Literary Newsmakers for Students Volume 1

LITERARY NEWSMAKERS for Students National Advisory Board Susan Allison: Librarian, Lewiston High School, Lewiston, M...

Author: Greg Wilson | Anne Marie Hacht

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LITERARY NEWSMAKERS

for Students

National Advisory Board Susan Allison: Librarian, Lewiston High School, Lewiston, Maine. Catherine Bond: Librarian, Conestoga High School, Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Cynthia Carpenter: Librarian, Ocean Springs, Missouri. Nancy Guidry: Reference Librarian, Grace Van Dyke Bird Library, Bakersfield Community College, California.

Ann Kearney: Literacy Volunteer for Broward County Public Schools and Broward County Public Library, Broward County, Florida. Carol Keeler: Upper School Media Specialist, Detroit Country Day School, Beverly Hills, Michigan. Mary Anne Nagler: English Department Chair, Oakland Community College, Southfield, Michigan.

Table of Contents ADVISORS .

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GUEST FOREWORD (by Greg Wilson) . . . . .

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INTRODUCTION .

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LITERARY CHRONOLOGY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . CONTRIBUTORS .

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THE DA VINCI CODE (by Dan Brown) . . . . . . 1

Author Biography. Plot Summary . . Characters. . . . Themes . . . . . Style . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . Sources . . . . . Further Reading. .

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2 2 6 9 10 11 12 14 21 21

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22 23 23 28 32 35

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (by J. K. Rowling) . . . . .

Author Biography. Plot Summary . . Characters. . . . Themes . . . . . Style . . . . . .

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Historical Context. Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . Sources . . . . . Further Reading. .

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35 36 38 44 45

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46 47 48 49 53 55 56 58 58 65 65

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66 66 67 71 73 75 76 77 78 84 84

HERE IN HARLEM (by Walter Dean Myers) . . .

Author Biography. Plot Summary . . Characters. . . . Themes . . . . . Style . . . . . . Historical Context. Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . Sources . . . . . Further Reading. .

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KIRA-KIRA (by Cynthia Kadohata). . . . . . .


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THE KITE RUNNER (by Khaled Hosseini) . . . .


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85 . 86 . 86 . 90 . 93 . 95 . 96 . 97 . 98 104 104

THE LAST JUROR (by John Grisham). . . . . . 106


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106 107 111 115 117 117 119 120 127 127

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THE LOVELY BONES (by Alice Sebold). . . . . 128


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129 129 133 136 138 139 140 141 148 148

MYSTIC RIVER (by Dennis Lehane) . . . . . . 149


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150 151 155 158 160 161 162 162 168 169

NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA (by Barbara Ehrenreich). . . . . 170


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171 171 175 177 179 181 182 183 190 190

A NORTHERN LIGHT(by Jennifer Donnelly) . . . 191


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SEABISCUIT: AN AMERICAN LEGEND (by Laura Hillenbrand) . . . . . . . . .

Author Biography. . . . . . . . . Plot Summary . . . . . . . . . . Characters. . . . . . . . . . . .

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192 192 196 199 201 201 202 204 210 211

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Themes . . . . . Style . . . . . . Historical Context. Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . Sources . . . . . Further Reading. .

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THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES (by Sue Monk Kidd) . . . . . . . . . .


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221 223 224 225 226 231 231

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THE DARK TOWER VI: SONG OF SUSANNAH (by Stephen King). . . . . . . 251


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252 253 257 260 262 263 264 265 268 268

STATE OF FEAR(by Michael Crichton) . . . . . 270


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271 271 276 278 280 281 282 283 289 289

Historical Context. Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . Sources . . . . . Further Reading. .

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301 302 303 308 308

TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (by Peter Carey) . . . . . . . . 309


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310 310 315 319 320 321 322 323 329 329

THE WEDDING (by Nicholas Sparks). . . . . . 330


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WILL IN THE WORLD: HOW SHAKESPEARE BECAME SHAKESPEARE (by Stephen Greenblatt) . . . . . . . . .


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GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS .

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331 331 335 337 338 340 340 341 348 348

349 350 351 355 358 360 360 362 363 369 369

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TRICKSTER’S CHOICE (by Tamora Pierce) . . . 290

Author Biography. Plot Summary . . Characters. . . . Themes . . . . . Style . . . . . .

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CUMMULATIVE AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX. NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY INDEX. SUBJECT/THEMATIC INDEX.

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Foreword Each volume of the Literary Newsmakers for Students series offers a collection of scholarly entries based on recent literary works—fiction, nonfiction and poetry—that have proven newsworthy. What makes a book newsworthy? There are a number of factors that can bring a book into the public spotlight; this volume covers a wide selection of titles that illustrate the many ways in which a book can become newsworthy. In some cases, the popularity of a title expresses a sort of cultural phenomenon, an idea that seizes the public’s imagination. Sometimes it involves a unique character perspective, such as that offered by Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones. It might offer a distinctive literary style, like True History of the Kelly Gang does. It might even present a new way of considering widely accepted truths and beliefs, as in The Da Vinci Code. For these books, reading groups and simple word of mouth helped them reach readers who might otherwise never have explored them. Conversely, for a select few authors, the publication of any new book is a cause for public attention; both Stephen King and John Grisham enjoy enough popularity to be regarded as newsmakers, not so much for specific titles as for their overall bodies of literary work. A book might also become newsworthy because of its connections to other forms of media. While the Harry Potter franchise was wildly popular even before the first film adaptation was made, the movies have expanded the

audience for the books; each new Harry Potter book is now considered a mammoth publishing event. Similarly, Mystic River sold well on its initial release in 2001; however, the 2003 release of a Clint Eastwood–directed film adaptation— and its two subsequent Academy Awards—did much to solidify the book’s place in the public consciousness. This is also true of Seabiscuit, which was adapted to film by acclaimed writer/ director Gary Ross in 2003 and earned seven Oscar nominations. Some books are newsworthy because they reflect current events. State of Fear focuses on recent scientific research related to humankind’s effect—or possibly lack of effect—on the global climate. Nickel and Dimed deals with the dramatic rise in minimum-wage and service industry jobs in America over the past decade and explores whether or not a person can truly support herself with such a job. Kite Runner offers a view of life in politically turbulent Afghanistan, describing in particular the harsh Taliban regime that has become infamous for its role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Even when it does not center on current events, literature, by its very nature, captures and defines the time in which it is written. It is intended for an audience contemporary with the author; this means that it is written in a style and structure that the author’s peers can relate to (even if it is meant to reflect another time period), and focuses on themes important to the

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reading audience. Descriptions reflect the world as the author and readers see it; metaphors and symbolism occur in a specific cultural context that resonates with the audience and emphasizes their meanings. Of course, the main purpose of literature is generally not to define a culture for study by future generations. Literature is meant to entertain us, enlighten us, expand our perspectives, and even incite discussion and change. This book offers a survey of literary works that span this spectrum. Some, like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, offer sheer escapist entertainment; others, like Nickel and Dimed, are intended to bring to light issues seldom discussed in the media and public sphere. Though they may achieve their goals through dramatically different methods, all these books are meant to move us in some way. This is why a survey of contemporary works serves as a snapshot of our culture. The themes found here are the very things that move us most. They are the issues that concern us as a society: our cumulative effect on the environment (State

of Fear); our capacity for coping with tragedy, and our desire for justice (The Lovely Bones and Mystic River); our ability to earn a living wage (Nickel and Dimed ); our preservation of cultural and personal history (Here in Harlem and True History of the Kelly Gang); and our desire to find and sustain love with others (The Wedding and The Secret Life of Bees). Literature is indeed a window to the culture in which it is created. Literary Newsmakers for Students offers a broad overview of works that have captured the spirit and imagination of our contemporary society. Indeed, these are titles deemed ‘‘newsworthy’’ because of their ability to resonate with modern readers. By analyzing their structures, themes, and contexts of these literary works, perhaps we can gain a deeper understanding of our contemporary society and what is most important to us. If so, such valuable knowledge might prove every bit as helpful to us now as it would to scholars of future generations, who will undoubtedly look back through decades and centuries to catch a glimpse of us through the window of our literature.

Greg Wilson Wilson is a writer and editor of literary reference and pop culture entertainment articles.

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Introduction PURPOSE OF THE BOOK The purpose of Literary Newsmakers for Students (LNfS) is to provide readers with an overview of contemporary literary works that have captured the public’s attention in recent years. The popularity of these titles commends them to be adopted for classroom study, and these volumes provide literary and critical information that is often limited for newer titles. LNfS gives students easy access to information about these works. Each work is treated with a separate entry. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the work and its author; a list of characters, including explanation of a given character’s role in the work as well as discussion about that character’s relationship to other characters in the work; a plot summary, to help readers understand the action and story of the work; an analysis of important themes addressed in the work; an examination of style elements used by the author; and a section on important historical and cultural events that shaped both the author and the work, as well as events that affect the plot or characters. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the work itself, students are also provided with a critical overview that provides information about how the work has been received. Accompanying the critical overview is an excerpt from a previously published critical

essay, as well as an essay commissioned by LNfS specifically for student audiences. For further analysis and enjoyment, a list of media adaptations is also included, as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include topics for discussion, which include ideas for research papers, and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the work.

SELECTION CRITERIA The titles for LNfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Input was also solicited from our advisory board, as well as from educators from various areas. Our advisory board members— educational professionals—helped pare down the list for this volume. If a work was not selected for the present volume, it was often noted as a possibility for a future volume. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.

HOW EACH ENTRY IS ORGANIZED Each entry heading includes the author’s name, the title of the work being discussed, and the year

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it was published. The following sections are included in the discussion of each entry: • Introduction: a brief overview of the work which provides information about its publication, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work. • Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author’s life, and focuses on events and times in the author’s life that inspired the work in question. • Plot Summary: a factual description of the events that occur within the work. The plot summary is broken down by subheadings, usually by chapter or section. • Characters: an alphabetic listing of major characters in the work. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character’s role in the work, as well as discussion of the character’s actions, relationships, and possible motivations. Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character’s first name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by that name. Variant names are also included for each character. Thus, the full name ‘‘Leigh Teabing’’ would appear in the character section for The Da Vinci Code, and also listed in a separate cross-reference would be Teabing’s other identity in the novel, ‘‘The Teacher.’’ • Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the work. Each theme discussed appears in a separate subhead. • Style: this section addresses important style elements of the novel, such as setting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might belong, such science fiction, historical, or nonfiction. Literary terms are explained within the entry but can also be found in the Glossary. • Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the work was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time

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in which the work was written. If the work is a historical one, information regarding the time in which the work is set is also included. Each section is broken down with helpful subheads. • Critical Overview: this section contains background on the critical reputation of the work, such as how it has been received by reviewers, critics, and the general public. Any bannings or controversy surrounding the work is included in this section. Direct quotes from reviews may also be included. • Criticism: an essay commissioned by LNfS that specifically deals with the work and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available.) • Sources: an alphabetical list of sources used in compiling the entry, including bibliographic information. • Further Reading: a list of texts that point students towards more in-depth information about topics, themes, or time periods discussed in the works. Bibliographic information is included. In addition, each entry includes the following sections, set apart from the rest of the text as sidebars: • Media Adaptations: a list of important film, television, stage adaptations, audio versions, or other forms of media related to the work. Source information is included. • Topics for Discussion: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the work. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. • What Do I Read Next?: a list of titles that might complement the featured work or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.

OTHER FEATURES LNfS includes ‘‘What Makes a ‘Newsmaker’?’’— a foreword by Greg Wilson, a writer and editor

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of literary reference and pop culture entertainment articles. This essay provides an analysis of societal factors that make a piece of literature a ‘‘newsmaker’’ and how Literary Newsmakers for Students can help provide a better understanding of contemporary society through study of these literary works. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the LNfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the LNfS series by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. Each entry may have several illustrations, including photos of the author, key elements of the plot, stills from film adaptations, and/or historical photos relating to the setting of the work.

When quoting the specially commissioned essay from LNfS (usually the first piece under the ‘‘Criticism’’ subhead), the following format should be used: Petrusso, Annette. Critical essay on Mystic River. Literary Newsmakers for Students. Ed. XXXXX. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2006. xxx–xx.

When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of LNfS, the following form may be used: Byam, Paige, ‘‘Children’s Literature or Adult Classic? The Harry Potter Series and the British Novel Tradition,’’ Topic: The Washington & Jefferson College Review Vol. 54 (Fall 2004), 7–13; excerpted and reprinted in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Vol. 1, Ed. XXX (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006), pp. xxx–xx.

