Essays on American Literature

Man’s search for spiritual fulfillment in their lifelong escape from emotional isolation has been a common theme in literature of all cultures. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, a feminist American writer, this spiritual search is reflected in the lives of...

If it happens that your parents concern themselves so little with the workings of boys’ minds as to christen you Elwyn Brooks White, no doubt you decide as early as possible to identify yourself as E.B. White. If it also happens that you attend Cornell,...

In Wise Blood, Flannery O’Conner creates a spiritually empty world in which her characters attempt to live life without morals or religion. Hazel Motes, the protagonist, creates the Church without Christ to escape organized religion all together. In her novel, Flannery O’ Conner explores humanity’s...

The novel “Chasing Lincoln’s Killer”, by James Swanson, is about the plotting and killing of President Lincoln; the twelve-day manhunt of John Wilkes Booth. Booth is the murderer of The United States 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. It was just the tail end of The Civil...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. contends “race” is not itself a natural entity, rather a synthetic construct used to degrade certain peoples. He implores society to move forward free from the shackles of categorization, liberating itself from a false reality. While this commentary holds significant merit...

The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers discusses the life of a 12 year old girl, Frankie, who is transitioning from childhood to adulthood.­ Frankie feels disconnected from the rest of the world, having lost her mother when she was born, and has a...

In a certain Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in Stockholm in 1950, William Faulkner famously declines to accept the end of man. Elaborating, Faulkner goes on to promise that “man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” This faith, he insists, has its roots in...

Set during the throws of the Cold War offensive and the threat of the domino theory in Asia, Graham Greene’s fiction annexes his experiences as a war correspondent in Indochina during the years 1951 – 1954 into his works, impart reasoning and voice into a...

According to Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” storytellers are a dying breed, and the novel only contributes to the death of storytelling. If that is true, then Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a fan fueling flames on the somber coals of storytelling. Cather uses various instances...

The past permeates the lives of New York Society as portrayed by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence. Society appears to be an inherently conservative institution with extreme attention to ritual and tradition, evidenced by our introduction at the beginning of the novel to...

The Lambert family, the protagonists of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, view the world through a lens which attaches monetary value to people, objects, and actions. Money is a constant presence in their lives, whether there’s plenty or not enough. Alfred, Enid, Gary, Denise, Chip, and...

One of the main themes that is recurrent throughout Edith Wharton’s work The Age of Innocence is the ongoing struggle between the individual and society. This is an issue that Wharton was quite concerned with in the novel, and it is reflected in the characters...

Literature often presents itself in different themes and messages for audience members. These themes may be reoccurring or even opposing at times between different texts. The play The Good Person of Szchecwan by Bertolt Brecht and Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson...

Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick that tells the story of Arn, a young Cambodian boy who finds himself caught between two warring factions, changing his life forever. Arn is only eleven when the Khmer Rouge first came through his village of Battambang in 1975....

In the novel Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers, the story of young Frankie Addams is told as she begins to navigate the world, documenting from her perspective, her exposure to harsh reality of the world as she begins to develop into a young...

“It’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence?” (164). Questioning the concepts of true freedom and liberty, the overall theme presented throughout Edith Wharton’s masterful novel, The Age of Innocence, is the abstraction...

Authors often use religious allusions to further the significance of a novel. It is when the reader recognizes and understands these influences that the importance of the novel can be truly understood. In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck utilizes numerous Christian references to...

The characters within the story “A&P 1” by John Updike are unique in a way that cannot be compared to other characters. Each character has their own personal flaws, as well as personal beliefs and ultimately, each character has their own actions. It is important...

In a society, there are often multiple unspoken rules that members must adhere to in order to fit in. When an individual begins to deviate from these rules, it may be difficult to understand why. In the novel The Age of Innocence, the aristocratic Newland...