Author: Jay Ruud

http://economiacircularverde.com/que-es-la-economia-circular/ Like a lot of people, my concept of Thomas More, or I suppose I should say “Saint Thomas More,” has been shaped by two major texts. The first, his famous literary text Utopia, reveals him to be a brilliant Renaissance thinker, a rational humanist philosopher whose thought, particularly as regards political philosophy, made him admired throughout… Continue reading Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”

John Griffith Chaney—generally known by his pen-name of Jack London—was one of the first American writers to capitalize on “commercial” fiction (the way, I suppose, that Dickens had in Victorian England), publishing his stories and serializing novels in American magazines and then in book form, becoming perhaps the first American writer to become a true… Continue reading Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild”

Sinclair Lewis has declined somewhat in popularity and scholarly interest since his heyday in the 1920s, having generally been surpassed in literary reputation by his younger contemporaries like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and even Steinbeck. It is true that his dystopian 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here, depicting the election of a political demagogue to the U.S.… Continue reading Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”

Like most Americans, I would guess, I had never heard of British novelist Andrea Levy before, finding her novel Small Island on the BBC list of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” I decided to read it and put an end to my ignorance. Levy, born in London to parents who had been Jamaican immigrants, spent her career… Continue reading Andrea Levy’s “Small Island”

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is another of the “no-brainers” that appear on this list. It was immediately popular upon its first publication in 1960, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. It has remained popular for more than sixty years, and is one of the most widely taught novels in high schools and… Continue reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”