ACKROYD, Peter (born 1949), British writer Ackroyd is a biographer as well as a novelist – his Dickens is 1,200 pages long, sumptuously detailed, and acclaimed – and his fiction benefits from a researcher’s eye for extraordinary and revealing detail about the past. Often, he blends a modern story with a historical one, and characters…
Category: Literature
Margery Allingham: Biography & Books
ALLINGHAM, Margery (1905–66), British novelist Allingham wrote ‘crime fiction’ only in the sense that each of her books contains the step-by-step solution of a crime, and that their hero, Albert Campion, is an amateur detective whose amiable manner conceals laser intelligence and ironclad moral integrity. But instead of confining Campion within the boundaries of the…
Isabel Allende: Biography & Books
ALLENDE, Isabel (born 1942), Peruvian-born Chilean novelist Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits (1985), was a glowing family tapestry in the magic-realist manner of >> Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, spanning five generations and thronged with larger-than-life characters and supernatural events. She followed this vein in Eva Luna, which is particularly evocative…
Characters in The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers
Aiken In the 1964 segment, Aiken is a player for Delaney High School, against whom Tommy Lewis plays hard. Annie Annie is Lizzy’s cousin in the 1864 segment of the novel. She does not understand why Joshua and Lem ran away. Bob Archer At the end of the 1964 segment, Bob Archer drives Tommy home…
The Glory Field: Summary
July 1753. Off the Coast of Sierra Leone, West Africa Muhammad Bilal is traveling on a slave ship from Africa, where he was captured by slave traders. He is trapped with other slaves in close quarters for a voyage of at least a month. Like the others, he suffers from pain and thirst, and longs…
Summary of ‘Beauty: The Retelling of the Story of the Beauty & the Beast’
Part One Beauty tells the story of a young girl whose given name is Honour, the youngest daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant named Roderick Huston, who lives in a large city by the sea. Her sisters are named Grace and Hope. Honour, upon hearing her father explain the meaning of her name at five…
The Adventures of Augie March: Quick Review
Augie March lives quite a life [in The Adventures of Augie March]. Up from the depths of poverty to the heights of success, back down, back up, and all in most peculiar fashion. Jobs, journeys, jolts—and women, women, women. Crime and college, labor unions and athletic clubs, Chicago and Mexico, slums and society, thievery and…
Critical Analysis of The Adventures of Augie March
Why do so many literary critics prize The Adventures of Augie March so highly? It is a novel in which a young man comes of age in Chicago yet cannot settle down to one career or commit to one relationship. It is a novel in which, after several hundred pages, the hero, Augie March, suddenly…
Historical Context of The Adventures of Augie March
The Great Depression Much of the action of the novel takes place during the Great Depression, widely considered the most serious economic downturn in United States history. The Great Depression began in the autumn of 1929, when the largely unregulated stock market plunged and American industry came almost to a standstill. By the early 1930s,…
Literary Style & Symbolism in The Adventures of Augie March
The Coming-of-Age Novel The Coming-of-Age Novel, also known as a Bildungsroman, tells the story of a young person discovering their true self and the nature of the world as they come into adulthood. Other examples include Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Adventures of Augie March…