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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”

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”

While Nobel laureate William Golding wrote several other novels in his life, including the Booker-Prize winning novel Rites of Passage in 1980, it is surely on the strength of his 1954 debut novel Lord of the Flies that his reputation chiefly rests. Although reviews were generally positive when the novel came out, it struggled to sell out its original… Continue reading William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”

Jane Gardam, the contemporary British novelist now in her 96th year, is quite highly regarded in her home country (she is OBE after all) but is little known outside the United Kingdom, and is virtually unknown in the U.S. Yet she is the winner of several awards and has been a prolific author of both children’s… Continue reading Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth”

The work that set the pattern for all subsequent multi-generational family sagas in English, John  Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, comprising three novels and two short interludes, covers a period from the late Victorian to the late Edwardian age in Britain, beginning in 1886 and ending in 1920 when the last surviving member of the older generation has… Continue reading John Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga”