Young at Art: Some 20-Something Authors Write Classics

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Authors need to be in their 30s or older before they have enough life experience and writing know-how to pen a dazzling and challenging novel. Right?

Usually, but not always. Sometimes, authors bring the precocious to the prose while still in their 20s. Many authors have written good novels in their 20s, but how many have written great ones?

I thought about that while recently reading The Luminaries, the 2013 novel published just before author Eleanor Catton turned 28. It was already surprising that her first book (The Rehearsal) came out five years earlier, but her Booker Prize-winning second novel is exceptionally mature, complex, riveting, and long (830 pages) for a work written at such a young age. Also, The Luminaries is set during New Zealand’s 1860s gold rush and has a mostly male cast, so Catton’s sprawling book required lots of research and imaginative leaping. (But I should note that her part-mystery novel could have been about 200 pages shorter, and its concluding “flashback” chapters are not quite as satisfying as what comes before.)

A number of young 19th-century authors wrote classics, too. For instance, the 1818-born Emily Bronte saw her highly original Wuthering Heights novel published in 1847, and her 1820-born sister Anne — after warming up with 1847’s straightforward Agnes Grey — broke feminist ground with 1848’s formidable, compelling The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The often-secluded nature of the Bronte sisters’ lives lent itself to lots of intense writing time — with another participant of course being Charlotte Bronte, who was in her early 30s when Jane Eyre rocketed to fame.

The 19th century was also a time of much less distraction (obviously no computers, social media, blogs, TV, movies, radio, etc.), so aspiring young authors could more easily concentrate on writing.

Mary Shelley hadn’t even turned 22 when Frankenstein was published in 1818. It didn’t hurt the development of Shelley’s literary genius that she was the daughter of writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin as well as the wife of renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. (The influence of Wollstonecraft — who wrote the novel Mary: A Fiction before age 30 — on her daughter was not direct; she unfortunately died just days after giving birth.) Before turning 30 herself, the 1797-born Mary Shelley went on to write three more novels — including the imaginative, apocalyptic The Last Man (1826).

Back in the 18th century, Goethe became famous for The Sorrows of Young Werther at age 25.

Charles Dickens wrote five novels before age 30, including some memorable ones, but his more challenging classics would come later. The 1819-born Herman Melville had a similar career trajectory, writing four novels by 1849 but Moby-Dick and other immortal works after that. And W. Somerset Maugham wrote four novels in his 20s but none of them the books we most remember him by.

Stephen Crane penned The Red Badge of Courage and all his other works as a 20-something, of course, because he never reached 30. F. Scott Fitzgerald had two fairly good novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned) out in his mid-20s before penning the masterful The Great Gatsby while still under 30. His contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, came out with The Sun Also Rises at age 27.

Moving further into the 20th century, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was released when author Carson McCullers was 23. Interestingly, that novel’s skillful interweaving of various characters’ lives made it the most complex of all the works she would write.

The flip side of this discussion is authors who didn’t write their debut novel until well on in years — with one of the most striking examples being Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra getting published when she was 74.

Your favorite authors who wrote great novels while still in their 20s? (You can include ones I mentioned. 🙂 ) Your favorite authors who wrote great novels as senior citizens? And, lastly, any thoughts on age as it relates to writing — including whether there’s an ideal time of life to pen a novel?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Single Parents Can Be Singular Characters

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A single parent in literature often draws our sympathy.

That person may be depressed about the death of a spouse, angry after a difficult divorce, worried about money, nervous about dating, and more. Amid all that, they’re raising a child or children — which can be wonderful, yet especially challenging and exhausting without a partner to help. Plenty of dramatic fodder for novels and other literary works!

As readers, we might also relate to single-parent protagonists if we’re current or former single parents ourselves (I was among that group). Also, readers in bad marriages or with ailing spouses know that solo parenthood could come their way — making fictional single parents possible models for real-life behavior to embrace or avoid.

Of course, how much sympathy we feel for fictional parents without partners partly depends on those characters’, well, character. Some of literature’s single moms and dads are quite unlikable.

