David Balfour The hero of Kidnapped, David Balfour is a sixteen-year-old boy from Essendean whose seemingly poor father, a schoolmaster, has just died. With his mother already dead, David has no choice but to leave the rented family home and find his way in the world. A letter left for him by his father sends…
Tag: Novels
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: Summary
Chapters 1–4 Kidnapped begins in June of 1751, in a region of Scotland known as the Lowlands. David Balfour, an Essendean boy of sixteen, is left homeless when his seemingly poor schoolmaster father dies. With his mother already dead, David believes himself to be without inheritance or living relative until the local minister, Mister Campbell,…
Intruder In The Dust: Analysis
William Faulkner was a legendary drinker in two senses: He could consume truly enormous amounts of alcohol, and some contended that he needed alcohol as a kind of potion that gave him creativity and inspiration as an artist. However, common sense states that no one could have produced novels as complex as he did while…
Intruder In The Dust: Setting of the Novel
The Antebellum, or Pre– Civil War, South Events in the South during Faulkner’s life cannot be understood without knowing something of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The essence of the situation is that the northern and southern sections of the United States had, over the course of the last two centuries before the Civil War,…
Intruder In The Dust: Themes
Debt and Payment The incident at the start of William Faulkner’s novel, when Beauchamp refuses the seventy-cent tip from Chick, is in fact complex. On one level, the young and thoughtless Chick regards it as an insult to his race. More is happening here, however. The incident swells in his mind in part because he…
Intruder In The Dust: Characters
Lucas Beauchamp Lucas Beauchamp is one of the central characters in the novel, the man accused of murdering Vinson Gowrie. Although still vigorous, he is in his seventies as the story takes place. The black owner of a small cabin and farm on the Edmonds estate, Beauchamp is in fact a direct descendent of Carothers…
Intruder In The Dust: Summary
Chapters 1–2 This classic novel by William Faulkner opens with the news that Lucas Beauchamp, a black man living in the countryside of Yoknapatawpha County, has been accused of murdering a white man, Vinson Gowrie. The novel is told from the point of view of sixteen year-old Charles ‘‘Chick’’ Mallison, and the news reminds him…
Themes in The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers
The Importance of Family and Land One overriding theme of the saga that is The Glory Field is the value of kinship and relations. Myers expresses this idea by emphasizing the importance of the relationships between the generations of the Lewis family and their holding onto the land they own in Curry Island, South Carolina….
Beryl Bainbridge: Biography & Books
BAINBRIDGE, Beryl (born 1934) British novelist In British music-hall and stand-up comedy, there is a tradition of using flat, unemotional words to recount the disasters that happen to perfectly ordinary people, whose boring lives conceal passions and aspirations the speaker can only hint at. Bainbridge’s short, dialogue-filled novels do the same thing in print. They…
Paul Auster: Biography & Books
AUSTER, Paul (born 1947) US writer Auster’s first book, Squeeze Play (1982), was a pastiche of a crime novel and his key work, The New York Trilogy (1987, although the individual books appeared separately in 1985 and 1986 as City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room), is also a sly deconstruction job on the…