‘Reading and Literature’ Archives
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad finished Heart of Darkness 12 years after attempting to get command of a steamer to travel up the Congo River. Since childhood, he had been fascinated with maps and, in particular, with the mysterious white blankness that marked contemporary maps of interior Africa. He wanted to explore that “white heart” of [...]
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s William Nance has called Breakfast at Tiffany’s a work that marks a turning point in Capote’s fiction—from inwardlooking to topical, cool, and sophisticated. The narrator is a writer who has “begun to look around him at the world,” as Capote himself was doing. Indeed, the narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany’s [...]
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy worked on Anna Karenina for seven years, beginning in 1870. Although the opening chapters appeared in 1875—the novel was first published in installments—the last chapters didn’t reach print until 1877. He described the writing process as a kind of slow agony, frustrated by what he described as a “block” that [...]
Born with the Dead by Robert Silverberg
Born with the Dead by Robert Silverberg (1964) Science fiction is often associated with predictions about the future. These are often extrapolations of current trends, perhaps exaggerated slightly for satiric effect, but essentially attempt to describe what our future might be like. Prediction is often the author’s intent, at least in general [...]
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1965) Feminist issues were prominent and controversial in the science fiction community during the 1960s, just as they were in the larger world. There was perhaps particular rancor at the time because the genre had traditionally been slanted heavily toward adolescent males. Female characters were usually [...]
Sayonara
Sayonara Sayonara tells the story of the 28-year-old son of a fourstar general, Major Lloyd “Ace” Gruver, who begins a vacation in Japan after shooting down his seventh MIG in the Korean War. His father’s friend General Webster arranges for Ace to be near his daughter, Eileen, to facilitate a formal engagement. The career-minded, [...]
Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers Lawrence began Sons and Lovers in 1910 and in its early drafts the novel was titled Paul Morel. In early 1912 two freeing, formative events occurred in Lawrence’s life: when his mother died, Lawrence was not only filled with intense grief, but also liberated from her suffocating love; and then, fired by the faith that he was [...]
Death in Venice
Death in Venice The period of German Romanticism in the early 19th century produced a number of novels with artist protagonists, most notably Goethe’s two “Wilhelm Meister” works (1777–1829). As a lingering look back at that great era, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—written in 1911 after the success of Buddenbrooks (1901) and Tonio [...]
Little Women
Little Women Before Louisa May Alcott began writing Little Women in 1867, she had already written several stories and tackled a variety of literary genres, including sensational thrillers that appeared anonymously in weekly magazines. Then a publishing friend asked her to write a book for girls. Alcott agreed, although as she drafted the [...]
The Man in the Iron Mask
The Man in the Iron Mask During the 1840s Alexandre Dumas, in collaboration with Auguste Maquet, produced the series of “Musketeer” novels on which his fame rests. The Man in the Iron Mask is actually the last of a trilogy collectively titled Vicomte de Bragelonne, in itself a sequel to The Three Musketeers (1844) and Twenty Years After [...]
