Tag: pulitzer
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The Dangers of Populism in All The King’s Men
“Mason city. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new” (opening lines) In an age where populist demagoguery has once again captured the hearts of the American voter, it has been illuminating for me to sit down and read this classic novel […]
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The Meaning of Innocence in To Kill A Mockingbird
“‘…before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience’” (105). I have always loved To Kill A Mockingbird. It is a gentle and compassionate novel confronting a difficult subject matter -the issue of racism in America. As I […]
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The Writer’s Endurance: The Old Man and the Sea
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish” (opening line). The Old Man and the Sea is a rich and deep novella about an old fisherman named Santiago and his Herculean effort to overcome a fishing dry-spell. […]
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Love and War In For Whom The Bell Tolls
For Whom The Bell Tolls is the novel that was supposed to win Ernest Hemingway his first Pulitzer Prize in 1941. However, like Sinclair Lewis before him, Hemingway was denied the prize by the President of Columbia University. As the story goes, the 1941 Novel Jury recommended several books for the Pulitzer Prize including, but […]
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The Grapes of Wrath: An Epic Dust Bowl Tragedy
“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth” (opening lines) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s epic story of a Dust Bowl migrant family, celebrated its 80th anniversary this year. The novel was originally born out of a […]
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Gone With The Wind: An American Epic of Nostalgia and Survivalism
“…tomorrow is another day.” In a rare interview with the Atlanta Journal in 1936, Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell described her debut (and only) novel, Gone With The Wind, as follows: “…the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction. The book isn’t strictly a […]
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