Author: Jay Ruud

The titanic figure of William Faulkner looms above American modernism like his contemporary Babe Ruth towered over the ballplayers of his era. There is no question that Faulkner must appear on any list of the best books in English, even though, truth be told, it wasn’t until his Nobel Prize in 1949 that he began… Continue reading William Faulkner’s “Light in August”

One of the most important writers of what’s generally considered the “second wave” of the Native American Renaissance, Louise Erdrich has been one of my favorite writers for nearly forty years. Her first novel, Love Medicine, was an instant classic, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984—the only first novel ever to win that award.… Continue reading Louise Erdrich’s “The Night Watchman”

One of the most significant novels of the 20th century, among the first widely read novels by a Black American author, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, seemed too important a book not to consider for my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.” The book has an impressive pedigree: It won the National… Continue reading Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”

It seems that the reputation of Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (since what Victorian publisher would accept a novel by someone with a woman’s name?), just keeps growing stronger and stronger as time goes by. Already a major novelist in her own time, with acclaimed novels like Silas Marner (1861), Daniel Deronda (1876), Adam Bede (1859), and The Mill on the Floss (1860),… Continue reading George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”