But that’s not the case with Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I recently reread. He’s tremendously admirable — as an attorney fighting racial injustice, and as a widowed father. Atticus’ legal and legislative work keeps him away from home fairly often, but his parenting is patient, affectionate, and at times firm but never harsh. Plus he made sure to have a competent “surrogate mother” (the housekeeper Calpurnia) for his kids Scout and Jem.

Then there are other kinds of injustice — as when Hester Prynne is ostracized in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter after her daughter Pearl is born out of wedlock. But like Atticus (who has an A in his name rather than on his clothes), Hester is a great parent and person.

There’s also the injustice of being unfairly detained in a mental institution — as happens to the loving, impoverished single mother Connie Ramos, whose daughter is taken away in Marge Piercy’s partly sci-fi Woman on the Edge of Time.

In a happier scenario, a vacationing single parent meets a charming younger man in Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back. That woman is divorced investment analyst Stella Payne.

Moving back to the 19th century, we have Helen Lawrence Huntington — who, with her young son, flees abusive and alcoholic husband Arthur in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Helen acted very courageously during a time when most women had little choice but to stay in rotten marriages.

Silas Marner, in the George Eliot novel named after him, unexpectedly becomes the adopted father of the girl Eppie. The miserly, melancholy Silas doesn’t initially seem like an ideal candidate to be a stellar single dad, but…

Eliot also created Lisbeth Bede, the mother in Adam Bede who’s eventually widowed. Lisbeth is likable, though perhaps a bit too “clingy” with her adult sons Adam and Seth.

Harder to categorize in terms of likability is the widowed mother who kicks out and disinherits her son in Herman Melville’s controversial Pierre, a critical and sales disaster when published but a rather fascinating novel. The mother had a pretty good reason for doing what she did, but…

James Fenimore Cooper featured more than one widowed father of daughters in his “Leatherstocking” novels, with those dads ranging from sympathetic to mixed in their behavior.

Jane Austen also created a mixed bag of a widower in her Emma novel (the friendly but hypochondriacal Henry Woodhouse) and a less-appealing widower in Persuasion (Anne Elliot’s vain, materialistic father Walter).

The Ida Mancuso character in Elsa Morante’s History doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, but she’s too tired, scared, and bewildered to be a better single mother to her two sons as she grapples with all kinds of hardships in World War II Italy.

Of course, there are some single parents loathed by readers. One is the buffoonish and irresponsible Fyodor Karamazov, who’s a crummy father to the three titular siblings in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Also unsympathetic is the ambitious and violent Esteban Trueba, who becomes a widower in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Negative in a more subtle way is the passive-aggressive Gilbert Osmond, father of Pansy in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady.

Hmm…seems like I included more widowed than divorced parents in this post. There was certainly less divorce before our modern era, and thus less divorce in older fiction.

Who do you think are some of the most memorable single parents in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Media People in the Medium of Literature

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It’s not news that some fictional characters work in the media. The casts of more than a few literary works contain reporters, columnists, bloggers, TV hosts, and other information/entertainment purveyors.

Those media people can be major protagonists, secondary characters who objectively or not so objectively observe what the main characters do, or just bit players. They’re smart, curious, driven, idealistic, investigative, crusading, accurate, sloppy, biased, cynical, pompous, abrasive, or egotistic — or several of those things, and more.

And they don’t just appear in post-19th-century novels. I recently read Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and among the most interesting characters is journalist Henrietta Stackpole. She’s friends with the novel’s American-in-Europe protagonist Isabel Archer, and provides a valuable perspective as a “modern woman” watching Isabel struggle with the constraints placed on most females back then. And unlike the wealthier characters who just talk and visit in that stellar James novel, Henrietta actually works for a living!

Moving to the 20th century and another gender, we have cynical journalist Will Farnaby checking out a utopian society in Aldous Huxley’s last novel: Island. Are the words “cynical” and “journalist” almost redundant? In many cases, but there are also many nice media people — including the very talented writers in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists organization of which I’m a member.

Columnists appear in novels such as Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men — with the latter book’s Jack Burden becoming an aide to Huey Long-like politician Willie Stark and playing a crucial role as the book’s narrator. He’s also an example of the way many media people cycle in and out of politics.

