Joel and Ethan Coen (b. 1954, 1957) started their careers in obscurity on a shoestring budget cajoled from family and friends in Minneapolis. Working entirely outside the studio system, the Coen brothers scored an unlikely first success in 1984 with their postmodern noir film Blood Simple. Two decades and nearly a dozen movies later, the Coens are now among the best-known writer/directors in Hollywood, turning out major studio releases featuring such stars as George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Tom Hanks.

The Coens' films all share a distinctive, quirky ambience that...

Joel and Ethan Coen (b. 1954, 1957) started their careers in obscurity on a shoestring budget cajoled from family and friends in Minneapolis. Working entirely outside the studio system, the Coen brothers scored an unlikely first success in 1984 with their postmodern noir film Blood Simple. Two decades and nearly a dozen movies later, the Coens are now among the best-known writer/directors in Hollywood, turning out major studio releases featuring such stars as George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Tom Hanks.

The Coens' films all share a distinctive, quirky ambience that...

This valuable and informative book is a study of Percy's five novels in the context of his southern and American literary sources and his tragic personal history. Though Percy has emphasized mainly his European existential influences, his highly allusive novels echo his tragic early years in the South, as well as his ambivalent relationship with his adoptive father William Alexander Percy and his awareness of such writers as Twain, Hemingway, and Warren.

This perceptive study examines Percy's novels in the light of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and literary analysis. The author...