Category: Review

Like a lot of people, my concept of Thomas More, or I suppose I should say “Saint Thomas More,” has been shaped by two major texts. The first, his famous literary text Utopia, reveals him to be a brilliant Renaissance thinker, a rational humanist philosopher whose thought, particularly as regards political philosophy, made him admired throughout… Continue reading Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”

John Griffith Chaney—generally known by his pen-name of Jack London—was one of the first American writers to capitalize on “commercial” fiction (the way, I suppose, that Dickens had in Victorian England), publishing his stories and serializing novels in American magazines and then in book form, becoming perhaps the first American writer to become a true… Continue reading Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild”

Sinclair Lewis has declined somewhat in popularity and scholarly interest since his heyday in the 1920s, having generally been surpassed in literary reputation by his younger contemporaries like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and even Steinbeck. It is true that his dystopian 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here, depicting the election of a political demagogue to the U.S.… Continue reading Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”

Like most Americans, I would guess, I had never heard of British novelist Andrea Levy before, finding her novel Small Island on the BBC list of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” I decided to read it and put an end to my ignorance. Levy, born in London to parents who had been Jamaican immigrants, spent her career… Continue reading Andrea Levy’s “Small Island”

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is another of the “no-brainers” that appear on this list. It was immediately popular upon its first publication in 1960, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. It has remained popular for more than sixty years, and is one of the most widely taught novels in high schools and… Continue reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”

D.H. Lawrence has always been a controversial figure in English letters. Though some of his novels (particularly The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Sons and Lovers) had been well received, his unorthodox lifestyle and the frank treatment of sex, especially in his later novels, alienated many readers and critics, so by the time of his death in 1930,… Continue reading D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”

When, at the age of 15, I first read David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ classic novel of the protagonist’s struggle to rise above child poverty in a society seemingly structured to keep him poor, it was the first book that made me tear up at the end, that glorious end with the angelic Agnes ever “pointing upward.” I… Continue reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead”

Before he became a counter-culture icon of the 60s as head of the “Merry Pranksters,” mixing LSD consumption and multi-media performances and launching the Grateful Dead into stardom, as documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey was a lowly orderly working the night shift at a mental health facility in Menlo Park,… Continue reading Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

There is no question that James Joyce is the most significant and influential English language writer of the twentieth century. As the preeminent stylist in English, with the uncanny ability to adopt style to situation, the premiere example of the use of “stream of consciousness,” the creator of a new kind of short story that… Continue reading James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

When I was in graduate school, some time back in the Jurassic period, I was assigned Henry James’ The Ambassadors to read for a seminar in literary theory. I remember slashing my way through the morass of James’ language like Henry Morton Stanley macheting his way through the thickest jungles in his search for Dr. Livingstone, he… Continue reading Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”