When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in a volume of LNfS, the following form may be used: Magistrale, Anthony, ‘‘The Shape Evil Takes: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited,’’ in Modern Critical Views: Stephen King, Ed. Harold Bloom, (Chelsea House Publishers, 1998), 77–86; excerpted and reprinted in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Vol. 1, Ed. XXX (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006), pp. xxx–xx.

CITING LITERARY NEWSMAKERS FOR STUDENTS When writing papers, student who quote directly from any volume of Literary Newsmakers for Students may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLA style. Teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from LNfS that is not attributed to a particular author (i.e., the Themes or Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format should be used in the bibliography section: ‘‘The Da Vinci Code.’’ Literary Newsmakers for Students. Ed. XXX. Vol. 1. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006. xxx-xx.

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WE WELCOME YOUR SUGGESTIONS The editorial staff of LNfS welcomes your comments, ideas, and suggestions. Readers who wish to suggest themes and works to appear in future volumes, or who have any other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may do so via email at ForStudentsEditors@thomson. com or via mail at: Editor, Literary Newsmakers for Students Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535

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Literary Chronology 1937 Walter Dean Myers is born on August 12 in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

1965 Dennis Lehane is born on August 4 in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

1941 Barbara Ehrenreich is born on August 26 in Butte, Montana.

1965 Khaled Hosseini is born in Kabul, Afghanistan.

1942 Michael Crichton (John Michael Crichton) is born on October 23 in Chicago, Illinois.

1965 Nicholas Sparks is born on December 31 in Omaha, Nebraska.

1943 Peter Carey is born on May 7 in the town of Bacchus Marsh in the Australian state of Victoria.

1967 Laura Hillenbrand is born in Fairfax, Virginia.

1943 Stephen Greenblatt is born on November 7 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2000 Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang is published.

1947 Stephen King is born on September 21 in Portland, Maine.

2001 Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River is published.

1948 Sue Monk Kidd is born on August 12 in Sylvester, Georgia. 1954 Tamora Pierce is born in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania. 1955 John Grisham is born on February 18 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. 1956 Cynthia Kadohata is born in Evanston, Illinois. 1963 Jennifer Donnelly is born in 1963 in Port Chester, New York.

2001 Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is published. 2001 Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend is published. 2002 Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones is published. 2002 Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees is published. 2003 Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light is published.

1963 Alice Sebold is born in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

2003 J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is published.

1964 Dan Brown is born on June 22 in Exeter, New Hampshire.

2003 Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is published.

1965 J. K. Rowling is born on July 31 in Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England.

2003 Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is published.

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2003 Nicholas Sparks’s The Wedding is published. 2003 Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Choice is published. 2004 Walter Dean Myers’s Here in Harlem is pub-lished. 2004 Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira is published. 2004 Michael Crichton’s State of Fear is published.

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2004 Stephen King’s The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah is published. 2004 John Grisham’s The Last Juror is published. 2004 Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is published. 2004 Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography or Autobiography.

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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Literary Newsmakers for Students (LITNM). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN LITNM, VOLUME 1 WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, v. XIX, fall, 2001 for ‘‘‘Seabiscuit’? Come On . . .’’ by Tim Morris. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—American Prospect , v. 12, July 30, 2001. Copyright 2001 The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission from The American Prospect, 11 Beacon Street, Suite 1120, Boston, MA 02108.—Arthuriana, v. 14, 2004. Reproduced by permission.—Book, v. 52, March, 2001. Copyright Ó 2001 West Egg Communications, LLC. Reproduced by permission.—Boston

Globe, February 2, 2004. Ó Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company. Reproduced by permission.—Brookings Institution, January 28, 2005. Copyright 2005 Brookings Institution. Reproduced by permission.—CBS’s The Early Show, September 15, 2003. Copyright 2003 CBS Worldwide, Inc. All rights reserved. CBS News Transcipts. Reproduced by permission.— Christian Century, v. 120, February 22, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by the Christian Century Foundation. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—CNN’s The Biz, September 15, 2003. Copyright 2003 Cable News Network. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Columbia Journalism Review, v. 42, November/ December, 2003 for ‘‘Class Warrior: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Singular Crusade’’ by Scott Sherman. Ó 2003 Columbia Journalism Review. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Dollars & Sense, January 2002. Copyright 2002 Economic Affairs Bureau. Reprinted by permission of Dollars and Sense, a progressive economics magazine <www.dollarsandsense.org>.—Entertainment Weekly, February 13, 2004. Copyright 2004 Time, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Humanist, v. 61, September, 2001 for a review of ‘‘Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America’’ by Joni Scott. Copyright 2001 American Humanist Association. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Kidsreads.com, February, 2004. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of

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the Book Report Network.—Lancet, v. 362, September 20, 2003. Ó Copyright 2003 The Lancet Publishing Group, a division of Elsevier Science Ltd. Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.—Meanjin, v. 60, September 1, 2001 for a review of Peter Carey’s ‘‘True History of the Kelly Gang’’ by Andreas Gaile. Copyright 2001 Meanjin Company Ltd. Reproduced by permission of the author.—National Observer, v. 64, autumn, 2005. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—National Public Radio (NPR), November 17, 2004. Copyright 2004 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—New York Daily News, November 3, 2004. Ó 2004 New York Daily News, L. P. Reprinted with permission.—New York Post online edition, February 16, 2005. Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—New York Review of Books, v. 48, March 29, 2001; v. 50, January 16, 2003. Copyright Ó 2001, 2003 by NYREV, Inc. Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books. Both reproduced by permission.—New York Times, November 16, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.—Off Our Backs, v. 35, January & February, 2005. Copyright 2005 Off Our Backs, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Publishers Weekly, v. 248, January 1, 2001. Copyright Ó 2001 by Reed Publishing USA. Reproduced from Publishers Weekly, published by the Bowker Magazine Group of Cahners Publishing Co., a division of Reed Publishing USA, by permission.—School Library Journal, October, 1993; May 1, 2005. Copyright Ó 1993, 2005. Both reproduced from School Library Journal, a Cahners/R. R. Bowker Publication, by permission.—Spectator, October 9, 2004. Copyright Ó 2004 by The Spectator. Reproduced by permission of The Spectator.— Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by The Times Supplements Limited. Reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission.—Topic: The Washington & Jefferson College Review, v. 54, fall, 2004. Copyright, Washington and Jefferson College 2004. Reproduced by permission.—U.S. Catholic, v. 68, November, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by Claretian Publications. Reproduced by permission.—Update, September, 2004. Copyright CILIP 2005. Reproduced by permission.— World Literature Today, v. 78, SeptemberDecember, 2004. Copyright Ó 2004 by World Literature Today. Reproduced by permission.

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN LITNM, VOLUME 1 WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: From ‘‘Walter Dean Myers,’’ in Writers for Young Adults. Edited by Ted Hipple. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997. Copyright Ó 1997 Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reproduced by permission of Thomson Gale. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN LITNM, VOLUME 1, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: ‘‘A Place in the Sun,’’ with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, in a scene from the 1951 film. Paramount/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Afghan soldiers, Kabul, Afghanistan, December 11, 2003, photograph. Ó Ahmad Masood/Reuters/Corbis.— Blackbeard and Maynard dualing, drawing. Ó Bettmann/Corbis.—Brown, Dan, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Carey, Peter, photograph. Ó Marc Asnin/Corbis Saba.—Chicken farm, Santa Cruz, California, 1913, photograph. Santa Cruz Public Libraries.—Crichton, Michael, photograph. Ó Douglas Kirkland/Corbis.—Donnelly, Jennifer, photograph. Ó Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—East Harlem street, photograph. Ó Corbis.—Ehrenreich, Barbara, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Elk Lake, Adirondack State Park, New York, photograph. Ó James L. Amos/Corbis.—Empty jury box, photograph. Ó Jose Luis Pelaez, Inc./ Corbis.—First Presbyterian Church, 1819, New Bern, North Carolina, photograph. Ó Lee Snider/Corbis.—Globe Theatre, engraving. Ó The Folger Shakespeare Library. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.— Grisham, John, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Greenblatt, Stephen, photograph. Ó Rick Friedman/Corbis.—Gunslinger, reenactment of a gunfight, Tombstone, Arizonia, photograph. Ó Richard A. Cooke/Corbis.—‘‘Hamlet,’’ with Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, photograph. Castle Rock Entertainment. Reproduced by permission of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.—‘‘Hamlet,’’ with Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, in a scene from the 1948 film. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.— ‘‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,’’ with Alan Rickman, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe, photograph. Ó Warner Bros. Pictures/Zuma/Corbis.—Harry Potter fans, Moscow, February 6, 2004, photograph.

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Ó Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters/Corbis.—Honeycomb, photograph by Edward S. Ross. Copyright Ó by E. S. Ross. Reproduced by permission.—Hosseini, Khaled, photograph. Ó Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Icicles on a cabin, photograph. Ó Nik Wheeler/Corbis.— John ‘‘Red’’ Pollard, with racehorse Seabiscuit, 1938, photograph. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.—Kadohata, Cynthia Lynn, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Kadohata, Cynthia, with older sister, 1967, photograph. Courtesy of Cynthia Kadohata.—Kidd, Sue Monk, photograph by Paula Illingworth. AP/Wide World Photos.—King, Stephen, photograph by Mirek Towski. AP/Wide World Photos.—Lagoon and Coral Atoll, Tetiaroa, French Polynesia. Ó Douglas Peebles/Corbis.—Lehane, Dennis, photograph. Ó Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Myers, Walter Dean, photograph by David Godlis. Reproduced by permission of Walter Dean Myers.—‘‘Mystic River’’ director Clint Eastwood, with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, both stars of the film, photograph by Kevork Djansezian. AP/Wide World Photos.— ‘‘Ned Kelly,’’ with Laurence Kinlan, Philip Barantini, Heath Ledger, and Orlando Bloom, in a scene from the 2003 film. Australian Film Commis-sion/Working Title/The Kobal Collection/Johns, Carolyn. Reproduced by permission.—‘‘Nickel and Dimed,’’ with Robynn Rodriguez as Barbara and Sarah Agnew as Holly, in the 2003 Guthrie Theater production, Minneapolis, MN, photograph by Michal Daniel. Ó Michal Daniel.—‘‘Nickel and Dimed,’’ with Robynn Rodriguez as Barbara, in the 2003 Guthrie Theater production, Minneapolis, MN,

photograph by Michal Daniel. Ó Michal Daniel.—Oil barges sit docked on the Chelsea, Massachusetts, side of the Mystic River, photograph. Neal Hamberg/Bloomberg News/ Landov.—Our Lady of Czestochowa (Black Madonna), ca. 1434, lime-wood painting. Ó Nicolas Sapieha/Art Resource, NY.—Reward poster for Edward Kelly, Daniel Kelly, Stephen Hart and Joseph Byrne, photograph. Mitchell Library, Sydney.—Richelieu Pavilion and Glass Pyramid of the Louvre, Paris, France, photograph. Ó Owen Franken/Corbis.—Rosslyn Chapel, carved interior roof, Roslin, Scotland, photograph. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.—Rowling, J. K., arrives at the premiere of ‘‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,’’ Odeon Leicester Square, London, May 30, 2004, photograph. Ó David Bebber/Reuters/Corbis.— ‘‘Seabiscuit,’’ with Chris McCarron and Tobey Maguire, in a scence from the 2003 film. Universal/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Sebold, Alice, photograph by Jim Cooper. AP/Wide World Photos.—Shakespeare, William, illustration. The Library of Congress.— Smoky Factory, photograph. Ó Royalty-Free/ Corbis.—Snow covering a field of corn stubble, photograph. Ó Richard Hamilton Smith/ Corbis.—Sparks, Nicholas, photograph. Ó by Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Swan floating, photograph by Robert J. Huffman. Field Mark Publications. Reproduced by permission.—The Cotton Club, ca. 1932, photograph. Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images.—‘‘The Last Supper,’’ ca. 1495-1498, fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. The Granger Collection, New York. Reproduced by permission.

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Contributors Margaret Brantley: Brantley is a writer and editor of literary reference and academic subject texts. Original essay on The Last Juror.

Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah. Original essay on The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah.

Charles Brower: Brower is an editor and freelance writer. Entry on The Secret Life of Bees. Original essay on The Secret Life of Bees.

Harry Harris: Harry Harris is an English instructor at The Ohio State University. Entry on Trickster’s Choice. Original essay on Trickster’s Choice.

