Author: Jay Ruud

Thomas Hardy, who always thought of himself first as a poet, was nevertheless the most important novelist of late Victorian England. Dickens had died in 1870. George Elliott, Hardy’s great precursor as a Victorian realist, had died in 1880, and it is Hardy whose novels shine brightest in the last two decades of Britain’s nineteenth… Continue reading Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”

The Maltese Falcon is a novel that is probably less well known than the film that was made from it—something, I suppose, like Gone With the Wind or The Godfather. In all these cases one could say that the book inspired the film, and the film still sends inspired viewers back to the book. The 1941 film noir classic (actually the third… Continue reading Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”

Graham Greene is still considered one of the major British authors of the twentieth century, and the sheer volume of his major novels seems likely to keep him there for the foreseeable future. He achieved both critical and popular success in his career, dividing his time between his serious novels and what he called his… Continue reading Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”

Robert Graves was a highly acclaimed English author generally associated with the earlier twentieth century (though in fact he lived to be 90 and died in 1985). He was a poet, a memoirist, a critic, a biographer, a classical scholar and translator, and a novelist, publishing nearly 150 significant texts in his lifetime. Among these… Continue reading Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius”