The Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature

2012-12-19T00:58:00.001-08:00

· Taxonomy · Classification · Persuasive Information Arrangement ·

Katherine Bertolucci is the leading information management consultant specializing in persuasive arrangement.

Is your organized information sending a winning message?

Do your taxonomies and classifications help users find data?

Or are they fighting with disorganized and poorly labeled lists?

Like all communication, organized information persuades and dissuades with subtle clues. Unintentional clues may have negative effects on your project.

Is your structured information working for you or against you?

One of the first to develop taxonomies for non-biologic information, Katherine Bertolucci began building new classifications immediately after graduating from library school at the University of Chicago, a dramatic departure from traditional librarianship.

That began a career of taxonomy and classification constructions for a multitude of subjects and data types.

Based in Phoenix, Katherine works on large and small projects, with such well known clients as Lowe’s Home Improvement Centers, Procter & Gamble, and Snoopy.

Services include new taxonomies and classifications, arrangement advice, and critiques of existing organizational structures.

Katherine’s lengthy experience in the design and observation of organized information will help you build persuasive arrangements for your users.

Photo Credit: Carson Smith

2012-12-19T00:49:00.000-08:00

Puzzle in Hollywood: Discovering Nathanael West’s Hidden Structure

By Katherine Bertolucci

George Dantzig solved unsolvable math problems because he assumed they had solutions. In my case, I discovered both the problem and the solution when I was assigned an oral presentation on the structure of The Day of the Locust during a college course on novels taught by a Nathanael West scholar.

The presumed solution to the problem of structure in West’s classic 1939 Hollywood novel had already been stated in class. There’s a riot in the first chapter and also in the final Chapter 27. The middle Chapter 14 was published as a short story before West wrote the novel. My Dantzig-like assumption was that I had to find something else to say about structure to get a good grade.
On the evening that I worked on the assignment, I immersed myself in the novel for hours before I saw the first clue. At one point in West’s story, there is a major plot event similar to another event later in the novel. I realized that the chapters for these two events are equidistant from the central Chapter 14, just like the two riots. When I looked at the pairs of chapters, 2 and 26, 3 and 25, 4 and 24, etc., I discovered that each pair is a match. The first half of the novel is reflected in the mirror of the second half. I had searched for hours, but once I saw the first clue, it took only minutes to figure out the entire novel. Like a wooden Chinese puzzle, the pieces just fell into place.
I gave my presentation and I was certainly expecting some nice compliments, but I had not even finished the first sentence when the instructor leaned forward in shock. With just as much shock, I realized this West scholar had not seen the puzzle. I spent the rest of the presentation aggressively defending my thesis.
That semester I was taking an overload, so after this incident I just went on to the next novel. Later when I was a library school student at the University of Chicago, there was some national news about professors taking credit for the work of their grad students. I remembered that I had handed my college instructor a nice fat journal article. Although I didn’t look into it, the story gave me some standing with my fellow Chicago students.
After graduation, my career immediately veered from traditional librarianship. I built a new classification system with my first professional position and continued in that direction, building new classifications for a multitude of clients, subjects and materials. My specialty now is the design of taxonomies and other structures for information presentation. I’m good at this because I have a natural ability to see patterns, which is why I recognized the puzzle in The Day of the Locust.
A few years ago I attended a professional meeting in New Orleans. Pam Rollo, now the President of the Special Libraries Association, arranged a dinner at one of the city’s finest restaurants. It is an evening that I will cherish for many reasons. Pam and I were talking about my unusual career path when I mentioned the Nathanael West story as an early indication of my skills. I said that if my teacher, a West scholar, hadn’t seen the puzzle, then nobody had seen it.
It was then I understood my obligation to Nathanael West and decided to pursue the discovery. I studied, and continue to study, the major criticism on The Day of the Locust. As far as the literary community is concerned, the structure of the novel consists of two riots and a short story in the middle. IsisInBlog is the first publication of the puzzle. Its details will be explored in future postings when I reveal Nathanael West’s elegant mirrored chapters.

2012-06-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

Love and Fatigue in America

Roger King

Soon after the narrator of this moving autobiographical novel, a teacher from England, arrives in Spokane, he is stricken by an illness that attacks his mind and body in equal measure. He is largely confined to beds and couches, and the smallest tasks become monumental efforts. It turns out that he has chronic fatigue syndrome. Friends and colleagues react with coldness and skepticism. Sympathy comes mainly from “women with deep, secret hurts.” As the disease drives the narrator from city to city, woman to woman, and doctor to doctor, it brings into relief many of America’s follies and excesses, most notably our healthcare system, which King portrays as antiquated, bureaucratic, and inhumane. After more than fifteen years, American brings the narrator “no aspiration realized, nor a largeness of life fitting to its open spaces, but the nascent ability to be satisfied with less.

—THE NEW YORKER

"Anonymous," The Film

2011-11-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

Movie review: 'Anonymous'

The film, with Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere, the film's purported bard behind Shakespeare, is no classic, but it's fun.

Joely Richardson and Jamie Campbell Bower in "Anonymous." (Reiner Bajo / Columbia TriStar)

October 28, 2011|By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

"Anonymous" — starring a sizable swath of Britain's resident acting class — is an ambitiously biting (gnawing?) literary whodunit turning on the Shakespeare question. As in, who really wrote all those seminal plays and sonnets, a long-running scholarly debate that (unlike the actual author) apparently will never die.
That might sound like costume drama taken to deadly boring academic extremes. But surprisingly, in director Roland Emmerich's usually effects-heavy hands ("Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow" and oh so many more), we have something closer to a fanciful commedia dell'arte. It's Shakespeare as B-movie, if you will, or to borrow from the bard, a boffo blast, which I'm pretty sure is from either "King Lear" or "Hamlet."

There are palace intrigues, beddings and beheadings, and lots of well-staged theater. Rhys Ifans turns out to be the best surprise of all — excellent as the eminence of pathos, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who (in this telling) wielded "the" mighty pen and had the ink-stained hands to prove it. Screenwriter John Orloff ("A Mighty Heart") doesn't do half bad himself.

"William Shakespeare" — whoever he was — I think would probably be at least a little amused by "Anonymous." For amusing it is — along with bawdy, brazen, politically outrageous, plausible enough and occasionally graced with something close to Shakespearean cleverness in an absurdist sort of way.
To set things up, the film opens as if we're watching a current production in London's West End, an actor on stage in a single spotlight, setting up the Shakespeare mythology. It quickly dissolves into Shakespeare's time, richly rendered from the pomp and ceremony of the royal court to the mud and muck of 16th century London.
As imagined in "Anonymous," William Shakespeare was an illiterate actor, barely able to write his name, much less a sonnet, and an opportunist with an outsized ego, all of which actor Rafe Spall ("Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz") handles nicely. The real playwright and poet was Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who for complicated reasons needs a front man for his work. De Vere is played with great aplomb by Ifans, unrecognizable from his naked "Notting Hill" days, in fact unrecognizable from anything he's ever done. Let us just point out that he does Elizabethan aristocracy very well indeed.
A noted writing contemporary of Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto, excellent in his creative frustration), is the man De Vere ultimately entrusts with his plays and with carrying out what really is — if it is — one of the greatest ruses ever. For all the royal betrayals, one of the rather delicious subtexts is that fights between writers for literary supremacy are just as deadly as struggles for the crown.
In a neat bit of symmetry, Vanessa Redgrave plays Queen Elizabeth I in her waning days, and Redgrave's daughter Joely Richardson plays the monarch in her lusty younger years — in this telling, "the Virgin Queen" is so in name only. The queen's confidant, William Cecil (David Thewlis), and later his nefarious hunchback son Robert (Edward Hogg) are De Vere's nemeses, both bristling with disdain for the Lord Oxford's various obsessions.
There are many more earls and lads and ladies in waiting in this sprawling cast. There is a crown in the offing for someone if they can just keep their heads about them. And overriding it all is the anonymous bard — writing what he sees, writing what he fears and putting it out there as fast as he can to inflame and inform the masses. If the filmmakers have done nothing else, they have turned "the pen is mightier than the sword" from mere axiom into action hero.

One of the film's great pleasures is the way in which Orloff uses fragments of Shakespeare's plays to fit the moment and mood of the time — it's all ripped-from-the-headlines stuff. This is where Emmerich's special-effects history pays off smartly too. London — from its world of theater to its class divides — comes to life exquisitely on screen (so hats off to the production/costume crews).

Beyond the filmmakers' attention to detail, it's interesting to watch snippets of the plays — so literate and lofty and set inside a world theoretically known only to members of the royal court (thus how could Shakespeare have written Shakespeare?) — completely understood and embraced by those unwashed masses. Which raises the question….
Because the film keeps picking up threads of so many of its characters from childhood, adulthood and later years; because the palace intrigues are so complex; and because, let's face it, this is not Shakespeare, "Anonymous" occasionally comes apart at the seams. But amusing and diverting it is, and on any given day, amusing and diverting is enough.
betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

A Jungian Interpretation of "The Emperor Jones"

2011-10-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

Editor: Frederick Wilkins
Suffolk University, Boston

Vol. IV, Nos. 1-2
May-September, 1980

(IN THIS ISSUE)

THE EMPEROR JONES: A JUNGIAN VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF FEAR IN THE BLACK RACE

While few of Eugene O'Neill's plays are staged as effectively as The Emperor Jones, none, however, receive interpretation as tentative and as indecisive. Travis Bogard's comment--that "What the action of Brutus Jones means, set apart from its stereotypical embellishments, is not entirely obvious"¹-- is representative of the dilemma that the play presents to critical judgment. One may account for the dilemma by recognizing that O'Neill seldom exploited stage business so fully, allowing it such primary importance in carrying the play's meaning. Perhaps because this drama's meaning is lodged so completely within the stage setting and stage sounds, interpretations of it appear to be incomplete.

Engel maintains that "The Emperor Jones ... is a simple representation of psychological naturalism for its own sake, ingeniously contrived to a point where one must recognize the performance as a tour de force."² John Henry Raleigh's excellent work hardly even treats the play, giving most of its attention to the misfortunes of Charles S. Gilpin, the creator of the role of Brutus Jones. Carpenter acknowledges Jung's Collective Unconscious as a paradigm for the play's action, but he avoids that perspective when he holds that Jones's chief error is his denial of Romantic Idealism as an operating base for human conduct.³ Falk, on the other hand, stresses Jung's Collective Unconscious as a perspective within which to approach the play, but, while seeing more than mere naturalism at work, confuses the meaning of the crocodile by confining it to being an incarnation of Jones's evil, emerging as an avenging God.⁴

There are several matters missing from this approach. For one, the crocodile is not viewed, in Falk's analysis, with reference to the tribe itself, nor is it readily understood as an incarnation of the tribe's evil made over in the form of an avenging God. Further, what is really lacking is a justification of the tribe's ancestral past being meaningful to Jones's experience as an individual at his own (much later) point in time. The struggle, as well as the fate, of the tribe is not seen as being continued and paralleled in the struggle of Jones. Primarily, the Crocodile God is not seen as that object of ideal belonging brought to sinister dimensions by superstitious, primitive religious ritual.

Common to most criticism is the failure to examine the palpable fear generated within Jones in the light of a more extensive application of Jung's Collective Unconscious. No one discounts the issue of fear in the play; in fact, fear, all too intensely present, actually determines the nature of stage setting and sound. Yet an understanding of the genesis of this fright might increase if one persisted in an analysis that allowed its perspective to be set for it by The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Most accounts do not utilize Jung's views to explain the nature of fear in both the personal and racial pasts of Jones. Little effort has been made to show Jones's quest as only a slight permutation of the ancestral tribe's quest--both being paradigms of the quests of all men. Yet the collective unconscious does supply a framework that allows the two different pasts to be interpreted in the light of a common referent. Certainly, it allows fear to be seen more clearly as deriving from one, single root condition.

In brief, Jung's observations stress the existence of a collective unconscious, an instinctual life below the ready access of consciousness, which all men share in common. Instincts of a sublunary nature might be the communally-shared fear of night, or the need for both a feminine and masculine influence in one's life in order to attain psychic wholeness. Instincts of a spiritual nature, however, come closer to O'Neill's purposes: such instincts as the need for a parentage of divine proportions, such as that embodied in the divine syzygies, or the need for a spiritual as well as a physical birth, or the need for a God.

These unconscious instincts, present in all men, seek successful expression at the conscious level. When allowed to find a continuous path up from unconscious life into conscious expression, the collective unconscious successfully releases an instinctual energy which becomes a source of exhilaration, strength, and personal unity--all properties of the Romantic unity of being after which an early O'Neill protagonist chased. Since it is constituted of energy, the instinctual life, once emerging complete and fulfilled, affords that inner harmony that allows for non-selfconsciousness, another important property of O'Neill's Romantic ideal. Naturally, the archetypal instincts, satisfied, do not provide the material for drama; certainly not for O'Neill's tragedies, centered as they are in struggle and quest. Thus, the successful expression of the archetypal instincts, for dramatic purposes, has to be aborted in order to set the terms for an O'Neillian tragic struggle.

With the Death of God, Jung affirms the disconnection of the archetypal instincts from their easy expression in conscious life. The ready outlets that religion supplied for the release of the collective unconscious instincts are no longer available. Jung's principal point--at least for consideration of The Emperor Jones--is the observation that the instinctual energies, robbed of ready release, do not dry up and dissipate; instead, they continue to exist in a repressed state and are forced to turn inward upon man, producing subsequent sieges of anxiety, fear, and projection. In Jung's words, "The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it."⁵ The often quoted letter of O'Neill's to George Jean Nathan reveals his sensitivity to Jung's stress on the survival of such instincts independent of a denied religious life. "The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it--the death of the Old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in."⁶

The Emperor Jones is about both the black man's and the white man's attempts to satisfy the surviving religious instinct. The black man fails to satisfy his need to quell fear due to the religious ritual being superstitious in nature. And the white man, despite the fact that his conscious mind ignores the archetypal need for God, still tries, and fails, to conquer the fear of spiritual displacement because the modern surrogate for God, Money, is equally superstitious in nature.

The Emperor Jones, therefore, is really O'Neill's demonstration of how the black race has failed to achieve a continuity between unconscious, archetypal instincts and the conscious expression of those instincts. The terror of not belonging to self and of not belonging in a unity with all being borders on the either/or terrors of Puritan election. For this reason, the black man is an inheritor of fear, of a terror that is ongoing from his racial past even into his American present. But the fear urges, in fact demands, that he make his attempts at belonging. Unfortunately for Jones, his attempts to satisfy the archetypal instincts must be conducted in a modern setting whose only equivalent for the black man's Crocodile God is now Money. Even as the tribe sought to become one with the ultimate power that sinewed the universe, so Jones attempts to anneal himself to that single power that makes all life move the way it does. Money, in the modern setting, is the ultimate power that sinews the earth; its possession makes one master of life and, therefore, master over fear.

While it may be reversing the order of the play, it is probably easier to reveal its Jungian parallels by dealing with the earliest point in historical time, Scene Seven, the racial scapegoat sacrifice. The sacrifice exists as a ritual intended by the primitive blacks to fulfill primitive religious aspirations. So that the will of that power which pervades existence be made to cohere with the tribe's will for itself, the human sacrifice is offered to a specific agent who either symbolizes or possesses divine power. Jones is offered to the crocodile so that the tribe may be reconciled with a spiritual father and a God. Typical of a ritual offering, the wished-for result is to harmonize the deity's will with man's will so that the divine power now accords with human needs. Divine power, then, is to inhere within the tribe and its individual members. To exist within power and yet have that power operate as pure benefice is the ritual's aim. This, in effect, is the tribe expressing its archetypal instinct to belong. Succeeding in this, the tribe would possess its own soul by identifying its aims and intentions with a transcendent object. An imperturbable spiritual power existing as a dimension of its inner life would make for the tribe's controlling experience.

At this point, O'Neill's accent on superstition can be seen in its full importance. Superstition pervades the play. It opens with Jones's position, established by superstition, being threatened by the tribe's superstition. The whole movement of the play is within the framing device of one superstition replacing another, whether it be Lem's replacing Jones's or the white man's replacing the black man's. In his ancient, tribal superstition, the black man does not secure a belonging whereby he would be master of his own psychic and spiritual state. The tribe's superstition subordinates man to nature, and, rather than achieving the ideal independence of soul so necessary to O'Neill's characters, the black man becomes dependent upon the vagaries of nature. Weather changes, crop failures, the death of offspring: these force a reconsideration of the tribe's successfully belonging to God, to the cosmos, and to itself. The continuum between unconscious instincts and conscious expression of those instincts, though satisfied by the tribe's ritual, is resolved erratically. Fear is never eliminated.

At this point in historical time, the black race is absorbed into white civilization, which has its own formula to appease the archetypal instincts. The aggressive materialism reflected in slave trading gives witness to the type of power the white man seeks in order to quell fear. Thus the black man, his archetypal instincts still alive in the modern setting, is made subject, in that setting, to others who believe they have the answers to belonging. The black man's Behind Life force, aggravated and internalized, becomes enamoured of a substitute deity offering a newer version of connection between the unconscious instincts and their conscious evocation. To his physical slavery is added the slavery to the proposition that the basic issues of life are settled by a materialist solution. The belief that they can possess their own souls through the possession of things outside of it is, for O'Neill, the white men's answer to the problem of belonging. The black man, in his spiritually weakened state, is made the victim of those who, under the illusion of satisfying their instinctual life, seek physical power and depend on it to sustain their illusion.

Jones sees the white world as pursuing an aim common to the black race--a participation in power and a harmony with the laws of the universe--that the white man seeks in his materialist belonging. But an essential distinction lies in the fact that, while the black man sought an internal power, a spiritual power, the white man understands his power in a purely material, external, physical sense. For the whites, then, worldly goods and their benefits become the surrogate objects of belonging through which spiritual satiety is, presumably, made possible.

Of course, Jung's position denies that these objects will ever serve satisfactorily as substitutes for the real religious objects that harmonize unconscious life with conscious life. Wealth can only be an illusory solution to satisfying the archetypal instincts. But for a time, perhaps for two hundred years or more, the capitalist appeal mesmerizes with its power and its prospect of self-sufficency. This explains the setting bathed in white and in light in the opening scene. As Michael Hinden notes, "The entire setting is a projected wish fulfillment of Jones's power craving self."⁷ Coupled with Jones's resplendent, regal attire, summoning the images of power, are the whiteness and light that illustrate the presumed clarity of purpose and the personal destiny possessed by Jones in his dedication to the white materialist ideal. The subsequent forest gloom, however, announces the tentative and illusory nature of this new, materialist resolution of the unconscious life-conscious life continuum. Jones's fulfillment of the archetypal instincts is as illusory as the ancient tribe's failed attempt.

Immediately Jones's material mastery of life is challenged: the formless fears emerge. And his fears intensify as his sense of spiritual direction, founded on a false God, diminishes. As the accouterments of power are stripped away, Jones's near-naked self is vivid testimonial to the need to belong to something within self rather than to something external to self. Jones moves from the light of "salvation" to the terror and darkness of "damnation." Having no satisfying state of spiritual belonging surviving from his roots in his ancestral past, Jones has pursued an equally bankrupt belonging by imitating the white man's erroneous solution to the unconscious archetypal instincts' expression. That fear is so quickly and so completely precipitated in Jones is a full representation of the Jungian picture of fear when man's unconscious instincts are internalized and given no conscious objectification.

This not-belonging-to-self, made inevitable by not belonging to the appropriate external, eternal object, is what the fear motif of The Emperor Jones is all about. With no true source of spirituality from his past to satisfy belonging, and with nothing to satisfy spiritual needs in his present but an impotent materialism, Jones is a representative of many black men--disenfranchised from purposeful life throughout their histories. The power that true belonging to a divinity predicates becomes, in terms of the white man's materialist belonging, a naked, raw, unmediated physical power symbolized by slave ships, slave sales, chain gangs, and weapons--all vestiges of criminal purpose.

Obviously, power, in the white man's sense, does not derive' from any internal state of being. Exterior condition is the exclusive preoccupation of white civilization. Since the white world disallows any alternative deity to Money, Jones has no choice but to accept the general precepts of white civilization and to define in his own person their failed content. Even in his flight, he fails to rely on inner strength to cope with fear, and, in exhausting white civilization's trusted forms of power, represented by the gun and the bullets, he prompts the magnification of fear in himself, a fear finally uncontrollable due to the now-absolute disconnection of unconscious instincts from satisfying implementation at the conscious level. In this absolute failure, Jones is merely describing the absolute failure of any surrogate God to supply secular resolution to the archetypal instincts of the collective unconscious.

In the play's entirety, O'Neill does not represent any time when such successful concord was extant. He closes the play still asserting that the black man's struggle, generally, has been far more close to the truth of the human condition than the white man's struggle has been. Even if superstitious, the black race's quest, at least, seeks to identify with a transcendent power. Lem's superstition renders Smithers' perception pale.

--Patrick J. Nolan

¹ Travis Bogard, Contour in Time (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press, 1972), p. 140.

² Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1953), p. 49.

³ Frederic I. Carpenter, Eugene O'Neill (N.Y.: Twayne, 1964), p. 94.

⁴ Doris Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U. Press, 1958), p. 69.

⁵ C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press, 1968), p. 63.

⁶ George Jean Nathan, quoted by Joseph Wood Krutch in the "Introduction" to Eugene O'Neill's Nine Plays (N.Y.: Modern Library, 1941), p. xvii.

⁷ Michael Hinden, "The Emperor Jones: O'Neill, Neitzsche, and the American Past," The Eugene O'Neill Newsletter (Jan., 1980), p. 4.

(IN THIS ISSUE)

Eugene O'Neill

2011-10-30T03:46:00.000-07:00

Eugene O'Neill

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eugene O'Neill
Portrait of O'Neill by Alice Boughton
Born	Eugene Gladstone O'Neill October 16, 1888(1888-10-16) New York City, US
Died	November 27, 1953(1953-11-27) (aged 65)Boston, Massachusetts, US
Occupation	Playwright
Nationality	United States
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature (1936)Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1920, 1922, 1928, 1957)
Spouse(s)	Kathleen Jenkins (1909–1912) Agnes Boulton (1918–1929) Carlotta Monterey (1929–1953)

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only one well-known comedy (Ah, Wilderness!).^[1]^[2] Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Early years

O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in Longacre Square (now Times Square), in the Barrett Hotel. The site is now a Starbucks (1500 Broadway, Northeast corner of 43rd & Broadway); a commemorative plaque is posted on the outside wall with the inscription: "Eugene O'Neill, October 16, 1888 ~ November 27, 1953 America's greatest playwright was born on this site then called Barrett Hotel, Presented by Circle in the Square."^[3]
He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan. Because of his father's profession, O'Neill was sent to a Catholic boarding school where he found his only solace in books. O'Neill spent his summers in New London, Connecticut. After being suspended from Princeton University, he spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression and alcoholism. O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie (who drank himself to death at the age of 45) died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater. Despite his depression he had a deep love for the sea, and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set onboard ships like the ones that he worked on.

Birthplace plaque in Times Square, NYC.
Portrait of O'Neill as a child, c. 1893.
Statue of a young Eugene O'Neill on the waterfront.

Career

O'Neill's first play, Bound East for Cardiff, premiered at this theatre on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays (the events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night). O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting.
During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party founder John Reed. O'Neill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds about the life of John Reed.
His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. O'Neill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays." Susan Glaspell describes what was probably the first ever reading of Bound East for Cardiff which took place in the living room of Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf (pictured) that was used by the Players for their theater. Glaspell writes in The Road to the Temple, "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished."^[4] The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and then moved to Broadway.
O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S. occupation of Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's presidential election.^[5] His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!,^[2]^[6] a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. After a ten-year pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and did not gain recognition as being among his best works until decades later.
He was also part of the modern movement to revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek theatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays, such as The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed.^[7]
O'Neill was very interested in the Faust theme, especially in the 1920s.^[8]

Family life

O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins from October 2, 1909 to 1912, during which time they had one son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (1910–1950). In 1917, O'Neill met Agnes Boulton, a successful writer of commercial fiction, and they married on April 12, 1918. The years of their marriage—during which the couple had two children, Shane and Oona—are described vividly in her 1958 memoir Part of a Long Story. They divorced in 1929, after O'Neill abandoned Boulton and the children for the actress Carlotta Monterey (born San Francisco, California, December 28, 1888; died Westwood, New Jersey, November 18, 1970). O'Neill and Carlotta married less than a month after he officially divorced his previous wife.^[9]

O'Neill in the mid-1930s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936

In 1929, O'Neill and Monterey moved to the Loire Valley in central France, where they lived in the Château du Plessis in Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. During the early 1930s they returned to the United States and lived in Sea Island, Georgia, at a house called Casa Genotta. He moved to Danville, California in 1937 and lived there until 1944. His house there, Tao House, is today the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.
In their first years together, Monterey organized O'Neill's life, enabling him to devote himself to writing. She later became addicted to potassium bromide, and the marriage deteriorated, resulting in a number of separations. O'Neill needed her, and she needed him. Although they separated several times, they never divorced.

Actress Carlotta Monterey in Plymouth Theatre production of O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, 1922. Monterey later became the playwright's third wife.

In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona for marrying the English actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54. He never saw Oona again.
He also had distant relationships with his sons, Eugene, Jr., a Yale classicist who suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40, and Shane O'Neill, a heroin addict who also committed suicide.

Child	Date of birth	Date of death
Eugene O'Neill, Jr	1910	1950
Shane O'Neill	1918	1977
Oona O'Neill	14/05/1925	27/09/1991

Illness and death

Grave of Eugene O'Neill

O'Neill stamp issued in 1967

After suffering from multiple health problems (including depression and alcoholism) over many years, O'Neill ultimately faced a severe Parkinsons-like tremor in his hands which made it impossible for him to write during the last 10 years of his life; he had tried using dictation but found himself unable to compose in that way. While at Tao House, O’Neill had intended to write a cycle of 11 plays chronicling an American family since the 1800s. Only two of these, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions were ever completed. As his health worsened, O’Neill lost inspiration for the project and wrote three largely autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He managed to complete Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, just before leaving Tao House and losing his ability to write. Drafts of many other uncompleted plays were destroyed by Carlotta at Eugene’s request.
O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. As he was dying, he, in a barely audible whisper, spoke his last words: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room."^[10] The building would later become the Shelton Hall dormitory at Boston University. There is an urban legend perpetuated by students that O'Neill's spirit haunts the room and dormitory. A revised analysis of his autopsy report shows that, contrary to the previous diagnosis, he did not have Parkinson's disease, but a late-onset cerebellar cortical atrophy.^[11]
Dr. Harry Kozol, the lead prosecuting expert of the Patty Hearst trial, treated O'Neill during these last years of ailment. He also was present for the death and announced the fact to the public.^[12]
He is interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.
Although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death, in 1956 Carlotta arranged for his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night to be published, and produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. This last play is widely considered to be his finest. Other posthumously-published works include A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).
The United States Postal Service honored O'Neill with a Prominent Americans series (1965–1978) $1 postage stamp.