Catherine Cucinella: Catherine Cucinella, a freelance writer, has edited a reference volume on contemporary American poets and has published articles on poetry and film. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. Entry on The Lovely Bones. Original essay on The Lovely Bones. Cynthia Clough: Cynthia Clough has a PhD in English, specializing in the novel, from Florida State University. Entry on A Northern Light. Original essay on A Northern Light. Margarette Connor: Connor holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches English courses online at Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland, and Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan. Entry on The Last Juror. Kathleen Helal: Dr. Helal has taught courses on writing and English literature for several years and has presented and published many papers and articles on women’s writing. Entry on The Da Vinci Code. Original essay on The Da Vinci Code. Gordon Theisen: Gordon Theisen is a freelance writer with a Ph.D. in English literature from Binghamton University. Entry on The

Laura Issen: Issen is a high school English teacher as well as a college instructor of rhetoric and composition. Entry on The Wedding. Original essay on The Wedding. Michael Kelsay: Kelsay is a novelist and instructor of English composition. Entry on True History of the Kelly Gang. Original essay on True History of the Kelly Gang. Maria Elena Caballero-Robb: Maria Elena Caballero-Robb earned her Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works in publishing and teaches courses in U.S. literature and culture and composition. Entry on The Kite Runner. Original essay on The Kite Runner. Peter Menard: Menard teaches comparative literature. Entry on Kira-Kira. Original essay on Kira-Kira. Ray Mescallado: Mescallado has studied literature and pop culture, writing extensively on these topics for academic and popular venues. Entry on Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Original essay on Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

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Andrew Newman: Newman teaches in the English Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Entry on Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Original essay on Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.

Laura Baker Shearer: Shearer holds a Ph.D. in American literature and works as an English professor and freelance writer. Entry on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Original essay on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

A. Petruso: Petruso is a freelance writer and editor, with an undergraduate degree in history and master’s degree in screenwriting. Entry on Mystic River. Original essay on Mystic River.

Sonny Williams: Williams is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as a poet and fiction writer. Original entry on State of Fear.

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The Da Vinci Code The Da Vinci Code became one of the first notable international literary events of the twenty-first century as soon as it was published in early 2003. It is a fast-paced thriller involving Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon, who must solve a murder mystery before he is arrested for the murder himself. While the plot moves along rapidly, the narrative and dialogue slow down briefly at times to explore weighty issues and consider controversial questions. Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene? Did early Christian leaders attempt to suppress her significance? Did Constantine the Great and the Council of Nicaea establish the divinity of Jesus Christ in 325 A . D .? Was Leonardo da Vinci one of the ‘‘keepers of the secret of the Holy Grail,’’ as Leigh Teabing, the historian scholar, declares? Did he encode his art with symbols that suggested a Christian history far different from the one with which we are familiar? Though fictional characters raise these questions, Brown, in interviews about his novel, generated much debate by defending the possibility that Christian history has been carefully and artificially constructed. When asked in an interview what he would change if he were writing the book as nonfiction rather than fiction, for example, Brown replied he would change nothing.

DAN BROWN 2003

Religious leaders, Christian scholars, historians, and media figures reacted strongly to Brown’s novel. In 2004, it was banned from

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Lebanon when Catholic leaders protested against its content. In 2005, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone publicly responded to the claims of the novel, which he called ‘‘a castle of lies.’’ A series of reactionary books bent on disproving the novel’s theories emerged, and documentaries exploring the controversies it brings out were aired on networks from ABC to the History Channel. As of 2005, Columbia Pictures was developing the film adaptation, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, and Ian McKellen, to be released in 2006.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire. His mother was a professional musician who specialized in sacred works, and his father, Richard Brown, was a Presidential Award–winning math teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy. After attending Exeter himself and graduating in 1982, Brown went to Amherst College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1986. He returned to teach at Phillips as an English instructor. While teaching in 1996, Brown began generating ideas for his first novel when he learned that the U.S. Secret Service had detained one of his students for composing an e-mail message that appeared to threaten the president of the United States. The novel, titled Digital Fortress (1998), explores the tension between privacy and national security. His second novel, Angels and Demons (2000), introduces a character that would become the hero of his future works, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, and concerns the Illuminati, a secret society that plots to bomb the Vatican. Deception Point (2001), his third novel, is a political thriller that begins with the NASA discovery of a meteor believed to verify the existence of extraterrestrial life. If Brown’s first three novels moderately interested reviewers and readers, his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, a thriller exploring the possibility of a radically alternative Christian history, made him a worldwide celebrity. In fact, Brown became as famous for the controversies he incites in this novel about Christian history, Arthurian legend, and Leonardo da Vinci as he was for the number of novels he sold. During the two years after its release in early 2003, The Da Vinci Code sold an estimated twenty-five million

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Dan Brown AP/Wide World Photos

copies worldwide in forty-four languages in its hardcover edition. In 2005, Brown was named one of the ‘‘world’s 100 most influential people’’ in a special issue of Time magazine. In that feature, Michele Orecklin dubbed The Da Vinci Code ‘‘The Novel That Ate The World’’ and noted that the Bible was one of the few books to sell more copies since the debut of Brown’s novel at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The novel was named Britain’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in London in 2005. Accepting the award via telecast from his home in New Hampshire, Brown was already at work on his next highly anticipated novel, The Solomon Key, a sequel to The Da Vinci Code set in Washington, D.C. with Robert Langdon investigating the secret world of the Freemasons. As of 2005, Brown was living in New Hampshire with his wife, Blythe.

PLOT SUMMARY Fact The Da Vinci Code begins with a page titled ‘‘Fact,’’ a term that sets the stage for the novel’s notoriety. The three brief paragraphs that follow are carefully phrased assertions: there is a secret

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society called the Priory of Sion to which figures from Sir Isaac Newton to Leonardo da Vinci may have belonged; an organization affiliated with the Vatican called Opus Dei has been accused of using cultish techniques to attract and keep members and has just spent $47 million building its headquarters in New York City; and finally, ‘‘all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.’’

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Bishop Aringarosa has requested a special tour of her church for one of his numeraries.

Chapters 10–25

The first nine chapters introduce all the major characters that the narrative will follow to the novel’s conclusion just a few hours later. Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who was to meet Saunie`re that night, is summoned to the Louvre to help French detective Bazu Fache interpret the strange series of clues at the crime scene. The narrative interrupts their meeting to introduce two other characters: Silas, the murderer, and Bishop Manuel Aringarosa, presidentgeneral of Opus Dei, both of whom are acting under orders from a character known only as the Teacher. Back at the crime scene, Langdon learns that Saunie`re has drawn a series of images and cryptic messages not only with his own blood but also with a watermark stylus, a pen whose markings can only be detected by black light. Fache’s colleague Lieutenant Collet listens intently from a concealed room to the conversation between Fache and Langdon, the primary suspect. Cryptologist Sophie Neveu arrives at the crime scene with a message for Langdon to contact the U.S. Embassy immediately. When Langdon retrieves the message with Fache’s cell phone under Sophie’s directions, he hears a message from Sophie herself to listen carefully because he is in grave danger. Meanwhile, Sister Sandrine Bieil, caretaker of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, is notified that

Silas visits the Church of Saint-Sulpice, possessing what he believes to be Saunie`re’s great secret, the location of a keystone that leads to the Holy Grail. A narrative flashback shows his tortured past as a victim of abuse. Back at the Louvre, Sophie departs quickly after declaring that one of Saunie`re’s clues is a numeric joke. Langdon requests a few minutes alone in the restroom, pretending that he has received devastating news of an accident back home. Fache grants his request, and joins Collet in his concealed office. Sophie meets Langdon in the restroom and alerts him that he is Fache’s primary suspect, and that Fache is tracking him with a small device he has slipped into his pocket. She helps him stage his escape by lodging the device into a bar of soap and hurling it out the window. The device falls onto a truck, and Fache and Collet watch their monitor in horror, believing that Langdon has jumped from the window. They conclude that because it looks as though he has escaped, he is indeed guilty. The device leads Fache and Collet on what they believe to be a wild chase after Langdon through the streets of Paris. Back in the restroom, Sophie tells Langdon that Saunie`re is her grandfather, and that he raised her after her family died in a car accident. She also shows him a copy of the crime scene Fache sent out to agents at the Central Directorate Judicial Police. The crime scene in the photo looks slightly different: at the end of Saunie`re’s message is the request, ‘‘P.S. Find Robert Langdon.’’ Sophie concludes that Fache, who seems unnaturally determined to implicate Langdon, erased the last line from Saunie`re’s message. When Langdon asks Sophie if the initials mean anything to her, she remembers a golden key with the same initials she had found once hidden in her grandfather’s room. When she confronted him, Saunie`re had told her the initials refer to her secret name, Princess Sophie. Hearing her describe the key, however, Langdon comes to a different conclusion: the initials stand for a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, and her grandfather was a member. He claims that the Priory, a pagan goddessworship cult, has existed for a thousand years, and has attracted prominent historical figures from Sir Isaac Newton to Leonardo da Vinci. Believing Saunie`re had meant to bring them

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Prologue The narrative opens with Louvre curator Jacques Saunie`re held at gunpoint by an albino man who demands the location of something extremely valuable. After surrendering the location, which the narrative later reveals is false, Saunie`re is shot and left to die in his museum’s Grand Gallery. Just after his murderer departs, and with only minutes to live, Saunie`re, ‘‘the sole guardian of one of the most powerful secrets ever kept,’’ struggles to somehow communicate the real secret in his own crime scene.

Chapters 1–9

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together, the pair begin a frantic search for the meaning behind the series of clues he left behind.

Chapters 26–39 With Fache and his team across town, Langdon and Sophie are free to further investigate the crime scene. The clues Saunie`re left on and around his body lead them to the Mona Lisa, one of the many da Vinci works allegedly containing secret codes that suggest the Church’s suppression of the sacred feminine. They find another message written with the invisible stylus on the Plexiglas front of the famous painting. The message prompts Langdon to conclude that Saunie`re was a member of the secret Priory of Sion. Interpreting it differently, Sophie finds another clue behind the painting directly across from it, da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks: the gold key she remembers finding as a child. At the Church of SaintSulpice, Silas attempts to unearth what he believes to be the keystone, and finds that he has been tricked. Sandrine looks on from a concealed position, and realizes that the members of the Priory have sent a silent alarm for her to warn its leaders, the seńećhaux. Silas discovers her frantically attempting to reach them, and when she insults Opus Dei, he murders her in a moment of rage. Langdon and Sophie barely escape Fache’s guards and race to the address Saunie`re has left on the back of their key. On the way, Sophie remembers seeing her grandfather engaged in a ritual that disgusted her so much she ceased communication with him completely, though the details of the ritual are left out of the narrative. Langdon reveals that the main oath of the Priory of Sion is to keep secret the real meaning behind the Holy Grail.

Chapters 40–51 Pursued by the police, Langdon and Sophie reach the Bank of Zurich. They use Saunie`re’s key and a passcode they decipher from a series of numbers he wrote at his crime scene to open his safe. Inside is a device Saunie`re built, using da Vinci’s blueprints, called a cryptex, a cylindrical vessel containing a secret message that can only be opened by a passcode. This cryptex, they believe, is the key to finding the Holy Grail. Meanwhile, Aringarosa visits Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence, where he meets members of the Vatican who pay him twenty million euros for a reason not disclosed to the reader. Back at the bank, Langdon and Sophie

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meet Andre´ Vernet, president of the branch, who helps them escape in a van to avoid negative publicity. Vernet stops the van in a nearby field and attempts to retrieve the cryptex, holding Langdon and Sophie at gunpoint. They outwit him, and escape in his van with the cryptex. Langdon decides they must visit the one person who might be able to help them open it, British Royal Historian Leigh Teabing.

Chapters 52–65 Langdon and Sophie arrive at Teabing’s lavish estate, where they are greeted by Re´my Legaludec, Teabing’s servant, and led into a drawing room. While they wait for Teabing, they decide to hide the cryptex under a divan. When Teabing enters, Langdon explains that they have information about the Priory of Sion, and that he would like Teabing to explain the ‘‘true nature’’ of the Holy Grail to Sophie. Teabing, who has devoted his life to researching theories about the Holy Grail, is delighted to present the story. Most ask about the location of the Holy Grail, Teabing says, when they should be asking what is the Holy Grail. Teabing’s version of the story involves a number of surprising claims that are woven together. The Bible in its present form omits several other gospels, and was ‘‘collated’’ by Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who presided over the Council of Nicaea in 325. Early Christians believed Jesus was mortal, and that his divine status was decided by a ‘‘relatively close vote’’ held at this fourth-century gathering. Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene and had a child by her. According to this alternative history, Teabing declares, the Holy Grail is actually Mary Magdalene and the set of Sangreal texts buried with her that prove her marriage to Jesus. Leonardo da Vinci knew all of this, Teabing claims, and painted clues to the story in his famous painting, The Last Supper. The Da Vinci Code, then, is the set of symbols in Leonardo da Vinci’s art that represent this other radically different Christian history. Teabing’s lecture is interrupted by Silas, who breaks in and attempts unsuccessfully to retrieve the cryptex just before Lieutenant Collet and a team of police storm the estate.

