophical meditation— exactly the sort of story cautious anthologists often include, a minor-key minirequiem for a grand past with only a twist of rue at the conclusion to relieve the sentimental mood. “The Egg Race,” from Problems, and Other Stories, is somewhat more severe in its recollection of the past. Here, the origins of the problems of the present are traced with some tolerance of human need back to the narrator’s father. The title story, “Trust Me,” is closer to the mood of middle-life angst that informs many of the stories. Again, the narrator reconsiders the past in an effort to determine the cause of the emptiness of the present, but in his attempts to explain the failure of faith in his life, he reveals (to himself) that his parents did not trust each other, that his first wife did not trust the modern world, that his child did not trust him, that with his girlfriend he does not trust himself, and that with a psychotropic agent, he does not (or cannot) trust his senses so he ultimately cannot trust his perceptions. Logically, then, he cannot know, with surety, anything at all. His predicament is a part of a larger vision of loss that directs many stories in the volume, as Updike’s characters attempt to cope with a deterioration of faith that revives some of the earlier questions of a religious nature that formed an important dimension of Updike’s writing

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in books such as The Poorhouse Fair (1959) or A Month of Sundays (1975). The situation has changed somewhat, though, since the more traditional religious foundations that Updike seemed to trust earlier have become less specifically sound, even if the theological questions they posed still are important. The newfound or sensed freedom that is glimpsed carries a terrifying burden of singularity. “Slippage” • “Slippage” conveys this feeling through its metaphors of structural fragility. A “not quite slight earthquake” awakens a man who is “nauseated without knowing why.” His wife, a much younger woman, is hidden under the covers, “like something dead on the road,” an image of nullity. Blessed or cursed with a memory that “extended so much further back in time than hers,” he feels she is preparing them prematurely for senility. At the age of sixty, he sees his life as a series of notquite-achieved plateaus. His work as a scholar was adequate but not all that it might have been, and his “late-capitalist liberal humanism” now seems passé. Even his delight in the sensual has been shaken, “though only thrice wed.” Updike depicts him in his confusion as “a flake of consciousness lost within time’s black shale” and extends the metaphor of infirmity to a loose molar and a feeling that his children are “a tiny, hard, slightly shrivelled core of disappointment.” In the story’s denouement, the man meets a woman at a party; she excites him, but it turns out that she is “quite mad,” an ultimate betrayal of his instincts. At the close, he lies in bed again, anticipating another earth tremor and feeling its unsettling touch in his imagination. “The City” • The aura of discouragement that “Slippage” projects is balanced by another of Updike’s most forceful stories, “The City” (also from Trust Me). Recalling both “Transaction” with its portrayal of a business traveler alone in an urban wasteland and several later stories in which illness or disease disarms a man, “The City” places Carson—a “victim of middle-aged restlessness—the children grown, the long descent begun”—in a hospital, where he must face a battery of tests to determine the cause of a vague stomach pain. Confronted by doctors, nurses, orderlies, other patients, and fellow sufferers, none of whom he knows, Carson is alone and helpless in an alien environment. The hospital works as a fitting figure for the absurdity and complexity of the postmodern world. The health professionals seem like another species, and Carson’s physical pain is a symbol of his spiritual discomfort as he proceeds with the useless repetition of his life’s requirements. From the nadir of a debilitating operation, Carson begins to overcome the indignity and unreality of his plight. He becomes fascinated with people who are unknown to him, like a beautiful black nurse whose unfathomable beauty expands the boundaries of his realm. He calls upon his lifelong training as a stoic WASP and determines not to make a fuss about his difficulties. He finds his “curiosity about the city revived” and develops a camaraderie with other patients, a community of the wounded. His removal from the flow of business life—he is a computer parts salesman fluent in techno-babble—helps him regain an ironic perspective that enables him to regard his estranged daughter’s ignorance of his crisis as “considerate and loving” because it contributes to the “essential solitude” he now enjoys. In a poetic excursion into Carson’s mind, Updike illustrates the tremendous satisfaction available to a person with an artistic imagination capable of finding meaning in any pattern of life’s variety. Carson makes the necessary leap of faith required to “take again into himself the miracle of the world” and seizes his destiny from a mechanized, indifferent cosmos. In a reversal of the curve of decline that was the trajec-

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tory of Updike’s thought from the problems of the early 1970’s through the 1980’s, Carson is depicted at the end of “The City” as a version of existential man who can, even amid doubt and uncertainty, find a way to be “free” and “whole”—at least as much as the postmodern world permits. The Afterlife, and Other Stories • The central character in many of the stories collected in The Afterlife, and Other Stories has a superficial autobiographical relationship to Updike, including having moved from the city to the country as a child and having desired to return to the city. In the award-winning “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” Joey Robinson visits his mother’s farmhouse and watches her die as the farmhouse deteriorates. After she dies, he discovers that the farmhouse was his true home: “He had always wanted to be where the action was, and what action there was, it turned out, had been back there.” “The Other Side of the Street” involves a protagonist, Rentschler, returning to his childhood home and seeing it from a house across the street, where he goes to have some papers notarized. He discovers that one of his childhood friends still lives next door to the notary’s house. As he leaves, he sees what used to be his house “lit up as if to welcome a visitor, a visitor, it seemed clear to him, long expected and much beloved.” He thus experiences a kind of homecoming. The final story in the collection, “Grandparenting,” is another tale in the Maple saga. Divorced and married to others, both Richard and Joan (now Vanderhaven) Maple are present when their daughter Judith has her first baby. In spite of the divorce, the Maples still continue as a family. Central to The Afterlife, and Other Stories is the family as seen from the perspective of an aging male. Story after story deals with people aging and dying. One, “The Man Who Became a Soprano,” treats a group who get together to play recorders. As members of the group begin to form liaisons that end in divorce, and some move away, the group itself agrees to play a concert for an elderly audience at the Congregational church. The concert is a success, but it signals the end of the recorder group. “The Afterlife,” the first story in the collection, focuses on Carter Billings. His and his wife Joan’s best friends, the Egglestons, move to England. During the first night of a visit there, Carter awakens and, wandering through the hall, tumbles down the stairs. “Then something—someone, he felt—hit him a solid blow in the exact center of his chest,” and he finds himself standing on a landing on the stairway. The next morning he decides that he actually bumped into the knob of a newel post. Nonetheless, after the experience his life seems charged with new feeling. It is as though he has had some kind of taste of the afterlife so that he is now “beyond” all earthly matters. Leon Lewis With updates by Richard Tuerk and the Editors Other major works plays: Three Texts from Early Ipswich: A Pageant, pb. 1968; Buchanan Dying, pb. 1974, pr. 1976. anthology: The Best American Short Stories of the Century, 2000. novels: The Poorhouse Fair, 1959; Rabbit, Run, 1960; The Centaur, 1963; Of the Farm, 1965; Couples, 1968; Bech: A Book, 1970; Rabbit Redux, 1971; A Month of Sundays, 1975; Marry Me: A Romance, 1976; The Coup, 1978; Rabbit Is Rich, 1981; The Witches of Eastwick, 1984; Roger’s Version, 1986; S., 1988; Rabbit at Rest, 1990; Memories of the Ford

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Administration, 1992; Brazil, 1994; In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996; Toward the End of Time, 1997; Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel, 1998; Gertrude and Claudius, 2000; Seek My Face, 2002; Villages, 2004; Terrorist, 2006. nonfiction: Assorted Prose, 1965; Picked-Up Pieces, 1975; Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism, 1983; Just Looking: Essays on Art, 1989; Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989; Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism, 1991; Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf, 1996; More Matter: Essays and Criticism, 1999; Still Looking: Essays on American Art, 2005. poetry: The Carpentered Hen, and Other Tame Creatures, 1958; Telephone Poles, and Other Poems, 1963; Dog’s Death, 1965; Verse, 1965; Bath After Sailing, 1968; The Angels, 1968; Midpoint, and Other Poems, 1969; Seventy Poems, 1972; Six Poems, 1973; Cunts (Upon Receiving the Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation), 1974; Query, 1974; Tossing and Turning, 1977; Sixteen Sonnets, 1979; Five Poems, 1980; Jester’s Dozen, 1984; Facing Nature, 1985; Mites, and Other Poems in Miniature, 1990; A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects, 1995; Americana, and Other Poems, 2001. Bibliography Donahue, Peter. “Pouring Drinks and Getting Drunk: The Social and Personal Implications of Drinking in John Updike’s ‘Too Far to Go.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Summer, 1996): 361-367. Argues that drinking, in the stories, moves from a conventional social pastime to an extension of the couple’s private discord, significantly changing how they view and interact with each other; their drinking habits expose the degree to which alcohol use is connected to the specific gender roles and family dynamics of the middle-class suburban world the Maples occupy. Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Introduction to Updike’s short fiction, dealing with his lyrical technique, his experimentation with narrative structure, his use of the short-story cycle convention, and the relationship between his short fiction and his novels. Includes Updike’s comments on his short fiction and previously published critical essays representing a variety of critical approaches. Macnaughton, William R., ed. Critical Essays on John Updike. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Comprehensive, eclectic collection, including essays by writers such as Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and Joyce Carol Oates, who provide reviews, and various Updike experts who have written original essays. Contains a survey of bibliographies and an assessment of criticism and scholarship. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of nine short stories by Updike: “A&P” and “Ace in the Hole” (vol. 1), “The Gun Shop” (vol. 3), “Leaves” and “Lifeguard” (vol. 4), “Pigeon Feathers” and “A Sandstone Farmhouse” (vol. 6), “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth” (vol. 7), and “Walter Briggs” (vol. 8). Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Studies the influence of Cold War society and politics in forming Updike’s worldview. Newman, Judie. John Updike. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Part of the Modern Novelists series, Newman covers the long fiction with facility and insight and offers a solid foundation for understanding Updike’s primary concerns throughout his writing. Contains a good, comprehensive introduction and a judicious bibliography.

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Pinsker, Sanford. “The Art of Fiction: A Conversation with John Updike.” The Sewanee Review 104 (Summer, 1996): 423-433. Updike discusses the visual artists who have inspired him, how his academic experiences helped to shape his writing, and how he regards criticism of his work. Pritchard, William H. Updike: America’s Man of Letters. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2000. Biography of the novelist, whom Pritchard sees as the heir to such American storytellers as William Dean Howells and Henry James, alone in a sea of metafiction. Rogers, Michael. “The Gospel of the Book: LJ Talks to John Updike.” Library Journal 124, no. 3 (February 15, 1999): 114-116. Updike expounds on books, contemporary writers, and the state of publishing at the end of the twentieth century. Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. General introduction surveying all of Updike’s work but focusing on his fiction in the late 1990’s. The chapter on the short story is relatively brief, with short analyses of such stories as “A&P” and “Separating.” Tallent, Elizabeth. Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike’s Erotic Heroes. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1982. Offers, in Judie Newman’s words, “a ground-breaking exploration of the erotic dimensions of selected works.” A long-needed analysis that includes a feminist perspective missing from much previous Updike criticism.

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Helena María Viramontes Viramontes, Helena María

Born: East Los Angeles, California; February 26, 1954 Principal short fiction • The Moths, and Other Stories, 1985; “Miss Clairol,” 1987; “Tears on My Pillow,” 1992; “The Jumping Bean,” 1993. Other literary forms • Helena María Viramontes is the author of two novels: Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), which she dedicated to the memory of civil rights activist César Chávez, and Their Dogs Came with Them (2000). With María Herrera-Sobek, she edited two anthologies, Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Creative Frontiers in American Literature and Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film (1995). Achievements • Helena María Viramontes won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989 and received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature for 1995. Biography • Helena María Viramontes was born on February 26, 1954, in East Los Angeles, California, a city that has served as the setting for most of her short fiction. One of nine children in the family, she learned the value of work from an early age. Her father was a construction worker, her mother a homemaker. The Viramontes household was often filled with friends and relatives who had crossed the Mexican border looking for work. In her fiction Viramontes draws on the memories of the stories she heard from these immigrants. As a student at Immaculate Heart College, where she was one of only five Chicanas in her class, Viramontes worked twenty hours a week while carrying a full load of classes. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1975 with a major in English literature. In 1977 her short story “Requiem for the Poor” won first prize for fiction in a contest sponsored by Statement Magazine of California State University, Los Angeles. In 1978 “The Broken Web” was the first-place winner, and in 1979 “Birthday” won first prize in the Chicano Literary Contest at the University of California at Irvine. “The Broken Web” and “Birthday” appear in her collection of short stories The Moths, and Other Stories. She received a master of fine arts degree in the creative writing program of the University of California at Irvine. She became an assistant professor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She has served as editor of the cultural magazine Chismearte and coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association. Analysis • In her short stories Helena María Viramontes provides a vision of Hispanic women in American society, presenting female characters whose lives are limited by the patriarchy of Hispanic society and the imposition of religious values. She provides a humanistic and caring approach to the poor and downtrodden women who inhabit the working-class world of her fiction. She deals with the issues of abortion, aging, death, immigration, divorce, and separation. The stories in The Moths, and Other Stories are arranged in the order of the stages in a woman’s life, beginning with the story of a young girl in “The Moths” moving on to stories of women in the later stage of life. Near the end of the collection, “Snapshots” is the story of a divorced woman who feels that she has wasted her life in the mundane and demanding trivia of

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housework. “Neighbors” depicts an elderly woman, isolated and living in fear of the young men in the neighborhood. “The Moths” • “The Moths” is the story of a young Chicana girl who finds a safe refuge in caring for her aging grandmother, her abuelita. Constantly in trouble at home, fighting with her sisters, and receiving whippings, the rebellious fourteenyear-old girl finds a purpose for her life as she works with her grandmother to plant flowers and grow them in coffee cans. Viramontes describes in detail how the two women nurture the plants as they form a world of their own, away from the dominating force of the girl’s father. The story contains elements of the Magical Realism that characterizes much contemporary Third World American literature. When her more feminine sisters call her “Bull Hands” because her hands are too large and clumsy for the fine work of embroidery or crocheting, the girl feels her hands begin to grow. As her grandmother soothes the hands in a balm of dried moth wings and Vicks, the girl feels her hands shrink back to normal size. Another example of Magical Realism occurs at the end of the story, when the image of the moths is realized as they fly out of the dead grandmother’s mouth. The women exist in a world of wild lilies, jasmine, heliotrope, and cilantro, working with mayonnaise jars and coffee cans. The vines of chayotes wind around the pillars of the grandmother’s house, climbing to the roof and creating the illusion that the house is “cradled” in vines, safe and protected. In her own home the girl’s Apá, her father, forces her to go to church by banging on the table, threatening to beat her, and lashing out at her mother, her Amá. In one brief scene Viramontes is able to portray the brutal hold the father has on the family. In contrast to this household, the grandmother’s house, devoid of a masculine presence, is a place of peace and growth. When the grandmother dies, the girl finds her, and she bathes her grandmother’s body in a ceremony. As she performs this ritual, the girl sees the old scars on the woman’s back, evidence that she, too, had suffered beatings. “Snapshots” • As the story opens, Olga Ruiz, a woman whose husband has left her, reflects on her life and admits that it was the “small things in life” that made her happy: “ironing straight arrow creases” on her husband’s work shirts and cashing in coupons. Now that she has reached middle age, she realizes that she has wasted her life in the pursuit of housework with nothing to show for all her efforts. Now that she is alone, a hopeless lethargy has set in, and she seems unable to cope with her new circumstances. Marge, her daughter, tries to get her involved with projects, pleading “Please. Mother. Knit. Do something.” As she pores over the snapshots in family albums, Olga sees that she has been “longing for a past that never actually existed.” The title of the story refers to more than the actual snapshots. Olga sees snapshots as ghosts and feels “haunted by the frozen moments.” She remembers her grandmother’s fear that snapshots would steal a person’s soul, and she recounts how her grandfather tried to take a family picture with his new camera; not knowing how to operate it, he took the film out and expected it to develop in the sunlight. As the story ends, Olga, fearing that her grandmother was right, decides that if she finds a picture of her grandmother, she will destroy it. Viramontes paints a portrait of a woman who has devoted her life to being a good wife and mother, cooking, cleaning, taking care of others, and then in her middle

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years has been abandoned. Her husband has remarried, and her son-inlaw is tired of her calls to her daughter, Marge. At one point he takes the phone away from Marge and says, “Mrs. Ruiz, why don’t you leave us alone.” A few minutes later, Dave, her former husband calls and asks her to “leave the kids alone.” After a lifetime of hard work, Olga has been left alone, feeling that her life was worthless.

“Neighbors” • “Neighbors,” the last story in the collection, tells the story of Aura Rodriguez, an isolated seventy-three-year-old woman who lives in fear of the young men in her neighborhood, who have vowed to get even with her for calling the police on them. Realizing that she must take care of herself, she gets a gun and sits Courtesy, Penquin Putnam, Inc. in a chair facing the door, ready to protect herself. This story opens with a description of a neighborhood that has “slowly metamorphosed into a graveyard.” Aura believes in living within her own space and expects her neighbors to do the same. In the words of Fierro, Aura’s old neighbor, Viramontes repeats the metaphor of the graveyard that she used at the beginning of the story. Fierro remembers the quiet hills and old homes that existed before the government destroyed the houses and covered the land with “endless freeway” that “paved over his sacred ruins, his secrets, his graves . . . his memories.” The story is filled with realistic details such as the description of Aura’s “Ben Gay scented house slipper.” “The Cariboo Café” • Conflict in Central America is the focus of “The Cariboo Café,” in which a woman from El Salvador has suffered the loss of her child at the hands of government officials. Interwoven with the story of her grief is the story of the cook, who suffers from loneliness after losing his wife and son, and the terrified illegal immigrants who fear capture by the police. The woman from El Salvador, who has been mourning the loss of her small son for several years, mistakenly believes that one of the immigrants in the café is her son. In the first segment of this three-part story, Sonya and her brother Macky, children of illegal immigrants, are frightened when they see a police officer seizing a man on the street. Trained to fear the police, the children run to the café for protection. In the second part, the narrator is the cook, who has shown immigration agents where the immigrants are hiding even though they have been regular customers. The narrator of the third part is the Salvadoran woman whose young son was taken by army officials. After numerous attempts to find her son, the woman moved across the Mexican border to the United States. In the final, violent confrontation when

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the police enter the café, the woman fights them, identifying them with the army officials who took her son. Viramontes tells this complex story through shifting points of view to reveal different perspectives as she shows the power of oppressive governments. Judith Barton Williamson Other major works anthologies: Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, 1987, revised 1996 (with María Herrera-Sobek); Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film, 1995 (with Herrera-Sobek). novels: Under the Feet of Jesus, 1995; Their Dogs Came with Them, 2000. nonfiction: “Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction,” 1989; “Why I Write,” 1995. Bibliography Bair, Barbara J. “The Cariboo Café.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “The Cariboo Café” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. ____________. “The Moths.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 5. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “The Moths” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llarona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24 (Summer, 1999): 53-74. Analyzes the representations of the Mexican goddess Coatlicue and the folkloric figure of the wailing ghost La Llarona in the works of Mexican American women writers Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros. Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason. American Women Writers. New York: Continuum, 1994. The editors provide a brief biographical sketch as well as an analysis of the short stories in The Moths. They emphasize the portrayal of Chicana women with their strengths and weaknesses as they struggle with the restrictions placed on them because they are women. They note that many of the characters pay a price for rebelling against traditional values. Moore, Deborah Owen. “La Llarona Dines at the Cariboo Cafe: Structure and Legend in the Works of Helena María Viramontes.” Studies in Short Fiction 35 (Summer, 1998): 277-286. Contrasts the distant and close-up narrative perspectives in Viramontes’s work. Richards, Judith. “Chicano Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature.” College Literature 25 (Spring, 1998): 182. In this review of the anthology edited by Viramontes and María Herrera-Sobek, Richards argues that the book provides a good starting place for those who want to evaluate the Chicana literary movement. Points to the emergence of urban working-class women as protagonists, the frequent use of child and adolescent narrators, and autobiographical formats that focus on unresolved issues as characteristics of Chicana literature. Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. “Helena María Viramontes.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Chicano Writers series. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Summarizes and analyzes several stories from The Moths, stressing the cultural and religious traditions that re-

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strict women’s lives. Discusses the patriarchal privileges that the father assumes in the story when he shouts at his daughter “‘Tu eres mujer’” (you are a woman) in order to control her. Calls “Snapshots” a “scathing critique of the politics of housework” and refers to the divorced Olga as “an alienated laborer whose value has decreased.” Swyt, Wendy. “Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena María Viramontes.” MELUS 23 (Summer, 1998): 189-201. Discusses the short stories “The Broken Web” and “Cariboo Café.” Yarbo-Bejarano, Yvonne. Introduction to “The Moths, and Other Stories.” Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1995. Discusses Viramontes’s portrayal of women characters who struggle against the restrictions placed on them by the Chicano culture, the church, and the men in these women’s lives. Provides a brief analysis of each story in the collection, showing that the stories deal with problems Chicana women face at various stages of their lives. Notes that, although Viramontes addresses the problems of racial prejudice and economic struggles, the emphasis is on the cultural and social values that shape these women and suggests that most of the stories involve the conflict between the female character and the man who represents an oppressive authority figure.

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Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut, Kurt

Born: Indianapolis, Indiana; November 11, 1922 Died: New York, New York; April 11, 2007 Principal short fiction • Canary in a Cat House, 1961; Welcome to the Monkey House, 1968; Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, 1999. Other literary forms • Kurt Vonnegut published numerous volumes, including essays, short stories, the plays Happy Birthday, Wanda June and Between Time and Timbuktu: Or, Prometheus-5, a Space Fantasy (1972), and the novels on which his reputation is principally based. His best-known novels include The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973), and he published Timequake in 1997. His last long fictional work, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999) is a novella. The last book he published during his lifetime, A Man Without a Country (2005), is a small collection of essays he published over the previous five years. Many of these contain autobiographical reflections and express his views on contemporary politics. Achievements • For many years, the popular success of the writing of Kurt Vonnegut exceeded critical recognition of his work. With his earlier work labeled as science fiction and published in paperback editions and popular magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, critical attention was delayed. In 1986, he received the Bronze Medallion from Guild Hall. He later was given lecturer and honorary professorial positions at distinguished universities. More important, his insightful and sympathetic treatment of the psychologically and morally disabled victims of the modern world earned him a reputation as one of the great humanist writers of his time. Biography • Although not specifically an autobiographical writer, Kurt Vonnegut drew frequently on facts and incidents from his own life in his writing. The youngest in a family of three children, Kurt Vonnegut was born and reared in Indianapolis, Indiana. While serving in the army as an infantry scout during World War II, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and interned at Dresden, Germany, at the time of the 1945 Allied firebombing of the city that cost 135,000 lives. He survived only through the ironic circumstance of being quartered in an underground meat locker. This episode contributed much toward his authorial distance: After returning to that meat locker forty-three years later in 1998, Vonnegut commented that he was one of the few who could recall the destruction of an Atlantis. Although the destruction of Dresden became a recurring motif in Vonnegut’s work, not until twenty-three years later could he bring himself to write the novel of his war experiences, Slaughterhouse-Five. Almost three decades later, he revisited that subject in Timequake. After World War II, Vonnegut worked in public relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York (called “Ilium” in his fiction), before leaving in 1950 to devote himself full-time to his writing. In 1945, he married Jane Marie Cox, settling in Cape Cod, where they reared their own three children and the three children of

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Vonnegut’s deceased sister, Alice. In 1972, he moved to New York City and was divorced from Cox early in 1974. He married the photographer Jill Krementz in November, 1979, and they adopted a daughter, Lily. They were divorced in 1991. When Vonnegut published Timequake in 1997, he declared that it would be his last book. Two years later, however, he published a volume of previously uncollected stories, Bagombo Snuff Box; a volume on his ideas about writing, Like Shaking Hands with God; and the novella God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. A Man Without a Country was his final book during his lifetime. He died on April 11, 2007, shortly after sustaining a head injury during a fall in his New York City home. Analysis • After the publication of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, however, the work of Kurt Vonnegut received increasingly serious critical commentary. He emerged as a consistent commentator on American culture through the second half of the twentieth century. His short stories range from satiric visions of grotesque future societies, which are extensions of modern societies, and portrayals of ordinary people, which reassert the stability of middle-class values. In his novels, the social satire predominates, and Vonnegut blends whimsical humor and something approaching despair as he exposes the foibles of American culture and a world verging on destruction through human thoughtlessness. As in the short stories, however, attention to an unheroic protagonist doing his or her best and to the value of “common human decency” persists. Best known for his novels, Vonnegut acknowledged the ancillary interest of short stories for him. In the preface to his collection of short stories Welcome to the Monkey House, he describes the stories as “work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise.” Vonnegut’s blunt comment, however, does not imply that the stories can be dismissed out of hand. The themes of the stories are the themes and concerns of all his work. Again, in the preface to Welcome to the Monkey House, Vonnegut describes those concerns in a characteristically tough style. He recalls a letter his brother sent him shortly after bringing his firstborn home from the hospital: “Here I am,” that letter began, “cleaning the TO VIEW IMAGE, s—- off of practically everything.” Of PLEASE SEE his sister, Vonnegut tells us that she PRINT EDITION died of cancer: “her dying words were ‘No pain.’ Those are good dyOF THIS BOOK. ing words. . . . I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: ‘Here I am cleaning the s—- off of practically everything’ and ‘No pain.’” These terms apply equally well to the themes of Vonnegut’s short stories. His muckraking is frequently social satire; his concern is with the allevia© Jill Krementz tion of human suffering.

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Vonnegut’s short stories generally fall into two broad categories: those that are science fiction, and those that are not. The science fiction characteristically pictures a future society controlled by government and technology, whose norms have made human life grotesque. The protagonist is often an outlaw who has found such norms or conventions intolerable. In contrast, Vonnegut’s stories that are not science fiction regularly affirm social norms. Ordinary life in these stories is simply not threatened by large-scale social evil. Some of these stories indeed depict the victims of society—refugees, displaced persons, juvenile delinquents—but primarily they show such people’s efforts to recover or establish conventional lives. It is within the context of conventional life that Vonnegut’s protagonists can achieve those qualities which in his view give a person stability and a sense of worth. These are the qualities of modesty, considerateness (which he often calls common human decency), humor, order, and pride in one’s work. They are values interfered with, in the science-fiction stories, by governmental and technological controls. Vonnegut resented any dismissal of his work merely because it is science fiction, a kind of writing he described as incorporating “technology in the human equation.” In the novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Eliot Rosewater speaks for Vonnegut when he delivers an impassioned, drunken, and impromptu defense of the genre before a convention of science-fiction writers: I love you sons of bitches. . . . You’re all I read any more. . . . You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. In Eliot Rosewater’s opinion, society’s “greatest prophet” is an obscure writer of science fiction named Kilgore Trout, a recurring character in Vonnegut’s fiction. His masterpiece, the work for which he will be revered in the far future, is a book entitled 2BR02B, a rephrasing of Hamlet’s famous question. “Welcome to the Monkey House” • The story of 2BR02B, in Vonnegut’s précis, corresponds closely to his own short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House.” Vonnegut writes of his fictional character, “Trout’s favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved.” The approach describes Vonnegut’s writing as well. 2BRO2B predicates an America crippled by automation and overpopulation. Machines have taken over most jobs, leaving people idle and feeling “silly and pointless.” The government’s solution has been to encourage patriotic suicide. Ethical Suicide Parlors have been widely established, each identifiable by its purple roof and each located next to a Howard Johnson’s restaurant (with its orange roof), where the prospective client is entitled to a free last meal. This is also the world of “Welcome to the Monkey House.” The stor y takes place in Cape Cod in an unspecified future time. Fourteen Kennedys, by now, have ser ved as presidents of the United States or of the world. There is a world government; in fact, in this world, Vonnegut writes, “practically ever ything was the Government.” Most people look twenty-two years old, thanks to the development of antiaging shots. The population of the world numbers seventeen billion people. For Vonnegut, the world’s dilemma is the result of advanced technology combined with backward human attitudes. Suicide is voluntar y, but ever yone, under law, must

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use “ethical” birth control pills that, in fact, control not birth but sexuality. Their effect is to make people numb below the waist, depriving them not of the ability to reproduce, “which would have been unnatural and immoral,” but rather of all pleasure in sex. “Thus did science and morals go hand in hand,” Vonnegut ironically concludes. The kind of morality that could produce these pills is exemplified in J. Edgar Nation, their inventor. Walking through the Grand Rapids Zoo with his eleven children one Easter, he had been so offended by the behavior of the animals that he promptly developed a pill “that would make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian family to see.” In the opinion of Billy the Poet, a renegade in this society, throughout history those people most eager “to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth” have been unaccountably terrified of human sexuality. Billy the Poet’s special campaign is to deflower hostesses in Ethical Suicide Parlors, who are all, as part of their qualifications for the job, “plump and rosy” virgins at least six feet tall. Their uniform is a purple body stocking “with nothing underneath” and black leather boots. In this world, only death is permitted to be seductive. Billy’s modus operandi is to single out a hostess and send her some bawdy doggerel, calculated to offend (and to excite) narrow sensibilities. Nancy McLuhan, his present target, is more intrigued than she will admit to herself. Billy kidnaps her and takes her to his current hideout, the old Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, now “a museum of how life had been lived in more expansive times. The museum was closed.” The original lawn is now green cement; the harbor is blue cement. The whole of the compound is covered by an enormous plastic geodesic dome through which light can filter. The only “light” in which an earlier graciousness can now be seen is colored by the world’s pervasive vulgarity. The current world president, named “Ma” Kennedy but not the “real thing,” keeps a sign reading “Thimk!” on the wall of her office in the Taj Mahal. Nancy’s encounter with Billy is not the licentious orgy she expects but an approximation of an old-fashioned wedding night. Billy explains to her that most people only gradually develop a full appreciation of their sexuality. Embarrassed and confused, she tries conscientiously to resist her comprehension of his motives. As he leaves, Billy offers Nancy another poem, this time the famous sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that begins “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” The implication is that sexuality is one dimension of human love sorely lacking in their world. Far from being obscene, that love pursues a larger “ideal Grace,” in the words of the poem, wholly unavailable either to the vulgarity of “Ma” Kennedy or to the narrow-minded purity of J. Edgar Nation. Billy also leaves with Nancy a bottle of birthcontrol pills that will not hamper sexual enjoyment. On the label are printed the words “WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE.” If Browning’s poem risks sentimentality, the story ends in a comic readjustment of the reader’s sense of proportion. Sex need not be humorless; the reader need not view himself and the human condition with the chilling seriousness and inflated self-importance of J. Edgar Nation. The reader is left with the impression that Nancy McLuhan has begun her conversion. There is a measure of hope in this world where, as Billy assures her, the “movement is growing by leaps and bounds.” “Harrison Bergeron” • Governmental domination of private life is nearly total, however, in the world of “Harrison Bergeron,” whose inhabitants are tortured and shackled as a matter of course, all in the name of equality. In the United States of 2081, equality of all persons has been mandated by the 211th, 212th, and 213th

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Amendments to the Constitution. People are not merely equal under the law, but “equal every which way.” Those people of “abnormal” capacities must wear equalizing disabilities at all times. Hazel Bergeron is a person of average intelligence, which means that “she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts.” Her husband, George, however, as a man of superior intelligence, has to wear a “mental handicap radio” in his ear which broadcasts at twenty-second intervals strident noises designed to break his concentration: burglar alarms, sirens, an automobile collision, or a twenty-gun salute. A strong man as well, George wears “forty-seven pounds of bird shot in a canvas bag” padlocked around his neck. Neither George nor his wife is able to recall that their fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, has just been arrested. They are watching on television a performance by ballerinas also weighted down with bird shot and masked to disguise their beauty. As a lawabiding couple, George and Hazel have only fleeting suspicions that the system is a bad one. If not for such handicaps, George says, “pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else.” When the television announcer cannot deliver a news bulletin because he—“like all announcers”—has a serious speech impediment, Hazel’s response is a well-meaning platitude, “He tried. That’s the big thing.” A ballerina, disguising her “unfair” voice, reads the announcement for him: Harrison Bergeron, “a genius and an athlete,” has escaped from jail. Suddenly Harrison bursts into the television studio. A “walking junkyard,” he wears tremendous earphones, thick glasses, three hundred pounds of scrap metal, a rubber ball on his nose, and black caps on his teeth. In this reductio ad absurdum of the ideal of equality, the technology is pointedly silly. “I am the Emperor!” Harrison cries, and tears off his handicaps, revealing a man who “would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.” Harrison is rival to the gods. A ballerina joins him as his empress. Freed of her restraints, she is “blindingly beautiful.” Whatever the reader may perceive as ultimate human beauty, Harrison and the ballerina are that. Together the two of them dance in “an explosion of joy and grace” equally as fantastic as the shackles they have thrown off. They leap thirty feet to kiss the ceiling and hover midair to embrace each other, “neutralizing gravity with love and pure will.” They have defied the laws of the land, the law of gravity, the laws of motion. They dance out the soaring aspiration of the human spirit, for a moment made triumphantly manifest. The United States Handicapper General, ironically named Diana Moon Glampers, then breaks into the television studio and shoots them both. Her ruthless efficiency is in marked contrast to the bumbling capabilities of everyone else. The reader is suddenly aware that the idea of equality has been made an instrument of social control. Clearly some are allowed to be more equal than others. In their home, Harrison’s parents are incapable of either grief or joy. They resume their passive, acquiescent lives, having forgotten the entire scene almost as soon as they witnessed it. If the conventional life depicted in Vonnegut’s work other than his science fiction has not been made this grotesque by technology and government, it is, nevertheless, also humdrum and uninspiring. These limitations, however, are more than compensated for by the fact that ordinary people feel useful, not superfluous, and they are capable of sustaining love. This dynamic is especially true of “Poor Little Rich Town,” first published in Collier’s and reprinted in Bagombo Snuff Box. In this story an entire village rejects the wisdom of an efficiency expert, Newell Cady. The bonds of community love win over logic, because the townspeople do not want the postmistress to lose her job.

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“Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” • In “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” the narrator’s occupation is selling and installing “aluminum combination storm windows and screens” and occasionally a bathtub enclosure. He marks as “the zenith of [his] career” an order for a glass door for a film star’s bathtub specially fixed with a lifesized picture of the film star’s face on it. He is comically intent on installing the enclosure and on doing the job well, even as the star’s household disintegrates around him. Yet if it is funny, the narrator’s pride in his mundane work is also the basis of stability in his life, a stability visibly lacking in the apparently glamorous life of Gloria Hilton, the film star. Also installing two windows for her, he says about them, The Fleetwood Trip-L-Trak is our first-line window, so there isn’t anything quick or dirty about the way we put them up. . . . You can actually fill up a room equipped with Fleetwoods with water, fill it clear up to the ceiling, and it won’t leak—not through the windows, anyway. While the narrator is at work in the bathroom, Gloria Hilton is engaged in dismissing her fifth husband. She speaks to him, as she always speaks, in a series of fatuous clichés. She tells him, “You don’t know the meaning of love,” after earlier seducing him away from his family with the words, “Dare to be happy, my poor darling! Oh, darling, we were made for each other!” She had then promptly announced to the press that the two of them were moving to New Hampshire “to find ourselves.” In the narrator’s (and the reader’s) only glimpse of Gloria Hilton, she is without makeup (“she hadn’t even bothered to draw on eyebrows”) and dressed in a bathrobe. He decides, “that woman wasn’t any prettier than a used studio couch.” Her actual commonplaceness and utter self-absorption are patent. Gloria’s hapless fifth husband is a writer, George Murra, of whom she had expected no less than “the most beautiful scenario anybody in the history of literature has ever written for me.” In the constant publicity and tempestuousness of their lives together, however, he has been unable to work at all. He had been lured by a hollow glamour, she by the possibility of greater self-glorification. The superficiality of their marriage is revealed in his references to her as “Miss Hilton,” and her contemptuous parting words: “Go on back to your precious wife and your precious son.” In a long drinking session together after Gloria leaves, Murra explains to the narrator his earlier dreams of breaking free from the petty marital squabbles, the financial worries, the drab responsibility and sameness of conventional life. The narrator momentarily and drunkenly succumbs to the appeal of the glamorous life; when he staggers home he immediately offends his wife. Murra is now repentant and nearly desperate for the forgiveness of his son, living at a nearby preparatory school. When the boy arrives to visit his father, it is apparent that the hurt and bitterness of his father’s desertion have made him rigid with intolerant rectitude. The situation looks hopeless until the narrator (back to finish his job) suggests to Murra that he topple the boy from his pedestal with a kick in the pants. The gambit works, the family is reconciled, and the narrator returns home, having agreed to exchange bathtub doors with Murra. He finds his own wife gone and his own son stuffily self-righteous; but his wife returns, her equanimity restored. The new bathtub enclosure with Gloria’s face on it amuses his wife. She is exactly Gloria’s height; when she showers, the film star’s face on the door forms a “mask” for her. Gloria’s glamour is all mask and pose; but his wife’s good humor is genuine. The ordinary lives of the narrator and his wife have provided them with exactly what Gloria lacks and what Murra and his son need to recover: the saving grace of humor, tolerance, and a sense of proportion.

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Bagombo Snuff Box • The 1999 publication of Bagombo Snuff Box presented again several of the previous stories, plus others that achieved magazine exposure in the 1950’s and 1960’s but had since been forgotten. In the introduction to this volume, Vonnegut explains that his stories are “a bunch of Buddhist catnaps” designed to slow the pulse and breathing and allow one’s troubles to fade away. He also provides his eight rules for writing stories in this introduction. Only three of the twenty-three stories here could be construed as futuristic. The title story focuses on a braggart who attempts to win favor with a former wife by false exaggeration of the exotic snuffbox, which her son quickly identifies as a common item. As in his previous work, the high and mighty are deflated and the average person is ennobled. George M. Helmholtz, a band director, is the qualified hero of three of these stories. An authorial “coda” at the end of the volume argues for the importance of the “Middle West” of Ohio and Indiana. Despite the fact that most of Vonnegut’s short stories are not science fiction and similarly applaud conventional life, the happy triumph of kindness and work seems contrary to the thrust of his novels. What he values remains the same, but the prospect of realizing those values becomes more desperate as the vision of normalcy recedes. The crises of the planet are too extreme and the capabilities of technology too great for Vonnegut to imagine a benign society in the future which could foster those values. Vonnegut’s novels are often described as “black humor,” wholly unlike the generous good humor of “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son.” This is another label that annoys the author (“just a convenient tag for reviewers”), but his description of black humor recalls his own lonely rebels whose cause is seriously overmatched by the monolithic enemy: “Black humorists’ holy wanderers find nothing but junk and lies and idiocy wherever they go.” Vonnegut said that the writer functions like the canaries coal miners took with them into the mines “to detect gas before men got sick.” He must serve society as an early-warning system so that one can work to improve the human condition while one still may. Martha Meek With updates by Peter J. Reed, Scott D. Vander Ploeg, and the Editors Other major works children’s literature: Sun Moon Star, 1980 (with Ivan Chermayeff). play: Penelope, pr. 1960, revised pr., pb. 1970 (as Happy Birthday, Wanda June). novels: Player Piano, 1952; The Sirens of Titan, 1959; Mother Night, 1961; Cat’s Cradle, 1963; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: Or, Pearls Before Swine, 1965; Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death, 1969; Breakfast of Champions: Or, Goodbye Blue Monday, 1973; Slapstick: Or, Lonesome No More!, 1976; Jailbird, 1979; Deadeye Dick, 1982; Galápagos, 1985; Bluebeard, 1987; Hocus Pocus, 1990; Timequake, 1997; God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999 (novella). nonfiction: Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (Opinions), 1974; Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, 1981; Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 1988; Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980’s, 1991; Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation About Writing, 1999 (with Lee Stringer); A Man Without a Country, 2005. teleplay: Between Time and Timbuktu: Or, Prometheus-5, a Space Fantasy, 1972.