“Miss Lonelyhearts” is the alias of a male advice-giver who gets depressed from the painful letters he has to read. The late twins Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren handled that burden a lot better in real life, and didn’t get into the trouble West’s character did! Landers was even the subject of a play a few years ago — David Rambo’s The Lady With All the Answers.

The most famous play about journalism might be Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, which of course was also adapted for the screen.

Perhaps the most famous reporter in recent fiction is none other than the nasty, at times weirdly charming Rita Skeeter of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. A biased tabloid reporter who would do just about anything for a scoop.

Speaking of that last word and sensationalistic reporting, there’s Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel Scoop.

Among the other literary works featuring journalists is Robertson Davies’ Murther & Walking Spirits, whose newspaper threesome includes a still-existing-in-a-way murdered man, the murdered man’s widow, and the murderer who had been sleeping with the murdered man’s wife. National Enquirer material!

Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection contains another trio: a man, the woman he divorces, and the younger woman he takes up with. The last is a glamorous, obnoxious TV host.

Fictional TV reporters also frequently make cameo appearances in novels, with one example being the smug, faux-sweet Tina Ultner in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior.

Print-media people can have small roles, too — as is the case with Alabama newspaperman Braxton Underwood, a racist who nonetheless was prepared to prevent a lynching in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Can comic book cartoonists be considered media people? If so, there are two memorable ones in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay who are loosely based on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the real-life “Superman” creators so monetarily exploited by corporate men in suits.

An honorable mention in this post is the real-life Nellie Bly, the famous journalist with a literary connection: She tried to circle the globe faster than the fictional Phileas Fogg did in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and finished her 1889-90 trip in just over 72 days.

What are some of your favorite literary works featuring media people in big or small roles? And given that there aren’t a huge number of such characters in fiction, you’re also welcome to discuss nonfiction books by or about media people, or discuss real-life media people you like best or least!

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Surprise, Surprise! How Authors Keep Us On Our Toes

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There are various ways fiction writers can play with reader expectations as they try to make their work more interesting.

Obviously, one approach is to create an ironic and/or surprise conclusion a la O. Henry — who was a master of that in tales such as “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf.” Readers will certainly want to keep reading a writer who offers story-line stunners.

Other short stories with major jolts at the end include “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, “Proof Positive” by Graham Greene, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” by Edgar Allan Poe, to name just a few.

Another way to intrigue readers is to mix in poetry, letters, lists, newspaper clippings, author drawings, and/or other content amid traditional text. That’s the case with A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, various novels by writer/doodler Kurt Vonnegut, and so on. (In Goethe’s day, novels with letters were fairly common.)

As I wrote in a past post, some authors also shake things up by including small amounts of whimsical humor in what are mostly dead-serious novels — such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Erich Maria Remarque’s The Black Obelisk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. This can surprise readers as well as give them a little breather that helps them better appreciate the rest of the great-but-depressing prose.

Yet another way of using unpredictability to draw readers in is to juxtapose a sad or partly sad plot line with an idyllic setting — say, Paris. Much of the French capital is of course beautiful and romantic, yet I can think of few very upbeat works set in “The City of Light.”

Instead, I think of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (with the struggling Jean Valjean) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (with the unhappy Quasimodo). Or Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (with frustrated painter Claude Lantier) and The Ladies’ Delight (which has a love story but mainly depicts the “Walmartization” of a 19th-century Paris neighborhood).

Or Balzac’s Cesar Birotteau (with its affluent title character duped into losing so much money he may or may not be able to repay his debts), Colette’s The Vagabond (about the often-tough life of vaudeville performer Renee Nere), and J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert (whose Lalla protagonist has some success in Paris but misses her native Morocco).

Non-French authors also depict Paris as a place with the potential for heartache. For instance, Henry James chronicles Christopher Newman’s difficult effort to marry a French woman in The American, Edith Wharton sets up the possibility of a happy or unhappy Paris ending in the mostly New York-set The Age of Innocence, and James Baldwin depicts a visiting American struggling with his gay identity (among other things) in Giovanni’s Room.

Without divulging too much about plot lines ( 🙂 ), can you name additional literary works that play with reader expectations in the ways I mentioned in this post? Also, in what other ways do authors shake up readers, and which literary works exemplify those other ways? And, heck, if you don’t want to deal with those two questions, I’d be happy to hear the titles of other novels set in Paris!