Chapters 66–84 Langdon, Sophie, Teabing, and his servant Re´my slip away undetected with Silas as their prisoner while Collet and his colleagues search

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the estate. They escape to London in Teabing’s private plane to follow the latest clue. During their flight, Sophie finally tells Langdon the reason she shut her grandfather out of her life. She had seen him engaging in a sexual ritual called Hieros Gamos with a woman she did not recognize. Langdon explains that Hieros Gamos, or sacred marriage, is an ancient rite that is performed to achieve spiritual enlightenment. He reassures her that this is an ancient spiritual ritual, and implores her to try to understand Saunie`re’s act as a means to the end of achieving a kind of spiritual nirvana. Sophie begins to regret that she had judged her grandfather so harshly. Turning their attention to the cryptex, Langdon, Sophie, and Teabing decipher the latest clue, and open it. Rather than yielding the location of the Grail, the cryptex opens to reveal a scroll that conceals a smaller cryptex requiring another password. When they land at the Kent airport in England, Fache and his team arrive just in time to see Teabing exit the plane with his butler, ignorant that Langdon, Sophie, and Silas are already hidden in his limousine. Fache searches the plane for clues. Teabing leads Langdon and Sophie to London’s Temple Church, where they believe the next clue will appear.

Chapters 85–97 While Langdon, Sophie, and Teabing search the church, Re´my frees Silas and reveals himself to be an employee of the Teacher as well. Together, they force the keystone from Langdon and take Teabing hostage. On a mission to recover both the cryptex and Teabing, Langdon and Sophie visit the library at King’s College to research the latest clue further. The Teacher directs Re´my to drop Silas off at London’s Opus Dei headquarters and notifies the police that he is there. When the police arrive, Silas opens fire and is shot, just before learning that one of his bullets has hit Bishop Aringarosa, who has come to help him. Meanwhile, Langdon and Sophie deduce from their research that they must visit Sir Isaac Newton’s grave in Westminster Abbey for the clue to opening the cryptex. As they approach the headstone, the Teacher watches them from a distance.

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Chapters 98–105 Langdon and Sophie discover a note on the grave directing them to meet the Teacher in a public garden by way of Chapter House. When they arrive at Chapter House, they reach a dead end, and are stunned to find Teabing standing in front of it with a loaded revolver pointed at them. In a dramatic standoff, Langdon throws the cryptex into the air, and Teabing, dropping his gun, leaps for it only to discover it has already been opened. Fache storms the room along with the British police to arrest Teabing, leaving Langdon and Sophie free to interpret the final clue. Meanwhile, Bishop Aringarosa awakes and finds himself carried by an injured Silas. He remembers the event that drove him to seek the Holy Grail. Five months earlier, he learned that the Vatican had decided to revoke their association with Opus Dei. The twenty million euros they gave him was meant to settle the debt they owed to Opus Dei, which loaned money to the Vatican Bank twenty years earlier. Desperate to save Opus Dei, Aringarosa jumps at the chance to retrieve the Holy Grail when he gets a call from the Teacher, a title used often in the prelature. Thinking the Teacher is a member of the Vatican who wants to save his organization, Aringarosa obeys his commands. When he learns that the Teacher is Teabing, who has attempted to implicate the Vatican and manipulate him, he decides to distribute the Vatican money among the families of those who were killed during his operation. Meanwhile, Saunie`re’s final clue takes Langdon and Sophie to Rosslyn Chapel, a magnificent display of religious and pagan symbols that was believed to have been the site of the Grail long ago. While there, Sophie feels she has been there before, and learns not only that her grandmother and brother have been living there in secrecy to protect her grandfather’s identity, but also that she is a descendant of Mary Magdalene.

Epilogue Two days later, Langdon experiences an epiphany about Saunie`re’s final clue, which leads him back to a small pyramid in the Louvre. He believes that Saunie`re’s secret was that this pyramid houses Mary Magdalene’s bones and is thus the site of the Holy Grail. He kneels down in reverential awe, imagining that he can hear Mary Magdalene’s whispering voice.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS The Da Vinci Code was released in 2003 as an unabridged version on audiocassette and audio CD. It is narrated by Paul Michael and is available from Random House Audio. The film version of The Da Vinci Code stars Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Audrey Tatou as Sophie Neveu, and Ian McKellen as Leigh Teabing. It is directed by Ron Howard, produced by Columbia Pictures, and is set for release in 2006. The official website written and updated by Dan Brown himself, www.danbrown.com, is an interesting and interactive website, but it is also primarily geared toward promoting sales of his novels. ABC News Presents: Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci is an hour-long documentary hosted by Elizabeth Vargas, produced by Koch Vision, 2004. Vargas interviews Dan Brown himself, as well as Karen King and Elaine Pagels, both Gnostic Gospel scholars, and Richard McBrien and Darrell Bock, both Christian scholars. It presents competing views of the novel’s controversial claims about Christian history, and is available on DVD from Koch Vision Studios.

CHARACTERS Bishop Manuel Aringarosa Bishop Aringarosa is the president-general of Opus Dei, a prelature of the Vatican that has come under scrutiny for its unorthodox methods of worship. Aringarosa criticizes the liberal actions of the Catholic Church and its reforms during Vatican II. Introduced at the site of the lavish Opus Dei headquarters in New York with an elaborate and expensive bishop’s ring, Aringarosa is portrayed as a man motivated by money. He works with Silas to recover the

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Breaking the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’ is an hourlong documentary featuring authors of books disproving the theories put forth in the novel, including Darrell Bock. It is produced by Grizzly Adams Family, 2005, and is available on DVD.

Cracking the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’ is a documentary that runs an hour and a half and was produced by Ardustry Home Entertainment in 2004. Host and author Simon Cox defends the legend of the Holy Grail. It is available on DVD from Ardustry Home Entertainment.

‘‘Da Vinci Code’’ Decoded is a three-hour documentary introduced by Dan Brown, produced by The Disinformation Company, 2004. It features interviews with the authors of books Brown used when researching for his novel and is available on DVD.

Exploring the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’ is a video tour of the famous locations to which the novel refers, hosted by Henry Lincoln, one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and released in 2005 by The Disinformation Company. It is available on DVD.

legendary keystone to discover the location of the Holy Grail under the direction of the Teacher. Ultimately, his main goal is to save Opus Dei: five months before the action in the novel, he had learned that his organization would lose its association with the Vatican in six months. Retrieving the Holy Grail for the Catholic Church, he thinks, might solidify his support from the Vatican.

Sister Sandrine Bieil Sister Sandrine manages the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the site Saunie`re names in his

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last words to Silas. She critiques what she perceives as misogyny in Opus Dei’s practices, and she is connected to the Priory of Sion. For several years, she has held instructions to contact the seńećhaux and the Grand Master if the seal in her church is ever broken, a silent alarm that indicates that the secrets of the Priory are threatened. When she sees Silas unwittingly send this silent alarm, she attempts to warn Priory members and is murdered in the process.

Marie Chauvel Marie Chauvel is caretaker of Rosslyn Chapel and Sophie Neveu’s grandmother. She has been living in secrecy with her grandson, Neveu’s brother, under the protection of the Priory for twenty-eight years. A direct descendant of the Merovingian families, Chauvel followed the orders of the Priory to go into hiding after the car accident that killed Neveu’s family. Since the accident, she has had to arrange secret meetings with her husband to protect her grandchildren and their true identities.

Lieutenant Collet Lieutenant Collet works under Captain Fache, whom he admires for his professional insight. He echoes the feelings of his colleagues, who see Fache as a heroic leader and example. He assists Fache on his hunt for Langdon and Neveu through the streets of Paris. Collet watches Fache alter his strategy a number of times but remains loyal to him to the end. When Fache captures the real villain, Leigh Teabing, Collet defends him in an interview with the BBC, declaring that Fache used Langdon and Neveu to ‘‘lure out the real killer.’’

Simon Edwards Simon Edwards is Executive Services Officer at Biggin Hill Airport. He is dismayed when he is summoned to help arrest his client, Leigh Teabing, as soon as his private plane lands.

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power as Captain and is greatly admired by his assistant, Lieutenant Collet. Though he seems unusually focused on Langdon at first, in the end, Fache is only interested in finding the real murderer. When he arrests Leigh Teabing, he lets Langdon and Neveu go, in spite of Teabing’s frantic declarations that they know the location of the Holy Grail.

Claude Grouard Claude Grouard is a security warden in the Louvre. He regards Saunie`re as a paternal figure, and is determined to keep Langdon in the Louvre when he finds him just after Fache and his team have left to chase the tracking device that is no longer on him. He is outwitted by Neveu when she uses the Madonna of the Rocks as a shield to escape the museum with Langdon.

Robert Langdon Robert Langdon is Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University. In the year before the novel takes place, Langdon became a celebrity for his role in a scandal at the Vatican involving a secret society known as the Illuminati. He has just completed a three-hundred-page manuscript tentatively titled Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine, and is in Paris to present a lecture about pagan symbols hidden in Chartres Cathedral. At the moment of his lecture, which takes place just before the novel opens, this bachelor professor is as famous for his research as he is for his charming and stylish appearance. He is dismayed to learn that he has been called ‘‘Harrison Ford in Harris tweed,’’ and that his female students refer to his alluring voice as ‘‘chocolate for the ears.’’ Author of several books on symbols, icons, and secret societies, with titles such as The Symbology of Secret Sects, The Art of the Illuminati, and Religious Iconography, Langdon was featured in Boston Magazine as one of the top ten most intriguing people in the city. He is recruited to help solve the mystery of Saunie`re’s death.

Captain Bezu Fache Bezu Fache is Captain of the Central Directorate Judicial Police in Paris. An ominous figure with dark hair and features, nicknamed le Taureau, the Bull, Fache is initially intent on proving Langdon’s involvement in Saunie`re’s murder. He dresses formally, and wears a tie clip that features a crux gemmata, a crucifix decorated with thirteen gems that represent Christ and his apostles. He carries an enormous amount of

Re´my Legaludec

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Re´my Legaludec is Leigh Teabing’s butler. A fifty-something Frenchman, Legaludec dons a formal white tie and tuxedo when he receives Langdon and Neveu in the middle of the night. He is the only one who has seen the Teacher face to face, and works under him to gather intelligence using a vast network of surveillance equipment. The Teacher motivates Legaludec by

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promising a life of luxury upon his retirement, but ultimately poisons him when his job is complete.

Sophie Neveu Sophie Neveu is a young, attractive cryptologer for the Central Directorate Judicial Police in Paris, and the granddaughter of Saunie`re. When she was only four, her parents, grandmother, and younger brother were killed in a car accident. She had a happy childhood living with Saunie`re, whose passion for mathematical mysteries and codes inspired her to study cryptography, the science of decoding secret messages, at the Royal Holloway in England. She had stopped communicating with him ten years earlier, when she witnessed him engaging in a disturbing ritual. The afternoon before Saunie`re is murdered, Neveu receives a call from him warning her of danger and promising to divulge the secret of her family. She helps Langdon to discover the meaning behind her grandfather’s clues, and also on his quest to find the Holy Grail. In the end, she learns that she belongs to the Merovingian families, believed to be descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.

Jacques Saunie`re Jacques Saunie`re has been a curator at the Louvre museum for twenty years. A highly respected and reclusive scholar of art, Saunie`re has published books on goddesses and pagan symbols in art. As the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, Saunie`re possesses the secret of the Holy Grail, and devotes his life to concealing both his identity and the location of the Grail. For many years, he had been a gentle and loving grandfather to Sophie Neveu after she had lost her family in a car accident. He shared his passions for mathematical symbols, puzzles, and secret codes with his granddaughter to the extent that she eventually chose to study cryptology. He had been estranged from Neveu for ten years, after she witnessed him engaged in a ritual so disturbing that she refused to speak to him. Though he is murdered at the opening of the novel, he haunts the remainder of the narrative in the form of a series of clues he leaves behind at his murder scene, and in the form of his granddaughter’s memories.