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Bibliography Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Allen’s study, part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series, places Vonnegut, and especially Slaughterhouse-Five, in the literary canon. Contains an annotated bibliography and an index. Boon, Kevin A., ed. At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Collection of eleven essays examining the novelist’s moral vision. Goldstein, Marc. “EPICAC.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 2. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “EPICAC” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Klinkowitz, Jerome, Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, and Asa B. Pieratt, Jr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1987. Authoritative bibliography of works by and about Vonnegut. Lists Vonnegut’s works in all their editions, including the short stories in their original places of publication, dramatic and cinematic adaptations, interviews, reviews, secondary sources, and dissertations. ____________. Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Klinkowitz makes a case for Vonnegut as a sort of redeemer of the novelistic form, after writers such as Philip Roth declared it dead. He traces Vonnegut’s successful integration of autobiography and fiction in his body of work. Provides an extensive bibliography and an index. Klinkowitz, Jerome, Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, Asa B. Pieratt, Jr., and John Somer, eds. The Vonnegut Statement. New York: Delacorte Press, 1973. Collection of essays by various authors, which establishes the nature and sources of Vonnegut’s reputation at this important juncture. Analyzes his career from his college writing to the short fiction, and through the novels to Slaughterhouse-Five. Includes an interview and a bibliography. The most important accounting of his career through its first two decades. Labin, Linda L. “Harrison Bergeron.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 3. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “Harrison Bergeron” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Leeds, Marc. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Concordance and encyclopedia identifying Vonnegut’s most frequently recurring images and all his characters; indispensable for serious students of Vonnegut. Merrill, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Comprehensive collection of essays on Vonnegut’s works and career, which includes reviews, previously published essays, and articles commissioned for this work. The extensive introduction traces in detail Vonnegut’s career and critical reception from the beginnings to 1990. Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Presents a brief history of the critical response to Vonnegut, and critical reviews. Reed, Peter J. The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Critical study of the author’s short fiction. Includes a bibliography and an index.

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Reed, Peter J. and Marc Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Vonnegut discusses, among other topics, postmodernism and experimental fiction. Includes a bibliography and an index.

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Born: Eatonton, Georgia; February 9, 1944 Principal short fiction • In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, 1973; You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, 1981; The Complete Stories, 1994; Alice Walker Banned, 1996 (stories and commentary). Other literary forms • Alice Walker is known for her achievements in both prose and poetry; in addition to several short-story collections, she has published several novels, volumes of poetry, collections of essays, and children’s books. Her novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), examine the struggles of African Americans—especially women—against destruction by a racist society. Walker’s poetry is collected in Once: Poems (1968), Five Poems (1972), Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Poems (1973), Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems (1979), Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 (1991), A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) is a collection of essays important to an understanding of Walker’s purposes and methods as well as the writers influential on her fiction. A later collection of nonfiction prose is Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987 (1988). Walker also wrote Langston Hughes: American Poet (1974), To Hell with Dying (1988), Finding the Green Stone (1991), and There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me (2006) for children. Walker also edited an anthology titled I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979) that did much to revive interest in the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, the writer whom she considers one of the major influences on her fiction. Achievements • From the beginning of her career, Alice Walker has been an awardwinning writer. Her first published essay, “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” won first prize in The American Scholar’s annual essay contest in 1967. That same year she won a Merrill writing fellowship. Her first novel was written on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In 1972, she received a doctoral degree from Russell Sage College. Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Poems was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Lillian Smith Award of the Southern Regional Council in 1973. In Love and Trouble won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. The Color Purple, which remained on The New York Times list of best-sellers for more than twenty-five weeks, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won both an American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker’s many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1969 and 1977, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 1971-1973, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1977-1978. In 1984, she received a Best Books for Young Adults citation from the American Library Association for In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. She has also won

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the O. Henry Award (1986), the Langston Hughes Award (1989), the Nora Astorga Leadership Award (1989), the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement (1990), the Freedom to Write Award (1990), the California Governor’s Arts Award (1994), and the Literary Ambassador Award (1998). Biography • Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecropper parents on February 9, 1944. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta on scholarship, transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from which she graduated in 1965. While working in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi in the summer of 1966, she met Melvyn Rosenman Levanthal, an attorney, whom she married in 1967. After residing for seven years in Jackson, Mississippi, the couple returned to the East in 1974, where Walker served as a contributing editor to Ms. magazine. The two were divorced in 1976, sharing joint custody of a daughter, Rebecca. Walker cofounded a publishing house in Navarro, California, Wild Trees Press. She has been a writer-inresidence and a teacher of black studies at Jackson State College (1968-1969), a lecturer in literature at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts at Boston (1972-1973), a distinguished writer in the African American studies department at the University of California at Berkeley (1982), and a Fannie Hurst Professor of Literature at Brandeis University (1982). She coproduced a 1992 film documentary, Warrior Marks, directed by Pratibha Parmar, a film she narrated and for which she wrote the script. Walker settled in Mendocino, California, where she continued to write and remained politically active. Analysis • The heroism of black women in the face of turmoil of all kinds rings from both volumes of Alice Walker’s short stories like the refrain of a protest song. In Love and Trouble reveals the extremes of cruelty and violence to which poor black women are often subjected in their personal relationships, while the struggles in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down reflect the social upheavals of the 1970’s. In Love and Trouble • Such subjects and themes lend themselves to a kind of narrative that is filled with tension. The words “love” and “trouble,” for example, in the title of the first collection, identify a connection that is both unexpected and almost inevitable. Each of the thirteen stories in this collection is a vivid confirmation that every kind of love known to woman brings its own kind of suffering. Walker is adept at pairing such elements so as to create pronounced and revealing contrasts or intense conflicts. One such pair that appears in many of these short stories is a stylistic one and easy to see: the poetry and prose that alternate on the page. Another unusual combination at work throughout the short fiction may be called the lyrical and the sociological. Like the protest song, Walker’s stories make a plea for justice made more memorable by its poetic form. She breathes rhythmic, eloquent language into the most brutish and banal abuses. These two elements—similarity of subject matter and the balance of highly charged contraries—produce a certain unity within each volume. Yet beyond this common ground, the stories have been arranged so as to convey a progression of interconnected pieces whose circumstances and themes repeat, alternate, and overlap rather like a musical composition. The first three stories of In Love and Trouble, for example, are all about married love; the next two are about love between parent and child; then come three stories in which black-white conflict is central; the fourth group concerns religious expression; and the last three stories focus on initiation. Other themes

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emerge and run through this five-set sequence, linking individual motifs and strengthening the whole. Jealousy is one of those motifs, as is the drive for self-respect, black folkways, and flowers, in particular the rose and the black-eyed Susan. Four stories suggest the breadth of Walker’s imagination and narrative skills. “Roselily” strikes an anticipatory note of foreboding. “The Child Who Favored Daughter” is an equally representative selection, this time of the horrific destruction of the black woman. “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” is as cool and clear as “The Child Who Favored Daughter” is dark and fevered. The narrator recounts a tale of Voodoo justice, specifically crediting Zora Neale Hurston, author of Mules and Men (1935). The final story in this collection, “To Hell with Dying,” is an affirmative treatment of many themes Walker has developed elsewhere more darkly. “Roselily” • “Roselily” takes place on a front porch surrounded by a crowd of black folk, in sight of Highway 61 in Mississippi during the time it takes to perform a wedding ceremony. As the preacher intones the formal words, the bride’s mind wanders among the people closest to her there—the bridegroom, the preacher, her parents, sisters, and children. The groom’s religion is not the same as hers, and she knows that he disapproves of this gathering. She speculates uneasily about their future life together in Chicago, where she will wear a veil, sit on the women’s side of his church, and have more babies. She is the mother of four children already but has never been

TO VIEW IMAGE, PLEASE SEE PRINT EDITION OF THIS BOOK.

Courtesy, The Eatonton Messenger

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married. He is giving her security, but he intends, she realizes, to remake her into the image he wants. Even the love he gives her causes her great sadness, as it makes her aware of how unloved she was before. At last, the ceremony over, they stand in the yard, greeting well-wishers, he completely alien, she overcome with anxiety. She squeezes his hand for reassurance but receives no answering signal from him. Poetic and fairy tale elements intensify the ambivalence felt by the bride in this magnetic mood piece. First, there are the ceremonial resonances of the words between the paragraphs of narrative, stately and solemn like a slow drumbeat. As these phrases alternate with Roselily’s thoughts, a tension develops. At the words “Dearly Beloved,” a daydream of images begins to flow, herself a small girl in her mother’s fancy dress, struggling through “a bowl of quicksand soup”; the words “we are gathered here” suggest to her the image of cotton, waiting to be weighed, a Mississippi ruralness she knows the bridegroom finds repugnant; “in the sight of God” creates in her mind the image of God as a little black boy tugging at the preacher’s coattail. Gradually, a sense of foreboding builds. At the words “to join this man and this woman” she imagines “ropes, chains, handcuffs, his religion.” The bridegroom is her rescuer, like Prince Charming, and is ready to become her Pygmalion. Like Sleeping Beauty, Roselily is only dimly aware of exchanging one form of confinement, of enchantment, for another. At the end of the ceremony, she awakes to his passionate kiss and a terrible sense of being wrong. “The Child Who Favored Daughter” • Although “Roselily” is a subtle story of a quiet inner life, “The Child Who Favored Daughter” records the circumstances of a shocking assault. It begins, also, on a front porch. A father waits with a shotgun on a hot afternoon for his daughter to walk from the school bus through the front yard. He is holding in his hand a letter she had written to her white lover. Realizing what her father knows, the girl comes slowly down the dusty lane, pausing to study the blackeyed Susans. As his daughter approaches, the father is reminded of his sister, “Daughter,” who also had a white lover. His intense love for his sister had turned to bitterness when she gave herself to a man by whom he felt enslaved; his bitterness poisoned all of his relationships with women thereafter. He confronts the girl on the porch with the words “White man’s slut!” then beats her with a stable harness and leaves her in the shed behind the house. The next morning, failing to make her deny the letter and struggling to suppress his “unnameable desire,” he slashes off her breasts. As the story ends, he sits in a stupor on the front porch. This story of perverted parental love and warring passions explores the destructive power of jealousy and denial. Its evil spell emanates from the father’s unrepented and unacknowledged desire to possess his sister. He is haunted by her when he looks at his own daughter. Once again, a strongly lyrical style heightens the dominant tone, in this case, horror. Short lines of verse, like snatches of song interspersed with the narrative, contrast sharply in their suggestion of pure feeling with the tightly restrained prose. The daughter’s motif associates her with the attraction of natural beauty: “Fire of earth/ Lure of flower smells/ The sun.” The father’s theme sounds his particular resignation and doom: “Memories of years/ Unknowable women—/ sisters/ spouses/ illusions of soul.” The resulting trancelike confrontation seems almost inevitable, the two moving through a pattern they do not control, do not understand. “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” • In “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” a woman who has lost husband, children, and self-respect, all because a charity worker

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denied her food stamps, comes to the seer Tante Rosie for peace of mind. Tante Rosie assures the troubled woman that the combined powers of the Man-God and the Great Mother of Us All will destroy her enemy. Tante Rosie’s apprentice, who narrates the story, teaches Mrs. Kemhuff the curse-prayer printed in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. Then she sets about to collect the necessary ingredients for the conjure: Sarah Sadler Holley’s feces, water, nail parings. Her task seems to become almost impossible when her mentor tells her that these items must be gained directly from the victim herself. Nevertheless, with a plan in mind, the young woman approaches Mrs. Holley, tells her that she is learning the profession from Tante Rosie, and then asks her to prove that she, as she claims, does not believe in “rootworking.” It is only a short while until Mrs. Kemhuff dies, followed a few months later by Mrs. Holley, who had, after the visit of the apprentice, taken to her bedroom, eating her nails, saving her fallen hair, and collecting her excrement in plastic bags and barrels. This is the first story in the collection in which the black community comes into conflict with the white. It is a conflict of religious traditions and a strong statement in recognition of something profound in African folkways. Mrs. Holley failed Mrs. Kemhuff years before in the greatest of Christian virtues, that of charity. Mrs. Kemhuff, though now reconciled to her church, cannot find peace and seeks the even greater power of ancient conjure to restore her pride. Like other African American writers who have handled this subject, Walker first acknowledges that Voodoo is widely discounted as sheer superstition, but then her story argues away all rational objections. Mrs. Holley does not die as the result of hocus-pocus but because of her own radical belief, a belief in spite of herself. There is something else about this story that is different from those at the beginning of the collection. Instead of a dreamy or hypnotic action, alert characters speak and think purposefully, clearly, one strand of many evolving patterns that emerge as the stories are read in sequence. “To Hell with Dying” • “To Hell with Dying” is the last story in the collection and a strong one. A more mellow love-and-trouble story than most preceding it, it features a male character who is not the villain of the piece. Mr. Sweet Little is a melancholy man whom the narrator has loved from childhood, when her father would bring the children to Mr. Sweet’s bedside to rouse him from his depression with a shout: “To hell with dying! These children want Mr. Sweet!” Because the children were so successful in “revivaling” Mr. Sweet with their kisses and tickling and cajoling ways, they were not to learn for some time what death really meant. Years pass. Summoned from her doctoral studies in Massachusetts, the twenty-four-year-old narrator rushes to Mr. Sweet’s bedside, where she cannot quite believe that she will not succeed. She does induce him to open his eyes, smile, and trace her hairline with his finger as he once did. Still, however, he dies. His legacy to her is the steel guitar on which he played away his blues all those years, that and her realization that he was her first love. It is useful to recognize this story as an initiation story, like the two that precede it, “The Flowers” and “We Drink the Wine in France.” Initiation stories usually involve, among other things, an unpleasant brush with reality, a new reality. A child, adolescent, or young adult faces an unfamiliar challenge and, if successful, emerges at a new level of maturity or increased status. Always, however, something is lost, something must be given up. As a very small girl, the narrator remembers, she did not understand quite what was going on during their visits to the neighbor’s shack. When she was somewhat older, she felt the weight of responsibility for the dying man’s survival. At last, after she has lost her old friend, she is happy, realizing how important

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they were to each other. She has successfully negotiated her initiation into the mysteries of love and death, as, in truth, she had already done to the best of her ability at those earlier stages. This often-reprinted story is a culmination of the struggle between Death and Love for the lives of the girls and women, really for all the blacks of In Love and Trouble, one which well represents Walker’s talent and demonstrates her vision of blacks supporting and affirming one another in community. You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down • You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down is her salute to black women who are pushing ahead, those who have crossed some barriers and are in some sense champions. There are black women who are songwriters, artists, writers, students in exclusive Eastern schools; they are having abortions, teaching their men the meaning of pornography, coming to terms with the death of a father, on one hand, or with the meaning of black men raping white women, on the other. Always, they are caught up short by the notions of whites. In other words, all the political, sexual, racial, countercultural issues of the 1970’s are in these stories, developed from what Walker calls the “womanist” point of view. This set of stories, then, is somewhat more explicitly sociological than the first and somewhat less lyrical, and it is also more apparently autobiographical, but in a special sense. Walker herself is a champion, so her life is a natural, even an inescapable, source of material. Walker-the-artist plays with Walker-the-college-student and Walkerthe-idealistic-teacher, as well as with some of the other roles she sees herself as having occupied during that decade of social upheaval. Once a writer’s experience has become transformed within a fictive world, it becomes next to impossible to think of the story’s events as either simply autobiography or simply invention. The distinction has been deliberately blurred. It is because Walker wants to unite her public and private worlds, her politics and her art, life as lived and life as imagined, that, instead of poetry, these stories are interspersed with autobiographical parallels, journal entries, letters, and other expressions of her personality. There are three stories that deserve special attention, “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” “Fame,” and “Source.” To begin with, they serve as checkpoints for the collection’s development, from the essentially simple and familiar to the increasingly complex and strange, from 1955 to 1980. Furthermore, these stories are independently memorable. “Nineteen Fifty-Five” • The opening story, “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” is presented from the perspective of a middle-aged blues singer, Gracie Mae Still, whose signature song, recorded by a young white man named Traynor, brings him fame and fortune. Gracie Mae records her impressions of Traynor in a journal, beginning with their first meeting in 1955 and continuing until his death in 1977. Over the years, the rock-and-roll star (obviously meant to suggest Elvis Presley) stays in touch with the matronly musician, buying her lavish gifts—a white Cadillac, a mink coat, a house—and quizzing her on the real meaning of her song. From the army, he writes to tell her that her song is very much in demand, and that everyone asks him what he thinks it means, really. As time goes by and his life disappoints him, he turns to the song, as if it were a touchstone that could give his life meaning. He even arranges an appearance for himself and Gracie Mae on the variety show hosted by Johnny Carson, with some halfdeveloped notion of showing his fans what the real thing is and how he aspires to it. If he is searching for a shared experience of something true and moving with his audience, however, he is to be disappointed again. His fans applaud only briefly, out of politeness, for the originator of the song, the one who really gives it life, then squeal

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wildly for his imitation, without any recognition of what he wanted them to understand. That is the last time the two musicians see each other. In part, this story is about the contribution that black music made to the spirit of the times and how strangely whites transformed it. The white rock-and-roll singer, who seems as much in a daze as some of the women of In Love and Trouble, senses something superior in the original blues version, but he misplaces its value, looking for some meaning to life that can be rolled up in the nutshell of a lyric. In contrast to the bemused Traynor, Gracie Mae is a down-to-earth champion, and her dialect looks forward to Walker’s masterful handling of dialect in The Color Purple. She repeatedly gives Traynor simple and sensible advice when he turns to her for help, and she has her own answer to the mystery of his emptiness: “Really, I think, some peoples advance so slowly.” “Fame” • The champion of “Fame” is Andrea Clement White, and the events take place on one day, when she is being honored, when she is being confronted by her own fame. She is speaking to a television interviewer as the story begins. The old woman tells the young interviewer that in order to look at the world freshly and creatively, an artist simply cannot be famous. When reminded by the young woman that she herself is famous, Andrea Clement White is somewhat at a loss. As the interview continues its predictable way, the novelist explaining once again that she writes about people, not their color, she uneasily asks herself why she does not “feel famous,” why she feels as though she has not accomplished what she set out to do. The highlight of the day is to be a luncheon in her honor, at which her former colleagues, the president, and specially invited dignitaries, as well as the generally detested former dean, will all applaud her life accomplishments (while raising money). All the while, the lady of the hour keeps a bitingly humorous commentary running in her mind. Her former students in attendance are “numbskulls,” the professors, “mediocre.” Out loud, she comments that the president is a bore. No matter how outrageous her behavior, she is forgiven because of her stature; when she eats her Rock Cornish hen with her hands, the entire assembly of five hundred follows suit. At last, however, the spleen and anxious bravado give way to something out of reach of the taint of fame: a child singing an anonymous slave song. Recalled to her dignity, the honored guest is able to face her moment in the limelight stoically. In this comic story of the aggravations and annoyances that beset the publicly recognized artist, Walker imagines herself as an aging novelist who does not suffer fools gladly. She puts the artist’s inner world on paper so that something of her gift for storytelling and her habits of mind become visible. The stress of the occasion and being brought into forced contact with her former president and dean trigger her aggressive imagination, and her innate narrative gift takes over. She visualizes using her heavy award as a weapon against the repulsive, kissing dean, hearing him squeal, and briefly feels gleeful. The story, however, is something more than simply a comic portrait of the artist’s foibles. When Andrea Clement White questions herself about her own sense of fame, admits her own doubts, she is searching for something certain, as Traynor is searching in “Nineteen Fifty-five,” though not so blindly. Like him, she is called out of the mundane by a meaningful song. “Source” • The last story of You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down is “Source,” which connects the social conscience of an antipoverty worker in Mississippi with the expanding consciousness of the alternative lifestyle as practiced on the West Coast. Two

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friends, Irene and Anastasia had attended college together in New York. When funding for Irene’s adult-education project was cut, she traveled to San Francisco for a change of scene, to be met by Anastasia, living on welfare with some friends named Calm, Peace, and their baby, Bliss, all under the guidance of a swami named Source. The two young women had been unable to find any common ground, Irene believing in collective action and Anastasia believing that people choose to suffer and that nothing can be changed. After walking out on a meeting with Source, Irene was asked to leave. Years later, the two meet again in Alaska, where Irene is lecturing to educators. Anastasia is now living with an Indian and “passing” for white. This time, the two women talk more directly, of color, of Anastasia’s panic when she is alone, of her never being accepted as a black because of her pale skin. Irene is brought to face her own part in this intolerance and to confess that her reliance on government funding was every bit as insecure as had been Anastasia’s reliance on Source. Their friendship restored and deepened, the two women embrace. The title of this story suggests a theme that runs throughout the entire collection, the search for a center, a source of strength, meaning, or truth. This source is very important to the pioneer, but it can be a false lure. When Irene recognizes that she and Anastasia were both reaching out for something on which to depend, she states what might be taken as the guiding principle for the champion: “any direction that is away from ourselves is the wrong direction.” This final portrait of a good woman who cannot be kept down is a distinctively personal one. Women who are not distracted by external influences and who are true to themselves and able to open themselves to one another will triumph. Walker’s short fiction adds a new image to the pantheon of American folk heroes: the twentieth century black woman, in whatever walk of life, however crushed or blocked, still persevering. Even those who seem the most unaware, the most poorly equipped for the struggle, are persevering, because, in their integrity, they cannot do otherwise. The better equipped know themselves to be advocates. They shoulder their dedication seriously and cheerfully. They are the fortunate ones; they understand that what they do has meaning. “Everyday Use” • One of the more widely anthologized of Walker’s stories, “Everyday Use” addresses the issues of identity and true cultural awareness and attacks the “hyper-Africanism” much in vogue during the 1960’s and 1970’s as false and shallow. The occasion of the story is Dee’s brief trip back to her home, ostensibly to visit with her mother and her sister, Maggie, who was left seriously scarred in the fire of suspicious origin that destroyed their home years earlier. Dee’s real purpose, however, is to acquire some homemade quilts and other artifacts of her culture so that she can display them in her home as tokens of her “authenticity,” her roots in the soil of rural Georgia. She wears a spectacular dashiki and wishes to be called by an “African” name; she is accompanied by a man who likewise affects “African” dress, hairstyle, naming tradition, and handshaking routines. Walker’s tongue is firmly in her cheek as she portrays these two characters in vivid contrast with Mama and Maggie, whose lives are simple, close to the earth, and genuine. Despite (or perhaps because of) Mama’s sacrifices and hard work to send Dee off to acquire an education in the outside world, Dee reveals a fundamental selfishness and lack of understanding of her culture and family and, her purposes thwarted, leaves without the quilts in a cloud of dust and disdain. Mama and Maggie sit in their neat yard, its dirt surface carefully raked, enjoying the shade and their snuff together “until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.”

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Walker’s control of style and tone is nowhere more certain than in this powerful and economical story. Here she shows that family, tradition, and strength are to be found in the items of everyday use that have survived the fires of prejudice, from whatever source, and illuminate the true meaning of family and love and forgiveness. Despite the truth of Dee’s parting statement that “it really is a new day for us,” Walker leaves no doubt that the promise of that new day will be dimmed if traditions are exploited rather than understood and cherished. Maggie, after all, learned how to quilt from her grandmother and her great aunt and thus has a much surer sense of her own identity than her sister. Rebecca R. Butler With updates by D. Dean Shackelford and Theodore C. Humphrey Other major works children’s literature: Langston Hughes: American Poet, 1974; To Hell with Dying, 1988; Finding the Green Stone, 1991; There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me, 2006. edited text: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 1979. novels: The Third Life of Grange Copeland, 1970; Meridian, 1976; The Color Purple, 1982; The Temple of My Familiar, 1989; Possessing the Secret of Joy, 1992; By the Light of My Father’s Smile, 1998; Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, 2004. nonfiction: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1983; Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987, 1988; Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, 1993 (with Pratibha Parmar); The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, 1996; Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, 1997; The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, 2000; Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, 2001. poetry: Once: Poems, 1968; Five Poems, 1972; Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Poems, 1973; Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems, 1979; Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, 1984; Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete, 1991; A Poem Traveled Down My Arm, 2003; Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems, 2003. miscellaneous: We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness—Meditations, 2006. Bibliography Bates, Gerri. Alice Walker: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Well-crafted biography that discusses Walker’s major works, tracing the themes of her novels to her life. Bauer, Margaret D. “Alice Walker: Another Southern Writer Criticizing Codes Not Put to ‘Everyday Use.’” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (Spring, 1992): 143-151. Discusses parallels between Walker’s In Love and Trouble and stories by William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. Argues that Walker, like these other southern writers, examines the tendency to support social and religious codes at the expense of individual fulfillment. Bloxham, Laura J. “Alice [Malsenior] Walker.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. General introduction to Walker’s “womanist” themes of oppression of

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black women and change through affirmation of self. Provides a brief summary and critique of previous criticism of Walker’s work. Borgmeier, Raimund. “Alice Walker: ‘Everyday Use.’” In The African-American Short Story: 1970 to 1990, edited by Wolfgang Karrer and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993. Detailed discussion of the generic characteristics of one of Walker’s best-known stories. Analyzes the tension between the typical unheard-of occurrence and everyday reality as well as the story’s use of a central structural symbol. Dieke, Ikenna, ed. Critical Essays on Alice Walker. New York: Greenwood Press, 1999. Especially well suited for use in college literature classrooms, this collection gives particular attention to Walker’s poetry and her developing ecofeminism. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Contains reviews of Walker’s first five novels and critical analyses of several of her works of short and long fiction. Also includes two interviews with Walker, a chronology of her works, and an extensive bibliography of essays and texts. Lauret, Maria. Alice Walker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Provocative discussions of Walker’s ideas on politics, race, feminism, and literary theory. Of special interest is the exploration of Walker’s literary debt to Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, and even Bessie Smith. McKay, Nellie. “Alice Walker’s ‘Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells’: A Struggle Toward Sisterhood.” In Rape and Representation, edited by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Shows how the story allows readers to see how women’s cross-racial relationships are controlled by systems of white male power. The story helps its audience understand why black women fail to provide group support for feminists of the antirape movement in spite of their own historical oppression by rape. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of six short stories by Walker: “Everyday Use” and “Her Sweet Jerome” (vol. 3); “Kindred Spirits” (vol. 4); and “Strong Horse Tea,” “A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring,” and “To Hell with Dying” (vol. 7). Petry, Alice Hall. “Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction.” In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. Skeptical analysis of Walker’s short fiction that contrasts the successful and focused achievement of In Love and Trouble (1973) with the less satisfying You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). Petry argues that the latter collection suffers in many places from unfortunate unintentional humor, trite and clichéd writing, and reductionism, and a confusion of genres that perhaps owes much to her being a “cross-generic writer.” White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. The life and accomplishments of Walker are chronicled in this biography through interviews with Walker, her family, and friends. Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992. Provides a comprehensive analysis of Walker’s short and long fiction. A brief biography and chronology precede the main text of the book. Each chapter refers to specific ideas and themes within Walker’s works and focuses on how Walker’s own experiences define her characters and themes. Following the narrative is a useful annotated bibliography.

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Robert Penn Warren Warren, Robert Penn

Born: Guthrie, Kentucky; April 24, 1905 Died: West Wardsboro, near Stratton, Vermont; September 15, 1989 Principal short fiction • Blackberry Winter, 1946; The Circus in the Attic, and Other Stories, 1947. Other literary forms • In addition to his short fiction, Robert Penn Warren published ten novels, several volumes of poetry, a play, a biography, two collections of critical essays, three historical essays, three influential textbooks, several children’s books, two studies of race relations in America, one memoir, and several book-length treatises on literature. Achievements • Honored as a major American poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren displayed uncommon versatility in significant contributions to almost every literary genre. His work has been translated worldwide, and his short stories are widely anthologized. Although he is best known for his novel All the King’s Men (1946), which won the Pulitzer Prize, he was most prolific as a poet whose awards included two Pulitzer Prizes and an appointment as America’s first poet laureate. Three of his novels have been filmed, and one of them, All the King’s Men , has been presented in operatic form. The subject of Warren’s fiction, and much of his poetry, is southern rural life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He reveals a rootedness in his subject and its values, a concern for moral issues, and a gift for dialogue and environmental detail that lends distinctiveness to his work. His short stories, for example, are set down in rich, vigorous style, and they delineate the flow of time, the influence of past on present, and the painful necessity of self-knowledge. Biography • Robert Penn Warren was educated at Guthrie High School. In 1925, he graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was associated with the Fugitive Group of poets. He did graduate work at the University of California (M.A., 1927), Yale University, and Oxford, and as a Rhodes scholar (D.Litt., 1930). In 1930, he contributed an essay, I’ll Take My Stand, to the Agrarian symposium. Between 1935 and 1942, he was an editor of the Southern Review and was influential in the articulation and practice of the New Criticism. After an active career as a professor of English at a number of American colleges and universities, he retired from Yale in 1973. His first marriage to Emma Brescia in 1930 ended in divorce in 1950. He and his second wife, the writer Eleanor Clark, herself a National Book Award winner, had one son and one daughter. Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979, and the National Book Award in 1958. From 1944 to 1945, he held the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. In 1952 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society; in 1959 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 1972 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1967, he received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and in 1970 the National Medal for Literature and the Van

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Wyck Brooks Award. In 1974, he was chosen to deliver the third Annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. In 1975 he received the Emerson-Thoreau Award of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the next year the Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets; and in 1977 the Harriet Monroe Prize for Poetry. Other awards included the Shelley Memorial Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1986, Warren achieved the unique distinction of becoming the first official “poet laureate” (by act of Congress) of the United States. Warren’s life spanned almost the whole twentieth century. After producing a rich final harvest of work from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s, he died in 1989 at the age of eighty-four at his summer residence in Vermont. He left to posterity a canon of outstanding creative effort. Analysis • Many of Robert Penn Warren’s stories feature an adult protagonist’s introspective, guilty recollections of imperishable childhood events, of things done or left undone or simply witnessed with childish innocence. “Blackberry Winter” • “Blackberry Winter” (the literal reference is to an unseasonable, late spring cold snap) opens with a nine-year-old boy’s unbroken, secure world, a small community permeated with the presence and warmth of protective loved ones. A vaguely sinister city-clothed stranger happens by and is given a job burying drowned chicks and poults by the boy’s mother. Later the boy watches with his father and neighboring farmers as a dead cow, the yoke still around her neck, bobs down a flooding creek past fields of ruined tobacco plants. Then the boy finds a somehow shocking heap of litter washed out from under the house of his father’s black help. Dellie, who lives there, is sick in bed with “woman-mizry,” and after calling him to her side, gives her son little Jebb a sudden, “awful” slap. Big Jebb predicts that the cold snap will go on and that everything and everyone will die, because the Lord is tired of sinful people. Later on, when the boy’s father explains that he cannot afford to hire any help now but offers the stranger fifty cents for a half day’s work, the stranger curses the farm and leaves, followed by the curious boy, whom he also curses. “You don’t stop following me and I cut yore throat, you little son-of-a-bitch.” “But I did follow him,” the narrator tells us, “all the years.” At the end of the story all the sureties of the boy’s world have been threatened, and in the epilogue we learn that the farm was soon lost, his parents died, and little Jebb has gone to prison. The narrator has learned that the essence of time is the passing away of things and people; he has been exposed to natural and moral evil. “When the Light Gets Green” • “When the Light Gets Green” (the reference is to a peculiar, ominous shade of greenish light just before a storm) recalls “Blackberry Winter” in its setting, characterization, and theme, as well as in its retrospective point of view. The story’s first two sentences display the technique: “My grandfather had a long white beard and sat under the cedar tree. The beard, as a matter of fact, was not very long and not very white, only gray, but when I was a child. . . .” Grandfather Barden had served as a Confederate cavalry captain in the Civil War (1861-1865); he had been a hero, but now he is old and thin and his blue jeans hang off his shrunken hips and backside. During a bad hailstorm in the summer of 1914 which threatens his son-in-law’s tobacco crop, the old man has a stroke and collapses, and later upstairs in his room waits to die—unloved, as he believes. His is the necessarily uncomprehending and hopeless fight that love and pride put up against time and change. His

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grandson, who visits him but cannot speak, suffers the guilt of having tried and failed both to feel and to communicate the impossible love the old man needed. Mr. Barden, as we learn in the epilogue, lived until 1918, by which time other catastrophes had intervened—the farm sold, his son-in-law fighting in France, where he would soon be killed, his daughter working in a store. “I got the letter about my grandfather, who died of the flu,” the story concludes, “but I thought about four years back, and it didn’t matter much.” The now adult narrator is puzzled and shamed by his failure and betrayal of his grandfather. In the dual perspective of the story Warren infuses a self-condemnatory ambivalence toward the old man which gives to the narrative the quality of expiation. “Prime Leaf” • “Prime Leaf,” Warren’s first published story, derives from the Kentucky tobacco wars of the first decade of the twentieth century, in which tobacco farmers organized in an attempt to secure higher prices from the tobacco buyers. The focus of the story is upon contention within the Hardin family, most directly between Old Man Hardin and Big Thomas, his son, but also involving Thomas’s wife and young son. Old Man Hardin leaves the farmers’ association rather than support the use of force against those members who object to the association’s price fixing. Big Thomas, whom he had originally persuaded to join the association, refuses to resign immediately. Their reconciliation occurs only after Big Thomas wounds one of a party of barn-burning night riders raiding the Hardins’ property. Big Thomas decides that he will wait at home for the sheriff, but his father urges him to ride into town to justice, and on the way Big Thomas is ambushed and killed. The opposition of father and son is a contest between idea and fact, between idealism and pragmatism. Old Man Hardin is a kind and morally upright man but is also notably detached, remote, and unyielding. To his idealism is opposed his son’s stubborn practicality, born of hard experience. In delineating the conflict of the two men, with its tragic and ironic outcome, Warren did not espouse the beliefs of either, but focused on the incompleteness of each. Old Man Hardin, embodying the rocklike integrity of the gentleman-farmer tradition, places an unwise reliance on what he still—despite much evidence to the contrary—takes to be the due processes of law. He cannot save his son and is in a way responsible for his death. Big Thomas, firing at the night riders until his rifle jams, before yielding to his father, does not resolve in acceptable fashion the problem of ends and means. “The Circus in the Attic” • “The Circus in the Attic” is a long and crowded tale about the meaning—or apparent meaninglessness—of history. It features, appropriately enough, a would-be local historian, Bolton Lovehart, a frail, frustrated man of aristocratic antecedents, whose deepest desire is simply to be free and himself. The only child of a weak father and an almost cannibalistically possessive mother, Bolton as a boy makes several doomed gestures of resistance. To his mother’s subsequent horror, he participates in a riverbank baptismal ceremony; later he runs off with a carnival but is immediately retrieved. During his first year at college his now widowed mother has a heart attack; such at least is her story, although she will not allow a specialist to examine her and treats her son’s suggestion as treason. In any event, Bolton does not return to college and life closes in on him. He begins to see a young woman, but, realizing that Bolton’s mother has the stronger hold, she deliberately seduces and then abandons him.

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Establishing the context of local history back to the first white settlers, Warren provides a series of vivid and ironic vignettes, one of which distinguishes between the official, heroic, United Daughters of the Confederacy version of the Civil War battle of Bardsville and the halfTO VIEW IMAGE, comic, half-sordid truth of the unrePLEASE SEE markable little affair. One of the PRINT EDITION heroes, Cash Perkins, full of liquor, climbed on the wrong horse, a parOF THIS BOOK. ticularly mean one, and was carried, helpless and roaring, directly into Yankee rifle range. The truth of the other memorialized hero, Seth Sykes, was somewhat more involved. He cared nothing for Secession, said so publicly, and lost a stomp-andgouge fight over it. Then he said he hoped the Yankees would come, which they soon did, to take his corn, for which they offered him a note. He would have none of it; he had offered them meat but not his Robert A. Ballard, Jr. corn. He resisted and was killed. Of the official versions of these two deaths, Warren wrote, “People always believe what truth they have to believe to go on being the way they are.” Bolton Lovehart’s major resource and consolation is the painstaking creation of a tiny circus—complete with animals and clowns and trapeze artists and a lion tamer— which he carves in the attic office where he is supposedly composing his study of local history. Upon his mother’s death (finally, she does have a heart attack), it appears that he may at last enter into a life of his own. Shortly before World War II, Bolton marries, finds a hero in his braggart stepson, a posthumous Medal of Honor winner, and becomes for a time in his reflected energy and glory a current affairs expert and historian of sorts. His wife, however, who has been unfaithful to him, is killed in an automobile crash, his stepson is taken from him, and at last he returns to the creation of those small, inanimate, innocent, wooden objects whose world alone he cherishes, controls, and understands. Bolton Lovehart’s is less a fully human life than a kind of pathetic facsimile. His study of Bardsville’s past—and by extension, humans’ study of history—seems to assert that historical causation and “truth” are unknowable, that all humans are equally unimportant, and that all people are trapped in their own dark compulsions. Warren is commonly identified as a southern writer and associated with such other premier representatives of that area as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. So long as “southern” is not equated with “regionalist” in the limiting sense of that term, the description is accurate if not very illuminating. In another sense, however, as is apparent in his short fiction, Warren was a provincial, at least insofar as he retained

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an attachment to and an awareness of generally humanistic values—moral, social, and theological—often regarded as a vital part of the region’s heritage. Thus the frequently noticeable tension between stylistic understatement (apparent in passages quoted earlier) and thematic intensity characteristic of the stories seems a reflection of a pull between the old humanistic conception of human wholeness and a naturalistic belief in the fragmented and unintegrated nature of human experience. Warren published his last short story, “The Circus in the Attic,” in 1947; thereafter he published as stories fourteen prepublication excerpts from his novels. Although in his nearly twenty years as a short-story writer Warren produced some fine work, both the author and a good many of his readers have found his achievement in short fiction less satisfying than that in other genres, notably poetry and the novel. Explanations for his limited success in and his dissatisfaction with short fiction might start with the fact that when he wrote many of the stories collected in The Circus in the Attic, and Other Stories, he was a beginner, at least in fiction. It is also the case, as Warren conceded, that he wrote for the quick buck, which did not come. Most of the stories did not represent major efforts; as Arthur Miller has said of his own short stories, they were what came easier. Finally, and most importantly, the form itself seems to have inhibited Warren’s natural talents and inclinations. In writing stories in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Warren appears to have backed into what was for him an unhappy compromise; stories were neither long enough nor short enough, offered neither the satisfying extensive scope of the novel nor the demanding intensive concision of the poem. Short stories might occasionally serve as sketches for novels (“Prime Leaf,” discussed earlier, is the prototype of Warren’s first published novel, Night Rider, 1939), but Warren found that the overlap between the short story and the poem was bad for him, that stories consumed material that would otherwise have become poems. Thus he said, “Short stories are out for me.” Despite such demurs, however, Warren’s achievement in the short story is that of a major talent. Warren’s ear never failed him; the voices from the past and of the present always ring true. No one writing in his day had a better ear—one could almost say recollection, if one did not know Warren’s age—for the voices of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. His eyes were open to both the panorama and to the smallest evocative detail: from the trapper looking across the mountains to the West to the cracked and broken shoe of a tramp. He was intensely alive to the natural world. This is not to say simply that the natural backgrounds of the stories are vividly realized and accurately observed, although Warren was here the equal of Ernest Hemingway or Faulkner, but that such observation and realization provide the bases for those effects characteristic of his stories, for the evocation of atmosphere, for tonal modulation, and for symbolic representation. Allen Shepherd With updates by Christian H. Moe Other major works plays: Proud Flesh, pr. 1947; All the King’s Men, pr. 1958 (adaptation of his novel). anthologies: An Approach to Literature, 1936 (with Cleanth Brooks and John Thibault Purser); Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, 1938 (with Brooks); Understanding Fiction, 1943 (with Brooks); Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1966; Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, 1967 (with Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor); American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 1973 (with R. W. B. Lewis).

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novels: Night Rider, 1939; At Heaven’s Gate, 1943; All the King’s Men, 1946; World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel, 1950; Band of Angels, 1955; The Cave, 1959; Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War, 1961; Flood: A Romance of Our Time, 1964; Meet Me in the Green Glen, 1971; A Place to Come To, 1977. nonfiction: John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, 1929; Modern Rhetoric, 1949 (with Cleanth Brooks); Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, 1956; Selected Essays, 1958; The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial, 1961; Who Speaks for the Negro?, 1965; Democracy and Poetry, 1975; Portrait of a Father, 1988; New and Selected Essays, 1989; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence, 1998 (James A. Grimshaw, Jr., editor); Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, 2000-2001 (2 volumes; William Bedford Clark, editor). poetry: Thirty-six Poems, 1935; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, 1942; Selected Poems, 1923-1943, 1944; Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, 1953; Promises: Poems, 1954-1956, 1957; You, Emperors, and Others: Poems, 1957-1960, 1960; Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966, 1966; Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968, 1968; Audubon: A Vision, 1969; Or Else: Poem/Poems, 1968-1974, 1974; Selected Poems 1923-1975, 1976; Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978, 1978; Brother to Dragons: A New Version, 1979; Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace, 1980 (with Bill Komodore); Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980, 1980; Rumor Verified: Poems, 1979-1980, 1981; Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, 1983; New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985, 1985; The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, 1998 (John Burt, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. This collection of essays on Warren’s work considers both the poetry and the fiction. Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997. Blotner’s is the first of what will almost certainly be many biographies following Warren’s death in 1989. Blotner began his work while Warren was still alive and had the good fortune to have the cooperation not only of his subject but also of the larger Warren family. Blotner’s book is straightforward and chronological; it makes a good beginning. Clark, William Bedford, ed. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Comprehensive collection of criticism by leading literary scholars of Warren’s major work as novelist, poet, biographer, and essayist. Among the contributors are Harold Bloom, Malcolm Cowley, Carlos Baker, John Crowe Ransom, and Randall Jarrell. The collection includes a valuable 1969 interview with Warren by Richard Sale. Dietrich, Bryan. “Christ or Antichrist: Understanding Eight Words in ‘Blackberry Winter.’” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (Spring, 1992): 215-220. Discusses the final line of the story, “But I did follow him, all the years,” by analyzing and critiquing previous critical interpretations of the line and by providing a religious reading of the tramp as Antichrist; suggests that the young protagonist of the story follows in the footsteps of disillusionment. Ferriss, Lucy. “Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity in Robert Penn Warren’s Fiction.” The Mississippi Quarterly 48 (Winter, 1994/1995): 147-167. Part of a special issue on Warren; suggests a feminist reading of Warren’s fiction, discussing significant women characters who have sexual liaisons with men of power and wealth; argues that Warren’s ability to risk the profound disruption of masculine authority either by admitting female “selves” or by exposing the self-other

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dialectic as unreliable demonstrates his faith in the continuing resilience of interpretation. Glenn, Jonathan A. “When the Light Gets Green.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 8. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “When the Light Gets Green” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Madden, David, ed. The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Collection of critical and biographical essays on Warren’s life and work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. May, Charles E. “Blackberry Winter.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Studentfriendly analysis of “Blackberry Winter” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Millichap, Joseph R. Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Millichap examines fourteen stories and two essays by Warren and maintains that the short works provide a window into Warren’s longer and betterknown writings. Ruppersburg, Hugh. Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Ruppersburg considers the Warren opus an attempt to define a national identity. He focuses, in particular, on Brother to Dragons, Audubon: A Vision, and Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. Subscribing to Warren’s notion that he was not a historical writer, Ruppersburg also attempts to place Warren in a contemporary context, emphasizing such modern American concerns as civil rights and nuclear warfare. Watkins, Floyd C., John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, eds. Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Collection of twenty-four interviews, extending from 1953 to 1985, in which Warren talks about his work with characteristic honesty, openness, folksiness, and wit from the joint perspective of writer, interpreter, and critic. The group of interviewers includes Ralph Ellison, Marshall Walker, Bill Moyers, Edwin Harold Newman, Floyd C. Watkins, and Eleanor Clark.

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Eudora Welty Welty, Eudora

Born: Jackson, Mississippi; April 13, 1909 Died: Jackson, Mississippi; July 23, 2001 Principal short fiction • A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories, 1941; The Wide Net, and Other Stories, 1943; The Golden Apples, 1949; Short Stories, 1950; Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1954; The Bride of the Innisfallen, and Other Stories, 1955; Moon Lake, and Other Stories, 1980; The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1980; Retreat, 1981. Other literary forms • In addition to her many short stories, Eudora Welty published novels, essays, reviews, an autobiography, a fantasy story for children, and a volume of photographs of Mississippi during the Depression, One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, A Snapshot Album (1971), taken during her stint as photographer and writer for the Works Progress Administration. Several posthumous volumes of her work have also been published, including On Writing (2002), a collection of her essays about literature, and a memoir, Some Notes on River Country (2003). Achievements • Eudora Welty possessed a distinctive voice in southern, and indeed in American, fiction. Her vibrant, compelling evocation of the Mississippi landscape, which was her most common setting, led to comparisons between her work and that of other eminent southern writers such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Welty’s graceful, lyrical fiction, however, lacks the pessimism that characterizes much of established southern writing, and though her settings are distinctly southern, her themes are universal and do not focus on uniquely southern issues. The honors and awards that Welty amassed throughout her long career are so many as to defy complete listing in a short space. Among her major achievements are four O. Henry Awards for her short stories (first prizes in 1942, 1943, and 1968, and a second prize in 1941), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1942, 1949), honorary lectureships at Smith College (1952) and the University of Cambridge (1955), election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1952) and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1971), honorary LL.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin (1954) and Smith College (1956), a term as honorary consultant to the Library of Congress (1958-1961), the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Ponder Heart (1954), the Gold Medal for Fiction of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (awarded in 1973 for her 1972 novel The Optimist’s Daughter), the National Medal of Literature and Medal of Freedom (1981), the National Medal of Arts (1986), the naming of the Jackson Public Library in her honor (1986), and a Rea Award (1992). Biography • Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi. In the Welty household, reading was a favorite pastime, and Welty recalls in her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), both being read to often as a young child and becoming a voracious reader herself. Her recollections of her early life are of a loving and protective family and of a close, gossip-prone community in which she developed

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her lifelong habit of watching, listening to, and observing closely everything around her. Her progressive and understanding parents encouraged her in her education, and in 1925, she enrolled at the Mississippi State College for Women. After two TO VIEW IMAGE, years there, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin and graduPLEASE SEE ated with a bachelor’s degree in EnPRINT EDITION glish in 1929. OF THIS BOOK. Welty subsequently studied advertising at the Columbia University Business School; her father had recommended to her that if she planned to be a writer, she would be well advised to have another skill to which she could turn in case of need. During the Depression, however, she had little success finding employment in the field of advertising. She returned to Mississippi and spent the next several years working variously as a writer for radio and as a society ediFrank Hains/Courtesy, Mississippi Department of Archives and History tor. In 1933, she began working for the Works Progress Administration, traveling throughout Mississippi, taking photographs, interviewing people, and writing newspaper articles. She later credited this experience with providing her with much material for her short stories as well as sharpening her habit of observation. During these working years, she wrote short stories and occasionally traveled to New York in an effort to interest publishers in her work, with little success. Her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” was published in 1936 by a “little” magazine called Manuscript. Her ability as a writer soon attracted the attention of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of The Southern Review, and over the next years her writing appeared in that magazine as well as in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Sewanee Review. Welty’s first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories, appeared in 1941, with a preface by Katherine Anne Porter. Welty’s reputation as an important southern writer was established with this first volume, and, at the urging of her editor and friend John Woodburn, who encouraged her to write a longer work of fiction, she followed it with her fabular novel The Robber Bridegroom in 1942. Thenceforth, she continued with a fairly steady output of fiction, and with each successive publication, her stature as a major American writer grew. Although fiction was her primary field, she wrote many essays and critical reviews and dabbled in the theater. In addition to stage adaptations of The Robber Bridegroom and The Ponder Heart, she collaborated on a musical (never produced) entitled What Year Is This? and wrote several short theatrical sketches. In 1984, her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, appeared and quickly became a best-seller. Welty spent most of her life living in, observing, and writing about Jackson and the

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Mississippi Delta country. Her frequent visits to New York, and her travels in France, Italy, Ireland, and England (where she participated in a conference on American studies at the University of Cambridge in 1955) provided her with material for those few stories that are set outside her native Mississippi. From time to time, she lectured or taught but in general preferred the quiet and privacy of her lifelong home of Jackson. Welty died of pneumonia in the place of her birth, Jackson, Mississippi, on July 23, 2001, at the age of ninety-two. Analysis • Although some dominant themes and characteristics appear regularly in Eudora Welty’s fiction, her work resists categorization. The majority of her stories are set in her beloved Mississippi Delta country, of which she paints a vivid and detailed picture, but she is equally comfortable evoking such diverse scenes as a northern city or a transatlantic ocean liner. Thematically, she concerns herself both with the importance of family and community relations and, paradoxically, with the strange solitariness of human experience. Elements of myth and symbol often appear in her work, but she uses them in shadowy, inexplicit ways. Perhaps the only constant in Welty’s fiction is her unerring keenness of observation, both of physical landscape and in characterization, and her ability to create convincing psychological portraits of an immensely varied cast of characters. “Death of a Traveling Salesman” • One of her earliest stories, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” tells of a commercial traveler who loses his way in the hill country of Mississippi and accidentally drives his car into a ravine. At the nearest farm dwelling, the salesman finds a simple, taciturn couple who assist him with his car and give him a meal and a place to stay for the night. The unspoken warmth in the relationship of the couple is contrasted with the salesman’s loneliness, and he repeatedly worries that they can hear the loud pounding of his heart, physically weakened from a recent illness and metaphorically empty of love. When he leaves their house in the morning, his heart pounds loudest of all as he carries his bags to his car; frantically he tries to stifle the sound and dies, his heart unheard by anyone but himself. “A Worn Path” • Another relatively early story, “A Worn Path,” recounts an ancient black woman’s long and perilous journey on foot from her remote rural home to the nearest town. The frail old woman, called Phoenix, travels slowly and painfully through a sometimes hostile landscape, described in rich and abundant detail. She overcomes numerous obstacles with determination and good humor. Into the vivid, realistic description of the landscape and journey, Welty interweaves characteristically lyrical passages describing Phoenix’s fatigue-induced hallucinations and confused imaginings. When Phoenix reaches the town, she goes to the doctor’s office, and it is revealed that the purpose of her journey is to obtain medicine for her chronically ill grandson. A poignant scene at the story’s close confirms the reader’s suspicion of Phoenix’s extreme poverty and suggests the likelihood that her beloved grandson will not live long; old Phoenix’s dignity and courage in the face of such hardship, however, raise the story from pathos to a tribute to her resilience and strength of will. Like her mythical namesake, Phoenix triumphs over the forces that seek to destroy her. “Why I Live at the P.O.” • “Why I Live at the P.O.” is a richly comic tale of family discord and personal alienation, told in the first person in idiomatic, naturalistic lan-

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guage that captures the sounds and patterns of a distinctive southern speech. It is one of the earliest examples of Welty’s often-used narrative technique, what she calls the “monologue that takes possession of the speaker.” The story recounts how Sister, the intelligent and ironic narrator, comes to fall out with her family over incidents arising from her younger sister Stella-Rondo’s sudden reappearance in their small southern town, minus her husband and with a two-year-old “adopted” child in tow. Welty’s flair for comedy of situation is revealed as a series of bizarrely farcical episodes unfolds. Through the irritable Stella-Rondo’s manipulative misrepresentations of fact and Sister’s own indifference to causing offense, Sister earns the ire of her opinionated and influential grandfather Papa-Daddy, her gullible, partisan mother, and her short-tempered Uncle Rondo. Sister responds by removing all of her possessions from communal use in the home and taking up residence in the local post office, where she is postmistress. Inability to communicate is a recurrent theme in Welty’s short fiction; in this case, it is treated with a controlled hilarity that is chiefly comic but that nevertheless reveals the pain of a family’s disunity. This story is one of the best examples of Welty’s gift for comic characterization, her gentle mockery of human foibles, and her ear for southern idiom and expression. “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” • Although Welty disliked having the term “gothic” applied to her fiction, “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” has a grotesque quality that characterizes much of southern gothic writing. Steve, a former circus sideshow barker, has enlisted the help of Max in finding a small, clubfooted black man who used to be exhibited in the sideshow as “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden.” As a sideshow freak, he was forced to behave savagely and eat live chickens. Max has brought Steve to the home of Little Lee Roy, who is indeed the man Steve seeks. As Little Lee Roy looks on, Steve tells Max the disgusting details of the sideshow act and explains how Little Lee Roy was ill-treated by the circus until a kind spectator rescued the victim from his degrading existence. Although he persistently refers to Little Lee Roy as “it” and, unlike Max, refuses to address Little Lee Roy directly, Steve expresses guilt and regret over his role in Little Lee Roy’s exploitation. There are subtle resonances of the South’s troubled legacy in the way the obviously culpable Steve tries to diminish his role in this ugly episode of oppression by pleading ignorance. He claims that he never knew that the sideshow freak was a normal man and not the savage beast that he was displayed as being in the circus. The simpleminded Little Lee Roy, however, reacts to these reminders of his bizarre past with uncomprehending glee; he seems to have forgotten the pain and unpleasantness of his life with the circus and remembers it only as a colorful adventure. Steve cannot expiate his guilt; he has nothing to offer Little Lee Roy to compensate him for his brutal treatment. He says awkwardly to Max, “Well, I was goin’ to give him some money or somethin’, I guess, if I ever found him, only now I ain’t got any.” After the white men’s departure, Little Lee Roy’s children return, but they hush him when he tries to tell them about the visitors who came to talk to him about “de old times when I use to be wid de circus.” The ugly incidents have left no scar on their simple victim; rather, it is the victimizer who suffers an inescapable burden of guilt and shame. “The Wide Net” • “The Wide Net” is a fabular tale of the mysteries of human relationships and the potency of the natural world. Young William Wallace returns home from a night on the town to find a note from his pregnant wife saying that she has

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gone to drown herself in the river. William Wallace assembles a motley collection of men and boys to help him drag the river. The river’s power as a symbol is apparent in the meaning that it holds for the many characters: To youngsters Grady and Brucie it is the grave of their drowned father; to the rough, carefree Malones, it is a fertile source of life, teeming with catfish to eat, eels to “rassle,” and alligators to hunt; to the philosophical and somewhat bombastic Doc, it signifies that “the outside world is full of endurance.” It is also, the river-draggers discover, the home of the primeval “king of the snakes.” Throughout the story, Welty deliberately obscures the nature of William Wallace’s relationship with his wife, the history behind her threat, and even whether William Wallace truly believes his wife has jumped in the river. Characteristically, Welty relies on subtle hints and expert manipulation of tone rather than on open exposition to suggest to her readers the underpinnings of the events that she describes. This deliberate vagueness surrounding the facts of the young couple’s quarrel lends the story the quality of a fable or folktale. The young lover must undergo the test of dragging the great river, confronting the king of snakes, and experiencing a kind of baptism, both in the river and in the cleansing thunderstorm that drenches the searchers, before he is worthy of regaining his wife’s love. Like a fable, the story has an almost impossibly simple and happy ending. William Wallace returns from the river to find his welcoming wife waiting calmly at home. They have a brief, affectionate mock quarrel that does not specifically address the incident at all, and they retire hand in hand, leaving the reader to ponder the mystery of their bond. “Livvie” • “Livvie” has a lyrical, fabular quality similar to that of “The Wide Net.” Livvie is a young black woman who lives with her elderly husband, Solomon, on a remote farm far up the old Natchez Trace. The strict old husband is fiercely protective of his young bride and does not allow her to venture from the yard or to talk with—or even see—other people. The inexperienced Livvie, however, is content in Solomon’s comfortable house, and she takes loving care of him when his great age finally renders him bedridden. One day, a white woman comes to her door, selling cosmetics. Livvie is enchanted with the colors and scents of the cosmetics but is firm in her insistence that she has no money to buy them. When the saleswoman leaves, Livvie goes into the bedroom to gaze on her ancient, sleeping husband. Desire for wider experience and a more fulfilling life has been awakened in her, and as her husband sleeps, she disobeys his strictest command and wanders off down the Natchez Trace. There, she comes upon a handsome, opulently dressed young man named Cash, whom she leads back to Solomon’s house. When Solomon awakes and sees them, he is reproachful but resigned to her need for a younger man, asking God to forgive him for taking such a young girl away from other young people. Cash steals from the room, and as Livvie gazes on the frail, wasted body of Solomon, he dies. In a trancelike shock, Livvie drops Solomon’s sterile, ticking watch; after momentary hesitation, she goes outside to join Cash in the bright light of springtime. “Livvie” is almost like a fairy tale in its use of simple, universal devices. The beautiful young bride, the miserly old man who imprisons her, the strange caller who brings temptation, and the handsome youth who rescues the heroine are all familiar, timeless characters. Welty broadens the references of her story to include elements of myth and religion. Young Cash, emerging from the deep forest dressed in a bright green coat and green-plumed hat, could be the Green Man of folklore, a symbol of

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springtime regeneration and fertility. In contrasting youth with age and old with new, Welty subtly employs biblical references. Old Solomon thinks rather than feels but falls short of his Old Testament namesake in wisdom. Youthful Cash, redolent of spring, tells Livvie that he is “ready for Easter,” the reference ostensibly being to his new finery but suggesting new life rising to vanquish death. The vague, dreamy impressionism of “Livvie,” which relies on image and action rather than dialogue to tell the story (except in the scenes featuring the saleswoman), adds to this folktale-like quality. “A Still Moment” • In “A Still Moment,” Welty uses historical characters to tell a mystically imaginative tale. Lorenzo Dow, the New England preacher, James Murrell, the outlaw, and John James Audubon, the naturalist and painter, were real people whom Welty places in a fictional situation. Dow rides with an inspired determination to his evening’s destination, a camp meeting where he looks forward to a wholesale saving of souls. With single-minded passion, he visualizes souls and demons crowding before him in the dusky landscape. Dow’s spiritual intensity is both compared and contrasted to the outlook of the outlaw Murrell, who shadows Dow along the Natchez Trace. Murrell considers his outlawry in a profoundly philosophical light, seeing each murder as a kind of ceremonial drawing out and solving of the unique “mystery” of each victim’s being. Audubon, like Dow and Murrell, has a strange and driving intensity that sets him apart from other men. His passion is the natural world; by meticulously observing and recording it, he believes that he can move from his knowledge to an understanding of all things, including his own being. The three men are brought together by chance in a clearing, each unaware of the others’ identities. As they pause, a solitary white heron alights near them in the marsh. As the three men stare in wonder at the snowy creature, Welty identifies for the reader the strange similarity of these outwardly diverse men: “What each of them had wanted was simply all. To save all souls, to destroy all men, to see and record all life that filled this world.” The simple and beautiful sight of the heron, however, causes these desires to ebb in each of them; they are transfixed and cleansed of desire. Welty uses the heron as a symbol of the purity and beauty of the natural world, which acts as a catalyst for her characters’ self-discovery. Oddly, it is Audubon, the lover of nature, who breaks the spell. He reaches for his gun and shoots the bird, to add to his scientific collection. The magic of the moment is gone, and the lifeless body of the bird becomes a mere sum of its parts, a dull, insensate mass of feathers and flesh. Audubon, his prize collected, continues on his way, and the horrified Dow hurries away toward his camp meeting, comforted by the vivid memory of the bird’s strange beauty. The dangerous Murrell experiences an epiphanic moment of selfrealization; the incident has reminded him poignantly of all men’s separateness and innocence, a thought that reconfirms in him his desire to waylay and destroy. It is only through a brief but intense moment of shared feeling and experience that the men can recognize their essential loneliness. As in “The Wide Net” and “Livvie,” the most important communication must be done without words. “Moon Lake” • “Moon Lake” is from the collection The Golden Apples, the stories of which are nearly all set in or around the mythical community of Morgana, Mississippi, and feature a single, though extensive, cast of characters. Thematically, it shares with “A Still Moment” the sense of the paradoxical oneness and interconnec-

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tedness of the human condition. The story describes a sequence of events at a camp for girls at the lake of the story’s title. The characteristically lushly detailed landscape is both beautiful and dangerous, a place where poisonous snakes may lurk in the blackberry brambles and where the lake is a site for adventure but also a brownwatered, bug-infested morass with thick mud and cypress roots that grasp at one’s feet. The story highlights the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of human connection. Antipathies abound among the group assembled at the lake: The lake’s Boy Scout lifeguard, Loch, feels contempt for the crowd of young girls; the Morgana girls look down on the orphan girls as ragged thieves; rivalry and distrust crops up among individual girls. The sensitive Nina yearns for connection and freedom from connection at the same time; she envies the lonely independence of the orphans and wishes to be able to change from one persona to another at will, but at the same time she is drawn to Easter, the “leader” of the orphans, for her very qualities of separateness and disdain for friendship. Nina and her friend Jinny Love follow Easter to a remote part of the lake in an unsuccessful attempt to cultivate her friendship, and when they return to where the others are swimming, Easter falls from the diving platform and nearly drowns. The near-drowning becomes a physical acting out of the story’s theme, the fascinating and inescapable but frightening necessity of human connection. Without another’s help, Easter would have died alone under the murky water, but Loch’s lengthy efforts to resuscitate the apparently lifeless form of Easter disgust the other girls. The quasisexual rhythm of the resuscitation is made even more disturbing to the girls by its violence: Loch pummels Easter with his fists, and blood streams from her mud-smeared mouth as he flails away astride her. The distressing physical contact contrasts with the lack of any emotional connection during this scene. One orphan, a companion of Easter, speculates that if Easter dies she gets her winter coat, and gradually the other girls grow bored of the spectacle and resent the interruption of their afternoon swim. Jinny Love’s mother, appearing unexpectedly at the camp, is more concerned with the lewdness that she imputes to Loch’s rhythmic motions than with Easter’s condition and she barks at him, “Loch Morrison, get off that table and shame on you.” Nina is the most keenly aware of the symbolic significance of the incident and of the peril of connection; she reflects that “Easter had come among them and had held herself untouchable and intact. For one little touch could smirch her, make her fall so far, so deep.” “The Whole World Knows” • Another story from The Golden Apples is “The Whole World Knows,” which features the adult Jinny Love Stark, whom readers have met as a child in “Moon Lake,” and Ran McLain, who appears briefly in “Moon Lake” and other stories in this collection. The story addresses the inescapable net of personal and community relations and the potentially stifling and limiting nature of smalltown life. Welty uses a monologue form similar to the one in “Why I Live at the P.O.,” but in this story, told by Ran, the tone is lamenting and confessional rather than comically outraged. Ran and Jinny are married but have separated, ostensibly over Jinny’s infidelity. They both remain in the claustrophobically small town of Morgana, living in the same street and meeting occasionally in the town’s bank, where Ran works alongside Jinny’s lover, Woody Spights. On the surface, the story centers on Ran’s developing relationship with a Maideen Sumrall, a foolish, chattering young country girl with

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whom he has taken up as a way of revenging himself on his wayward wife. The true focus, however, is on the causes of the deterioration of Ran’s marriage to the lively, enthusiastic Jinny, revealed obliquely through other events in the story. The reasons for Jinny’s initial infidelity are only hinted at; her irrepressibly joyous and wondering outlook is contrasted with Ran’s heavy and brooding nature, indicating a fundamental incompatibility. Ran’s careless and selfish use of Maideen, to whom he is attracted because she seems a young and “uncontaminated” version of Jinny, suggests a dark side to his nature that may be at the root of their estrangement. There is a vague suggestion, never clearly stated, that Ran may have been unfaithful to Jinny first. The merry, carefree Jinny baffles and infuriates Ran, and he fantasizes about violently murdering both Jinny and her lover, Woody. His true victim, however, is Maideen, the vulnerable opposite of the unflappable, independent Jinny. After Ran roughly consummates his shabby affair with the semi-willing Maideen, he wakes to find her sobbing like a child beside him. Readers learn in another story that Maideen eventually commits suicide. The story ends inconclusively, with neither Ran nor Jinny able or even entirely willing to escape from their shared past, the constricted community of Morgana being their all-knowing “whole world” of the story’s title. As in “Moon Lake,” true connection is a paradox, at once impossible, inescapable, desirable, and destructive. “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” • “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” was originally published in The New Yorker, and it remained uncollected until the appearance of the complete The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in 1980. In it, Welty uses a fictional voice to express her views on the civil rights struggle in the South. The story, written in 1963 in response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Welty’s hometown of Jackson, is told as a monologue by a southern white man whose ignorance and hate for African Americans is depicted as chillingly mundane. He tells how, enraged by black activism in the South, he determines to shoot a local civil rights leader. He drives to the man’s home late on an unbearably hot summer night, waits calmly in hiding until the man appears, and then shoots him in cold blood. The callous self-righteousness of the killer and his unreasoning hate are frighteningly depicted when he mocks the body of his victim, saying “Roland? There was only one way left for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you, by Dad, and I just taken it. . . . We ain’t never now, never going to be equals and you know why? One of us is dead. What about that, Roland?” His justification for the murder is simple: “I done what I done for my own pure-D satisfaction.” His only regret is that he cannot claim the credit for the killing. Welty scatters subtle symbols throughout the story. The extremely hot weather, which torments the killer, reflects the social climate as the civil rights conflict reaches a kind of boiling point. To the killer, the street feels as hot under his feet as the barrel of his gun. Light and dark contrast in more than just the black and white skins of the characters: The stealthy killer arrives in a darkness that will cloak his crime and he finds light shining forth from the home of his prey, whose mission is to enlighten. When the killer shoots his victim, he sees that “something darker than him, like the wings of a bird, spread on his back and pulled him down.” Unlike most of Welty’s fiction, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” clearly espouses a particular viewpoint, and the reader is left with no doubt about the writer’s intention in telling the story. The story, however, embodies the qualities that typify Welty’s fiction: the focus on the interconnections of human society; the full, sharp characterization achieved in a minimum of space; the detailed description of the

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physical landscape that powerfully evokes a sense of place; the ear for speech and idiom; and the subtle, floating symbolism that insinuates rather than announces its meaning. Catherine Swanson With updates by the Editors Other major works children’s literature: The Shoe Bird, 1964. novels: The Robber Bridegroom, 1942; Delta Wedding, 1946; The Ponder Heart, 1954; Losing Battles, 1970; The Optimist’s Daughter, 1972. miscellaneous: Stories, Essays, and Memoir, 1998; Early Escapades, 2005 (Patti Carr Black, editor). nonfiction: Music from Spain, 1948; The Reading and Writing of Short Stories, 1949; Place in Fiction, 1957; Three Papers on Fiction, 1962; One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, a Snapshot Album, 1971; A Pageant of Birds, 1974; The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, 1978; Ida M’Toy, 1979; Miracles of Perception: The Art of Willa Cather, 1980 (with Alfred Knopf and Yehudi Menuhin); Conversations with Eudora Welty, 1984 (Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, editor); One Writer’s Beginnings, 1984; Eudora Welty: Photographs, 1989; A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews, 1994 (Pearl Amelia McHaney, editor); More Conversations with Eudora Welty, 1996 (Prenshaw, editor); Country Churchyards, 2000; On William Hollingsworth, Jr., 2002; On Writing, 2002 (includes essays originally published in The Eye of the Story); Some Notes on River Country, 2003; On William Faulkner, 2003. Bibliography Devlin, Albert J. Eudora Welty’s Chronicle: A Story of Mississippi Life. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983. Devlin analyzes certain works, such as Delta Wedding, in great detail. He offers insightful criticism and suggests that Welty’s writing contains a historical structure, spanning from the territorial era to modern times. Georgia Review 53 (Spring, 1999). A special issue on Welty celebrating her ninetieth birthday, with articles by a number of writers, including Doris Betts, as well as a number of critics and admirers of Welty. Kaplansky, Leslie A. “Cinematic Rhythms in the Short Fiction of Eudora Welty.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Fall, 1996): 579-589. Discusses the influence of film technique on Welty’s short fiction; argues that in taking advantage of cinematic rhythm in her stories, Welty developed her mastery of technique and style. Marrs, Suzanne. Eudora Welty: A Biography. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Literary biography provides insight into Welty’s life and writing and serves to refute some popular conceptions of the writer. ____________. One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Combination of critical analysis and memoir, written by a long-time friend of Welty who is also a scholar and the archivist of Welty’s papers. Discusses the effects of both close personal relationships and social and political events on Welty’s imagination and writing. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of thirteen short stories by Welty: “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (vol. 2); “Keela, the Outcast Indian

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Maiden” (vol. 4); “A Memory” and “No Place for You, My Love” (vol. 5); “Petrified Man,” “A Piece of News,” and “Powerhouse” (vol. 6); “Shower of Gold” (vol. 7); and “A Visit of Charity,” “The Wide Net,” “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and “A Worn Path” (vol. 8). Mississippi Quarterly 50 (Fall, 1997). A special issue on Welty, with essays comparing Welty to William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and discussions of the women in Welty’s stories, her political thought, her treatment of race and history. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Collection of interviews with Welty spanning the years 1942-1982. Welty talks frankly and revealingly with interviewers such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Alice Walker about her fiction and her life, addressing such topics as her methods of writing, her southern background, her love of reading, and her admiration for the works of writers such as William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, and Katherine Anne Porter. Waldron, Ann. Eudora Welty: A Writer’s Life. New York: Doubleday, 1998. The first fulllength biography of Welty, but one that was done without her authorization or permission; provides a great deal of detail about Welty’s life and literary career but derives commentary about Welty’s work from reviews and other previous criticism. Weston, Ruth D. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Discusses Welty’s use of the gothic tradition in her fiction; provides original readings of a number of Welty’s short stories.

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Born: New York, New York; January 24, 1862 Died: St.-Brice-sous-Forêt, France; August 11, 1937 Principal short fiction • The Greater Inclination, 1899; Crucial Instances, 1901; The Descent of Man, 1904; The Hermit and the Wild Woman, 1908; Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910; Xingu, and Other Stories, 1916; Here and Beyond, 1926; Certain People, 1930; Human Nature, 1933; The World Over, 1936; Ghosts, 1937; The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, 1968; Collected Stories, 1891-1910, 2001 (Maureen Howard, editor); Collected Stories, 1911-1937, 2001 (Howard, editor). Other literary forms • Edith Wharton’s prolific career includes the publication of novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel books, criticism, works on landscaping and interior decoration, a translation, an autobiography, and wartime pamphlets and journalism. Her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Several of her works have been adapted for the stage, including The Age of Innocence and the novels Ethan Frome (1911), The House of Mirth (1905), and The Old Maid (1924). The dramatization of The Old Maid was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1935. Films based on Edith Wharton’s works include The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), and The Old Maid. Achievements • Edith Wharton’s talent in affording her reader an elegant, wellconstructed glance at upper-class New York and European society won for her high esteem from the earliest years of her career. The novel The House of Mirth was her first best-seller and, along with Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, is considered to be one of her finest works. During World War I, Wharton served the Allied cause in Europe by organizing relief efforts and caring for Belgian orphans, work for which she was inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1916 and the Order of Leopold (Belgium) in 1919. In the United States, the 1920’s would see Wharton’s literary career flower. In 1921, she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize, awarded to her for The Age of Innocence; in 1923, she also became the first female recipient of an honorary degree of doctor of letters from Yale University; in 1927, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature; in 1928, her novel The Children was the Book-of-theMonth Club selection for September. By 1930, Wharton was one of the most highly regarded American authors of the time and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After Wharton’s death in 1937, her fiction was not as widely read by the general public as it was during her lifetime. Feminist literary scholars, however, have reexamined Wharton’s works for their unmistakable portrayal of women’s lives in the early twentieth century. Biography • Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones, a member of a family occupying the highest level of society. Like most girls of her generation and social class, she was educated at home. At the age of twenty-three she married a wealthy young man, Edward Wharton; they had no children. Wharton divided her time between writing and her duties as a society hostess. Her husband, emotionally unstable, suffered

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several nervous breakdowns, and in 1913, they were divorced. Wharton spent a great deal of time in Europe; after 1912 she returned to America only once, to accept the honorary degree of doctor of letters from Yale University in 1923. During World War I, Wharton was very active in war work in France, for which she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916. Realizing that after her death her friends would suppress much of her real personality in their accounts of her life, and wanting the truth to be told, Wharton willed her private papers to Yale University, with instructions that they were not to be published until 1968. These papers revealed a totally unexpected side of Wharton’s character: passionate, impulsive, and vulnerable. This new view of the author has had a marked effect on subsequent interpretations of her work. Analysis • Because many of Edith Wharton’s characters and themes resemble those of Henry James, her work has sometimes been regarded as derivative of his. Each of these authors wrote a number of stories regarding such themes as the fate of the individual who challenges the standards of society, the effect of commercial success on an artist, the impact of European civilization on an American mentality, and the confrontation of a public personality with his own private self. Further, both James and Wharton used ghost stories to present, in allegorical terms, internal experiences which would be difficult to dramatize in a purely realistic way. Wharton knew James and admired him as a friend and as a writer, and some of her early short stories—those in The Greater Inclination and Crucial Instances, for example—do resemble James’s work. As she matured, however, Wharton developed an artistic viewpoint and a style which were distinctly her own. Her approach to the themes which she shared with James was much more direct than his: She took a more sweeping view of the action of a story and omitted the myriad details, qualifications, and explanations which characterize James’s work. It is not surprising that Wharton and James developed a number of parallel interests. Both writers moved in the same rather limited social circle and were exposed to the same values and to the same types of people. Not all their perceptions, however, were identical since Wharton’s viewpoint was influenced by the limitations she experienced as a woman. She was therefore especially sensitive to such subtle forms of victimization as the narrowness of a woman’s horizons in her society, which not only denied women the opportunity to develop their full potential but also burdened men with disproportionate responsibilities. This theme, which underlies some of her best novels—The House of Mirth is a good example—also appears in a number of her short stories, such as “The Rembrandt.” “The Rembrandt” • The narrator of “The Rembrandt” is a museum curator whose cousin, Eleanor Copt, frequently undertakes acts of charity toward the unfortunate. These acts of charity, however, often take the form of persuading someone else to bear the brunt of the inconvenience and expense. As “The Rembrandt” opens, Eleanor persuades her cousin to accompany her to a rented room occupied by an elderly lady, the once-wealthy Mrs. Fontage. This widowed lady, who has suffered a number of financial misfortunes, has been reduced from living in palatial homes to now living in a dingy room. Even this small room soon will be too expensive for her unless she can sell the one art treasure she still possesses: an unsigned Rembrandt. The supposed Rembrandt, purchased under highly romantic circumstances during the Fontages’ honeymoon in Europe, turns out to be valueless. The curator, however, is

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moved by the dignity and grace with which Mrs. Fontage faces her situation, and he cannot bring himself to tell her that the painting is worthless. He values it at a thousand dollars, reasoning that he himself cannot be expected to raise that much money. When he realizes that his cousin and Mrs. Fontage expect him to purchase the painting on behalf of the museum, he temporizes. Meanwhile, Eleanor interests an admirer of hers, Mr. Jefferson Rose, in the painting. Although he cannot really spare the money, Rose decides to buy the painting as an act of charity and as an investment. Even after the curator confesses his lie to Rose, the young man is determined to relieve Mrs. Fontage’s misery. The Library of Congress curator, reasoning that it is better to defraud an institution than an individual, purchases the painting for the museum. The only museum official who might question his decision is abroad, and the curator stores the painting in the museum cellar and forgets it. When the official, Crozier, returns, he asks the curator whether he really considers the painting valuable. The curator confesses what he has done and offers to buy the painting from the museum. Crozier then informs the curator that the members of the museum committee have already purchased the painting privately, and beg leave to present it to the curator in recognition of his kindness to Mrs. Fontage. Despite its flaws in structure and its somewhat romantic view of the business world, “The Rembrandt” shows Wharton’s concern with the relationship between helpless individuals and the society which produced them. Her portrait of Mrs. Fontage is especially revealing—she is a woman of dignity and breeding, whose pride and training sustain her in very difficult circumstances. That very breeding, however, cripples Mrs. Fontage because of the narrowness which accompanies it. She is entirely ignorant of the practical side of life, and, in the absence of a husband or some other head of the family, she is seriously handicapped in dealing with business matters. Furthermore, although she is intelligent and in good health, she is absolutely incapable of contributing to her own support. In this very early story, Wharton applauds the gentlemen who live up to the responsibility of caring for such women. Later, Wharton will censure the men and the women whose unthinking conformity to social stereotypes has deprived women like Mrs. Fontage of the ability to care for themselves and has placed a double burden on the men. “The Eyes” • As Wharton matured, her interest in victimization moved from the external world of society to the internal world of the individual mind. She recognized

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the fact that adjustment to life sometimes entails a compromise with one’s private self which constitutes a betrayal. One of her most striking portrayals of that theme is in “The Eyes.” This tale employs the framework of a ghost story to dramatize an internal experience. The story’s aging protagonist, Andrew Culwin, has never become part of life, or allowed an involvement with another human being to threaten his absolute egotism. One evening, as his friends amuse themselves by telling tales of psychic events they have witnessed, Culwin offers to tell a story of his own. He explains that as a young man he once flirted with his naïve young cousin Alice, who responded with a seriousness which alarmed him. He immediately announced a trip to Europe; but, moved by the grace with which she accepted her disappointment, Culwin proposed to her and was accepted. He went to bed that evening feeling his self-centered bachelorhood giving way to a sense of righteousness and peace. Culwin awakened in the middle of the night, however, and saw in front of him a hideous pair of eyes. The eyes, which were sunken and old, had pouches of shriveled flesh beneath them and red-lined lids above them, and one of the lids drooped more than the other. These eyes remained in the room all night, and in the morning Culwin fled, without explanation, to a friend’s house. There he slept undisturbed and made plans to return to Alice a few days later. Thereupon the eyes returned, and Culwin fled to Europe. He realized that he did not really want to marry Alice, and he devoted himself to a selfcentered enjoyment of Europe. After two years, a handsome young man arrived in Rome with a letter of introduction to Culwin from Alice. This young man, Gilbert Noyes, had been sent abroad by his family to test himself as a writer. Culwin knew that Noyes’s writing was worthless, but he temporized in order to keep the handsome youth with him. He also pitied Noyes because of the dull clerk’s job which waited for him at home. Finally, Culwin told Noyes that his work had merit, intending to support the young man himself if necessary. That night, the eyes reappeared; and Culwin felt, along with his revulsion, a disquieting sense of identity with the eyes, as if he would some day come to understand all about them. After a month, Culwin cruelly dismissed Noyes, who went home to his clerkship; Culwin took to drink and turned up years later in Hong Kong, fat and unshaven. The eyes then disappeared and never returned. Culwin’s listeners perceive what the reader perceives: The eyes that mock Culwin’s rare attempts to transform his self-centered existence into a life of involvement with someone else are in fact his own eyes, looking at him from the future and mocking him with what he would become. The eyes also represent Culwin’s lesser self, which would in time take over his entire personality. Even in his youth, this lesser self overshadows Culwin’s more humane impulses with second thoughts of the effect these impulses are likely to have on his comfort and security. The story ends as Culwin, surprised by his friends’ reaction to his story, catches sight of himself in a mirror, and realizes the truth. “After Holbein” • Wharton’s twin themes of social and self-victimization are joined most effectively in a later story which many readers consider her best: “After Holbein.” The title refers to a series of woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger, entitled “The Dance of Death.” They show the figure of death, represented by a skeleton, insinuating himself into the lives of various unsuspecting people. One of these engravings, entitled “Noblewoman,” features a richly dressed man and woman following the figure of death. The story begins with a description of an elderly gentleman, Anson Warley, who

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has been one of the most popular members of New York society for more than thirty years. In the first three pages of the story, the reader learns that Warley fought, long ago, a battle between his public image and his private self; and the private self lost. Warley gradually stopped staying at home to read or meditate and found less and less time to talk quietly with intellectual friends or scholars. He became a purely public figure, a frequenter of hot, noisy, crowded rooms. His intellect gave itself entirely to the production of drawing-room witticisms, many of them barbed with sarcasm. On the evening that the story takes place, Warley finds himself reminded of one of these sallies of his. Some years earlier, Warley, who had been dodging the persistent invitations of a pompous and rather boring society hostess, finally told his circle of friends that the next time he received a card saying “Mrs. Jasper requests the pleasure,” he would reply, “Mr. Warley declines the boredom.” The remark was appreciated at the time by the friends who heard it; but in his old age Warley finds himself hoping that Mrs. Jasper never suffered the pain of hearing about it. At this point in the story, Wharton shifts the scene to a mansion on Fifth Avenue, where a senile old woman prepares herself for an imaginary dinner party. She wears a grotesque purple wig, and broad-toed orthopedic shoes under an ancient purple gown. She also insists on wearing her diamonds to what she believes will be another triumph of her skill as a hostess. This woman is the same Mrs. Jasper whom Warley has been avoiding for years. She is now in the care of an unsympathetic young nurse and three elderly servants. Periodically, the four employees go through the charade of preparing the house and Mrs. Jasper for the dinner parties which she imagines still take place there. While Mrs. Jasper is being dressed for her illusory dinner party, Anson Warley is preparing to attend a real one. Despite his valet’s protests concerning his health, Warley not only refuses to stay at home but also insists on walking up Fifth Avenue in the freezing winter night. Gradually he becomes confused and forgets his destination. Then he sees before him Mrs. Jasper’s mansion, lighted for a dinner party, and in his confusion, he imagines he is to dine there. He arrives just as Mrs. Jasper’s footman is reading aloud the list of guests whom Mrs. Jasper thinks she has invited. When dinner is announced, Warley and Mrs. Jasper walk arm in arm, at a stately processional gait, to the table. The footman has set the table with heavy blue and white servants’ dishes, and he has stuffed newspapers instead of orchids into the priceless Rose Dubarry porcelain dishes. He serves a plain meal and inexpensive wine in the empty dining room. Lost in the illusion, however, Warley and Mrs. Jasper imagine that they are consuming a gourmet meal at a luxuriously appointed table in the presence of a crowd of glittering guests. They go through a ritual of gestures and conversation which does indeed resemble the danse macabre for which the story is named. Finally, Mrs. Jasper leaves the table exhausted and makes her way upstairs to her uncomprehending and chuckling nurse. Warley, equally exhausted and equally convinced that he has attended a brilliant dinner party, steps out into the night and drops dead. “After Holbein” is a powerful story primarily because of the contrasts it establishes. In the foreground are the wasted lives of Warley and Mrs. Jasper, each of whom has long given up all hope of originality or self-realization for the sake of being part of a nameless, gilded mass. The unsympathetic nurse, who teases Mrs. Jasper into tears, acts not from cruelty but from her inability to comprehend, in her own hopeful youth, the tragedy of Mrs. Jasper’s situation. This nurse is contrasted with Mrs. Jasper’s elderly maid, Lavinia, who conceals her own failing health out of loyalty to her

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mistress, and who is moved to tears by Mrs. Jasper’s plight. Even the essential horror of the story is intensified by the contrasting formality and restraint of its language and by the tight structuring which gives the plot the same momentum of inevitability as the movements of a formal dance. Warley and Mrs. Jasper have been betrayed from within and from without. They have traded their private selves for public masks, and have spent their lives among others who have made the same bargain. Lavinia’s recollections suggest to the reader that Mrs. Jasper subordinated her role as mother to her role as hostess; and her children, reared in that same world, have left her to the care of servants. Her friends are dead or bedridden, or they have forgotten her. She exists now, in a sense, as she has always existed: as a grotesque figure in a world of illusion. Warley, too, has come to think of himself only in terms of his social reputation— he will not accept the reality of his age and infirmity. Thus, as he drags one leg during his icy walk along Fifth Avenue, he pictures a club smoking room in which one of his acquaintances will say, “Warley? Why, I saw him sprinting up Fifth Avenue the other night like a two-year-old; that night it was four or five below.” Warley has convinced himself that whatever is said in club smoking rooms by men in good society is real. None of the acquaintances, however, to whom he has given his life is with him when he takes that final step; and it would not have mattered if anyone had been there. Warley is almost inevitably and irrevocably alone at last. Wharton’s eleven volumes of short stories, spanning thirty-nine years, record her growth in thought and in style. They offer the entertainment of seeing inside an exclusive social circle which was in many respects unique and which no longer exists as Wharton knew it. Some of Wharton’s stories are trivial and some are repetitive; but her best stories depict, in the inhabitants of that exclusive social world, experiences and sensations which are universal. Joan DelFattore With updates by Mary F. Yudin Other major works novels: The Touchstone, 1900; The Valley of Decision, 1902; Sanctuary, 1903; The House of Mirth, 1905; Madame de Treymes, 1907; The Fruit of the Tree, 1907; Ethan Frome, 1911; The Reef, 1912; The Custom of the Country, 1913; Summer, 1917; The Marne, 1918; The Age of Innocence, 1920; The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922; A Son at the Front, 1923; Old New York, 1924 (4 volumes; includes False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year’s Day); The Mother’s Recompense, 1925; Twilight Sleep, 1927; The Children, 1928; Hudson River Bracketed, 1929; The Gods Arrive, 1932; The Buccaneers, 1938. nonfiction: The Decoration of Houses, 1897 (with Ogden Codman, Jr.); Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904; Italian Backgrounds, 1905; A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908; Fighting France from Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915; French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919; In Morocco, 1920; The Writing of Fiction, 1925; A Backward Glance, 1934; The Letters of Edith Wharton, 1988; The Uncollected Critical Writings, 1997 (Frederick Wegener, editor); Yrs. Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield, 2000 (Daniel Bratton, editor). poetry: Verses, 1878; Artemis to Actæon, 1909; Twelve Poems, 1926.