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Oh, Canada Has Great Literature

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Last week, I talked about American traits we might find in fiction. This week, I’m moving to Canada (literarily, not literally).

As a U.S. citizen, I don’t possess enough firsthand knowledge to discuss the psyche of our northern neighbor. I’ve spent 30 or so days in Canada, and have the sense that the people there are friendlier, more modest, and more tolerant than many citizens of the American colossus to their south. But that’s just a snapshot. Canada is also quite a birthplace of musical acts: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan, Oscar Peterson, Alanis Morissette, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Metric, Rush, The Guess Who, etc.

But I digress.

I’ve read several of Canada’s better-known fiction writers, and they will be what this post is about. Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Yann Martel, L.M. Montgomery, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, and even that part-time “Canadian” Willa Cather, who spent many a summer on New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island.

Atwood deserves a Nobel Prize, just like Munro merited the one she received last year. A novelist since 1969, Atwood has excelled at traditional fiction, satirical fiction, feminist fiction, historical fiction, dystopian fiction, speculative fiction, and more. She is of course best known for The Handmaid’s Tale, a superb/scary book about the future subjugation of women that shares my “Top Six Atwood Novels” list with The Robber Bride (three women with the same enemy), Alias Grace (inspired by a real-life double murder), The Blind Assassin (novel within a novel within a novel), Cat’s Eye (painter reflects on her younger years), and Oryx and Crake (post-apocalypse). Despite the intense subject matter in many of her works, Atwood’s writing can also be quite funny.

I confess to having read only one Munro short-story collection, Friend of My Youth, but the tales were moving, subtle, and emotionally complex — along with being quite readable. It has been said that Munro never needed to write a novel because her stories are like mini-novels.

As with Munro, I’ve only read one work apiece (all novels) by Martel, Richler, and Davies.

Martel, of course, wrote the renowned Life of Pi, which mixes philosophical ruminations with an adventure story about a boy and tiger (not Calvin and Hobbes!) adrift after a shipwreck. Pi avoids two BC’s: British Columbia and Being Consumed.

Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here — considered by some to be “The Great Canadian Novel” — is a multigenerational story of a wealthy, eccentric family. The seriocomic saga includes real-life events and…Yiddish-speaking Eskimos!

Davies’ Murther & Walking Spirits is about a murdered newspaperman who retains a consciousness that allows him to see his widow, the man who murdered him, and the history of his many ancestors — with that history unfolding via a movie-theater film only the dead man can view. Rated PG: Progenitors Galore.

Richler is perhaps best known for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and Davies for the three novels comprising “The Deptford Trilogy.”

Then there’s the great L.M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery, author of the young-adult classic Anne of Green Gables about an imaginative, brilliant orphan girl. (I just reread that very engaging and heartwarming novel last week.) Montgomery also penned many Anne sequels (some better than others), the semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy, and “grown-up” books such as The Blue Castle — the most absorbing and at times funniest story you’ll ever read about a bright young woman with a (supposed) terminal illness. One of my top-ten favorite novels.

Montgomery’s fiction usually has rural settings, befitting the less densely populated nature of much of Canada.

Part-time Grand Manan Islander Willa Cather’s most Canada-centric book is Shadows on the Rock — a gem of an historical novel, starring a father and daughter, set in late-17th-century Quebec City. Canada also figures in Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge.

Is there something about Canadian literature that makes it different than, say, American literature? (Besides scenes of colder weather. 🙂 ) Is the fiction in The Country of Provinces “friendlier, more modest, and more tolerant” — like Canadians might be themselves? Hard to say. I certainly haven’t noticed an inferiority complex in the works of Canadian authors. Any thoughts on what, if anything, might make a novel “Canadian”?

Two more questions: Who are your favorite Canadian authors? (Obviously, I’ve named only some of the most famous ones.) And what are your favorite novels or other literary works from Canada?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Read, Right, and New? Some American Traits in Fiction

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Which works of literature feature protagonists who embody the American character? And what are some traits of a “typical” American?

Henry James, I think, tried to answer that second question in The American. After all, he didn’t name his excellent 1877 novel Christopher Newman Goes to France.