Silas Silas is the albino monk who murders Saunie`re. He has no last name, and cannot remember his real name in the midst of repressing

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his abusive childhood. What he does remember is stabbing his father to death at the age of seven, after witnessing him beat his mother to death. His childhood act of rage precipitates further acts of violence that eventually land him in prison. While in prison, he suffers a tortured existence. When an earthquake destroys the prison and frees him, he wanders aimlessly until he meets Bishop Aringarosa. The Bishop names him Silas after reading him a passage of the Bible that refers to a prisoner with that name who prays to God in spite of being beaten regularly, and is eventually freed by an earthquake. Aringarosa converts Silas to Catholicism and recruits him to help build his church. A devout Christian, he wears a spiked cilice around his thigh and whips himself with a discipline, devices used to remind him of Christ’s suffering. He struggles with his role as an assassin of the three seńećhaux, Saunie`re, and Sister Sandrine.

Sir Leigh Teabing See The Teacher

The Teacher The Teacher is the anonymous mastermind behind the plan to find the Holy Grail. Until his identity is revealed at the end of the novel, he is never seen but only heard, primarily through telephone conversations with Silas and Bishop Aringarosa. He has access to a staggering amount of information, and seems to be able to see all that is happening in the novel. He obtains the names of the three seńećhaux and the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, commands Silas to kill them, and informs Bishop Aringarosa of the status of their quest to retrieve the Holy Grail. Because of his close ties to Silas and the Bishop, the infinite fortune he seems to have, and references he makes to doing God’s work, he initially appears to be associated in some way with the Catholic Church. But he actually works only for himself, and reveals his identity at the climax of the novel as Leigh Teabing. As Teabing, he helps Langdon and Neveu interpret the clues left by Saunie`re, as he summarizes some of the more controversial ideas of the novel. His eagerness to aid Langdon and Sophie in decoding the cryptex and discovering the Grail is interpreted by them as scholarly interest, but his true motives are soon revealed. At the climax of the novel, he finally identifies himself as the Teacher, the one responsible for the murders, the one who has manipulated Silas

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and Aringarosa, and the architect behind the entire plan to find the Holy Grail.

President of the Paris Depository Bank of Zurich, Andre´ Vernet is eager to keep his name out of the headlines. He helps Langdon and Neveu escape his bank, which has never been the subject of scandal. He turns out to have been a very close friend of Saunie`re’s, entrusted to guard the safety box the Grand Master had stored in his bank.

THEMES Sacrifice The Da Vinci Code opens with a dramatic personal sacrifice—Saunie`re’s death to protect the secret of the Priory of Scion—but theme of sacrifice appears repeatedly throughout the novel. It does not always require a death, however; a sacrifice can be any type of loss, from loss of integrity or freedom to the loss of a physical item. A sacrifice entails the giving up of something in exchange for something else. It is a circumstance that does not allow for two competing needs to exist together. For example, Saunie`re makes the ultimate sacrifice—death— that hundreds in the Priory throughout history, according to Brown, have been willing to make. Likewise, Sister Sandrine Bieil sacrifices her life to warn the Priory when Silas attempts to unearth the keystone in the Church of SaintSulpice. Sophie’s grandmother and brother, whom she had long thought dead, sacrifice their freedom—and time with their family—to go into hiding in order to protect her grandfather’s identity. Leigh Teabing, the long-time scholar of the Sacred Feminine, sacrifices his integrity and conscience in exchange for the possibility of gain; he is willing to stop at nothing in order to procure the Holy Grail. But perhaps the greatest sacrifice in the novel is not made by one of the characters, but by, according to Teabing and Langdon, the Catholic Church. They believe that in order to keep the knowledge of Christ’s earthly wife and child a secret, the Catholic Church, in essence, sacrificed Mary Magdalene. Teabing and Langdon’s theory is that the Church designated her a prostitute to discredit any rumor of Christ’s involvement with her, in

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fear that knowledge of a marriage with Mary would affect Christ’s divine status.

Quest

Andre´ Vernet

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At the heart of Brown’s novel is the quest, not only as a long adventurous journey in search of something, but also as one of the most archetypal elements in literature, the pursuit of the Holy Grail. Several characters are on quests in the novel for different reasons. Silas looks for the keystone that will lead to the Holy Grail for his savior, Bishop Aringarosa. Detective Fache searches for the murderer of Saunie`re. Langdon explores the meaning behind Leonardo da Vinci’s symbols to greater understand the subject to which he has devoted his studies. Sophie seeks answers to truths about her family. In the novel, these fictional pursuits merge with the quintessential quest for the Holy Grail, a tale represented in Christian tradition literally as the search for the goblet that Christ drank from during the Last Supper and that Joseph of Arimathea used to catch Christ’s blood as he hung from the cross, and figuratively as the search for Christ within one’s soul. The tale of the quest actually surfaced in the twelfth century as a poem by Chre´tien de Troyes, and the legend took different forms as others rewrote it. The most famous of those to invoke the legend in their art are thirteenth-century German epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, fifteenth-century English writer Sir Thomas Malory, English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and composer Richard Wagner in the nineteenth century. Brown’s novel changes the quest considerably in proposing that the Grail is not a chalice at all, but rather Mary Magdalene herself and the texts that tell the secret of her marriage to Jesus.

Christianity Though The Da Vinci Code appears to implicate Catholic institutions in a conspiracy to wipe out alternative Christian histories, its suggestions that Jesus was not divine, that Mary Magdalene had children by him, that she, rather than the apostle Peter, was intended to be the first leader of Christianity, and that Constantine the Great suppressed all of this and assembled the Bible at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A . D ., all relate to Christians of any denomination. Of course, history, which the narrative declares is written by those who are victorious, does not support any of these suggestions. The gospels of Matthew, Mark,

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

With a partner, research the claims made in the novel about Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings Madonna of the Rocks and The Last Supper. Prepare presentations that present different interpretations of the paintings, using evidence from your research.

Leigh Teabing makes a number of declarations regarding the Council of Nicaea in 325. After conducting historical research on that event, stage a reenactment with other classmates of a debate that is likely to have taken place there. Conclude with your views on the authenticity of Teabing’s statements. Though the first word in the novel is ‘‘Fact,’’ Brown carefully words the claims he makes in the narrative. Using his statements on the first page, compose a list that indicates only what Brown claims is true in the novel, especially ‘‘descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals.’’ Conduct research on one of those elements, such as The Last Supper or Rosslyn Chapel, to measure his accuracy. Prepare a presentation that lists each claim, followed by what you found in your research.

Research one of the figures named in Les Dossiers Secrets. What information can you find to suggest that the person you choose was a member of the Priory of Sion? What symbols and codes are left behind to show a connection to the secret society? Write a brief biography of that person, detailing what you found in your research.

Luke, and John repeatedly refer to the divinity of Christ, and there is no evidence that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus. The major texts of Gnosticism—the belief in the gnosis (intuitive knowledge) of the human soul, surfaced in the second and third centuries, well after early Christians deemed the four gospels authoritative, though they are said in the novel

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to be suppressed by Constantine. Christianity, moreover, is portrayed in the novel as a patriarchal religion built on conspiracies authored by those who want to suppress information. The Christian characters in the novel delight in masochism and thirst for power. Nevertheless, Brown carefully phrases his page of facts to state simply that the Priory of Sion exists, that Opus Dei has built an elaborate and expansive headquarters in New York and has been the subject of controversy, and that descriptions of art, architecture, rituals, and documents are accurate. Most of the claims about an alternative Christian history, furthermore, are spoken authoritatively by the novel’s villain, Leigh Teabing.

STYLE Fact in Fiction The Da Vinci Code is striking in the way the fictional plot is woven into several other intriguing historical plots. References to actual historical figures such as Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Constantine the Great, and Leonardo da Vinci have prompted scholars to write articles and books responding to claims about them made by the fictional Saunie`re, Langdon, and Teabing. References to existing locations such as the Louvre and Rosslyn Chapel have generated so much interest that tour guides developed the ‘‘Da Vinci Code Walking Tour’’ in Paris and the number of tourists to Rosslyn Chapel doubled in the few years following the novel’s publication. Further, references to real organizations such as Opus Dei and the Vatican have inspired many readers to question Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. Though the novel follows its fictional characters during the course of only a few days, the search for the answers to symbols, clues, and riddles Saunie`re leaves behind is related to the search for answers to mysteries in the Bible as well as the history of the quest for the Holy Grail. It also invokes the history of the Council of Nicaea and its role in shaping Christianity, the history of the Priory of Sion, and speculation about Leonardo da Vinci’s artwork. Though the narrative raises several questions about history, the fictional plot in The Da Vinci Code ends with most of its questions answered and its conflicts resolved.

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Suspense Any description of this novel would not be complete without mentioning suspense, or the literary technique of creating excitement, apprehension, and expectation. The final sentences of the Prologue give nothing away as they describe how Saunie`re sets the scene that will preoccupy characters during the first half of the novel: ‘‘Wincing in pain, he summoned all of his faculties and strength. The desperate task before him, he knew, would require every remaining second of his life.’’ When a clue is left on the glass covering the Mona Lisa, the last sentence of the chapter indicates only that ‘‘six words glowed in purple, scrawled directly across the Mona Lisa’s face,’’ and the narrative shifts to another scene in the following chapter before showing readers what those words are. Curious omissions, changing interpretations of symbols and riddles, and plot twists in the narrative drive the reader to seek further for more complete descriptions and definitive interpretations, and to rush to the end of the novel.

Mystery The major appeal of Brown’s novel is its construction of profound mysteries, both fictional and historical. It deploys one of the most conventional elements of the classic mystery genre only to dismiss it immediately: the novel begins with a murder, but reveals the identity of the murderer in the second chapter. The central mysteries in the novel are the reasons behind Saunie`re’s murder and the possible organizations involved, the meaning of various clues and riddles he leaves behind, and the truth about Sophie’s family. Equally important is the novel’s introduction to real historical mysteries. What role did Mary Magdalene play in Jesus’ life? What was the real role of Constantine in shaping Christianity’s future? How credible are the Gnostic gospels? What is the history of the Priory of Sion and who were its members? Was Leonardo da Vinci trying to communicate hidden messages in his paintings? What is the meaning of the number of Divine Proportion? Because the answers to these historical questions depend on historical evidence, or texts written by those who were victorious, the book plays upon the plausible idea that what is called history may be an artificial construction of true events. While the fictional mysteries in the novel entertain readers, the historical mysteries it interprets made it an international phenomenon.

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Though there is no explicit reference to the year in which it takes place, The Da Vinci Code is set in a time contemporaneous with its publication in 2003. The narrative refers to several recent events, from the construction of the New York headquarters of Opus Dei in 2000 to the scandalous public indictment of Opus Dei member and FBI spy Robert Hanssen in April of 2001. Brown’s contentious portrayal of Opus Dei appeared as the organization struggled to redeem its reputation after being accused by former members of using cultish techniques. The novel’s suggestion that widely accepted histories are simply works constructed by those in power has motivated historians to critique its liberal interpretations of the past. Its equally strong claims about an alternative history of Christianity have provoked many biblical scholars to counter in a growing number of books written explicitly to discredit the novel. Its portrayal of religious fanaticism plays into readers’ fears of spiritual politics, especially in the wake of recent terrorist acts committed by religious fundamentalists. In depicting Mary Magdalene as one of the most important early Christian leaders, the novel also brings out the debate about the role of women in Christianity, a highly charged issue as the Catholic Church elected a new Pope after the death of John Paul II in 2005, the Church’s leader for almost a quarter century. The novel’s female critic of the Church, Sister Sandrine, feels that ‘‘most of the Catholic Church was gradually moving in the right direction with respect to women’s rights,’’ but objects to Opus Dei, which ‘‘threatened to reverse the progress.’’ Feminist scholars praised the novel’s assertions that Mary Magdalene played a more important role than the official Bible indicates, and that femininity has been suppressed by Christian leaders throughout history. While the novel is obviously fiction as a thriller that follows its protagonists through some extremely narrow escapes and ends with complete resolution, it does make interpretations of two historical events worth mentioning here: the origin of the Priory of Sion in the eleventh century, and the Council of Nicaea in 325 A . D . As a secret society, the Priory of Sion is shrouded in mystery. On the first page of the