Museums and collections

O'Neill's home in New London, Monte Cristo Cottage, was made a National Historic Landmark in 1971. His home in Danville, California, near San Francisco, was preserved as the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in 1976.
Connecticut College maintains the Louis Sheaffer Collection, consisting of material collected by the O'Neill biographer. The principal collection of O'Neill papers is at Yale University. The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut fosters the development of new plays under his name.

Work

Full-length plays

Bread and Butter, 1914
Servitude, 1914
The Personal Equation, 1915
Now I Ask You, 1916
Beyond the Horizon, 1918 - Pulitzer Prize, 1920
The Straw, 1919
Chris Christophersen, 1919
Gold, 1920
Anna Christie, 1920 - Pulitzer Prize, 1922
The Emperor Jones, 1920
Diff'rent, 1921
The First Man, 1922
The Hairy Ape, 1922
The Fountain, 1923
Marco Millions, 1923–25
All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924
Welded, 1924
Desire Under the Elms, 1925
Lazarus Laughed, 1925–26
The Great God Brown, 1926
Strange Interlude, 1928 - Pulitzer Prize
Dynamo, 1929
Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
Ah, Wilderness!, 1933
Days Without End, 1933
The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, published 1940, first performed 1946
Hughie, written 1941, first performed 1959
Long Day's Journey Into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956 - Pulitzer Prize 1957
A Moon for the Misbegotten, written 1941–1943, first performed 1947
A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958
More Stately Mansions, second draft found in O'Neill's papers, first performed 1967
The Calms of Capricorn, published in 1983

One-act plays

The Glencairn Plays, all of which feature characters on the fictional ship Glencairn -- filmed together as The Long Voyage Home:

Bound East for Cardiff, 1914
In The Zone, 1917
The Long Voyage Home, 1917
Moon of the Caribbees, 1918

Other one-act plays include:

A Wife for a Life, 1913
The Web, 1913
Thirst, 1913
Recklessness, 1913
Warnings, 1913
Fog, 1914
Abortion, 1914
The Movie Man: A Comedy, 1914^[2]^[13]
The Sniper, 1915
Before Breakfast, 1916
Ile, 1917
The Rope, 1918
Shell Shock, 1918
The Dreamy Kid, 1918
Where the Cross Is Made, 1918
Exorcism 1919 ^[14]

Other works

The Last Will and Testament of An Extremely Distinguished Dog, 1940. Written to comfort Carlotta as their "child" Blemie was approaching his death in December 1940.^[15]

[edit] See also

Biography portal

The Eugene O'Neill Award

[edit] References

^ The New York Times, August 25, 2003: 'Next year Playwrights Theater will present an unproduced O'Neill comedy, Now I Ask You, a comic spin on Ibsen's Hedda Gabler."
^ ^a ^b ^c The Eugene O'Neill Foundation newsletter: "Now I Ask You, along with The Movie Man, ... is the only surviving comedy from O’Neill’s early years."
^ Arthur Gelb (1957-10-17). "O'Neill's Birthplace Is Marked By Plaque at Times Square Site". The New York Times: p. 35. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00910F73B5C127A93C5A8178BD95F438585F9. Retrieved 2008-11-13.
^ Susan Glaspell, (1927), The Road to the Temple, Frederick A. Stokes, New York, 2nd ed. 1941, p. 255
^ Renda, Mary (2001). Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 198–212. ISBN 0807849383.
^ The New York Times, Aug. 25, 2003: 'Next year Playwrights Theater will present an unproduced O'Neill comedy, Now I Ask You, a comic spin on Ibsen's Hedda Gabler."
^ Smith, Susan Harris (1984). Masks in Modern Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 66–70, 106–08, 131–36, index S124. ISBN 0520050959.
^ Floyd, Virginia (1985). "Chapter 2". Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment. New York: F. Ungar Publishing. p. 180. ISBN 0804422060.
^ "Eugene O'Neill Wed to Miss Monterey". The New York Times: p. 9. 1929-07-24. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60D10F6345D14738DDDAD0A94DF405B898EF1D3. Retrieved 2008-11-13.
^ Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son and Artist. Little, Brown & Co., 1973 ISBN 0-316-78337-4
^ "Eugene O'Neill - What Went Wrong?". Neuroscience for Kids. April 22, 2000. http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/oneill.html. Retrieved 2009-02-12.
^ "Eugene O'Neill Dies of Pneumonia; Playwright, 65, Won Nobel Prize". The New York Times. Retrieved August 13, 2011.
^ Title as in original typescript and title page of Modern Library edition
^ ""Exorcism". Yale U. Library Acquires Lost Play by Eugene O'Neill. Chronicle of Higher Education. October 19, 2011. http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/yale-u-library-acquires-lost-play-by-eugene-oneill/29541?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en. Retrieved October 22, 2011.
^ O'Neill, Eugene; Adrienne Yorinks (1999). The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog (First ed.). New York: Henry Holt and Co. ISBN 0805061703. http://www.eoneill.com/texts/blemie/contents.htm. Retrieved 2008-11-16.

[edit] Further reading

O'Neill, Eugene; Bogard, Travis (1988). Complete Plays 1913–1920. The Library of America. 40. New York: Literary Classics. ISBN 9780940450486.
O'Neill, Eugene; Bogard, Travis (1988). Complete Plays 1920–1931. The Library of America. 41. New York: Literary Classics. ISBN 9780940450493.
O'Neill, Eugene; Bogard, Travis (1988). Complete Plays 1932–1943. The Library of America. 42. New York: Literary Classics. ISBN 9780940450509.
Black, Stephen A. (2002). Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. Yale University press. ISBN 0300093993.
Clark, Barrett H. (November 1932). "Aeschylus and O'Neill". The English Journal (The English Journal, Vol. 21, No. 9) XXI (9): 699–710. doi:10.2307/804473. JSTOR 804473.
Floyd, Virginia (editor) (1979). Eugene O'Neill: A World View. Frederick Unger. ISBN 0804422044.
Floyd, Virginia (1985). The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment. Frederick Unger. ISBN 0804422060.
Gelb, Arthur & Barbara (2000). O'Neill: Life with Monte Christo. Applause/Penguin Putnam. ISBN 0-399-14912-0.
Sheaffer, Louis (2002 [1968]). O'Neill Volume I: Son and Playwright. Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0815412436.
Sheaffer, Louis (1999 [1973]). O'Neill Volume II: Son and Artist. Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0815412444.
Wainscott, Ronald H. (1988). Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-04152-7.
Winther, Sophus Keith (1934). Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study. New York: Random House. OCLC 900356.
Clark, Barrett H. (1926). Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays. Dover Publications, Inc. New York.

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Eugene O'Neill

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Eugene O'Neill

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill official website
Casa Genotta official website
Eugene O'Neill at Find a Grave
Eugene O'Neill at the Internet Broadway Database
Eugene O'Neill at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
Eugene O'Neill at the Internet Movie Database
Eugene O'Neill at the Notable Names Database
Eugene O'Neil Autobiography at the Nobel Foundation
The Iceman Cometh: A Study Guide
Works by Eugene O'Neill at Project Gutenberg
Works by Eugene O'Neill at Project Gutenberg Australia
Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site
American Experience - Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film on PBS
Works by Eugene O'Neill (public domain in Canada)
Haunted by Eugene O'Neill Article in BU Today, Sept 29 2009
Eugene O'Neill public domain audiobooks from LibriVox

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Warren S. Stone	Cover of Time Magazine March 17, 1924	Succeeded by Raymond Poincaré

[show]v · d · eNobel Laureates in Literature (1926–1950)

Grazia Deledda (1926) Henri Bergson (1927) Sigrid Undset (1928) Thomas Mann (1929) Sinclair Lewis (1930) Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931) John Galsworthy (1932) Ivan Bunin (1933) Luigi Pirandello (1934) Eugene O'Neill (1936) Roger Martin du Gard (1937) Pearl S. Buck (1938) Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939) Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944) Gabriela Mistral (1945) Hermann Hesse (1946) André Gide (1947) T. S. Eliot (1948) William Faulkner (1949) Bertrand Russell (1950)

Complete list (1901–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

[show]v · d · ePulitzer Prize for Drama (1918–25)

Jesse Lynch Williams (1918) Eugene O'Neill (1920) Zona Gale (1921) Eugene O'Neill (1922) Owen Davis (1923) Hatcher Hughes (1924) Sidney Howard (1925)

Complete list (1918–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

[show]v · d · ePulitzer Prize for Drama (1926–50)

George Kelly (1926) Paul Green (1927) Eugene O'Neill (1928) Elmer Rice (1929) Marc Connelly (1930) Susan Glaspell (1931) George S. Kaufman / Morrie Ryskind / Ira Gershwin (1932) Maxwell Anderson (1933) Sidney Kingsley (1934) Zoe Akins (1935) Robert E. Sherwood (1936) Moss Hart / George S. Kaufman (1937) Thornton Wilder (1938) Robert E. Sherwood (1939) William Saroyan (1940) Robert E. Sherwood (1941) Thornton Wilder (1943) Mary Chase (1945) Russel Crouse / Howard Lindsay (1946) Tennessee Williams (1948) Arthur Miller (1949) Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II / Joshua Logan (1950)

Complete list (1918–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

[show]v · d · ePulitzer Prize for Drama (1951–75)

Joseph Kramm (1952) William Inge (1953) John Patrick (1954) Tennessee Williams (1955) Albert Hackett / Frances Goodrich (1956) Eugene O'Neill (1957) Ketti Frings (1958) Archibald MacLeish (1959) Jerome Weidman / George Abbott / Jerry Bock / Sheldon Harnick (1960) Tad Mosel (1961) Frank Loesser / Abe Burrows (1962) Frank D. Gilroy (1965) Edward Albee (1967) Howard Sackler (1969) Charles Gordone (1970) Paul Zindel (1971) Jason Miller (1973) Edward Albee (1975)

Complete list (1918–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

Authority control: PND: 118590014 | LCCN: n79092602 | VIAF: 24615441 | SELIBR: 220970 | WorldCat

Persondata
Name	O'Neill, Eugene
Alternative names	O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone
Short description	American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature
Date of birth	1888-10-16
Place of birth	New York City, New York, US
Date of death	November 27, 1953
Place of death	Boston, Massachusetts, US

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African American Literature

2011-10-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

African American literature, body of literature written by Americans of African descent.

Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century.

Antebellum literature

African Americans launched their literature in North America during the second half of the 18th century, joining the war of words between England and its rebellious colonies with a special sense of mission. The earliest African American writers sought to demonstrate that the proposition “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence required that black Americans be extended the same human rights as those claimed by white Americans. Couching a social justice argument in the Christian gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity, African-born Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, dedicated her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first African American book, to proving that “Negros, black as Cain,” were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could “join th’ angelic train” as spiritual equals to whites. Composing poems in a wide range of classical genres, Wheatley was determined to show by her mastery of form and metre, as well as by her pious and learned subjects, that a black poet was as capable of artistic expression as a white poet. Poems on Various Subjects provided a powerful argument against the proslavery contention that the failure of African peoples to write serious literature was proof of their intellectual inadequacies and their fitness for enslavement. The poetry and sermons of the Connecticut slave Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), though their major theme is the urgency of Christian conversion, buttressed the demand of early African American writers for literary recognition.

In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, Wheatley’s most famous black literary contemporary, published his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A British citizen who had experienced enslavement in the Americas, Equiano has been traditionally regarded, along with Wheatley, as the founder of African literature in English by virtue of his having pioneered the slave narrative, a firsthand literary testimony against slavery which, by the early 19th century, earned for African American literature a burgeoning readership in Britain as well as in the United States. One of the most remarkable features of Equiano’s story is his use of African origins to establish his credibility as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. Recent research, however, has raised questions about whether Equiano was born an Igbo (Ibo) in Africa, as he claims in his autobiography. His baptismal record in Westminster, England, lists him on February 9, 1759, as “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old.” Scholars have also debated whether Equiano’s account of Igbo life in his autobiography is based on reading rather than memory. In the absence of scholarly consensus on these controversial matters, The Interesting Narrative remains a pivotal text in portraying Africa as neither morally benighted nor culturally backward but rather as a model of social harmony defiled by Euro-American greed.

In the early 19th century, the standard-bearers of African American literature spoke with heightening urgency of the need for whites to address the terrible sin of slavery. Through essays, poetry, and fiction as well as more conventional journalism, African American newspapers, inaugurated by Freedom’s Journal in 1827, extolled the achievements of black people worldwide while lobbying persistently for an end to slavery. As the prophet of literary black nationalism in the United States, David Walker wrote his incendiary Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) to warn white America of impending racial violence if slavery were not abolished. Echoing Walker, who was a fellow Bostonian, Maria W. Stewart, the first African American woman political writer, issued her Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart in 1835, in which she encouraged black women in the North to take a more outspoken role in civil rights agitation and black community building. A year after the publication of Stewart’s Productions, Jarena Lee, a domestic servant impelled by a call to preach, published The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, the first spiritual autobiography by an African American woman.

Slave narratives In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton county, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery movement in the United States sponsored firsthand autobiographical accounts of slavery by fugitives from the South in order to make abolitionists of a largely indifferent white Northern readership. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time. By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy, education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans. In his second, revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass depicted himself as a product of a slave community in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and explained how his struggles for independence and liberty did not end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. Chronicling what she called “the war” of her life, which ultimately won both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been applied pervasively to female slaves. Her work and the antislavery and feminist oratory of the New York ex-slave who renamed herself Sojourner Truth enriched early African American literature with unprecedented models of female eloquence and heroism.

Prose, drama, and poetryThrough the slave narrative, African Americans entered the world of prose and dramatic literature. In 1853 William Wells Brown, an internationally known fugitive slave narrator, authored the first black American novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. It tells the tragic story of the beautiful light-skinned African American daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress; Clotel dies trying to save her own daughter from slavery. Five years later Brown also published the first African American play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, based on scenes and themes familiar to readers of fugitive slave narratives. In the late 1850s Martin R. Delany, a black journalist and physician who would later serve as a major in the Union army during the Civil War, wrote Blake; or, The Huts of America (serially published in 1859), a novel whose hero plots a slave revolt in the South. In 1859 the first African American women’s fiction appeared: “The Two Offers,” a short story by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper dealing with middle-class women whose race is not specified, and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, an autobiographical novel about the life of a working-class black woman in the North. The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), an apparently fictionalized slave narrative discovered in manuscript in the early 21st century, also may be among the earliest contributions to African American women’s fiction, but the identity of its author, Hannah Crafts, has yet to be confirmed. Harper, by contrast, was renowned in mid-19th-century black America as the poetic voice of her people, a writer whose verse was direct, impassioned, and poignant. She and James M. Whitfield, author of a volume of spirited protest poetry entitled America and Other Poems (1853), helped ensure that the 1850s would become the first African American literary renaissance.

Oral tradition Behind the achievements of individual African American writers during the antislavery era lies the communal consciousness of millions of slaves, whose oral tradition in song and story has given form and substance to much subsequent literature by black Americans. Douglass recalled that the plantation spiritual “Run to Jesus” had first suggested to him the thought of making his escape from slavery. When slaves sang “I thank God I’m free at last,” only they knew whether they were referring to freedom from sin or from slavery. A second great fund of Southern black folklore, the beast fables that originated in Africa testified to the slaves’ commonsense understanding of human psychology and everyday justice. The slaves selected for special celebration trickster figures, most notably Brer Rabbit, because of their facility in combating stronger antagonists through wit, guile, and the skillful adoption of deceptive masks.

The Civil War and Reconstruction

With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their voices to convince President Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war to end slavery, which black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight. This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 black soldiers joining the Union army. Charlotte Forten, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most black Americans when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.

The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from slavery in St. Louis to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent ex-slave in the person of Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries

As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-conscious black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century. Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular American literature, which middle-class black writers often imitated, to a real-world sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that highlighted the centrality of educated black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.

African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among black readers with two book-length epic poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in Spenserian stanzas.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

On August 25, 1893, Whitman shared the platform for African American literature at the Chicago World’s Fair with a 21-year-old Ohioan named Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had just that year published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy. Though not the first black American to write poetry in so-called Negro dialect, Dunbar was by far the most successful, both critically and financially. Deeply ambivalent about his white readers’ preference for what he called “a jingle in a broken tongue,” Dunbar wrote a great deal of verse in standard diction and form, including a handful of lyrics, such as “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy,” and “The Haunted Oak,” that testify candidly and movingly to his frustrated aspirations as a black poet in a white supremacist era. The first professional African American writer, Dunbar also authored a large body of fiction, including four novels, the most important of which—The Sport of the Gods (1901)—offered a bleak view of African American prospects in urban America that anticipated the work of Richard Wright.

The novel as social analysis

While most of Dunbar’s fiction was designed primarily to entertain his white readers, in the hands of Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed whites to ignore worsening social conditions for blacks in the last decades of the 19th century. Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) attempted to counter specious notions of slavery popularized by white writers who idealized plantation life, while offering models of socially committed middle-class African Americans who exemplify the ideals of uplift that motivated much of Harper’s writing. Griggs, a Baptist minister who wrote five novels and founded a publishing company, excoriated racism in his fiction, stressing the need for his educated middle-class heroes and heroines to turn away from whiteness as a standard of value and rely instead on self-determination and racial solidarity. Unlike Harper and Griggs, whose fiction won few readers outside black communities, Chesnutt attracted the backing of prestigious publishing houses in Boston and New York. Between 1899 and 1905 he published two books of short stories and three novels of purpose that addressed the causes and consequences of racial problems in the postwar South. Based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, racial massacre of 1898, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) was reviewed extensively throughout the United States as a timely study of troubling contemporary issues, but its commercial success was limited, probably because of its unsparing assessment of white supremacy.

Booket T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois

As segregation regimes took hold in the South in the 1890s with the tacit approval of the rest of the country, many African Americans found a champion in Booker T. Washington and adopted his self-help autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), as their guidebook to improved fortunes. Washington portrayed his own life in such a way as to suggest that even the most disadvantaged of black people could attain dignity and prosperity in the South by proving themselves valuable, productive members of society deserving of fair and equal treatment before the law. A classic American success story, Up from Slavery solidified Washington’s reputation as the most eminent African American of the new century. Yet Washington’s primacy was soon challenged. In his landmark collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, disputed the main principle of Washington’s political program, the idea that voting and civil rights were less important to black progress than acquiring property and achieving economic self-sufficiency. Unlike Washington, who foresaw the steady obliteration of racial prejudice and discrimination, Du Bois prophesied in the opening lines of The Souls of Black Folk: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” An uncompromising advocate of civil and voting rights, Du Bois asserted in The Souls of Black Folk that through “work, culture, and liberty” the dual heritage of African Americans—what he called “double-consciousness”—could be melded into a force for positive social and cultural change in the United States. Du Bois’s striving to dramatize in his narrator a synthesis of racial and national consciousness dedicated to “the ideal of human brotherhood” made The Souls of Black Folk one of the most provocative and influential works of African American literature in the 20th century.

The rise of the New Negro

During the first two decades of the 20th century, rampant racial injustices, led by weekly reports of grisly lynchings, gave strong impetus to protest writing. From the editor’s desk of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline E. Hopkins wrote novels, short stories, editorials, and social commentary in the early 1900s that attempted to revive the fervour of the antislavery era. The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 in New York City put Du Bois in charge of its organ, The Crisis, which, as its editor from 1910 to 1934, he fashioned into the most widely read African American magazine of its time. In 1912 future NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, poet, diplomat, and journalist, published anonymously The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a psychological novel that employed the theme of passing for white to explore the double consciousness of its protagonist with a dispassionate objectivity unattempted in African American fiction up to that time. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Harlem was well on its way to becoming what Johnson called “the greatest Negro city in the world,” attracting key intellectual leaders and artists such as Du Bois and Johnson, not to mention thousands of migrants from the South and Midwest whose talents and aspirations would fuel in the 1920s the second great renaissance of African American culture.

The Harlem Renaissance

The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to black writing on the part of major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favour and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few, until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry. Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and file of black America and proudly identified themselves as black poets, Cullen sought success through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to the folk sermon tradition of Southern blacks.

NovelistsMcKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade. Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and colour prejudice among black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929) exposes colour prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality. The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the black female protagonists of her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern black community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.

Playwrights and editors

Although the most memorable literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was in narrative prose and poetry, the movement also inspired dramatists such as Willis Richardson, whose The Chip Woman’s Fortune (produced 1923) was the first nonmusical play by an African American to be produced on Broadway. African American editors such as Charles S. Johnson, whose monthly Opportunity was launched in 1923 under the auspices of the National Urban League, and the respected Caribbean-born short-story writer Eric Walrond, who published young black writers in Negro World, the organ of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, provided significant visibility for New Negro writers. Anthologies, particularly of poetry, abounded during the Harlem Renaissance, enhancing the literary reputations of both the writers represented in them and their editors. The editors included James Weldon Johnson (The Book of American Negro Poetry [1922] and The Book of American Negro Spirituals [1925, 1926]), Charles S. Johnson (Ebony and Topaz [1927]), and Cullen (Caroling Dusk [1927]), to mention only a handful of the most noteworthy.

The advent of urban realism

Despite the enormous outpouring of creativity during the 1920s, the vogue of black writing, black art, and black culture waned markedly in the early 1930s as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. African American pundits in the 1930s and ’40s tended to depreciate the achievements of the New Negroes, calling instead for a more politically engaged, socially critical realism in literature.

Richard Wright The chief proponent of this position was Richard Wright, whose fiction, autobiography, and social commentary dominated African American literature from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. A migrant from Mississippi with barely a ninth-grade education, Wright set the tone for the post-New Negro era with Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of novellas set in the Jim Crow South that evidenced Wright’s strong affinity with Marxism and the influence of American Naturalist writers such as Theodore Dreiser. In 1940 Wright’s monumental novel Native Son appeared, winning thunderous critical acclaim as well as unprecedented financial success. Charting the violent life and death of a Chicago ghetto youth, Native Son revived the protest tradition of 19th-century African American literature while eschewing its moralizing, sentimentality, and political conservatism. Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) also revisited a 19th-century tradition, the slave narrative, to chronicle his quest, as much intellectual as physical, from an oppressive South to anticipated freedom in Chicago. After the critical and popular success of Black Boy in the mid-1940s, Wright moved to Paris, where he continued to publish fiction and travel books, though none matched the achievement of his work in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the stamp Wright placed on African American prose remained evident in the work of novelists such as William Attaway, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry, which has often been interpreted as belonging to “the Wright school” of social realism. Petry’s The Street (1946) adopted Wright’s pitiless assessment of the power of environment in the lives of black urban dwellers, but, unlike Wright, whose female characters generally exemplify demoralization and passivity, Petry created a female protagonist who fights back.

Chicago writers

The Chicago Defender, one of the premier African American newspapers of the 20th century, portrayed the Windy City as a cultural and economic mecca for black migrants fleeing the South during the Great Depression. Wright, who moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Chicago in 1927, found in the South Side of Chicago a lively community of young African American writers, among them poet Margaret Walker, playwright Theodore Ward, poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, and novelist and children’s book author Arna Bontemps. Chicago-based Abbott’s Monthly (1930–33), established by the Defender’s editor, Robert Abbott, published the work of Wright and Himes for the first time, while New Challenge (1937), coedited by novelist Dorothy West and Wright, helped the fledgling Chicago black literary renaissance expound its purpose. In the 1940s Negro Digest and Negro Story, also literary products of Chicago’s South Side, provided outlets for fiction writers, poets, and essayists. Encouraged by the Chicago and New York units of the Federal Theater Project, African American drama advanced during the Depression, led by Abram Hill, founder of the American Negro Theater in Harlem; Hughes, whose play Mulatto (produced 1935) reached Broadway with a searching examination of miscegenation; and Ward, whose Big White Fog (produced 1938) was the most widely viewed African American drama of the period.

The 1940s

During the 1930s and ’40s Hughes and Sterling A. Brown kept the folk spirit alive in African American poetry. An admirer of Hughes, Margaret Walker dedicated For My People (1942), the title poem of which remains one of the most popular texts for recitation and performance in African American literature, to the same black American rank and file whom Hughes and Brown celebrated. By the early 1940s three figures, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, were showing how the vernacular tradition could be adapted to modernist experimentation. The variety of expressiveness and formal innovation in African American poetry of the 1940s is reflected in Tolson’s densely allusive Rendezvous with America (1942), Hayden’s meditative history poems such as “Middle Passage” (1945) and “Frederick Douglass” (1947), and Brooks’s tribute to the vitality and rigours of black urban life in A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949). The 1940s was also a decade of creative experimentation in autobiography, led by Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940), a self-styled “essay toward an autobiography of a race concept”; Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an early venture in “autoethnography,” the writing of self via the characterization of a culture (in this case, the rural Southern black culture of Hurston’s roots); J. Saunders Redding’s No Day of Triumph (1942), the story of an alienated Northern professional’s quest for redemptive immersion in Southern black working-class communities; and Wright’s Black Boy.

Ralph Ellison In 1949 the young New York essayist James Baldwin, a protégé of Wright, published “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” a criticism of protest fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son. Baldwin’s charge that the protest novel was prone to categorize humanity rather than reflect its full “beauty, dread, and power” heralded a shift in the 1950s away from Wright’s brand of realism. The most enduring African American novel of the 1950s, Invisible Man (1952), by another Wright protégé, Ralph Ellison, answered Baldwin’s call for “a new act of creation,” a new kind of black hero, and a new way of picturing that hero’s participation in post-Depression, post-World War II American reality. The protagonist of Ellison’s novel is an unnamed black everyman who makes the traditional journey in African American literature from the South to the North, where he goes in search of conventional success and ends up, through a series of ironic revelations, discovering himself. The Invisible Man has been called a modern Odysseus and a 20th-century Candide, in tribute to Ellison’s ability to invest in his central character a universality that bespeaks its author’s wide reading in Western myth and European, British, and American literature. But foremost the Invisible Man is a black American engaged, willy-nilly, in an often painful process of education. Part Douglass, part Washington, and part Du Bois, he struggles with the dominant “isms,” from Freudianism to Marxism, of the first half of the 20th century to decide what black intellectual leadership can and should be in the second half of the century. Encountering a volatile American reality that defies every political or philosophical attempt to define and control it, the Invisible Man comes to realize that his African American folk and cultural heritage, embodied in a series of black antagonists and enigmatic mentors, represents some of the most valuable wisdom he needs in order to discover his role and responsibilities in modern America. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, reflecting the enormously positive critical reception the novel enjoyed. Ellison never published another novel during his lifetime, but his essays, reviews, and interviews, published as Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), acknowledged his unwavering commitment to a pluralistic ideal of art that knows no allegiance to any school or program.

