Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television […]
Category Archives: The American Novel
Book Review: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
The European conquest of the United States began in 1492, when Columbus dropped anchor off the coast of an island he named San Salvador. Historians often date the end of the conquest as December 29, […]
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
As a new nation, America lacks a national epic. We do not have an Iliad or a Gilgamesh Epic or a Beowulf to connect us to antiquity, to a time before written language, to the […]
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly as a name is ironic, because everywhere she goes, she goes loudly. She’s a seeker with only a vague idea of what she hopes to find. She’s also a runaway with a clear […]
Book Review: It by Stephen King
Halfway through Stephen King’s It, I realized that I find neither clowns nor balloons scary, and since they’re the principle devices King use to suggest the supernatural, that aspect of the novel failed to scare […]
The American Novel: Summer by Edith Wharton
I know the mountain. I lived there for two years. We called it Onion Creek, and it’s not much of a mountain, as mountain goes—more of a foothill—but it was an isolated, rural land populated […]
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
To show a man has nothing, give him everything men want. That formula, it seems, had been in my thoughts for as long as I’ve been writer, but I’m uncertain where it came from. It […]
The American Novel: The Natural by Bernard Malamud
During one of my writing classes at Eastern Washington University, John Keeble assigned us to read a novel each by three writers whom we had never read before. I do not remember the other two […]
Book Review: Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ
Chances are, if you live on Earth, particularly in the United States, when I say Ben-Hur, you think Charlton Heston. He starred in the 1959 movie that might’ve been the favorite of your grandmother. It […]
5 Compelling Opening Lines in Historical Fiction
At the risk of stubbing my toe against a cliché, let me tell you to never judge a book by its cover. I wish I could brag that I follow that edict to the word, […]