‘Reading and Literature’ Archives
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lady Chatterley’s Lover D.H. Lawrence began writing his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in Italy in October 1926. Focusing on the sexual relationship between an aristocratic woman and her husband’s gamekeeper, the novel presents a portrait of class conflict and the potential for social and individual renewal through sexual passion. [...]
Jane Austen
Jane Austen (1775-1817), Jane Austen was an English novelist. The daughter of a clergyman, Austen spent her short life in Hampshire, near the south coast of England, in a large lively family. She never married. Her novels describe the everyday life of people in the uppermiddle class circles she knew best. Money and social position were very [...]
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding (1707-54), Henry Fielding is an English novelist and playwright, who started his career with writing light comedies and farces. He formed a company of comedians and managed a small theatre in the Haymarket, London. Fielding's early satirical plays led to the introduction of censorship. His first novel Joseph Andrews was published [...]
The Red Pony
The Red Pony In his letters John Steinbeck writes of working on “a pony story” as early in his career as 1933. Two sections, “The Gift” and “The Great Mountains,” were published in North American Review in late 1933. It wasn’t until 1937 that “The Promise” appeared in Harper’s, while “The Leader of the People” first [...]
The Pickwick Papers
The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens, better known to the readers of his sketches as “Boz,” launched his career as a novelist with this episodic, comic adventure tale. The fame it brought him was hitherto unprecedented among popular novelists. Beyond its impact on Dickens’s career, Pickwick charted a new direction for the modern novel and [...]
The Quiet American
The Quiet American The Quiet American tells the story of a love triangle complicated by politics, as a cynical and burnt-out British journalist named Fowler attempts to maintain the status quo of his own comfortable existence, both politically and romantically, while serving in Saigon during the early 1950s. The action is set in French colonial [...]
Room at the Top
Room at the Top Room at the Top is the first novel by John Braine, one of a group of English writers known as the Angry Young Men who flourished in the 1950s. They expressed the discontent of a generation educated at redbrick universities but unable to enter the power circles of British politics, education, or literature because of entrenched [...]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man apparently began as a quasi-biographical memoir entitled Stephen Hero, written by James Joyce (1882–1941) between 1904 and 1906 but later dismissed by the novelist as a “schoolboy’s production.” Joyce left Ireland in 1904 to become a professional writer [...]
Robert Browning
Robert Browning (1812-89) Robert Browning is an English poet recognized as one of the best in his time. He is best remembered by his short lyrics which are in most cases simple and direct. The collection of his works Bells and Pomegranates, published in several parts between 1841 and 1846 , include such poems of lasting popularity as Pippa [...]
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice Even in her early writing, Jane Austen possessed an ironic humor and keenness for social observation that she refined in her later novels. One piece of juvenilia entitled “First Impressions” that she completed in 1797 would appear 16 years later as one of her most adored works, Pride and Prejudice. For some reason, [...]