James Baldwin

In 1953 Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, testified anew to the sophisticated formal experimentation and piercing examination of African American consciousness of which the writers coming of age in the 1950s were capable. The story of religious conversion experienced by 14-year-old John Grimes of Harlem, Go Tell It on the Mountain places in creative tension its hero’s spiritual awakening and his determination to gain his independence from his oppressive stepfather. The result is a novel of unprecedented honesty in its revelation of generational and gender conflicts between its central characters, who constitute an African American family haunted by self-hatred, guilt, the psychological scars of racism, unsanctioned sexual desire, and a hunger for deliverance. Two years after Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin collected his essays in Notes of a Native Son, a mix of autobiography and political commentary on race in America that identified Baldwin as the new conscience of the nation on racial matters. Subsequent volumes of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), underlined Baldwin’s fame as the most incisive and passionate essayist ever produced by black America. His novels of the 1950s and ’60s—particularly Giovanni’s Room (1956), the first African American novel to treat homosexuality openly, and Another Country (1962), a best-seller that examined bisexuality, interracial sex, and the many prejudices that enforced hierarchies of difference in American society—confirmed Baldwin’s leadership among those black American writers at mid century who wanted to move fiction toward a renewed search for personal meaning and redemption while challenging the white American consensus that viewed triumph in World War II as a vindication of the American way on the racial home front.

African American theater

During the decade following World War II, professional African American dramatists—such as William Blackwell Branch, author of In Splendid Error (produced 1954); Alice Childress, creator of the Obie Award-winning Trouble in Mind (produced 1955); and Loften Mitchell, best known for A Land Beyond the River (produced 1957)—found greater access to the white American theatre than any previous generation of black playwrights had known. Baldwin began a dramatic career in 1955 with The Amen Corner, which focuses on a female preacher in a Harlem storefront church. Hughes continued his stage presence with his musical comedy Simply Heavenly in 1957.

But no one in African American theatre could have predicted the huge critical and popular success that came to Chicagoan Lorraine Hansberry after her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in March 1959. A searching portrayal of an African American family confronting the problems of upward mobility and integration, A Raisin in the Sun introduced not only the most brilliant playwright yet produced by black America but also an extraordinarily talented cast of African (or Bahamian, in the case of Sidney Poitier) American actors, including Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Lou Gossett, Jr., and the play’s director, Lloyd Richards, the first black director of a Broadway show in more than 50 years. Hansberry’s play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959; she was the first African American writer to win this prestigious award. Hansberry completed another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (produced 1964), and several screenplays, including the film version of A Raisin in the Sun (1961), before her death at age 34.

The literature of civil rights

Declaring that “all art is ultimately social,” Hansberry was one of several African American writers—most prominently Baldwin and Alice Walker—to take an active part in the civil rights movement and to be energized, imaginatively and socially, by the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and the ’60s. The murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager visiting Mississippi in 1955, led Gwendolyn Brooks to compose “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” signaling her gravitation toward a more explicitly socially critical verse as featured in her volume The Bean Eaters (1960). Poets Margaret Esse Danner and Naomi Long Madgett began their careers publishing similar work in the 1950s.

Amiri Baraka

The development of an increasingly black-identified poetry in the 1960s, written deliberately to inspire black pride and to inflame black revolution, is epitomized in the evolution of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka. Based in New York’s East Village, Jones became known first as a Beat poet whose collection Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) consisted largely of apolitical critiques of 1950s conventionality and materialism. By 1968, however, Jones had renamed himself Amiri Baraka and resettled in Harlem, where he became the fiery literary voice of a new black self-consciousness and social consciousness declaiming its freedom in original, sometimes shocking verse previewed in Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964, first published under the name of LeRoi Jones). In the same year, Baraka’s play Dutchman, which climaxes in the death of an incipient black revolutionary poet at the hands of a white woman on a subway, won the 1964 Obie Award for the best off-Broadway production of the year. Dutchman’s polarized audience, including particularly whites offended by the murderous and manipulative female lead in the play, foreshadowed the effect that most African American writers who sought to emulate Baraka had when the Black Arts movement, which Baraka advocated, came into full flower in the late 1960s.

The Black Arts movement

The assassination of Malcolm X, eloquent exponent of black nationalism, in 1965 in New York and the espousal of “Black Power” by previously integrationist civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) helped to galvanize a generation of young black writers into rethinking the purpose of African American art. Rejecting any notion of the artist that separated him or her from the African American community, the Black Arts movement engaged in cultural nation building by sponsoring poetry readings, founding community theatres, creating literary magazines, and setting up small presses. In 1968 poetry, fiction, essays, and drama from writers associated with the movement appeared in the landmark anthology Black Fire, edited by Baraka and Larry Neal. One of the most versatile leaders of the Black Arts movement, Neal summed up its goals as the promotion of self-determination, solidarity, and nationhood among African Americans.

To Black Arts writers, literature was frankly a means of exhortation, and poetry was the most immediate way to model and articulate the new Black consciousness the movement sought to foster. Baraka’s Black Magic (1969) and It’s Nation Time (1970) typify the stylistic emphases of the poetry of this movement, particularly its preference for street slang, the rhythm of blues, jazz, and gospel music, and a deliberately provocative confrontational rhetoric. Important poets in this mode were Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Etheridge Knight, Haki R. Madhubuti, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Nikki Giovanni. Among the leading Black Arts playwrights, Baraka was joined by Ed Bullins, whose plays, such as Clara’s Ole Man (produced 1965) and The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced 1971), concentrated on the gritty existence of urban African Americans, earning three Obie Awards. Although fiction was not as important to the Black Arts movement as were poetry and drama, the mythopoeic short stories of Henry Dumas, collected in Ark of Bones, and Other Stories (1970), and the novels of John A. Williams, particularly The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a roman à clef about a dying black novelist intent on maintaining his political integrity in the face of government persecution, communicate the spirit of the new Black ideals. The “tell it like it is” temper of the 1960s spurred an unprecedented candour about race and placed a premium on authentic self-expression in African American autobiography. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration between Malcolm X and journalist-author Alex Haley, provided a standard that Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970), and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) sought to emulate.

Reconceptualizing Blackness

Not all African American writers in the 1960s and early ’70s subscribed to the new credo of Blackness, however. While Gwendolyn Brooks switched publishers, from New York’s Harper & Row to Detroit’s Broadside Press, out of sympathy to the new movement, Robert Hayden was repelled by what he called “the chauvinistic and the doctrinaire.” Ishmael Reed, who reserved the right to lampoon any attempts to impose artistic orthodoxy on African American writing, embarked on his iconoclastic career with a series of parodic novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), the latter one taking aim at black cultural nationalism. Another 1960s writer more postmodernist than nationalist, Adrienne Kennedy made her avant-garde theatre debut with stunningly innovative, nightmarish one-act plays, most notably Funnyhouse of a Negro (produced 1962) and The Owl Answers (produced 1963), which featured surrealist spectacles of black women caught between African and European heritages. Offering no political solutions to her female characters’ tormented struggles for unity and purpose, Kennedy dramatized the potent psychological and social symbolic value of black American women’s emotions and personal lives. Less openly resistant to the strictures of the Black Arts aesthetic but no less dedicated to faithful and nuanced presentations of a wide range of African American experience, Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson also broke into print during the 1960s, demonstrating a mastery of the short story that yielded for Gaines the much-applauded stories in Bloodline (1968) and for McPherson the equally celebrated collection Hue and Cry (1968). Gaines went on to create in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) one of the most famous female characters in African American fiction, whose first-person narrative testifies to the dauntless progress of the black folk whom she represents from bondage to the civil rights era. Jane Pittman joined Vyry Ware, the indomitable heroine of Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), in liberating black American women of the South from the stereotypes that had bound them to the “mammy” image while also serving notice to the male- and urban-oriented Black Arts movement that the voices and traditions of black women, Southern black culture, and the rural past offered much to the reconceptualizing of blackness that the 1960s and ’70s had undertaken.

Renaissance in the 1970s

A variety of literary, cultural, and political developments during the 1950s and ’60s, including the heightened visibility of Hansberry, Kennedy, Walker, and Brooks, the expanding presence of black women’s experience and expressive traditions in African American writing, and the impact of the women’s movement on African American women’s consciousness, fostered what has been termed “the black women’s literary renaissance” of the 1970s.

Toni Morrison Although this outpouring of creative energy by African American women, especially in fiction, had a long foreground, its founding text is generally considered The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison. Born in Lorain, Ohio, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University, Morrison, a senior editor at Random House when she started her literary career, focused her first novel on the destructive effect of white ideals of beauty, symbolized in blue eyes, on a lonely black girl’s attempt to find a positive sense of identity in a loveless family and a community prone to scapegoating. The Bluest Eye’s implicit endorsement of the “Black is beautiful” slogan of the 1970s made it topical, but its attention to the psychology of oppression affecting a poor, small-town black girl diverged from the norm of the Black Arts movement, which featured male protagonists in conflict with the larger white society. By 1974 The Bluest Eye was out of print, but in the previous year Morrison had brought out Sula, original for its portrayal of female friendship as the essential relationship in an African American novel and for its creation of the amoral, adventurous, and self-sanctioned Sula Peace, whose radical individualism Morrison traces with nonjudgmental detachment. More popular than The Bluest Eye, Sula whetted the appetite of Morrison’s growing audience for her third major work of the 1970s, Song of Solomon (1977), the first African American novel since Native Son to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. Song of Solomon blends African American folklore, history, and literary tradition to celebrate the moral and spiritual revival of Macon Dead, the first male protagonist in a Morrison novel, via the guidance and example of his aunt Pilate, another of Morrison’s unconventional, soul-liberating heroines. By the end of the decade, Morrison was the leading African American writer of the 1970s, an inspiration to a generation of younger novelists, especially Toni Cade Bambara, whose novel The Salt Eaters (1980) won the American Book Award, and Gloria Naylor, whose novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982) won a National Book Award for best first novel in 1983.

Alice Walker Morrison was not the only black woman to exert a major influence on African American literature in the 1970s and ’80s. Alice Walker punctuated the decade with a series of controversial books: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), an epic novel that tracks three generations of a black Southern family through internal strife and a struggle to rise from sharecropping; Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), a collection of poems that urges its reader to “[b]e nobody’s darling; / Be an outcast”; and Meridian (1976), a novelistic redefinition of African American motherhood. In 1982 Walker’s most famous novel, The Color Purple, an epistolary novel that depicted rape, incest, bisexuality, and lesbian love among African Americans, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The successes of Morrison and Walker helped foster a climate for artistic explorations of race, gender, and class in a wide range of literary forms, such as the novels of Paule Marshall (a novelist previously published but not accepted as a major writer until the appearance of Praisesong for the Widow [1983]), Octavia E. Butler, Gayl Jones, and Jamaica Kincaid; the poetry of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Rita Dove; and the drama of Ntozake Shange. The remarkable sustained popularity of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), one of the most widely read and taught books by an African American woman, demonstrates the lasting appeal to white as well as black American readers of much contemporary African American women’s writing, especially when it is informed by the upbeat, woman-affirming outlook typified by Angelou’s prose and poetry.

The turn of the 21st century

Although women’s writing claimed centre stage in the eyes of many critics and a large number of readers of African American literature from the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, African American male writers continued to receive important recognition for their work during this time. Seven years after Dove received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Thomas and Beulah (1986), her tribute to her maternal grandparents, Yusef Komunyakaa won the same prize for Neon Vernacular (1993), a collage of new and collected poems from seven previous volumes, ranging from Dien Cai Dau (1988), based on Komunyakaa’s service in Vietnam, to Magic City (1992), a tense and lyrical evocation of the poet’s boyhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana. When Butler, the first important African American woman science fiction writer, won that genre’s prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards for her 1984 short story “Bloodchild,” she retraced the path opened by Samuel R. Delany, who garnered Nebulas for Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967) and a Hugo for the autobiographical The Motion of Light in Water (1988). The voices of novelist John Wideman (who twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award given by the international writers’ organization Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists [PEN]) and his incarcerated brother Robby in Brothers and Keepers (1984), one of the most innovative African American autobiographies of the late 20th century, previewed the success that awaited later women’s collaborative first-person texts, such as the 1988 American Book Award winner Tight Spaces by Kesho Scott, Cherry Muhanji, and Egyirba High and the best-selling Having Our Say (1993) by centenarian sisters Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany.

In the last decades of the 20th century, African American drama soared into the highest echelon of American theatre, as Charles Gordone won the first Pulitzer Prize for an African American play with his depiction of a black hustler-poet in No Place to Be Somebody (produced 1969), Joseph A. Walker earned a prestigious Tony Award (presented by two American theatre organizations) for the best play of 1973 for the smash Broadway hit The River Niger (produced 1972), and Charles H. Fuller, Jr., claimed a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for A Soldier’s Play (produced 1981), a tragedy set in a segregated military base in Louisiana. In the 1980s and ’90s, George Wolfe won substantial acclaim both as a playwright, whose The Colored Museum (produced 1986) lampooned stereotypes and myths of black culture, and as the director of Angels in America, a Tony Award-winning drama by white playwright Tony Kushner.

August Wilson The most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century, August Wilson, a high-school dropout and Black Power activist in the 1960s, opened his first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on Broadway in 1984 with great critical and commercial success. The first of Wilson’s “20th-century cycle,” a series of plays designed to treat African American life in every decade of the past century, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which concerns blues musicians during the 1920s, was followed by Fences (produced 1985), which delineates a father-son conflict in a working-class family of the 1950s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (produced 1986), about a displaced Southern black man’s quest for his wife in 1911 Pittsburgh; The Piano Lesson (produced 1987), in which competing ideas about their legacy threatens to rupture an African American family in the 1930s; and Two Trains Running (produced 1990), a look at the Black Power ideals of the 1960s from the perspective of the late 1980s. Fences and The Piano Lesson both won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilson’s later plays, Seven Guitars (produced 1995), Jitney! (produced in 1982 and revived in 1996), King Hedley II (produced 1999), and Gem of the Ocean (produced 2003), continued to excite the admiration of critics and viewers alike.

African American rootsThe reclamation of African American history has propelled imaginatively an unusual number of black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet for a feature film about black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).

Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada (1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial fugitive slave protagonist on a quest for emancipation that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning ideas about self and race. The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, an African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which an escaped slave mother killed her infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and, with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).

In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the “word-work” of black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.

William L. Andrews

ARTICLEAdditional ReadingStudies of major periods of African American literature are Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (1989), and The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (2001); Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (1993); Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature: The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (1989– ); and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981, reissued 1997).

Studies of major genres and literary traditions in African American literature include William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986); Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987); Barbara T. Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980); Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2nd ed. (1991); and Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (1973).

Among the major anthologies of African American literature are Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2003); and Patricia Liggins Hill et al. (eds.), Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998).

William L. Andrews

LINKSRelated ArticlesAspects of the topic African American literature are discussed in the following places at Britannica.

Assorted References•major reference (in American literature: African American literature)

Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both protégés of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the full complexity of black life in the United States. In his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the...

•research by Gates (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (American critic and scholar))

...the years that followed he earned a reputation as a “literary archaeologist” by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our...

BRITANNICA CLASSIC•article by Du Bois (in Tylenol (drug)

What follows is a brief summary of the unique contribution of African Americans to American literature, written for the 13th edition (1926) of Encyclopædia Britannica. Its author, W.E.B. Du Bois, had played a prominent role in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and at the time this article was written he was the...

)

OtherThe following is a selection of items (artistic styles or groups, constructions, events, fictional characters, organizations, publications) associated with "African American literature"

•African American literature

•literature

Supplemental Information

ARTICLESpotlightsEncyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History

Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to the Nobel Prizes

LINKSExternal Web SitesThe topic African American literature is discussed at the following external Web sites.Snally Gaster’s African American Phat Library

African American Literature Book Club

Informative, easily navigable resource for African-American literature. Offers profiles of African-American authors, virtual poetry readings, book reviews, a comprehensive list of resources for writers, the online purchasing of books, and more.

PBS Online - Literature and Life

ThinkQuest - Biography of W.E.B. DuBois

Academic resource on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s life and works. Includes biographical articles and information on the scholars influenced by this social scientist. Features conference details and a bibliography.

Citations

MLA Style:

"African American literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. .

APA Style:

African American literature. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/926640/African-American-literature

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Elaine Showalter (Guardian) chooses the best novelists writing in the US today

2011-10-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Elaine Showalter The Guardian, Friday 8 May 2009 Article history

The female frontier

The postwar literary landscape has been dominated by the male giants of American letters. So where are all the women? Elaine Showalter chooses the best novelists writing in the US today

Great Americans ... (clockwise from top l) Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Marilynne Robinson and Gish Jen. Photographs: Murdo Macleod/Getty/Authorpictures/PR

When John Updike died in January, Ian McEwan lamented his passing in these pages as the "end of the golden age of the American novel." In an article for the Times, headed "Who will fly the flag for the great American novel now,?" Stephen Amidon asked whether Updike would have any successors who "possess the ability to engage with the culture at large, to create works that become part of the fabric of their era." Amidon could only think of only one woman, Jhumpa Lahiri, to include in his list of six contenders. Most of Updike's eulogists excluded women completely.

I'm disappointed but not surprised. "Writers can write about anything they want, any sex they want, any place they want," Annie Proulx has declared. But being free to write doesn't mean that American women are equal in a literary marketplace still dominated by male precedents, male literary juries and male standards of greatness. As Joyce Carol Oates has ruefully noted, "the woman who writes is a writer by her own definition, but a woman writer by others' definitions". She cannot transcend readers' assumptions about her gender "unless she writes under a male pseudonym and keeps her identity secret". Yet unlike their 19th-century British and European female precursors, American women novelists have very rarely used male pseudonyms, believing that democratic principles would win them respect. If Uncle Tom's Cabin had been signed by "Harry Beecher Stowe", women's standing in American literary history might look very different.

Women writers today, however, are especially disadvantaged when they have to contend with the mystique of the Great American Novel. In 1868, when the southern novelist John William De Forest coined the phrase, he defined it as "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence", and nominated Uncle Tom's Cabin, rather than The Scarlet Letter, as the leading candidate. But gradually the definition took on the meanings of Melville's call in Moby-Dick for a "mighty theme", for an art commensurate with the vastness of the nation and the scope of its dreams - a great white whale, a great war, or a great hero. Now it also carries a political dimension; as John Walsh recently defined it, the GAN is "the big one ... a single perfect work of fiction that would encapsulate the heart of the US, interpret its history through the light of a single, outstanding consciousness, unite the private lives of the characters with the public drama of its politics".

Women writers generally fare very badly in competition for the Big One. In 2006, the New York Times asked 200 writers and "literary sages" to nominate the best single work of American fiction in the past 25 years. In his introduction to the survey, the Times critic AO Scott defended the exercise; even if the GAN is a mythical creature like the yeti or the sasquatch, he argued, many people still believe it exists. While Toni Morrison's Beloved topped the list, Marilynne Robinson was the only other woman novelist to receive more than two votes.

It's not just that the GAN is about masculine themes. As Katha Pollitt pointed out on Slate in March, "there's a certain kind of critical receptivity, a hope of greatness for certain kinds of books by men that hardly ever comes into play with books by women, no matter how wonderful they are". Although many women novelists do write about "big public subjects" and many male novelists write about "intimate life", Pollitt suggests, "we emphasise different elements in similar books and only notice the evidence that confirms our gender biases - and give men more benefits of more doubts."

Moreover, serious women writers are much less likely than men to celebrate themselves, like Whitman (who anonymously and ecstatically reviewed Leaves of Grass) or to advertise themselves, like Mailer; and women are judged much more harshly if they are seen as self-promoting or self-important attention-seekers. As a result, they have lower public profiles and less name recognition. They do not marry models, actors or movie stars; they do not get chosen for People magazine's "most beautiful" people of the year; they do not run for political office; they do not stab their spouses or get into brawls on the street; they do not carry sawn-off shotguns in the front of their cars. On the other hand, they don't refuse to appear on Oprah, or brag about staying a little drunk every day; they do not become notorious recluses or unapproachable gurus. They are less likely to be in the headlines, the tabloids and the magazines, and less likely to be in the minds of literary list-makers.

Most important, I believe, women writers do not figure in American literary history, in the large narratives of national cultural development. Indeed, as the scholar Nina Baym has said, American woman writers have entered literary history as the enemy - what Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously called the "damned mob of scribbling women" whose bestselling, sentimental trash kept him and other serious male artists from finding readers and buyers. And women have been too dignified and self-effacing to make their own claims to artistic immortality. Women novelists do not observe the rituals of male literary artistry that sustain historical memory; they have rarely produced manifestoes, aligned themselves in a notable school, named their generation (whether Lost or Beat) and their genre, or feuded heroically and publicly with a critic-double, or a female rival.

But the main reason why women do not figure in American literary history is because they haven't written it. Women writers need to be seen in larger contexts than their most recent novel, placed in relation to their contemporaries and their precursors, understood in terms of the themes and issues of their generations. Only then can we rewrite American literary history overall to reflect its full evolution and significance.

So who are the outstanding contemporary American women novelists, and what do they have in common? For one thing, they are strikingly similar to each other in their degrees of higher education. A considerable number, including Jane Smiley, Bobbie Ann Mason, Marilynne Robinson, Siri Hustvedt, Jhumpa Lahiri, Diane Johnson, Dara Horn and Rebecca Goldstein, have PhDs. (Male critics seem largely unaware of the intellectual credentials of women writers; Morris Dickstein, for example, calls Mason, who published her dissertation on Nabokov, as a "lower-middle-class writer" of "Kmart" fiction). Many others, including Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Annie Proulx, Andrea Barrett, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Amy Tan and Barbara Kingsolver, began postgraduate work in subjects from linguistics to Henry James to evolutionary biology. Almost all the rest have MAs or MFAs in creative writing. They are sophisticated and self-aware creators of fiction.

They have also thought a lot about what it means to be American, as we see in the titles of novels such as Gish Jen's Typical American (1991) and Susan Choi's American Woman (2003). Many of them are writing about classic American historical themes of cultural and religious identity, revisiting key periods from the civil war to Vietnam. They are aware of their gender but they are "Free Women", in Doris Lessing's famous phrase, free imaginatively as well as politically or sexually, refusing to limit themselves to "feminine" themes of domesticity or love, or to female protagonists. As Gillian Beer noted about the Orange prize submissions in 2002: "Women have freed themselves to write more forcefully about much larger networks - wars, families, communities, national change, terrorism and history."

There are at least 50 outstanding contemporary American women novelists, but I am going to limit myself to eight key figures (Toni Morrison is so well known she does not need to be included). At the top of the list is the prodigious Joyce Carol Oates, author of 55 novels, more than 800 short stories, and thousands of pages of plays (frequently staged in the US), poems, journals and critical essays. Influenced by both Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, Oates has reinvented herself as a novelist in almost every decade. In the 1960s, she was a social realist devoted to chronicling the lives of her parents' generation in the depression, and writing about migrant workers, "white trash", racial tensions, and the powerless inhabitants of towns such as Lockport, New York, where she grew up, and Detroit, where she lived and taught from 1962 to 1967. In the 1970s, Oates experimented with postmodernism, writing about "the yet uncharted, apocalyptic America of the late Vietnam war period when the idealism of antiwar sentiment had turned to cynicism and the counterculture fantasy ... had self-destructed". Then in the 1980s she reimagined the great fictional genres of 19th-century American women writers in novels such as A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984); explored the deep sources of female creative identity in Solstice (1985) and Marya (1986); and challenged the macho literary establishment, especially Norman Mailer, with books, stories and essays about the symbolic themes of American masculine fantasy and contest, including boxing, sports-car racing and Marilyn Monroe.

From the 1990s to the present, she has been writing with ever-more furious speed and intensity on varieties of American crime, from rape to child murder to serial killers, and their effects on families and communities. Although she insists that violence and psychopathology are part of the contemporary subjects a serious writer must explore, I suspect that Oates, whose life has undergone dramatic changes in 2009, with the death of her husband of 47 years and a recent second marriage, is about to enter a new phase in her fiction. Whatever comes next, her obsession to record what she has called "American ambition, American delusion, American strife, American hopes, American violence, American dreams-gone-wrong" will continue to expand.

Jane Smiley and Annie Proulx have also taken on both the feminine and the masculine traditions of classic American literature. In her poignant early novellas, Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989), Smiley showed that she could write with extraordinary beauty and power about the sorrows of marriage and parenthood. Since then she has displayed her virtuosity in a series of daring and unpredictable novels, including A Thousand Acres (1991), an American updating of King Lear; The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998), a novel set in 1855 during the battles of "Bleeding Kansas," with a feisty heroine who is a combination of Huck Finn and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Ten Days in the Hills (2007), which relocates the Decameron to contemporary Hollywood at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, with graphic sexual interludes and stories based on movies past, present and future that connect to the American consciousness. A brilliant and learned literary critic, with a PhD in Old Norse, Smiley has also published a study of Dickens and a book on the art of the novel in world literature.

More than any other American woman writer, Proulx has claimed male territory as her own, writing about fishermen, itinerant musicians, cowboys, ranchers and drifters in ways that seem natural and unforced. In her three books of short stories set in Wyoming, she has mixed gritty naturalism, magical realism and local colour to talk about love and death in the American west. "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" rewrites one kind of Grimm fairy tale, "The Frog Prince"; the frog in this case is a talking John Deere 4030 tractor, crooning love to hefty Ottaline Touhey, one of the few heroines in the stories. Ottaline suffers from "minstrel problems", she's "the size of a hundred-gallon propane tank" and likes a good bull sale, where "scrotal circumference is damn important". The tractor is determined to win her: "There's girls fell in love with tractors all over the country. There's girls married tractors." But Ottaline is immune to his charms. Another kind of grim fairy tale, "Brokeback Mountain", made her famous when it became an Oscar-winning movie.

Proulx's understanding of the west and the western genre is radically antiheroic. In reality, "women in the west boiled down to emigrant wives and female children on their way to Oregon and California over the dusty trails; frontier school teachers; the wives that ranchers, cowboys, store-keepers and army officers went back east to marry and bring west; and at the bottom of the ladder, prostitutes and squaws". In 2008's Fine Just the Way It Is, Proulx turned to write about the harsh lives of female homesteaders, housewives and daughters in the tough and unforgiving Wyoming territory. "Them Old Cowboy Songs", set in 1885 on the frontier, tells the story of a teenage husband and wife, Archie and Rose McLaverty, who come to grief trying to fight poverty, isolation and the cruel landscape. The magnificent final story, "Tits-Up in a Ditch", is set in the present. Dakotah Lister escapes from a teenage marriage to become an MP in Iraq, where she falls in love with another woman, but ends up severely wounded, bereaved, and trapped back home. Dakotah comes to see the Wyoming country, with its "romantic heritage of the nineteenth-century ranch", as a tragic place, another graveyard of the American Dream, where every woman had suffered, and "every ranch ... had lost a boy, lost them early and late".

Marilynne Robinson has published only three novels, but each is a stunningly original exploration of the classic forms and formulas of American writing. The descendant of pioneers who arrived in Idaho in covered wagons, Robinson began by drawing attention to the far west as an overlooked site of American history and culture. With a PhD on Shakespeare, Robinson was also drawn to 19th-century American literature, and "was particularly impressed with the use of metaphor in all the great ones - Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau. It seemed to me that the way they used metaphor was a highly legitimate strategy for real epistemological questions to be dealt with in fiction and poetry."

Her first novel, Housekeeping (1981), was a fable of female relationships to language, nature and home set in a surreal and metaphorical western landscape. Housekeeping presents heroic American Eves who reject the conventions of domesticity, rather than American Adams like Ahab or Melville himself, who escape the pull of the domestic to contend with brute nature. As Robinson has acknowledged, Housekeeping was intended to be a female counterpoint to Moby-Dick, in the sense that it raised mighty American themes out of an environment populated exclusively by one sex. "I thought that if I could write a book that had only female characters that men understood and liked," she explained, "then I had every right to like Moby-Dick."

