Risky, Ambitious, and Brilliant is the way to describe this author's works and life. As a contemporary American novelist and short-story writer he uses his characters to express his life throughout the war. One of his most recent works is "In the Lake of the Woods". All of his writing...

Ernest Hemingway and his works are best described by Maxwell Geismar: "His work as a whole has been a sort of literary catalyst which has affected the entire course of American writing, and like a catalyst it has remained untouched by and superior to all the imitations of it" (Geismar).Ern...

Norman Mailer: Excesses all around One of the giants among mid-20th century American novelists, Norman Mailer has been described in a recent review of his latest book, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, as "Aquarius in winter," a not-so-gentle aging of his own 1960s' sobriquet, Aq...

Women writers in the late 19th century struggled with their voices, their characters, and their writing, just as all writers do. However, many also had to struggle to be taken seriously by predominately male publishers, and such was the case with Kate Chopin. Throughout her career, "Chop...

The Visible Man "Ralph Ellison" There have been many great writers who have had impact upon the world in which we live. Among the best of them, in my opinion, is Ralph Ellison. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, OK to L...

The Visible Man "Ralph Ellison" There have been many great writers who have had impact upon the world in which we live. Among the best of them, in my opinion, is Ralph Ellison. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, OK to L...

In the history of American literature there have been many great novels. To write a good novel there must be a great author who knows how to manipulate words and phrases to set a mood or feeling that lets the reader understand how the characters feel on a more personal level. These authors grab th...

Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" is considered to be by critics and readers alike one of the most significant novels of the African American literature. It is the creative result of one of the most acclaimed writers of the American cultural scene. The author draws her inspiration and...

"The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under...

In Prefaces to the Experience of Literature, Lionel Trilling explains the parallels in My Kinsman, Major Molineux. He believes that Hawthorne created this literary story to reflect that of his own life. He says that the character Robin has similarities and emotions that parallel that of Hawtho...

World War One. The first great tragedy of humanity. That is of course excluding love and life. Combine all three and you find one of the most masterfully written novels about life, love, and war that could only be written by Ernest Hemingway. Born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a sub...

War and Peace – one of the greatest novels in the world, written by giant of Russian literature count Leo Tolstoy. Leo Tolstoy, the son of Count Nicholas Tolstoy, was born in 1828 at the family estate Yasnaya Polyana about 100 miles south of Moscow. His greatest novel War and Peace was publish...

James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. His name at birth was James Arthur Jones. Baldwin never knew his father; his mother, who was originally from Maryland, was named Emma Burdis Jones. In 1927, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher and factory worker from New Orleans with a tw...

One of the greatest American writers, Willa Cather illustrated her intense love towards the vast countrysides of Nebraska in her novel My Antonia. Cather's childhood began with a life in Virginia, constantly surrounded by immigrant farm workers and the magnificently rich countryside (Willa, Cat...

"KINDRED" BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER Kindred was the very first book by Octavia Butler that I read. Unlike many science-fiction writers, she spends no time discussing the dynamics of time travel, which for a tale of this emotional magnitude, is a good thing. Kindred is hard book to read...

Hollywood takes novels and turns them into movies. Screen writers make a lot of changes due to the length of the motions picture and cost of production. The screenwriter of The Natural altered the characters personalities and appearances. Iris played an important character in both the nove...

James Fenimore Cooper--The Historian James Fenimore Cooper is, in his own right, a historian. Cooper is responsible for passing on views of early America that will never be available to us again. He helped many Americans view Indians and other ethnic groups as people and not "savages&...

Roddy Doyle is an amazing writer and is seen by his friends as a studious-looking and down-to-earth kind of guy. He is one of the new breed of young Irish artists who came of age in the 1960's and 1970's. Roddy Doyle was born in May of 1958 in the northern Dublin suburb of Kilbarrack, ...

Incorporating jazz music with the lives of African-Americans during the 1920's, Toni Morrison's Jazz is a wonderful story about slavery and spirituality. Jazz is an extension of Morrison's previous novel, Beloved, which was about the lives of African Americans during the late 1800&apo...

Hemingway's Iceberg In the works of Ernest Hemingway, prose style is as important to the work as the content. Hemingway's style includes the use of short, choppy sentences that are descriptive and have underlying meanings that are integral to the work. Hemingway uses this technique, th...

Stephen Crane, Born November 1st, 1871 into a middle class New Jersey family, he was the youngest of fourteen children (About Stephen Crane 1). Brought up to be a baseball player by his father, a Methodist minister, the Crane family re-located to upstate New York (About Stephen Crane 1). Stephen att...