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Bibliography Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Ammons proposes that Wharton’s “argument with America” concerns the freedom of women, an argument in which she had a key role during three decades of significant upheaval and change. This engaging book examines the evolution of Wharton’s point of view in her novels and discusses the effect of World War I on Wharton. Contains a notes section. Banta, Martha. “The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World.” American Literary Realism: 1870-1910 27 (Fall, 1994): 1-10. An analysis of Wharton’s ghost story “Afterward” and her novella Ethan Frome as illustrative of the nineteenth century craving for a circumscribed experience of the bizarre. Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1997. Beer devotes two chapters to Wharton’s short fiction, focusing primarily on the novellas in one chapter and the regional stories about New England in the other. Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994. As the first substantial biography of Wharton to appear in nearly two decades, Benstock’s study is informed by her investigation of a variety of primary sources that have become available in recent years. Fracasso, Evelyn E. Edith Wharton’s Prisoner of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Analyzes stories from three periods of Wharton’s career. Focuses on her technique in treating the theme of imprisonment. Deals with people trapped by love and marriage, imprisoned by the dictates of society, victimized by the demands of art and morality, and paralyzed by fear of the supernatural. Gawthrop, Betty G. “Roman Fever.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “Roman Fever” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story. Lane, James B. “The Other Two.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of “The Other Two” that covers the story’s themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Extensive study on Wharton, whom Lewis calls “the most renowned writer of fiction in America.” Notes that Wharton thoughtfully left extensive records, made available through the Beinecke Library at Yale, on which this biography is based. Essential reading for serious scholars of Wharton or for those interested in her life and how it shaped her writing. Nettels, Elsa. Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Nettels examines American writers struggling with the problems of patriarchy. Young, Judy Hale. “The Repudiation of Sisterhood in Edith Wharton’s ‘Pomegranate Seed.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (Winter, 1996): 1-11. Argues that the story is an indictment of the woman writer who perpetuates the state of noncommunication among women; claims the story is Wharton’s anti-manifesto of female writing. In it, she presents her notion of just what the woman who writes must not do.

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Born: Chelmsford, Massachusetts; February 11, 1944 Principal short fiction • Taking Care: Short Stories, 1982; Escapes: Stories, 1990; “Craving,” 1991; “The Route,” 1992; “Marabou,” 1993; Honored Guest: Stories, 2004. Other literary forms • Although Joy Williams is known mainly for her short fiction, she is also the author of the novels State of Grace (1973), The Changeling (1978), Breaking and Entering (1988), and The Quick and the Dead (2000) and two volumes of nonfiction: Florida Keys: A History and Guide (1986) and Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (2001). She has also written travel articles for Esquire magazine, including “How to Do and Undo Key West” (February, 1996), “Nantucket Now” (September, 1996), “Desert Flower” (January, 1997), and “No Place Like Home” (March, 1997). Achievements • Joy Williams has established herself as one of the preeminent practitioners of the short-story form in the United States. Along with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and a handful of other writers, she has perfected a style and content which accurately render life in late twentieth century America. It is not a pretty picture she paints: In Williams’s stories, characters cannot communicate, couples cannot connect, and children are being abandoned or reared by others. Williams has been the recipient of numerous awards in her career, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1974. Her stories regularly appear in the leading U.S. literary journals—Esquire, The New Yorker, Grand Street—and many have been collected in the annual The Best American Short Stories or Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards collections and in other prime anthologies of contemporary American fiction. Biography • Born in 1944, Joy Williams grew up in the small Maine town of Cape Elizabeth, where both her father and her grandfather were Congregational ministers. She holds degrees from Marietta College, in Ohio, and from the University of Iowa. Married to Rust Hills, the writer and fiction editor at Esquire, she has one daughter, Caitlin. She has taught in the writing programs at several leading U.S. universities (including the University of California at Irvine and the University of Arizona) and has settled into homes in Arizona and Florida. Analysis • Joy Williams is a short-story writer with a dark vision encased in a clean prose style. Although a few of her stories have an experimental, almost surrealistic form, and often a wry, ironic tone, the bulk fall into what can be called the realist mode, minimalist division: Williams deals with American family life in the last third of the twentieth century, focusing on troubles, handicaps, and incompletions. She interests readers in these subjects without divulging all the information that they might ordinarily want or need about the characters and their situations. What further distinguishes her stories is a prose style that is clean but highly metaphorical, for the images

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and motifs of the stories often carry the meaning more deeply than the action or exposition. Hers is not a reassuring portrait of contemporary American life. The families are often dysfunctional, physically as well as psychologically: parents abandon children, by leaving or by dying, and children wander in life without guidance. Alcohol is a cause of the unhappiness as well as its hoped-for cure. In nearly all her stories, love is being sought but is rarely found and nearly as rarely expressed. Characters seem unable to ask the questions that might free them from their unhappiness; the best they can hope for is an escape to some other state, physical or emotional. Disabilities, addictions, dead animals, arguments in restaurants, and car accidents abound in Williams’s stories. Williams’s first collection Taking Care contains stories published in the 1970’s and early 1980’s in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, Esquire, Ms., and other leading vehicles of contemporary American fiction. These stories show a firmness and subtlety that have marked Williams’s style over her entire career (although there was probably more range here than in her second collection). The themes that would mark that career are clearly established in this first collection. Although many of the stories are riveting in their subject matter, they leave readers with a sense of hollowness and futility. There are few resolutions in Williams, even early in her career, but there are the tensions, violence, and disconnections that mark most of her stories. “Taking Care” • In the title story, Jones, a preacher, is “taking care” of two generations: a wife dying of leukemia and a six-month-old baby girl whom his daughter has left him to care for before fleeing to Mexico. Jones baptizes his granddaughter and then brings his wife back from the hospital; in the last line of the story, “Together they enter the shining rooms”—rooms made “shining” by Jones’s love and care. This epiphanic ending, however, cannot erase all the abandonment and death. Jones is surely “taking care” of more than his required load in this life, and there is a heaviness, a spiritual sadness, that is expressed appropriately in Williams’s flat, terse prose style. Other stories in Taking Care have similar themes and forms. In “Traveling to Pridesup,” three sisters in their eighties and nineties, “in a big house in the middle of Florida,” find a baby abandoned in a feed bag on their mailbox. In the journey in their old Mercedes to find someone to help, Lavinia gets them lost, drives hundreds of miles in circles, and finally crashes. In a tragicomic mix reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor, the story ends with a painful revelation, “the recognition that her life and her long, angry journey through it, had been wasteful and deceptive and unnecessary.” “Winter Chemistry,” features two students who spy on their teacher every night and inadvertently kill him when they are caught. “Shepherd” concerns a young woman who cannot get over the death of her German shepherd and who will probably lose her boyfriend because of it. (“‘We are all asleep and dreaming, you know,’” he tells her in a speech that might apply to characters in other stories in Taking Care. “‘If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.’”) In “The Farm,” alcohol, infidelities, and the accidental killing of a hitchhiker will destroy the central couple. “Breakfast,” too, has many of the stock Williams ingredients: parents who abandon their children, a half-blind dog, and characters who are both alcoholic and lacking direction.

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Possibly the only difference in Taking Care from Williams’s later fiction is that there appears to be more humor in these early stories, and more effort by Williams to perfect a wry, ironic style. (“The Yard Boy,” for example, is a surreal caricature of a kind of New Age spiritual character.) Yet the other landmarks are there as well: The style is often flat and cryptic, events and incidents seem to have more a symbolic than a representational quality, and people pass by one another without touching or talking. There is little love in these stories (even in those that are supposedly love stories), but often a violence beneath the surface that is constantly threatening to bubble up and destroy the characters or kill their animals (as in “Preparation for a Collie” or “Woods”). People rarely have names; rather, they are “the woman,” “her lover,” “the child.” Williams writes easily about children, but hers are children who are wandering in an adult world without supervision or love (as in “Train” or “The Excursion.”) Williams works here in the great American tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), in which characters become what Anderson called “grotesques.” Williams writes of grotesques as well, of bizarre characters who are lost or losing or obsessive, and whom nothing, apparently, will save. Escapes • These elements can be found throughout the title story of Williams’s second collection, Escapes. The narrator, a young girl, describes the time when her alcoholic mother (abandoned by the father) took her to see a magician. The mother, drunk, wanders onto the stage and has to be removed. Layers of escape, both literal and metaphorical, characterize this story: the father’s abandonment of his dysfunctional family; the magician’s illusions (“Houdini was more than a magician, he was an escape artist”); the mother’s addiction to alcohol; and the daughter’s dreams of escaping her lot: “I got out of this situation,” Lizzie writes in the last line of the story, “but it took me years.” Williams’s later short fiction is unique not only for this bleak view of human nature, in which people are shown trapped and searching for some inexpressible transcendence, but also for a prose style that is both less and more than it appears: less because, like other minimalists whom Williams resembles (such as Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie), she draws only the outlines of the action and leaves the characters’ backgrounds to the reader’s imagination and more because Williams manipulates metaphors and motifs in such a way that they carry a heavy weight of meaning in her stories. In “Escapes,” for example, the old magician’s illusion of sawing a woman in half becomes the vehicle for the story’s theme: The alcoholic mother tells her daughter that she witnessed that trick performed by Houdini when she was a child. She wanted to be that lady, “sawed in half, and then made whole again!” Her subsequent intrusion into the show by walking onstage is her attempt to escape by realizing that dream, “to go and come back,” but the dream is impossible to realize and therefore self-destructive. The usher escorts mother and daughter out of the theater, assuring the drunken woman that she can “pull [herself] through.” She will not, however, succeed in reconstructing herself and her life, and in the end, the reader suspects, the daughter will escape only by abandoning the mother. The stories in Escapes thus seem to work at cross-purposes: Although the prose style is clean and uncluttered, the motifs and metaphors lead readers to meanings beneath the surface, to a depth that is full of horror and despair. In the second story, “Rot” (first reprinted in the O. Henry Prize collection of 1988), these concerns and formal characteristics continue. Dwight persuades his wife, who is twenty-five years younger than he is, to allow him to park the vintage Thunderbird he has just bought

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in their living room. The car is full of rot and rust—a symbol, readers may suspect, of the couple’s marriage. The reader learns little about these characters, what they do or where they are headed; instead, symbolism replaces information: The rusting car was found in a parking lot with its owner dead inside it; now Dwight sits in the car in the living room and looks dead. The other stories in Escapes take a similar approach: “The Skater,” which was chosen to appear in the 1985 collection Best American Short Stories, presents a family, parents and a daughter, on a tour of East Coast prep schools. It slowly becomes apparent that the sickness at the heart of this family is the memory of the daughter—like the skater of the title who glides in and out of the story at several points—who died the previous year; the parents simply want Molly to be away from the sadness of their home. The young woman in “Lulu” puts an old couple to bed after all three have gotten drunk one morning; she then attempts to drive off with their boa constrictor, apparently searching for love (she wonders, “Why has love eluded me”). In “Health,” a twelve-year-old girl is undergoing ultraviolet treatments to help her recover from tuberculosis but is surprised by a man who walks in during one of her tanning sessions, as she lies naked on the couch. The grandmother of “The Blue Men” tries, in part through use of alcohol, to assuage her grief over her dead son, who was executed for murdering a police officer. “The Last Generation,” the collection’s closing story, depicts a father, numbing his pain over his wife’s death through drink and work and neglecting his own children. Williams’s bleak vision is mitigated only by the sureness of her prose and the symbolic poetry of her language. “Bromeliads,” in which a young mother abandons her new baby to her parents, becomes the central metaphor of the story’s meaning. As the young woman explains, bromeliads are “thick glossy plants with extraordinary flowers. . . . They live on nothing. Just the air and the wind”—a perfect description of the mother herself. In “White,” a couple has moved from Florida to Connecticut to escape the memory of their two babies, who have died. They cannot, however, escape their grief, even in alcohol and evasion. At a party they throw for a departing Episcopal priest, the husband describes a letter that the couple has recently received from the woman’s father; after the greeting, the letter contains nothing, “just a page, blank as the day is long.” The letter becomes a symbol for the missed communication, the things that are not said and that may in fact be inexpressible, abandonment and death among them. In the end, readers are left with the bleakness of Williams’s stories—despite a minimalist style and a use of metaphor that almost negates that vision. Only “Honored Guest” differs in that it implies affirmation of life through a character’s likening those alive to honored guests. Nevertheless, Williams remains one of the more highly regarded short-fiction writers in modern-day America, often anthologized and the recipient of numerous awards. Along with Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, and a handful of other contemporaries, she continues to produce works that are read by university students and the general public alike, and younger writers emulate her polished style. David Peck With updates by Mary H. Bruce and the Editors

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Other major works novels: State of Grace, 1973; The Changeling, 1978; Breaking and Entering, 1988; The Quick and the Dead, 2000. nonfiction: Florida Keys: A History and Guide, 1986; Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, 2001. Bibliography Cooper, Rand Richards. “The Dark at the End of the Tunnel.” The New York Times, January 21, 1990. In this detailed review of Escapes, Cooper focuses on the quirky, ominous world they create; discusses several stories, arguing that “The Blue Men” and the title story are the strongest. Heller, Zoe. “Amazing Moments from the Production Line.” The Independent, July 21, 1990, p. 28. In this review of Escapes, Heller complains that Williams’s style has become a mannerism, but singles out “In the Route” as a story that is more interesting than the other formulaic pieces in the collection. Hills, Rust. Review of State of Grace. Esquire 80 (July, 1973): 26, 28. Hills recognizes that Williams has a problem with structure but praises her language: “open the novel to virtually any page and you’ll instantly see it—a kind of strange phosphorescent style describing disquieting, dark and funny goings-on. Sentences are brilliant, gorgeous, surprising.” Kirkus Reviews. Review of Escapes. 57 (November 15, 1989): 1633. This anonymous reviewer recognizes that “Williams’ weird, seemingly anesthetized, protagonists are usually in flight: from inexorable fate, from the oppressive past, from reality itself.” Kornblatt, Joyce. “Madness, Murder, and the Surrender of Hope.” Review of Taking Care. The Washington Post Book World, March 21, 1982, 4. Noting her similarity to Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, the reviewer here sees the redemptive qualities of Williams’s work, for in the “fragile gestures” of these stories, “we glimpse, merely glimpse, an order of being that eschews randomness, that ascribes value, that insists on love in the face of destructiveness.” Malinowski, Sharon. “Joy Williams.” In Contemporary Authors, edited by Deborah A. Straub. Vol. 22. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Good summary of Williams’s career, including long passages from reviews of her novels and her short-story collections through 1982. “In Williams’s fiction, the ordinary events of daily life are susceptible to bizarre turns of horror and individuals are lost in their private selves, unable to comprehend the forces which shape their lives. Although Williams occasionally alleviates her bleak vision with humor, a sense of hopelessness and despair remains central to her work.” May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Williams: “The Farm” and “Health” (vol. 3), and “Taking Care” and “Train” (vol. 7). Williams, Joy. “Joy Williams.” Interview by Molly McQuade. Publishers Weekly 237 (January 26, 1990): 400-401. This brief but wide-ranging interview allows Williams to talk about her career and her sense of her own writing; words, for example, are intended “to affect the reader in unexpected, mysterious, subterranean ways. The literal surface has to be very literal—smooth and exact—yet what makes it strange is what’s teeming underneath. Stories should be something other than they appear to be. . . . They should make you uncomfortable.”

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Tennessee Williams Williams, Tennessee

Born: Columbus, Mississippi; March 26, 1911 Died: New York, New York; February 25, 1983 Principal short fiction • One Arm, and Other Stories, 1948; Hard Candy: A Book of Stories, 1954; The Knightly Quest: A Novella and Four Short Stories, 1967; Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: A Book of Stories, 1974; Collected Stories, 1985. Other literary forms • In addition to his three dozen collected and uncollected stories, Tennessee Williams wrote two novels, a book of memoirs, a collection of essays, two volumes of poetry, numerous short plays, a screenplay, and more than twenty fulllength dramas. Among the most important of his plays are The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Achievements • Tennessee Williams’s most obvious achievements in literature lie in the field of drama, where he is considered by many to be America’s greatest playwright, a standing supported by two Pulitzer Prizes, a Commonwealth Award, a Medal of Freedom (presented by President Jimmy Carter), and an election in 1952 to a lifetime membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Williams himself, however, believed that his short fiction contained some of his best writing. Indeed, besides stories appearing in his own collections, Williams published stories in many of America’s most prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker and Esquire, and many have been selected for various anthologies, including three in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories annual anthologies. Williams’s short stories and plays alike dramatize the plight of the “fugitive,” the sensitive soul punished by a harsh, uncaring world; in the stories, however, readers find specific and frequent voice given to a theme and subject only hinted at in Williams’s drama, at least until his later, less memorable, plays: the plight of the homosexual in a bigoted society. Biography • Descended on his mother’s side from a southern minister and on his father’s from Tennessee politicians, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams moved with his family from Mississippi to St. Louis shortly after World War I. He attended the University of Missouri and Washington University, finally graduating from the University of Iowa. After odd jobs in the warehouse of a shoe factory, ushering at a movie house, and even a stint screenwriting in Hollywood, he turned full-time writer in the early 1940’s, encouraged by grants from the Group Theatre and Rockefeller Foundation. Despite purchasing a home in Key West, Florida, in 1950, Williams spent most of the remainder of his life living for short periods in a variety of locales in Europe, the United States, and Mexico. His two Pulitzer Prizes early in his career, plus four Drama Critics Circle Awards, solidified Williams’s reputation as a playwright; the quality of his writing declined, however, after the early 1960’s, in great part as a result of drug dependency. He died, alone, in a New York City hotel room in 1983.

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Analysis • Although during his lifetime Tennessee Williams was commonly held to be without peer among America’s—many would say the world’s—playwrights, he began his career writing short fiction, with a story entitled “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in Weird Tales in 1928. As late as 1944, when his first theatrical success was in rehearsal, George Jean Nathan reportedly observed that Williams “didn’t know how to write drama, that he was really just a short-story writer who didn’t understand the theatre.” In proportion to the worldwide audience familiar with Williams’s dramas, only a handful know more than a story or two, usually from among the ones later transformed into stage plays. Seven of Williams’s full-length dramas, in fact, had their genesis in the fiction: The Glass Menagerie in “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”; Summer and Smoke (1947) in “The Yellow Bird”; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in “Three Players of a Summer Game”; The Night of the Iguana and Kingdom of Earth (1968) in stories of the same names; The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963) in “Man Bring This Up Road”; and Vieux Carré (1977) in “The Angel in the Alcove” and “Grand.” “The Night of the Iguana” • The play The Night of the Iguana is sufficiently different from its progenitor to indicate how Williams rethought his material in adapting it to another medium. Both works portray a spinsterish artist, Miss Jelkes; but while Hannah in the play has fought for and achieved inner peace, Edith’s harsher name in the story belies her edginess, neurosis, and lack of “interior poise.” Having channeled her own “morbid energy” into painting, she discerns in the contrasting “splash of scarlet on snow . . . a flag of her own unsettled components” warring within her. When a servant at the Costa Verde hotel tethers an iguana to the veranda, Edith recoils hysterically from such brutality against “one of God’s creatures,” taking its suffering as proof of a grotesque “universe . . . designed by the Marquis de Sade.” This picture of cosmic indifference, even malevolence, occurs in a handful of Williams’s stories, most notably in “The Malediction,” in which the lonely Lucio exists in a meaningless universe verging on the absurd, ruled by a God “Who felt that something was wrong but could not correct it, a man Who sensed the blundering sleepwalk of time and hostilities of chance” and “had been driven to drink.” Edith finds God personified in a violent storm “like a giant bird lunging up and down on its terrestrial quarry, a bird with immense white wings and beak of godlike fury.” Edith’s fellow guests at the hotel are two homosexual writers. Squeamish and yet attracted by the forbidden nature of their relationship, Edith insinuates herself into their company only to become the object of a desperate attack on her “demon of virginity” by the older of the two. Although she has earlier hinted that she always answers, with understanding, cries for help from a fellow sufferer, she ferociously fends off his pathetic advances, metaphorically associated with the predatory “bird of blind white fury.” Afterward, however, once the younger man has mercifully cut loose the iguana, Edith feels her own “rope of loneliness had also been severed,” and—instead of drawing back in “revulsion” from “the spot of dampness” left on her belly by the older writer’s semen—exclaims “Ah, life,” evidently having reached through this epiphanic moment a new acceptance and integration of her sexuality. Yet, unlike Hannah, whose compassionate response to Shannon in the play is for him a saving grace and who can affirm, along with Williams, that “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent,” Edith’s inability to answer unselfishly the older man’s need—the cardinal sin in Williams—may have permanently maimed him by destroying his self-respect. Williams does not always capitalize fully on his gift for writing dialogue in his

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stories. For all its interest in light of the later play, the pace of “The Night of the Iguana” is curiously desultory and ener vated, which might not have been true if the story had been written from Edith’s point of view. Williams does indeed prove adept at handling firstperson narration in several autobiographical tales, whose content seems hardly distinguishable at times from the sections of the Memoirs (1975). “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin” • Williams can become annoyingly self-conscious when, in authorial intrusions analogous to the nonrepresentational techniques that deliberately destroy the illusion of reality in his dramas, he breaks the narrative line in a dozen or so stories to interject comments about himself as writer manipulating his materials, sometimes Sam Shaw/Courtesy, New Directions Publishing apologizing for his awkwardness in handling the short-story form, or for playing too freely with chronology or radically shifting tone. At times these stories provide some notion of Williams’s aesthetic theories and practice, as when, in “Three Players of a Summer Game,” for example, he discusses the method by which the artist orders experience by a process that distorts and “yet . . . may be closer than a literal history could be to the hidden truth of it.” These “metafictional” asides might indicate his conception of character portrayal. On that point—while without qualms at employing clinical details when necessary—Williams insists, in “Hard Candy,” on the need for “indirection” and restraint rather than “a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy” if he is to remain nonjudgmental and respect the “mystery” at the heart of character. An almost identical comment occurs in “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin,” part of a small group of rites de passage stories in the Williams canon. The story centers on a love triangle of sorts as the young narrator faces the destruction of the “magical intimacy” with his pianist sister as she enters adolescence—that “dangerous passage” between the “wild country of childhood” and the “uniform world of adults”—and turns her attentions toward a fellow musician, Richard Miles. It is as if she has deserted the narrator and “carried a lamp into another room [he] could not enter.” He resents the “radiant” Richard, but also feels a frightening prepubescent physical attraction for the older boy. Like many of Williams’s adult neurotics whose libidinous desires rebel against their Puritan repressions, the narrator longs to touch Richard’s skin, yet recoils in shame and guilt from the boy’s offer of his hand as if it were somehow “impure.” Seeing Richard play the violin, however, provides an epiphany as the narrator “learns the will of life to transcend the single body” and perceives the connection between Eros and Thanatos. For the narrator equates the act of playing the phallic violin with “making love,” and the violin case to “a little black

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coffin made for a child or doll.” He mourns the loss of youth and innocence and the birth of the knowledge of sin and death. Tom, the authorial voice in The Glass Menagerie, confesses to “a poet’s weakness for symbols,” and one of Williams’s own hallmarks has always been an extensive use of visual stage symbolism—“the natural speech of drama.” As he remarks in one of his essays, it can “say a thing more directly and simply and beautifully than it could be said in words”; he employs symbols extensively, however, in only a handful of stories, although he does rely heavily on figurative language. In the earlier stories the imagery is ordinarily controlled and striking, as, for example, in this line (reminiscent of Karl Shapiro’s “cancer, simple as a flower, blooms”) describing the doctor’s tumor from “Three Players of a Summer Game”: “An awful flower grew in his brain like a fierce geranium that shattered its pot.” In the more recent tales, however, Williams’s diction frequently becomes overwrought and demonstrates some lack of control, falling into what he criticizes elsewhere in the same essay as “a parade of images for the sake of images.” If the mood of “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin” is tender and elegiac, the tone of a much later rite de passage story, “Completed,” is chilling, but no less haunting and memorable. Miss Rosemary McCord, a student at Mary, Help a Christian School, is a withdrawn debutante subjected by her unsympathetic mother to a pathetic and bizarre coming-out dance. The onset of menstruation has been late in coming for Rosemary, and when it finally does arrive, she is pitifully unprepared for it. Ironically, the fullness of physical development in Rosemary coincides with a death wish; her only “purpose in life is to complete it quick.” Her one understanding relative, the reclusive Aunt Ella, deliberately retreats from the external world through morphine; the drug brings her comforting apparitions of the Virgin Mary and tears of peace. Rosemary goes to live with her, aware that she has been taken captive and yet willingly submissive, ready to be calmed through drugs and her own reassuring visions of the Virgin. Her life—apparently the latest of several variations on that of Williams’s own sister—is over before it began. Perhaps it is, however, only in such a sheltered, illusory life that this fragile, sensitive girl can exist. “Sabbatha and Solitude” • The other “passage” that threads through Williams’s stories is that from life to death, obsessed as he is with what he terms “a truly awful sense of impermanence,” with the debilitating effects of time on both physical beauty and one’s creative powers, and the sheer tenacity necessary if one is to endure at least spiritually undefeated. In “Sabbatha and Solitude,” the aging poetess (undoubtedly semi-autobiographical) finds that the process of composition is a trial not unlike the Crucifixion that results only in “a bunch of old repeats,” while in the picaresque “Two on a Party,” the blond and balding queen and hack screenwriter exist at the mercy of that “worst of all enemies . . . the fork-tailed, cloven-hoofed, pitchforkbearing devil of Time.” “Completed” • “Completed” is one of Williams’s few later stories—“Happy August the Tenth” is another—that can stand alongside some of his earliest as a fully successful work. Just as there was a noticeable diminution in the power of his later dramas compared with the ones from The Glass Menagerie through The Night of the Iguana, so, too, each successive volume of short fiction was less impressive than its predecessor. As Williams’s vision of the universe darkened and became more private, the once elegiac tone acquired a certain stridency and sharp edge; and as Williams developed a

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tough, self-protective shell of laughter as a defense against his detractors, some of the dark humor—what he once called the “jokes of the condemned”—became directed toward the pathetic grotesques who increasingly peopled his works, whereas once there was only compassion. “Desire and the Black Masseur” • Thus, two of the most representative stories, “One Arm” and “Desire and the Black Masseur,” neither of which, significantly, has ever been dramatized, appeared in his first collection. Unquestionably the most macabre of all his tales is “Desire and the Black Masseur,” which details the fantastic, almost surreal sadomasochistic relationship between the insecure, sexually repressed Anthony Burns and an unnamed black masseur at a men’s bath. Burns, whose name blends that of a Christian saint with the suggestion of consummation by fire—here metaphoric—suffers from an overly acute awareness of his own insignificance, as well as of his separateness and lack of completeness as a human being. Williams views the latter as an inescapable fact of the human condition and proposes three means available to compensate for it: art, violent action, or surrendering oneself to brutal treatment at the hands of others. Burns chooses the third path, submitting himself as if in a dream, finding at the punishing hands of the masseur first pain, then orgasmic pleasure, and ultimately death. Although the masseur thus secures a release from his pent-up hatred of his white oppressors, this tale should not be construed as a social comment reflecting Williams’s attitude toward black/white relations, hardly even peripherally a concern in his work, despite his being a southern writer. Blacks figure importantly in only two other stories. In the ribald “Miss Coynte of Greene,” the title character’s long-frustrated female eroticism erupts into nymphomania, her pleasure intensified by the dark skin of her sexual partners. In “Mama’s Old Stucco House,” Williams’s gentlest foray into the black/white terrain, the failed artist Jimmy Krenning is cared for physically and emotionally after his own mother’s death by the black girl Brinda and her Mama, the latter having always functioned as his surrogate mother. That “Desire and the Black Masseur” is to be read on levels other than the literal appears clear when Williams places its climax at the end of the Lenten Season. The death and devouring of Burns becomes a ritual of expiation, a kind of black mass and perversion of the sacrifice on Calvary, even accomplished in biblical phraseology. Indeed, counterpointed with it is a church service during which a self-proclaimed Fundamentalist preacher exhorts his congregation to a frenzy of repentance. What Williams has written, then, is not only a psychological study of man’s subconscious desires and an allegory of the division between innocence and evil within all men but also a parable exposing how excessive emphasis on guilt and the need for punishment at the hands of a vengeful God have destroyed the essential New Testament message of love and forgiveness. So Burns’s strange rite of atonement stands as a forceful indictment of a Puritanism that creates a dark god of hate as a reflection of one’s own obsession with evil, which is one of the recurrent emphases in almost all of Williams’s important dramas, especially Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and The Night of the Iguana. “One Arm” • Something of the obverse, the possibility for transcending one’s knowledge of evil and isolation, occurs in “One Arm,” the quintessential—and perhaps the finest—Williams story, in which can be discerned nearly all the central motifs that adumbrate not only his fiction but also his plays. Oliver Winemiller, a former

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light heavyweight champion who in an accident two years earlier lost an arm, is one of Williams’s “fugitive kind,” a lonely misfit, cool, impassive, now tasting, like Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the charm of the defeated.” Since all he possessed was his “Apollo-like beauty,” after his physical mutilation he undergoes a psychological and emotional change; feeling that he has lost “the center of his being,” he is filled with self-loathing and disgust. He enters on a series of self-destructive sexual encounters, finally committing a murder for which he is sentenced to die. While in confinement awaiting execution, he receives letters from all over the country from his male lovers, confessing that he had aroused deep feelings in them, that he had effected a “communion” with them that would have been, if he had only recognized it, a means of “personal integration” and “salvation.” If it was not until very late in his dramas that Williams openly treated homosexuality with sympathy, in his stories his unapologetic and compassionate attitude existed from the very first. Oliver’s epiphany, that he had been loved, liberates him from his self-imposed insularity; ironically, however, this rebirth makes his approaching death harder to accept. On the eve of his execution, he recognizes that the Lutheran minister who visits him has used religion as an escape from facing his own sexuality, and he desperately hopes that by forcing the minister to come to terms with himself and his “feelings” he can thereby somehow repay his debt to all those who had earlier responded to him with kindness. The minister, however, recognizing a forbidden side of himself and still suffering guilt over his adolescent sexual awakening during a dream of a golden panther, which Oliver reminds him of, refuses to give Oliver a massage and rushes from his cell. Oliver goes to his execution with dignity, gripping the love letters tightly between his things as a protection from aloneness. The doctors performing the autopsy see in Oliver’s body the “nobility” and purity of an “antique sculpture.” Yet Williams reminds his readers in the closing line that “death has never been much in the way of completion.” Although the work of art is immutable, it is not alive as only the emotionally responsive person can be, for the true artist in Williams is the person who goes out unselfishly to answer the cry for help of others, and the real work of art is the bond of communion that is formed by that response. Thus “One Arm” incorporates virtually all of Williams’s major attitudes, including his somewhat sentimental valuation of the lost and lonely; his romantic glorification of physical beauty and worship of sexuality as a means of transcending aloneness; his castigation of Puritan repression and guilt that render one selfish and judgmental; and his Hawthornian abhorrence of the underdeveloped heart that prevents one from breaking out of the shell of the ego to respond with infinite compassion to all God’s misbegotten creatures. Although Williams’s stories, with their frequent rhetorical excesses, their sometimes awkward narrative strategies, and their abrupt shifts in tone, technically do not often approach the purity of form of Oliver’s statue, they do, nevertheless—as all good fiction must—surprise the reader with their revelations of the human heart and demand that the reader abandon a simplistic perspective and see the varieties of human experience. What in the hands of other writers might seem a too specialized vision, frequently becomes in Williams’s work affectingly human and humane. Thomas P. Adler With updates by Dennis Vannatta

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Other major works plays: Fugitive Kind, pr. 1937, pb. 2001; Spring Storm, wr. 1937, pr., pb. 1999; Not About Nightingales, wr. 1939, pr., pb. 1998; Battle of Angels, pr. 1940, pb. 1945; I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, wr. 1941, pb. 1951, pr. 1959 (one act); This Property Is Condemned, pb. 1941, pr. 1946 (one act); The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, pb. 1942 (one act); The Glass Menagerie, pr. 1944, pb. 1945; Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton, pb. 1945, pr. 1955 (one act); You Touched Me, pr. 1945, pb. 1947 (with Donald Windham); A Streetcar Named Desire, pr., pb. 1947; Summer and Smoke, pr. 1947, pb. 1948; American Blues, pb. 1948 (collection); Five Short Plays, pb. 1948; The Long Stay Cut Short: Or, The Unsatisfactory Supper, pb. 1948 (one act); The Rose Tattoo, pr. 1950, pb. 1951; Camino Real, pr., pb. 1953; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, pr., pb. 1955; Sweet Bird of Youth, pr. 1956, pb. 1959 (based on The Enemy: Time); Orpheus Descending, pr. 1957, pb. 1958 (revision of Battle of Angels); Suddenly Last Summer, pr., pb. 1958; Period of Adjustment, pr. 1959, pb. 1960; The Enemy: Time, pb. 1959; The Night of the Iguana, pr., pb. 1961; The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, pr. 1963, revised pb. 1976; The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, pr., pb. 1964 (revised of Summer and Smoke); Slapstick Tragedy: “The Mutilated” and “The Gnädiges Fräulein,” pr. 1966, pb. 1970 (one acts); The Two-Character Play, pr. 1967, pb. 1969; The Seven Descents of Myrtle, pr., pb. 1968 (as Kingdom of Earth); In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, pr. 1969, pb. 1970; Confessional, pb. 1970; Dragon Country, pb. 1970 (collection); Out Cry, pr. 1971, pb. 1973 (revised of The Two-Character Play); The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, pb. 1971-1981 (7 volumes); Small Craft Warnings, pr., pb. 1972 (revised of Confessional); Vieux Carré, pr. 1977, pb. 1979; A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Clothes for a Summer Hotel, pr. 1980; A House Not Meant to Stand, pr. 1981; Something Cloudy, Something Clear, pr. 1981, pb. 1995. novels: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1950; Moise and the World of Reason, 1975. nonfiction: Memoirs, 1975; Where I Live: Selected Essays, 1978; Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, 1990; The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, 2000-2004 (2 volumes; Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, editors); Notebooks, 2006 (Margaret Bradham Thornton, editor). poetry: In the Winter of Cities, 1956; Androgyne, Mon Amour, 1977; The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, 2002. screenplays: The Glass Menagerie, 1950 (with Peter Berneis); A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951 (with Oscar Saul); The Rose Tattoo, 1955 (with Hal Kanter); Baby Doll, 1956; Suddenly Last Summer, 1960 (with Gore Vidal); The Fugitive Kind, 1960 (with Meade Roberts; based on Orpheus Descending); Stopped Rocking, and Other Screenplays, 1984. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Tennessee Williams. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection of critical essays carries an introduction by Bloom that places Williams in the dramatic canon of American drama and within the psychological company of Hart Crane and Arthur Rimbaud. Authors in this collection take traditional thematic and historical approaches, noting Williams’s “grotesques,” his morality, his irony, his work in the “middle years,” and the mythical qualities in his situations and characters. Kolin, Philip C. The Tennesse Williams Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Useful guide to Williams and his work. In 160 informative entries, Williams scholars offer the reader a wealth of information. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. This first volume of a two-volume biography traces Williams’s life for the first

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thirty-three years. Draws on previously unpublished letters, journals, and notebooks. Discusses Williams’s focus on how society has a destructive influence on sensitive people and his efforts to change drama into an unrealistic form. Martin, Robert A., ed. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Excellent, accessible collection of criticism of Williams’s works. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Williams: “Happy August the Tenth” and “The Field of Blue Children” (vol. 3), “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin” (vol. 6), and “Three Players of a Summer Game” (vol. 7). Pagan, Nicholas. Rethinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach to Tennessee Williams. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Discusses the symbolism of Williams’s characters in relation to his life. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Spoto’s lively chronicle details Williams’s encounters with such diverse influences as the Group Theatre, Frieda and D. H. Lawrence, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Fidel Castro, Hollywood stars, and the homosexual and drug subcultures of Key West. Forty-two pages of notes, bibliography, and index make this study a valuable resource for further scholarship. Tischler, Nancy Marie Patterson. Student Companion to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. A well-known Williams scholar brings together the playwright’s biography and critical assessments of his works to provide students with a thorough introduction and appreciation of Williams’s achievements. Vannatta, Dennis. Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988. The only book-length study of Williams’s short fiction. Contains a selection of essays concerning Williams’s short fiction by various scholars and a selection of Williams’s own letters, essays, and reviews. Williams, Dakin, and Shepherd Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York: Arbor House, 1983. One of the more bizarre duos in biographical writing, Williams (Tennessee’s brother) and Mead (Tennessee’s childhood friend) produce a credible biography in a highly readable, well-indexed work. Their account of the playwright also helps to capture his almost schizophrenic nature. A solid index and extensive research assist the serious scholar and general reader.