Robinson wrote only non-fiction for the next 24 years before publishing her second novel Gilead (2004), about the spiritual battles of a midwestern congregationalist minister, John Ames, whose ancestors were abolitionists in "Bleeding Kansas" before the civil war. In Home (2008), set in 1957 during the civil rights movement, John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Ames's best friend, returns to Gilead, Iowa. His story, which raises modern questions of race and redemption, is told through the eyes of his sister Glory. As Sarah Churchwell pointed out in her justly rhapsodic review of the novel for this paper, it is the most "explicitly political" of the three books about "metaphysical exile and homecoming and their relation to history".

Anne Tyler, too, has written about these subjects, in a more realistic mode than Robinson's. In Morgan's Passing (1980), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985) and Breathing Lessons (1988), Tyler's characters run away from claustrophobic marriages, families and homes, and recreate new families and utopian communities in unexpected forms. In Saint Maybe (1991), my favourite of her novels, Tyler invents a very American and very pragmatic religion, the Church of the Second Chance. As its minister, Reverend Emmett, sums up its credo, "Jesus remembers how difficult life on earth can be ... he helps you with what you can't undo. But only after you've tried to undo it." In a recent novel, The Amateur Marriage (2004), Tyler begins on Pearl Harbor Day, 1941, and ends 60 years later, after the World Trade Center attack. These days of infamy bracket tectonic shifts in American society. The novel is also a beautifully recreated social history of the disappearance of an immigrant generation - Polish Catholics in Baltimore - into the American mainstream.

American women writers have usually written about war by telling the story of non-combatants on the home front, but Jayne Anne Phillips and Bobbie Ann Mason feel free both to write directly from male perspectives and to imagine the soldier's war through the emotions of sisters. Phillips began her literary career with a book of short stories, Black Tickets (1979), which Raymond Carver praised. In Machine Dreams (1984), she wrote a complex and luminous novel detailing the history of a representative American family, the Hampsons, from the second world war to the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Narrated by all the members of the family - the father Mitch, mother Jean, daughter Danner and the son Billy - Machine Dreams also includes letters and dreams: combat dreams, post-traumatic stress dreams, dreams of the moon landing and the Vietnam draft lottery which will determine the fate of so many young men. Mason's first book of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories (1983) was packed with references to popular culture, television and rock music. The title story, "Shiloh", named for a famous civil war battlefield and memorial park, describes the disintegration of a marriage, told from the perspective of the husband, a truck driver named Leroy Moffitt. Injured in an accident, he is at home doing crafts and even needlework, while his wife Norma Jean is taking bodybuilding classes and adult education courses. Tracing the effects of the new civil wars of gender and generation, "Shiloh" was the most-anthologised American short story of the 1980s.

For In Country (1985), her novel about the post-Vietnam generation, Mason used an epigraph from Bruce Springsteen: "Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go." Her 18-year-old heroine, Samantha Hughes, the daughter of a soldier killed in Vietnam, buys Born in the USA en route from Kentucky to see the Vietnam Veterans' War Memorial in Washington. The songs of Springsteen and the soundtrack from the movie Apocalypse Now form a counterpoint to Sam's journey in country, trying to come to terms with her lost father and the losses of the war. Towards the end of the novel, Sam reads her father's diary from Vietnam, preserved but probably unread by his parents, and is sickened by his account of killing. She runs away to a Kentucky swamp in an attempt to experience something like jungle survival herself: "If men went to war for women, and for unborn generations, then she was going to find out what they went through ... If the USA sent her to a foreign country, with a rifle and heavy backpack, could she root around in the jungle, sleep in the mud, and shoot at strangers? How did the Army get boys to do that?"

Immigrant women writers have always played an important role in recording and shaping the American experience, writing on the borders between the old world and the new. Russian-born Mary Antin emigrated to the United States in 1894 and settled in Chelsea, a poor urban area near Boston that was rapidly becoming the first stop for Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. She was a gifted child, who dreamed of the day when she would find her name close to Louisa May Alcott's in a dictionary of American writers. By the beginning of the century, she was publishing in such strongholds of New England tradition as the Atlantic Monthly. In 1912 the old-guard Boston firm Houghton Mifflin published her 20-chapter memoir, The Promised Land, with the Statue of Liberty on the cover, and a golden torch on the spine. She was a Jewish immigrant woman who dared to claim the Puritans as her forefathers too, and who compared Ellis Island to Plymouth Rock: "Every ship that brings your people from Russia and other countries where they are mistreated is a Mayflower."

Contemporary women novelists from a wide variety of locales and hyphenated national origins, as well as second-generation daughters of immigrant parents, stress their contributions to the American experience rather than their distance or alienation from it. In this generation, which includes Julia Alvarez, Fae Myenne Ng, Edwidge Danticat, Sandra Cisneros, Jhumpa Lahiri and Dara Horn, Gish Jen is outstanding both as a novelist and as a spokeswoman. "I do struggle with the Asian-American thing," she has said. "I don't mind it being used as a description of me, but I do mind it being used as a definition of me." In her fiction, she addresses the changing status of Asian-Americans, and defines her own status as an American novelist. Her first book, Typical American, centres on Ralph Chang, a Chinese-American immigrant who makes himself into a middle-class American despite homesickness and racism.

Jen followed it in 1996 with Mona in the Promised Land, a coming-of-age novel about Chang's American-born teenage daughter. The feminist adolescent heroine is at a new stage of ethnic identity, renaming and self-creation; in the promised land, American girls can change their names, their religions, their nationalities. Mona converts to Judaism, and in the final pages of the novel, discusses with her Aunt Theresa the possibility of changing her name when she marries her high-school sweetheart, Seth Mandel:

"To Mandel?" says Theresa, surprised. "No more women's lib? ..."
"No, no. To Changowitz," says Mona. "I was thinking that Seth would change his name too."

Jen has yet to write a sequel about the marriage of Mona and Seth Changowitz; but her vision of a multicultural America goes well beyond the angry rants or despairing projections of Roth, DeLillo, McCarthy or other finalists in the Great American Novel competition. Like Oates, Smiley, Proulx, Robinson, Tyler, Phillips and Mason, she writes about great public themes without fanfare or pretension. The death of John Updike was a great loss for American letters and the international novel, but it was not the end of a golden age. In the 21st century, no understanding of American literature that excludes women's voices can hope to do justice to its splendour.

The Phoenix Edition of D.H. Lawrence, "Studies in Classic American Literatuure"!!!

2011-10-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

Studies in Classic American Literature (The Phoenix Edition of D. H. Lawrence) [Gebundene Ausgabe]

D.H. Lawrence (Autor)

Fourth-Grader reviews "Portnoy's Complaint"

2011-10-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

Fourth-Grade Summer Reading: Portnoy’s Complaint

By Jacob Lambert posted at 11:38 am on August 11, 2010 9

[Recent studies] suggest that children learn best when they are allowed to select their own books… [According to one researcher,] “I don’t think the majority of these kids ever read during the summer, but [being] given the opportunity to select their own books and discuss what they knew… was, in itself, motivating to them.” -The New York Times

My Summer Book Report

By Zach McCormick

Mrs. Bianco’s class, Grade 4

The book I picked to read during my summer vacation was Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth. I picked Portnoy’s Complaint because it was right on my dad’s bookshelf and also because the cover was very yellow and the writing on the cover was very swirly. And I was also pretty curious about Portnoy and his complaint. What is he complaining about, I wondered? I like to complain sometimes, like when my mom forgets to put Fruit By the Foot in my lunchbox, or if she puts a plum in there instead of Fruit By the Foot. So I thought it would be neat to see what he’s complaining about.

The first thing he complains about is his mom. I don’t think he likes her very much, because she does really bad things to him. She won’t even let him eat French fries or hamburgers! She says, “Don’t eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school.” My mom doesn’t want me to eat French fries that much either, but Portnoy can’t EVER have them or he’ll get in trouble.

Portnoy also complains about his dad, because he doesn’t know how to hold a baseball bat! Portnoy also talks a lot about his dad’s rectum, which is WEIRD. I never read a book that had the word “rectum” in it before, except maybe the dictionary. I know it’s in there because I looked it up when I was reading “Portnoy’s Complaint.” It means “tush.”

Also, besides “rectum,” there are a LOT of bad words in Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth! Portnoy says the “f” word a LOT. I felt kind of bad when I was reading it, because I knew I wasn’t supposed to see those words, and my dad might catch me and then I wouldn’t be able to watch “Phineas and Ferb” for a whole week. That’s what happened when I used his drill, even though I was wearing goggles and I didn’t go ALL the way through the car door. He never caught me reading Portnoy’s Complaint, though.

Portnoy also says “bullshit” and “nipple” and “bitches” and “whore” and “ass.” Also, he says “prick” and “tits” and “sex.” And also, “suck” and “crap” and “diarrhea.” (Sorry, Mrs. B!)

There are a lot of words in Portnoy’s Complaint that I didn’t really get, like shtupp and schlong and shmutzig and punim. I don’t know what they mean, but they’re really fun to say! Shtupp shtupp shtupp shtupp schlong schlong schlong schlong!

There’s a whole part in Portnoy’s Complaint called “WHACKING OFF” that I didn’t really get. Philip Roth, who wrote Portnoy’s Complaint, keeps talking about penis, so maybe it’s about peeing? Which I like, especially after asparagus, so it smells like asparagus pee. But Portnoy doesn’t talk about asparagus pee at all. Maybe Portnoy isn’t talking about peeing?

What’s a “vaselined upright”?

I guess the main part of Portnoy’s Complaint is how he has all of these girlfriends, but he doesn’t really like them, and that’s sort of WEIRD. I don’t have a girlfriend really, but I think if I did, I would like her. DON’T TELL HER, Mrs. B, but I had a SUPER HUGE CRUSH on Danielle S. last year. She wasn’t my girlfriend because I never talked to her, but I really sort of liked her and never threw at her in dodgeball, except the one time when I hit her in the ear and she had to go home. But Portnoy even calls one of his girlfriends a monkey! Monkeys are cool, especially ones that wear clothes, but I don’t think I’d want a monkey for my girlfriend. She’d probably smell bad and have bugs on her, and also she’d try to eat my Fruit By the Foot.

I wonder if you had a monkey girlfriend though, if you could play baseball with her. I saw a movie one time where a monkey was a pitcher on a baseball team. That was the best movie. If my monkey girlfriend could play baseball than maybe it would be okay if she was a monkey. Portnoy never did that with his monkey. They were always doing something else, I think.

But Portnoy doesn’t like his monkey girlfriend, especially when he calls her a “crazy bitch.” (Sorry, Mrs. B!) He doesn’t like ANYTHING, to tell you the truth. He doesn’t like his parents, or his girlfriends, or even himself, really! He says he’s a barbarian, and a pig, and also “psychoneurotic,” which I’m not sure what that means, but it doesn’t really sound very great. We had an assembly last year where they did this play, and it was all about how you should like yourself. They sang “I’m unique and unrepeatable” a bunch of times, and it got stuck in my head for about a month! I don’t think Portnoy saw this play, which had puppets in it.

I didn’t really like Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, even if it had a yellow cover and swirly letters. It was pretty hard to read, because I didn’t understand a lot of the words, and it made me feel kind of gross, like the time I ate all those Rice Krispies treats at the beach. There were a lot of curses, and Portnoy was angry all the time. He complained about EVERYTHING. I probably should’ve picked Diary of A Wimpy Kid for my summer reading book.

P.S., Mrs. B—what does “Jewish guilt” mean?

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Support the Millions, subscribe to our RSS feed, become a fan on Facebook .9 Responses to “Fourth-Grade Summer Reading: Portnoy’s Complaint”

AmyCat

at 6:16 pm on August 11, 2010 Hey, kid, it could be worse: when I was even younger than you are, I tried to read my mom’s copy of _1984_… Ick! I had nightmares about rats for weeks!

If you want something MUCH better than DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, and without words which Ms. B. won’t want to see in your Book Report, check out SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD by Diane Duane…

Seriously, this was a HOOT. Thanks.

TG

at 10:32 am on August 12, 2010 Mrs. B, he should read HIS MONKEY WIFE next! It’s about a monkey! Who is also a wife! I say that because he says he likes monkeys and plus I like monkeys, too. I don’t know if I like wives yet but I think I might.

Lisa

at 11:19 am on August 12, 2010 This post reminds me of when my 11th grade English teacher suggested I write a book report about FANNY HILL. My parents brought me to the book store and we bought it; I think my mother knew what it was but figured I was old enough to read it. My recollection is that my book report focused on FH as a cultural phenomenon.

I still haven’t read PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, which I heard about as a child: I thought the title was “PORT NOISE COMPLAINT,” probably because I lived on an island with a power plant.

Ken

at 7:40 pm on August 12, 2010 The book seems like it was written by a fourth-grader, so I guess it makes sense to have it reviewed by a fourth-grader.

Zachary Overline

at 11:36 pm on August 12, 2010 Hahah. So delightfully inappropriate — love the post script.

GuiltyFeat

at 2:33 am on August 13, 2010 There’s nothing in Portnoi that the kids haven’t already sen and heard in reruns of Friends and Seinfeld and their Mom’s box set of Sex and the City.

Reading List: A 10-year old reads “Portnoy’s Complaint” and more… « New Voices

at 1:32 am on August 26, 2010 [...] What happens when a pre-pubescent non-Jewish kid reads a revolutionarily risque Philip Roth book about a frustrated MOT? Sentences like, “There are a lot of words in Portnoy’s Complaint that I didn’t really get, like shtupp and schlong and shmutzig and punim. I don’t know what they mean, but they’re really fun to say!” and “What’s a ‘vaselined upright?’” [The Millions] [...]

cherylllr

at 5:55 pm on September 10, 2010 GuiltyFeat, not everyone lets their children watch tv unsupervised. I hope you’re not a parent.

Batgirl

at 11:25 pm on September 14, 2010 And I thought reading Oedipus Rex in 4th grade was bad haha, this is amazing, thanks for the laughs, and trust me you dont want to know the meaning of those things, at least for now……ahhh the innocence of being a kid, wish I could go back to those days ;D

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Portnoy complained about EVERYTHING. I probably should’ve picked Diary of A Wimpy Kid.

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Novels by Philip Roth

2011-10-15T00:44:00.000-07:00

The Human Stain and The Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature
Letting Go and The Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature
Goodbye Columbus and The Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature
Portnoy's Complaint and The Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature
American Pastoral and the Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature

Philip Roth Timeline

2011-08-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

"The Plot Against America"

(Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie FEB 17, 2005)

"Never Before - the great refrain of 1942."

In the spring of 1942, to celebrate the success of the Iceland Understanding, a state dinner was given at the White House by president and Mrs Lindbergh to honor Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was known to have touted Lindbergh to his Nazi colleagues as Germany's ideal American presidential candidate long before the Republican Party drafted Lindbergh at the 1940 convention. Von Ribbentrop was the negotiator seated at Hitler's side throughout the Iceland meetings and the first Nazi leader to be invited to America by 'any' government official or agency since the fascists had come to power nearly ten years before. No sooner was the announcement of the von Ribbentrop dinner made public than strong criticism was voiced by the liberal press, and rallies and demonstrations were staged all across the country protesting the White House decision. For the first time since he left office, former President Roosevelt emerged from seclusion to make a brief nation-wide address from Hyde Park urging President Lindbergh to rescind the invitation 'for the sake of all freedom-loving Americans, and particularly the tens of millions of Americans of European stock whose ancestral countries must live beneath the Nazi' crushing yoke."

Alternate history, is the exercise of looking at the past and asking "what if?" What if some major historical event had gone differently? How might the world have been changed? Ultimately, alternate history is the road not taken. Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America, is based on the premise that in the 1940 US presidential election, last minute Republican candidate Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine!! Roth, the author, has imagined, and his result is both brilliant and mind boggling - an extraordinary, bone chilling story, beautifully written. This is, at least partially, an autobiographical novel. The subject is fear - fear and anxiety so sharp the reader can smell it, almost taste it - a boy's fear, and that of the Roth family's of Newark, NJ, their neighbors' and community's. It is also a love story. I have rarely read fiction where the writer pours so much love onto the page - especially for his parents and brother. Herman Roth, Philip's father, is the book's hero, and Bess, his mother shines as the ultimate Jewish heroine - "whose worth is far above rubies."

"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course, no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews." Thus the book begins, in the words of the now adult Philip, reminiscing about himself as a seven year-old boy. Our narrator for this tale, however, is young Philip, and a very effective guide he is. His voice is authentic and honest and lends much reality to this alternate fiction. It is not very difficult to remember one's childhood fears, and other emotions. But we examine these feelings in retrospect, colored by the years we have lived since that time. The true genius of this narrative lies in the immediacy with which Roth expresses these long-ago feelings. It is as if he has regressed and tapped into the true emotions of his boyhood self.

The Great Depression devastated the American economy in the 1930s. It also gave birth to extreme political movements. Fascism never really caught on in the US, but it did have a following, and anti-Semitism was rampant. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were influential voices to the far right, and were extreme isolationists in their views on the European war, better known as the German invasion of Europe. Both received and accepted medals from the Third Reich. In this 1940 election, the one that never happened, Roosevelt runs a campaign based on complex policies, foreign and domestic. Lindbergh, a national hero, handsome and athletic, flies around the USA in his Spirit of St. Louis, promising to keep America out of Europe's war. He greets cheering crowds with the words, "Your choice is simple. It's between Lindbergh and war. To preserve the nation, we must resist the propaganda of 'the Jewish race,' and their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." In a momentous victory, Lindbergh becomes the 33rd President of the United States, with isolationist Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler as his vice president, and Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior.

To the Roths, who are second and third generation Americans, this country has always provided a set of constitutional protections which allow them to live, as Jews, in Jewish neighborhoods or anywhere else, should they so wish, without the fear of the violence so prevalent in Europe. They had been relieved from the burden of obvious prejudice when their parents immigrated to the US, never more to be looked upon as outsiders. Herman and Bess Roth are startled by Lindbergh's victory. Herman comments when hearing the jubilant, cheering crowd, "They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare."

The characters throughout the novel are lifelike, superbly constructed and three-dimensional - but then I have a feeling that such consistently powerful figures must be largely autobiographical. And the historical figures are absolutely believable. As a matter of fact, Roth has placed a detailed reference at the back of the book, "A True Chronology of the Major Figures," from Roosevelt, Lindbergh, Walter Winchell, (who becomes a presidential candidate), and Henry Ford to Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop, (who is given a state dinner at the White House). Additional documentation is included in this reference also.

Mr. Roth succeeds with his vision of an alternate pre-WW II history. This is an extremely difficult genre in which to write a believable narrative. Historical accuracy is necessary, in terms of what has occurred before the author's point of divergence. The historical projection must make complete sense. The devil is in the details - and the details are where the real difficulty lies. The writer has to be part economist, sociologist, historian, military strategist, political scientist, etc.. Most readers are certainly capable of suspending belief, but asking them to stretch their imagination too far is a formula for disaster. Roth's novel is a coherent blend of autobiography, history, and speculation which makes sense of fiction.

The plot is fascinating, fast paced and riveting. The writing is fluid. The author's vivid descriptions bring sights, smells, entire neighborhoods and events to life, and make a variety of intense feelings palpable. I could not put this book down. The use of irony and dark humor are fantastic. I don't remember whether I laughed more than I cried. I believe that Philip Roth confronts the possibility of an anti-Semitic, fascist America from an American point of view, rather than from a Jewish perspective. For Herman Roth, Jewishness is, "neither a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be 'proud' of." It is rather "in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins." He insists on a place in this country, his country, as an American, no matter what "the nature of things" might be. This is what Herman Roth believes and this is what makes The Plot Against America an American novel. I give this one my highest recommendation!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
1933: Philip Roth in born on March 19 in Newark, New Jersey, second child of Herman Roth and Bess Finkel.

1957: Roth's story "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings" is published in Commentary.

1958: Roth's stories "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Epstein" are published in The Paris Review. Houghton Mifflin awards Roth the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to publish the novella and five stories in one volume.

1959: Roth's story "Defender of the Faith" is published in The New Yorker. Goodbye, Columbus is published in May. Roth receives Guggenheim fellowship and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

1960: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories wins National Book Award.

1962: Letting Go is published.

1967: When She Was Good is published.

1969: Portnoy's Complaint published in February. Within weeks it becomes the number-one fiction best-seller and a widely discussed cultural phenomenon.

1970: Roth is elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters and is its youngest member.

1971: Excerpts of Our Gang, a satire of the Nixon administration, appear in New York Review of Books and Modern Occasions; the book is published in the fall.

1972: The Breast, the first book of three featuring protagonist David Kepesh, is published.

1973: The Great American Novel is published.

1974: My Life as a Man is published.

1975:Reading Myself and Others is published.

1977: The Professor of Desire, the second book of Kepesh trilogy, is published.

1979: The Ghost Writer, first novel featuring novelist Nathan Zuckerman as protagonist, is published in its entirety in The New Yorker, then in book form.

1980: A Philip Roth Reader is published.

1981:Zuckerman Unbound is published.

1984: The Anatomy Lesson is published.

1985: Zuckerman Bound, a compilation of The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, with epilogue The Prague Orgy, is published.

1987: The Counterlife is published; wins National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

1988: The Facts is published.

1990: Deception is published.

1991: Patrimony is published; wins National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

1993: Operation Shylock is published; wins PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

1995: Sabbath's Theater is published and wins National Book Award for fiction.

1997: American Pastoral, first book of the "American trilogy," is published and wins Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

1998: I Married a Communist, the second book of the trilogy, is published and wins Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union. In November Roth receives National Medal of Arts at the White House.

2000: Publishes The Human Stain, final book of American trilogy, which wins PEN/Faulkner Award in U.S., the W. H. Smith Award for Best Book of the Year in the U.K., and the Prix Medicis for the best foreign book of the year in France.

2001: The Dying Animal, final book of the Kepesh trilogy, and Shop Talk, a collection of interviews with and essays on Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, I. B. Singer, Edna O'Brien, Milan Kundera, Ivan Klíma, Philip Guston, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, and an exchange with Mary McCarthy, are published. Roth receives highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient," previously awarded to Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others.

2002: Roth wins the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

2004: The Plot Against America, which becomes a bestseller and wins the W.H. Smith Award for best book of the year in the U.K, is published.

2005: Roth becomes only the third living writer to have his works collected in The Library of America. The first two volumes, Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962 and Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972, are published in September.

2006: Everyman is published. Roth becomes the fourth recipient of the PEN's highest writing honor, the PEN/Nabokov Award. The third volume in the Library of America Philip Roth edition, Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977, is published.

2007: Roth is awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman. Exit Ghost is published. The fourth volume in the Library of America Philip Roth edition, Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy & Epilogue 1979-1985, is published.

2008: Indignation is published. The fifth volume in the Library of America Philip Roth edition, Philip Roth: Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991, is published.

Saul Bellow Chronology

2011-07-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

Chronology

1915 Born July 10 in Montreal, Canada, the fourth child of Abraham Bellow and Liza Gordon Bellow who had immigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia in 1913.

1924 Family moves to Chicago permanently.

1933 Graduates from Tuley High School (on Chicago's Northwest Side) and enters Univeristy of Chicago.

1935 Transfers to Northwestern University.

1937 B.A. from Northwestern. Honors in sociology and anthropology.

1938 Returns to Chicago. Works on WPA Writer's Project.

1939 Supports himself with teaching, odd jobs and work on the Index (Synopticon) of Great Books series and generally leads a bohemian existence.

1941 "Two Morning Monologues," first publication.

1942 "The Mexican General."

1943 Working on Dangling Man.

1944 Dangling Man, first novel.

1946–48 Teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

1947 The Victim.

1948 Guggenheim Fellowship.

1948–50 Writes and lives in Paris. Travels in Europe. Begins work on The Adventures of Augie March, and publishes segments in various magazines.

1949 "Sermon of Dr. Pep."

1950 Returns to U.S.A. for the next ten years and lives in New York City and Duchess County, New York. Teaches evening courses at New York University, Washington Square. Reviews books, writes articles. Works on novels and short stories.

1951 "Looking for Mr. Green"; "By the Rock Wall"; "Address by Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago."

1952 National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Creative Writing Fellow, Princeton University.

1953 The Adventures of Augie March; National Book Award; translates Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" from the Yiddish.

1955 "A Father-to-Be"; Guggenheim Fellowship.

1956 Seize the Day;"The Gonzaga Manuscripts."

1958 "Leaving the Yellow House"; Ford Foundation grant.

1959 Henderson the Rain King.

1960–62 Co-edits The Noble Savage; Friends of Literature Fiction Award.

1962 Honorary Doctor of Letters, Northwestern University; joins Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. "Scenes from Humanitis," an early version of the play The Last Analysis.

1963 Edits Great Jewish Short Stories; Honorary Doctor of Letters, Bard College. Returns to Chicago in the fall.

1964 Herzog; James L. Dow Award; National Book Award; Fomentor Award; The Last Analysis opens on Broadway.

1965 International Prize for Herzog; three one-act plays: "Out from Under," "Orange Souffle," "A Wen," staged in April off Broadway by Nancy Walker, for a private showing at the Loft.

1967 "The Old System"; reports on the Six-Day War for Newsday magazine, then published by Bill Moyers.

1968 Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories; Jewish Heritage Award from B'nai B'rith; French Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Begins work on Mr. Sammler's Planet.

1969 Early version of Mr. Sammler's Planet appears.

1970 Mr. Sammler's Planet.

1971 National Book Award for Mr. Sammler's Planet.

1974 "Zetland: By a Character Witness."

1975 Humboldt's Gift.

1976 To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account; Nobel Prize for Literature.

1978 "A Silver Dish."

1982 The Dean's December.

1984 Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories.

1989 A Theft.

1989 The Bellarosa Connection.

1992 Something to Remeber Me By.

1994 It All Adds Up.

1997 The Actual.

2000 Ravelstein.

2005

From Saul Bellow Journal

2011-07-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Mr. Sammler's Planet

Criticism

Reviews

Criticism

Budick, Emily. "The Black, the Israeli, and the American Jew in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998: 149–160.

Paints the 1969 background in MSP as a moment of explosive black-Jewish race relations. Additionally, American Jewish identification with a Jewish homeland about to be annihilated by Arab insurgency means Jews were once again threatened with annihilation. The stunning victory for Israeli Jews causes American Jews much pride and reidentification, while Bellow tries to think through his own situation as an American Jew by thinking through the situation of blacks. Thus he differentiates himself from both Israeli Jews and American blacks. He resists the pride involved in identity politics and the rising multiculturalism of the universe. The black pickpocket represents American ethnicity gone wild. The racial implications of using a black man as morally and racially degenerate is serious, when coupled with Bellow's description of New York gone mad as African. While Sammler is only a caricature of Bellow, the racism is, more accurately, Sammler's. Nevertheless, why does Bellow give voice to racist stereotypes? It is a book peopled by black-obsessed Jews and a racist protagonist. Both the black pickpocket and Eisen are examples of virility and potency. Bellow uses the pickpocket not only to construct American Jewish identity, but to portray the Israeli Jewish example American Jews must resist. Underneath the plot, Bellow is asking if suffering produces morally superior human beings. The sheer act of survival with some degree of integrity intact must be granted its status. Sammler preserves tenuous ethical distinctions and through him, Bellow is rejecting Enlightenment thought and its emphasis on individualism. Neither Eisen with his art, nor the pickpocket with his penis provides a path for American Jewry to follow. However, it is the Israeli who is most to be feared. The passivity on the part of the American Jews in the face of the Civil Rights Movement as embodied by Mr. Sammler is highly problematic when considered from the perspective of the African American reader who might construe Sammler as telling the embattled white community it was right all along.