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novel, unambiguously titled ‘‘Fact,’’ Brown claims it is a ‘‘European secret society founded in 1099,’’ and writes that in 1975, documents were found that identify figures from Sir Isaac Newton to Leonardo da Vinci as Priory members. Scholars have pointed out that Brown takes this claim from another international bestseller titled The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent. Brown uses the last names of the two latter authors as straightforward and anagrammatic sources for his fictional historian, Leigh Teabing. Their book refers to the true story of a priest appointed in 1885 named Be`renger Saunie`re, who mysteriously acquires great wealth in a short period of time, and eventually purchases a lavish estate. Though the story of Be`renger Saunie`re is widely accepted as fact, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail assumes that Saunie`re’s wealth is a direct result of his finding secret papers that prove the existence of Jesus’ and Mary Magdalene’s lineage. It also suggests that the real Saunie`re is a member of the Priory, which has existed since the eleventh century. But these myths were perpetuated by his housekeeper, Marie Deńarnaud, and the next owner of his estate, Noe¨l Corbu, who turned the estate into a resort to maximize public interest, thus increasing his profit. When the eccentric Parisian Pierre Plantard heard of the story in the mid-twentieth century, he created a series of documents including false genealogical records that suggested his relation to the Merovingian line. With the help of his friend Phillipe de Che´risey, Plantard crafted fake parchments containing coded messages, all of which were introduced under pseudonyms into the Bibliothe`que Nationale in the 1960s. But these ‘‘dossiers secrets’’ were exposed as forgeries, and historians agree that there is no proof that the Priory has existed since the eleventh century. A French journalist uncovered the hoax in the 1980s, and a BBC documentary titled ‘‘The History of a Mystery’’ reiterated its falsity in 1996. Brown’s historian, Leigh Teabing, brings out the second relevant historical event when he discusses the Council of Nicaea, a gathering called by Roman Emperor Constantine the Great to unite the government with the Catholic Church. During this meeting, the Bible was officially canonized and Jesus’ divinity was made concrete. Teabing argues that Constantine the Great ‘‘collated’’ the Bible and suppressed the Gnostic

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gospels, and that Jesus’ divinity was debated and eventually accepted by a ‘‘relatively close vote.’’ While making these controversial claims, he asserts that ‘‘everything you need to know about the Bible can be summed up by the great canon doctor Martyn Percy.’’ Percy, a British theologian and the only living scholar Brown quotes, has responded to this reference in Brown’s novel by discrediting the idea that Constantine could have divinized Jesus. Most of what Teabing says about Constantine comes from the same book of speculations Brown uses as evidence of Priory history, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Religious scholars point out that the council was called to address the ‘‘Arian heresy,’’ or the unconventional belief that Jesus was not divine, that the gospels were considered authoritative as early as the first century A . D . Most historians, moreover, note that the ‘‘relatively close vote’’ to which Teabing refers was actually not close at all, and that Jesus’ divinity was widely accepted among the early Christians. In fact, many scholars have invalidated the claims the novel makes about Christian history. Brown’s theories are most convincing to those who see history as a conspiracy, not as a factual account of the past.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Da Vinci Code debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and generated high praise from many critics for its entertainment value. Reviewing the novel for the New York Times, Janet Maslin declares, ‘‘In this gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to blockbuster proportion.’’ On the other side of the Atlantic—and indeed, on the other side of the critical spectrum—Peter Millar writes in his review for the Times (London) that the novel ‘‘is without doubt, the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype-driven, cloth-eared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction that I have read.’’ Whatever the reaction, reviewers most often took polarized views of the book initially. Whatever the reason, sales of the novel increased exponentially. As of 2005, the novel had been listed in the New York Times bestseller list for ninety-six weeks, even though it had not yet been released in paperback. Over

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The Louvre, Paris Ó Owen Franken/Corbis

twenty-five million copies had been purchased in the two years following its publication to generate more than $210 million in sales. Its worldwide success and controversial claims were deemed so dangerous that Lebanese religious leaders had it banned from the country, and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone urged Catholics to boycott it. The year after it was published, some critics began analyzing the reasons behind its success. Writing for the New Statesman, Jason Cowley notes that the novel brings out ‘‘many of the most urgent political themes of our time—religious extremism, the idea that history itself is a vast conspiracy, the power of secret networks and societies over our lives, the global reach of the internet, the omnipresence of satellite surveillance and other new technologies.’’ More specifically, Cowley argues that ‘‘In the aftermath of the events of September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq, in a world where a mysterious and opaque global network of religious terrorists called al-Queda threatens the west as well as, it is believed, communicating via encoded messages,’’ the novel ‘‘carries a powerful political charge.’’

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Capitalizing on the novel’s widespread success, networks produced a number of programs exploring its subjects. ABC sent reporter Elizabeth Vargas on an international journey to interview scholars about the novel’s claims. The special, titled ‘‘Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci,’’ aired in the fall of 2003. ‘‘Da Vinci Code: The Full Story,’’ another program to explore the novel’s issues, aired on the National Geographic Channel, attracted more viewers than the channel had for any other program in its history. As a summary of Christian scholars’ critiques of the novel, PAX aired ‘‘Breaking The Da Vinci Code’’ in early May of 2005, taking its title from Darrel Bock’s critical book. The History Channel produced a two-hour special titled ‘‘Beyond The Da Vinci Code,’’ which aired in late May of 2005. Many religious scholars published critical books of their own, taking issue with Brown’s sensational assertions, voiced in interviews, that he believes in his novel’s theories; they also took exception to the novel’s astounding market success. Among those to debunk the novel are Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel in The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in ‘‘The Da Vinci Code’’ (2004). The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, speaking in

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Ignatuis Books, calls The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in ‘‘The Da Vinci Code’’ ‘‘the definitive debunking’’ of The Da Vinci Code. In a pamphlet for Our Sunday Visitor, Amy Welbourn excerpts from her book, De-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of ‘‘The Da Vinci Code’’ (2004). In it, she calls The Da Vinci Code ‘‘logically and historically flawed,’’ and cites that Brown holds ‘‘no advanced degrees in religion.’’ Other scholars and critics take more objective historical perspectives, with an aim of providing historical information that is sometimes at odds with the facts in Brown’s novel. These books include Simon Cox’s Cracking the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’: The Unauthorized Guide to the Facts behind Dan Brown’s Bestselling Novel, and Sharan Newman’s The Real History Behind the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’ (2005).

CRITICISM Kathleen Helal Dr. Helal has taught courses on writing and English literature for several years, and has presented and published many papers and articles on women’s writing. In this essay, Helal analyzes the curious discrepancy between the feminist message of the novel’s theories about Christian history and the misogynist portrayal of its heroine, Sophie Neveu. Mary Magdalene is arguably the true hero of The Da Vinci Code. She is the Holy Grail, the secret kept by the Priory of Sion, the figure to whom the main character bows in reverence in the final chapter, the ‘‘woman’s voice . . . the wisdom of the ages . . . whispering up from the chasms of the earth’’ in the final sentence. Indeed, the success of The Da Vinci Code in seducing readers to believe her role is more central in Christianity than it seems is due in part to Brown’s reverence for this forgotten female figure. Leigh Teabing interprets the Christian misrepresentation of Mary Magdalene as a conspiracy to suppress her importance: ‘‘That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church. The Church needed to defame Mary Magdalene in order to cover up her dangerous secret—her role as the Holy Grail.’’ Indeed, since Pope Gregory delivered a series of sermons in 591 that simplified her identity as a sinner in contrast to the other

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THOUGH THE NOVEL OVERTLY ENGAGES CHRISTIAN HISTORY TO CRITIQUE IT FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE, SOPHIE NEVEU FUNCTIONS DISTURBINGLY AS THE PASSIVE VESSEL INTO WHICH LEIGH TEABING AND ROBERT LANGDON POUR THEIR THEORIES ABOUT THE LOST SACRED FEMININE.’’

famous Mary, revered as Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene has been depicted as a prostitute. Though historians generally do not ‘‘ascribe malicious intent to Gregory . . . who most likely wanted to use the story to assure converts that their sins would be forgiven,’’ as Heidi Schlumpf argues in U.S. Catholic, Mary Magdalene’s reputation has been tarnished for centuries. The Vatican did vindicate her in 1969, and many biblical scholars such as Jane Schaberg and Susan Haskins have reconstructed her image. Schlumpf hopes that ‘‘with the prostitute baggage properly disposed of, Mary of Magdala can emerge as a model of a faithful, devoted follower of the Lord, as well as a strong, independent leader in the early Church.’’ For many, the appeal of The Da Vinci Code is its seemingly feminist celebration of Mary Magdalene as one of the most heroic figures in Christian history. Surely the fictional heroine of Brown’s novel is just as honorable. The attractive and accomplished Sophie Neveu is a cryptologist for the Central Directorate Judicial Police in Paris; however, though she initially appears as an assertive and intelligent character, Neveu regresses as the novel progresses. Any feminist message is further undermined when Brown presents his revision of Mary Magdalene’s story by staging a conversation between two male teachers and a female student that replicates the very patriarchal system he seems to critique. Though the novel overtly engages Christian history to critique it from a feminist perspective, Sophie Neveu functions disturbingly as the passive vessel into which Leigh Teabing and Robert Langdon pour their theories about the lost sacred feminine.

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Neveu, who is oddly called ‘‘Sophie’’ throughout a narrative that refers only to the surnames of the male characters, first appears as a ‘‘young Parisian dećhiffreuse,’’ or one who decodes complex messages. She has ‘‘studied cryptology in England at the Royal Holloway,’’ an actual school internationally acclaimed for its academic research of cryptography—the science of enciphering and deciphering messages in secret code. She is defiant, fearless, and, of course, beautiful, to the dismay of her enemy Bazu Fache: At thirty-two years old, she had a dogged determination that bordered on obstinate. Her eager espousal of Britain’s new cryptologic methodology continually exasperated the veteran French cryptographers above her. And by far the most troubling to Fache was the inescapable universal truth that in an office of middle-aged men, an attractive young woman always drew eyes away from the work at hand.

Framing the heroine as a sort of rival to the misogynist Fache is one strategy Brown uses to present her favorably. He continues by shifting from Fache’s perspective to Langdon’s, emphasizing the contrast in the way she is seen differently by each male character: Langdon turned to see a young woman approaching. She was moving down the corridor toward them with long, fluid strides . . . a haunting certainty to her gait. Dressed casually in a knee-length, cream-colored Irish sweater over black leggings, she was attractive and looked to be about thirty. Her thick burgundy hair fell unstyled to her shoulders, framing the warmth of her face. Unlike the waifish, cookiecutter blondes that adorned Harvard dorm room walls, this woman was healthy with an unembellished beauty and genuineness that radiated a striking personal confidence.

If Fache’s description of Neveu is meant to reveal more about his insecurity than her character, Langdon’s description functions as the more definitive one. Yet, it is as remarkable that one’s hair could be associated with the term ‘‘burgundy’’ as that her ‘‘unembellished beauty and genuineness’’ could be immediately perceived by a perfect stranger. Nevertheless, initially Neveu is meant to be a highly intelligent and benevolent character. When she helps Langdon escape the museum with a clever plan that fools Detective Fache and his entire team, Langdon concludes: ‘‘Sophie Neveu was clearly a hell of a lot smarter than he was.’’ Brown’s portrayal of her seems at first to be consistent

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with the feminist message of the alternative Christian history he will develop. As the novel continues, however, Neveu seems inexplicably to lose her faculties. It is the symbologist, Langdon, who first interprets the cipher Saunie`re leaves, and when he declares that ‘‘It’s the simplest kind of code!’’ Neveu ‘‘was stopped on the stairs below him, staring up in confusion. A code? She had been pondering the words all night and had not seen a code. Especially a simple one.’’ Brown justifies her ignorance by declaring that her intelligence causes her to seek complexity. But even the narrative seems to reveal this interpretation as ridiculous: Her shock over the anagram was matched only by her embarrassment at not having deciphered the message herself. Sophie’s expertise in complex cryptanalysis had caused her to overlook simplistic word games, and yet she knew she should have seen it. After all, she was no stranger to anagrams—especially in English.

Neveu’s inability to decode the simple anagram is followed by a narrative flashback in which she is a six-year-old girl, her ‘‘tiny hand’’ in her grandfather’s as he leads her through the Louvre. As her memories of herself as a girl continue intermittently in the narrative, her adult self seems to regress into childhood. When Neveu learns about the Holy Grail from Langdon and Teabing, she is depicted as an innocent child: Langdon sighed. ‘I was hoping you would be kind enough to explain to Ms. Neveu the true nature of the Holy Grail.’ Teabing looked stunned. ‘She doesn’t know?’ Langdon shook his head. The smile that grew on Teabing’s face was almost obscene. ‘Robert, you’ve brought me a virgin? . . . You are a Grail virgin, my dear. And trust me, you will never forget your first time.’

