No less an author than T.S. Eliot, writing his introduction to an edition of Huckleberry Finn in 1950, said The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the only one of Mark Twain’s various books which can be called a masterpiece. I do not suggest that it is his only book of permanent interest; but it is the only one… Continue reading Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
Author: Jay Ruud
Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”
Anthony Trollope never met an 800-page novel he didn’t like. Like Dickens and other Victorian novelists, Trollope wrote many of his novels for periodical publication, and so they were first published one section at a time—and the more serial installments, the more the writer was paid. When those novels were published in book form, they… Continue reading Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”
John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”
Everybody knows the story—one might say the “legend”—of John Kennedy Toole and his magnum opus, A Confederacy of Dunces: How the young writer, despondent over the manuscript’s rejection by many publishers, took his own life by asphyxiation in his car in 1969 at the age of 31; how his mother Thelma found a carbon copy of… Continue reading John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”
Tolkien, whose day job was as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, dabbled in world-creation in his spare time from as early as 1917—beginning with his creation of two different elvish languages, Quenta and Sindarin, and the alphabets that go with them. He invented Middle Earth and made up the stories first in order… Continue reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”
Marjorie Saiser’s “Thanksgiving for Two”
Ishmael Reed’s “A Black Genius”
Kenyatta Rogers’ “Ars Poëtica”
William Makepeace Thackery’s “Vanity Fair”
“ In his own day, William Makepeace Thackery was considered the one great Victorian novelist who could be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens. Both had a string of highly admired novels and were well-known public figures on the lecture circuit, and each grudgingly admired the other’s work in print. So admired was Thackery… Continue reading William Makepeace Thackery’s “Vanity Fair”
Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”
I remember as a young child seeing the 1939 American animated film of Gulliver’s Travels at a local movie theater, I suppose as a 20th anniversary “re-release.” Though dealing only—and not very faithfully—with Gulliver’s first voyage, to Lilliput, it made a tolerably entertaining children’s story. Indeed, the book is often put forward as a children’s novel, presenting… Continue reading Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”