Bus, Heiner. "Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler's Planet." Amerikanische Erzahlliterature 1950–1970. Ed. Fricder Bush and Rcnate Schmidt-von Bardelcben. Kritische Information 28. Munich: Fink, 1975. 170–85.

Gelfant, Blanche. "In Terror of the Sublime: Mr. Sammler and Odin." Notes on Modern American Literature 2.4 (1978): Item 25.

Traces some rather interesting archetypal patterns in MSP by comparing those same patterns as they appear in the mythology surrounding Odin. Particularly convincing in its tracing of several parallel motifs.

Karim, Dr. No Ao (?) "Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet."

Mr. Sammler stands out as comically impressive and tragically significant of the suffering tribe of Bellow heroes who are all condemned to inwardness and alienation. Bellow's characters are all sick and morbid with the virus of the sick society in which they live. But Mr. Sammler is far less morbid than his fictional cousins. The New York he moves through is a disorderly mess for a man neurotically self-absorbed, a metaphysician witnessing the sexual madness of the 1960s. Nevertheless, he transcends his neuroses as he affirms the value of life and his human connection with Elya Gruner.

Kistler, Suzanne F. "Epic Structure and Statement in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Notes on Modern American Literature 2.4 (1978): Item 28.

Sees MSP as a literary epic in the Bowra sense, a pattern exemplified in The Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Sammler as epic hero undertakes an Odyssean journey from nineteenth-century blindness to illumination and wisdom. MSP is a modern epic because of its magnitude, its consecrated hero, and its positive vision of man's potential.

Loris, Michelle Carbone. "Mr. Sammler's Planet: The Terms of the Covenant." Renascence 30.4 (1978): 217–23.

Asserts that for Bellow the essential quest is the spiritual search for humanness in a world that daily assaults and denies such a search. This search informs every novel and MSP is no exception.

Lyons, Bonnie. "Seeing and Suffering in The Pawnbroker and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Yiddish 6.4 (1987): 114–21.

Comments on the lack of successful fictional responses by American writers to the Holocaust and then discusses two of the more successful and finally positive American–Jewish novels making use of Holocaust material, Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, and Saul Bellow's MSP, which both employ the metaphor of seeing as a central organizing principle. Goes on to argue how both books are structured around this metaphor by focusing on what the character sees or doesn't see.

Manning, Gerald F. "The Humanizing Imagination: A Theme in Mr. Sammler's Planet." English Studies in Canada 3.2 (1977): 216–22.

MSP displays Bellow's characteristic preoccupation with the relationship between individual and environment, as well as extensive social and cultural criticism. However, this novel also develops some ideas with aesthetic as well as moral dimensions.

Mesher, David R. "Three Men on the Moon: Friedman, Updike, Bellow, and Apollo Eleven." Research Studies 47.2 (1979): 67–75.

Comments on the responses to space travel of three contemporary novelists, including Bellow. With particular reference to MSP, he discusses what the Apollo Eleven flight symbolized to the human imagination. Sammler rejects Lal's idea that landing a colony on the moon might solve metaphysical problems. The moon becomes a symbol for Sammler of all the deaths and escapes he has known. Yet it does not solve the problem of death or morality.

Murty, M. S. Rama. "The Creative Intransigent: A Study of Mr. Sarnmler's Planet." Journal of English Studies [India] 12.1 (November 1980): 800–11.

Comments that the central quest for Sammler is not personal, nor is it to question the limitations of the self, but rather it is to fulfill the terms of one's contract and to know life. Provides a general exposition of theme and intent in the novel, and concludes that the novel is more concerned with values than with individual adjustment.

Nevius, Blake. "Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen [Helsinki] 73 (1972): 248–60.

Generalizes about the theatrical structures of the pre-1969 novel inasmuch as they are dialogic and focused on the individual protagonist's identity. Sampler represents vanished traditions of wisdom and mercy and is busy at work cultivating disinteredness. Yet, he too is dandling between alternatives and suffering from demoralization. MSP is redolent with Bellow's ambivalence about romanticism and radical skepticism. The vision of this world beset by fear, terror of the self, terror of the sublime, and teetering on the edge of madness is unsparing. Theaters and "lifestyles" are also shown to be divorced from human reality, and even dangerous in their sartorial eccentricities. Details the theaters of Rumkowski episode, New York, and death camps as a kind of perverse theater. All this serves as a backdrop for the theater of the soul. In this theater both Sampler and Gruner recognize what they have meant to one another and together they accept their earthly hope and earthly fate.

Ravvin, Norman. "An End to Endings: Saul Bellow's Anti-Apocalyptic Novel." A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory. McGill-Queens Studies in Ethnic History Ser. 2. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997. 124–31.

Discusses the age-old influence of apocalyptics on the Western imagination and concurrent discourses of "the end." Points out how such apocalyptic modes have influenced a wide range of discourses—the political, the philosophical, the literary, as well as on visionary religious writings. In MSP, Bellow confronts the Holocaust, the American Space Program, and the dedication of late-sixties youth to "experience the Age" (62). It is Mr. Sammler's perception of the dangerous flirtation with apocalypticism that informs his response to his times, and in particular his strong opinions about "eschatological eloquence." Concludes that in the final analysis it is an anti-apocalyptic novel.

Clements, James “Bottomless Surfaces: Saul Bellow’s Refreshed Phrenology.” Journal of Modern Literature 33:1 (Fall 2009):75-91

Argues that in MSP the eponymous narrator states that we should concentrate less on explanation and more on distinguishing the goal of that inquiry. This core Bellowian idea suggests that there are intangible truths –morality—for instance, that are not mere human construction, and which do indeed have an objective ontological presence. Points out that Bellow playfully suggests we collapse the false divide between subject and object, accept the troubling idea of “truth in subjectivity,” and distinguish between natural knowledge and self-imposed concepts. Traces this concept in MSP and in Bellow’s mid-period work in relation to his ethical theory. Also traces its roots in MSP to Bellow’s investigations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his follower, Rudolf Steiner.

Meyers, Jeffery. “Allusions in Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” Notes on Contemporary Literature. 39.5 (2009).

Discusses literary allusions from MSP concerning the collapse of civilization derived from a very wide variety of sources, from Chaucer to Wagner toNietzsche.

Dell’Amico, Carol. “Herzog/Sammler: On the Ethics of Form and Self.” Saul Bellow Journal. 21.1–2 (2005–06): 19–27.

Compares Herzog and Sammler, and the flâneur—tourist, traveller, urban pedestrian—because such a comparison reveals Bellow’s struggle with and investment in the “wasteland mentality,” against which he is said to have consistently written. The flâneur figure is a useful one because it shows the observer struggling with engagement issues. Bellow’s commitment to an inviolate self is worked out through the protagonists struggling with their rejection of an imperfect world often manifest in characters for whom the gap between self and other is never bridged, thus compromising the novel’s claims of ethical communitarianism. The flâneur text and figure highlights Bellow’s compromised project. The figure asks us to pay attention to each moment of a character’s travels, as indeed there might be no particular end to which the flâneur looks forward. Bellow shares what he decries among the “Wastelanders” and therefore we see in these flâneurs just how the gap between affinity for others and the world is not developed meaningfully or closed. Concludes that while Bellow might always successfully write against meaninglessness, he occasionally fails to write convincingly in service of the social, communal superego. While we are habituated to Bellow’s erudition and brilliance, we can still see behind the dazzle to the magisterial egos of so many of his protagonists.

Halldorson, Stephanie S. “Mr Sammler’s Planet. The Hero Accused.” The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 71–85.

Calls MSP a novel that so immerses the reader in contraries that he or she cannot find stable ground. It represents a break in the historical representation of the hero. It begins well past all the lyric endings of Bellow’s previous novels and offers an attack on readers and critics, who, Bellow insists, must stand up and defend their own ideas and their own “painted millstones” (Bellow “Where Do We Go” 212). Sammler believes himself to be a heroic type, but this impulse has been damaged. Sammler is forced by those around him to at least appear not to be dead. Here the forest appears darker, readers and critics are dismayed. Yet Sammler discovers, like Emerson, that “society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not” (Self Reliance 51).

Quayum, M. A. “Chapter 4: Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 131–66. Print.

Describes MSP’s stinging attack on 1960s American counterculture, noisy prosperity, and national demagoguery promoting lawlessness. Bellow is interested in the outward-looking imagination of his aging protagonist musing on the destiny, not merely of his own soul, but that of all humanity. The context here is global—finally gone is the mere introspection demonstrated by the early protagonist. Sammler’s mission is not introversion and individual redemption for himself. Instead he is seeking equilibrium, unity, dialogue, and double-consciousness. He is thus a latter-day disciple of Emerson and Whitman by being equally uneasy with the “cleans” and the “dirties.” Concludes that Dr. Lal, and more particularly, Elya Gruner, are real friends and men with an Emersonian and Whitmanesque sense of inner equilibrium. They encompass prudence and passion, practicality and emotion. Elya is the transcendental model Sammler identifies with and who lies most squarely within the tradition of American Transcendentalism.

Chavkin, Allan and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. “Child of the Holocaust in Mr. Sammler’s Planet.”Saul Bellow Journal. 23 1-2 (2007-2008): 37-52.

Criticizes Sammler’s “forget it and move on formula” for dealing with the Holocaust and focuses on the obvious unresolved Holocaust trauma of Shula Slawa. Examines in detail the methods and clinical symptomology of both father and daughter. Concludes that there is no indication at the end that Sammler can see his daughter’s trauma. Or that he has any intention changing his mind about his own methods for coping.

Alexander, Edward. "Imagining the Holocaust: Mr. Sammler's Planet and Others." Judaism 22.3 (1973): 288–300. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow: A Jewish Farewell to the Enlightenment." The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate. Edward Alexander. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1979. 171–93.

Describes Bellow's life-long sense of the inadequacy of Enlightenment principles and categories as a means of interpreting modern experience. Alexander argues that in Bellow's mind the holocaust functions as a metaphysical refutation of Enlightenment assumptions. He explicates MSP from this perspective. Argues persuasively that the central intent of MSP is an examination and denunciation of the Holocaust. Beginning with Sammler's attack on ideas of Hannah Arendt's thesis on Eichmann and moving through Sammler's gradual awareness of the insanity of the twentieth-century, the reader reaches the bedrock of Sammler's experience—the death camp sojourn that constantly rises to the surface of his mind and asserts itself as the chief determinant of such life as is left to him.

Alter, Robert. "A Fever of Ethnicity." Commentary June 1972: 68–73.

Comments briefly on MSP in the context of a broad discussion of the history of the American identity crisis issue and the two major alternatives of identity developed in the dissident movements of the late 1960's—submergence of individuality in the paramilitary collective and a flamboyant antinomianism among the proponents of the counter-culture. Sees MSP as a compassionately sad comment on how the programmatic abandonment of modes of self leads to the unwitting imitation of lesser models.

Atchity, Kenneth John. "Bellow's Mr. Sammler: 'The Last Man Given for Epitome.' " Research Studies 38.1 (1970): 46–54.

Complains that MSP is "a plotless, interminable interior monologue, starkly naked in its insufficiency as a structuring agent." The focus of the novel is the implications of the Apollo moon landing. Sammler is "the last man given for epitome" because he straddles two worlds, one dying and one struggling to be born—of the past and the future."

Atwill, William D. "Machines for Going Away: Mr. Sammler and the Labor of Puritanism." Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative. William D. Atwill. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1994. 25–44.

Describes the moon-bound, outer reaches of the universe phenomena in American literature and makes brief reference to MSP. Comments that the world Sammler's wastrel nephew inhabits in which he wants to know what old English dance begins with "m," coincides with the year 1969 of the lunar landing. Hence the world that Wallace and Artur inhabit is in Bellow's view astounding and filled with a thousand fantasies, wherein lies its precise danger. Demonstrates Bellow's emphasis on many kinds of flight in MSP and his exploration of what it means to live without limitations. Describes Bellow's views on H. G. Wells, of Sammler's participation in the last days of English cultural and technological imperialism to the present site of geopolitical power, and New York City. Concludes that MSP is a Jeremiad against modernism's socially alienating pull and postmodernism's historical deathlessness. In it, Bellow opts for a return to virtue and puritanical discipline in the face of cultural barbarism. MSP is a conservative, thoughtful, rational examination of what changes of the heart are necessary to achieve justice on this planet before setting off for others.

Austin, Mike. "The Genesis of the Speaking Subject in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1992): 25–36.

Argues that what Herzog learns by writing letters is something contemporary rhetoricians accept as a philosophical cornerstone, that as Jargen Habermas posits in his Theory of Communicative Action: "Persons acquire their identities through linguistically mediated interaction"(105) In his writing of over eighty letters to friends, acquaintances, former enemies, God and numerous others, Herzog has entered into the discourse of his community and, by the end of the novel, invents and establishes a Self. This self-creation theme in H serves as an excellent introduction to Bellow's follow-up novel, MSP, whose hero moves from a state of alienation and separation, in which he is unable to connect and communicate with members of his community, through to a remarkable rhetorical transformation and healing stage in which he, like Herzog, is able to escape from his role as an object of discourse. But before meriting his rhetorical redemption, Sammler must overcome an acute fear of public discourse and learn to speak and write himself into subjective existence. Observes that Mr. Sammler, unlike most Bellow protagonists, does not write. Despite his trained verbal ability he has suffered a thirty-year-long case of writer's block, as well as a silence in all forms of discourse and public or interpersonal communication. Comments on his propensity for interior monologue and "disinterestedness." Identifies several reasons for Sammler's rhetorical block and its eventual healing, as he begins a dialogue with Govinda Lal and is transformed into a loving relative who finally wants to speak his love to Elya Gruner and other family members. Concludes with Kenneth Burke, that Sammler comes to believe that "individualistic" knowledge, meaning, transcendence, and identity—can be produced only by a symbolically mediated interaction in a community of speaking subjects.

Basu, Biman. "Mr. Sammler's Planet Revisited: Bellow's Comment on Intellectual Life." Saul Bellow Journal 6.1 (1987): 18–27.

Argues that critics are so disturbed by Bellow's ideas they fail to perceive how those ideas are carefully grounded in MSP through subtle handling of metaphor. "The novel investigates the intellectual's preoccupation with overly rationalistic explanations, his perceptions of reality, and his use of language and certain literary devices in that perception."

Bayley, John. "By Way of Mr. Sammler." Salmagundi 30 (Summer 1975): 24–33. Rpt. in Salmagundi Reader. Eds. Robert T. Boyers and Peggy Boyers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1983. 384–93.

Sees Sammler and Gruner as nineteenth-century bourgcois recreated to see if they can acclimatize to our times. Sees the American–Jewish novel as optimal for the experiment, givcn its roots in the traditions of the Victorian novel. Yet the modern reader probably cannot take its premises about nobility seriously. Hence MSP functions partly as a parody on the techniques, symbolism and egocentric premises of the modern novel. MSP succeeds by being partial and incomplete, by rejecting the modern novel's paradigm of totality in the act of consciousness.

Bell, Pearl K. "American Fiction: Forgetting the Ordinary Truths." Dissent 20 (1973): 26–34.

Bennett, John R. "The Complex Fate of Being an Immigrant American: Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Mei kuo yen chiu [American Studies] [China] 10.4 (1980): 77–93.

Invokes Henry James' treatments of the international theme and comments that being an American has turned out to be a far more complex fate in MSP. Points out that with the move of non-native born American narrators to the literary center stage America is under fictional surveillance from the margins. The Jamesian focus now becomes not the American abroad, but he outside as American. MSP is that book in which Bellow is most directly concerned with the immigrant experience, and more dedicated to capturing its complex rhythms and accents. Sammler's encounter is a collision course of national and racial myths as the archetypal wandering Jew meets the all-absorbing democratic melting pot of which the forefathers promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Defined by the sheer weight of his past collected experiences, Sammler views the decadence of his adopted land and thinks of Sodom and Gomorrah and the end of the world. America becomes the testing grounds where living history is confronted with his old world values as an eternal outsider or symbolic alien. What elements of social satire reside in the book are transcended by Sammler's metaphysical awareness. Concludes that Sammler's holding fast to his own moral views in this tenuous world illustrates his willingness to grasp his own complex fate and become a pattern for a successful contemporary hero.

Berger, Alan L. "Holocaust Survivors in Anya and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Modern Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 81–87.

Deals with thc psycho-social catastrophe of the Holocaust as Bcrger traces the Holocaustal reactions of Anya, Ninka, Shula and Mr. Sammler in terms of survivor missions intended to clarify identity and recreate a moral universe.

Berger, Alan L. "Judaism as a Secular Value System: Saul Bellow." Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction. Alan L. Berger. SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 1985. 96–110.

Calls MSP an indictment of secular humanism and all its forms of individualism. Structurally the novel belongs to a subtype called the survivalist genre. Typical of this genre is Bellow's description of the ancien regime, a descent into the anus mundo, and of postliberation experience. Drawing on Hebrew and humanist traditions, Bellow advocates reverence for the sacredness of life, and rejects apocalypticism. He serves as a warning and an example to American jews whose covenantal amnesia draws them into a vortex of spiritual destruction and physical excess. Unsentimental and alienated, Sammler maps the psychic deformity of the survivors and the psychic deformities and spiritual bankruptcy of American Jewry. The Holocaust has been Sammler's point of entry into Jewish history and human awareness. His second life is less marked by cultural achievements than by moral rectitude. Describes Sammler's invocation of the Kaddish for Elya Gruner in temrs of Jewish theology and mystical traditions, and his rejection of anthropomorphic salvation and rationalism. Describes the sermonic content of Sammler's encounter with Dr. Lal and comments that Sammler's God is neither the living God of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, nor the God of the philosophers. His choices are sainthood or madness. An ambiguously Jewish character, Sammler is more at home in a library than a synagogue. Yet his message is etched with Jewish specificity. However, he is a man whose musings prevent him from acting. Concludes that, in Bellow's view, Judaism has a better chance of surviving in Israel than in America.

Berryman, Charles. "Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler and King Lear." Essays in Literature 10.1 (1983): 81–92.

Calls in question criticism that has lauded Bellow for his affirmations. Reviews major opinions on Bellow's work and sees criticism reaching "its uncritical height" with the publication of MSP. Sammler is very possibly mad and his bitter views are not those of the author. Sammler is presented with considerable irony and is an unreliable seer and prophet. The plot follows the outline of King Lear. Bellow's version of the play does not reach a full, tragic conclusion because Sammler, though lunatic, eccentric and endearing, is still alive.

Berryman, Charles. "Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler's Planet." Decade of Novels: Fiction of the 1970s: Form and Challenge. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1990. 5–18.

Reviews critical works about the American novel by such people as Ihab Hassan, Marcus Klein, and Jonathan Baumbach, and suggests it is no wonder critics were disappointed with MSP. For his part, John Clayton, in his seminal work on Bellow, confuses criticism with moral philosophy and sets the same pattern for future critics whose work more resembles semi-religious statements than anything else. Likewise, MSP was hailed as a novel which would reconcile the paradoxical nature of religious faith in its ironic formulas. Bellow's critical difference from the protagonist was not well understood. Criticizes those readings which focus on character and profoundly religious, philosophical voices when all are steeped in irony. Sees King Lear, not Jeremiah, as the proper model for Sammler. Traces the plot with a close eye to Shakespeare's play and searches both characters, Lear and Sammler, for correspondences. Plays up the emphasis on fathers and adult children, and discounts both Lear's and Sammler's final denunciations as guides to the perplexities of the times. Nor does Bellow's version of Lear give full tragic conclusions. Sammler is, after all, still alive and with all of his indestructible, eccentric, endearing lunacy.

Bilik, Dorothy Seidman. "Bellow's Worldly 'Tsadik'." Immigrant Survivors: Post Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish–American Literature. Dorothy Seidman Bilik. New York: Wesleyan UP, 1981. 137–66.

Sammler as a worldy tsadik whose history is synchronous with that of the twentieth-century in its endowment of Western, Eastern, Christian and Jewish thought. He is a man without a real home who has lived as a Jew, as a European intellectual, as a victim of the holocaust, and as an American. His mental world may be seen as a metaphoric diaspora wherein he attempts to see possible relationships between universal and particular, past and present, God and man, in order to find tentative answers as to how one should prepare for death, or conversely, how one should live.

Birnbaum, Milton. "The Aging Process: A Literary Perspective." Currents in Modern Thought (March 1995): 427–39.

Deals with Eliot, Hemingway, Singer, and Bellow–four Nobel Prize winners. Argues that Bellow's view of old age is reined in by the demands of reality. In MSP (1970) Bellow is concerned with twentieth-century civilization and its discontents, especially as found in New York City after WWII. Describes Sammler in detail and concludes that he has come to a position of faith in the ethical obligation to one's fellowman. Concludes with Heraclitus' view that your character is your fate, that life must not be lived in splendid isolation, but in caring community.

Boiling, Douglass. "Intellectual and Aesthetic Dimensions of Mr. Sammler's Planet." Journal of Narrative Technique 4.3 (1974): 188–203.

Defends MSP as a novel whose unreconciled duality is a deliberate artistic invention. Two major patterns inform the novel. One of these controlling patterns is Mr. Sammler's involvement in ethical and philosophical concerns at a primarily speculative and intellectualized level. The second pattern is the controlling rhythm of the protagonist's efforts to recover Govinda Lal's purloined manuscript. The view of the protagonist as lofty contemplator and farcical fool is deliberate. MSP evinces a highly disciplined artistry.

Bonca, Cornel. "Significant Space and the Postmodern in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1992): 3–13.

Discusses Bellow's use of the metaphor of "significant space" from the mid-1970s on to enact a kind of psychic cloister to protect the soul or the "human" within the individual or self. Argues that in Charlie Citrine, for instance, this is tied to a Wordsworthian faith in the child, and a visionary romanticism designed to justify conspicuous retreats from the postmodern world and reclaim a region about every person through which events must make a decent approach. Argues that in MSP in particular, Bellow is using Baudrillard's notions of "hyperreality," the distortions of mass media, the "ecstasy of communication" and disappearance of the private sphere as the state where the drama of the subject at odds with his objects and with his image is played out. Also invokes Frederick Jameson's epiphenomena of "late capitalism," "commodification," "historicism," and "hyperspace," where individuals can no longer position themselves and cognitively map the space they inhabit. Asserts that while Bellow's views often parallel these, he veers away from Baudrillard's poststructuralist fascination with the ecstasy of communication and Jameson's pessimistic prognoses in favor of the continuing possibility of "significant space," befitting his typically "barrel-chested humanism." Insists that these issues have dominated Bellow's fiction since the 1960s, and that Bellow's fiction is saturated in postmodern ideas. Concludes that in writing Sammler's affirmation of humanistic knowledge, Bellow must have felt he was nurturing that knowledge, but that the novel's dramatic underpinning for that affirmation is lacking because Bellow does not have the sympathy that the affirmation demands. Bellow sets Sammler up in a significant space so thickly guarded that his "we know, we know" commonly echoes within its own walls.

Boyers, Robert T. "Nature and Social Reality in Saul Bellow's Sammler." Critical Quarterly 15.3 (1973): 251–71. Rpt. in Salmagundi 30 (Summer 1975): 34–56; Excursions.' Selected Literary Essays. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1977. 25–46.

Examines the idea of Nature in Bellow and its relation to two others—the idea of social reality, and the idea of character conceived both in their moral and aesthetic dimensions.

Charlson, Joshua L. "Ethnicity, Power, and the Postmodern in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Centennial Review 41.3 (1997): 529–36.

Focuses on the central encounter in MSP between Mr. Sammler and the nameless African American pickpocket. Attempts to draw a connection between the role of the pickpocket and the role of the Holocaust to establish not only their interdependency, but their centrality to the larger themes of the book. Argues that the ethnic body in this novel is a site over which power struggles take place, rather than an "Other" against whom Sammler must define himself. He is a double who allows Sammler to recognize the realities of oppression and victimization, and his own implication in that network. The pickpocket is, therefore, a kind of postmodern agent whom Sammler and Bellow both resist, but whose influence insinuates itself into the very structure of the novel, producing the inconsistencies that have so often bothered its critics. Concludes that the postmodern pickpocket appears in a narrative structure that circles and concludes with an open-ended, ultimately self-defeating, and mysterious position. The Holocaust is that event which shatters all the instruments of knowledge and ushers in this postmodern condition and which results in the breakdown of Bellow's careful realist aesthetic. The postmodern ethnic body, then, is the reminder of that racial difference continually arising from the repressed of the American collective unconscious.

Chavkin, Allan. "Mr. Sammler's War of the Planets." The Critical Response to H. G. Wells. Ed. William J. Scheick. Critical Responses in Arts and Letters 17. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. 33–49.

Argues that MSP is a kind of Wordsworthian discursive meditation done only in "crisis," whose key figure is H. G. Wells. Illustrates how Sammler tries to reconcile his "British world," his "Polish world," and his "American world." Elaborates on the nature of these three worlds from Sammler's perspective and moves on to an elaborate and detailed discussion on H. G. Wells. Discusses Sammler's attraction to Wells' The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Argues that Sammler's most detailed meditation on Wells is contained in his conversation with Dr. Lal, and suggests that because of this critique Sammler will write a very different book on Wells in this decade than the one that was written in the 1930s. Notes that Sammler's final break with Wells's assimilationist views comes because Sammler is now opposed to such views, as well as Wellsian utopianism, rationalism, sexual views, Zionism, naivete, misanthropy, and literary views. Sammler's Wordsworthian imagination enables him to feel "intimations of immortality," which remain the strongest shaping influence. However, when Sammler abandons his Wellsian utopianism and jettisons his naive, assimilated Jewish Anglophile self, he is influenced by Wells's dark romanticism of The War of the Worlds period. Sammler now abandons his goal of being "perfectly disinterested" and his mystic detachment to become committed to everyday life on Earth, where "doubt, change, and mutability" are inevitable.

Chouard, Géraldine. "Mr. Sammler's Planet: Le funambule mélancolique." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 69–87.