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William Carlos Williams Williams, William Carlos

Born: Rutherford, New Jersey; September 17, 1883 Died: Rutherford, New Jersey; March 4, 1963 Principal short fiction • The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories, 1932; Life Along the Passaic River, 1938; Make Light of It: Collected Stories, 1950; The Farmers’ Daughters: The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams, 1961; The Doctor Stories, 1984; The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams, 1996. Other literary forms • Best known as a poet, William Carlos Williams nevertheless wrote in a variety of literary forms (some of them defying categorization) including poetry, novels, short stories, prose poetry, essays, autobiography, and plays. Paterson, his extended poem published in four separate volumes (1946-1951), with a fifth volume serving as a commentary (1958), is his most famous and enduring work. Achievements • William Carlos Williams received numerous awards, including the Dial Award in 1926, the National Book Award in 1950, the Bollingen Award in 1953, and, posthumously, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1963. Biography • After attending public schools in New Jersey, spending time in Europe, and then finishing high school in New York, William Carlos Williams enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School in 1902. While completing his medical degree there, he met Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and the painter Charles Demuth. In 1910, he began work as a general practitioner in Rutherford, New Jersey; in addition to this practice, from 1925 on he became a pediatrician at Passaic General Hospital. Williams held these positions until several strokes forced him to retire in 1951. His medical and literary careers always coexisted. In 1909, he had his first volume, Poems, privately published. As his reputation grew, he traveled to Europe several times and encountered such writers as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. He married Florence Herman in 1912, and they had two sons. Williams died on March 4, 1963, in his beloved Rutherford. Analysis • William Carlos Williams is one of the major figures of literary modernism whose peers included Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Highly influenced by the visual arts and the imagist movement, Williams’s work was marked by a rejection of metaphysics, characterized by his famous dictum: “No ideas/ But in things.” Williams’s objective approach to literature is reflected in the coarse realism of his short stories. His prose shares the basic principles of his poetic theory: use of an American idiom, adherence to a locale, communication through specifics, and belief in organic form. The pastiche effects of Williams’s poetry and prose had a profound influence on the next generation of American literary modernists, particularly the so-called Objectivist School, which included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Charles Reznikoff. M. L. Rosenthal claims that William Carlos Williams’s short stories “are often vital evocations of ordinary American reality—its toughness, squalor, pathos, intensities.”

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As such, this short fiction tends to exhibit distinctive characteristics. First, its style is the American idiom, with heavy reliance on dialogue and speech rhythm. Second, Williams almost inevitably writes of his own locale and stresses the TO VIEW IMAGE, Depression’s dramatic effect on PLEASE SEE ordinary working people. Third, PRINT EDITION as he shows in his poem “A Sort of a Song,” there should be “No OF THIS BOOK. ideas/ But in things”; in other words, details should suggest underlying ideas, not vice versa. Fourth, Williams himself is often present, but as a doctor, never as a poet; thus biography and autobiography constitute important plot elements. Last, the author allows plot to develop organically, which affects length (the tales range from one to thirty pages) and structure (the stories may appear diffuse or highly compressed). Williams published two main short-story anthologies: The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories and Life Along the Passaic River. In 1950, he collected these and other stories into a single volume called Make Light of It; then, in 1961, this was superseded by his complete collected stories entitled The Farmers’ Daughters. Although these stories may indicate progressive technical sophistication or experimentation, they all treat “the plight of the poor” (as Williams says on several occasions) or the physician’s frequently ambiguous role of healing the sick within an infected society. “Old Doc Rivers” • On the choice of title for his first short-story anthology, Williams observes, “The times—that was the knife that was killing them” (the poor). A typical story is “Old Doc Rivers,” which provides a full background on one rural general practitioner. It also contains a strong autobiographical element because the narrator is a younger doctor (apparently Williams). An enormously complex picture emerges of Doc Rivers: efficient, conscientious, humane, yet simultaneously crude, cruel, and addicted to drugs and alcohol. The story builds this portrait by piling up specifics about the physician’s personal and professional lives and interweaving case studies among the young doctor-narrator’s comments. The narrator is astonished by Rivers’s psychological sharpness, intuition for the correct diagnosis, and ability to inspire blind faith in his patients. As with many Williams tales, the reader’s moral response is ambiguous, for when sober, Rivers is not a good doctor, yet when drunk or doped, he is at least as good as anyone else. The plot follows a roughly chronological structure which charts Rivers’s gradual mental and physical decline. This story’s particular strengths are its narrator voice, concrete details, re-creation of dialogue, and exploration of the doctor-patient relationship.

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“Jean Beicke” • Williams further considers the physician-patient relationship in “Jean Beicke” and “A Face of Stone,” representative of his second short-fiction collection. Told by a pediatrician-narrator (but this time an established, not a beginning, doctor), “Jean Beicke” is set in a children’s ward during the Depression and recounts the story of a “scrawny, misshapen, worthless piece of humanity.” Although Jean is desperately ill, she wins the hearts of the physicians and nurses by her sheer resilience: “As sick as she was,” the narrator marvels, “she took her grub right on time every three hours, a big eight ounce bottle of milk and digested it perfectly.” Yet little Jean’s symptoms puzzle the medics, and despite initial improvement, she finally dies. Up to this point, doctors and readers alike have been ignorant of her previous history, but when her mother and aunt visit the dying infant, it is learned that she is the third child of a woman whose husband deserted her. As her aunt says, “It’s better off dead—never was any good anyway.” After the autopsy, the doctors discover they have completely misdiagnosed Jean. The storyteller ends the tale like this: I called the ear man and he came down at once. A clear miss, he said. I think if we’d gone in there earlier, we’d have saved her. For what? said I. Vote the straight Communist ticket. Would it make us any dumber? said the ear man. Williams thought “Jean Beicke” was “the best short story I ever wrote.” One reason is its involved narrator, whose sophisticated social conscience (why cure these Depression babies only to return them to a sick society?) contrasts with the nurses’ instinctive (but perhaps naïve) humanitarianism. The story’s careful structure takes us from external details—Jean’s misshapen body, tiny face, and pale blue eyes—to internal ones—in the postmortem—and so suggests that beneath society’s superficial ills lie fundamental, perhaps incurable, troubles. Once again, Williams shows his skill for catching the speech patterns of ordinary Americans, especially in the monologue of Jean’s aunt. Finally, the author’s main achievement is to individualize yet not sentimentalize Jean and to dramatize her life-and-death struggle so that it matters to him—and to the reader. “A Face of Stone” • In “A Face of Stone,” the doctor-narrator becomes the main character. A harried family doctor, he finds himself at the end of a busy morning confronted by a young Jewish couple. The husband, one of “the presuming poor,” insists that he examine their baby, while the wife maintains an expressionless, stony face. As the doctor approaches the baby boy, his mother clutches him closer and is extremely reluctant to relinquish him. Frustrated and tired, the doctor is brusque and patronizing. When he eventually looks at the child, he discovers that it is quite healthy. During the winter, the people request a house call, but he refuses to go; then, in the spring, they return and still protest that the child is unwell. Conquering his annoyance at their persistence, the family doctor checks the boy and says that he simply needs to be fed regularly and weaned. Now the physician expects the consultation to finish, but the young Jew asks him to examine his wife. The doctor is by this time exhausted and furious; however, he starts to check this passive, poverty-stricken, physically unattractive woman. Then, almost accidentally, he discovers she is a Polish Jew who has lost her whole family. Immediately, he forgets her ugliness, grasps her intense anxiety for her baby, and realizes the strong bond between wife and husband: “Suddenly I understood his half

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shameful love for the woman and at the same time the extent of her reliance on him. I was touched.” The woman smiles for the first time when the doctor prescribes painkillers for her varicose veins and she senses that she can trust him. This story effectively dramatizes the shifting reactions among patients and doctors as they try to establish a successful relationship. Often, a physician may exploit his position of power (as this one does at the beginning) and forget that his clients are human. If he does, he turns into Doc Rivers at his worst. The best relationship occurs when both parties move beyond stereotypes to view each other as individuals. Because the doctor narrates the tale, the reader follows his process of discovery, so when he stops stereotyping the couple, the reader does too. Williams once again successfully uses dialogue to convey character interaction. Also, as in “Jean Beicke,” he reveals people through detail (such as the woman’s ripped dress, bowlegs, and highheeled, worn-out shoes). “The Farmers’ Daughters” • Williams composed few notable short stories after Life Along the Passaic River, mainly because he diverted his energies into longer projects (novels, plays, and Paterson). From the early 1940’s to the mid-1950’s, however, he worked on a long short story which he eventually called “The Farmers’ Daughters” (and whose title he used for his collected short fiction). The title characters are Helen and Margaret, two southern women who have been (and continue to be) betrayed by their men. Their similar background and experience form the basis of an enduring, unshakable friendship that terminates only with Margaret’s death. Technically, this is one of Williams’s best stories: It unfolds quickly in a “paragraph technique” as the narrator—once more a doctor—re-creates the women’s conversations and letters, then links them chronologically with his own comments. The teller refers to himself in the third person, so that most of the time the story progresses through dialogue. This extract, in which Margaret and the doctor chat, illustrates the strength of using direct, idiomatic speech: What’s your favorite flower, Margaret? Why? I just want to know. What’s yours? No. Come on—don’t be so quick on the trigger so early in the evening. I think I can guess. Petunias! (emphasizing the second syllable.) God knows I’ve seen enough of them. No. Red roses. Those are really what I love. Unlike Williams’s previous stories, “The Farmers’ Daughters” relies on complex character depiction and development rather than on plot or theme. Most short-story writers merely write, but Williams left behind theoretical as well as practical evidence of his interest in the genre. A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes) (1950) outlines his basic tenets: truthfulness, unsentimentality, and simplicity. “The finest short stories,” he states, “are those that raise . . . one particular man or woman, from that Gehenna, the newspapers, where at last all men are equal, to the distinction of being an individual.” From the herd of humanity, Williams succeeds in individualizing Doc Rivers, little Jean Beicke, the Jewish couple, Margaret, Helen, and all his various doctor-narrators. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian With updates by William E. Grim

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Other major works plays: A Dream of Love, pb. 1948; Many Loves, and Other Plays, pb. 1961. novels: The Great American Novel, 1923; A Voyage to Pagany, 1928; White Mule, 1937; In the Money, 1940; The Build-up, 1952. miscellaneous: The Descent of Winter, 1928 (includes poetry, prose, and anecdotes); Imaginations, 1970 (includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction). nonfiction: In the American Grain, 1925; A Novelette, and Other Prose, 1932; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 1951; Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, 1954; The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, 1957; I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, 1958; The Embodiment of Knowledge, 1974; A Recognizable Image, 1978; William Carlos Williams, John Sanford: A Correspondence, 1984; William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 1989; Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, 1996 (Hugh Witemeyer, editor); The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 2003 (Barry Ahearn, editor); The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, 2003 (James H. East, editor). poetry: Poems, 1909; The Tempers, 1913; Al Que Quiere!, 1917; Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1920; Sour Grapes, 1921; Spring and All, 1923; Collected Poems, 1921-1931, 1934; An Early Martyr, and Other Poems, 1935; Adam & Eve & The City, 1936; The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938, 1938; The Broken Span, 1941; The Wedge, 1944; Paterson, 1946-1958; The Clouds, 1948; Selected Poems, 1949; Collected Later Poems, 1950, 1963; Collected Earlier Poems, 1951; The Desert Music, and Other Poems, 1954; Journey to Love, 1955; Pictures from Brueghel, 1962; Selected Poems, 1985; The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, 1986; The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939-1962, 1988. translations: Last Nights of Paris, 1929 (of Philippe Soupault; with Raquel Hélène Williams); A Dog and the Fever, 1954 (of Francisco de Quevedo; with Raquel Hélène Williams). Bibliography Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds. Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Solid collection of essays. Beck, John. Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Analyzes Williams’s political convictions as reflected in his writings, and compares them with those of philosopher John Dewey. Bremen, Brian A. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Examination of the development of Williams’s poetry, focused on his fascination with the effects of poetry and prose, and his friendship with Kenneth Burke. Using Burke’s and Williams’s writings and correspondence, and the works of contemporary critics, Bremen looks at how the methodological empiricism in Williams’s poetic strategy is tied to his medical practice. Gish, Robert. William Carlos Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Very fine single-volume study of Williams’s substantial contributions to the short story and the essay. Haisty, Donna B. “The Use of Force.” In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. vol. 8. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of “The Use of Force” with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story.

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Lenhart, Gary, ed. The Teachers and Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1998. Offers more than a dozen practical and innovative essays on using Williams’s work to inspire writing by students and adults, including the use of both his classics and his neglected later poems. Sayre, Henry M. The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Sayre ably demonstrates the influence that modernist painters and photographers had on Williams’s poetry and prose, and he examines the visual effects of the graphic presentation of Williams’s poetry on the printed page. Wagner, Linda W. “Williams’ ‘The Use of Force’: An Expansion.” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (Summer, 1967): 351-353. Disagrees with the rape interpretation of the story, arguing that nothing could be further from the Doctor’s intention and that his use of force can be attributed to other reasons. Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Whitaker’s discussion of the short stories in chapter 6 of this general introduction to Williams’s life and art focuses primarily on the stories in The Knife of the Times; includes a brief discussion of the oral style of the stories and the transformation of their anecdotal core. Williams, William Carlos. Interviews with William Carlos Williams. Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: New Directions, 1976. Contains an introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin. Williams speaks candidly about himself and his work. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

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Tobias Wolff Wolff, Tobias

Born: Birmingham, Alabama; June 19, 1945 Principal short fiction • In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, 1981; Back in the World, 1985; The Stories of Tobias Wolff, 1988; The Night in Question, 1996. Other literary forms • In addition to his short stories, Tobias Wolff has also published several works of long fiction: Ugly Rumours (1975), The Barracks Thief (1984), and Old School (2003). One of his best-known works is his memoir, This Boy’s Life (1989). He has also edited six volumes of short-story anthologies, ranging from Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories in 1983 to Writers Harvest 3 in 2000. Achievements • The quality of his work has earned for Wolff much critical respect and numerous literary prizes. He received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in 1975-1976 to study creative writing at Stanford University, and even before he published his first book, he won creative writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978, 1985), a Mary Roberts Rinehart grant (1979), and an Arizona Council on the Arts and Humanities fellowship in creative writing (1980). He has also won several O. Henry Awards (1980, 1981, and 1985) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1982). Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs received the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction (1982), his The Barracks Thief (1984) took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1985), and he won the Rea Award for short stories (1989). Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1989) won The Los Angeles Times book prize for biography and the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also brought to the screen in 1993 in a film that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Wolff himself. Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994) won Esquire-Volvo-Waterstone’s Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Award (1994) and The Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography (1995). He has also received a Whiting Foundation Award (1990), a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award (1994), and a Lyndhurst Foundation Award (1994). Biography • Readers are lucky to have two prime sources dealing with Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff’s parents and Wolff’s early life: Wolff’s own memoir and a recollection of his father entitled The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (1979), written by Wolff’s older brother, the novelist Geoffrey Wolff. Together, these works portray a remarkable family, though Rosemary Loftus Wolff, Wolff’s mother, wryly observed that if she had known so much was going to be told, she might have watched herself more closely. The one who bore watching, however, was Wolff’s inventive father, a genial Gatsby-like figure who, in pursuit of the good life, forged checks, credentials, and his own identity. He began as Arthur Samuels Wolff, a Jewish doctor’s son and boardingschool expellee, but later emerged as Arthur Saunders Wolff, an Episcopalian and Yale University graduate. A still later reincarnation was as Saunders Ansell-Wolff III.

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On the basis of forged credentials, he became an aeronautical engineer and rose to occupy an executive suite. During his time, however, he also occupied a number of jail cells. Still, he showed remarkable creativity in his fabrications, so perhaps it is not surprising that both his sons became writers of fiction. Family life with him was something of a roller coaster, exciting but with many ups and downs. Eventually, this instability led to the family’s breakup in 1951: Twelve-year-old Geoffrey remained with the father, while the mother took five-year-old Tobias, who had been born June 19, 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama, one of several locations where the family had chased the American Dream. Henceforth reared separately, sometimes a country apart, the two boys were not reunited until Geoffrey’s final year at Princeton University. Meanwhile, Tobias and his mother lived first in Florida, then in Utah, and finally in the Pacific Northwest, where his mother remarried. The stays in Utah and the Pacific Northwest are recounted in This Boy’s Life, which covers Wolff’s life from the age of ten until he left for Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he faked his references in order to be accepted. He attended Hill School for a time but did not graduate and instead ended up joining the military. From 1964 to 1968, Wolff served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and toured Vietnam as an adviser to a South Vietnamese unit, experiences he recounted in his second volume of memoirs, In Pharaoh’s Army. After this service, deterred by the antiwar movement in the United States, he traveled to England, where he enrolled at Oxford University. He received a bachelor’s degree with first class honors from Oxford University in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked first as a reporter for The Washington Post, then at various restaurant jobs in California, and finally entered the Stanford University creative writing program. He received a master’s degree from Stanford in 1978. While at Stanford, he met and became friends with other writers, including Raymond Carver, and taught for a period of time. While pursuing his own writing, Wolff has taught creative writing at Goddard College, Arizona State University, and Syracuse University. In 1975, he married Catherine Dolores Spohn, a teacher and social worker; they had two sons, Michael and Patrick. Analysis • Tobias Wolff is an outstanding contemporary craftsman of the American short story. Working slowly, sometimes taking months and countless drafts, he polishes each story into an entertaining, gemlike work that reads with deceptive ease. He has said, in interviews, that he needs time to get to know his characters but that the finished story no longer holds any surprises for him. For the reader, the result is full of surprises, insights, humor, and other line-by-line rewards, particularly in character portrayal and style. The influences on his work—his friend Raymond Carver and earlier masters such as Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor—indicate the company Wolff intends to keep. No overriding theme, message, or agenda seems to unite Wolff’s work—only his interest in people, their quirks, their unpredictability, their strivings and failings, and their predicaments as human beings. Despite their dishonesty and drug use, most of his characters fall within the range of a very shaky middle-class respectability or what passes for it in contemporary America. Although most of them do not hope for much, many still have troubles separating their fantasies from reality. Despite their dried-up souls, vague remnants of Judeo-Christian morality still rattle around inside their rib cages, haunting them with the specter of moral choice (Wolff himself is a Roman Catholic). It is perhaps emblematic that a considerable amount of action

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in his stories occurs inside automobiles hurtling across the landscape (except when they break down or fly off the road). Wolff himself has called his stories autobiographical (just as his memoirs are somewhat fictionalized), but this seems true only in a broad sense. Wolff goes on to say that many of his characters reflect aspects of himself and that he sometimes makes use of actual events. According to Wolff, “The Liar” mirrors himself as a child: The story is about a boy who reacts to his father’s death by becoming a pathological liar. A story that appears to make use of an actual event is “The Missing Person,” about a priest who, to impress his drinking buddy, fabricates a story about killing a man with his bare hands. Before he knows it, the buddy has spread the news to the nuns. Wolff related a similar story about himself in an Esquire magazine article (“Raymond Carver Had His Cake and Ate It Too,” September, 1989), recalling his friend Carver after Carver’s death from cancer. In a tale-swapping competition with Carver, known for his bouts with alcohol, Wolff bested his friend by fabricating a story about being addicted to heroin; aghast, Carver repeated the story, and people began regarding Wolff with pity and sorrow. “Our Story Begins” • A truly autobiographical story titled “Our Story Begins” (a double or triple entendre) probably gives a more typical view of Wolff’s sources of inspiration: uncanny powers of observation and a good ear. In this story, Charlie, an aspiring writer, who barely supports himself by working as a busboy in a San Francisco restaurant, is discouraged and about ready to quit. On his way home through one of those notorious San Francisco fogs, however, he stops at a coffeehouse. There he overhears a conversation between a woman, her husband, and another man. The man tells a story about a Filipino taxi driver’s fantastic love obsession with a local woman, and the trio are identified as a love triangle themselves. Charlie soaks it all in with his cappuccino, then, newly inspired by these riches, heads home through the fog. Wolff brings these stories to a close with a patented ending: A Chinese woman carrying a live lobster rushes past, and a foghorn in the bay is likewise an omen that “at any moment anything might be revealed.” In the Garden of the North American Martyrs • Wolff’s patented ending is an updated open version of O. Henry’s surprise ending, which wrapped things up with a plot twist. Wolff’s endings are usually accomplished with a modulation of style, a sudden opening out into revelation, humor, irony, symbolism, or lyricism. Such an ending is illustrated by “Next Door,” the first story of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. A quiet couple are scandalized by the goings-on next door, where everybody screams and fights and the husband and wife make love standing up against the refrigerator. To drown out these raucous neighbors, the couple turns up their television volume, goes to bed, and watches the film El Dorado. Lying next to his wife, the husband becomes sexually aroused, but she is unresponsive. The seemingly uneventful story ends when the husband suddenly imagines how he would rewrite the movie—an ambiguous ending that suggests both his desire for some of the lusty, disorderly life next door (and in the movie) and the quiet, passionless fate that he is probably doomed to endure. The next story, “Hunters in the Snow,” perhaps Wolff’s best, is much more eventful and has an unforgettable ending. The story is set in the wintry fields of the Northwest, where three deer hunters, supposedly old buddies, rib and carp and play practical jokes on one another. The ringleader, Kenny, who is driving his old truck, is

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unmerciful to Frank and especially to Tub. Tub, however, wreaks a terrible revenge when one of Kenny’s practical jokes backfires and, through a misunderstanding, Tub shoots him, inflicting a gruesome gut wound. Frank and Tub throw Kenny into the back of the pickup truck and head off over unfamiliar country roads for the hospital fifty miles away. After a while, Frank and Tub become cold from the snow blowing through a hole in the windshield and stop at a tavern for a beer, where they strike up a sympathetic conversation with each other. Leaving the directions to the hospital on the table, they hit the road again. A little farther on, Frank and Tub have to stop at the next tavern for another beer and, this time, a warm meal. Self-absorbed, they continue their discoveries that they have much in common and become real pals. Meanwhile, Kenny is cooling in the back of the truck, and the story ends when they get under way again: As the truck twisted through the gentle hills the star went back and forth between Kenny’s boots, staying always in his sight. “I’m going to the hospital,” Kenny said. But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back. The title story, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” shows that academics can be just as cruel as hunters (or, in this case, the Iroquois Indians). The story’s protagonist is Mary, a mousy historian who has a terrible teaching job at a college in the rainy Northwest. She is invited by her friend Louise—who is a member of the history faculty of a posh college in upstate New York, Iroquois country—to interview for a job opening there. When Mary arrives on campus, she finds that she has been cruelly exploited: The interview was only a setup to fulfill a college requirement that a woman be interviewed for every job opening. As the story ends, Mary changes the topic of her demonstration lecture and—before horrified faculty and students assembled in the college’s modernized version of the long house—delivers a grisly account of how the Iroquois “took scalps and practiced cannibalism and slavery” and “tortured their captives.” Two other memorable stories in Wolff’s first collection explore the bittersweet possibilities of relationships that never come to fruition. In “Passenger,” the strictly behaved protagonist, Glen, is conned into giving a ride to the aging flower child Bonnie and her dog Sunshine. They become a working unit in the car, like an informal but close-knit family, and the reader sees that they are good for each other but realizes that the relationship probably would not last much longer than the day’s journey; the probability is symbolized by a hair-raising incident along the way, when the dog leaps on the driver, Glen, causing the car to go spinning down the wet highway out of control. In “Poaching,” a real family gets together again, briefly: A divorced woman visits her former husband and their small son. It is clear that husband and wife should reunite for their own good and the good of the child, but neither will make the first move—even though they sleep together in the same bed. The state of their relationship is symbolized by an old beaver who tries to build his lodge in a pond on the property and is quickly shot. Back in the World • The stories in Back in the World, Wolff’s second collection, are not quite as finished as the ones in his first but include several worth noting. The title is a phrase used by American soldiers in Vietnam to refer to home. Ironically, from Wolff’s stories it appears that “back in the world” is also a crazy battle zone. Besides “The Missing Person” and “Our Story Begins,” other stories that stand out are “Coming Attractions,” “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” and “The Rich Brother.”

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“Coming Attractions,” the collection’s first story, showcases a precocious teenage girl who is every parent’s nightmare. She shoplifts and makes random anonymous phone calls late at night: For example, she calls and wakes an unfortunately named Mr. Love, sixty-one years old, and gets him excited about winning a big contest. First, however, he has to answer the question: “Here’s the question, Mr. Love. I lie and steal and sleep around. What do you think about that?” Still, she reveals another side of herself at the end, when she dives to the bottom of an ice-cold swimming pool in the middle of the night and fishes out an abandoned bike for her little brother. The two other stories feature cars. In “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” the car of a young family fresh back from Germany—a former American soldier, his pregnant German wife, and their first child—breaks down at an isolated service station in the Mojave desert. The locals do not lift a hand to help, except for a woman who runs the station, and the husband is tempted to abandon his young family there. The story demonstrates that men cannot be depended on, but women are quite capable of taking care of themselves: The German wife beats up one of the local cowboys, and the station operator goes out and shoots rabbits for dinner. In “The Rich Brother,” the collection’s last story, the lifestyles of two brothers clash. The rich brother drives to a distant religious commune to rescue his young brother, but on the way home, they quarrel, and the rich brother abandons the young one along the roadside. As the story ends, however, the rich brother is having second thoughts, afraid to get home and face the questions of his wife: “Where is he? Where is your brother?” The Night in Question • The fifteen stories in The Night in Question again display Wolff’s command of dialogue, expressive detail, and meticulous plotting. The plots frequently turn on situational irony, and the endings show the principal characters suffering unexpectedly because of their behavior. That behavior devolves from selfdelusion. The disparity between characters’ intentions and the consequences of their actions creates conflict that at times skirts the bizarre but is moving and provocative in the end. The “Other Miller” illustrates Wolff’s use of a surprise ending to reveal the source of self-delusion. Miller, a young soldier, is told that his mother has died. He is delighted because he believes that the authorities have mistaken him for another Miller in his battalion. He plays along in order to get emergency leave and amuses himself with the sympathy of other soldiers. He never believes his mother has died because she is young and, more important, he is obsessed with punishing her for remarrying after his father’s death. His enlistment, in fact, had been meant to punish her. Not until he opens the door to his home does the truth force its way through his childish spite. The only mistake, all along, has been his; his mother now dead, he has only punished himself with his bitter love. In some stories the ending is foreshadowed, gradually intensifying for the reader the emotional state of the protagonists. “The Life of the Body” concerns an aging preparatory school English teacher. A romantic, he loves the classics and is liberal in applying their themes to modern social problems. The story opens in a bar. He is drunk, makes a pass at a pretty young veterinarian, and is beaten up by her boyfriend. The next day, heroically bruised, he does not correct the rumors among his students that he has been mugged by a gang. He tells the truth to a friend and admits his foolishness but continues to pursue the veterinarian despite her hostility and dangerous boyfriend. As the story ends, she relents slightly, just enough to give him hope for more adventure and romance. However irrational his actions, he deeply craves di-

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rect experience. The title story, “The Night in Question,” similarly heightens suspense in order to depict a complex emotional state with devastating power. Frank and Frances grew up under a violently abusive father. As adults, they seem familiar literary types: Frank has been the wild youth who now has gotten religion; Frances is the long-suffering, practical big sister. In the story, Frank repeats to Frances a sermon he has heard about a man who must choose between saving his beloved son and a passenger train. Frances will have none of the story’s pat message about choice and trust in the heavenly Father. It becomes ever clearer as she listens that she is spiritually alive only when she is protecting her brother. In fact, as their names suggest—Frank (Francis) and Frances—their earthly father’s violence has welded them into a single spiritual being. The story makes the psychological concept of codependency potently eerie. Like Wolff’s earlier collections, The Night in Question portrays the predicaments of human intercourse vividly and conveys their psychological or philosophical consequence by suggestion. Wolff rarely sermonizes. If he comments at all, he usually comments indirectly, through symbolism or his patented ending. Above all, Wolff is a lover of good stories and is content to tell them and let them stand on their own. Harold Branam Other major works anthologies: Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories, 1983; The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories, 1993; The Best American Short Stories, 1994, 1994; The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, 1994; Best New American Voices, 2000; Writers Harvest 3, 2000. novels: Ugly Rumours, 1975; The Barracks Thief, 1984; Old School, 2003. nonfiction: This Boy’s Life, 1989; In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, 1994. Bibliography Challener, Daniel D. Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodrigues, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff. New York: Garland, 1997. Compares the poverty-stricken childhoods of several notable writers, analyzing what led them to overcome early hardship and go on to literary greatness. Includes a bibliography and index. Desmond, John F. “Catholicism in Contemporary American Fiction.” America 170, no. 17 (1994): 7-11. Notes Wolff’s Christian ethos and comments on his use of liars and lying as means of exploring the manipulation of reality in his fiction. Hannah, James. Tobias Wolff: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction 64. New York: Twayne, 1996. Good critical study of the short fiction of Tobias Wolff. Kelly, Colm L. “Affirming the Indeterminable: Deconstruction, Sociology, and Tobias Wolff’s ‘Say Yes.’” Mosaic 32 (March, 1999): 149-166. In response to sociological approaches to literature, argues that stories like Wolff’s are polysemous and therefore not reducible to any single interpretation; provides a deconstructive reading of the story, setting it off against three possible readings derived from current sociological theory, in order to show how the story deconstructs the theories that attempt to explain it. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains

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articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of five short stories by Wolff: “Hunters in the Snow,” “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” and “The Liar” (vol. 4); and “The Rich Brother” and “Say Yes” (vol. 6). Peters, Joanne M., and Jean W. Ross. “Tobias Wolff (Jonathan Ansell).” In Contemporary Authors, edited by Hal May. Vol. 117. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. Peters gives a brief overview of Wolff’s work, but more important is the interview by Ross. In the interview, Wolff talks about his reasons for writing short stories, the writers who have influenced him, his working methods and sources of inspiration, his own reading, and his teaching of creative writing. Prose, Francine. “The Brothers Wolff.” The New York Times Magazine, February 5, 1989, 22. Prose’s fine article, which is also collected in The New York Times Biographical Service (February, 1989), introduces the writing of the Wolff brothers, Geoffrey and Tobias. Traces how they grew up apart but became inseparable, even bearing striking resemblances to each other. The article also provides background on their parents, particularly their father. Wolff, Tobias. “A Forgotten Master: Rescuing the Works of Paul Bowles.” Esquire 103 (May, 1986): 221-223. Wolff’s article not only helps rescue a forgotten master but also provides an index of what Wolff values in writing. He praises Bowles for the mythic quality of his stories, the clarity of his language, his ability to shift moods at will, and his ability to depict a wide range of international characters. He feels that Bowles’s pessimism might have contributed to his lack of popularity. ____________. Interview by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Publishers Weekly 241 (October 24, 1994): 45-46. A brief biographical sketch and survey of Wolff’s career; Wolff discusses his writing habits and his works. ____________. “An Interview with Tobias Wolff.” Contemporary Literature 31 (Spring, 1990): 1-16. Wolff discusses lying in his story “The Liar” and the nature of “winging it” in his story “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.” Wolff also talks about the fable aspect of his story “The Rich Brother,” as well as his fiction about the Vietnam War.

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Virginia Woolf Woolf, Virginia

Born: London, England; January 25, 1882 Died: The River Ouse, near Rodmell, Sussex, England; March 28, 1941 Principal short fiction • Two Stories, 1917 (one by Leonard Woolf); Kew Gardens, 1919; The Mark on the Wall, 1919; Monday or Tuesday, 1921; A Haunted House, and Other Short Stories, 1943; Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 1973 (Stella McNichol, editor); The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 1985. Other literary forms • Besides authoring short stories, Virginia Woolf was an acute and detailed diarist (her diary entries occupy five volumes in the authoritative collected edition); a prolific letter writer (six volumes in the authoritative collected edition); a biographer; a perceptive, original, and argumentative essayist and reviewer (her collected essays fill six volumes in the authoritative edition); and a pioneer of the modern novel in her ten works of long prose fiction, which include the acknowledged classics Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Achievements • A distinguished and distinctive prose stylist, Virginia Woolf excelled in fiction, nonfiction, and her own unique hybrid of these genres in her two whimsical books Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Flush: A Biography (1933), which are variously categorized as fiction, nonfiction, or “other” by critics of her work. In nonfiction, essays such as “The Death of the Moth,” “How Should One Read a Book?” and “Shakespeare’s Sister” have been widely anthologized, and in their vividness, imagery, and keen analysis of daily life, literature, society, and women’s concerns assure Woolf a place in the history of the essay. In fiction, Woolf’s classic novels, sharing much in style and theme with the nonfiction, have overshadowed the short stories. Reacting against the realistic and naturalistic fiction of her time, Woolf often emphasized lyricism, stream of consciousness, and the irresolute slice of life in both her novels and her stories, though she wrote more conventional fiction as well. Whether the conventional “well-made” or the experimental stream-of-consciousness variety, many of her approximately fifty short stories are accomplished works of art. Because of their precise and musical prose style, irony, ingenious spiral form (with narrative refrains), reversal or revelatory structure, and exploration of human nature and social life, they deserve to be better known and to be studied for themselves and not just for what they may reveal about the novels. Biography • Virginia Woolf was born as Adeline Virginia Stephen and grew up in the household of her father, Leslie Stephen, a Victorian and Edwardian literary lion who was visited by many prominent writers of the time. The importance of books in her life is reflected in many of the short stories, such as “Memoirs of a Novelist,” “The Evening Party,” and “A Haunted House”; her father’s extensive personal library provided much of her education, along with some private tutoring (especially in Greek). Despite Katherine Stephen, niece of Leslie Stephen, being the principal of Newnham College at the University of Cambridge (reflected in the story “A

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Woman’s College from Outside”), Virginia was denied a formal college education because of persistent ill health (emotional and physical), as well as her father’s male bias in this matter, all of which is echoed with mild irony in “Phyllis and Rosamond” (about two sisters who resemble Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, lacking a college education) and “A Society” (in which the character Poll, lacking a college education, receives her father’s inheritance on condition that she read all the books in the London Library). The early death of Woolf’s mother, Julia, in 1895, the repeated sexual molestation by her half brother George Duckworth, her father’s transformation of Virginia’s sisters Stella and Vanessa into surrogate mothers after Julia’s death, and her own attachments to women such as Violet Dickinson and, later, Vita Sackville-West culminated in Virginia’s cool and ambivalent sexuality, reflected by the general absence of sexual passion in many of the short stories as well as by what Woolf herself described as the “Sapphism” of “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points.’” The more regular element of her adolescence and generally happy life with Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, was the social round of upper-middle-class life, including horticultural outings in London (reflected in “Kew Gardens”), parties, private concerts, and theater-going (as in “The Evening Party,” “The String Quartet,” the Mrs. Dalloway party cycle of stories, “Uncle Vanya,” and “The Searchlight”), and excursions to the country (as in “In the Orchard”), seashore (as in “Solid Objects” and “The Watering Place”), or foreign resorts (as in “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” and “The Symbol”). Clustering around Virginia and her sister Vanessa, when they moved to a house in the Bloomsbury district after Leslie Stephen’s death in 1904, was a group of talented writers, artists, and intellectuals who came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group and were generally among the avant-garde in arts and letters. (This period is portrayed in “Phyllis and Rosamond.”) Many intellectuals from the group continued to associate with Virginia and Leonard Woolf after their marriage, and some, such as T. S. Eliot, had books published by the Hogarth Press, which was set up by the Woolfs in 1917. Indeed, all Virginia Woolf’s short stories in book form have been published in England by this press. In 1919, the Woolfs, for weekend and recreational use, took a country cottage called Monks House, whose reputation for being haunted evoked “A Haunted House” and whose vicinity, Rodmell (as well as Leonard Woolf, by name), is jocularly referred to in “The Window and the Parrot: A True Story.” Because of numerous family deaths as well as, later, the strain and letdown of completing her novels and the anxiety from World Wars I and II (referred to in many of the stories, and responsible in 1940 for the destruction of the Woolfs’ London house), Woolf had been and continued to be subject to mental breakdowns. The motifs of liquid’s destructiveness and death by drowning in several of the stories (“Solid Objects,” “A Woman’s College from Outside,” “The Widow and the Parrot,” “The New Dress,” “The Introduction,” “A Simple Melody,” “The Fascination of the Pool”) were actualized when, in early 1941, Woolf, at the onset of another breakdown, drowned herself in the Ouse River, near Rodmell and Monks House. Analysis • Perhaps related to her mental condition is Virginia Woolf’s interest in perception and perspective, as well as their relationship to imagination, in many stories. In two short avant-garde pieces—“Monday or Tuesday” (six paragraphs) and “Blue and Green” (two paragraphs, one for each color)—Woolf attempts to convey

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“Monday or Tuesday” and “Blue and Green” • In “Monday or Tuesday,” a series of contrasts between up and down, spatially free timelessness (a lazily flying heron) and restrictive timeliness (a clock striking), day and night, inside and outside, present experience and later recollection of it conveys the ordinary cycle of life suggested by the title and helps capture its experiential reality, the concern expressed by the refrain question that closes the second, fourth, and fifth paragraphs: “and truth?” Similar contrasts inform the two paragraphs describing the blue and green aspects of reality and the feelings associated with them in “Blue and Green.” These two colors are Courtesy, D.C. Public Library dominant and symbolic throughout Woolf’s short stories. Differing perspectives, which are almost cinematic or painterly, also structure “In the Orchard,” as each of the story’s three sections, dealing with a woman named Miranda sleeping in an orchard, focuses on, in order, the sleeping Miranda in relation to her physical surroundings, the effect of the physical surroundings on Miranda’s dreaming (and thus the interconnection between imagination and external world), and finally a return to the physical environment, with a shift in focus to the orchard’s apple trees and birds. The simultaneity and differing angle of the three perspectives are suggested by the narrative refrain that closes each section, a sentence referring to Miranda jumping upright and exclaiming that she will be late for tea. The ability of the imagination, a key repeated word in Woolf’s short stories, to perceive accurately the surrounding world is an issue in many of the stories. In “The Mark on the Wall,” a narrator is led into associative musings from speculating about the mark, only to discover, with deflating irony, that the source of the imaginative ramblings is in reality a lowly snail (with the further concluding ironic reversal being an unexpected reference to World War I, whose seriousness undercuts the narrator’s previous whimsical free associations). Even more difficult is the imagination’s perception of people (who and what individuals really are) in the surrounding world. This is the chief problem of the biographer, a task at which Woolf herself was successful, though not the self-centered and somewhat dishonest novelist’s biographer who narrates “Memoirs of a Novelist.” In the four stories “An Unwritten Novel,” “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points,’” “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection,” and “The Shooting Party,” a major character or the narrator is led through small details into imaginative flights about the life and personality of an individual—only, in the story’s concluding reversal, to be proved incorrect or be left