Newman is a “New Man” compared to Europeans living in an older civilization, as well as “An American in Paris” who’s wealthy, self-made, entrepreneurial, generous, mobile, confident, curious, open, honest, direct, unpretentious, unsophisticated (at first), and good-natured (most of the time).

Henry James was on to something there, but Newman is missing most of the negative traits that are also part of the American pysche (more on those traits later). Also, Newman is just one person, and obviously no single person is ever truly representative of an entire population. In addition, many people who aren’t American also had and have Newman’s traits. Finally, the American psyche may have changed quite a bit since 1877, so is Newman outdated as a prototypical U.S. personality?

That said, I still thought it would be interesting to name a number of literary works starring protagonists who might be thought of as quintessentially American. Then I’ll ask you to chime in, because the U.S. is a democracy, right? Well, sort of. 🙂

Doing this in roughly chronological fashion, I’ll start with James Fenimore Cooper’s five “Leatherstocking” novels, published between 1823 and 1841. They star Natty Bumppo (under various nicknames such as “The Pathfinder”), who’s a noble example of the frontiersman/pioneer that’s so much a part of the American mythos. He does depart from “the norm” in certain ways, such as being friendlier to (some) Native Americans than most white men of his time and being much more talkative than the typical taciturn loner living in the woods of the 1700s and the prairie of the early 1800s.

The characters in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a 1985 novel set in the circa-1850 American West, remind us of more nightmarish U.S. traits: over-the-top machismo, land grabs cloaked in “Manifest Destiny,” the massacre of Native Americans, etc. We’re not talking Bonanza‘s Ben Cartwright here!

Staying in the 1800s but moving to Mark Twain, his co-authored The Gilded Age spotlights such character flaws as hucksterism and naked greed, and his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn focuses on loyalty, boyhood pluckiness, and racism in the South (and by extension everywhere in the U.S.). All of which reminds us of how Americans like and don’t like to see themselves.

More on the very American traits of bigotry and trying to deal with that bigotry can be found in the people populating Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, and countless other works.

Another 19th-century frontier was the sea, and various Melville characters reflect how some Americans thirst for adventure and “exotic” places — not only in Moby-Dick, but in Melville novels such as Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket. That author also addressed U.S. imperialism and colonialism in some of his works, but later novelists — such as Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible — would do that more explicitly.

Kingsolver’s hateful missionary Nathan Price is one example of how the U.S. is more religious than most other western countries. Literature does have sincerely spiritual characters, such as the proselytizing but well-meaning Jean Marie Latour in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Rev. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Jim Casy in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and the Quakers in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (with the latter two novels also displaying how some Americans strongly fight injustice). But then you have narrow-minded and/or hypocritical religious people in novels like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry.

Lewis also took a stab at depicting the quintessential U.S. businessman in Babbitt, whose titular character is at first a conformist, money-obsessed workaholic but eventually exhibits the also-very-American traits of restlessness and dissatisfaction.

Joe Christmas of William Faulkner’s Light in August is also an intensely American character — uncertain of his ancestry, a wanderer who doesn’t put down roots, a man who reinvents himself, and a man who partly works “off the books,” as a bootlegger.

Another character with a bootlegger background is Jay Gatsby — whose ill-gotten gains, conspicuous consumption, and single-minded drive to enter high society help make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby an emblematic novel of “The American Dream.”

The dream to come to America and adapt to the land of “rugged individualism” suffuses characters in immigration-themed literature such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Again, the many traits mentioned above are by no means exclusively American (heck, look at religious hypocrite Brocklehurst in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and religious fool William Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). But perhaps some traits are more pronounced in U.S. citizens — including the loud and crude yet endearing Chuck Mumpson, who has an odd-couple relationship with England-loving American professor Virginia Miner in Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs. Unsavory or downright corrupt political leaders can also be found everywhere, but a particularly American version is the Huey Long-like Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

The authors I’ve named are mostly U.S.-born, but of course many fiction writers from other countries have created American characters and looked at the American psyche. Two examples include Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, whose titular protagonist travels to the U.S.; and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, set in the early days of The Vietnam War.

Which literary characters and works do you think showcase American traits? And, in your opinion, what are those traits, anyway? (I realize several of you who regularly read and comment here don’t reside in the U.S.!)

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

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For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Bad Marriages…We’ve Read a Few

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What is literature full of? Words, sentences, paragraphs, and…unhappy marriages.

And why not? There are tons of unhappy marriages in real life, and many fiction readers are fascinated by car wrecks — whether literal (dented vehicles) or figurative (dented relationships). Heck, authors are among the people in negative wedlock, and the adage is “write what you know,” isn’t it?

I just read E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, a 1930s-set memoir/novel in which young Edgar’s parents Rose and Dave “exemplify” several reasons why unhappy couples are unhappy. The too-practical Rose is frustrated in the way many stay-at-home moms were before the modern feminism era, while the free-spirited but at times irresponsible Dave has wider interests — one of which seemingly involves cheating on Rose. Also, Dave’s mother is very condescending to Rose, who not only bitterly resents that but resents Dave for not taking his mother to task for her attitude. Meanwhile, the family is slipping financially.

Yes, marriages can be troubled because of money problems, adultery, mismatched personalities, and many other reasons — including health issues, mental issues, and physical or psychological abuse.

The passive-aggressive Edward Casaubon is psychologically abusive to his young wife Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which also dissects the strained marriage between the ambitious Dr. Lydgate and the spoiled Rosamond Vincy. In the same author’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, the willful but basically decent Gwendolen Harleth marries wealthy brute Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt out of financial desperation — and disaster ensues.

Few authors depict wedded non-bliss in as astute a way as Eliot does.

Published a year after Daniel Deronda, Emile Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den) sees a happy marriage between Coupeau and the hardworking Gervaise go sharply downhill when the former gets injured and becomes an alcoholic. Eventually, Gervaise…well, I won’t give away what happens to her, except to say that the abused wife in Stephen King’s Rose Madder ends up faring much better (with a little supernatural help).

Societal racism can also weigh heavily on a marriage that might have been happier in a more unbiased world. That weight is certainly apparent with couples in novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

While the male half of a couple is often most at fault in literature, that’s not always the case. For instance, Cathy is amoral while Adam Trask is merely clueless in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and the hypochondriacal Zeena is much less sympathetic than the taciturn title character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Wharton also created another unlikable woman in The Custom of the Country‘s social-climbing Undine Spragg, who badly treats her first husband Ralph Marvell.

Here are a few of the countless other fictional works with somewhat or very troubled marriages, of long or short duration: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, Graham Greene’s short story “The Basement,” Henry James’ The American, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior, W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, and Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection.

This blog post focused on heterosexual marriages because gay marriage is relatively new enough to not yet appear in a lot of novels (as far as I know). And I didn’t discuss not-wed couples in order to keep this post a manageable length! Besides, it’s often easier to get out of a bad relationship than a bad marriage.

Which unhappy marriages do you remember most in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

An Array of Activist Authors

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There are loner authors who do little but write during their working hours, and then there are activist authors who spend a fair amount of time on various causes that are important to them. This post is about that second group of fiction writers, living or dead.

Looking outward can be a mixed bag for activist authors. The time they spend advocating for various things can siphon valuable hours from writing, perhaps make their fiction too polemic for some readers’ tastes, and/or turn off some politically opposite readers even if the fiction doesn’t get strident.

On the other hand, being an advocate can enrich authors’ literary output by giving their works more passion and more of a seen-it-firsthand foundation, and by making their fictional characters more vivid and realistic because activist authors meet many more people than reclusive authors do. Also, the advocacy of authors can engender intense loyalty from their ideological soul mates among readers.

Of course, working for causes isn’t admirable if the causes aren’t admirable. A case in point is the way Orson Scott Card of Ender’s Game fame has spent lots of time ranting against same-sex marriage — making him a “poster child” for anti-human-rights blather. But many Card fans say his homophobia isn’t noticeable in his fiction.

Activism obviously takes many forms, and I’m going to mostly discuss activist fiction writers of the liberal persuasion. But please feel free to also mention conservative authors in the comments section below.

I’ll start with Upton Sinclair, who spent nearly two months working incognito as a meatpacking plant worker to help research The Jungle novel that exposed the horrendous, unsanitary condition of those plants. Nearly three decades later, another example of Sinclair’s activism would be his campaign for governor of California.

Then there are the fiction writers who, in wartime, help the wounded (as Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman did during the American Civil War), work as journalists (as Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway did during the Spanish Civil War), or even participate in military action at an older age than the typical fighter (as George Orwell did during the Spanish Civil War). In some cases, those actions directly result in a novel (like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls) or nonfiction book (like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia).

Parker’s sympathetic writing about Spain’s anti-fascist forces for a leftist magazine, along with her other political work over the years, eventually got the humorist/short-story writer/screenplay writer blacklisted by Hollywood movie bosses during the McCarthy era — affecting her work in that way. And right-wingers were surely not pleased to learn that Parker, who died in 1967, bequeathed her estate to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaking of civil rights, one example of South African author Nadine Gordimer’s anti-apartheid activism was helping to edit the famous “I Am Prepared to Die” courtroom speech that Nelson Mandela gave in 1964 before being sentenced to his long prison term.

Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize-winning author of the novel The Interpreters and other works, was also a political prisoner, in Nigeria. He was denied writing implements in jail — hardly conducive for an author to continue one’s career — but still managed to compose some poems, among other creations.

In the French literary realm, Victor Hugo went into exile after criticizing Napoleon III’s autocratic regime, and Emile Zola fled to England in 1898 after authorities targeted him for taking his public “J’accuse” stand against the anti-Semitic railroading of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Zola’s courage may not have greatly affected his novel writing (which had creatively peaked between 1877 and 1890), but it could have affected his life: Zola’s 1902 asphyxiation death from a blocked chimney may have been retaliatory rather than accidental.

Among the many other past and present authors who have been activists in deed or speech include Douglas Adams (animal rights), Margaret Atwood (feminism, the environment), Margaret Drabble (anti-war, anti-imperialism), Alice Walker (civil rights, anti-war), Rita Mae Brown (civil rights, anti-war, gay rights, feminism), Arundhati Roy (anti-globalization, anti-imperialism, anti-nuclear power), Stephen King (pro-gun control, pro-higher taxes for the rich, anti-Tea Party), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (anti-czar, anti-serfdom), Booth Tarkington (served a term as a Republican legislator in Indiana), Norman Mailer (ran for mayor of New York City), and Gore Vidal (ran for U.S. Congress).

Many authors in the above paragraph, and in this blog post as a whole, were involved with other causes in addition to those I mentioned. And the very act of writing certain books is activism, with an obvious example being Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Who are some of your favorite activist authors? (As noted earlier, I named mostly liberal ones but you’re welcome to name conservative ones, too.) As an optional question, do you think author activism is a good, bad, or mixed thing — and why?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Fiction and Nonfiction Writers Can Be One and the Same

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Many notable novelists have also written nonfiction books — and that’s a fact. So while this blog usually focuses on fiction, I’m expanding things today to discuss some memorable nonfiction books penned by literary lions and lionesses.

I thought about this topic last week while reading My Family and Other Animals, a very funny memoir of the boyhood years British naturalist Gerald Durrell spent on a Greek island with his mother and siblings. The adult Durrell became better known for his nonfiction than fiction, but I’ll turn that around and mention writers better known for their fiction than nonfiction — one of whom was Gerald’s brother Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet fame.

Obviously, some great novelists can write nonfiction books that are almost as compelling and readable as the best literature. One expert at that was Mark Twain, who’s a legend for fictional works such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but penned terrific nonfiction as well.

My favorites in Twain’s factual canon are The Innocents Abroad, which is the funniest travel book I’ve ever read; and Life on the Mississippi, which is partly a river’s history and partly a memoir of the young Samuel Clemens’ stint as a riverboat pilot before the Civil War.

John Steinbeck, a novelist icon of the 20th century, also wrote nonfiction works such as Travels With Charley — a touching book about seeing America with his dog, and a revealing book about an America partly going to the dogs (though Travels does contain some optimism).

There have been questions about whether Steinbeck fictionalized certain sections of Travels, an uneven book with both excellent and so-so moments. But memoirs and other nonfiction often contain at least some of the “imagination” fiction writers excel at, even as most fiction has at least some basis in reality.

Also, many fiction writers are as skilled as nonfiction writers at doing research; indeed, many novelists spend countless hours unearthing and confirming the facts that help make their books believable. Steinbeck certainly did tons of research before writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Another major 20th-century author best known as a novelist was Richard Wright, whose riveting Native Son is his fictional masterpiece. But he also wrote plenty of nonfiction, including the famous memoir Black Boy.

One of the living novelists who has occasionally veered into nonfiction territory is Barbara Kingsolver. Her co-authored book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — about eating more locally grown foods — may not be as compelling as her fiction, but it’s quite informative and engaging.

Among the many, many other present or past novelists who have also written nonfiction books (with just a few examples of those books in parentheses) are Isabel Allende (Paula), Isaac Asimov (The Egyptians), Margaret Atwood (In Other Worlds), Alexandre Dumas (A Year in Florence), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Clandestine in Chile), Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road), Stephen King (On Writing), W. Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up), Sir Walter Scott (The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You), and David Foster Wallace (his Consider the Lobster collection).

What are your favorite nonfiction books by authors best known for their fiction? And, if you’d like, you could also name your favorite nonfiction books by authors who rarely or never wrote fiction.

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.

A Look at Young Protagonists in Literature

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With the school year underway, kids are on the minds of many — including book lovers. So, our subject this week is literature’s most memorable young characters (from babies to teens).

I just finished Elsa Morante’s History, and Giuseppe in that magnificent/heartbreaking novel is one of the most adorable, engaging, precocious, well-drawn kids I’ve ever encountered in fiction. This is especially amazing because he was conceived when a German soldier raped his Italian mother Ida — after which she and Giuseppe spend the rest of World War II suffering additional privations such as the loss of their bombed home, near starvation, and Ida’s constant fear that her half-Jewish ancestry would be discovered by the Nazis. (All that horror, combined with a hereditary condition, does eventually affect Giuseppe’s psyche and health.)

Obviously, the vast majority of young people in literature don’t have to go through those things. Readers can enjoy the innocence of many kid characters, hope those characters turn out okay when older, cringe if they get jaded or go bad, and be reminded of their own childhood and/or their own kids and grandkids.

Another unforgettable child in fiction is Anne Shirley, who’s an 11-year-old orphan when we first meet her in Anne of Green Gables. Brainy, friendly, funny, needy — Anne has captivated readers since L.M. Montgomery’s novel was first published in 1908. Heck, a late-in-life Mark Twain said Anne is “the dearest, most moving, and most delightful child since the immortal Alice.” That of course being Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland-visiting Alice — another enduring kid in lit.

Montgomery created a second memorable girl in her semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy, whose title character becomes a writer.

Among the many other young females who strongly resonate in literature are the four diverse sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; the bright, frustrated Maggie Tulliver, who’s initially nine years old in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss; the mistreated, resilient Celie when a teen in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; the neglected, loyal Florence in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son; the iconic Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; and the offbeat, perceptive Pearl — daughter of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

The young Owen Meany is also offbeat and perceptive in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Other compelling boys in lit include Charlie, the beleaguered teen son of a semi-crazy dad in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast; Twain’s entrepreneurial, bossy, annoying, sometimes admirable Tom Sawyer; and the more likable Huck Finn, a secondary character in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before taking the spotlight in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Speaking of annoying, the kidnapped boy in O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” story is so grating that the kidnappers have to pay his father to take him back! Now that’s a memorable young character.

Other great literary creations include the intelligent, buffeted-by-tragedy fraternal twins — impulsive Rahel and mute Estha — in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; and the destined-to-meet Yuri Zhivago and Lara during their adolescent years in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

The seven Harry Potter books are of course chock-full of distinctive young people: the brave Harry, the brilliant Hermione Granger, the affable Ron Weasley, the hilarious Weasley twins, the spacey Luna Lovegood, the spoiled Dudley Dursley, the often-brutish Draco Malfoy, the at-first-downtrodden Neville Longbottom, etc.

Children’s books also have tons of interesting kid protagonists, but that could be the subject of a whole other blog post. So The Cat in the Hat‘s Sally and her brother get only a brief Seussical mention here.

Who are your favorite young characters in YA or grown-up literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.