MSP unwinds along a long taut rope stretched between the conquest of space and the nightmare of the concentration camps. While America sets out on its great journey to the Moon pushing forward the frontiers of the continent, Sammler continues to be haunted by his experience of the Holocaust, which exercises a powerful, inescapable hold over his consciousness. The placement of the Genocide at the heart of the novel—a singular event in the work of Bellow—can be seen as a form of tribute to Jewish history. This theme serves as the essential principle for structuring a narrative marked by the notions of deportation, detachment, distance. A survivor of the death camps, a modern-day Lazarus, a somnambulist in the night of oblivion, Sammler adopts an impassive tone and a deliberate literalness in reciting the austere historical truth, without resorting in his testimony to any form of "effect." Going beyond the mere fact of the trauma itself, MSP examines the movement through which life's empty time slips into the fabric of the living experience and exerts its devitalizing influence. Hence, the text is centered on the frustration and vainness of mourning. Torn between silence and speech, detachment and engagement, Sammler displays all the characteristic traits of the melancholic temperament, trapped within the chronic incongruities of temporal existence. Eternally suspended between the void and a pallid will to live, he pursues his perilous walk strung along the path of History. With Sammler (a dangling man), tightrope walking becomes a way of being in the world, and ethic of unstable equilibrium, but above all the vertiginous experience of freedom.

Cronin, Gloria L. "Faith and Futurity: The Case for Survival in Mr. Sarnrnler's Planet." Literature and Belief 3 (1983): 97–108.

Argues that MSP, while it minimizes external action, employs what R.S. Crane has called the "plot of thought." Far from exhibiting a failure of moral energy or faltering design, the novel is centered on a three-way debate between three radically opposed contemporary philosophies: 1) traditional humanism, 2) modernist scientific rationalism, 3) bizarre late romantic individualism. However, instead of focusing on the modernist literary legacy of Joyce, Lawrence and Eliot, his indictment of modernism targets the unleashing of radicalism, perverted individualism, liberalism and hedonism—in short the Nietzschean Dionysiac spirit.

Cronin, Gloria L. "Searching the Narrative Gap: Authorial Self-Irony and the Problematic Discussion of Western Misogyny in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth-Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 97–122.

Argues that not surprisingly Bellow uses some of his intellectual protagonists to interpret himself to himself. However, understanding this process hinges on how we view the constantly varying distance he projects between himself and them. Calls this the working space in which critiques, interprets, and even deconstructs his own intellectual acculturation. Within this narrative gap lies the key to his self-irony and his culpability concerning gender issues, since the distance between creature and creator is a sophisticated and shifting one that does not permit easy description. Proceeds to argue that MSP is Bellow's first really focused and searching psycho-social mapping of the phenomenon of misogyny and that it is possible to read Mr. Sammler as Bellow's quintessential wounded misogynist, a "Western Civ" imago in whom converge the misanthropic and misogynistic Western intellectual traditions of Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and modern literary cultures. Shows how in this novel Bellow delineates the shape of Sammler's misogyny through: 1) indicating the host of intellectual mentors, 2) providing elaborate accounts of the intellectual age he spans, 3) describing his privileged, upper class childhood upbringing, and 4) delineating his pathological fear of women. Concludes that among other things, Sammler is a useful narrative device because he allows Bellow to take yet another kind of deconstructive measure of his own intellectual milieu, an exercise in which he uses the narrative gap between himself and Sammler in which to do self-irony, mea culpa, a little deconstruction of the less admirable traditions of Western Humanist Culture. Or, perhaps it is an exercise in character delineation which finally took on a life all its own. Concludes that perhaps we should simply celebrate the complex network of conflicting structures and multiple determinants, of which conscious intention is only one, that render this text so rich in its dimensions.

Crouch, Stanley. "Barbarous on Either Side: The New York Blues of Mr. Sammler's Planet." Philosophy and Literature 20:1 (1996): 89–103. Rpt. as Introduction. Mr. Sammler's Planet. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. London; New York: Penguin, 1996. vii–xxvii.

Treats MSP as Bellow's expose of the vulgarity of our culture, its terrible children, bad politicians, and rampant sleaze across all classes, races, and religions as viewed by the European immigrant who is obsessed by understanding what makes or breaks a civilization and causes it to embrace ruthlessness and possible collapse. Describes the horrors and shallowness Bellow saw rising up from the sewers of our continental spirit as that which has gotten a more cavalier grip on our national passions. Notes that critics initially failed to see the deeper meanings of the book and dismissed Bellow as a racist fuddy duddy instead of seeing him as a prophetic writer with a rich knowledge of world history. Bellow, like Balzac, gives the reader a thorough grounding in how the literary classes function in a time of corruption. Sees Sammler as a Pere Goriot of the moment, the soul of his circle, and a force for heroic love and civilization.

Cushman, Keith. "Mr. Bellow's Sammler: The Evolution of a Contemporary Text." Studies in the Novel 7.3 (1975): 425–44.

Describes the evolution of the novel with the benefit of all the various holograph, typescript and galley materials available in the Special Collections Department at the University of Chicago Regenstein Library. It is a detailed textual analysis of considerable sophistication.

DeMott, Benjamin. "Saul Bellow and the Dogmas of Possibility." Saturday Review 7 Feb. 1970: 25–28, 37.

Discusses the narrative action, history, and character of Sammler, humorous episodes like the flooding of the Gruner household, and Bellow's informing humanity. Criticizes Bellow for overprotecting his sage and for his gratuitous optimism.

Dittmer, Kurt. "The End of Enlightenment: Bellow's Universal View of the Holocaust in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 63–80.

Notes that Edward Alexander's study The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate (1979) entitled its chapter on Bellow "Saul Bellow: A Jewish Farewell to the Enlightenment." Argues that in Bellow's mind the Holocaust functions as a metaphysical refutation of Enlightenment assumptions, not just a Jewish one. Discusses the critical debate which criticizes American Jewish writers for ignoring, avoiding, or obscuring the brutality of Jewish suffering in Europe, and concludes with Irving Howe that American Jewish prosperity and prestige simply could not be reconciled with the six million dead, and that the American novelist, therefore, produced a mixture of personal anguish and self-conscious dissociation in his works. Deals with MSP within this context and comments that it is a book not just about the six million, but about all the millions in the twentieth-century who have gone down in an anonymous collective suffering. Provides a detailed analysis of the book, and concludes that Bellow has refrained from approaching the Holocaust directly because of necessity owing to moral and aesthetic obligations, not by omission.

Ertel, Rachel. "Mr. Sammler's Planet—Roman de memoire et d'Histoire." Delta 19 (Oct. 1984): 155–69.

Discusses MSP as taking a place apart among Bellow's works as a novel of memory and history.

Essex, Ruth. "Bellow's Sammler and Kosinski's Kosky in New York." New Voices in an Old Tradition 13 (1994): 85–92.

A comparison of Jerzy Kosinski's The Hermit of 69th Street and Saul Bellow's MSP (1969). Describes the American literary silence after the events of the Holocaust, a silence which prevents both writers from entering the space of the victims. Then describes how they subsequently locate themselves by omitting the intervening silent years so that now, as older men, they must consider what they have previously ignored. Points out how both Sammler and Kosky recognize each person's responsibility and their disrupted family units, experience the absence of nurturing women, and do their respective tale-telling within a male enclave. Both men are self-enclosed exiles in apartments which promise safety, but exist in the midst of madness where the fates both escaped in Europe await them in a disintegrating West. Describes how both are involved in writing and how both are in danger of having their texts usurped. Suggests that what differentiates their final pages is the varied experiences of their creators–Bellow and Kosinski–each Jewish, but one a native of the American continent, the other a Holocaust survivor who endeavors to narrate his own experience. Concludes that Bellow's Holocaust telling is moral but inadequate and smacks of the Diaspora, which conditioned generations of Jews to be unprepared to shelter themselves. Detects a false note of remoteness and fragility in the book despite the obvious sincerity of the writer.

Finklestein, Sidney. "The Anti-Hero of Updike, Bellow and Malamud." American Dialogue 7.2 (1972): 12–14, 30.

Galloway, David D. "Mr. Sammler's Planet: Bellow's Failure of Nerve." Modern Fiction Studies 19.1 (1973): 17–28.

MSP shows the bankruptcy of Bellow's novelistic imagination. After admitting that the novel is beautifully written, and that its avuncular hero is its greatest asset, Galloway criticizes the novel for its lack of discrimination in what Sammler calls the "sovereign youth-style." Mr. Sammler himself is full of contradictions. He is forced to assume a burden of meaning he cannot bear. The dialogue with Lal is terribly contrived. Sammler ends up as a ventrioloquist's dummy. The facile formula of the typical Bellovian ending found in MSP is awful as is the clumsy handling of symbols.

Gittleman, Sol. "Mr. Samrnler's Planet Ten Years Later: Looking Back on Crises of 'Mishpocha.'" Judaism 30 (Fall 1981): 480–83.

Represents, as does no other work of American literature, the confrontation between Jewish children of the 1960's generation and their parents. It climaxes a century of Jewish writing about the father who fails.

Glickman, Susan. "The World as Will and Idea: A Comparative Study of An American Dream and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Modern Fiction Studies 28.4 (1982–83): 569–82.

Discusses the distance Bellow creates between himself and his persona. Describes the distance between actuality and the American dream. Makes a variety of comparative references to other works of contemporary American literature.

Goffman, Ethan. "Between Guilt and Affluence: The Jewish Gaze and the Black Thief in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Contemporary Literature 38.4 (1997): 705–25.

The black thief in Bellow's MSP is perhaps the quintessential representation of Jewish–American literature's view of blackness as dangerous, primitive, and very sexual. At the end of the 1960s, anxieties about social breakdown, especially in New York City, were acute and black anti-semitism was rising. The black pickpocket Bellow writes about inflicts violence on a Jewish person. Concludes that in spite of this, Jewish perspective is not the perspective of the novel when it comes to the thief. It is that of the dominant society.

Goldman, Licla H. "The Source for Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." American Noles and Queries 20.7–8 (1982): 117–19.

Examines the novel as a tribute to Isaac Roscnfeld whose masterpiece short story "King Solomon" provided Bellow with the idea of a satirical King Solomon. Traces the influence of "Ecclesiastes" generally.

Goldsmith, Arnold L. "'More Green Growth Rising from the Burnt Black': Mr. Sampler's Planet." The Modern American Urban Novel: Nature as "Interior Structure." Arnold L. Goldsmith. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 133–52.

Treats MSP and The Pawnbroker as slow American fictional responses to the Holocaust. Sammler, unlike the misanthropic Pawnbroker, has managed to hold on to his ability to love. Tensions in MSP arise from old versus new, thought vs. sex, conservative vs. radical, sane vs. insane, pessimism vs despair. Notes Bellow's celebration of Spring in the novel, and his careful delineation of the dualities in Sammler which show his shadow and his substance with imagery drawn from Nature. Delineates Bellow's focus on 1960s America, prehistory, savagery, animal origins, ape-monkey-baboon imagery, and the general creatureliness of various characters. A novel with the external action, MSP is about old ideas and new. Even the metaphysical ideas are couched in animal imagery and its is also used to describe madness, sexual disorder, and the streets of New York, his wayward daughter, Mrgotte, his landlady, and the wastrel, Wallace. Likewise, a variety of colors trigger memories of mankind in a state of Nature. Images of the moon and ideas of moon colonization, along with the account of biophysics and organism also underscore the earthboundness of mankind. The cornucopia of flowers, animals, birds, vegetation, stars, and planets enriches the novel's coherence, embodies its major themes, and provides solidity of specification.

Goldstein, Laurence. The Flying Machine and Modern Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 1986. 208–11.

MSP assesses the relationship of crisis to the moon landing. Details the intellectual dimensions of Mr. Sammler, his moral issues, his response to the official credo and the space program. Details precisely the dimensions of Dr. Lal's pessimism. Mostly concerns itself with the topic of the moon landing.

Graff, Gerald. "Babbitt at the Abyss: The Societal Context of Postmodern American Fiction." TriQuarterly 33.3 (1975): 3305–37. Rpt in Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. 207–39.

Greenstone, Maryann D. "Saul Bellow and Isaac Babel: A Review of Mr. Sammler's Planet." Jewish Spectator Nov. 1970: 10–12.

Provides a general discussion of theme in MSP based on a comparison between Babel and Bellow. Claims that both arc writing about the nature of man's heart and his future.

Grobman, Laurie. "African Americans in Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and Malamud's The Natural." Studies in American Jewish Literature 14 (1995): 80–89.

Each of these novels portrays a multilayered relationship between a Jewish protagonist and the African American with whom they come in contact. Both members of the encounter are marginalized by the dominant culture, and both are involved in a relationship of mutual identification and mirroring indicative of the fragile Jewish–American and African–American relationship in our society. Describes Sammler and the pickpocket in MSP as parallels in alienation and oppression, and also begs the question of stereotypes. It is Sammler's repeated observations of the African–American pickpocket viewed and filtered through his experiences as a Holocaust survivor that set in motion the events leading to his renewed and enlarged vision of the relationship of their mutual and historically constructed alienations. This victimizer is also a victim and is also human. But he is an emblem rather than a whole human being.

Gross, Beverly. "Dark Side of the Moon." Nation 9 Feb. 1970: 153–55.

Aruges that this book has not earned its perspective as a secular summa. Sammler is dismissed as crotchety, ruminative, and passive. Morally and artistically the book too easily dismisses its own life. The novel is rich with ideas about life, but poor in life itself.

Grubb, Daniel S. "Another Gulliver?" Studies in the Humanities 4.1 (1974): 3–9.

Compares Sammler and Gulliver as subjective-objective observers, as moralists, as travelers, and as collectors. Both arc associated with animal imagery and scatological references; both note the sexual madness of the world, and both are mystical and empirical. Concludes that having described the world in these terms, neither of the men feels a part of it.

Guthridge, George. "The Structure of Twentieth-Century Society: The Concept of the Intellectual in Bcllow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Newsletter I. 1 ( 1981 ): 6–10.

Unlike the situation in H, Mr. Sammler's philosophizing "is coordinated with the novel's physical action, and subordinate to it." Bellow protagonists do nothing and their attempts to understand their experiences are more important to them than the experiences themselves. Yet Mr. Sammler is more than acted upon. Thc mccting ground between intellectuals and actors is a sexual one. Concludes with a series of loosely connected general observations.

Guttman, Allen. "Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler." Contemporary Literature 14.2 (1973): 157–66.

Guttman defends the negative critical reception of MSP by insisting on the ironic distance that exists between the author and his protagonist. He finds many parallels between the two, but concludes that Sammler is older, narrower, more crotchety, and more opinionated than Bellow. Provides a detailed examination of Sammlcr's character as a means of refuting much of the initial criticism of the novel. Concludes that Bellow has created an extraordinary character and not a mouthpiece for the radical right.

Haber, Leo. "Saul Bcllow's Discourse." Jewish Frontier June 1970: 24–26.

Sees Mr. Sammler as a seventy-year-old luftmensch who, after several lifetimes of experience that have culminated in his confrontation with Black Power, sexuality and psychosis in friend and foe, finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. Criticizes the novel's lack of real action, and concludes by asking if this is a novel or the "stenographic record of Talmudic debate."

Hadari, Amnon. "Ha-professor Eino Me'uban; Cohav Ha-lekhet Shel Mar Sammler Me'et Saul Bellow." Shdemot 44 (1971): 102–13. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1971.

Harris, James Nell. "One Critical Approach to Mr. Sammler's Planet." Twentieth Century Literature 18.4 (1972): 235–50.

Finds MSP a profoundly religious work concerned with the process of acquiring faith. It attempts to show that Mr. Sammler's quest, that finally culminates in epiphany, involves a struggle which seems to be the use of irony to finally destroy irony, and to reconcile the paradoxical nature of religious faith through the paradox of the novel's dianoia. The faith finally acquired is an ethical faith. Sammler finally eschews "mere explanation hunting" for the higher activity of distinguishing as a means toward religious faith.

Held, George. "Men on the Moon: American Novelists Explore Lunar Space." Michigan Quarterly Review 18.2 (1979): 318–42.

Discusses the idea that from the beginning the ability of America to absorb infinite space has gripped the American imagination. Sees the American imagination now projecting itself beyond consideration of frontier and into outer space itself. Traces this in many writers, including Bellow, where the discussion centers mainly on MSP.

Hoggatt, Douglas. "Reconciliation and the Natural Knowledge of the Soul in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 13.1 (1995): 3–21.

Argues that the charge of "didacticism" which has been leveled against MSP represents a misunderstanding of the character of Mr. Sammler. Sammler is actually a heavy-handed moralist whose pedantic nature we should regard ironically in order to establish the main theme of the novel. This is the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that this idea is part of the natural knowledge of the soul. We appreciate human life only when we are in a state of communion with the world around us. Mr. Sammler is didactic because he is alienated from society. Only in his prayer of reconciliation over the body of Elya Gruner does he finally achieve this reconciliation, a reconciliation between himself and humanity, but also between the infinite spiritual world and the finite physical world.

Howe, Irving. "Fiction: Bellow, O'Hara, Litwak." Harper's Feb. 1970: 106, 108, 112, 114, 116–118.

Jones, Roger. "Artistry and the Depth of Life: Aspects of Attitude and Technique in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Anglo-Welsh Review 25 (1975): 138–53.

This is a discursive introductory article arranged under such headings as "Organization and Meaning," "Toward Meaning," "Living with all Combinations of the Facts," "Form and Material," and "The Failure of Artistry."

Kar, Prafulla C. "What it Means to Be Exactly Human: A Study of Mr. Sammler's Planet." Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder. Eds. Jagdish Chander and Pradhan S. Narindar. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1976. 97–109.

Argues that this novel defines what it means to be human in a society that tries to destroy all traces of humanity. It is built upon tensions between society and the individual. Through his historical consciousness, Sammler sifts the world for evidence of the human and the humanizing.

Kociatkiewicz, Justyna Maria. "Modern Visions of Death and Apocalypse: Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and Don DeLillo's White Noise." Anglica Wratislaviensia (Wroclaw, Poland) 33: (1998): 59–70.

Argues that both Bellow and DeLillo seem to be fascinated with the decline of modern civilization, and with the catastrophe brought about this violence. Both MSP and White Noise deal with the problem of death, individual and universal, and with apocalyptic disasters and the human reaction to them. Both aim at communicating the feeling of fear and loss in the face of inevitable destruction. Traces in very close detail the development and transformation of the issues of death, violence, and catastrophe in both novels. Concludes that while Sammler witnesses violence, Gladney has to face the denaturalization of the human and physical worlds. Both writers, however, seem to say that death is an inescapable subject in a declining world, and that we must greet the unavoidable with dignity and resignation.

Kremer, S. Li!lian. "The Holocaust in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985): 19–32.

Claims that in Be!low's pre-1970's novels the Holocaust was evoked symbolically and allusively, but that in MSP he deals with the subject by recording the haunting recollections of survivors, and studies the current behavioral and emotional disorders stemming from wartime brutality.

Kumar, P. Shiv. "Yahudim and Ostjude: Social Stratification in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Literary Half-Yearly 21.2 (1980): 53–67.

Examines the pattern of immigration into the USA that brought Yahudim and Ostjude into sociological conflict. Applies these observations to MSP, a novel that tries to vindicate the Ostjude ethic over against the ethic of the from the WASP code. The novel projects this social stratification through Elya Gruner and his wife Hilda.

Kuna, F. M. "The European Culture Game: Mr. Bellow's Planet." English Studies 53.6 (1972): 531–44.

Provides a general overview of the plot and some of the formal elements of the novel. Sees the novel as a vendetta against the "Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean legacy in modernism.'' Condemns it for its unsuccessful attempt to blend art and philosophy.

Langer, Lawrence L. "Fictional Facts and Factual Fictions: History in Holocaust Literature." Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature. Ed. Randolph L. Braham. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Rpt. in Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. Lawrence L. Langer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 75–87.

Describes the particular dilemmas of authorship when the subject matter is the Holocaust. Concedes, however, that the urgency of the historical event continues to exert its mysterious power over modern consciousness. In this fiction, fact resists symbolic displacement. Reviews a large number of writers of the Holocaust and says MSP is not a typical Holocaust novel because the title figure has had an encounter with mass murder and atrocity, and has been unalterably affected by his ordeal. Mr. Sammler is modest about what he has endured. The novel is the search for some intellectual, emotional, and spiritual "air" to liberate Sammler's consciousness from this stifling heritage. Defeated by history, Sammler is unable to bring his Holocaust experience into the foreground of his own consciousness, and unable to bring it to anyone else either. So he must bear his memories and their consequences alone. Describes Sammler's progressive alienation, and argues that while avoiding the pessimism of Schopenhauer, he develops a internal resistance to succumbing to unseriousness and the fathering momentum of history. Sammler is finally a blend of earthliness and consciousness, thus reflecting the difficulty of maintaining an equilibrium between facts and human decency.

Levy, Paul. "'Black Holes' versus 'Connections': Conflicting Visions of the Holocaust in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Reclaiming Memory: American Representations of the Holocaust. Eds. Pirjo Ahokas and Martime Chard Hutchinson. Turku, Finland: U of Turku, 1997. 131–48.

Argues that the issue of the Holocaust is an ever-present component in Bellow's fiction, and comes to the fore in MSP and BC. Here Bellow explores not the tragedy, but the various modes of response to it. In both novels, Shoah appears as the elusive center, the wide pool of darkness, the narrative keeps circling around, and scrutinizing, in an effort to relate it to present history and experience. Here the Holocaust is presented as an abyss which no theory or discourse can circumscribe, and present too is the urgent need to draw from an event a historical and moral significance that may be salvaged through memory. However, after all the structures and strategies both books hold in common, they differ in perspective and tone. MSP centers on a survivor who tries to overcome his trauma and confront the American present. BC shifts attention from the survivor himself to an obtuse assimilated Jew who represents the American post-holocaust generation. Seeks to explore the questions of what such changes reveal about the evolution of Bellow's post-Holocaust consciousness. Concludes that Bellow is sending a warning to the post-Holocaust generations that they should not be tempted to forget about remembering.

Levy, Paule. "'Words, words, words', rhetorique de la satire dans le rona Mr. Sammler's Planet de Saul Bellow." Configurations de l'ethnicite aux-Etats-Unis. Cahiers Charles V/Universite de Paris VII-Denis Diderot/Institut d'etudes anglophones 15. Paris: Institut de'etudes anglophones de l'Universite de Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1993.

Maloney, Stephen R. "Half-Way to Byzantium: Mr. Sammler's Planet and the Modern Tradition." South Carolina Review 6.1 (1973): 31–40.

Defines Bellow's anti-modernism not as a reaction against the Eliot-Pound-Joyce movement, but against liberalism, progressivism, and relativism. Traces similarities between Mr. Sammler and the personna of Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium."

McCormick, James. "Two Camusian Existential Variants: Bellow's Sammler and Cheever's Farragut." Saul Bellow Journal 10.2 (1992): 14–24.

Compares Bellow's Artur Sammler (MSP) and Cheever's Ezekial Farragut (Falconer) in terms of Herbert Marcuse's existentialist nations of the essential reprehensibility and irrationality of society. Also bases his argument in Camus's notions of the impossibility of reconciliation between absurdity and rational unity in the world. Argues that for Sammler and Farragut the absurd takes form in the institutions (family, marriage, job, science, religion) and the daily workings of their surroundings. Provides a detailed analysis of both works from within this comparative paradigm. Concludes that at the end of each novel we find both men resembling the profile Camus has given for each existential man. Bellow and Cheever both seem to be asserting that each of us has within us the inclination to truth, that our existence in this world is absurd, but that, as Camus has written, "the point is to live."

Newman, Judie. "Mr. Sammler's Planet: Wells, Hitler and the World State." Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo–American Letters 13.1 (1983): 55–71.

Newman establishes that in MSP Bellow's primary interest lies in two historical events governing the action: the Holocaust and the Apollo moonshot. Both are governed by a planetary metaphor. The world of the death camps is another planet, as is the world of the future that lies beyond man's comprehension. The novel is structured around the infinite poles of optimistic and pessimistic ideas of history, with the middle gound of the present defined in ethical imperatives. Only one fixed pole emerges from this—the moral imperative. Sees the novel as profoundly moral and carrying both aesthetic and intellectual conviction.

O'Brien, Maureen S. N. D. "Seeing and Knowing in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Chu-Shikoku Studies in American Literature [Japan] 12 (1976): 1–8. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1979.

Overton, Harvey. "Sharing Mr. Sammler's Planet: Intellect and Conscience in Science and Technology." Journal of General Education 32.4 (1981): 309–19.

Uses a brief passage from MSP as a preface to a worthwhile and erudite article on the subject of science, technology and moral issues. Elucidates a subject that Bellow has discussed fictionally for a long time.

Oz, Amos. "Mr. Sammler and Hannah Arendt's Banality." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth-Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 21–25.

Describes Margotte Arkin's rendition of Hanna Arendt's central idea of the banality of evil in Eichman in Jerusalem and proceeds to discuss Sammler's perspective in MSP. Notes Ussher Arkin's impatience with this Jewish urge to grant Christian forgiveness to the Nazis, a tendency he calls Weimar Schmaltz. Goes on to expatiate on the concept of Weimar Schmaltz as dealt with in Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah and then returns to Mr. Sammler's view. Describes the sheer creativity of the Nazi bureaucratization of mass murder, and concludes that Mr. Sammler, and Bellow himself seems to pick a fight not just with Margotte or Arendt but with Christ himself, who would forgive them for they know not what they do. For as Mr. Sammler says "the truth of it is–that we all know, God, that we know, we know, we know."

Parini, Jay. "Mr. Sammler, Hero of Our Time." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 66–70.

Gives a brief anecdotal account of his 1970s experience of the decade and MSP. Provides a detailed account of Mr. Sammler's views on history as a representative of his age. Calls Mr. Sammler's the kind of alienation experienced by a Polish-Oxonian fascinated by history and H. G. Wells while his West Side neighbors do not care a whit for Sammler, who seems pushy and arrogant. Even Sammler has abandoned H. G. Wells's scientific rationalism for Meister Eckhardt, the Bible, and mysticism. While Sammler broods endlessly on cycles of history, and on the pessimistic theories of Spengler and Toynbee, and on the patterns of violence which recur in cycles, Bellow would seem to suggest here that existential man has it within his grasp to explore the depths of selfhood and find there, through prayer and the operations of grace, some alternative.

Pifer, Ellen. "'Two Different Speeches': Mystery and Knowledge in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Mosaic 18.2 (1985): 17–32.

Describes a rift in Sammler's consciousness that the author identifies as "the polarization of two modes of consciousness, the analytic and the intuitive." Sammler perceives reality in radically opposing terms. At times he attempts to disengage himself from the world and the claims he intuitively knows it has upon him. These shifting modes of apprehension unfold a continuous dialectic between two modes of speech in his consciousness.

Quayum, M. A. "Finding the Middle Ground: Bellow's Philosophical Affinity with Emerson in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 8.2 (1989): 24–38.

Compares Bellow and Emerson in terms of their idealistic commitment to optimism, transcendentals, and balance. Mediation, moderation, and the middle ground define Bellow's view. Concludes that Emerson's and Bellow's philosophy is one of grand acquiescence and continuous compromise—the central motifs of the mainstream of American romanticism–a stream beginning with Emerson and ending with Bellow as one of its latter-day descendants.

Reif, Rita. "Bellow Auctioning Off 'Sammler' Manuscript." New York Times 5 May 1988: C30.

Discusses Bellow's selling of the typescript of all the papers relating to MSP. Describes Sotheby's procedure and the anxiety it causes scholars. Reports a telephone interview with Bellow on the matter and discusses the effect on Bellow's attitude toward his manuscripts of the 1970 Tax Reform Act, which reduces an author's deductions on gifts of manuscripts. Suggests the effect this sale might have on escalating the price of such manuscripts. Also contains comments from Bellow about how little he cares for scholarship on his own work, because it makes him feel too important.