Of course, as Langdon relates, anyone unfamiliar with the Grail legend is traditionally called a virgin by those familiar with the story. But the repeated characterization of Neveu as virgin and the pleasure Teabing takes in flaunting his knowledge and superior position seems extremely odd because he will tell her that women have been subordinated in Christian history. Teabing’s message is feminist; his demeanor is quite the opposite. In fact, the entire section of Brown’s novel that delves into the alternative Christian history that celebrates femininity has Langdon and

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Teabing lecturing a wide-eyed, ignorant Neveu. The feminist claims that Mary Magdalene was meant to be the first priest and that Christian leaders have demonized femininity contrast with the antifeminist portrayal of Neveu’s character. The association of Sophie Neveu’s name with wisdom does very little to counter terms used to describe her as she learns that the Holy Grail is a woman and can only stare in awe and ask simple questions. As Teabing declares that the Council of Nicaea established Jesus’ divinity in 325 by a ‘‘relatively close vote,’’ ‘‘Sophie’s head was spinning. . . . Sophie glanced at Langdon, and he gave her a soft nod of concurrence.’’ Strangely, it takes a long time for this accomplished cryptologist to grasp fully what Teabing and Langdon suggest: ‘‘The Holy Grail is a woman, Sophie thought, her mind a collage of interrelated ideas that seemed to make no sense.’’ When she is told that the female Holy Grail appears in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, she ‘‘was certain she had missed something’’ in looking for her in the painting, and ‘‘turned to Langdon for help. ‘I’m lost.’’’ As Langdon and Teabing race through their revisionist theories, Neveu always remains one step behind them. The divergence between Teabing’s message and Brown’s portrayal of Neveu having a hard time following him is striking: ‘Peter expresses his discontent over playing second fiddle to a woman. I daresay Peter was something of a sexist.’ Sophie was trying to keep up. ‘This is Saint Peter. The rock on which Jesus built his Church.’ ‘The same, except for one catch. According to these unaltered gospels, it was not Peter to whom Christ gave directions with which to establish the Christian Church. It was Mary Magdalene.’ Sophie looked at him. ‘‘You’re saying the Christian Church was to be carried on by a woman?’’

During this exchange, the feminist message of this alternative version of Christianity is given to and interpreted for the bewildered, ‘‘surprised,’’ incredulous Neveu, who glances back to Langdon for his reassuring nods as Teabing relates the controversial claims. Teabing eventually addresses her as ‘‘my dear child,’’ as he answers her questions, and his ‘‘words seemed to echo across the ballroom and back before they fully registered in Sophie’s mind.’’ The ideas that seem incredulous to Neveu are markedly simple.

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The carved interior roof of Rosslyn Chapel, Roslin, Scotland Getty Images

When she is told that ‘‘history is always written by the winners. . . . By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account,’’ Brown writes, ‘‘Sophie had never thought of it that way.’’ That an educated cryptologist would not have deduced that history could be manipulated seems quite astonishing, to say the least. Ultimately, while the novel attempts to proclaim the feminist secret at the heart of the ‘‘greatest cover-up in human history,’’ it conceals its own subordination of femininity in a narrative that moves so quickly readers hardly pause to actually consider what it suggests about its female characters in particular, and femininity in general. Source: Kathleen Helal, Critical Essay on The Da Vinci Code, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Digital Fortress (1998), Dan Brown’s first novel, explores the secret world of the National Security Agency. The title refers to an unbreakable code that former programmer Ensei Tankado uses to paralyze TRNSLTR, a computer used to monitor private terrorist communications.

Professor Robert Langdon makes his first appearance in Dan Brown’s second novel, Angels and Demons (2000). Already a famous symbologist, Langdon is recruited to interpret a symbol that has been branded on a murdered scientist. As the novel progresses, he is called to interpret further murder scenes and comes to discover the symbols that connect them are all related to a group known as the Illuminati, an ancient secret society formed in opposition against the Catholic Church.

Brown’s third novel, Deception Point (2001), is a political thriller that begins with the NASA discovery of an object in the Arctic that would solidify the status of the space agency. Intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton is sent to verify its authenticity, but when she finds the discovery has been staged, she and her academic colleague Michael Tolland are hunted by assassins before they can notify the president of the United States of their find. The book follows them as they work to learn the truth behind the scientific deception. Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1983), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, is the bestseller from which Brown draws many of his theories. The book combines history and speculation about the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion.

Margaret Starbird examines the evidence of the idea that Mary Magdalene played a central role in Jesus’ ministry in The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail (1993). Most strikingly, Starbird argues that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and that the Holy Grail is the secret of their relationship.

In The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (1998), Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince present their view of what secret societies such as the Freemasons, the Cathars, and the Knights Templar believed about the roles of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and John the Baptist.

In The Gnostic Gospels (1989), Elaine Pagels imagines what Christianity would be like if the Gnostic texts were included in the Bible. Her book is considered one of the most accessible guides to the philosophies of Gnosticism and its implications for Christianity.

Marvin Meyer, Professor of Bible and Christian Studies, summarizes the history of Mary Magdalene’s changing reputation and explores his theory that she had an intimate relationship with Jesus in The Gospels of Mary: The Secret Tradition of Mary Magdalene, the Companion of Jesus (2004).

The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus (2005), compiled and translated by Marvin Meyer, is a complete collection of the Nag Hammadi library, the set of ancient papyrus manuscripts found in the 1940s. These fragments include many of the Gnostic texts to which Brown’s novel refers, from the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary to the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth.

Norris J. Lacy In the following except, Lacy questions the validity of Brown’s research in The Da Vinci Code, and whether or not accuracy is important in a work of fiction such as this.

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The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, 1498 The Granger Collection, New York. Reproduced by permission

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FURTHER READING Bock, Darrell L., Breaking the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’: Answers to the Questions Everybody’s Asking, Nelson Books, 2004. This guide focuses on the three centuries following the birth of Christ to examine the suggestions the novel makes about early Christian history. It largely discredits the theories Brown puts forth in the novel. Burstein, Dan, Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind ‘‘The Da Vinci Code,’’ CDS Books, 2004. In a study almost as long as the novel itself, Burstein collects interviews and essays from historians, scientists, archeologists, and theologians, some of whom have contrasting views about the questions the novel raises. This is considered one of the most comprehensive guides to the topics the novel engages, such as what is known about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Gnostic gospels, and secret societies.

Welbourn, Amy, ‘‘The Da Vinci Code‘‘: The Facts Behind the Fiction, Catholic Educator’s Resource Center, www.catholiceducation.org/articles/facts/fm0035.html (July 28, 2005); originally published in Our Sunday Visitor, May 2004.

Ehrman, Bart D, Truth and Fiction in the ‘‘Da Vinci Code’’: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine, Oxford University Press, 2004. A Professor of Religious Studies, Bart Ehrman uses the novel not only to explore Christian history, but also to show what a religious historian does to uncover the truth about the past. Rather than attempting to invalidate the theories of the novel or delving into theological issues, Ehrman cites inaccuracies in the fiction to show how historians interpret topics such as the significance of the Gnostic gospels, the role Constantine played in shaping Christianity, and the relation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Morris, David, The Art and Mythology of ‘‘The Da Vinci Code,’’ Lamar Publishing, 2004. Morris presents the artistic complement to Brown’s novel in this comprehensive collection of photographs and illustrations of art and locations to which the novel refers, from da Vinci’s paintings to the mythological images mentioned in the narrative. Each image is presented in the order in which it appears in the novel. Welborn, Amy, De-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of ‘‘The Da Vinci Code,’’ Our Sunday Visitor, 2004. Though it is not the most comprehensive guide, Welborn’s rebuttal of Brown’s novel is extremely easy to read and concise. She systematically refutes many of the sensational claims Brown’s characters make about Christian history from a Catholic point of view.

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Source: Norris J Lacy, ‘‘The Da Vinci Code: Dan Brown and The Grail That Never Was,’’ in Arthuriana, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2004, pp. 81–89.

SOURCES Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday, 2003. Cowley, Jason, ‘‘The Author of the Bestselling Da Vinci Code Has Tapped into our Post-9/11 Anxieties and Fear of Fundamentalism,’’ in New Statesman, December 13, 2004, pp. 18–21. George, Cardinal Francis, Ignatuis Books, www.ignatius. com/books/davincihoax (July 28, 2005). Maslin, Janet, ‘‘Spinning a Thriller from a Gallery at the Louvre,’’ in the New York Times, March 17, 2003, p. E8. Millar, Peter, ‘‘Holy Humbug: Book of the Week,’’ in the Times (London), June 21, 2003, p. 15. Schlumpf, Heidi, ‘‘Who Framed Mary Magdalene?’’ in U.S. Catholic, Vol. 65, No. 4, April 2000, pp. 12–16.

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is J. K. Rowling’s fifth installment in her internationally bestselling series about a young orphaned wizard named Harry Potter. The ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books have been translated into numerous languages, have sold over 80 million copies, and appeal to a wide range of audiences including both children and adults. Published in 2003, The Order of the Phoenix has topped many Bestseller Lists, continuing to widen Rowling’s extraordinary global fan base. The 800-page novel sees the main character, Harry Potter, enter his fifth year at wizardry school, Hogwarts. Now fifteen, Harry encounters such teenage problems as moodiness and resentment of authority, while at the same time trying to untangle the mysterious return of the all-powerful, evil Lord Voldemort. By the end of the story, readers watch Harry transform from a young, confused boy into a strong leader of his fellow students, and a brave warrior against the dark powers of his world. This transformation is not without its difficulties, however, as one of Harry’s dearest companions is lost in the final battle. In a slower buildup to this story’s main action than in earlier books, readers follow Harry’s psychological journey toward a more mature understanding of himself and his place in the wizardry community. Rowling spends much of The Order of the Phoenix tracking Harry’s growing frustration as those who care

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most about him continue to withhold valuable information from him in an attempt to keep Harry safe from Voldemort’s powers. In the end, Harry learns, through a series of mistakes and triumphs, that he is finally mature enough to learn the full truth about his famous but mysterious past as well as his significant but ominous future.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Beginning in 1998 with the publication of her first novel about a young wizard named Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling launched an internationally recognized writing career and a literary sensation unmatched in the early twentyfirst century. With record breaking sales for each completed installment of her seven part series, Rowling’s 2003 addition, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, sold in excess of eight million copies in the United States alone. As publishers translate the series into sixty one languages in two hundred different countries, fans worldwide flock to pre-order the remaining books of the series and to view ‘‘Harry Potter’’ movies, making Rowling not only wealthier than the Queen of England, but also a worldwide phenomenon. Joanne Rowling was born in Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England on July 31, 1965. She later adopted her middle initial of K in honor of her favorite grandmother, Kathleen. Rowling was educated at Exeter University and has called England, France, Portugal, and Scotland home. Naming E. Nesbit, Paul Gallico, and C. S. Lewis as her literary influences, the former teacher always knew she would be a writer. As the popular story goes, she conceived the idea for Harry Potter while on a train and wrote the first novel while her young daughter napped. Rowling subsisted on welfare while writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with the main goal of merely being published, never daring to dream of the acclaim she would receive. Despite the series’ phenomenal success, Rowling reports being rejected by numerous publishers before securing a contract from Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Scholastic in the United States.

J. K. Rowling Ó David Bebber/Corbis

edition; British edition titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Each Rowling release, in addition to being wildly popular, has also garnered critical acclaim. She has been awarded many notable literary prizes including the British Book Award’s Children’s Book of the Year, the Hugo Award, the Whitbread Award for Best Children’s book, and several consecutive years of the Smarties Prize. As of 2005, Rowling lives in Scotland with her husband and three children.