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very doubtful about the picture or account created. Likewise showing a connection between the literary artist’s problem of depicting the truth and the imagination’s problem in probing reality is the story “The Three Pictures,” in which the first picture, of a sailor’s homecoming to a welcoming wife, leads the narrator to imagine further happy events, undercut by the second and third pictures revealing the sailor’s death from a fever contracted overseas and the despair of his wife. The problem of “and truth?” (as phrased in “Monday or Tuesday”) can be comically superficial, as in the narrator’s wasted sympathetic imaginings in “Sympathy” in response to a newspaper account of Humphrey Hammond’s death, only to discover in the story’s conclusion that the article referred to the elderly father rather than the son (with ironic undercutting of the genuineness of the narrator’s sympathy because of her chagrin about the “deception” and “waste”). In contrast, in “The Fascination of the Pool,” the deeply evocative imagery and symbolism of never-ending layers of stories absorbed by a pool over time, and always going inexhaustibly deeper, have a meditative and melancholic solemnity. “Kew Gardens” • Related to imagination and art (which may or may not bridge the gap between human beings), as well as to social criticism and feminist issues (whether roles and identities unite or divide, fulfill or thwart people), is the motif of isolation and alienation in many of the stories. In “Kew Gardens,” the first paragraph’s twice-repeated detail of the heart-and-tongue shape of the colorful plants symbolizes the potential of love and communication to effect communion, while the colors projected by the flowers from sunlight on various things (mentioned in the first and last paragraphs) symbolize the various couples’ imaginations projected on the environs. In the social context of the park, however, the four sets of strollers are isolated from one another, as is the other major “character” described, the snail; each is solipsistically involved in its own affairs. Only in the fourth set, a romantic young couple, do love and communication seem to promise, though not guarantee, the hope of communion. “Solid Objects” • In “Solid Objects,” the first paragraph’s emphasis on a changing perspective (a black dot on the horizon becomes four-legged and then two men) symbolizes how the protagonist’s, John’s, perspective changes from imaginative engagements with people, politics, and ideas, to engagements with small things or concrete objects, beginning with his discovery at the beach of a smooth, irregular fragment of glass. While Charles, John’s friend, at the beach casts flat slate stones into the water, aware of objects only as a means of allowing physical action and release, John becomes attached to them with the child’s and artist’s fascination, which lures him away from the practical and pragmatic adult world of action and politics, in which he had a bright future. John thus becomes alienated from all those around him, including Charles. Symbolically during their last encounter, both end up conversing at cross purposes, neither person understanding the other. “A Haunted House” and “Lappin and Lapinova” • “A Haunted House” and “Lappin and Lapinova” show, respectively, success and failure in human communion. The former story uses the convention of the ghost story and gothic fiction, almost satirically or ironically, to suggest the broader theme of the mystery of the human heart. Implicitly two kinds of mystery are contrasted: the mystery of ghosts, haunted houses, secret treasures, and so on, and the real, important mystery of what is most

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worthwhile in the universe—the ghostly couple’s lesson at the story’s close that the house’s hidden treasure is love, “the light in the heart.” The implicitly living couple presumably have love, paralleling the ghostly couple’s bond. The cyclical repetitions in the story help convey, stylistically, the pulsation or beating of the human heart, the seat of this love. In contrast, the married couple in “Lappin and Lapinova” become alienated because the husband cannot genuinely share in the wife’s imaginative fantasy of the two of them as rabbit and hare, reverting to his pragmatic and stolid family heritage and an arrogant masculine impatience. Mrs. Dalloway Party Cycle • Most of the nine stories constituting the Mrs. Dalloway party cycle (“Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” “The New Dress,” “Happiness,” “Ancestors,” “The Introduction,” “Together and Apart,” “The Man Who Loved His Kind,” “A Simple Melody,” “A Summing Up”) naturally deal, by their focus on a social occasion, with communion or alienation, as suggested by the title “Together and Apart.” In “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” the title character remains isolated or insulated from the surrounding world, symbolized by the gloves that she is going to buy (perhaps for the party), by her general disregard of traffic and other phenomena while she muses about the death of a recent acquaintance, and by her disregard of a literal explosion that ends the story (though paradoxically she communes with an acquaintance by remembering and uttering the name while ignoring the explosion). At the party itself, Mabel Waring, the protagonist of “The New Dress,” is alienated because her new dress, owing to her limited means, seems a failure and source of embarrassment; Stuart Elton, protagonist of “Happiness,” remains withdrawn in himself to preserve an egocentric equilibrium that is his happiness; Mrs. Vallance, protagonist of “Ancestors,” is alienated by the superficial and undignified talk and values of the young around her, in contrast to her past. Woolf’s feminist concerns about the unjust subordination and oppression of women (prominent in “Phyllis and Rosamond,” “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.,” “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” “A Society,” “A Woman’s College from Outside,” and “The Legacy”) are suggested by the isolation and alienation of Lily Everit, who feels inadequate when introduced to Bob Brinsley, symbol of thoughtless male power and conceit. Despite Everit’s esteemed essay writing (paralleling Woolf’s), Brinsley negligently assumes that she must, as a woman, write poetry, as his initial question shows. Everit feels crushed, stifled, and silenced by the weight of masculine accomplishment in the arts and sciences. Two impromptu pairings in the Dalloway party cycle—Roderick Serle and Ruth Anning of “Together and Apart,” and Prickett Ellis and Miss O’Keefe of “The Man Who Loved His Kind”—achieve temporary communion: Serle and Anning when they imaginatively attune to each other, sharing profound emotions about experiences in Canterbury; Ellis and O’Keefe when the latter concurs with the former’s concern about the poor excluded from affairs such as Mrs. Dalloway’s party. These couples, however, driven apart at story’s end by the evening’s experience—Serle and Anning when the former is mockingly accosted by a female acquaintance, and Ellis and O’Keefe when the former fails, with some self-centered posturing, to appreciate the latter’s understanding of the need for beauty and imagination in the life lived at all social levels. Only the protagonists of the last two stories of the cycle, George Carslake in “A Simple Melody” and Sasha Latham in “A Summing Up,” achieve a transcendence over isolation and alienation. Carslake melds all the partygoers and himself through a blend of imagination, art, and nature by meditating on a beautiful painting of a heath in the Dalloways’ house and imagining the various partygoers on

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a walk there that reduces them all to fundamentally decent human beings coalesced in a common enterprise. Like Carslake, Latham achieves wisdom by fixing on inanimate objects, the Dalloways’ beautiful Queen Anne house (art) and a tree in the garden (nature), and meditating on them; like Carslake, Latham sees people admirably united in motion—in her reverie, adventures and survivors sailing on the sea. Norman Prinsky Other major works novels: Melymbrosia, wr. 1912, pb. 1982, revised pb. 2002 (early version of The Voyage Out; Louise DeSalvo, editor); The Voyage Out, 1915; Night and Day, 1919; Jacob’s Room, 1922; Mrs. Dalloway, 1925; To the Lighthouse, 1927; Orlando: A Biography, 1928; The Waves, 1931; Flush: A Biography, 1933; The Years, 1937; Between the Acts, 1941. nonfiction: The Common Reader: First Series, 1925; A Room of One’s Own, 1929; The Common Reader: Second Series, 1932; Three Guineas, 1938; Roger Fry: A Biography, 1940; The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays, 1942; The Moment, and Other Essays, 1947; The Captain’s Death Bed, and Other Essays, 1950; A Writer’s Diary, 1953; Letters: Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, 1956; Granite and Rainbow, 1958; Contemporary Writers, 1965; Collected Essays, Volumes 1-2, 1966; Collected Essays, Volumes 3-4, 1967; The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, 1888-1912, 1975 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1888-1912, 1975; Nigel Nicolson, editor); The London Scene: Five Essays, 1975; Moments of Being, 1976 (Jeanne Schulkind, editor); The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, 1912-1922, 1976 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1912-1922, 1976; Nicolson, editor); A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1923-1928, 1977 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1923-1928, 1978; Nicolson, editor); Books and Portraits, 1977; The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1977-1984 (5 volumes; Anne Olivier Bell, editor); A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, 1929-1931, 1978 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV: 1929-1931, 1979; Nicolson, editor); The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, 1932-1935, 1979 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V: 1932-1935, 1979; Nicolson, editor); Leave the Letters Til We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, 1936-1941, 1980 (Nicolson, editor); The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1987-1994 (4 volumes); Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, 2003 (David Bradshaw, editor). Bibliography Baldwin, Dean R. Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Baldwin’s lucid parallels between Woolf’s life experiences and her innovative short-story techniques contribute significantly to an understanding of both the author and her creative process. The book also presents the opportunity for a comparative critical study by furnishing a collection of additional points of view in the final section. A chronology, a bibliography, and an index supplement the work. Barrett, Eileen, and Patricia Cramer, eds. Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. New York: New York University Press, 1997. This collection of conference papers features two essays on Woolf’s stories: one on Katherine Mansfield’s presence in Woolf’s story “Moments of Being,” and one that compares lesbian modernism in the stories of Woolf with lesbian modernism in the stories of Gertrude Stein.

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Bleishman, Avrom. “Forms of the Woolfian Short Story.” In Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, edited by Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. In twenty-six pages, abstract theoretical issues concerning genre are discussed; then several stories are divided into the two categories of linear (for example, “The New Dress” and “Kew Gardens”) and circular (for example, “The Duchess” and “Lappin and Lapinova”) in form. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Thorough biography of Woolf, shedding light on her creative process as well as her own perceptions of her work. Dalsimer, Katherine. Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Woolf has long been associated with psychoanalysis as the first English-language publisher of Sigmund Freud. Dalsimer, a psychoanalyst herself, analyzes Woolf’s writings in all genres to uncover the psychology that underlies her literary persona. Dick, Susan, ed. Introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. 2d ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Along with classification of stories into traditional ones and fictional reveries, with affinities in works of nineteenth century writers such as Thomas De Quincey and Anton Chekhov, invaluable notes are given on historical, literary, and cultural allusions, as well as textual problems, for every story. Head, Dominic. “Experiments in Genre.” In The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Head discusses Woolf’s search for a narrative texture that would adequately portray her notion of life as amorphous. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. This volume discusses George Eliot, Woolf, Willa Cather, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Focuses on the female view and feminism in literature. King, James. Virginia Woolf. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Literary biography that relates Woolf’s life to her work. Shows how the chief sources of her writing were her life, her family, and her friends. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Detailed biography of Woolf, her complex family relationships, her lifelong battle with mental illness, and her relationship to the Bloomsbury group. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Woolf: “A Haunted House” (vol. 3), “The Mark on the Wall” (vol. 5), and “The Symbol” and “Together and Apart” (vol. 7). Roe, Sue, and Susan Sellers, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Landmark collection of essays by leading scholars that addresses the full range of Woolf’s intellectual perspectives—literary, artistic, philosophical, and political.

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Richard Wright Wright, Richard

Born: Roxie, Mississippi; September 4, 1908 Died: Paris, France; November 28, 1960 Principal short fiction • Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas, 1938 (expanded as Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories, 1938); Eight Men, 1961. Other literary forms • Although Richard Wright is best known for his novel Native Son (1940), his nonfiction works, such as the two volumes of his autobiography Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945) and American Hunger (1977) along with books such as Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) and White Man, Listen! (1957), have proven to be of lasting interest. He developed a Marxist ideology while writing for the Communist Daily Worker, which was very influential on his early fiction, notably Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children, but which culminated in an article, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” first published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1944. Although he abandoned Marxist ideology, he never abandoned the idea that protest is and should be at the heart of great literature. Achievements • Richard Wright is often cited as being the founder of the post-World War II African American novel. The works of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison owe a direct debt to the work of Wright, and his role in inspiring the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s is incalculable. Further, he was one of the first African American novelists of the first half of the twentieth century to capture a truly international audience. Among his many honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 and the Spingarn Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1941 for his novel, Native Son. This novel, which James Baldwin said was “unquestionably” the “most powerful and celebrated statement we have had yet of what it means to be a Negro in America,” along with the first volume of his autobiography and the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, constitute Wright’s most important lasting contributions to literature. His plots usually deal with how the harrowing experience of racial inequality transforms a person into a rebel—usually violent, and usually randomly so. The more subtle achievement of his fiction, however, is the psychological insight it provides into the experience of oppression and rebellion. Biography • The poverty, racial hatred, and violence that Richard Nathaniel Wright dramatizes in fiction come directly from his own experience as the child of an illiterate Mississippi sharecropper. Richard was six years old when his father was driven off the land and the family moved to a two-room slum tenement in Memphis, Tennessee. The father deserted the family there. Richard’s mother, Ella Wright, got a job as a cook, leaving Richard and his younger brother Alan alone in the apartment. When his mother became ill, the brothers were put in an orphanage. An invitation for Ella and the boys to stay with a more prosperous relative in Arkansas ended in panic and flight when white men shot Uncle Hoskins, who had offered the Wrights a home. The family lived for some time with Richard’s grandparents, stern Seventh-day Adventists. In this grim, repressive atmosphere, Richard became increasingly violent and rebellious.

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Although he completed his formal education in the ninth grade, the young Richard read widely, especially Stephen Crane, Fyodor Dostoevski, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. The family eventually migrated to Chicago. Wright joined the Communist Party in 1933, and, in 1937 in New York City, became editor of the Daily Worker. The publication of Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and Black Boy brought Wright fame both in the United States and in Europe. In 1945, at the invitation of the French government, Wright went to France and became friends with JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and other existentialists. His next novel, The Outsider (1953), has been called the first existential novel by an American writer. Wright traveled widely, lectured in several countries, and wrote journalistic accounts of his experiences in Africa and Spain. He died unexpectedly in Paris of amoebic dysentery, probably contracted in Africa or Indonesia under conditions his friend and biographer Margaret Walker, in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), believes indicate at least medically questionable decisions, or, possibly, homicide. Analysis • “Fire and Cloud” in Uncle Tom’s Children is perhaps the best representative of Richard Wright’s early short fiction. It won first prize in the 1938 Story magazine contest which had more than four hundred entries, marking Wright’s first triumph with American publishers. Charles K. O’Neill made a radio adaptation of the story after it appeared in American Scenes. “Fire and Cloud” • Unlike the later works concerning black ghetto experience, “Fire and Cloud” has a pastoral quality, recognizing the strong bond of the southern black to the soil and the support he has drawn from religion. Wright reproduces faithfully the southern black dialect in both conversation and internal meditations. This use of dialect emphasizes the relative lack of sophistication of rural blacks. His protagonist, Reverend Taylor, is representative of the “old Negro,” who has withstood centuries of oppression, sustained by hard work on the land and humble faith in a merciful God. Wright’s attitude toward religion, however, is ambivalent. Although he recognizes it as contributing to the quiet nobility of the hero, it also prevents Taylor from taking effective social action when his people are literally starving. The final triumph of Reverend Taylor is that he puts aside the conciliatory attitude which was part of his religious training and becomes a social activist. Instead of turning the other cheek after being humiliated and beaten by white men, he embraces the methods of his Marxist supporters, meeting oppression with mass demonstration. Strength of numbers proves more effective and appropriate for getting relief from the bigoted white establishment than all his piety and loving kindness. Early in the story Taylor exclaims “The good Lawds gonna clean up this ol worl some day! Hes gonna make a new Heaven n a new Earth!” His last words, however, are “Freedom belongs t the strong!” The situation of the story no doubt reflects Wright’s early experience when his sharecropper father was driven off the plantation. Taylor’s people are starving because the white people, who own all the land, have prohibited the blacks from raising food on it. No matter how Taylor pleads for relief, the local white officials tell him to wait and see if federal aid may be forthcoming. When two communist agitators begin pushing Taylor to lead a mass demonstration against the local government, white officials have Taylor kidnapped and beaten, along with several deacons of his church. Instead of intimidating them, this suffering converts them to open confrontation. As the communists promised, the poor whites join the blacks in the march, which

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forces the white authorities to release food to those facing starvation. The story’s strength lies in revealing through three dialogues the psychological dilemma of the protagonist as opposing groups demand his support. He resists the communists initially because their methods employ threat of open war on the whites—“N tha ain Gawds way!” The agitators say he will be responsible if their demonstration fails through lack of numbers and participants are slaughtered. On the other hand, the mayor and chief of police threaten Taylor that they will hold him personally responsible if any of his church members join the march. After a humiliating and futile exchange with these men, Taylor faces his own church deacons, who are themselves divided and look to him for leadership. He knows that one of their number, who is just waiting for a chance to Library of Congress oust him from his church, will run to the mayor and police with any evidence of Taylor’s insubordination. In a pathetic attempt to shift the burden of responsibility that threatens to destroy him no matter what he does, he reiterates the stubborn stand he has maintained with all three groups: He will not order the demonstration, but he will march with his people if they choose to demonstrate. The brutal horse-whipping that Taylor endures as a result of this moderate stand convinces him of the futility of trying to placate everybody. The Uncle Tom becomes a rebel. Critics sometimes deplore the episodes of raw brutality described in graphic detail in Wright’s fiction, but violence is the clue here to his message. Behind the white man’s paternalistic talk is the persuasion of whip and gun. Only superior force can cope with such an antagonist. “The Man Who Lived Underground” • Wright’s best piece of short fiction is “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Although undoubtedly influenced by Dostoevski’s underground man and by Franz Kafka’s “K,” the situation was based on a prisoner’s story from True Detective magazine. The first version appeared in 1942 in Accent magazine under the subtitle “Two Excerpts from a Novel.” This version began with a description of the life of a black servant, but Wright later discarded this opening in favor of the dramatic scene in which an unnamed fugitive hides from the police by descending into a sewer. This approach allowed the story to assume a more universal, symbolic quality. Although racist issues are still significant, the protagonist repre-

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sents that larger class of all those alienated from their society. Eventually the fugitive’s name is revealed as Fred Daniels, but so completely is he absorbed into his Everyman role that he cannot remember his name when he returns to the upper world. His progress through sewers and basements becomes a quest for the meaning of life, parodying classic descents into the underworld and ironically reversing Plato’s allegory of the cave. Although Plato’s philosopher attains wisdom by climbing out of the cave where men respond to shadows on the cave wall, Wright’s protagonist gains enlightenment because of his underground perspective. What he sees there speaks not to his rational understanding, however, but to his emotions. He moves among symbolic visions which arouse terror and pity—a dead baby floating on the slimy water whose “mouth gaped black in a soundless cry.” In a black church service spied on through a crevice in the wall, the devout are singing “Jesus, take me to your home above.” He is overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and intuits that there is something obscene about their “singing with the air of the sewer blowing in on them.” In a meat locker with carcasses hanging from the ceiling, a butcher is hacking off a piece of meat with a bloody cleaver. When the store proprietor goes home, Fred emerges from the locker and gorges on fresh fruit, but he takes back with him into the sewer the bloody cleaver— why he does not know. When Fred breaks through a wall into the basement of a movie house, the analogy to Plato’s myth of the cave becomes explicit. He comes up a back stair and sees jerking shadows of a silver screen. The Platonic urge to enlighten the people in the theater, who are bound to a shadow world, merges with messianic images. In a dream he walks on water and saves a baby held up by a drowning woman, but the dream ends in terror and doubt as he loses the baby and his ability to emulate Christ. All is lost and he himself begins to drown. Terror and pity are not the only emotions that enlarge his sensibilities in this underground odyssey. As he learns the peculiar advantages of his invisibility, he realizes that he can help himself to all kinds of gadgets valued by that shadow world above ground. He collects them like toys or symbols of an absurd world. He acquires a radio, a light bulb with an extension cord, a typewriter, a gun, and finally, through a chance observation of a safe being opened by combination, rolls of hundred dollar bills, containers of diamonds, watches, and rings. His motivation for stealing these articles is not greed but sheer hilarious fun at acquiring objects so long denied to persons of his class. In one of the most striking, surrealist scenes in modern literature, Fred delightedly decorates his cave walls and floor with these tokens of a society which has rejected him. “They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty.” He glues hundred dollar bills on his walls. He winds up all the watches but disdains to set them (for he is beyond time, freed from its tyranny). The watches hang on nails along with the diamond rings. He hangs up the bloody cleaver, too, and the gun. The loose diamonds he dumps in a glittering pile on the muddy floor. Then as he gaily tramps around, he accidentally/on purpose, stomps on the pile, scattering the pretty baubles over the floor. Here, indeed, is society’s cave of shadows, and only he realizes how absurd it all is. When the euphoria of these games begins to pall, Fred becomes more philosophical, perceiving the nihilistic implications of his experience. “Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was

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right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture.” In his unlettered, blundering way, he is groping toward Ivan Karamazov’s dark meditation: “If there is no God, then all things are permissible.” Fred becomes convinced of the reality of human guilt, however, when he witnesses the suicide of the jewelry store’s night watchman, who has been blamed for the theft he himself committed. At first, the scene in which police torture the bewildered man to force a confession strikes Fred as hilariously funny, duplicating his own experience. When the wretched man shoots himself before Fred can offer him a means of escape, however, Fred is shocked into a realization of his own guilt. The protagonist ultimately transcends his nihilism, and like Platonic realism’s philosopher who returns to the cave out of compassion for those trapped there, Fred returns to the “dead world of sunshine and rain” to bear witness to the Truth. Like the philosopher who is blinded coming out of the light into cave darkness, Fred seems confused and stupid in the social world above ground. When he is thrown out of the black church, he tries inarticulately to explain his revelation at the police station where he had been tortured and condemned. The police think he is crazy, but because they now know they accused him unjustly, they find his return embarrassing. Fred euphorically insists that they accompany him into the sewer so that they, too, can experience the visions that enlightened him. When he shows them his entrance to the world underground, one of the policemen calmly shoots him and the murky waters of the sewer sweep him away. This ironic story of symbolic death and resurrection is unparalleled in its unique treatment of existential themes. Guilt and alienation lead paradoxically to a tragic sense of human brotherhood, which seems unintelligible to “normal” people. The man who kills Fred Daniels is perhaps the only person who perceives even dimly what Daniels wants to do. “You’ve got to shoot this kind,” he says. “They’d wreck things.” Katherine Snipes With updates by Thomas Cassidy Other major works play: Native Son: The Biography of a Young American, pr. 1941 (with Paul Green). novels: Native Son, 1940; The Outsider, 1953; Savage Holiday, 1954; The Long Dream, 1958; Lawd Today, 1963. miscellaneous: Works, 1991 (2 volumes). nonfiction: Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, 1941 (photographs by Edwin Rosskam); Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, 1945; Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, 1954; The Color Curtain, 1956; Pagan Spain, 1957; White Man, Listen!, 1957; American Hunger, 1977; Richard Wright Reader, 1978 (Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, editors); Conversations with Richard Wright, 1993 (Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, editors). poetry: Haiku: This Other World, 1998 (Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, editors). Bibliography Butler, Robert. “Native Son”: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Critical but accessible look at the seminal novel. Includes bibliographical references and index.

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____________. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Collection of Michel Fabre’s essays on Wright. A valuable resource, though not a sustained, full-length study. It contains two chapters on individual short stories by Wright, including the short story “Superstition.” Supplemented by an appendix. Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980. General biographical and critical source, this work devotes two chapters to the short fiction of Wright. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. This study of Wright’s fiction as racial discourse and the product of diverse cultures devotes one chapter to Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, focusing primarily on racial and cultural contexts of “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Kinnamon, Kenneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Study of Wright’s background and development as a writer, up until the publication of Native Son. ____________. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary: 1933-1982. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Mammoth annotated bibliography (one of the largest annotated bibliographies ever assembled on an American writer), which traces the history of Wright criticism. This bibliography is invaluable as a research tool. ____________, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Twayne, 1997. Divided into sections of reviews, reprinted essays, and new essays. Includes discussions of Wright’s handling of race, voice, tone, novelistic structure, the city, and literary influences. Index but no bibliography. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Designed for student use, this reference set contains articles providing detailed plot summaries and analyses of four short stories by Wright: “Big Boy Leaves Home” and “Bright and Morning Star” (vol. 1), and “The Man Who Lived Underground” and “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (vol. 5). Rand, William E. “The Structure of the Outsider in the Short Fiction of Richard Wright and F. Scott Fitzgerald.” CLA Journal 40 (December, 1996): 230-245. Compares theme, imagery, and form of Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” with Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” in terms of the treatment of the outsider. Argues that both Fitzgerald and Wright saw themselves as outsiders—Wright because of race and Fitzgerald because of economic class. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1988. Critically acclaimed study of Wright’s life and work written by a friend and fellow novelist. Not a replacement for Michel Fabre’s biography but written with the benefit of several more years of scholarship on issues that include the medical controversy over Wright’s death. Walker is especially insightful on Wright’s early life, and her comments on Wright’s short fiction are short but pithy. Includes a useful bibliographical essay at the end.

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Aestheticism: European literary movement, with its roots in France, that was predominant in the 1890’s. It denied that art needed to have any utilitarian purpose and focused on the slogan “art for art’s sake.” The doctrines of aestheticism were introduced to England by Walter Pater and can be found in the plays of Oscar Wilde and the short stories of Arthur Symons. In American literature, the ideas underlying the aesthetic movement can be found in the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Allegory: Literary mode in which characters in a narrative personify abstract ideas or qualities and so give a second level of meaning to the work, in addition to the surface narrative. Two famous examples of allegory are Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, Part I (1678). Modern examples may be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Artist of the Beautiful” and the stories and novels of Franz Kafka. Allusion: Reference to a person or event, either historical or from a literary work, which gives another literary work a wider frame of reference and adds depth to its meaning. For example, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s story “Winter in the Air” gains greater suggestiveness from the frequent allusions to William Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610-1611), and her story “Swans on an Autumn River” is enriched by a number of allusions to the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Ambiguity: Capacity of language to suggest two or more levels of meaning within a single expression, thus conveying a rich, concentrated effect. Ambiguity has been defined by William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) as “any verbal nuance, however, slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.” It has been suggested that because of the short story’s highly compressed form, ambiguity may play a more important role in the form than it does in the novel. Anachronism: Event, person, or thing placed outside—usually earlier than—its proper historical era. Shakespeare uses anachronism in King John (c. 1596-1597), Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606-1607), and Julius Caesar (c. 1599-1600). Mark Twain employed anachronism to comic effect in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Anecdote: Short narration of a single interesting incident or event. An anecdote differs from a short story in that it does not have a plot, relates a single episode, and does not range over different times and places. Antagonist: Character in fiction who stands in opposition, or rivalry, to the protagonist. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c. 1600-1601), for example, King Claudius is the antagonist of Hamlet. Anthology: Collection of prose or poetry, usually by various writers. Often serves to introduce the work of little-known authors to a wider audience. Aphorism: Short, concise statement that states an opinion, precept, or general truth, such as Alexander Pope’s “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Apostrophe: Direct address to a person (usually absent), inanimate entity, or abstract quality. Examples are the first line of William Wordsworth’s sonnet “London,

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1802,” “Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour,” and King Lear’s speech in Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1605-1606), “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” Archetypal theme: Recurring thematic patterns in literature. Common archetypal themes include death and rebirth (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798), paradise-Hades (Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”), the fatal woman (Guy de Maupassant’s “Doubtful Happiness”), the earth goddess (“Yanda” by Isaac Bashevis Singer), the scapegoat (D. H. Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away”), and the return to the womb (Flannery O’Connor’s “The River”). Archetype: Term used by psychologist Carl Jung to describe what he called “primordial images,” which exist in the “collective unconscious” of humankind and are manifested in myths, religion, literature, and dreams. Now used broadly in literary criticism to refer to character types, motifs, images, symbols, and plot patterns recurring in many different literary forms and works. The embodiment of archetypes in a work of literature can make a powerful impression on the reader. Atmosphere: Mood or tone of a work; it is often associated with setting but can also be established by action or dialogue. The opening paragraphs of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and James Joyce’s “Araby” provide good examples of atmosphere created early in the works and pervading the remainder of the story. Black humor: General term of modern origin that refers to a form of “sick humor” that is intended to produce laughter out of the morbid and the taboo. Examples are the works of Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Günter Grass, and Kurt Vonnegut. Burlesque: Work that, by imitating attitudes, styles, institutions, and people, aims to amuse. Burlesque differs from satire in that it aims to ridicule simply for the sake of amusement rather than for political or social change. Caricature: Form of writing that focuses on unique qualities of a person and then exaggerates and distorts those qualities in order to ridicule the person and what he or she represents. Contemporary writers, such as Flannery O’Connor, have used caricature for serious and satiric purposes in such stories as “Good Country People” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Character type: Term can refer to the convention of using stock characters, such as the miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) of Renaissance and Roman comedy, the figure of vice in medieval morality plays, or the clever servant in Elizabethan comedy. It can also describe “flat” characters (the term was coined by E. M. Forster) in fiction who do not grow or change during the course of the narrative and who can be easily classified. Climax: Similar to crisis, the moment in a work of fiction at which the action reaches a turning point and the plot begins to be resolved. Unlike crisis, the term is also used to refer to the moment in which the reader’s emotional involvement with the work reaches its point of highest intensity. Comic story: Form encompassing a wide variety of modes and inflections, such as parody, burlesque, satire, irony, and humor. Frequently, the defining quality of comic characters is that they lack self-awareness; the reader tends not to identify with them but perceives them from a detached point of view, more as objects than persons. Conflict: Struggle that develops as a result of the opposition between the protagonist and another person, the natural world, society, or some force within the self. In

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short fiction, the conflict is most often between the protagonist and some strong force either within the protagonist or within the given state of the human condition. Conte: French for tale, a conte was originally a short adventure tale. In the nineteenth century, the term was used to describe a tightly constructed short story. In England, the term is used to describe a work longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. Crisis: Turning point in the plot, at which the opposing forces reach the point that a resolution must take place. Criticism: Study and evaluation of works of literature. Theoretical criticism, as for example in Aristotle’s De poetica, c. 334-323 b.c.e. (Poetics, 1705), sets out general principles for interpretation. Practical criticism (Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare, for example) offers interpretations of particular works or authors. Deconstruction: Literary theory, primarily attributed to French critic Jacques Derrida, which has spawned a wide variety of practical applications, the most prominent being the critical tactic of laying bare a text’s self-reflexivity, that is, showing how it continually refers to and subverts its own way of meaning. Defamiliarization: Term coined by the Russian Formalists to indicate a process by which the writer makes the reader perceive the concrete uniqueness of an object, event, or idea that has been generalized by routine and habit. Denouement: Literally, “unknotting”; the conclusion of a drama or fiction, when the plot is unraveled and the mystery solved. Detective story: A “classic” detective story (or “mystery”) is a highly formalized and logically structured mode of fiction in which the focus is on a crime solved by a detective through interpretation of evidence and clever reasoning. Many modern practitioners of the genre, however, such as Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and Ross Macdonald, have placed less emphasis on the puzzle-like qualities of the detective story and have focused instead on characterization, theme, and other elements of mainstream fiction. The form was first developed in short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe; Jorge Luis Borges has also used the convention in short stories. Deus ex machina: Latin, meaning “god out of the machine.” In the Greek theater, it referred to the use of a god lowered out of a mechanism onto the stage to untangle the plot or save the hero. It has come to signify any artificial device for the easy resolution of dramatic difficulties. Device: Any technique used in literature in order to gain a specific effect. Poets use the device of figurative language, for example, while novelists may use foreshadowing, flashback, and so on, in order to create desired effects. Dialogics: Theory that fiction is a dialogic genre in which many different voices are held in suspension without becoming merged into a single authoritative voice. Developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Didactic literature: Literature that seeks to instruct, give guidance, or teach a lesson. Didactic literature normally has a moral, religious, or philosophical purpose, or it will expound a branch of knowledge (as in Vergil’s Georgics, c. 37-29 b.c.e.; English translation, 1589). It is distinguished from imaginative works, in which the aesthetic product takes precedence over any moral intent. Diegesis: Hypothetical world of a story, as if it actually existed in real space and time. It is the illusory universe of the story created by its linguistic structure. Doppelgänger: Double or counterpart of a person, sometimes endowed with ghostly

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qualities. A fictional doppelgänger often reflects a suppressed side of his or her personality, as in Fyodor Dostoevski’s novella Dvoynik (1846; The Double, 1917) and the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jorge Luis Borges, among other modern writers, have also employed the doppelgänger with striking effect. Dream vision: Allegorical form common in the Middle Ages, in which the narrator or a character falls asleep and dreams a dream that becomes the actual framed story. Subtle variations of the form have been used by Hawthorne in “Young Goodman Brown” and by Poe in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Dualism: Theory that the universe is explicable in terms of two basic, conflicting entities, such as good and evil, mind and matter, or the physical and the spiritual. Effect: Total, unified impression, or impact, made upon the reader by a literary work. Every aspect of the work—plot, characterization, style, and so on—is seen to directly contribute to this overall impression. Epiphany: A literary application of this religious term was popularized by James Joyce in his book Stephen Hero (1944): “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” Many short stories since Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914) have been analyzed as epiphanic stories in which a character or the reader experiences a sudden revelation of meaning. Essay: Brief prose work, usually on a single topic, that expresses the personal point of view of the author. The essay is usually addressed to a general audience and attempts to persuade the reader to accept the author’s ideas. Essay-sketch tradition: The earliest sketches can be traced to the Greek philosopher Theophrastus in 300 b.c.e., whose character sketches influenced seventeenth and eighteenth century writers in England, who developed the form into something close to the idea of character in fiction. The essay has an equally venerable history, and, like the sketch, had an impact on the development of the modern short story. Exemplum: Brief anecdote or tale introduced to illustrate a moral point in medieval sermons. By the fourteenth century these exempla had expanded into exemplary narratives. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” are exempla. Existentialism: Philosophy and attitude of mind that gained wide currency in religious and artistic thought after the end of World War II. Typical concerns of existential writers are human beings’ estrangement from society, their awareness that the world is meaningless, and their recognition that one must turn from external props to the self. The writings of Albert Camus and Franz Kafka provide examples of existentialist beliefs. Exposition: Part or parts of a work of fiction that provide necessary background information. Exposition not only provides the time and place of the action but also introduces readers to the fictive world of the story, acquainting them with the ground rules of the work. In the short story, exposition is usually elliptical. Fable: One of the oldest narrative forms. Usually takes the form of an analogy in which animals or inanimate objects speak to illustrate a moral lesson. The most famous examples are the fables of Aesop, a Greek who used the form orally around 600 b.c.e. Fabulation: Term coined by Robert Scholes and used in contemporary literary criti-

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cism to describe novels radically experimental in subject matter, style, and form. Like the Magical Realists, fabulators mix realism with fantasy. The works of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass provide examples. Fairy tale: Form of folktale in which supernatural events or characters are prominent. Fairy tales usually depict realms of reality beyond those of the natural world and in which the laws of the natural world are suspended. Among the most famous creators of fairy tales are Germany’s Brothers Grimm. Fantastic: The Bulgarian Critic Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a genre that lies between the uncanny and the marvelous. Whereas the marvelous presents an event that cannot be explained by the laws of the natural world and the uncanny presents an event that is the result of hallucination or illusion, the fantastic exists as long as the reader cannot decide which of these two applies. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) is an example of the fantastic. Figurative language: Any use of language that departs from the usual or ordinary meaning to gain a poetic or otherwise special effect. Figurative language embodies various figures of speech, such as irony, metaphor, simile, and many others. Flashback: Scene that depicts an earlier event; it can be presented as a reminiscence by a character in a story, or it can simply be inserted into the narrative. Folktale: Short prose narrative, usually handed down orally, found in all cultures of the world. The term is often used interchangeably with myth, fable, and fairy tale. Form: Organizing principle in a work of literature, the manner in which its elements are put together in relation to its total effect. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with structure and is often contrasted with content: If form is the building, content is what is in the building and what the building is specifically designed to express. Frame story: Story that provides a framework for another story (or stories) told within it. The form is ancient and is used by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400). In modern literature, the technique has been used by Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898), Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1902), and John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Framework: When used in connection with a frame story, the framework is the narrative setting, within which other stories are told. The framework may also have a plot of its own. More generally, the framework is similar to structure, referring to the general outline of a work. Gendered: When a work is approached as thematically or stylistically specific to male or female characteristics or concerns, it is said to be “gendered.” Genre study: Concept of studying literature by classification and definition of types or kinds, such as tragedy, comedy, epic, lyrical, and pastoral. First introduced by Aristotle in Poetics, the genre principle has been an essential concomitant to the basic proposition that literature can be studied scientifically. Gothic genre: Form of fiction developed in the late eighteenth century which focuses on horror and the supernatural. Examples include the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. In modern literature, the gothic genre can be found in the fiction of Truman Capote. Grotesque: Characterized by a breakup of the everyday world by mysterious forces, the form differs from fantasy in that the reader is not sure whether to react with humor or horror. Examples include the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka.

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Hyperbole: Greek term for “overshooting” that refers to the use of gross exaggeration for rhetorical effect, based on the assumption that the reader will not be persuaded of the literal truth of the overstatement. Can be used for serious or comic effect. Imagery: Often defined as the verbal stimulation of sensory perception. Although the word betrays a visual bias, imagery, in fact, calls on all five senses. In its simplest form, imagery re-creates a physical sensation in a clear, literal manner; it becomes more complex when a writer employs metaphor and other figures of speech to recreate experience. In medias res: Latin phrase used by Horace, meaning literally “into the midst of things” that refers to a literary technique of beginning the narrative when the action has already begun. The term is used particularly in connection with the epic, which traditionally begins in medias res. Initiation story: Story in which protagonists, usually children or young persons, go through an experience, sometimes painful or disconcerting, that carries them from innocence to some new form of knowledge and maturity. William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Alice Walker’s “To Hell with Dying,” and Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” are examples of the form. Interior monologue: Defined as the speech of a character designed to introduce the reader directly to the character’s internal life, the form differs from other monologues in that it attempts to reproduce thought before any logical organization is imposed upon it. An example is Molly Bloom’s long interior monologue at the conclusion of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Irrealism: Term often used to refer to modern or postmodern fiction that is presented self-consciously as a fiction or fabulation rather than a mimesis of external reality. The best-known practitioners of irrealism are John Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. Leitmotif: From the German, meaning “leading motif.” Any repetition—of a word, phrase, situation, or idea—that occurs within a single work or group of related works. Literary short story: Term that was current in American criticism in the 1940’s to distinguish the short fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson, and others from the popular pulp and slick fiction of the day. Local color: Term that usually refers to a movement in literature, especially in the United States, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The focus was on the environment, atmosphere, and milieu of a particular region. For example, Mark Twain wrote about the Mississippi region; Sarah Orne Jewett wrote about New England. The term can also be used to refer to any work that represents the characteristics of a particular region. Lyric short story: Form in which the emphasis is on internal changes, moods, and feelings. The lyric story is usually open-ended and depends on the figurative language generally associated with poetry. Examples of lyric stories are the works of Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Conrad Aiken, and John Updike.

