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Literature Criticism
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The parents of David Belasco came to San Francisco from England during the Gold Rush, and his early theatrical experience was gained entirely in the American and Canadian west. Humphrey Abraham Belasco was a harlequin...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Elizabeth Bishop's autobiographical "In the Village," a story which moves towards poetry and was originally included at the center of Questions of Travel, shows how the sounds and sights and textures of a Nova Scotia...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)In his treatise On Moral Fiction John Gardner is quite specific: a good book is "one that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it." His best works give testimony to this...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The contribution to American drama that inspired some critics to describe Bronson Howard as the "Dean of American Drama" derives largely from his ability to support himself as a dramatist, the first American to achieve...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Although often considered William Faulkner's best novel, Absalom, Absalom! is also his most involved. First of all, the narrative is related by mostly unreliable narrators years after the events described. The basic...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The last poem in Making Certain It Goes On, Richard Hugo's collected poems, ends with a speculation that the community, which has emerged as the subject of the poem, will be "going strong another hundred years." The...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Adrienne Rich's comments on her early poems offer the best insight into the shape of her career. In "When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision" (1971) she notices that "Beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)For more than a century after its publication in 1826, The Last of the Mohicans was by far the most widely read of any of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Nonetheless, while praised for its strong narrative interest,...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The literary sensation of 1896 was Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware, published in England as Illumination. One of the oddities in this book about a Methodist minister who strays from the fundamentals of his...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)One of that group of gifted Americans who came to early maturity in the 1890s only to have their lives end before the first decade of the new century was completed, Trumbull Stickney is memorable on several counts. As an...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The adolescent heroine of Sylvia Plath's only novel, The Bell Jar, has looked into her grave and seen a sobering and a maddening truth. Her suicidal hysteria, like that which finally took Plath herself, is the anguish of...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Isaac Bashevis Singer is an example of a strange phenomenon in American Jewish literature—a Yiddish writer who in his later years gained international fame through the English translation of his novels and short stories....
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)After William Vaughn Moody's early death, Edwin Arlington Robinson, his close friend and literary ally, wrote Harriet Moody, "Thank God he lived to do his work—or enough of it to place him among the immortals." While...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Paule Marshall has stated that her goals as a writer are "to create a body of work that will offer young black women ... a more truthful image of themselves in literature." Such a literature, Marshall commented further...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)James Russell Lowell's The Cathedral is a neglected major American poem. First printed in 1869 and given final revised form for an edition of Lowell's collected works in 1890, it is richly representative of Lowell as...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)A reluctant author, persuaded to write by his admirers, Booker T. Washington is not a natural stylist. His books reflect the main concern of his life in the outside world—namely, the "raising up" of his fellow black...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Galway Kinnell is now acknowledged as a major American poet, even though he may lack the popular name recognition of John Ashbery, James Merrill, his former Princeton classmate W.S. Merwin, or James Dickey, to whom he...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)In an essay for the collection The Writer on Her Work, Gail Godwin discusses both the matriarchal structure of her family as well as her mother's profession as a writer. Her mother was a newspaper journalist who wrote...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)S. Weir Mitchell enjoyed during his lifetime almost as wide an acclaim for his work as a physician as for his writing. The hand that produced hundreds of scientific medical treatises was no less prolific in this other...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Like Walt Whitman, his forebear, Allen Ginsberg is a prolific poet who writes too much: some of his work is, like Whitman's, unfocused, emotionally scattered, and prone to large abstractions unrelated to any concrete...