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”
Author: Jay Ruud
Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”
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”
John Crowe Ransom’s “Piazza Piece”
Amy Lowell’s “Venus Transiens”
John Betjeman’s “In Westminster Abbey”
Matthew Johnson’s “The Greatest Catch by Willie Mays”
D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”
D.H. Lawrence has always been a controversial figure in English letters. Though some of his novels (particularly The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Sons and Lovers) had been well received, his unorthodox lifestyle and the frank treatment of sex, especially in his later novels, alienated many readers and critics, so by the time of his death in 1930,… Continue reading D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”
Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead”
When, at the age of 15, I first read David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ classic novel of the protagonist’s struggle to rise above child poverty in a society seemingly structured to keep him poor, it was the first book that made me tear up at the end, that glorious end with the angelic Agnes ever “pointing upward.” I… Continue reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead”
Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
Before he became a counter-culture icon of the 60s as head of the “Merry Pranksters,” mixing LSD consumption and multi-media performances and launching the Grateful Dead into stardom, as documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey was a lowly orderly working the night shift at a mental health facility in Menlo Park,… Continue reading Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