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Malaprop/Malapropism: Malapropism occurs when one word is confused with another because of a similarity in sound between them. The term is derived from the character Mistress Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), who, for example, uses the word “illiterate” when she really means “obliterate” and mistakes “progeny” for “prodigy.” Märchen: German fairy tales, as collected in the works of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm or in the works of nineteenth century writers such as Novalis and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Metafiction: Refers to fiction that manifests a reflexive tendency, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The emphasis is on the loosening of the work’s illusion of reality to expose the reality of its illusion. Such terms as “irrealism,” “postmodernist fiction,” and “antifiction” are also used to refer to this type of fiction. Metaphor: Figure of speech in which two dissimilar objects are imaginatively identified (rather than merely compared) on the assumption that they share one or more qualities: “She is the rose, the glory of the day” (Edmund Spenser). The term is often used in modern criticism in a wider sense to identify analogies of all kinds in literature, painting, and film. Metonymy: Figure of speech in which an object that is closely related to a word comes to stand for the word itself, such as when one says “the White House” when meaning the “president.” Minimalist movement: School of fiction writing that developed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and that John Barth has characterized as the “less is more school.” Minimalism attempts to convey much by saying little, to render contemporary reality in precise, pared-down prose that suggests more than it directly states. Leading minimalist writers are Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. A character in Beattie’s short story “Snow” (in Where You’ll Find Me, 1986) seems to sum up minimalism: “Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.” Mise en abème: Small story inside a larger narrative that echoes or mirrors the larger narrative, thus containing the larger within the smaller. Modern short story: Literary form that dates from the nineteenth century and is associated with Edgar Allan Poe (who is often credited with inventing the form) and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United States, Honoré de Balzac in France, and E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany. In his influential critical writings, Poe defined the short story as being limited to “a certain unique or single effect,” to which every detail in the story should contribute. Monologue: Any speech or narrative presented by one person. It can sometimes be used to refer to any lengthy speech, in which one person monopolizes the conversation. Motif: Incident or situation in a story that serves as the basis of its structure, creating by repetition and variation a patterned recurrence and consequently a general theme. Russian Formalist critics distinguish between bound motifs, which cannot be omitted without disturbing the thematic structure of the story, and unbound motifs, which serve merely to create the illusion of external reality. In this sense, motif is the same as leitmotif. Myth: Anonymous traditional story, often involving supernatural beings or the interaction between gods and human beings and dealing with the basic questions of how the world and human society came to be as they are. Myth is an important term in contemporary literary criticism. Northrop Frye, for example, has said that

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“the typical forms of myth become the conventions and genres of literature.” By this, he means that the genres of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony (satire) correspond to seasonal myths of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Narrative: Account in prose or verse of an event or series of events, whether real or imagined. Narrative persona: “Persona” means literally “mask”: It is the self created by the author and through whom the narrative is told. The persona is not to be identified with the author, even when the two may seem to resemble each other. The narrative persona in George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819-1824), for example, may express many sentiments of which Byron would have approved, but he is nevertheless a fictional creation who is distinct from the author. Narratology: Theoretical study of narrative structures and ways of meaning. Most all major literary theories have a branch of study known as narratology. Narrator: Character who recounts the narrative. There are many different types of narrators: The first-person narrator is a character in the story and can be recognized by his or her use of “I”; third-person narrators may be limited or omniscient. In the former, the narrator is confined to knowledge of the minds and emotions of one or, at most, a few characters. In the latter, the narrator knows everything, seeing into the minds of all the characters. Rarely, second-person narration may be used. (An example can be found in Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place, 1973.) Novel: Fictional prose form, longer than a short story or novelette. The term embraces a wide range of types, but the novel usually includes a more complicated plot and a wider cast of characters than the short story. The focus is often on the development of individual characterization and the presentation of a social world and a detailed environment. Novella, Novelette, Novelle, Nouvelle: These terms all refer to the form of fiction that is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. Novella, the Italian term, is the term usually used to refer to English-language works in this genre, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Novelle is the German term; nouvelle the French; “novelette” the British. The term “novel” derives from these terms. Oral tale: Wide-ranging term that can include everything from gossip to myths, legends, folktales, and jokes. Among the terms used by Stith Thompson to classify oral tales (The Folktale, 1951) are Märchen, fairy tale, household tale, conte populaire, novella, hero tale, local tradition, migratory legend, explanatory tale, humorous anecdote, and merry tale. Oral tradition: Material that is transmitted by word of mouth, often through chants or songs, from generation to generation. Homer’s epics, for example, were originally passed down orally and employ formulas to make memorization easier. Often, ballads, folklore, and proverbs are also passed down in this way. Parable: Short, simple, and usually allegorical story that teaches a moral lesson. In the West, the most famous parables are those told in the Gospels by Jesus Christ. Paradox: Statement that initially seems to be illogical or self-contradictory yet eventually proves to embody a complex truth. In New Criticism, the term is used to embrace any complexity of language that sustains multiple meanings and deviates from the norms of ordinary language usage. Parody: Literary work that imitates or burlesques another work or author for the pur-

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pose of ridicule. Twentieth century parodists include E. B. White and James Thurber. Periodical essay/sketch: Informal in tone and style and applied to a wide range of topics, the periodical essay originated in the early eighteenth century. It is associated in particular with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and their informal periodical, The Spectator. Personification: Figure of speech which ascribes human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects, as in these lines by W. H. Auden: “There’s Wrath who has learnt every trick of guerrilla warfare,/ The shamming dead, the night-raid, the feinted retreat.” Richard Crashaw’s “Hope, thou bold taster of delight” is another example. Plot: Way in which authors arrange their material not only to create the sequence of events in a play or story but also to suggest how those events are connected in a cause-and-effect relationship. There is a great variety of plot patterns, each of which is designed to create a particular effect. Point of view: Perspective from which a story is presented to the reader. In simplest terms, it refers to whether narration is first person (directly addressed to the reader as if told by one involved in the narrative) or third person (usually a more objective, distanced perspective). Postcolonial: Literary approach that focuses on English-language texts from countries and cultures formerly colonized or dominated by the United States or the British Empire, and other European countries. Postcolonialists focus on the literature of such regions as Australia, New Zealand, Africa, or South America, and such cultural groups as African Americans and Native Americans. Postmodern: Although this term is so broad it is interpreted differently by many different critics, it basically refers to a trend by which the literary work calls attention to itself as an artifice rather than a mirror held up to external reality. Protagonist: Originally, in the Greek drama, the “first actor,” who played the leading role. The term has come to signify the most important character in a drama or story. It is not unusual for a work to contain more than one protagonist. Pun: Puns occur when words that have similar pronunciations have entirely different meanings. The results may be surprise recognition of unusual or striking connections, or, more often, humorously accidental connections. Realism: Literary technique in which the primary convention is to render an illusion of fidelity to external reality. Realism is often identified as the primary method of the novel form; the realist movement in the late nineteenth century coincided with the full development of the novel form. Rhetorical device: Rhetoric is the art of using words clearly and effectively, in speech or writing, in order to influence or persuade. A rhetorical device is a figure of speech, or way of using language, employed to this end. It can include such elements as choice of words, rhythms, repetition, apostrophe, invocation, chiasmus, zeugma, antithesis, and the rhetorical question (a question to which no answer is expected). Rogue literature: From Odysseus to Shakespeare’s Autolocus to Huckleberry Finn, the rogue is a common literary type. He is usually a robust and energetic comic or satirical figure whose roguery can be seen as a necessary undermining of the rigid complacency of conventional society. The picaresque novel (pícaro is Spanish for “rogue”), in which the picaro lives by his wits, is perhaps the most common form of rogue literature.

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Romance: Originally, any work written in Old French. In the Middle Ages, romances were about knights and their adventures. In modern times, the term has also been used to describe a type of prose fiction in which, unlike the novel, realism plays little part. Prose romances often give expression to the quest for transcendent truths. Examples of the form include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Romanticism: Movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which exalted individualism over collectivism, revolution over conservatism, innovation over tradition, imagination over reason, and spontaneity over restraint. Romanticism regarded art as self-expression; it strove to heal the cleavage between object and subject and expressed a longing for the infinite in all things. It stressed the innate goodness of human beings and the evils of the institutions that would stultify human creativity. Satire: Form of literature that employs the comedic devices of wit, irony, and exaggeration to expose, ridicule, and condemn human folly, vice, and stupidity. Justifying satire, Alexander Pope wrote that “nothing moves strongly but satire, and those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous.” Setting: Circumstances and environment, both temporal and spatial, of a narrative. Setting is an important element in the creation of atmosphere. Short story: Concise work of fiction, shorter than a novella, that is usually more concerned with mood, effect, or a single event than with plot or extensive characterization. Simile: Type of metaphor in which two things are compared. It can usually be recognized by the use of the words “like,” “as,” “appears,” or “seems”: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” (Muhammad Ali); “The holy time is quiet as a nun” (William Wordsworth). Sketch: Brief narrative form originating in the eighteenth century, derived from the artist’s sketch. The focus of a sketch is on a single person, place, or incident; it lacks a developed plot, theme, or characterization. Story line: Differing from plot, a story line is merely the events that happen; plot is how those events are arranged by the author to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship. Stream of consciousness: Narrative technique used in modern fiction by which an author tries to embody the total range of consciousness of a character, without any authorial comment or explanation. Sensations, thoughts, memories, and associations pour out in an uninterrupted, prerational, and prelogical flow. Examples are James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Structuralism: Structuralism is based on the idea of intrinsic, self-sufficient structures that do not require reference to external elements. A structure is a system of transformations that involves the interplay of laws inherent in the system itself. The structuralist literary critic attempts, by using models derived from modern linguistic theory, to define the structural principles that operate intertextually throughout the whole of literature as well as principles that operate in genres and in individual works. Style: Style is the manner of expression, or how the writer tells the story. The most appropriate style is that which is perfectly suited to conveying whatever idea, emotion, or other effect that the author wishes to convey. Elements of style include diction, sentence structure, imagery, rhythm, and coherence.

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Tale: General term for a simple prose or verse narrative. In the context of the short story, a tale is a story in which the emphasis is on the course of the action rather than on the minds of the characters. Tall tale: Humorous tale popular in the American West; the story usually makes use of realistic detail and common speech, while telling a tale of impossible events that most often focus on a single legendary, superhuman figure, such as Paul Bunyan or Davy Crockett. Theme: Loosely defined as what a literary work means, theme is the underlying idea, the abstract concept, that the author is trying to convey: “the search for love,” “the growth of wisdom,” or some such formulation. The theme of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” for example, might be interpreted as the failure of the attempt to isolate oneself within the world of art. Tone: Strictly defined, tone is the authors’ attitudes toward their subjects, their personas, themselves, their audiences, or their societies. The tone of a work may be serious, playful, formal, informal, morose, loving, ironic, and so on; it can be thought of as the dominant mood of a work, and it plays a large part in the total effect. Trope: Literally “turn” or “conversion”; a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used in a way that deviates from the normal or literal sense. Verisimilitude: When used in literary criticism, verisimilitude refers to the degree to which a literary work gives the appearance of being true or real, even though the events depicted may in fact be far removed from the actual. Vignette: Sketch, essay, or brief narrative characterized by precision, economy, and grace. The term can also be applied to brief short stories, less than five hundred words long. Yarn: Oral tale or a written transcription of what purports to be an oral tale. The yarn is usually a broadly comic tale, the classic example of which is Mark Twain’s bluejay yarn. The yarn achieves its comic effect by juxtaposing realistic detail and incredible events; tellers of the tale protest that they are telling the truth; listeners know differently. Bryan Aubrey Updated by Charles E. May

1140

Time Line Time Line

Date and place of birth June or July, 1313; Florence or Certaldo (now in Italy) c. 1343; London(?), England

Name Giovanni Boccaccio Geoffrey Chaucer

April 3, 1783; New York, New York January 4, 1785; Hanau, Hesse-Kassel (now in Germany) February 24, 1786; Hanau, Hesse-Kassel (now in Germany)

Washington Irving Jacob Grimm

September 27, 1803; Paris, France July 4, 1804; Salem, Massachusetts April 2, 1805; Odense, Denmark

Prosper Mérimée Nathaniel Hawthorne Hans Christian Andersen Edgar Allan Poe Nikolai Gogol

January 19, 1809; Boston, Massachusetts March 31, 1809; Sorochintsy, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine)

Wilhelm Grimm

November 9, 1818; Orel, Russia August 1, 1819; New York, New York

Ivan Turgenev Herman Melville

November 11, 1821; Moscow, Russia December 12, 1821; Rouen, France September 9, 1828; Yasnaya Polyana, Russia

Fyodor Dostoevski Gustave Flaubert Leo Tolstoy

November 30, 1835; Florida, Missouri August 25, 1836; Albany, New York

Mark Twain Bret Harte

June 24, 1842; Horse Cave Creek, Ohio April 15, 1843; New York, New York September 3, 1849; South Berwick, Maine August 5, 1850; Château de Miromesnil, France November 13, 1850; Edinburgh, Scotland

Ambrose Bierce Henry James Sarah Orne Jewett Guy de Maupassant Robert Louis Stevenson

February 8, 1851; St. Louis, Missouri December 3, 1857; Near Berdyczów, Podolia, Poland June 20, 1858; Cleveland, Ohio

Kate Chopin Joseph Conrad Charles Waddell Chesnutt Arthur Conan Doyle Anton Chekhov Hamlin Garland

May 22, 1859; Edinburgh, Scotland January 29, 1860; Taganrog, Russia September 14, 1860; West Salem, Wisconsin

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Date and place of birth January 24, 1862; New York, New York September 11, 1862; Greensboro, North Carolina December 30, 1865; Bombay, India June 28, 1867; Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, Italy December 18, 1870; Akyab, Myanmar (formerly Burma)

Name Edith Wharton O. Henry Rudyard Kipling Luigi Pirandello Saki

November 1, 1871; Newark, New Jersey April 25, 1873; Charlton, Kent, England December 7, 1873; Back Creek Valley, Virginia January 25, 1874; Paris, France May 29, 1874; London, England June 6, 1875; Lübeck, Germany January 12, 1876; San Francisco, California September 13, 1876; Camden, Ohio January 4, 1878; Folkestone, Kent, England January 1, 1879; London, England

Stephen Crane Walter de la Mare Willa Cather W. Somerset Maugham G. K. Chesterton Thomas Mann Jack London Sherwood Anderson A. E. Coppard E. M. Forster

January 25, 1882; London, England February 2, 1882; Dublin, Ireland July 3, 1883; Prague, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic) September 17, 1883; Rutherford, New Jersey March 6, 1885; Niles, Michigan April 17, 1885; Rungsted, Denmark September 11, 1885; Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England October 14, 1888; Wellington, New Zealand August 5, 1889; Savannah, Georgia May 15, 1890; Indian Creek, Texas

Virginia Woolf James Joyce Franz Kafka William Carlos Williams Ring Lardner Isak Dinesen D. H. Lawrence

January 7, 1891; Eatonville, Florida August 22, 1893; West End, New Jersey July 13, 1894; Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) December 8, 1894; Columbus, Ohio August 28, 1896; Gort na gCapell, Aran Islands, Ireland September 24, 1896; St. Paul, Minnesota September 25, 1897; New Albany, Mississippi April 23, 1899; St. Petersburg, Russia June 7, 1899; Dublin, Ireland July 21, 1899; Oak Park, Illinois August 24, 1899; Buenos Aires, Argentina February 22, 1900; Cork, Ireland December 16, 1900; Ipswich, England

Zora Neale Hurston Dorothy Parker Isaac Babel

February 1, 1902; Joplin, Missouri February 19, 1902; St. Paul, Minnesota February 27, 1902; Salinas, California

Langston Hughes Kay Boyle John Steinbeck

Katherine Mansfield Conrad Aiken Katherine Anne Porter

James Thurber Liam O’Flaherty F. Scott Fitzgerald William Faulkner Vladimir Nabokov Elizabeth Bowen Ernest Hemingway Jorge Luis Borges Seán O’Faoláin V. S. Pritchett

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Date and place of birth 1903; Cork City, Ireland February 22, 1903; Toronto, Ontario, Canada February 1, 1904; Brooklyn, New York July 14 or November 21, 1904; Leoncin, Poland October 2, 1904; Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England April 24, 1905; Guthrie, Kentucky October 10, 1906; Madras, India August 31, 1908; Fresno, California September 4, 1908 ; Born: Roxie, Mississippi October 12, 1908; Old Saybrook, Connecticut April 13, 1909; Jackson, Mississippi August 3, 1909; East Orland, Maine

Name Frank O’Connor Morley Callaghan S. J. Perelman Isaac Bashevis Singer Graham Greene Robert Penn Warren R. K. Narayan William Saroyan Richard Wright Ann Petry Eudora Welty Walter Van Tilburg Clark

March 26, 1911; Columbus, Mississippi May 27, 1912; Quincy, Massachusetts June 11, 1912; East Walpole, Massachusetts January 14, 1913; Omaha, Nebraska March 1, 1914; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma April 26, 1914; Brooklyn, New York August 26, 1914; Brussels, Belgium October 27, 1914; Swansea, Wales June 10, 1915; Lachine, Quebec, Canada January 8, 1917; Trenton, Tennessee February 19, 1917; Columbus, Georgia July 8, 1917; Jacksonville, Illinois December 16, 1917; Minehead, Somerset, England February 1, 1918; Edinburgh, Scotland January 1, 1919; New York, New York October 22, 1919; Kerm~nsh~h, Persia (now B~khtar~n, Iran) December 14, 1919; San Francisco, California August 22, 1920; Waukegan, Illinois

Tennessee Williams John Cheever Mary Lavin Tillie Olsen Ralph Ellison Bernard Malamud Julio Cortázar Dylan Thomas Saul Bellow Peter Taylor Carson McCullers J. F. Powers Arthur C. Clarke Muriel Spark J. D. Salinger Doris Lessing

August 11, 1922; Montreal, Quebec, Canada November 11, 1922; Indianapolis, Indiana December 11, 1922; New York, New York July 14, 1923; Near Fremont, Ohio November 20, 1923; Springs, Transvaal, South Africa August 2, 1924; New York, New York September 30, 1924; New Orleans, Louisiana January 14, 1925; Tokyo, Japan March 25, 1925; Savannah, Georgia August 14, 1926; Fredericksburg, Virginia May 7, 1927; Cologne, Germany March 4, 1928; Nottingham, England March 6, 1928; Aracataca, Colombia April 4, 1928; St. Louis, Missouri

Mavis Gallant Kurt Vonnegut Grace Paley James Purdy Nadine Gordimer James Baldwin Truman Capote Yukio Mishima Flannery O’Connor Alice Adams Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Alan Sillitoe Gabriel García Márquez Maya Angelou

Shirley Jackson Ray Bradbury

Time Line

1143

Date and place of birth April 17, 1928; New York, New York May 24, 1928; Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland October 21, 1929; Berkeley, California November 16, 1930; Ogidi, Nigeria December 15, 1930; Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland

Name Cynthia Ozick William Trevor Ursula K. Le Guin Chinua Achebe Edna O’Brien

April 7, 1931; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania July 10, 1931; Wingham, Ontario, Canada February 4, 1932; Charles City, Iowa March 18, 1932; Shillington, Pennsylvania August 22, 1935; Norwich, Connecticut August 11, 1936; Lake Charles, Louisiana May 25, 1938; Clatskanie, Oregon June 16, 1938; Lockport, New York; March 25, 1939; New York, New York November 18, 1939; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada March 28, 1940; Newton, Massachusetts May 1, 1940; Mayfield, Kentucky July 27, 1940; Calcutta, West Bengal, India

Donald Barthelme Alice Munro Robert Coover John Updike E. Annie Proulx Andre Dubus Raymond Carver Joyce Carol Oates Toni Cade Bambara Margaret Atwood Russell Banks Bobbie Ann Mason Bharati Mukherjee

October 25, 1941; Minneapolis, Minnesota April 10, 1942; Chicago, Illinois August 2, 1942; Lima, Peru February 9, 1944; Eatonton, Georgia February 11, 1944; Chelmsford, Massachusetts June 19, 1945; Birmingham, Alabama September 8, 1947; Washington, D.C. December 2, 1948; Peekskill, New York May 25, 1949; Saint Johns, Antigua

Anne Tyler Stuart Dybek Isabel Allende Alice Walker Joy Williams Tobias Wolff Ann Beattie T. Coraghessan Boyle Jamaica Kincaid

December 14, 1951; Chicago, Illinois February 19, 1952; Oakland, California February 26, 1954; East Los Angeles, California

Amy Hempel Amy Tan Helena María Viramontes Louise Erdrich Sandra Cisneros Barbara Kingsolver

June 7, 1954; Little Falls, Minnesota December 20, 1954; Chicago, Illinois April 8, 1955; Annapolis, Maryland October 7, 1966; Spokane Indian Reservation, Wellpinit, Washington

Sherman Alexie

Index

Index Index

“A&P” (Updike), 1032 “Abroad” (Gordimer), 448 “Accompanist, The” (Pritchett), 888 Achebe, Chinua, 1-6 Acres and Pains (Perelman), 836 “Across the Bridge” (Gallant), 417 Actual, The (Bellow), 109 Adams, Alice, 7-12 “Admiralty Spire, The” (Nabokov), 747 “Adrianna Takes a Trip” (Pirandello), 853 “Adultery” (Dubus), 361 “Adventure of the Dancing Men, The” (Doyle), 354 “Adventure of the Empty House, The” (Doyle), 354 Aesop, 1132 Aestheticism, 1129 African American writers; Maya Angelou, 43-47; James Baldwin, 66-72; Toni Cade Bambara, 73-78; Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 242-249; Ralph Ellison, 368-373; Langston Hughes, 505-511; Zora Neale Hurston, 512-518; Jamaica Kincaid, 576-582; Ann Petry, 841-849; Alice Walker, 1056-1065; Richard Wright, 1123-1128 African writers; Chinua Achebe, 1-6; Isak Dinesen, 333-341; Nadine Gordimer, 444-452; Doris Lessing, 628-635 “After Holbein” (Wharton), 1086 After Rain (Trevor), 1003 Afterlife, and Other Stories, The (Updike), 1039 Aiken, Conrad, 13-19 Alexie, Sherman, 20-23 “Alicia Who Sees Mice” (Cisneros), 266 “All Fires the Fire” (Cortázar), 313 Allegory, 1129; Geoffrey Chaucer, 217; Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 244-245; Gabriel García Márquez, 424; Nikolai Gogol, 437; Nathaniel Hawthorne, 477, 480, 482; O. Henry, 501; Shirley Jackson, 530; Ursula K. Le Guin, 624;

Bernard Malamud, 655; Herman Melville, 706, 709; Vladimir Nabokov, 748; Joyce Carol Oates, 764; James Purdy, 897; Robert Louis Stevenson, 954-955, 957; Edith Wharton, 1084; Tennessee Williams, 1099 Allende, Isabel, 24-27 Allusion, 1129 “Altar of the Dead, The” (James), 538 Ambiguity, 1129 American Indian writers. See Native American writers “Amuck in the Bush” (Callaghan), 176 Anachronism, 1129 Andersen, Hans Christian, 28-34 Anderson, Sherwood, 35-42 Andrézel, Pierre. See Dinesen, Isak Anecdote, 1129 “Angel Levine” (Malamud), 653 Angelou, Maya, 43-47 “Another Time” (O’Brien), 775 “Ant” (Dybek), 366 Antagonist, 1129 Anthology, 1129 Antigua, 576-582 Aphorism, 112-113, 571, 1129 Apostrophe, 437, 1129 “Arabesque: The Mouse” (Coppard), 307 Archetypes, 1130; Jorge Luis Borges, 129; Elizabeth Bowen, 138, 140; Truman Capote, 186; Arthur Conan Doyle, 348; Grimm Brothers, 462, 467; Washington Irving, 522 Argentina, 125-135, 310-316 Aristotle, 1131, 1133 “Artificial Nigger, The” (O’Connor), 782 Asian American writers; Bharati Mukherjee, 723-733; Amy Tan, 961-965 Asian writers; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 550-554; Yukio Mishima, 717-722; Bharati Mukherjee, 723-733; R. K. Narayan, 752-758 “Aspern Papers, The” (James), 536

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Short Story Writers Assignation, The (Oates), 766 “Asya” (Turgenev), 1011 “At Sallygap” (Lavin), 605 “At the Bay” (Mansfield), 676 “At the Bottom of the River” (Kincaid), 580 “At The Tolstoy Museum” (Barthelme), 92 “Athénaïse” (Chopin), 260 Atmosphere, 1130 Atwood, Margaret, 48-57 Autobiographical fiction; Sherman Alexie, 21; Maya Angelou, 43; Margaret Atwood, 53; Isaac Babel, 59-60; Toni Cade Bambara, 75; Russell Banks, 80-81, 83; Giovanni Boccaccio, 118; Raymond Carver, 193; John Cheever, 221; Stuart Dybek, 366; Gustave Flaubert, 398; Mavis Gallant, 416; Shirley Jackson, 526-527; Franz Kafka, 568, 572; Jamaica Kincaid, 578; Mary Lavin, 604, 608; D. H. Lawrence, 612; Jack London, 639; Carson McCullers, 645; Thomas Mann, 667; Katherine Mansfield, 670; Yukio Mishima, 720; Alice Munro, 736; Vladimir Nabokov, 744; Seán O’Faoláin, 796; S. J. Perelman, 836; Isaac Bashevis Singer, 931; Dylan Thomas, 977; James Thurber, 982-984; Leo Tolstoy, 988; Ivan Turgenev, 1011; John Updike, 1039; Kurt Vonnegut, 1047; Alice Walker, 1061; Tennessee Williams, 1097-1098, 1104; Tobias Wolff, 1111 “Autumn Day” (Gallant), 415 “Average Waves in Unprotected Waters” (Tyler), 1024 “Axolotl” (Cortázar), 312 Babel, Isaac, 58-65, 1008 “Babette’s Feast” (Dinesen), 339 “Babylon Revisited” (Fitzgerald), 392 Back in the World (Wolff), 1112 Bagombo Snuff Box (Vonnegut), 1053 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 875 Baldwin, James, 45, 66-72; and Russell Banks, 80; and Richard Wright, 1123 “Ballad of the Sad Café, The” (MacCullers), 646 “Balloon, The” (Barthelme), 90

Bambara, Toni Cade, 73-78 “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” (Spark), 944 Banks, Russell, 79-85 “Bardon Bus” (Munro), 738 “Barn Burning” (Faulkner), 384 Barthelme, Donald, 86-95 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 706 “Basement Room, The” (Greene), 456 “Beach of Falesá, The” (Stevenson), 958 “Bear, The” (Faulkner), 383 Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms, The (film), 167 “Beast in the Jungle, The” (James), 539 Beattie, Ann, 96-103, 681, 1092 “Beautiful Girl” (Adams), 10 “Before the Law” (Kafka), 570 “Beggars, The” (O’Flaherty), 807 “Belle Zoraïde, La” (Chopin), 259 Belloc, Hilaire, 251 Bellow, Saul, 104-111 Benchley, Robert, 13 “Best Quality” (Tan), 964 “Bestiary” (Cortázar), 311 “Beyond the Pale” (Kipling), 590 Bierce, Ambrose, 112-117 “Big Blonde” (Parker), 832 “Big Garage, The” (Boyle), 154 “Big Meeting” (Hughes), 508 “Birthmark, The” (Hawthorne), 481 Black humor, 835, 1130; Ambrose Bierce, 112; James Thurber, 982; Kurt Vonnegut, 1053 “Black Is My Favorite Color” (Malamud), 654 “Black Magic of Barney Haller, The” (Thurber), 983 Black Swan, The (Mann), 665 “Blackberry Winter” (Warren), 1067 “Blind Love” (Pritchett), 886 “Blind Man, The” (Lawrence), 614 “Blinder” (Gordimer), 450 “Bliss” (Mansfield), 673 “Bloodfall” (Boyle), 153 “Blow-Up” (Cortázar), 313 Blow-Up (film), 310-311 “Blue and Green” (Woolf), 1118 “Blue Cross, The” (Chesterton), 252 “Blue Hotel, The” (Crane), 323 “Blue Island” (Powers), 879

1148

Index “Blue Kimono, The” (Callaghan), 178 “Bluebeard’s Egg” (Atwood), 52 Blixen, Karen. See Dinesen, Isak Boccaccio, Giovanni, 118-124 “Bones of Louella Brown, The” (Petry), 847 Book of the Duchess (Chaucer), 206 “Book of the Grotesque, The” (Anderson), 37 Borges, Jorge Luis, 86-88, 125-135, 311, 743; and Ray Bradbury, 166; and Sandra Cisneros, 265 “Boring Story, A” (Chekhov), 236 “Boule de Suif” (Maupassant), 698 Bowen, Elizabeth, 136-142, 670 “Boxes” (Carver), 195 Boyle, Kay, 143-151 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 152-159 Bradbury, Ray, 160-172 “Branch Road, A” (Garland), 431 Breakfast at Tiffany’s (film), 182 Briar Rose (Coover), 300 “Bride, The” (Chekhov), 238 “Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The” (Crane), 322 “Bridle, The” (Carver), 194 “Brigadier and the Golf Widow, The” (Cheever), 227 Brod, Max, 565 “Brokeback Mountain” (Proulx), 892 “Broken Homes” (Trevor), 1002 Brontë, Charlotte, 615, 992 Brontë, Emily, 942 Brooks, Van Wyck, 13 “Brushwood Boy, The” (Kipling), 592 “Buck in the Hills, The” (Clark), 272 ”Bucket Rider, The” (Kafka), 530, 571 “Bums in the Attic” (Cisneros), 266 “Bunchgrass Edge of the World, The” (Proulx), 893 Burlesque, 1130; Geoffrey Chaucer, 216; Washington Irving, 522; Franz Kafka, 570; Vladimir Nabokov, 747

Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 211 “Cap for Steve, A” (Callaghan), 179 Capote, Truman, 182-187, 641 “Cariboo Café, The” (Viramontes), 1044 Caricature, 1130; Anton Chekhov, 233; Joseph Conrad, 288; S. J. Perelman, 836; V. S. Pritchett, 886; Joy Williams, 1092 Carmen (Mérimée), 714 Carver, Raymond, 96, 188-197, 497; and Tobias Wolff, 1110-1111 “Casualty” (Lessing), 633 Cather, Willa, 198-204; and Sarah Orne Jewett, 543-544, 548 “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The” (Twain), 1016 “Celestial Omnibus, The” (Forster), 411 “Census Taker, The” (Oates), 763 “Champion” (Lardner), 599 Character types, 38, 1130; Geoffrey Chaucer, 218; Bret Harte, 470; Guy de Maupassant, 695; Isaac Bashevis Singer, 934 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 205-219, 595-596, 833; and Giovanni Boccaccio, 118 “Cheat’s Remorse, The” (Callaghan), 179 Cheever, John, 220-230; and T. Coraghessan Boyle, 152 Chekhov, Anton, 63, 231-241, 671, 747; and Seán O’Faoláin, 796; and V. S. Pritchett, 886; and William Saroyan, 920 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 242-249 Chesterton, G. K., 250-257 “Chickamauga” (Bierce), 114 “Child of God, The” (O’Flaherty), 805 “Child Who Favored Daughter, The” (Walker), 1059 Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (Dybek), 365 “Childybawn” (O’Faoláin), 798 Chile, 24-27, 291 Chilly Scenes of Winter (film), 97 “Chip of Glass Ruby, A” (Gordimer), 447 Callaghan, Morley, 173-181 Chopin, Kate, 258-263 “Camberwell Beauty, The” (Pritchett), 887 “Christmas Tree and a Wedding, A” Canadian writers; Margaret Atwood, 48-57; (Dostoevski), 345 Morley Callaghan, 173-181; Mavis Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Garcia Gallant, 413-419; Alice Munro, 734-742 Márquez), 424

1149

Short Story Writers “Chrysanthemums, The” (Steinbeck), 951 “Cicely’s Dream” (Chesnutt), 247 “Cinderella Waltz, The” (Beattie), 99 “Circular Ruins, The” (Borges), 131 “Circus, The” (Porter), 872 “Circus in the Attic, The” (Warren), 1068 Cisneros, Sandra, 264-270 “City, The” (Updike), 1038 “City of the Dead, a City of the Living, A” (Gordimer), 450 “Civil Peace” (Achebe), 5 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 271-276 Clarke, Arthur C., 277-284 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain, Mark“Clerk’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 216 Climax, 1130 Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Proulx), 892 “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (Nabokov), 748 Coast of Chicago, The (Dybek), 366 “Cock Robin, Beale Street” (Hurston), 517 Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, The (Gallant), 416 Collected Stories, The (Paley), 827 Colomba (Mérimée), 714 Colombia, 420-427 “Color of Darkness” (Purdy), 898 Comic stories, 798, 1062, 1130 “Completed” (Williams), 1098 “Conjurer’s Revenge, The” (Chesnutt), 245 Conrad, Joseph, 285-294, 317; and Liam O’Flaherty, 804 Conte, 1131 “Conversation, A” (Aiken), 17 Cooper, James Fenimore, 523, 536 Coover, Robert, 295-302 Coppard, A. E., 303-309 “Cords” (O’Brien), 772 “Corn Planting, The” (Anderson), 40 Cortázar, Julio, 125, 310-316 “Country Doctor, A” (Kafka), 572 “Country Husband, The” (Cheever), 226 “Country Passion, A” (Callaghan), 175 “Course of English Studies, A” (Jhabvala), 551 “Cousin Theresa” (Saki), 906 “Cousins” (Bellow), 109 “Cracked Looking-Glass, The” (Porter), 870

Crane, Stephen, 317-326 Crayon, Geoffrey. See Irving, Washington Criticism, 1131 “Crown, The” (Lawrence), 616 “Curtain Blown by the Breeze, A” (Spark), 943 “Cutting Edge” (Purdy), 899 Czech writers; Franz Kafka, 565-575; Thomas Mann, 659-669 Daisy Miller (James), 535 “Damned Thing, The” (Bierce), 115 “Dance of the Happy Shades” (Munro), 735 “Dancing Girls” (Atwood), 50 Danish writers; Hans Christian Andersen, 28-34; Isak Dinesen, 333-341 “Danny’s Girls” (Mukherjee), 730 “Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, The” (Saroyan), 921 Dark Carnival (Bradbury), 164 Darkness (Mukherjee), 726 “Darkness Box” (LeGuin), 624 “Darling, The” (Chekhov), 238 “Daughters of the Late Colonel, The” (Mansfield), 674 “Dawn” (Purdy), 900 “Dayspring Mishandled” (Kipling), 595 De la Mare, Walter, 327-332 “Dead, The” (Joyce), 562 “Dean of Men” (Taylor), 967 “Death and the Child” (Crane), 324 “Death and the Compass” (Borges), 130 Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories (Mishima), 718 “Death in the Woods” (Anderson), 39 Death in Venice (Mann), 663 “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (Welty), 1075 Death of Ivan Ilyich, The (Tolstoy), 993 “Death of Justina, The” (Cheever), 226 Deconstruction, 1131 Defamiliarization, 298, 1131 “Defeated, The” (Gordimer), 450 “Demon Lover, The” (Bowen), 139 Denís, Julio. See Cortázar, Julio Dénouement, 1131 “Descent into the Maelström, A” (Poe), 859

1150

Index “Desire and the Black Masseur” (Williams), 1099 “Désirée’s Baby” (Chopin), 260 “Destiny” (Erdrich), 376 “Destructors, The” (Greene), 457 Detective stories. See Mystery and detective fiction Deus ex machina, 218, 1131 “Devil Was the Joker, The” (Powers), 877 Dialogics, 1131 “Diary of a Madman, The” (Gogol), 440 “Diary of a Superfluous Man, The” (Turgenev), 1010 Dickens, Charles; and Bret Harte, 470; and O. Henry, 500 Didacticism, 991, 1131 Diegesis, 1131 Dinesen, Isak, 333-341 Displaced Person, The (O’Connor), 783 “Diver, The” (Pritchett), 887 “Dividends” (O’Faoláin), 799 “Doctor, The” (Gallant), 417 Dodu, and Other Stories (Narayan), 754 “Doll’s House, The” (Mansfield), 677 Domecq, H. Bustos. See Borges, Jorge Luis “Domestic Dilemma, A” (MacCullers), 643 “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name” (Purdy), 899 “Doorbell, The” (Nabokov), 746 Doppelgänger, 351-352, 540, 957, 1131 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 342-347; and Nikolai Gogol, 188, 435; and Ivan Turgenev, 1007, 1010 “Downward Path to Wisdom, The” (Porter), 873 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 348-357; and O. Henry, 500 “Dream of a Ridiculous Man, The” (Dostoevski), 345 Dream vision, 205-206, 208-209, 527, 1132 “Drummer Boy, The” (Trevor), 1001 “Drunkard, The” (O’Connor), 792 Dualism, 1132 Dubliners (Joyce), 544, 557, 604 Dubus, Andre, 358-363 “Duel, The” (Chekhov), 236 “Duel, The” (Conrad), 290 “Dwarf House” (Beattie), 97 Dybek, Stuart, 364-367

“Edna's Ruthie” (Cisneros), 267 “Egg, Thel” (Anderson), 40 Eggleston, Edward, 429 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 155 “Eleven” (Cisneros), 268 Eliot, T. S., 13 Ellison, Ralph, 368-373, 1123 “Emperor’s New Clothes, The” (Andersen), 31 Enemies: A Love Story (film), 933 “Enormous Radio, The” (Cheever), 223 “Entered as Second-Class Matter” (Perelman), 838 “Epilogue II” (Mansfield), 672 Epiphany, 1132 Erdrich, Louise, 374-378, 962 “Escapade, An” (Callaghan), 176 Escapes (Williams), 1092 Essay, 1132 Essay-sketch tradition, 1132 “Eterna” (Lavin), 607 “Eternal Moment, The” (Forster), 409 “Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne), 482 “Evening with John Joe Dempsey, An” (Trevor), 1000 “Eventide” (Purdy), 902 “Everyday Use” (Walker), 1063 Everything That Rises Must Converge (O’Connor), 784 “Everything Under the Sun” (Purdy), 900 “Ex Parte” (Lardner), 601 Exemplum, 216, 245, 382, 1132 Existentialism, 177, 359, 1132; Donald Barthelme, 89, 93; Ann Beattie, 100; Raymond Carver, 190, 194; Christian, 843; Fyodor Dostoevski, 344; Mavis Gallant, 417; Henry James, 540; Franz Kafka, 565, 573; Doris Lessing, 630; Flannery O’Connor, 778; Ann Petry, 843; Luigi Pirandello, 850; Jean-Paul Sartre, 177; Isaac Bashevis Singer, 938; Richard Wright, 1124, 1127 “Experiment in Misery, An” (Crane), 319 Exposition, 1132 “Eye of Apollo, The” (Chesterton), 253 “Eyes, The” (Wharton), 1085 Fables, 1132; Sherwood Anderson, 37; Geoffrey Chaucer, 212, 215-216;

1151

Short Story Writers Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 244; Robert Coover, 300; Zora Neale Hurston, 517; Rudyard Kipling, 592; Ursula K. Le Guin, 626; Bernard Malamud, 650, 653, 655; parodies of, 243; and science fiction, 279; James Thurber, 984; Mark Twain, 1015 Fabulation, 461, 1132 “Face of Stone, A” (Williams), 1105 “Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut, The” (Twain), 1017 “Fairy Goose, The” (O’Flaherty), 805 Fairy tales, 622, 1133; Hans Christian Andersen, 28-34; Donald Barthelme, 87; John Cheever, 226; Grimm Brothers, 461-468, 767; Washington Irving, 522; Ursula K. Le Guin, 624; Bernard Malamud, 652; James Thurber, 981 “Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 863 “Fame” (Walker), 1062 Family Happiness (Tolstoy), 992 Fanatic Heart, A (O’Brien), 774 Fantastic, 1133; Julio Cortázar, 311; Isak Dinesen, 334, 336; E. M. Forster, 408; Gabriel García Márquez, 422, 424; Nikolai Gogol, 441; Franz Kafka, 565, 571; James Thurber, 984; Ivan Turgenev, 1007, 1009, 1012 “Farmers’ Daughters, The” (Williams), 1106 “Fat” (Carver), 190 “Father, A” (Mukherjee), 728 “Father’s Story, A” (Dubus), 361 Faulkner, William, 379-387, 752, 983; and Sherwood Anderson, 36 “Fiddler, The” (Melville), 709 “Fidelity” (Jhabvala), 552 “Field of Mustard, The” (Coppard), 304 Field, Eugene, 429 Fields, Annie, 543 “Fig Tree, The” (Porter), 873 “Fight, The” (Thomas), 976 Figurative language, 1133 “Figure in the Carpet, The” (James), 537 “Final Problem, The” (Doyle), 352 “Finding a Girl in America” (Dubus), 360 “Fine Accommodations” (Hughes), 508

“Fire and Cloud” (Wright), 1124 “First Confession” (O’Connor), 792 “First Love” (Turgenev), 1011 “First Seven Years, The” (Malamud), 652 “First Year of My Life, The” (Spark), 944 Fisherman of the Inland Sea, A (LeGuin), 625 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 88, 388-396, 601; and Morley Callaghan, 173-174 “Five-Forty-Eight, The” (Cheever), 225 Flashbacks, 1133; Mary Lavin, 606; Edna O’Brien, 775; V. S. Pritchett, 886; Muriel Spark, 944; Anne Tyler, 1024 Flaubert, Gustave, 397-406, 558-559, 653, 990; and Guy de Maupassant, 695-697 “Fleur” (Erdrich), 376 “Flight” (Steinbeck), 952 “Flights of Fancy” (Trevor), 1002 “Fly, The” (Mansfield), 674 “Flying Home” (Ellison), 371 Flying Home, and Other Stories (Ellison), 369 Folktales, 1133; Hans Christian Andersen, 31; Kate Chopin, 259; Robert Coover, 298; Gabriel García Márquez, 424; Grimm Brothers, 465; Washington Irving, 519; Jamaica Kincaid, 577; Russian, 235, 438; Eudora Welty, 1077 “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (Salinger), 912 “Forest in Full Bloom, The” (Mishima), 718 “Forks, The” (Powers), 878 Form, 1133 Forster, E. M., 407-412; and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 550 “Four Men in a Cave” (Crane), 319 Frame story, 1133 Framework, 1133 “Franklin’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 218 Franny and Zooey (Salinger), 915 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 584 French writers; Julio Cortázar, 310-316; Gustave Flaubert, 397-406; Mavis Gallant, 413-419; Guy de Maupassant, 695-703; Prosper Mérimée, 712-716 Funerales de la Mamá Grande, Los (Garcia Márquez), 423 “Fur Coat, The” (O’Faoláin), 798

