"The St. Botolphs of Cheever's early stories and the upscale, Westchester-like towns - Shady Hill, Proxmire Manor, and Bullet Park - of his later work find their complex companions in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and John Updike's Rabbit's world. Cheever laid out the parameters of this creative world in his very first published story, "Expelled," which appeared in the New Republic in 1930 when Cheever was only 18. The young protagonist of this autobiographical story would be the first of many Cheever heroes to fall from what Meanor describes as "a condition of Edenic happiness and childlike innocence into the chaos and pain of adult knowledge." Moses Wapshot of Cheever's first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1958), Neddy Merrill of the critically acclaimed short story "The Swimmer" (1964), and even Zeke Farragut of Cheever's novel of redemption, Falconer (1977), struggle to reclaim some remnant of an earlier, lost happiness." "Loneliness, fear of aging, family disintegration, alcoholic obsessiveness, sexual desperation, the threat of financial ruin, and a reliance on illusion form the dark core of Cheever's work, creative transformations of some of the themes that dominated his life. Throughout this volume Meanor distinguishes the autobiographical strains in the fiction by drawing from Cheever's documents of his struggles - especially with alcoholism and bisexuality - in The Letters of John Cheever (1988) and The Journals of John Cheever (1991)." "Meanor fleshes out both biblical and mythological motifs in the stories and the novels; his study is perhaps the first to treat the possible symbolic interpretations of names of characters and places so thoroughly. Burdened by a biblical sense of shame and guilt, Cheever's characters find fleeting, life-giving moments of psychological release "in the celebratory paganism of Greek and Roman myth," Meanor writes, in love, passion, the pleasures of the body."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Critics examine the Cheever's short stories "The Country Husband," "Goodbye, My Brother," and "The Five-Forty-Eight."

A Study Guide for John Cheever's "Swimmer," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

In this revised edition of the 1967 Twayne volume, Sanders sees The Call (1985) as the culmination of Hersey's career, since it draws on autobiographical themes and marks a standard against which his earlier work in fiction and journalism should be measured. Discussing Hersey's early career as a correspondent as well as his major volumes of fiction and nonfiction in separate chapters, Sanders makes a persuasive case for Hersey as an important figure among writers who have experimented with journalism and the novel. He includes a chronology, a comprehensive bibliography of Hersey's works and a succinct, annotated bibliography of writing about Hersey. ISBN 0-8057-7610-9: $20.95.

A completely updated new edition of David Lowenthal's classic account of how we reshape the past to serve present needs.

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of John Updike.

The first book-length analysis of the controversial Pan-Hispanic short story anthology “McOndo” (1996) draws on World Literature scholarship to take a step toward reclaiming the anthology’s artistic intentions and considering its generation-defining legacy in Latin American literary history.

This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

A Who's Who of Western culture, from Woody Allen to Emile Zola... Containing four hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. Next to Karl Marx is Bob Marley, with John Ruskin is Salman Rushdie, alongside Darwin is Luigi Dallapiccola, Deng Xiaoping rubs shoulders with Jacques Derrida as do Julia Kristeva and Kropotkin. With its global reach, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing as well as an index of names and key terms.

Praise for the print edition:" ... no other reference work on American fiction brings together such an array of authors and texts as this.