Reif, Rita. "Bellow Papers Bring a Record at Auction." New York Times 8 June 1988: C38.

Reports on Sotheby's sale of 16 MSP typescripts, galleys, and manuscripts for a record $66,000. Reports also that the manuscripts have gone to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library as an anonymous gift.

Russell, Mariann. "White Man's Black Man: Three Views." College Language Association Journal 17 (1973): 93–100.

Examines MSP and several other novels of the 1960's and 1970's with regard to what their white authors have made of black characters within the novels. It illustrates the complexity of Bellow's black character and establishes how far Bellow reaches beyond the traditional stereotypes initially invoked in the novel to develop his character as a meaningful aspect of Mr. Sammler's humanity.

Sacks, June. "Questioning of a Survivor: A Reappraisal of the Role of Mr. Sammler." Unisa English Studies 26.2 (1988): 21–26.

Argues that all the basic questions of mankind shape MSP while tentative.,answers are provided through the thoughts, actions, and moral growth of Sammler himself. Shows how because of his persecuted past, Sammler's perception of fundamental issues has an intensity denied to more fortunate Americans with whom he now associates. Writes that through his Holocaust experiences his former faith in the Enlightenment crystallized in admiration for H. G. Wells but that he has now to reconsider his previous preconceptions about mankind. Points out that these new moral questions are rooted in his combining of the roles of righteous man and wise man until he resembles the Jewish hero of old, the religious sage whose dignity, knowledge, and virtue—not physical valor or material wealth-command universal respect. Concludes that these new questions become centered in an ancient moral response recalling certain tenets of Judaism.

Salter, D. P. M. "Optimism and Reaction in Saul Bellow's Recent Work." Critical Quarterly 14.1 (1972): 57–66.

Sees this novel as an extension of H with a new departure into a sense of affirmation and wisdom embodied in the hero, Arthur Sammler. Sammler is a person who has the kind of sanctity or wholeness which Herzog is beginning to grope for at the end of the book. In this book Bellow more openly functions as a writer with a moral function.

Samuels, Charles T. "Bellow on Modernism." New Republic 7 Feb. 1970: 27–30.

Sees the book as intelligent and beautifully written, but imperfect in its failure to connect between action and idea.

Satyanarayana, M. R. "The Reality Teacher as Hero: A Study of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Osmania Journal of English Studies [India] 8.2 (1971): 55–68.

Unlike previous novels, MSP has a hero who instead of having a separate reality instructor is his own reality instructor. Sensing that the world is mad, Sammler confronts it with disinterestedness. He tries to keep his counsel, to avoid involvement, but the outside world pulls him into its whirlpool.

Scheick, William J. "Circle Sailing in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." Essays in Literature 5.1 (1978): 95–101.

Describes Mr. Sammler as possessing an imaginary axis comprised of the emotional extremities of attraction and repulsion, around which axis the self, as it were, rotates, experiencing a cyclic affirmation and despair equivalent to the planetary manifestations of day and night. This is indicated in the lunar symbolism and Sammler's light and dark eyes.

Schneider, Joseph L. "The Immigrant Experience in Prin and Mr. Sammler's Planet." On Poets and Poetry: Second Series. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 27. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1980. 37–40.

Schulz, Max F. "Mr. Bellow's Perigree, Or, The Lowered Horizon of Mr. Sammler's Planet." Contemporary American–Jewish Literature: Critical Essays. Ed. Irving Malin. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973. 117–33.

In MSP Bellow unveils a central character who, unlike previous Bellow characters, is analytical rather than generous, and somehow less optimistic. His vision is essentially more earth-centered than visionary. This novel represents Bellow in retreat. Sammler is a collector of dour prognostications of the imminent collapse of civilization. This philosophical shift may be temporary or permanent.

Sharma, D. R. "Mr. Sammler's Planet: Another 'Passage' to India." Pan jab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 4.1 (April 1973): 97–104.

Provides an overall analysis of the socio-cultural critique in the novel and an explanation of its basic value structure. Clearly sees the novel in terms of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Concentrates largely on the exchange between Sammler and Lal in the latter part of the novel. Also expands on the theme of India found in earlier American literature.

Siegel, Ben. "Saul Bellow and Mr. Sammler: Absurd Seekers of High Qualities." Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975. 122–34.

Traces carefully the intellectual climate of the late 1950's and early 1960's that produced cries that the old novel was dead, that a generation of apocalyptic young novelists had arrived, and that post-modernism had triumphed. Shows MSP as an unpopular comment on the failure of this movement to be "more dishevelled than revolutionary." The article illustrates the book's value as a social commentary of the times and as a protest against the failure of 1960's radicalism to produce values, ideas and a lifestyle that can stand the test of history. Points out how Bellow distinguishes in the novel between true radicalism and misused, phony radicalism.

Singh, Amritjit. "Freedom and Failure in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Mr. Sammler's Planet."

SD and MSP are good illustrations of Bellow's lasting interest in the twin themes of freedom and failure. In both novels the individual's sense of failure is shaped by his attempts to assert his individuality in the face of successful fathers, domineering siblings or friends, or the prevailing ethic of society, but do so very differently. Tommy withholds himself from individuals and conventions all too eager to remake him in their own terms. Mr. Sammler must hold on to sanity and definitude in a world where individuality seems to have run amuck.

Sire, James W. "Mr. Sammler and the God of Our Fathers." Christianity Today 4 June 1971: 6–9.

Sees MSP as an almost Christian novel, a piece of work that stands out like an oasis in the desert of postwar American literature. Sees the character, Mr. Sammler, as an analogue of seventy tears of Jewish experience. Documents Sammler's intellectual and spiritual strength and his eventual escape from reason. Criticizes Bellow for not taking the last step that would make this a truly Christian novel—belief in the teachings of Meister Eckhart.

Sloss, Henry. "Europe's Last Gasp." Shenandoah 22.1 (1970): 82–86.

Quarrels with the premises behind Sammler's lifestyle comprised of both the wisdom of Europe and the wisdom of the American schools. This wisdom counts the world as something to be understood, given to us to interpret, analyze, and perceive. With this goes hopelessness and a recognition of unresponsive necessity as signs of intelligence. Sammler is a lost man—a troglodyte.

Stafford, W. T. "The Black/White Continuum: Some Recent Examples in Bellow, Malamud, and Updike." Books Speaking to Books.' A Contextual Approach to American Fiction. W. T. Stafford. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1981. 71–102. Trilling, Lionel, et al. "Sincerity and Authenticity: A Symposium." Salmagundi 41 (1977): 87–110.

Venkateswadu, D. "Ideology in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler Planet." Punjab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 21.2 (1990) 125–30. Rpt. in Jewish–American Writers and Intellectual Life in America. New Delhi: Prestige, 1993. 13–23.

Begins with Althusser's definition of idealogy or worldview as not necessarily corresponding to reality, Marxist notions of ideology as false consciousness, and Adorno's notions of ideology meaning society as an "appearance" or "system of interested deceit." Wonders how a social realist writer like Bellow grapples with these imaginary relations as he tries to perceive truth and social reality. Comments on how all realistic writing pretends to reflect a particular social ambience, and embodies such complexities as imaginary relations, and then poses the question about how much caution the implied reader should exercise in disentangling Bellow's personal idealogy. Discusses MSP with special reference to his portrayal of the New Left and other related matters. Shows how Bellow exemplifies reality and traces how these are refracted through both the ideological and creative process, through a deconstruction of the superstructure, and through the creative impulse in the novel. Sees Bellow's debunking of the New Left in terms of the Nazi Holocaust as problematic, and concludes by asking what the status of deliberately ideological works of art should be.

Vernier, Jean-Pierre. "Mr. Sammler's Lesson." Les Americanistes: New French Criticism on Modern American Fiction. Eds. Ira D. Johnson and Christiane Johnson. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1978. 16–36.

Provides a thorough analysis of the value system implicit in the text through an examination of narrative technique. Establishes that Bellow's fiction is extremely sophisticated and extremely modern in that it questions the capacity of literature to convey truth and stresses the autonomous quality of the world of the imagination. But, on the other hand, Bellow apparently refuses to be concerned with the various problems connected with the creation of artistic illusion by means of writing. His ontological quest bypasses the level of fictional representation in order to refer directly to a metaphysical question. Bellow is not unaware of or uninterested in the problems raised by his own medium: for him no novel can find itself sufficient justification and raison d'etre. Ultimately the novel is a lesson to the reader that each reader must decipher for himself.

Walden, Daniel. "Rejecting Romanticism, Rejecting Nihilism: The Pickpocket in Mr. Sammler's Planet as a Symbol of Equilibrium and Coherence." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 59–68.

Asserts that Saul Bellow, by refusing to subscribe to alienation and negativism has long believed in a radical reconstruction of society. To the question: "How should a good man live?" posed in DM, he answered that one should become a mensch, one who lives according to moral precepts. In MSP the exposure scene is usually connected with Schopenhauer's dictum that "the seat of the will in human beings is . . . the organs of sex." But another explanation is offered. To his nephew Wallace Gruner's question doubting Mr. Sammler's eyesight, Sammler quotes Tolstoy to the effect that "you don't kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such a look." As Bernard Malamud has put it, this is a case exemplifying that the role of literature was to keep civilization from destroying itself. It is an example of what Sidney Richman called "redemptive suffering" or "creative suffering." Concludes that it is no wonder MSP is called a novel in which the errors of the past and present are revealed and the extremes of both romanticism and nihilism are denied.

Weber, Ronald. "The View from Space: Notes on Space Exploration and Recent Writing." Georgia Review 33.2 (1979): 280–96.

Weber finds that both serious and popular contemporary fiction uses space exploration in significant ways such as Bellow does in MSP, to explore its "triumphs and possibilities.., in ironic counterpoint to the messy yet human concerns of the earthbound."

Weinstein, Mark A. "The Fundamental Elements in Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 18–26.

Weinstein demonstrates that the fundamentals with which MSP concerns itself are communicated by means of elaborate image patterns from the four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Analyzes these patterns in considerable depth.

Wethington, Dirk. "Re/Establishing Boundaries in Bellow: Postmodernism and Mr. Sammler's Planet." Saul Bellow Journal 13.2 (1995): 3–18.

Suggests that MSP, though linear and modernist in form, can be conceived of in two parts: one in which the business of progressing through narrative events and dialogue is carried out, and a second that functions as something of an academic diary, in which the protagonist of the novel reacts to the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Consistent with Frederic Jameson's suggestion that postmodernism is nothing more than another step in the march of capitalism. MSP reflects this unique paradigm shift and Mr. Sammler's realization that he is indeed a product of the modern tradition. Concludes that Bellow deconstructs this dilemma by suggesting that at certain times, despite our pretensions and pretending, we are only human and must ultimately share certain worlds and planets.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana, and Andrea Cohen Malamut. "Jewish and Human Survival on Bellow's Planet." Modern Fiction Studies 25.1 (1979): 59–74; Rpt. in Saul Bellow: A Symposium on the Jewish Heritage. Eds. Vinoda and Shiv Kumar. Warangal, India: Nachson, 1983. 56–74.

Sees MSP as Bellow's best Jewish novel because it deals directly with the Holocaust, the state of Israel, and American Jewry's relation to both. The value system in the novel also is essentially Jewish, with its unwavering belief in survival under any circumstances, an emphasis on reason and human intellect. It is part of a long tradition of interpretation and commentary on scripture; a preference for good deeds and actions over contemplation; the concept of mitzvoth. All of these values constitute a rejection of despair.

Reviews

Sullivan, Walter. "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Sewanee Review 78.4 (1970): 654–64.

Wright, Derek. "The Mind's Blind Eye: Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet." International Fiction Review 22.1–2 (1995): 21–24.

Claims that in MSP, as in other books, the pressures of mass society force the thinker to retreat inwards into his own private intellectual center, where the furious mess of the world can be converted into something he can handle. At the same time he struggles to prevent this inward movement from cutting him off entirely from the human community around him. However, Sammler discovers, too late, that he has been so preoccupied by book-learned ideas about solidarity fed him by the reading eye that he misses the chance to encounter, with the observing eye, the thing itself, as it actually happens in the world. He has the idea but misses the experience.

"In Search of Order." Times Literary Supplement 9 July 1970: 749. Rpt. in T.L.S., Essays and Reviews from The Times Literary Supplement. London: Oxford LT P, 1971. 38–43.

"Saul Bellow: Seer with a Civil Heart." Time 9 Feb. 1970: 81–84.

Bayley, John. "More Familiar than Novel." Listener 9 July 1970: 51–52.

Braine, John. "Bellow's Planet." National Review 10 Mar. 1970: 264–66.

Broyard, Anatole. "Mr. Sammler's Planet." New York Times Book Review I Feb. 1970: 1, 40.

Edelman, Lily. "Saul Bellow's Planet—and Ours." Jewish Heritage Sept. 1970: 3–4, 67.

Epstein, Joseph. "Saul Bellow's Messenger of Ill-Tiding." Chicago Tribune Book Week I Feb. 1970: 1, 3.

Fein, Richard J. "Bellow's Turf." Judaism Sept. 1970: 252–54.

Fletcher, Janet. "Mr. Sammler's Planet." Library Journal Feb. 1970:51 I.

Frank, Mike. "The Travail of Being Human." American Zionist Dec. 1970: 41–42.

Gray, Paul Edward. "New Novels in Review." Yale Review 59.3 (1970): 430–38.

Katz, Phyllis R. Best Sellers I Feb 1970: 409–10.

Kazin, Alfred. "Though He Slay Me..." New York Review of Books 3 Dec. 1970: 3–4.

Kiely, Robert. "Saul Bellow's Balanced Man." Christian Science Monitor 5 Feb. 1970:11A.

Lindroth, James R. "The Proper Study of Mankind Is..." America 21 Feb. 1970: 190.

Lurie, Alison. "The View From the Moon." New Statesman 10 July 1970: 19.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Articulations." Critic: A Catholic Review of Books and the Arts May–June 1970: 68–69.

Opdahl, Keith M. "An Honorable Old Man in a World of Obsessed Young Adults." Commonweal 13 Feb. 1970: 535–36.

Pinsker, Sanford. "Few Real Surprises." Reconstructionist 29 May 1970: 20–22.

Pritchard, William H. "Senses of Reality." Hudson Review 23.1 (1970): 169–70.

Sissman, L. E. "Uptight." New Yorker 31 Jan. 1970: 82, 85–87.

Sokolov, Raymond A. "West Side Lear." Newsweek 2 Feb. 1970: 77.

Stock, Irvin. "Man in Culture." Commentary May 1970: 89–94. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 41–48.

Walden, Daniel. "Rejecting Romanticism, Rejecting Nihilism: The Pickpocket in Mr. Sammler's Planet as a Symbol of Equilibrium and Coherence." Profils Americains (France) 9 (1997): 59–68.

Asserts that Saul Bellow, by refusing to subscribe to alienation and negativism has long believed in a radical reconstruction of society. To the question: "How should a good man live?" posed in DM, he answered that one should become a mensch, one who lives according to moral precepts. In MSP, the exposure scene is usually connected with Schopenhauer's dictum that "the seat of the will in human beings is . . . the organs of sex." Then re-evaluates this scene not as a sexual humiliation but as an act of human communication involving eye contact—a kind of begging both visually and psychologically. To his nephew Wallace Gruner's question doubting Mr. Sammler's eyesight, Sammler quotes Tolstoy to the effect that "you don't kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such a look." As Bernard Malamud has put it, this is a case exemplifying that the role of literature was to keep civilization from destroying itself. It is an example of what Sidney Richman called "redemptive suffering" or "creative suffering." Concludes that it is no wonder MSP is called a novel in which the errors of the past and present are revealed and the extremes of both romanticism and nihilism are denied.

Wohlgelernter, Maurice."Don't Stop the World: Sammler Wants to Stay On." Congress Bi-Weekly 25 Dec. 1970: 17–21. Rpt. in Jewish Writers/Irish Writers:? Selected Essays on the Love of Words. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000. 61–67.

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Moby Dick Chapter 2

2011-07-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Chapter 2 - The Carpet-Bag

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original- the Tyre of this Carthage;- the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones- so goes the story- to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,- So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the towards the north with the darkness towards the south- wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don't be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The Crossed Harpoons"- but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn," there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,- rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The Crossed Harpoons," and the "The Sword-Fish?"- this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath- "The Spouter Inn:- Peter Coffin."

Coffin?- Spouter?- Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.

It was a queer sort of place- a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer- of whose works I possess the only copy extant- "it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind- old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper- (he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.

"Meliville's Quarrel with God, Lawrance Thompson"

2011-07-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

Moby Dick: A Wicked Book

by Gary Sloan
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Shortly after his American classic was published in 1851, Herman Melville (1819-1891) confessed to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne: "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." Earlier, the book still in press, he said it was "broiled in hell-fire." Its secret motto, he told Hawthorne, is Ego non baptizo te in nomine.

The Latin fragment truncates an incantation by the monomaniac skipper of the Pequod, Captain Ahab, hellbent on smiting the elusive White Whale, Moby Dick, who "dismasted" him of a leg. In Chapter 113 ("The Forge"), Ahab baptizes the harpoon he will dart into the whale. As he anoints the barb with the blood of his pagan harpooners, he mocks the Christian baptismal formula. "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris," he says, "sed nomine diaboli" ("I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil").

Not long before Melville began to broil his wicked book, he had, like the apostate Ahab, bolted to the devil's camp. Wakened by voyages on merchant, naval, and whaling ships, he began to reassess the Christian theodicy inculcated by his parents and the Dutch Reformed Church, an offshoot of Calvinism, in which he had been baptized, catechized, and reared. He had been taught to acquiesce in God's will no matter how unjust or cruel it might seem, for God, a deft magician, always plucked good from evil. When his father, a martinet who spelled "god" in all capital letters, died an excruciating death, the boy's mother admonished the children to eschew recriminations. The Lord, she reminded, moves in mysterious ways. "Love God, obey His commands, & your religious & moral instruction," she exhorted.

Her seafaring son darkened counsel. He began to suspect that the world is helmed by a truculent Skipper. In his Bible, he underscored Exodus 15:3: "The Lord is a man of war." The "universal thump," he observes in Moby Dick, "is passed around." In his serpentine travels, he witnessed on every hand disease, pestilence, catastrophe, destitution, racism, hatred, cruelty, and brutality incompatible with the providence of a benevolent deity. Reconciliation required obdurate sophistry.

In the South Pacific, he contracted an incurable aversion to Christianity. He whiffed the foul contagion of colonialism. On Tahiti, an influx of diseases from Christian Europe had whittled the native population from 200,000 to 9,000. In the Marquesas Islands, "the small remnant of natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burdens. They were broken into the traces and harnessed to the vehicles of their instructors like dumb brutes." On one island, he beheld Christian sailors frenziedly sating their lusts on naïve Polynesian maidens.

On another, French gunners tested their cannons on natives assembled to greet them. Years later, on the lecture circuit, he was still dumfounded: "Who ever heard of a vessel sustaining the honor of a Christian flag and the spirit of the Christian Gospel by opening its batteries in indiscriminate massacre upon some poor little village on the seaside--splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent?"

Melville came to associate Christianity not with faith, hope, and charity, but with militaristic nationalism, ethnocentrism, slavery, hypocrisy, and predatory capitalism.

In Moby Dick, he routinely twits Christians. Blood bonding with the heathen harpooner Queequeg, Ishmael, the Presbyterian narrator, says: "I'll try a pagan friend since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy." As the Pequod readies to launch (on Christmas day), the money-grubbing Bildad, part owner of the ship, offers a mammonish benediction:

God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping men. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't forget your prayers, either. Don't whale it too much a Lord's days, men; but don't miss a chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts.

Melville's taunts occasionally turn bawdy. He recounts how a mincer, a whaleman who cuts blubber into thin slices the whalemen call "bible leaves," tailors himself a crude jacket from the foreskin of a whale. The vestment donned, the mincer performs his sacred office (slicing blubber): "Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves--what a candidate for an archbishoprick [italics added], what a lad for a Pope this mincer."

In Chapter 94 ("A Squeeze of the Hand"), the bawdiness thickens when Ishmael describes how in a vat he manipulates spermaceti (whale sperm) to ready it for ointments, cosmetics, and candles. Melville spoofs the maudlin Christian precept that one must love one's neighbor as oneself:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands... At last I was continually looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say--Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Despite the snide commentary, Melville knew Christianity had no corner on iniquity. Everyone, in some measure, was a malefactor. He scoffed at "mooncalf idealisms" that envision humans as altruistic. "The glow of sociality," he wrote in his journal, "is so evanescent, selfishness so lasting." He concurred with the devil in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown": "Evil is the nature of mankind. The human bosom inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power can make manifest in deeds. The whole earth is one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot." As Hamlet tells Ophelia, "We are arrant knaves, all."

In Melville's diabolic wrinkle on Calvinism, fallen Adam didn't sire our knavish proclivities. God did. He is the Original Sinner, the only begetter of evil, the primal Archfiend.

With malice aforethought, he rigs us with the capacity to lie, cheat, deceive, connive, scheme, steal, harass, hate, torment, torture, maim, cripple, kill. With another turn of the screw, he fits us with a faculty for self-abuse: fear, anxiety, doubt, dread, suspicion, brooding, remorse, guilt, and other pale casts of thought. He further ratchets the misery with natural ills: hunger, thirst, poison, disease, plague, drought, lightning, tempest, volcano, typhoon, earthquake, tornado, and the bloody leapers and creepers of the animal kingdom. In this worst of all possible worlds, the demonic Prankster tosses in a little good to emboss the evil and to raise false hopes.

Like a fiendish twin of John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost to "justify the ways of God to man," Melville wrote Moby Dick to lambast God. Melville sided with Milton's Satan, Lord Byron's Lucifer, Shelley's Prometheus, and other indomitable scofflaws who said "No! in thunder" to the ruthless sway of the Almighty. "For all men who say yes," Melville averred, "lie." In Captain Ahab, Melville created a thunderous naysayer of his own.

Knowing any barefaced condemnation of the Almighty would rankle his readers, predominantly Christian, Melville indemnified himself by filtering Ahab's thunderous invective through a nominally Christian narrator, Ishmael, who brands Ahab an irremediable lunatic: "Human madness is often a cunning and feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into a subtler form. Ahab's lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted." By ascribing Ahab's blasphemies to madness, Melville could fob off querulous critics. (Actually, Ishmael cloaks his true allegiance. He is a surreptitious ally, a laundered counterpart, of Ahab.)

Melville further shielded himself with opaque symbolism. The uninitiated reader may be baffled by the hoopla surrounding a prolix narrative on whaling. In Melville's day, this Great American Novel was panned as an uneven sea yarn, marred by philosophical digressions, gratuitous ribaldry, and recondite allusions. Even Ahab's thunder can sound like a distant, muffled rumble. One isn't always sure just where or what the lightning struck.

The novel is one vast, hooded allegory. Throughout, cetology is code for theology. In Melville's Quarrel with God, Lawrance Thompson notes that "Melville's entire artistic contrivance in Moby Dick is his own esoteric and cabalistic commentary on God." All talk of whales (Moby Dick, above all) is God-talk.

Hence, rumor has it that Moby/God is "not only ubiquitous, but immortal." He is invulnerable to assault: "Though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he will still swim away unharmed." He transcends understanding: "The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. One portrait may hit the mark nearer than another, but none can hit it with any considerable degree of accuracy." He is intelligent, powerful, grand, mighty. Some characterize him as bloodthirsty, vengeful, and malevolent, though one ship doctor, a prosaic diagnostician, opines: "What you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness."

Having never heard of him, some sailors doubt he exists. Others have heard, "but don't believe in him at all." The whale's whiteness is linked to "the heartless voids and immensities of the universe" and the "colorless, all-color of atheism."

To Captain Ahab, Moby Dick bodies forth a malignant universe designed to vex, baffle, and infuriate. Ishmael, who knows all, explains:

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down."

Moby Dick is a mask of God. By harpooning the whale, Ahab hopes to strike the "unknown but still reasoning thing that puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask." Fluent in Ahabese, Starbuck, the pious First Mate of the Pequod, knows who the reasoning thing is. When Starbuck accuses Ahab of blasphemy, the Captain retorts:

"How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me the White Whale is that wall, shoved near to me. He tasks me; he heaps me. I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the White Whale agent, or be the White Whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

In Ahab's brainish apprehension, Moby God is a skulking ruffian who picks on pint-sized opponents: "I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies: Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags!"

Ahab's sacrilege isn't always mediated by the whale symbolism. At one point, he grouses to a subordinate: "Ahab feels, feels. To think's audacity. Only God has that right and privilege." The unelaborated comment encrypts a sentiment Melville confided to Hawthorne:

"I had rather be a fool with a heart than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch."

Melville waggishly added: "You perceive I employ a capital letter in the pronoun referring to the Deity. Don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?"

With Machiavellian deviltry, the cerebral Deity--an "unearthly, cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor"--orchestrates Ahab's very blasphemies:

"Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, or God, that lifts this arm? If the great sun moves not of himself, but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I."

So Ahab rages at God because God compels him to. Or does God rage at himself? "I am madness maddened," says Ahab. One begins to see why.

Whether to mollify or to heckle Christians (or both), Melville dissociates the Christian deity from Ahab's God, the "unsuffusing thing beyond." In a tutorial prayer to the Godhead, symbolized by a "lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames" (three lightning-lit masts), Ahab says:

"Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical."

Melville had mused to Hawthorne: "We incline to think that God cannot explain his own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us."
A Saintly devil, indeed

Since Moby Dick emblematizes God, Ahab's vengeful quest has a predictable terminus: The whale destroys Ahab and all his crew--except Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale. Pious readers sometimes construe the whale's triumph as an exemplum on the folly of sacrilege. For Melville, the whale's rough-and-tumble retaliation was another instance of God-bullying.

Captain Ahab mirrors the tragic hero Melville limned for Hawthorne: "He declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish, but so long as he exists, he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an equal basis." To the end, Ahab is defiant and disdainful: "To neither love nor reverence wilt thou [God] be kind. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional mastery in me."

After Moby Dick, Melville began to slough off the neo-Calvinism and slither toward agnosticism. Still, he occasionally pined for the custodial Papa Above of his boyhood. Hawthorne, who understood Melville as well as anyone, said of him: "He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. He has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us."

A saintly devil, indeed!

Blog editor's comment on this review:

I derived the title of my book, "Johnson's Quarrel With Swift," from Lawrance Thompson's, "Melville's Quarrel with God," to suggest that Swift in Johnson's lifetime had bcome enthroned as a model of irrefutable wit and logic. Swift as a clergyman, Johnson, the "harmless drudge lecicographer" could well have felt uncomfortable that Swift was one stage nearer the "Absolute."
Therefore, Swift may have been Johnson's white whale, or Moby Dick (the voice of the deity) for his circle of aristocratic and well-heeled literary circle.
"A saintly devil, indeed." is Gary Sloan's epitaph for Melville for being in the middle of the theological doubt. Perhaps Samuel Johnson also felt like a "saintly devil," for taking on the crashing rhetoric of the late Dean's words.

