Understanding Richard Powers presents an introduction to one of the most important and admired writers to emerge in the post-Pynchon era of American literature. Joseph Dewey contends that while Powers's novels investigate the most pressing issues of the new millennium, the novelist is most deeply interested in the same thematic argument that consumed Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson-the problem of the self, the deep and unshakable loneliness that has always been at the heart of the American literary imagination. Through an overview of Powers's career and close readings of his novels,...

In Understanding James Welch, Ron McFarland offers analysis and critical commentary on the works of the renowned Blackfeet-Gros Ventre writer whose first novel, Winter in the Blood, has become a classic in Native American fiction and whose book of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, has remained in print since its initial publication in 1971. McFarland offers close readings of Welch's poems and five novels, as well as his volume of nonfiction, Killing Custer, which tells the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn from a Native American perspective. Demonstrating how Welch wrote each of the...

In this perceptive study of the literary career of Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), Alice Griffin and Geraldine Thorsten provide a balanced, in-depth examination of Hellman's major works. In the thirties, when Hellman's theater career began, George Jean Nathan, the dean of theater critics, suggested that although Hellman was the country's foremost playwright, she would never equal a man. Correcting the badly skewed evaluations that such bias fostered, Griffin and Thorsten give Hellman's plays fresh critical assessments as they analyze her rarely acknowledged dramatic gifts for humor, irony,...

The first book-length examination of the critically acclaimed contemporary Native American author

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity,...

Pat Conroy's work as a novelist and a memoirist has indelibly shaped the image of the American South in the cultural imagination. His writing has rendered the physical landscape of the South Carolina lowcountry familiar to legions of readers, and it has staked out a more complex geography as well, one defined by domestic trauma, racial anxiety, religious uncertainty, and cultural ambivalence.
In Understanding Pat Conroy, Catherine Seltzer engages in a sustained consideration of Conroy and his work. The study begins with a sketch of Conroy's biography, a narrative that, while fascinating...