1152

Index Gallant, Mavis, 413-419 García Márquez, Gabriel, 420-427; and Isabel Allende, 25; and Julio Cortázar, 310; and William Faulkner, 379 “Garden of Forking Paths, The” (Borges), 130 “Garden-Party, The” (Mansfield), 677 Garland, Hamlin, 318, 428-434 “Gaspar Ruiz” (Conrad), 291 Gendered, 1133 “General’s Day, The” (Trevor), 999 Genre study, 1133 Gentle Grafter, The (Henry), 502 “Geranium, The” (O’Connor), 781 “German Refugee, The” (Malamud), 655 German writers; Grimm Brothers, 461-468; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 550-554; Thomas Mann, 659-669 “Gift of the Magi, The” (Henry), 500 “Gilded Six-Bits, The” (Hurston), 517 “Gimpel the Fool” (Singer), 935 “Girl” (Kincaid), 578 “Girls at War” (Achebe), 4 “Give It Up!” (Kafka), 570 “Giving Birth” (Atwood), 51 Glass Family Cycle, The (Salinger), 914 “Glass Mountain, The” (Barthelme), 93 “Go-Away Bird, The” (Spark), 944 “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” (Vonnegut), 1052 “Godfather Death” (Grimm), 463 “Godliness” (Anderson), 38 “God’s Wrath” (Malamud), 656 Gogol, Nikolai, 435-443; and T. Coraghessan Boyle, 154-155; and Vladimir Nabokov, 745 “Going Home With Uccello” (Beattie), 102 “Going to Meet the Man” (Baldwin), 68 Golden Apples of the Sun, The (Bradbury), 167 “Golden Honeymoon” (Lardner), 600 “Gonzaga Manuscripts, The” (Bellow), 107 Good Bones and Simple Murders (Atwood), 55 “Good Country People” (O’Connor), 782 Good Man Is Hard to Find, A (O’Connor), 781 “Good Women, The” (Sillitoe), 927

“Goodbye, My Brother” (Cheever), 223 “Goophered Grapevine, The” (Chesnutt), 244 Gordimer, Nadine, 444-452 “Gorilla, My Love” (Bambara), 75 Gorilla, My Love (Bambara), 74 Gothic stories, 1133; Sherwood Anderson, 38-39; Ray Bradbury, 169; Truman Capote, 186; Isak Dinesen, 334; Arthur Conan Doyle, 350; Washington Irving, 523; Joyce Carol Oates, 761; Edna O’Brien, 773-774; Edgar Allan Poe, 857-866; James Purdy, 899; Eudora Welty, 1076; Virginia Woolf, 1119 “Grandfather and Grandson” (Singer), 937 Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories, The (Narayan), 756 “Grave, The” (Porter), 872 Greene, Graham, 453-460; and R. K. Narayan, 753; and William Trevor, 998 “Greenleaf” (O’Connor), 784 Grimm Brothers, 87, 461-468, 767, 1133 Grotesques, 1133; Sherwood Anderson, 37, 39, 1092; Ann Beattie, 97-98; Ray Bradbury, 164; Raymond Carver, 190; Gustave Flaubert, 402; Carson McCullers, 641-642, 646; Flannery O’Connor, 778; Cynthia Ozick, 817; Edgar Allan Poe, 859; Peter Taylor, 967 “Guests of the Nation” (O’Connor), 789 “Haircut” (Lardner), 599 “Half-Skinned Steer, The” (Proulx), 893 “Hammer of God, The” (Chesterton), 254 “Hammer of God, The” (Clarke), 282 “Hands” (Anderson), 37 “Handsome Is as Handsome Does” (Pritchett), 884 “Happiness” (Lavin), 608 “Happy Death, A” (Lavin), 605 “Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut), 1050 Harte, Bret, 469-474 “Harvest, The” (Hempel), 497 “Haunted House, A” (Woolf), 1119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 223, 475-485, 655, 704; and Herman Melville, 705; and John Updike, 1029-1030 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 288, 958

1153

Short Story Writers “Hector Quesadilla Story, The” (Boyle), 155 Hemingway, Ernest, 193, 272, 486-494, 497, 538; and Sherwood Anderson, 36; and Isaac Babel, 58; and Ann Beattie, 97; and Morley Callaghan, 173; and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 272; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, 388; and J. D. Salinger, 911, 913 Hempel, Amy, 495-498 Henry Bech stories (Updike), 1033 Henry, O., 499-504 “Her Table Spread” (Bowen), 138 “Hérodias” (Flaubert), 404 “Heroine, The” (Dinesen), 338 “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” (Olsen), 812 “Higgler, The” (Coppard), 306 High Noon (film), 299 “Hills Like White Elephants” (Hemingway), 488 Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories (Bellow), 108 “Hint of an Explanation, The” (Greene), 454 Hoaxes; Henry James, 538; Prosper Mérimée, 713 “Holiday” (Porter), 874 “Holidays” (Kincaid), 579 “Homeland” (Kingsolver), 585 Homeland, and Other Stories (Kingsolver), 584 “Hook” (Clark), 275 “Horla, The” (Maupassant), 700 Horse and Two Goats, and Other Stories, A (Narayan), 755 “Horse Dealer’s Daughter, The” (Lawrence), 615 Horse Feathers (film), 835 Hous of Fame (Chaucer), 207 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 265 “Housebreaker of Shady Hill, The” (Cheever), 225 “How I Became a Holy Mother” (Jhabvala), 552 “How I Finally Lost My Heart” (Lessing), 631 Howards End (film), 550 Howells, William Dean, 318, 429 Hughes, Langston, 505-511; and Zora Neale Hurston, 513

“Human Element, The” (Maugham), 692 Hurston, Zora Neale, 512-518, 1056; and Alice Walker, 1058, 1060 “Hymeneal” (O’Faoláin), 800 Hyperbole, 1134 “I Am a Fool” (Anderson), 40 I Sing the Body Electric! (Bradbury), 168 “I Stand Here Ironing” (Olsen), 812 “Ideal Craftsman, An” (De la Mare), 330 “Idiots First” (Malamud), 654 “If They Knew Yvonne” (Dubus), 359 Illustrated Man, The (Bradbury), 166 Imagery, 1134 In a Café (Lavin), 608 “In a Café” (Mansfield), 672 “In a Strange Country” (Ellison), 371 “In Another Country” (Hemingway), 489 “In Darkness and Confusion” (Petry), 844 In His Own Country (Callaghan), 177 In Love and Trouble (Walker), 1057 In medias res, 1134 “In the Autumn of the Year” (Oates), 765 “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” (Hempel), 496 “In the Forest” (De la Mare), 329 In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (Wolff), 1111 “In the Region of Ice” (Oates), 764 “In the Train” (O’Connor), 790 India, 408, 550-554, 588-597, 723-733, 752-758 “Indian Uprising, The” (Barthelme), 89 “Indian Well, The” (Clark), 274 Initiation stories, 415, 417, 651, 1060, 1134 Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories (Garcia Márquez), 424 Interior monologues, 143, 380, 437, 791, 811, 991, 1134 “Introverted” Ireland (O’Connor), 793 “Intruder, The” (Gordimer), 448 Irish writers; Elizabeth Bowen, 136-142; James Joyce, 555-564; Mary Lavin, 603-610; Edna O’Brien, 770-777; Frank O’Connor, 788-795; Seán O’Faoláin, 796-802; Liam O’Flaherty, 803-809; William Trevor, 998-1005

1154

Index Irrealism, 1134 Irving, Washington, 519-525 “Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?” (Gordimer), 447 “Islands on the Moon” (Kingsolver), 586 Italian writers; Giovanni Boccaccio, 118-124; Luigi Pirandello, 850-856 “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt” (Gogol), 438 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (Joyce), 562 Jackson, Shirley, 526-532 James, Henry, 67, 97, 533-542, 695, 990; and Rudyard Kipling, 589; and Prosper Mérimée, 714; and Cynthia Ozick, 817; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 954, 958; and James Thurber, 981; and Ivan Turgenev, 1007; and Edith Wharton, 1084 “Janus” (Beattie), 101 Japan, 717-722 “Jasmine” (Mukherjee), 730 “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” (Mansfield), 673 “Jean Beicke” (Williams), 1105 “Jewbird, The” (Malamud), 655 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 543-549 Jewish writers; Isaac Babel, 58-65; Saul Bellow, 104-111; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 550-554; Bernard Malamud, 649-658; Tillie Olsen, 810-815; Cynthia Ozick, 816-822; Grace Paley, 823-829; Isaac Bashevis Singer, 931-940 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 550-554 “Jockey, The” (MacCullers), 642 “John Redding Goes to Sea” (Hurston), 515 “Jolly Corner, The” (James), 540 “Joy Luck Club, The” (Tan), 963 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 962 Joyce, James, 555-564, 916, 1033; and Sherwood Anderson, 36; and Morley Callaghan, 174; and Edna O’Brien, 775; and S. J. Perelman, 839 “Judgement Day” (O’Connor), 785 “Judgment, The” (Kafka), 568 Just So Stories (Kipling), 592

Kafka, Franz, 154, 565-575; and Nikolai Gogol, 435 “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” (Welty), 1076 Kenya, 333-341 “Kew Gardens” (Woolf), 1119 “Killers, The” (Hemingway), 490 Kincaid, Jamaica, 576-582 King, Stephen, 21 “King Lear of the Steppes” (Turgenev), 1011 “King of the Bingo Game” (Ellison), 370 “King’s Ankus, The” (Kipling), 592 Kingsolver, Barbara, 583-587 Kipling, Rudyard, 588-597; and W. Somerset Maugham, 689, 691 Kirkland, Joseph, 429 “Knight’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 213 Kreutzer Sonata, The (Tolstoy), 994 “Labor Day Dinner” (Munro), 739 “Lady and the Lion, The” (Grimm), 463 “Lagoon, The” (Conrad), 288 “Lame Shall Enter First, The” (O’Connor), 784 “Lappin and Lapinova” (Woolf), 1119 Lardner, Ring, 598-602 “Last Kiss” (Fitzgerald), 394 The Last Lovely City (Adams), 10 “Last Mohican, The” (Malamud), 653 Latino writers; Isabel Allende, 24-27; Sandra Cisneros, 264-270; Helena María Viramontes, 1042-1046 Lavin, Mary, 603-610 “Law of Life” (London), 638 Lawley Road (Narayan), 755 Lawrence, D. H., 31, 611-620, 740; and Katherine Mansfield, 671 Le Guin, Ursula K., 621-627 “Leaning Tower, The” (Porter), 873 Legend of Good Women, The (Chaucer), 209 “Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The” (Irving), 523 “Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler, The” (Flaubert), 402 Leitmotif, 662, 1134 Lessing, Doris, 628-635 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 118 “Lesson, The” (Bambara), 76

1155

Short Story Writers “Letter from Home, The” (Kincaid), 579 “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” (Cortázar), 312 “Life You Save May Be Your Own, The” (O’Connor), 781 “Lifeguard, The” (Beattie), 98 “Like a Winding Sheet” (Petry), 844 “Like Argus of Ancient Times” (London), 639 “Lily’s Party” (Purdy), 901 “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” (Powers), 879 Literary short stories, 1134 Little Disturbances of Man (Paley), 825 “Little Dog” (Hughes), 506 “Little Farmer, The” (Grimm), 465 “Little Herr Friedemann” (Mann), 661 “Livvie” (Welty), 1077 Local colorists, 1134; Kate Chopin, 258; Nikolai Gogol, 438; Bret Harte, 469; O. Henry, 500; Sarah Orne Jewett, 543; Prosper Mérimée, 714; Frank O’Connor, 790; Mark Twain, 1016 “Lodging for the Night, A” (Stevenson), 955 London, Jack, 636-640 Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The (Alexie), 21 “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, The” (Sillitoe), 926 Lonely Voice, The (O’Connor), 793 Long After Midnight (Bradbury), 169 “Long Road to Ummera, The” (O’Connor), 791 Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callagham, The (Callaghan), 180 “Lost Battle, The” (Mansfield), 673 “Lottery, The” (Jackson), 529 Love Life (Mason), 683 “Love-o’-Women” (Kipling), 590 Love of a Good Woman, The (Munro), 740 “Lovers of Their Time” (Trevor), 1001 “Love’s Lesson” (O’Brien), 775 “Lucretia Burns” (Garland), 430 Lyotard, Jean-François, 297 Lyric short stories, 304, 1134 McCullers, Carson, 641-648, 1073 Machineries of Joy, The (Bradbury), 168

“Madame Tellier’s Establishment” (Maupassant), 699 “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” (MacCullers), 642 “Madwoman, The” (Maupassant), 698 “Magic Barrel, The” (Malamud), 652 Malamud, Bernard, 649-658 Malapropism, 562, 1135 Malgudi Days (Narayan), 753 “Man and Two Women, A” (Lessing), 632 “Man and Wife” (Purdy), 902 “Man Child, The” (Baldwin), 67 “Man from Mars, The” (Atwood), 49 “Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, The” (Twain), 1018 “Man Who Became a Woman, The” (Anderson), 40 Man Who Died, The (Lawrence), 618 “Man Who Lived Underground, The” (Wright), 1125 “Man Without a Temperament, The” (Mansfield), 675 Mann, Thomas, 105, 659-669; and Guy de Maupassant, 700 Mansfield, Katherine, 670-679; and Conrad Aiken, 16 “Manuscript, The” (Singer), 937 Märchen, 298, 1135; Grimm Brothers, 461-468 Mario and the Magician (Mann), 664 “Markheim” (Stevenson), 956 “Martha’s Lady” (Jewett), 547 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury), 165 Marxism; Saul Bellow, 107; T. Coraghessan Boyle, 154-155; Jack London, 636; Richard Wright, 1123-1124 “Mary Postgate” (Kipling), 595 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 680-686 “Master and Man” (Tolstoy), 995 “Master Misery” (Capote), 185 “Matchimanito” (Erdrich), 377 “Mateo Falcone” (Mérimée), 714 “Matter of Chance, A” (Nabokov), 746 Maugham, W. Somerset, 687-694; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 958 Maupassant, Guy de, 695-703; and Isaac Babel, 64; and Frank O’Connor, 792 “May Night, A” (Gogol), 438

1156

Index “May-Pole of Merrymount, The” (Hawthorne), 479 “Me and Miss Mandible” (Barthelme), 88 Medicine for Melancholy, A (Bradbury), 167 “Medley” (Bambara), 77 “Meeting with Medusa, A” (Clarke), 281 Melville, Herman, 704-711; and E. M. Forster, 407; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 476 “Merchant’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 217 Mérimée, Prosper, 712-716 Metafiction, 1135; Donald Barthelme, 93; Robert Coover, 297; Amy Hempel, 497; Henry James, 533, 538; Cynthia Ozick, 817; Tennessee Williams, 1097 “Metamorphosis, The” (Kafka), 567 Metaphor, 1135 Metonymy, 437, 1135 Mexico, 113, 264, 421, 616, 868 Middleman, and Other Stories, The (Mukherjee), 728 Midnight Magic (Mason), 684 “Migraine Workers, The” (Petry), 847 “Miller’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 213 “£1,000,000 Bank-Note, The” (Twain), 1017 “Minerva Writes Poems” (Cisneros), 267 Minimalism, 190, 192, 358, 1135; Donald Barthelme, 86; Ann Beattie, 96-97, 101; Raymond Carver, 189, 191; Amy Hempel, 495; James Joyce, 561; Joy Williams, 1090, 1092-1093 “Minister’s Black Veil, The” (Hawthorne), 479 “Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, A” (Cheever), 221 Mise en abème, 1135 Mishima, Yukio, 717-722 “Miss Brill” (Mansfield), 673 “Miss Holland” (Lavin), 604 “Miss Leonora When Last Seen” (Taylor), 969 “Miss Muriel” (Petry), 845 Miss Muriel, and Other Stories (Petry), 844 Moby Dick (film), 160 Modern short story form, 521, 670, 1135 “Molly’s Dog” (Adams), 8 “Monday or Tuesday” (Woolf), 1118

“Monkey, The” (Dinesen), 334 Monkey Business (film), 835 Monologue, 1135 “Moon Lake” (Welty), 1078 Morley Callaghan’s Stories (Callaghan), 179 Morsberger, Robert, 983 “Mosby's Memoirs” (Bellow), 107 Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories (Bellow), 106 “Moslem Wife, The” (Gallant), 417 “Most Girl Part of You, The” (Hempel), 497 “Moth and the Star, The” (Thurber), 984 “Mother Africa” (Petry), 847 “Moths, The” (Viramontes), 1043 Motif, 1135 “Mountain Tavern, The” (O’Flaherty), 807 Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (film), 550 “Mrs. Bathurst” (Kipling), 593 Mrs. Dalloway party cycle (Woolf), 1120 Mrs. Reinhardt, and Other Stories (O’Brien), 773 “Mud Below, The” (Proulx), 893 Mukherjee, Bharati, 723-733 “Mumu” (Turgenev), 1010 Munro, Alice, 734-742 Munro, Hector Hugh. See Saki, Museums and Women, and Other Stories (Updike), 1034 Music School, The (Updike), 1034 “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (Hawthorne), 478 “My Mother” (Kincaid), 579 My Name Is Aram (Saroyan), 921 “My Oedipus Complex” (O’Connor), 792 Mystery and detective fiction, 1131; Jorge Luis Borges, 130; G. K. Chesterton, 250-257; Arthur Conan Doyle, 348-357; Gabriel García Márquez, 424; Henry James, 540; Edgar Allan Poe, 857-866; Dylan Thomas, 973 Myth, 1135 Nabokov, Vladimir, 681, 743-751 Narayan, R. K., 752-758 Narrative, 1136 Narrative persona, 1136 Narratology, 1136 Narrator, 1136

1157

Short Story Writers Native American writers; Sherman Alexie, 20-23; Louise Erdrich, 374-378; Barbara Kingsolver, 583-587 Navarre, Marguerite de, 118 “Necessary Knocking on the Door, The” (Petry), 846 “Neighbor Rosicky” (Cather), 201 “Neighbors” (Carver), 190 “Neighbors” (Viramontes), 1044 “Never Marry a Mexican” (Cisneros), 268 “Nevsky Prospect” (Gogol), 440 “New Café, The” (Lessing), 633 “New Mirror, The” (Petry), 845 “New Music, The” (Barthelme), 93 New World, The (Banks), 81 New Zealand, 670-679 New Zealand Stories (Mansfield), 675 “Nice Day at School” (Trevor), 1000 Nigeria, 1-6 Night at the Movies, A (Coover), 299 Night in Question, The (Wolff), 1113 “Night of the Iguana, The” (Williams), 1096 “Nightingale, The” (Andersen), 32 Nikolai Gogol; and Fyodor Dostoevski, 188 “Nine Billion Names of God, The” (Clarke), 280 “Nineteen Fifty-Five” (Walker), 1061 Nixon, Richard M., 295 No One Writes to the Colonel (Garcia Márquez), 423 “Noon Wine” (Porter), 871 Norris, Frank, 429 “Nose, The” (Gogol), 441 “Nostalgia” (Mukherjee), 727 “Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party” (Malamud), 656 Novel, 1136 Novelette, 1136 Novella, 1136 Now That April’s Here, and Other Stories (Callaghan), 177 “Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 215 “O Yes” (Olsen), 812 “O Youth and Beauty” (Cheever), 224 Oates, Joyce Carol, 7, 759-769 O’Brien, Edna, 770-777 “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An” (Bierce), 113

O’Connor, Flannery, 359, 778-787; and Carson McCullers, 641; and Katherine Anne Porter, 873 O’Connor, Frank, 603, 788-795; and A. E. Coppard, 304 October Country, The (Bradbury), 167 “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (Lawrence), 613 O’Faoláin, Seán, 788-789, 796-802 “Office Romances” (Trevor), 1001 O’Flaherty, Liam, 803-809 Ojos de perro azul (Garcia Márquez), 422 “Old Doc Rivers” (Williams), 1104 “Old Forest, The” (Taylor), 970 “Old Lady, The” (Jhabvala), 551 “Old Master, The” (O’Faoláin), 797 “Old Mortality” (Porter), 870 Olsen, Tillie, 810-815 “On Saturday Afternoon” (Sillitoe), 926 “On the Edge of the Cliff” (Pritchett), 888 “One Arm” (Williams), 1099 “One Holy Night” (Cisneros), 268 “£1,000,000 Bank-Note, The” (Twain), 1017 “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The” (LeGuin), 624 “Only Rose, The” (Jewett), 546 “Open Boat, The” (Crane), 320 Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories (Spark), 945 “Open Window, The” (Saki), 908 Oral tale, 1136 Oral tradition, 243, 305, 462, 847, 1016, 1136 “Orchards, The” (Thomas), 978 “Orgy, The” (De la Mare), 329 “Other Kingdom” (Forster), 410 “Other Paris, The” (Gallant), 414 “Our Story Begins” (Wolff), 1111 “Outcasts of Poker Flat, The” (Harte), 471 “Outpost of Progress, An” (Conrad), 287 “Overcoat, The” (Gogol), 440 “Overcoat II, The” (Boyle), 154 Ozick, Cynthia, 816-822 “Pagan Rabbi, The” (Ozick), 817 “Pair of Tickets, A” (Tan), 964 “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (Porter), 871

1158

Index Paley, Grace, 823-829 Parables, 38, 1136; Russell Banks, 81; Bret Harte, 472; Amy Hempel, 495; Shirley Jackson, 530; Franz Kafka, 570; Bernard Malamud, 655; Herman Melville, 709; Saki, 906; Leo Tolstoy, 993; Tennessee Williams, 1099 “Paradise Lounge, The” (Trevor), 1003 Paradox, 1136 “Park City” (Beattie), 102 Parker, Dorothy, 830-834; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, 389 “Parker’s Back” (O’Connor), 785 Parlement of Foules (Chaucer), 208 Parodu, 1136 Parody; Sherman Alexie, 21; T. Coraghessan Boyle, 154, 158; Geoffrey Chaucer, 209, 214, 216; Anton Chekhov, 233; Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 243; Robert Coover, 299; Gustave Flaubert, 401-402; Gabriel García Márquez, 424; Washington Irving, 520; S. J. Perelman, 836, 839; Ann Petry, 848; Edgar Allan Poe, 859; James Thurber, 981; Mark Twain, 1019; John Updike, 1033 “Passing of Grandison, The” (Chesnutt), 246 “Past One at Rooney’s” (Henry), 501 Pastures of Heaven, The (Steinbeck), 950 “Patricia, Edith and Arnold” (Thomas), 976 “Patriot, The” (O’Faoláin), 801 “Patriotism” (Mishima), 720 “Paul’s Case” (Cather), 200 “Pawnbroker’s Wife, The” (Spark), 943 “Peace of Utrecht, The” (Munro), 736 “Peaches, The” (Thomas), 975 “People Who Don’t Know the Answers” (Tyler), 1026 Perelman, S. J., 835-840 “Perfect Day for Bananafish, A” (Salinger), 914 Periodical essay/sketch, 1137 Personification, 1137 Peru, 24-27 Petry, Ann, 841-849 “Phantom ‘Rickshaw, The” (Kipling), 591 “Philosopher, The” (Anderson), 37

“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote“ (Borges), 131 Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories (Updike), 1031 “Pillar of Salt” (Jackson), 529 Pirandello, Luigi, 695, 850-856 “Pit Strike” (Sillitoe), 928 Plot, 1137 “Po’ Sandy” (Chesnutt), 244 Poe, Edgar Allan, 192, 483, 655, 857-866; and Arthur Conan Doyle, 351 Point of view, 1137 “Polarities” (Atwood), 51 Polish writers; Joseph Conrad, 285-294; Isaac Bashevis Singer, 931-940 “Pomegranate Trees” (Saroyan), 922 “Poor Franzi” (Gallant), 416 “Poor Thing, The” (Powers), 879 “Portable Phonograph, The” (Clark), 273 Porter, Katherine Anne, 867-875, 1074 Porter, William Sydney. See Henry, O. “Portobello Road, The” (Spark), 944 “Post Office, The” (O’Flaherty), 808 Postcolonial, 1137 Postmodernism, 297, 1137; Sherman Alexie, 21; Donald Barthelme, 86, 88-89, 91; Robert Coover, 295; Andre Dubus, 358; Stuart Dybek, 365; Barbara Kingsolver, 585; Carson McCullers, 641; Flannery O’Connor, 780; Cynthia Ozick, 817 Powers, J. F., 876-880 “Predicament, A” (Callaghan), 176 “Prelude” (Mansfield), 676 “Pretty Girl, The” (Dubus), 360 Pricksongs and Descants (Coover), 298 “Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love, The” (Mishima), 720 “Prime Leaf” (Warren), 1068 “Prince of Darkness” (Powers), 877 “Princess, The” (Lawrence), 617 Pritchett, V. S., 881-890 Problems, and Other Stories (Updike), 1035 “Professor” (Hughes), 507 “Prospect of the Sea, A” (Thomas), 977 Protagonist, 1137 Proulx, E. Annie, 891-895 “Prussian Officer, The” (Lawrence), 614 “Psychology” (Mansfield), 672

1159

Short Story Writers “Public Pool, A” (Adams), 8 Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), 593 Puns, 138, 500, 614, 625, 653, 1033, 1137 Purdy, James, 896-904 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe), 861 Puttermesser Papers, The (Ozick), 820 Quicker than the Eye (Bradbury), 169 “Raid, The” (Tolstoy), 990 “Rain” (Maugham), 691 “Ransom of Red Chief, The” (Henry), 502 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne), 481 “Rapture” (Purdy), 901 “Rapunzel” (Grimm), 464 “Raven’s Wing” (Oates), 766 “Raymond’s Run” (Bambara), 76 “Razor, The” (Nabokov), 745 “Real Thing, The” (James), 536 Realism, 1137 “Red” (Maugham), 689 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 318 “Red Barbara” (O’Flaherty), 806 Red Cavalry (Babel), 61 “Red Clowns” (Cisneros), 267 “Red Convertible, The” (Erdrich), 375 “Red-Headed League, The” (Doyle), 351 “Red Petticoat, The” (O’Flaherty), 806 “Reeve’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 214 “Rembrandt, The” (Wharton), 1084 “Rembrandt’s Hat” (Malamud), 655 “Rescue Party” (Clarke), 279 “Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin, The” (Williams), 1097 “Return of a Private, The” (Garland), 432 Returning (O’Brien), 774 “Reunion, The” (Angelou), 45 “Revelation” (O’Connor), 785 “Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff, The” (Walker), 1059 Rhetorical devices, 462, 1137 “Rich Boy, The” (Fitzgerald), 391 “Riddle, The” (De la Mare), 328 “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving), 522 “Road from Colonus, The” (Forster), 410 Roads of Destiny (Henry), 501 “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” (Barthelme), 90

“Roger Malvin’s Burial” (Hawthorne), 477 Rogue literature, 1137 Romance, 1138 Romanticism, 1138 Room with a View, A (film), 550 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 659 “Rosa” (Ozick), 819 “Rose for Emily, A” (Faulkner), 380 “Roselily” (Walker), 1058 “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (Chekhov), 237 “Rules of the Game” (Tan), 963 Russian writers; Isaac Babel, 58-65; Anton Chekhov, 231-241; Fyodor Dostoevski, 342-347; Nikolai Gogol, 435-443; Vladimir Nabokov, 743-751; Leo Tolstoy, 987-997; Ivan Turgenev, 1006-1014 “Sabbatha and Solitude” (Williams), 1098 “Sailor-Boy’s Tale, The” (Dinesen), 338 “Saint Marie” (Erdrich), 376 St. Mawr (Lawrence), 617 Saki, 905-909 Salinger, J. D., 910-918 Same Door, The (Updike), 1031 Saroyan, William, 190, 919-924 Satire, 1138; Hans Christian Andersen, 32; Margaret Atwood, 49-50; T. Coraghessan Boyle, 153-156; John Cheever, 227; Anton Chekhov, 233; Gabriel García Márquez, 424; Nikolai Gogol, 437; Bret Harte, 469; Washington Irving, 519; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 551; James Joyce, 557, 559, 562; Ring Lardner, 600; Katherine Mansfield, 672, 674; R. K. Narayan, 753; Joyce Carol Oates, 763; Flannery O’Connor, 782; Liam O’Flaherty, 807; Dorothy Parker, 830, 833; S. J. Perelman, 836; Luigi Pirandello, 854; Edgar Allan Poe, 857; J. F. Powers, 877; V. S. Pritchett, 884; James Purdy, 897; Saki, 905-906; John Steinbeck, 949; Leo Tolstoy, 989; Anne Tyler, 1023; Kurt Vonnegut, 1048 “Say Could That Lad Be I” (Lavin), 606 “Scandal in Bohemia, A” (Doyle), 351 “Scandalous Woman, A” (O’Brien), 772 “Schloimele” (Singer), 938

1160

Index Science fiction; Ray Bradbury, 160-172; Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 273; Arthur C. Clarke, 277-284; E. M. Forster, 408; Nathaniel Hawthorne, 482; Ursula K. Le Guin, 621-627; Jack London, 636; Edgar Allan Poe, 859; Kurt Vonnegut, 1047-1055 “Scoundrel, The” (Nabokov), 747 “Sculptor’s Funeral, The” (Cather), 199 Searching for Survivors (Banks), 81 Sebastopol (Tolstoy), 990 “Secret Garden, The” (Chesterton), 253 “Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The” (Thurber), 983 “Secret of Father Brown, The” (Chesterton), 252 “Secret Sharer, The” (Conrad), 292 “Senility” (Lavin), 607 “Sense of Humour” (Pritchett), 884 “Sentence” (Barthelme), 93 “Sentinel, The” (Clarke), 279 “Seraph and the Zambesi, The” (Spark), 942 Setting, 1138 “Seymour: An Introduction” and “Hapworth 16, 1924” (Salinger), 917 “Shadow, The” (Andersen), 30 Shaw, George Bernard, 429; and G. K. Chesterton, 250; and H. G. Wells, 251 “Shawl, The” (Ozick), 819 Shawn, William, 577 Shelley, Mary, 115, 942 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 984 Shiloh, and Other Stories (Mason), 681 “Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The” (Hemingway), 491 “Shower of Gold, A” (Barthelme), 89 “Sick Call, A” (Callaghan), 178 “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (Atwood), 53 “Signora Frola and Her Son-in-Law, Signor Ponza” (Pirandello), 854 “Signs and Symbols” (Nabokov), 749 “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” (Aiken), 13 Sillitoe, Alan, 925-930 “Silver Dish, A” (Bellow), 109 Simile, 1138 “Simple Heart, A” (Flaubert), 399 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 931-940

“Singing Bone, The” (Grimm), 466 “Sins of the Third Age” (Gordimer), 450 “Six Feet of the Country” (Gordimer), 447 “Six Soldiers of Fortune” (Grimm), 462 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (Maugham), 691 Sixty-three: Dream Palace (Purdy), 901 “Skeleton, The” (Pritchett), 886 Sketch, 1138 “Sleep Tight” (Purdy), 899 “Slippage” (Updike), 1038 Smith, Rosamond. See Oates, Joyce Carol Smoke Signals (film), 20, 22 “Smuggler, The” (Singer), 938 “Snapshots” (Viramontes), 1043 “Snow” (Beattie), 100 “Snow Queen, The” (Andersen), 29 “Snow White” (Grimm), 465 “Snows of Kilimanjaro, The” (Hemingway), 490 “Soldier’s Embrace, A” (Gordimer), 448 “Soldier’s Home” (Hemingway), 490 “Solid Objects” (Woolf), 1119 “Some Like Them Cold” (Lardner), 600 “Some of These Days” (Purdy), 901 Somers, Jane. See Lessing, Doris Something Out There (Gordimer), 449 “Song of Triumphant Love, The” (Turgenev), 1012 “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin), 69 “Sophistication” (Anderson), 39 “Sorrow-Acre” (Dinesen), 337 “Sorry Fugu” (Boyle), 156 “Source” (Walker), 1062 “South, The” (Borges), 132 South Africa, 444-452 South American writers; Isabel Allende, 24-27; Jorge Luis Borges, 125-135; Julio Cortázar, 310-316; Gabriel García Márquez, 420-427 Southern Renaissance, 380, 518 Southern, Terry, 835 Spark, Muriel, 941-947 “Sparrows” (Lessing), 633 “Spectre Bridegroom, The” (Irving), 521 “Spinoza of Market Street, The” (Singer), 936 “Spinster’s Tale, A” (Taylor), 968 Sportsman’s Sketches, A (Turgenev), 1008

1161

Short Story Writers “Spring in Fialta” (Nabokov), 748 “Spunk” (Hurston), 516 “Sredni Vashtar” (Saki), 907 “Star, The” (Clarke), 280 “Star, The” (Wells), 280 “Steady Going Up” (Angelou), 44 Steinbeck, John, 21, 584, 948-953; and Raymond Carver, 194 “Steppe, The” (Chekhov), 235 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 954-960; and W. Somerset Maugham, 689-690 “Still Moment, A” (Welty), 1078 Stories of Eva Luna, The (Allende), 25 Stories of Ray Bradbury, The (Bradbury), 169 “Storm, The” (Chopin), 261 “Storms” (Lessing), 633 “Story by Maupassant, A” (O’Connor), 792 Story line, 1138 “Story of an Hour, The” (Chopin), 259 “Strange Moonlight” (Aiken), 15 Strange Pilgrims (Garcia Márquez), 425 Stream of consciousness, 143, 1116, 1138 “Strength of God, The” (Anderson), 38 “Strider” (Tolstoy), 992 Structuralism, 1138 Style, 1138 Success Stories (Banks), 83 “Sugawn Chair, The” (O’Faoláin), 799 “Summer Night” (Bowen), 137 “Summer of the Beautiful White Horse, The” (Saroyan), 922 “Summer Tidings” (Purdy), 901 “Sunlight and Shadow” (Pirandello), 852 “Sweat” (Hurston), 516 “Swimmer, The” (Cheever), 227 T. C. Boyle Stories (Boyle), 157 “Taibele and Her Demon” (Singer), 935 “Taking Care” (Williams), 1091 Tale, 1139 “Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, The” (Gogol), 439 Tales of Odessa (Babel), 60 Tall tales, 1139; Donald Barthelme, 90; Ambrose Bierce, 112; Arthur C. Clarke, 278; William Faulkner, 386; O. Henry, 502; S. J. Perelman, 837; Mark Twain, 1016 “Tamurlane” (Mukherjee), 727

Tan, Amy, 961-965 Taylor, Peter, 966-972 “Teenage Wasteland” (Tyler), 1026 “Telephone Call, A” (Parker), 831 “Tell Me a Riddle” (Olsen), 813 “Tell Me Yes or No” (Munro), 738 “Tenant, The” (Mukherjee), 731 “Thank You M’am” (Hughes), 507 “Theft” (Porter), 870 “They” (Kipling), 595 “Thistledown” (Aiken), 16 Thomas, Dylan, 973-980 Thompson, Hunter, 835 “Those Who Don't” (Cisneros), 266 “Three Sisters, The” (Cisneros), 267 Thurber, James, 836, 981-986 “To Build a Fire” (London), 637 “To Hell with Dying” (Walker), 1060 “To See You Again” (Adams), 9 “Today Will Be a Quiet Day” (Hempel), 496 Tolstoy, Leo, 92, 987-997; and Anton Chekhov, 235; and Ivan Turgenev, 1007 “Tom” (Lavin), 606 “Tomorrow—Fairly Cloudy” (Perelman), 837 Tone, 1139 Tonio Kröger (Mann), 662 Toynbee Convector, The (Bradbury), 169 Trailerpark (Banks), 82 “Transaction” (Updike), 1036 Transcendentalism, 224, 476 Transposed Heads, The (Mann), 665 “Tree, The” (Thomas), 978 “Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, A” (MacCullers), 644 “Tree of Night, A” (Capote), 183 Trembling of a Leaf, The (Maugham), 688 Trevor, William, 604, 998-1005; and Mary Lavin, 609 “Trimmed Lamp, The” (Henry), 501 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 209 Trope, 1139 “True Story, A” (Twain), 1016 “Trust Me” (Updike), 1037 Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories (Hempel), 497 Turgenev, Ivan, 1006-1014; and Guy de Maupassant, 695; and V. S. Pritchett, 886

1162

Index “Turkey, The” (O’Connor), 781 Twain, Mark, 1015-1021; and Russell Banks, 80; and Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 242; and Bret Harte, 469; and James Thurber, 984 “Two Corpses Go Dancing” (Singer), 934 “Two Hussars” (Tolstoy), 991 “Two Kinds” (Tan), 964 “Two Lovely Beasts” (O’Flaherty), 806 “Two Old Women and a Young One” (Lessing), 633 “Two Ships” (Boyle), 155 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 277 Tyler, Anne, 1022-1028; and Carson McCullers, 641 “Typhoon” (Conrad), 290

“Visitor, The” (Thomas), 978 “Viy” (Gogol), 439 Vonnegut, Kurt, 1047-1055

“Uncle Ben’s Choice” (Achebe), 3 “Uncle Ernest” (Sillitoe), 926 “Uncle Valentine” (Cather), 201 “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” (Chesnutt), 247 “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (Salinger), 913 Under the Banyan Tree, and Other Stories (Narayan), 755 “Under the Lion’s Paw” (Garland), 429 “Unearthing Suite” (Atwood), 53 Updike, John, 7, 361, 893, 1029-1041; and R. K. Narayan, 756 “Valiant Woman, The” (Powers), 878 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 422 “Vengeful Creditor” (Achebe), 2 Venus of Ille, The (Mérimée), 715 Verbal Wit (Perelman), 838 Verisimilitude, 1139 “Views of My Father Weeping” (Barthelme), 91 Vignettes, 1139; Sherwood Anderson, 36; Raymond Carver, 190-191; Sandra Cisneros, 265; O. Henry, 502; R. K. Narayan, 755; Isaac Bashevis Singer, 938; Muriel Spark, 945; William Trevor, 1000; Mark Twain, 1018; Robert Penn Warren, 1069 “Vintage Thunderbird, A” (Beattie), 98 Viramontes, Helena María, 1042-1046 “Visit, The” (Jackson), 528

Walker, Alice, 1056-1065 “Waltz, The” (Parker), 831 Warren, Robert Penn, 1066-1072, 1074 “Wedding Day” (Boyle), 144 “Wedding Dress, A” (Callaghan), 176 “Welcome to the Monkey House” (Vonnegut), 1049 Wells, H. G., 251, 280 Welty, Eudora, 734, 1023, 1073-1082 Wharton, Edith, 1083-1089 “What I Have Been Doing Lately” (Kincaid), 579 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver), 191 “What You Hear from ‘Em?” (Taylor), 968 Whelan, John Francis. See O’Faoláin, Seán “When My Girl Comes Home” (Pritchett), 885 “When the Light Gets Green” (Warren), 1067 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Oates), 764-765, 836 “Where I’m Calling From” (Carver), 193 “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (Welty), 1080 White Deer, The (Thurber), 985 “White Heron, A” (Jewett), 545 “White Horses of Vienna, The” (Boyle), 147 “White Nights” (Dostoevski), 344 “White Quail, The” (Steinbeck), 952 “Whole World Knows, The” (Welty), 1079 “Why Can’t They Tell You Why?” (Purdy), 899 “Why Don’t You Dance?” (Carver), 191 “Why I Live at the P.O.” (Welty), 1075 “Wide Net, The” (Welty), 1076 “Wife of Bath’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), 216 “Wife of His Youth, The” (Chesnutt), 246 “Wife of Nashville, A” (Taylor), 969 “Wife’s Story, A” (Mukherjee), 731 “Wife-Wooing” (Updike), 1033 Wilderness Tips (Atwood), 53 Will You Always Love Me? (Oates), 767 Williams, Joy, 1090-1094

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Short Story Writers Williams, Tennessee, 1095-1102 Williams, William Carlos, 1103-1108 “Windy Day at the Reservoir” (Beattie), 101 “Winter Dreams” (Fitzgerald), 391 “Winter Night” (Boyle), 149 ”Winter: 1978” (Beattie), 99 “Wish House, The” (Kipling), 591 Without a Hero (Boyle), 157 “Witness, The” (Petry), 846 Wolfe, Thomas, 81 Wolfe, Tom, 835 Wolff, Tobias, 1109-1115 “Woman Hollering Creek” (Cisneros), 269 Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (Cisneros), 267 “Woman Who Rode Away, The” (Lawrence), 617 “Wonderful Glass, The” (Grimm), 464 Woolf, Virginia, 1116-1122; and Mary Lavin, 604; and Katherine Mansfield, 671; and Ivan Turgenev, 1006 “World According to Hsü, The” (Mukherjee), 726

“Worn Path, A” (Welty), 1075 Wright, Richard, 842, 1123-1128; and James Baldwin, 66; and Ralph Ellison, 368; and Carson McCullers, 642 “Xuela” (Kincaid), 580 Yarns, 1016, 1139 Yentl (film), 933, 938 “You Are What You Own” (Adams), 9 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker), 1061 “You May Safely Gaze” (Purdy), 902 “You Touched Me” (Lawrence), 615 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne), 223, 480 “Young Man with the Carnation, The” (Dinesen), 336 “Your Obituary, Well Written” (Aiken), 16 “Your Place Is Empty” (Tyler), 1024 “Youth” (Conrad), 288 “Zeitl and Rickel” (Singer), 936 Zola, Émile, 86

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