Jordan Richman

Moby Dick Chapter 1

2011-07-09T11:46:00.001-07:00

Chapter 1 - Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling And there they stand- miles of them- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets avenues- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies- what is the one charm wanting?- Water- there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick- grow quarrelsome- don't sleep of nights- do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;- no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,- though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board- yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;- though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bakehouses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about- however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way- either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,- what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way- he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL." "BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces- though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it- would they let me- since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

Next Chapter
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
- Samuel Johnson

Moby Dick Herman Melville

2011-04-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Read this book from the chapters below at: Moby Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville :: Classic Books and Short Stories

Moby Dick; or, The Whale

Moby-Dick, written in 1851, recounts the adventures of the narrator Ishmael as he sails on the whaling ship Pequod under the command of Captain Ahab.

Ishmael believes he has signed onto a routine commission aboard a normal whaling vessel, but he soon learns that Captain Ahab is not guiding the Pequod in the simple pursuit of commerce but is seeking one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great while whale infamous for his giant proportions and his ability to destroy the whalers that seek him. Captain Ahab's wooden leg is the result of his first encounter with the whale, when he lost both leg and ship. But Captain Ahab is bent on revenge and he intends to get Moby-Dick.

Ahab demonstrates erratic behavior from the very beginning and his eccentricities magnify as the voyage progresses. As the novel draws to a conclusion, the Pequod encounters the whaling ship Rachel. The Rachel's captain asks Ahab to help him in a search and rescue effort for his whaling-crew that went missing the day before - and the captain's son is among the missing. But when Ahab learns that the crew disappeared while tangling with Moby-Dick he refuses the call to aid in the rescue so that he may hunt Moby-Dick instead.

The encounter with Moby-Dick brings a tragic end to the affair. Ishmael alone survives, using his friend Queequeg's coffin as a flotation device until he is ironically rescued by the Rachel, which has continued to search for its missing crew.

The novel is not only a great American classic, but is also heralded as one of greatest novels in the English language. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Start Reading Moby Dick; or, The Whale

Table of Contents

ETYMOLOGY

Chapter 1 - Loomings

Chapter 2 - The Carpet-Bag

Chapter 3 - The Spouter Inn

Chapter 4 - The Counterpane

Chapter 5 - Breakfast

Chapter 6 - The Street

Chapter 7 - The Chapel

Chapter 8 - The Pulpit

Chapter 9 - The Sermon

Chapter 10 - A Bosom Friend

Chapter 11 - Nightgown

Chapter 12 - Biographical

Chapter 13 - Wheelbarrow

Chapter 14 - Nantucket

Chapter 15 - Chowder

Chapter 16 - The Ship

Chapter 17 - The Ramadan

Chapter 18 - His Mark

Chapter 19 - The Prophet

Chapter 20 - All Astir

Chapter 21 - Going Aboard

Chapter 22 - Merry Christmas

Chapter 23 - The Lee Shore

Chapter 24 - The Advocate

Chapter 25 - Postscript

Chapter 26 - Knights and Squires

Chapter 27 - Knights and Squires

Chapter 28 - Ahab

Chapter 29 - Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb

Chapter 30 - The Pipe

Chapter 31 - Queen Mab

Chapter 32 - Cetology

Chapter 33 - The Specksynder

Chapter 34 - The Cabin-Table

Chapter 35 - The Mast-Head

Chapter 36 - The Quarter-Deck

Chapter 37 - Sunset

Chapter 38 - Dusk

Chapter 39 - First Night-Watch

Chapter 40 - Midnight, Forecastle

Chapter 41 - Moby Dick

Chapter 42 - The Whiteness of The Whale

Chapter 43 - Hark!

Chapter 44 - The Chart

Chapter 45 - The Affidavit

Chapter 46 - Surmises

Chapter 47 - The Mat-Maker

Chapter 48 - The First Lowering

Chapter 49 - The Hyena

Chapter 50 - Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah

Chapter 51 - The Spirit-Spout

Chapter 52 - The Albatross

Chapter 53 - The Gam

Chapter 54 - The Town-Ho's Story

Chapter 55 - Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

Chapter 56 - Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes

Chapter 57 - Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

Chapter 58 - Brit

Chapter 59 - Squid

Chapter 60 - The Line

Chapter 61 - Stubb Kills a Whale

Chapter 62 - The Dart

Chapter 63 - The Crotch

Chapter 64 - Stubb's Supper

Chapter 65 - The Whale as a Dish

Chapter 66 - The Shark Massacre

Chapter 67 - Cutting In

Chapter 68 - The Blanket

Chapter 69 - The Funeral

Chapter 70 - The Sphynx

Chapter 71 - The Jeroboam's Story

Chapter 72 - The Monkey-Rope

Chapter 73 - Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale and Then Have a Talk Over Him

Chapter 74 - The Sperm Whale's Head - Contrasted View

Chapter 75 - The Right Whale's Head - Contrasted View

Chapter 76 - The Battering-Ram

Chapter 77 - The Great Heidelburgh Tun

Chapter 78 - Cistern and Buckets

Chapter 79 - The Prairie

Chapter 80 - The Nut

Chapter 81 - The Pequod Meets The Virgin

Chapter 82 - The Honor and Glory of Whaling

Chapter 83 - Jonah Historically Regarded

Chapter 84 - Pitchpoling

Chapter 85 - The Fountain

Chapter 86 - The Tail

Chapter 87 - The Grand Armada

Chapter 88 - Schools and Schoolmasters

Chapter 89 - Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

Chapter 90 - Heads or Tails

Chapter 91 - The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud

Chapter 92 - Ambergris

Chapter 93 - The Castaway

Chapter 94 - A Squeeze of the Hand

Chapter 95 - The Cassock

Chapter 96 - The Try-Works

Chapter 97 - The Lamp

Chapter 98 - Stowing Down and Clearing Up

Chapter 99 - The Doubloon

Chapter 100 - Leg and Arm. The Pequod of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London

Chapter 101 - The Decanter

Chapter 102 - A Bower in the Arsacides

Chapter 103 - Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton

Chapter 104 - The Fossil Whale

Chapter 105 - Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? - Will He Perish?

Chapter 106 - Ahab's Leg

Chapter 107 - The Carpenter

Chapter 108 - Ahab and the Carpenter

Chapter 109 - Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin

Chapter 110 - Queequeg in His Coffin

Chapter 111 - The Pacific

Chapter 112 - The Blacksmith

Chapter 113 - The Forge

Chapter 114 - The Gilder

Chapter 115 - The Pequod Meets The Bachelor

Chapter 116 - The Dying Whale

Chapter 117 - The Whale Watch

Chapter 118 - The Quadrant

Chapter 119 - The Candles

Chapter 120 - The Deck Toward the End of the First Night Watch

Chapter 121 - Midnight - The Forecastle Bulwarks

Chapter 122 - Midnight Aloft.- Thunder and Lightning

Chapter 123 - The Musket

Chapter 124 - The Needle

Chapter 125 - The Log and Line

Chapter 126 - The Life-Buoy

Chapter 127 - The Deck

Chapter 128 - The Pequod Meets The Rachel

Chapter 129 - The Cabin

Chapter 130 - The Hat

Chapter 131 - The Pequod Meets The Delight

Chapter 132 - The Symphony

Chapter 133 - The Chase - First Day

Chapter 134 - The Chase - Second Day

Chapter 135 - The Chase - Third Day

Epilogue

The Raven Edgar Allan Poe

2011-04-06T15:08:00.000-07:00

Title: The Raven
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--

Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--

Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door--

Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;

This it is and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door--

Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"--

Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping something louder than before.

"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;

Let me see, then, what thereat is and this mystery explore--

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--

'Tis the wind and nothing more.

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,

Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore--

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door--

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

With such name as "Nevermore."

But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only

That one word, as if its soul in that one word he did outpour

Nothing farther then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered--

Till I scarcely more than muttered: "Other friends have flown before--

On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before."

Then the bird said "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster

Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore--

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

Of 'Never--nevermore.'"

But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,

But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er

She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee

Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!--

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--

On this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore--

Is there--is there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!"

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore--

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting--

"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming

And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadows on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted--nevermore!

_________

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2011-03-01T11:30:00.001-08:00

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2011-01-04T12:45:00.000-08:00

The First Assassin

By John J. Miller

The year is 1861 with the country on the brink of the Civil War. The United States has just elected Lincoln the 16th President of the United States. Having already unknowingly dodged one assassination attempt, the President’s life is constantly in danger.

Colonel Charles P. Rook is enlisted to organize Washington D. C.’s security to protect the President-elect. It is a difficult task. Lincoln’s election leads to the secession of South Carolina from the Union and sparks a wave of violence across the nation. As death threats and rumors of conspiracy began to seep into the capital, Rook finds himself alone in his investigations. His superior officer, General Winfield Scott, insists an assassination is simply not possible.

After the Baltimore Plot (Chapter One) Lincoln actually did dodge a bullet by arriving in Washington the night before his train schedule. Since he was was accused of cowardice for having gone along with this ruse, Lincoln decides to conduct an open presidency, permitting everybody to enter the White House, and making himself available to minor petitioners of all kinds. The result is a security nightmare for Colonel Rook. Because of the President's distaste of an obvious armed presence, Rook puts several of his men into plain clothes, investigating threats from outside the White House by means of covert surveillance and good detective work. In doing so, he incurs the wrath of his superior officer, General Winfield Scott, who believes that a soldier's job is fighting battles rather than skulking around after private citizens -- especially when one of the citizens in question is a noted Washington hostess, Violet Grenier, a sympathizer for the South, whose salons are frequented by powerful men of all persuasions, despite her known secessionist views. But, as always in Washington, knowledge is power, and Rook is determined to make up in knowledge what he lacks in manpower.

Given his name, Colonel Rook by the author, suggests to me the action of the novel moving along the lines of a chess game--between the characters who represent the North and South. Lincoln is the Black King since he takes the side of the slaves and Colonel Rook is his black Rook, the piece that protects and fights for him. On the Black side there are two slaves, Lucius and Big Joe who are the Black Knights who hop over the heads of their white master's pieces and sacrifice their lives to get vital information to President Lincoln. They use Portia, the granddaughter of Lucius, as the pawn who delivers the information to the Black King and then wins her freedom when she reaches the President's row on the chessboard.

On the White side is Langston Bennett the White King, who always makes the first move, and his Queen, Violet Grenier, who conspires to help the assassin Langston has hired, known only as "Mazorca," a sinister hit man from Argentina, to kill President Lincoln. When Mazorca dons the preacher's black coat, after he slashes his throat and throws his bible into the waste canal (so he can use his own homemade gun bible) he becomes the avenging White Bishop for the White King.

After the game is over with the death of Mazorca, Violet Grenier suggests to Langston Bennett, in the Epilogue, that a second game could be in the works since "the war is young."

If Mr. Miller does write a sequel to this fascinating historical novel, I'm sure there will be lots of fans, including myself, who will like to have a ring-side seat to do their kibbitzing.

Dr. Jordan Richman
The Coronado Review of American Literature

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2010-11-28T21:31:00.001-08:00

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2010-10-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

Jewish-American Literature by Dr. Gerhard Falk

2010-10-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

Jewish-American Literature by Dr. Gerhard Falk

Jewish-American literature is now only about one century old if we include that literature which was written in Yiddish by immigrants between 1885 and 1935. Yiddish, however, is hardly used in America at the beginning of the 21st century so that anything foreign except some of the works of Goethe and Voltaire has no influence on the American Jew simply because he cannot read it.

Yiddish writers were commonly radicals and secularists. From the time of the first volume of Yiddish poetry published in America in 1877 to the end of the Yiddish era in about 1975, Jewish-American writers always exhibited a strong interest in radical and hence secular ideas. Yiddish writers expressed themselves in poetry, in the theater, in novels, in newspapers and in intellectual books, papers and pamphlets. Throughout these five media ran, for the most part, a secular attitude most visible in the novel.

The first Jewish novels written in America were written by immigrants. This was true not because there were no Jews here before the last two decades of the nineteenth century, but because those Jews who had come here before 1881 were very few, had arrived in the 17th century from Spain and Portugal and in the nineteenth century from Germany and had rapidly assimilated into the majority American culture. However, 1881 marked a major turning point in Jewish history. On March 1 of that year the Russian Czar, Alexander II, was assassinated. When his son Alexander III ascended the Russian throne persecution of the Jews became the policy of the Russian government and led to the prompt immigration of millions of Jews to America. These millions of Jews spoke Yiddish so that it is not at all surprising that the first American Jewish writers included in that migration wrote in that language.

Thus, the Jewish writers of that day brought European Jewishness to America. Among these was Morris Winshevsky, who promoted socialism but had very little Jewish content in his poetry. Instead, Winshevsky was a follower of the Jewish enlightenment, called Haskalah, a movement with a distinct secular emphasis. In fact, Winshevsky represented the revolt against religion at the end of the 19th century when he wrote: "For me....my disbelief and hatred toward all faiths reached a high point of fanaticism.....My greatest delight was to prove that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that Joshuah did not cause the heavens to stand still."

There were of course innumerable other authors but only a few stand out as major contributors to Yiddish writing in the U.S.A. There was Morris Rosenfeld, prime representative of the so-called "sweatshop" poets, who reflected the Jewish radicalism of his day. That radicalism was the reaction to the misery of living in immigrant slums, of the exploitation of the Jewish workers, and the desperation of the Jewish masses. It was a radicalism which rejected the religion of Europe and sought to rely on the politics of this world instead. Although Rosenfeld was translated into English, his following in the English language was only temporary so that his fame rests finally on the Yiddish following he was able to attract. He too was an agnostic.

The most important Yiddish writer of the early twentieth century however, was Abraham Cahan. Although he spoke Yiddish better than English, Cahan succeeded in publishing The Chosen People and The Rise of David Levinsky in English in 1917. This book has been called "the most important novel written by a Jewish immigrant". In it Levinsky becomes an American millionaire at the cost of his Jewish heritage and upon first becoming a thoroughgoing secularist. "Spencer and Darwin replace the Torah, Dickens and Thackeray the Talmud." Cahan depicts the emptiness of Levinsky's life despite his rise to money and fame.

Other American Jewish writers who wrote in the Yiddish or the English idiom were Sidney Nyburg, Anzela Yezierska, James Oppenheim, Samuel Ornitz and Ludwig Lewisohn, who was born in the United States, the son of German Jewish immigrants. All these dealt with the fate of the immigrants. All of these rejected religion and sought to show how pragmatism and realism were far superior in solving man's problems than belief in anything supernatural.

During the depression of the 1930's American Jewish writers, now mostly born in the U.S.A., were very much affected by the discontinuity of European Judaism with American Judaism. Except for the 1978 Nobel prize winner in literature Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland in 1904, these writers all wrote in English. Singer, although he wrote in Yiddish, was published in English so that his work is known to almost all Americans in the latter idiom.

Except for Ludwig Lewisohn and Meyer Levin, who defended Jewishness if not Judaism, these writers all rejected Jewish tradition. Instead, these writers leaned toward the political "left" and viewed their Jewishness as a secular condition. Nelson Algren in Somebody in Boots, Albert Halper in The Foundry, Isadore Schneider in From the Kingdom of Necessity and many others viewed socialism as the answer to the Jewish problem both here and abroad and disdained religion entirely. Demanding a future free of tradition, writers such as Michael Gold in Jews Without Money, or Charles Reznikoff in By the Waters of Manhattan all believe that Marxism, not Judaism, is the inevitable answer to the degradations and hardships of the immigrant slums.

The writer Paul Goodman, whom the historian Irving Howe called a "Jewish intellectual alienated to the point of complete reduction," thought that the fellowship of all humans is enhanced by the Jewish tradition and that the fully Jewish is regarded as the fully human. Judaism as a religion or as a separate experience is hardly credited by Goodman.

Added to these novelists, there were in the first part of the 20th century Jewish theologians who also strove to distance theology from the European tradition. Kaufman Kohler, a reform Rabbi wrote Jewish Theology Systematically and Historically Considered in 1918 and in 1934 Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, a representative of the conservative movement in Judaism, published his monumental Judaism as a Civilization.

Not only did these rabbis disconnect American Judaism from European Judaism, they also redefined the God concept. Thus, Kaplan presents God as "a chronologically variable social idea," or as a "struggling ordering force of nature."

Thus, after the second world war, i.e., after 1945, a vast number of Jewish - American writers inundated the literature of the United States and have kept this up until the beginning of this century.

A list of all the American - Jewish writers who have contributed to American literature since 1945 cannot be presented here. It is far too long and would involve a discussion of a whole social movement with far reaching consequences for American culture. Some of the most prominent names among American-Jewish fiction writers are of course Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Tillie Olson, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Herbert Gold, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow, Stanley Elkin, Hugh Nissensen and Phillip Roth.

The works of Phillip Roth are undoubtedly excellent examples of the rejection of traditional Judaism already exhibited by the Yiddish writers a generation earlier. Like their non-Jewish contemporaries and predecessors, Jewish writers in the last half of the 20th century contributed a great deal to the secularization of America and Jewish life as well as they created a distinction between Judaism and Jewishness which their grandparents never knew and which has become the Great Divide within the Jewish community in the twenty-first century.

In 1933, when Phillip Roth was born, mass immigration to the United States had come to an end and Jewish immigration, mostly from Germany, was small and involved many newcomers already secularized by their German environment. Numerous Yiddish writers and the philosophical, scientific and literary world in America had secularized at least the academic world and in particular such institutions as the University of Chicago, where Roth was a student and where American sociology was created.

Like thousands of other Jews who came of age in the '30's, Roth entered into the world of higher education where the challenges to Judaism or any religion were already embedded in the curriculum. And since over eighty percent of Jews of college age attend an institution of higher education and have done so for half a century, they, like Roth, found every reason to divorce Judaism from Jewishness and discard "the faith of our fathers."

Many of the Jewish writers, with Roth in the forefront, now opposed their Jewish heritage and treated it with contempt, disdain and calumny. In fact, since Roth wrote Good-Bye, Columbus in 1959 "there are those who still grit their teeth, hoping that the irreverent, satirical Mr. Roth will go away."

Roth, of course, did to the Jewish world what non-Jewish writers had already done to the Christian world for a century. He secularized the sacred. He ridiculed the divine. He insulted the tradition and he vulgarized his "in-group." Thus, Roth, and so many other Jewish - American writers, contributed mightily, not only to the secularization of Judaism and America in general, but also to the de-mystification of the Jewish tradition. This means that both for non-Jews and for Americans of Jewish origins who had left the tradition behind, Roth provides insight into 20th (and 21st) century Jewish life as it is lived each day. He explains what is important to contemporary American Jews. He shows that Judaism is not one of the important ideas in the lives of American Jews but that Jews have substituted membership in clubs and organizations for membership in synagogues. Roth further claims that synagogues and rabbis are themselves secular institutions at the end of the 20th century, that Jewish ritual emphasizes financial display as in Bar Mitzvahs and weddings and that the Jewish community in America is governed by the same type of business interests which Sinclair Lewis described governing the Christian community exhibited and shown over and over again in Babbitt.

No doubt it is Portnoy's Complaint, however, which Roth wrote in 1969, that led to the accusations that Roth is a Jewish anti-semite, a self hater and a self promoter. This book, which attacks the stereotypical Jewish mother, recites at length and in detail the sexual problems of the protagonist. It has been labeled "pornographic" for good reason and was truly "shocking" on first coming to public attention. Now, at the beginning of the century, nothing else will shock anyone any more. Dreiser and Lewis and their companions also shocked Americans. But by the time Roth began to write, the only means of gaining the readers' attention among all the competing writers was to do something yet more extreme than what had already been done before the second world war. Merely proclaiming one's disbelief in orthodox theology was no longer necessary since, as we have seen, innumerable writers in philosophy, science and literature had already made secularization a most popular attitude. Roth and his contemporaries, particularly his Jewish companions, sought to now attack the core of Jewishness as they understood it. This Jewishness, in the hands of these writers, consists of being "raving hysterics", nagging "Jewish mothers", and female shrews of every variety. Thus, the popular Jewish writers in the tradition of Roth were accused of being Jewish "anti-semites", producers of filth and self - hatred and conveyors of the same calumnies which the Jews of the old world endured for so long.

Roth has rejected all of these complaints in an essay he wrote for Commentary in 1963. Roth argues there that his Jewish characters, who are inevitably less than admirable, are never meant to represent all Jews or even a large number. To Roth, each story he wrote refers only to the one person described and without any further implications. Yet, Roth himself quotes a letter he received after the publication of his story "Defenders of the Faith," which says in part.".......With your one story, 'Defenders of the Faith', you have done as much harm as all the organized anti-Semitic organizations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars and connivers." Roth writes that he was even accused of legitimizing the murder of six million European Jews by stories which, he does not deny, vilify Jews. Yet, his argument is that those who see these things in his stories do not understand them and that it is submission to anti-Semitism to not write about subjects which depict Jews as human beings, i.e., sinners, fools, adulterers, cowards and connivers.

Now Roth has always argued that fiction and reality are different. He did so again in 1987 in The Counterlife and seeks thereby to escape responsibility for what are clearly attacks on Jewishness and Judaism. To Roth Jewish identity cannot be taken for granted. It is always in question as seen once more in his relatively recent effort called Operation Shylock (1993).

Roth holds that it is "timidity and paranoia" for American Jews to object to his stories about Jewish failure and Jewish moral weakness. He will not accede to the common Jewish view that a Jew must never talk about negative Jewish traits to non-Jews. Roth rejects that anti-Jewish conduct can result from his negative stories about Jews. Referring to a complaining rabbi, Roth writes: "Can he actually believe that on the basis of my story anyone is going to start a pogrom, or keep a Jew out of medical school, or even call a Jewish school child a 'kike'?"

Although it is indeed true that one author cannot provoke a "pogrom" it is also true that those who like to set quotas on Jews in medical schools or call children ethnic names can easily feel themselves justified in that kind of persecution by using a story by Roth.

More important is that Roth and his followers have legitimized the distancing of Jews from Judaism and the Jewish tradition and have in that sense contributed immensely to the secularization of Judaism in the United States.

This may be said of Roth despite the fact that in "Eli the Fanatic" Roth exposes the boorishness of many modern American Jews who find even the survivors of the Holocaust irrelevant in their anxiety to avoid being identified with Jews dressed in the black garb of the Chassidim and speaking with a distinct accent.

This then leads us to consider one more aspect to American - Jewish writing which is unique to Jews and has been very influential in promoting secularization in the Jewish community at the end of the twentieth century. That is the fiction and the historiography of the holocaust. This writing has led to the phenomenon in the Jewish community of literally substituting holocaust memorial activities for Judaism so that for many otherwise utterly secular Jews ceremony and ritual surrounding the holocaust has become their religion. This phenomenon was instigated by holocaust writers, both fictional and non -fictional. The second way in which holocaust literature has influenced secularization is raised by those who question whether a God can exist in a world which permits such horrors.

Foremost among these writers is Elie Wiesel. Although of a Yiddish speaking background, Wiesel has made a name for himself in both French and English. When "Night" was first translated from the French and published in America in 1960 it opened the door to a wide range of such literature thereafter.

It is true that Chaim Grade had already published "My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner" in 1951, but that book was written in Yiddish and only later became available in English. Grade deals with one question in his book. The question is: "How can one believe in God after the Holocaust?" Grade renounces religion and belief in God. Saul Bellow, however, in Mr. Sammler's Planet describes in detail the horrors of the Holocaust experience but reaches the conclusion that God does exist and "nihilism is denied."

Many Jews have answered Grade's question by renouncing traditional religion and placing their emotions into "holocausting," which refers not only to attendance at various commemorative events, but also refers to financial contributions to the Washington D.C. holocaust museum, the Los Angeles based "Wiesenthal Center," and other such efforts to remember the mass murders of the second world war. This means in practice that it is much easier for commemorative organizations to raise money concerning the past than it is for Jewish educational institutions to raise funds for the propagation of Judaism among the young.

Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, Bernard Malamud in The Fixer, and Saul Bellow's aforementioned Mr. Sammler's Planet all deal with the issue of how the immigrant survivor can deal with his past and his future.

There are many additional Jewish-American fiction writers who have concerned themselves with the Holocaust. The work of Cynthis Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Richard Elman, Zdena Berger, Norma Rosen, Isaac B. Singer, Joshuah Singer and Daniel Stern are only a small example of all that has been written and is still being produced concerning that heinous crime.

There is also an ever growing non-fiction literature concerning the Holocaust. Best known among these is Lucy Dawidowicz, who has received the most attention among historians for her book The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975) although Nora Levin, writing in The Holocaust in 1968, was far more detailed in her description of the events collectively so labeled than was Dawidowicz. There is also the book by Hilberg called The Destruction of the European Jews and more recently The Holocaust by Gilbert.

In addition to these major histories there are innumerable other works dealing with the holocaust such as oral histories, psycho-social analyses, memoirs and diaries. This literature is increasing as the years since that crime go on. Each of these many publications raises the questions anew. Is there a God? Is religion meaningless? Can one be a Jew by showing an interest in that terrible Jewish experience? The memorializing of the holocaust has yet one more dimension for the vast majority of American Jews who never experienced those horrors. It gives the native American Jewish population a pseudo-martyr status. American Jews, fortunately ignorant of what is really meant by the word "Holocaust" and not really willing to listen to the first hand accounts of survivors, enjoy the victim status some assume when these nightmares are discussed in public. This kind of stance is evident during the large Holocaust commemorations which secular American Jewish "leaders" like to stage in full view of television cameras and other media coverage. These events are generally chaired by some one known as a "great contributor." Such a personage addresses the crowd and the cameras and creates the impression, at least in his eyes, that he is somehow a victim. In the victim oriented American society at the beginning of the 21st century, this stance is sought after and prestigious and achieved by making large financial contributions. All that in face of living holocaust survivors who, by reason of their general poverty, are often ignored because they have neither the education nor the finesse to make a convincing television appearance. Thus, even the Holocaust and all that implies has become banal and absurd in the hands of those who cannot understand that such overused phrases as "the Jews went to their deaths like sheep" are false and nonsense. Even worse is the effort on the part of some native American Jews, and a good number of non-Jews, to trivialize the Holocaust by comparing it to the bombing of Dresden, the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the innumerable slaughters that have taken place since 1945 in every part of the world. All of that is the consequence of the perceived need to compete for victim status in a world so secularized that even the most incomprehensible of human experiences is categorized as an occasion to gain status and prestige.

Shalom u’vracha.

jprich9231@aol.com

2010-10-05T22:25:00.000-07:00

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The Phoenix Coronado Review of American Literature

Puzzle in Hollywood: Discovering Nathanael West’s Hidden Structure

By Katherine Bertolucci

"Anonymous," The Film

Movie review: 'Anonymous'

The film, with Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere, the film's purported bard behind Shakespeare, is no classic, but it's fun.

A Jungian Interpretation of "The Emperor Jones"

Eugene O'Neill

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Moby Dick Chapter 2

"Meliville's Quarrel with God, Lawrance Thompson"

Moby Dick Chapter 1

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