Author: Jay Ruud

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”

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, Quenya 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”

“ 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”

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”

I had deliberately avoided this book for forty years. Sure, it was  a huge bestseller in 1979 and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1980, and yes, it was honored with a spot on Modern Library’s famous “100 Greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century” (not to mention ranking 57th on Radcliffe’s “100 Best… Continue reading William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice”