John Steinbeck

Murder They Wrote

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Today is “The Ides of March,” the March 15 date on which Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated in the year 44 BC. So, I’m going do a word salad rather than a Caesar salad discussing some memorable murders in literature — while trying to avoid too many spoilers in the specific details.

Murders are of course awful, even as they’re sometimes almost merited for righteous revenge reasons. Whatever the motives behind them, they can be a key plot device and make for painfully dramatic reading.

One novel’s title that literally telegraphs a killing is Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Written in a journalistic reconstruction fashion, the book is far from the author’s best work but still interesting.

Also quite interesting is Albert Camus’ The Stranger and its puzzling murder by the novel’s detached protagonist.

The brutal double-killing early in the iconic Crime and Punishment is…iconic. Then we spend the rest of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s psychological novel observing Rodion Raskolnikov’s angst, his attempts to justify his action, his worry about capture, and more.

Other novels with multiple murders? We’ve read a few — including Agatha Christie’s classic And Then They Were None and its many dispatched characters. They deserve some punishment, but do they deserve dying? Murders, of course, are a staple of mysteries, detective fiction, and thrillers.

Totally innocent is Black teen Donte Drumm, who’s wrongly accused of killing a white high school girl in John Grisham’s The Confession. Will that murder by someone else lead to another murder — the execution of Drumm — by racist authorities?

Which reminds me of the unjust killings by law enforcement of characters in novels such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (another Black teen is the victim) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (a white man is the victim).

Retaliatory killings? We see righteous ones in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph, and Percival Everett’s James — the last book a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Speaking of Twain, he wrote about the execution of a real-life heroine in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — a novel in the historical-fiction genre also inhabited by Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and its double-murder.

If we include genocide in this discussion, various grim novels come to mind — including Holocaust ones such as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance.

In the short-story realm, there many murder-in-the-mix tales to choose from: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe, etc., etc.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

I will probably be offline much of tomorrow (Monday, March 16) while in New York City but will reply to comments after I return. 🙂

Misty the cat asks: “Is it necessary for my building to have a steering wheel?”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — with my thoughts about unofficial voting results on a school deficit matter roiling my town — is here.

Favorite Females in Fiction, Recently Read

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Today is International Women’s Day. Over the years, I’ve written blog posts from various angles about women in literature. This time, I’ll focus on some of my favorite women characters in novels I’ve read (though were not necessarily published) during the past couple of years.

Because of its title, the first book that came to mind was Kristin Hannah’s terrific 2024 novel The Women focusing on Vietnam War combat nurses. It stars Frances “Frankie” McGrath, a somewhat-naive young woman from an affluent family who’s forced to mature very quickly while treating horrendous battle injuries. Her two war-zone mentors — Barb Johnson and Ethel Flint — are also memorable in secondary roles.

Hannah’s previous novel, 2021’s The Four Winds, also has a stirring woman protagonist in Elsa Wolcott. (Her 1930s-set story is clearly influenced by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.)

Elin Hilderbrand’s novels — nearly 30 of which I read in 2024 and 2025 — are teeming with compelling women characters. Among my favorites are teacher Mallory Blessing of 2020’s bittersweet 28 Summers (inspired by Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year) and the strong-willed Irene Steele who moves from Iowa to the Caribbean after her husband dies mysteriously in Hilderbrand’s Paradise trilogy (2018/2020/2020).

I was also drawn to another teacher: Maggie Jones of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, an affecting 1999 novel that features interlocking stories.

And to the brave/beleaguered former government agent who goes by various aliases in Stephenie Meyer’s 2016 thriller The Chemist.

And to 1950s mathematician/astronaut Elma York of Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2018 alternative-history novel The Calculating Stars.

And to Wall Street attorney-turned-Appalachia legal aid attorney Samantha Kofer in John Grisham’s Gray Mountain (2014).

In the sleuth genre, three impressive yet very human/relatable women I’ve recently mentioned in other posts include Robin Ellacott of J.K. Rowling’s 2013-launched series, cold-case detective Karen Pirie of Val McDermid’s 2003-launched series, and private investigator Kinsey Millhone of the late Sue Grafton’s 1982-2017 alphabet-mystery series I’m currently working through (now enjoying Q Is for Quarry).

Among my favorite women characters in novels (some classic) that I read years ago include Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s book of the same name, Helen Huntingdon of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Elliot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Maggie Tulliver of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Denise Baudu of Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, Marian Halcombe of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Ethelberta Petherwin in Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta, Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Anne Shirley of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Renee Nere of Colette’s The Vagabond, Pilate Dead of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Imogene “Idgie” Threadgoode of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Eliza Sommers of Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, and Dellarobia Turnbow of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, to name a few. (Actually, Anne Shirley is only 16 at the end of Montgomery’s book.)

Your thoughts about this topic, and your favorite women characters?

Misty the cat says: “Last night, clocks and patches of snow both moved one hour ahead.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which comments on a fraught upcoming school budget vote — is here.

A Semi-Comprehensive Look at Semi-Autobiographical Novels

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In early 2016, I wrote about semi-autobiographical novels. Now that nearly 10 years have passed, I suppose it would be semi-okay to write about those books again — mentioning semi-autobiographical novels I’ve read since then or had read before then but didn’t mention in that previous post. So, with this semi-decent first paragraph nearly done, here goes:

As I wrote in ’16, semi-autobiographical novels “can be the best of both worlds for authors and their readers. That mix of memoir and fiction takes facts and embellishes them and/or dramatizes them and/or smooths them into more coherent form. A partly autobiographical approach also allows authors to potentially pen very heartfelt books — after all, they lived the emotions — and perhaps provides those writers with some mental therapy, too.” I also wrote that a semi-autobiographical novel is often, but of course not always, a debut novel — at least partly because that kind of book might be easier to write; the author can use aspects of her or his own past.

Back here in late 2025, I just read The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, whose 2011 coming-of-age novel was inspired to an extent by the author’s life and a ship voyage he took as a boy from his native Sri Lanka to rejoin his mother in England after his parents had separated several years earlier. A boy named…hmm…Michael. The Cat’s Table is another compelling book by The English Patient author, who went on to live in Canada.

Another semi-autobiographical/coming-of-age novel (those two things often go together) is Betty Smith’s 1943 bestseller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — about a brainy girl (Francie) growing up in an impoverished urban family.

Then there’s Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, who loosely based her classic 1868-69 novel on herself and her three sisters.

A few decades earlier, Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man featured three principal characters based on herself, her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend and fellow writer Lord Byron.

Aldous Huxley also used famous people as models for characters in his 1928 novel Point Counter Point — including himself, Nancy Cunard, D.H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield.

The characters in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) are somewhat modeled on the author’s father (attorney Atticus Finch in the novel), herself (Scout in the book) and Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote (fictionally named Dill).

Kurt Vonnegut’s horrific World War II experiences were fuel for his sci-fi-infused 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, and Jack Kerouac’s travel experiences provided fodder for his On the Road (1957).

Some of the semi-autobiographical novels mentioned in my 2016 post include James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Colette’s The Vagabond, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jack London’s Martin Eden, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Herman Melville’s Typee, L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “When Christmas-tree lights reflect off the window, it’s a pane in the grass.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which contains a tale of two meetings — is here.

Observe the Learning Curve

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Sometimes, authors dazzle with their debut novels. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights. Carson McCullers and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man. Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things. Zadie Smith and White Teeth. Etc.

But more frequently there’s somewhat of a learning curve for authors, which is totally natural — and totally the topic of this post.

I came to this topic via the work of Stephenie Meyer, three of whose novels I recently read in reverse order: first The Chemist (2016), then The Host (2008), and then Twilight (2005). Twilight was of course Meyer’s mega-bestselling debut featuring a teen human and teen vampire who fall in love. An interesting take on the vampire genre that held my interest even as it was too often written in a pedestrian way. Published three years later, The Host turned out to be a fascinating sci-fi story — and more skillfully crafted. Finally, The Chemist thriller about a hunted female ex-government agent was full of superb prose and dialogue. Meyer’s wordsmithing arc was impressive.

It all reminded me a bit of J.K. Rowling’s progression. The first Harry Potter novel was compelling and tons of fun as the author did her world-building, even as the writing itself was not super-scintillating. But Rowling’s prose and dialogue got better and better as her next six wizard-realm books emerged, and continued in that direction with the skillfully written The Casual Vacancy and the riveting crime series starring private investigators Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.

Both Rowling and Meyer can be rather long and wordy in their more recent offerings, but I’m here for it.

Going much further back in time, I liked the feminist idea of Jack London’s early novel A Daughter of the Snows, but the dialogue was laughable and the prose clunky. One year later, London’s pitch-perfect The Call of the Wild was released. I don’t know what writing elixir the author imbibed during those 12 months, but I want it. 🙂

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s college-set debut novel This Side of Paradise is quite uneven, only hinting at the greatness of The Great Gatsby published just five years later.

John Steinbeck’s debut novel Cup of Gold was an okay, rather conventional pirate novel before much of his later fiction became light years better — including, of course, his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath.

Willa Cather’s first two novels — Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! — exhibited some authorial growing pains before they were followed by her absorbing The Song of the Lark and then the masterful My Antonia.

Dan Brown’s early-career novel The Da Vinci Code was VERY popular and quite ingenious in its way but even more awkwardly written than Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. I never read Brown again, but I assume his writing improved?

Any comments about, or examples of, this theme?

Misty the cat asks: “How am I supposed to shovel this stuff without opposable thumbs?”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which has “no appeal” appeal — is here.

Cars Can Help Drive the Plots of Novels

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Our 2014 Toyota Prius leaving its apartment-complex garage. (Driven by my wife Laurel/photographed by me.)

My wife Laurel and I drove from New Jersey to Michigan and back this weekend for a memorial service in Ann Arbor for a cherished family member. It was a crazily compressed November 14-16 car journey of more than 1,200 miles round trip — a travel method we chose to avoid possible flight problems in the aftermath of the U.S. government shutdown.

Anyway, all that automotive time means I have driving on my mind, so I’m resurrecting a piece about cars in literature that I wrote for The Huffington Post in 2013, a year before starting this WordPress blog. Here it is, slightly edited and slightly rewritten:

In literature, sometimes a car is just a car. But sometimes it’s a “vehicle” for authors to write about independence, loneliness, progress, sex, death, wealth, poverty, and more.

Whether or not book-based cars are weighted with symbolism, most readers relate to driving. So I’d like to steer you to some novels in which cars are important “characters,” and then hear about your favorite fictional works that feature those on-the-road contraptions.

Which reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road novel and the way some cars in literature are used to search (futilely or otherwise) for freedom and/or pleasure, and can speak to characters’ restlessness, aimlessness, and/or discontent.

That’s the case in Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance. Protagonist Jim Nashe spends the first part of the novel endlessly crisscrossing the U.S. in a car after his wife leaves him. The ex-firefighter, who finances his marathon road trip with an unexpected inheritance, eventually ends up involved in a high-stakes poker game at the mansion of two eccentric/heartless rich guys. Then things get really weird before the novel concludes with (wait for it!) one more car ride.

There’s another fateful auto scene — though not at the end of the book — in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. It’s a car chase that features Calliope’s dad Milton driving too fast on the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Canada.

Motor vehicles also figure prominently in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, with successful automaker Eugene Morgan representing turn-of-the-20th-century progress while Major Amberson and his dwindling fortune represent the vanishing horse-and-buggy age. New money vs. old money and all that.

Tarkington contemporary L.M. Montgomery offers a scene in The Blue Castle of Valancy Stirling sharing an exuberant car ride with “misfit” Barney Snaith. Many people in their straitlaced town are suspicious of Barney, but Valancy finds him very interesting — so the car ride is a symbol of Valancy’s break from the conventions of her place, time, and family.

Novels of the Montgomery-Tarkington era were usually subtle about sex, but that’s not the case with many books of recent decades. For instance, there’s a scene in Ken Grimwood’s time-travel novel Replay that shows how cars can potentially be bedrooms on wheels.

Speaking of time travel, there’s a great section of Jack Finney’s Time and Again in which Simon accompanies Julia from her present (1880s) to his present (around 1970), and Julia is of course stunned by the experience of riding in a modern motor vehicle.

Readers are the ones who might be stunned as they peruse Charles Dickinson’s The Widows’ Adventures, a novel starring two women on a long road trip. The one doing the driving is…blind!

Then there are supernatural thrills in car-oriented Stephen King novels such as Christine and From a Buick 8. The latter book includes a spooky gas station scene before various law-enforcement people enter the story.

Two memorable moments in Cormac McCathy’s Suttree involve what the title character does to a police car (to avenge racist cop behavior) and what Suttree’s girlfriend does to the couple’s own car. And in Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection, the spurned older wife is jailed after using an auto to do a certain something to the trophy wife who “replaced” her.

Or how about that tense yet hilarious Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets scene in which J.K. Rowling has Harry and Ron travel to Hogwarts in a flying car? An auto can definitely be a “vehicle” for humor.

On a much more serious note, a car converted into a truck of sorts is how the Joad family travels from drought-stricken/agribusiness-devastated Oklahoma to a hoped-for better life in California. But the reality out west for the non-rich is as dismal as the Joads’ aged jalopy in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

People take long car trips for various reasons. In John Grisham’s The Client, attorney Reggie Love and her beleaguered 11-year-old client Mark drive from Memphis to New Orleans to try to locate the body of a murdered U.S. senator.

What are your favorite fictional works with motor vehicle motifs?

Misty the cat says: “The Lincoln Tunnel has been renovated!”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about two flawed local ballot questions relating to a massive school budget deficit — is here.

Fictional People Are Getting Deported, Too

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The Trump regime’s cruel deportation program has extended to fictional characters. And this program is widespread: affecting characters from the United States or other countries, characters who live in the present or lived in the past, etc. Because novels can make readers smarter and more empathetic, most of today’s Republicans feel many characters have to be removed from the pages where they live — including pages in some of my favorite literature.

I first heard about character deportations when The Grapes of Wrath‘s Tom Joad, who develops a stronger class consciousness as John Steinbeck’s book goes on, was yanked from the novel by Trump’s masked ICE agent goons. Determined to find Tom, the rest of the Joad family traveled east instead of west and ended up picking crops in New York City’s Times Square. Needless to say, not much was growing through the pavement.

ICE agents also plucked Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s novel because she’s a determined young woman too independent-minded for Trump’s taste, and doesn’t have big blonde hair like many Fox News hosts do. So, U.S. Secretary of Education/wrestling biz wacko Linda McMahon substituted for Jane as little Adele’s teacher, and Rochester instead fell in love with a Disney princess.

Of course, characters of color are most at risk of the Trump regime’s deportations, and Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright’s Native Son was no exception. Plus his attorney is a communist! With Bigger no longer around as a client, that lawyer represented Jane Eyre as she tried to return to her novel, but Jane instead got sent to Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” two centuries before that repugnant concentration-camp-like jail was built.

Clara del Valle Trueba was also deported — from The House of the Spirits. After being kicked out of Isabel Allende’s novel, the clairvoyant Clara took her knowledge of Trump’s guilt in the sickening Epstein pedophile scandal and started a blog about that. Because Clara had been in a magic-realism book, the blog levitated out of her computer screen — which puzzled WordPress customer support.

In Daniel Deronda, Daniel D. and Mirah Lapidoth and Ezra Mordecai Cohen are idealistic proto-Zionists rather than the U.S.-armed genocidal Zionists in Israel’s current leadership who are mass-murdering Palestinian civilians, so the three were deported when entering a government office to register as George Eliot characters. That left Gwendolen Harleth wandering around Eliot’s 19th-century novel, searching for a Burger King in which to have lunch.

Atticus Finch? Taken from To Kill a Mockingbird for being an attorney with integrity. This came after some Trump regime hesitation to deport Finch because author Harper Lee had the same last name as Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general greatly admired by right-wingers for fighting to defend the appalling institution of slavery. But Atticus did ultimately get booted from To Kill a Mockingbird before joining Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch novel starring a painting of a bird sharing his last name.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, every character except the ultra-evil Lord Voldemort was deported to make the series more palatable for Republican fascists. One of the characters, Nearly Headless Nick, went on to successfully lose 10 pounds by becoming Completely Headless Nick.

But no character was spared from deportation in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things because Trump erroneously thought the title of that novel referred to his fingers and his…

Misty the cat says: “Where’s my teen human? Oh, she went away to college last weekend.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the spending to date of money authorized by my town’s massive 2022 school bond referendum — is here.

Reimagination Actualization

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Four years ago, I blogged about fiction that uses previous fiction as a jumping-off point — and perhaps reimagines well-known characters. This post is sort of a sequel to that post, taking a somewhat different angle and including several novels I’ve read since 2021.

In general, I’m not a huge fan of fiction that’s heavily inspired by a famous work; I’d rather writers be more original than that. Still, there have been some excellent novels that offer insights into the previous work and might be great in their own right.

My latest encounter with this reimagining phenomenon was Queen Macbeth, Val McDermid’s 2024 novella that takes a fascinating approach to characters in Shakespeare’s iconic Macbeth play. The book is excellent, giving Lady Macbeth a more positive (and more historically accurate) persona as a compelling plot unfolds in two different timelines.

McDermid’s book reminded me a bit of Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella The Penelopiad (mentioned in my 2021 post) that gives Penelope a bigger and more feminist role than she had in Homer’s ancient Odyssey poem.

There’s also Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 tour de force that gives Charles Dickens’ 1850 classic David Copperfield a modern spin in America’s Appalachian region during the opioid epidemic.

Kristin Hannah’s gripping 2021 novel The Four Winds was obviously inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), but it’s still plenty original and differs in featuring a female protagonist. (The title character in Demon Copperhead is male.)

Zadie Smith has described the structure/focus of her novel On Beauty (2005) as an homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).

In her also-published-in-2005 novel March, Geraldine Brooks takes the father from Louisa May Alcott’s 1868-released Little Women and gives him his own story.

I haven’t read it yet, but Percival Everett’s acclaimed James (2024) reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim.

In my 2021 post, I mentioned the 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Jean Rhys gives three-dimensionality to the “madwoman in the attic” of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre; Rhys’ creation is in effect a prequel to Bronte’s 1847 book. I also discussed the novel (by Gregory Maguire) and the play Wicked, which sympathetically portray the Wicked Witch from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel (1900) and The Wizard of Oz movie (1939).

Mentioned as well in that post were Isabel Allende’s 2005 novel Zorro, Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 Jane Austen parody Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — the last of which I haven’t felt the “Persuasion” to read.

Comments about, and examples of, this theme?

Misty the cat says: “My right turn has nothing to do with politics.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a badly maintained lower-income apartment building, a change in venue for a senior center, and more — is here.

An Array of Admirable Activists

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Zohran Mamdani walking New York City’s streets during his mayoral campaign.

I’ve written about activist authors (in 2014) and courageous characters (last year), but as far as I can recall I’ve never written specifically about activist characters in novels. So, today I will. 🙂

My inspiration for this topic was 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani winning last month’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor — and, thrillingly, the results weren’t even close. If Mamdani also wins the general election this fall he’ll become the youngest NYC mayor in more than a century, the city’s first Muslim mayor, and clearly the most progressive mayor the biggest U.S. city has ever had. Among Mamdani’s November opponents will be current NYC mayor Eric Adams, a cartoonishly corrupt politician who escaped multiple criminal charges by making a sell-out deal with Trump’s ghoulish Republican regime.

At a time of ever-growing economic inequality in NYC and the rest of the country, the charismatic Mamdani ran an energetic grassroots campaign that focused on freezing rents, making buses free, offering universal childcare, raising the inadequate minimum wage, and other pocketbook proposals — all to be paid for by raising the too-low taxes on the very rich.

Much of the very rich, of course, went bananas, and many of them during the primary backed Mamdani’s mayoral opponent Andrew Cuomo — the conservative-leaning former New York governor who resigned in disgrace four years ago after causing thousands of deaths by sending COVID patients into nursing homes and after being credibly accused of sexual harassment by 13 women who worked for the state. Plus, plenty of corruption in his administration. Many of those wealthy Cuomo supporters are now backing the aforementioned Adams, a right-wing Democrat who sat out the June primary and is now running as an “independent.”

Mamdani, who has an activist history, is also the rare American politician who supports equal rights for Palestinians and has publicly decried Israel’s genocide of innocent civilians in Gaza — drawing bogus accusations of anti-Semitism from people who wrongly equate being against Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government with being anti-Semitic. In fact, Mamdani received many Jewish votes amid many votes from young people, Asian-American residents, etc. Also, Mamdani and Jewish mayoral candidate Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other — something they were able to do under the election’s ranked-choice system.

I should mention that I feel a connection to New York City because I lived in its Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens boroughs for a total of 16 years and worked in Manhattan for 30 years. My current town of Montclair is 12 miles west of NYC in New Jersey.

Anyway, on to some inspiring activist characters in literature!

There’s lapsed preacher Jim Casy, one of the memorable supporting players in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Casy tries to organize migrant workers after he tags along with the Joad family to California, where conditions for financially struggling newcomers are appalling.

Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds was clearly inspired by The Grapes of Wrath, though that 2021 novel is original in many ways. It tracks the radicalization of Elsa Wolcott, who’s part of a cast that also includes union organizer Jack Valen.

Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code (also 2021) focuses on a memorable trio of female British code breakers during World War II.

Another compelling historical novel is Leon Uris’ Mila 18 (1961), about the desperate Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.

And Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) features the part-fictionalized sisters who opposed the regime of brutal Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo.

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) has a supporting cast that includes radical lawyer Boris Max, who represents protagonist Bigger Thomas.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments — the 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) — includes the Daisy character (birth name: Nicole) who infiltrates the repressive, patriarchal society of Gilead.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Dellarobbia Turnbow is an initially apolitical young farmer’s wife who joins the fight against climate change.

Then there’s the against-the-odds activism in these two classics: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

While activism occasionally succeeds, many other times it doesn’t — given the formidable/well-funded forces on the other side: powerful politicians, heavily armed military and police, giant corporations trying to increase their already-huge profits, bend-the-knee mainstream media outlets, etc. In fact, some of the fictional characters I mentioned in this post ended up being killed, making for riveting reading but very depressing reading.

Examples of activist characters in novels? Thoughts on this topic?

Misty the cat says: “When I groom myself near a window, it’s ‘A Groom with a View.'”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my younger daughter’s June 26 high school graduation (again), a Township Council meeting, and more — is here.

Paying Deference to Novelistic Self-Reference

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Was W. Somerset Maugham relaxing after appearing in his own book? Maybe. 🙂

Our attention is definitely captured when authors directly or indirectly refer to themselves and their own books in their novels.

This can give readers an additional sense of a writer’s personality, and provide other extra elements to a book — including humor. On the possibly negative side, “self-insertion” can puncture fiction’s illusory world and remind readers that there’s an authorial presence pulling the strings.

The example of “self-insertion” I noticed most recently was when Elin Hilderbrand had one of her fictional characters in The Five-Star Weekend buy a Hilderbrand novel while in a Nantucket bookstore. Some delightful authorial self-mocking was part of the scene as another character tried to ply the Hilderbrand-interested character with more “serious” literature.

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote novel, the title character has Cervantes’ debut book in his library. Also, another character in the classic 17th-century work says he’s a friend of Cervantes.

Then there’s John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which was partly inspired by the author’s own family history. So it’s not a total surprise when Steinbeck himself pops up for a brief cameo in the novel.

W. Somerset Maugham put somewhat more of his actual self in his latter-career novel The Razor’s Edge when his searching-for-meaning-in-life protagonist — the fictional Larry Darnell — has a deep discussion about spirituality and more in a Paris cafe with…Maugham. (Of Human Bondage, the Maugham novel considered that author’s masterpiece, is actually more semi-autobiographical than The Razor’s Edge.)

And Emile Zola put a LOT of himself in his novel The Masterpiece; the book’s fictional author Pierre Sandoz is clearly based on Zola himself, who had a long real-life friendship with painter Paul Cezanne. The Masterpiece‘s protagonist — painter Claude Lantier — is partly based on Cezanne as well as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator character is obviously Vonnegut himself. There are even these lines: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”

Herman Melville did a self-reference variation by having the title character in Pierre write a book that appalled its would-be publisher. This plot twist was a way for Melville to vent about the poor critical and commercial reception for Moby-Dick, released the previous year. Pierre — which, like Moby-Dick, was ahead of its time in various ways — would also sell badly, and cause lots of controversy with its implied-incest element.

Of course, as several early commenters rightly note below, most novelists put something of themselves in the books they write — even if subconsciously. My post mostly focused on when writers do this in a pretty overt way. 🙂

Your thoughts on, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “I’m on the windswept moors of ‘Wuthering Heights.'”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.


In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about past-due school district bills, a township manager payout, diminished mass transit, and more — is here.

The ‘Winter’ of Our Book Content

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Misty the cat thinks these books have a BACK story. (Photo by me.)

It’s early winter in part of the world, so thoughts turn to novels with…the word “Winter” in the title. Okay, maybe most readers’ thoughts don’t turn to that, but I needed a blog topic this week. 🙂

I just finished reading Winter Street, the first of a four-book Elin Hilderbrand series that continues with Winter Stroll, Winter Storms, and Winter Solstice. The mostly Nantucket, Massachusetts-set Winter Street focuses on the Quinn family as it goes through a dramatic Christmas week that includes a marital separation, other relationship issues, an engagement, no word from a son fighting in Afghanistan, another son facing an insider-trading charge, etc. Yes, Christmas time is not always a 100% happy time. The book obviously deals with some heavy issues, yet often retains a light touch.

Another accomplished contemporary author, Kristin Hannah, wrote Winter Garden. Not on the level of her best novels such as The Nightingale, The Great Alone, The Four Winds, and Firefly Lane, but still pretty good. Winter Garden is about two very different sisters and their cold, mysterious mother — who’s originally from snowy Russia during the period of Stalin’s iron rule.

The late Rosamunde Pilcher’s final novel, Winter Solstice, is I think the second best of her many books — behind only her terrific The Shell Seekers. Winter Solstice (published before Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name) unfolds amid a cold-weather gathering of people from various generations.

Of course, there’s John Steinbeck’s also-final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, which has the overarching theme of trying to maintain integrity in a corrupt society. It’s one of Steinbeck’s deeper books, though not as compelling as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

Among the “Winter”-titled novels I haven’t read are Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter (part of The Little House on the Prairie series). I should also mention George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter — the lengthy, long-delayed, not-yet-finished sixth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series that started with A Game of Thrones.

Then there are plays such as Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter.

Any thoughts about, and/or examples of, this theme?

On yet another rainy winter morning, Misty the cat says: “I’d build an ark, but the lumber yard’s closed.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which discusses an “F-bomb” controversy and much more via a poem co-starring Santa Claus — is here.