Author: Jay Ruud

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”

The Scarlet Letter has been a staple of high school English classes since the late nineteenth century. It was the sixth most frequently taught book in the last decades of the twentieth century, and even though in the twenty-first century the traditional literary canon has been largely replaced by more contemporary works by writers of varied… Continue reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”

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”