Author: Jay Ruud

Aldous Huxley came from a privileged background: he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, famous Victorian biologist and agnostic spokesman (known as “Darwin’s bulldog”), and on his mother’s side was the great nephew of the famous Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, and with that pedigree graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. By 1932 he… Continue reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

Ernest Hemingway was the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. I’m sure some people might beg to differ, but I don’t think their objections would be completely serious. Sure he’s fallen somewhat out of fashion due to his machismo chest-beating and well-publicized misogyny. For which defects in his character a lot of people,… Continue reading Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”

I’ve always said, and every right-thinking person should agree, that Catch-22 is the greatest American novel of the post-war period (that’s World War II if you’re counting), and the greatest of all post-modern novels. Recent decades have shown that a significant number of readers and critics agree with me, at least with assigning a classic status to… Continue reading Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”

To talk about Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter immediately after considering Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is kind of like déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would have put it. In both texts, a young and sympathetic woman is shamed by society because of an extramarital affair that winds up producing a child. Both novels present the helpless plight of… Continue reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”