PLOT SUMMARY Chapters 1–8

Rowling’s other titles in the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series include, in order of publication: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (American

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opens with Harry Potter, a fifteen-year-old boy possessed with magical powers, spending another unhappy summer with his non-magical, or Muggle, guardians, the Dursleys. Still reeling from the previous school year’s tragic events (chronicled in Rowling’s fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), Harry suffers

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recurring nightmares about his graveyard meeting with the dark Lord Voldemort where his friend Cedric was murdered. As a result of that encounter, Voldemort has now returned to bodily form, and Harry, with great anxiety, awaits news of the destruction Voldemort will inflict upon the wizardry and non-wizardry worlds. Harry finds there are no reports of unusual events despite his constant checking of the newspaper and television news, until one summer evening when he hears a sound that leads him to take a walk in the dark. Harry runs into his cousin Dudley while walking and as they taunt each other, two Dementors, the death-like, happiness-sucking prison guards from the wizardry world, attack the boys. Harry is able to fend them off with his sophisticated magic, only to find that he has been watched all summer by a neighbor as well as several incognito witches and wizards. Underage magic is banned in the Muggle world, thus Harry is threatened with expulsion from his wizardry boarding school, Hogwarts, and thrown out of his relatives’ home for his defense against the Dementors. Several mysterious letters delivered by owl reverse both of Harry’s punishments, setting a hearing for his return to Hogwarts and threatening Aunt Petunia into continuing to provide a home for Harry. Harry waits for any helpful information from his friends to explain recent events, but receives none until a troop of adult witches and wizards appears in the Dursleys’ kitchen. The group leads Harry to the invisible and secret location of those fighting against Voldemort’s return to power. Located at the family estate of Sirius Black—Harry’s godfather—the Order of the Phoenix represents an elite guard of witches and wizards fighting against Voldemort. Once Harry arrives at the Order, he is reunited with best friends and classmates, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Despite being relieved to finally see his friends again, Harry expresses his anger at their keeping him uninformed about events in the wizardry world over the summer. His friends explain their promise kept to Hogwarts Headmaster and Order of the Phoenix leader, Albus Dumbledore, not to give Harry any knowledge that might be dangerous. Ron and Hermione also reveal that most of the wizardry world does not believe Voldemort has returned, and instead regards both Harry and Dumbledore as liars.

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Harry joins his friends in cleaning chores throughout the enchanted Black family house while the Order has secret meetings to plan their defense against Voldemort. The kids manage to eavesdrop and find out that Voldemort now seeks some mysterious weapon to enhance his power. Harry also finds out that Sirius Black comes from a long line of dark wizards who support Voldemort, and consider Sirius an outcast. Once Harry has his hearing in front of the full Ministry of Magic court, he does his best to justify his use of magic against the Dementors. The Minister of Magic himself tries to discredit Harry’s story, but Harry wins the hearing only after Dumbledore produces a surprise eyewitness to his account. Harry is thrilled to be going back to Hogwarts, but notices an unusual distance that Dumbledore, his once-confidant, seems to be keeping from him.

Chapters 9–13 Everyone but Sirius is thrilled with Harry’s successful hearing. Sirius, on the other hand, is a fugitive of the law and will be staying alone in his family home over the coming year; he had hoped Harry would be around to keep him company. The mood around the house becomes increasingly strained when Ron and Hermione receive news of their appointment to school Prefect but Harry is denied the title. Feeling resentful and angry already, Harry becomes even more depressed when he is shown a photo of the previous Order of the Phoenix members, many of whom have become Voldemort’s victims. Harry’s parents are featured in the photo. It is finally time for school to begin, and Harry and his friends leave the Black house to meet the Hogwarts Express. Sirius disobeys Dumbledore’s orders and follows Harry to the train, disguised as the shaggy black dog, Snuffles. When Ron and Hermione must meet for Prefect duties, Harry is reunited with friend Neville Longbottom, and they sit together on the train, meeting another student named Luna Lovegood. Luna appears to be a flighty girl whose father publishes a tabloid newspaper called The Quibbler, which is considered a less trustworthy news source than the popular wizarding newspaper, The Daily Prophet. Harry also has an awkward meeting with his crush from last year, Cho Chang. Once at Hogwarts, Harry sees mysterious black horses

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pulling the school carriages that previously were horseless; many students cannot see the horses, and Harry finds little comfort in the fact that the slightly strange Luna says she can see them too. Once inside the Hogwarts castle, the students gather to hear the Sorting Hat’s yearly song. This year’s song emphasizes school unity, implying that the return of Voldemort may cause detrimental divisions among the students and staff. Almost immediately the school provides evidence of such divisions, as many mock and scorn Harry’s story about the battle in the graveyard. Harry notices that Hagrid does not appear at the faculty table, but a new Defense Against Dark Arts Professor, Delores Umbridge, does. She also contradicts typical Hogwarts protocol by interrupting Dumbledore’s speech to warn against change and progress. Her instruction, once classes begin, further varies from that of previous teachers. She uses only the textbook and refuses to allow students to actually practice magic. This teaching strategy angers both Hermione and Harry, the latter of whom receives a week’s worth of detention for telling what Umbridge considers a lie, that Voldemort has returned. Her detentions prove to be particularly cruel as she forces Harry to carve a sentence onto the back of his own hand. Harry continues to be angry at his treatment by both students and faculty but refuses to report anything to Dumbledore.

Chapters 14–20 Both Ron and Harry receive significant correspondences from those close to them. Ron fumes after receiving a long letter from his estranged brother Percy, who now works for the Minister of Magic, congratulating him on becoming Prefect and encouraging him to support Umbridge’s new policies at Hogwarts. He further tries to persuade Ron that both Dumbledore and Harry should be avoided because they are threats to the Ministry. Sirius appears to Harry in a fire in the common-room fireplace, explaining that the Ministry of Magic is keeping a close watch on Hogwarts through Professor Umbridge because it suspects Dumbledore of conspiracy. Both Percy’s and Sirius’s words are proven true when Umbridge becomes High Inquisitor of the school, allowing her to inspect all faculty and students for the Ministry of Magic’s benefit. Umbridge proceeds to attend various professors’ classes, interrupt their lessons, and threaten them with probation. Ron struggles as the newest

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goalkeeper for the Gryffindor Quidditch team while Harry continues to have nightmares involving long, dark corridors. Hermione’s distaste for the new rules at Hogwarts leads her to propose that Harry form a club to practice now-forbidden Defense Against Dark Arts techniques. After angrily reliving his many frightening encounters with Voldemort, Harry calms down and sees the logic in Hermione’s proposal. Meeting at a pub in nearby Hogsmead that they think is safe, many students gather to discuss the new Dark Arts group. Harry is both excited and nervous at the prospect of teaching fellow students. The group plans their first meeting time and signs a list committing to the cause. When the next day there is a new Ministry decree requiring Umbridge to approve all student organizations, the Dark Arts group realizes they were noticed at the pub; Sirius later appears in the fire in the common-room fireplace confirming that the students were easily overheard. A hand reaches out from the fire to catch Sirius and injures Harry’s messenger owl, Hedwig, establishing that all communication at Hogwarts is being monitored by Umbridge. Fred and George Weasley provide comic relief throughout these events as they continuously experiment with various practical joke products they hope to market in the future. Harry contemplates his mysterious internal connection with Voldemort because he now not only feels pain in his scar when the evil wizard becomes angry, but also seems to be aware when his foe experiences happiness or triumph. Harry remains intensely curious about the weapon for which Voldemort searches, and the dreams of corridors seem to provide important clues to its whereabouts. His house-elf friend, Dobby, informs Harry of a special room where the Dark Arts group can hold their now-secret meetings. At their first gathering, the group chooses to call themselves Dumbledore’s Army, or the D.A., and begins to practice spells and charms at Harry’s direction. Pleased with the first meeting’s success, Harry finds even more thrill in his conversation with Cho. Houses Gryffindor and Slytherin meet in the first Quidditch match, where Ron plays miserably but Harry wins for the team. After the match, Harry’s school nemesis, Draco Malfoy, taunts the Gryffindor players, causing Harry, Fred, and George to physically attack him. As

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a result, Umbridge bans all three Gryffindor players from Quidditch for life. Hagrid finally returns to Hogwarts, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione rush to welcome him. They find out that Hagrid has been on a secret mission for the Order of the Phoenix, recruiting giants for their cause. Hagrid explains that his mission was a failure because the giants fight amongst themselves and the Order’s rival group, the Death Eaters, were also courting the giants.

Chapters 21–26 In Hagrid’s class, Harry learns that the black horses pulling the Hogwarts carriages are called thestrals. Because only those who have witnessed someone’s death can see the horses, Harry is among the few in the class to whom they are not invisible. Harry feels intensely proud as the D.A. continues to meet and make great progress. After one class, Cho dawdles to talk to Harry; first she cries about Cedric’s death last year, then she kisses Harry. He calls his first kiss ‘‘wet’’ when he talks to Ron, and despite Hermione’s extensive explanations, remains confused about Cho’s emotional nature. Harry’s dreams reach a new level of reality as he sees himself behind the eyes of a serpent attacking Ron’s father, Arthur Weasley. So intense is the dream that Harry is convinced Mr. Weasley is actually hurt; when Harry awakes, he insists on reporting his dream to members of the Order of the Phoenix. After Dumbledore hears about the dream, he quickly finds out that Mr. Weasley was indeed attacked. Following a long night of waiting, Harry and the Weasley family visit Mr. Weasley and find that he will make a full recovery. Harry feels guilty for his seeming participation in the snake attack, and only feels worse when he overhears members of the Order discussing whether Voldemort may in fact be possessing Harry. Panicked, Harry believes the only way to keep his friends safe from Voldemort is to run away. When Dumbledore sends a messenger to him, Harry decides to stay but remains sullen because his mentor still will not speak directly to him. Harry enjoys a happy Christmas break with the Weasleys and other members of the Order after his friends convince him that although there is a strange connection between himself and Voldemort, it is unlikely that he is being possessed. The Weasley’s celebrations include

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visits to Mr. Weasley at the hospital, where Harry, Ron, and Hermione also run into fellow classmate Neville Longbottom. Ron and Hermione find out that Neville’s parents permanently reside at St. Mungo’s Hospital because they were tortured into insanity by Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange. As Christmas vacation comes to a close, Harry finds out he will be taking extra lessons with his least favorite professor, Severus Snape, to learn how to close his mind to Voldemort. Called Occlumency, the skill to control entry to one’s mind should help Harry ward off his dreams and thus Voldemort’s access to him. Once back at Hogwarts, students find out that there are several gains for supporters of Voldemort: many Death Eaters break out of prison and a potential witness for the Order is murdered. Despite Umbridge’s attempts to control all political conversation at Hogwarts, students begin to suspect the Ministry’s cover-up and wonder whether Voldemort has indeed come back. Taking advantage of this turning tide, Hermione convinces Harry to publish in The Quibbler his account of Voldemort’s return to power. Harry feels Voldemort’s moods more often, and continues having the vivid dreams involving the evil wizard and his followers.

Chapters 27–32 More fast-moving action begins in this section as a new Divination professor is hired when Umbridge fires Professor Trelawney. Firenze the centaur takes over Trelawney’s classes, though Dumbledore allows Trelawney to remain living at Hogwarts. During one Divination class, Firenze sends a mysterious message to Hagrid through Harry, telling him to give up his latest project because it is failing. One of the D.A. students betrays the group to Umbridge, causing a round-up in Dumbledore’s office, including Harry and several officials from the Ministry of Magic. Once the list titled ‘‘Dumbledore’s Army’’ appears, Dumbledore uses this loophole as a way of claiming the group as his own. Umbridge has no choice but to find Harry innocent of organizing an illegal student group. Instead of allowing the Ministry to capture him, though, Dumbledore escapes arrest and exits his office amid a shower of spells and charms. As news of Dumbledore’s absence spreads, Fred and George promise to cause chaos as a sign of loyalty to their Headmaster.

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At Dumbledore’s urging, Harry continues Occlumency lessons with Professor Snape. During one session, Harry enrages Snape when he sneaks a look into the Pensieve, which holds Snape’s past memories; Harry sees disturbing scenes of his father acting like a schoolboy bully. The idea that his father was arrogant and cruel as a teenager haunts Harry and leads him to arrange, with the help of Fred’s and George’s antics, a conversation with Sirius about his father’s upsetting behavior. Meanwhile, students study frantically for their fifth-year exams called O.W.L.s. Snape cancels Occlumency classes because of his anger, and although Harry has made some progress in closing his mind, he continues to relish his recurring dreams because he wants to find out what is behind the last door. Fred and George make a memorable exit from Hogwarts. During another Quidditch match, Hagrid enlists Harry and Hermione to follow him into the Forbidden Forest as a favor. Once deep within the trees, Hagrid reveals his project has been to tame his brother, a full-size giant named Grawp. Hagrid expects to be fired by Umbridge at any time, and wants Harry and Hermione to visit Grawp in his absence. On their return to campus, they find that Ron actually played well and helped Gryffindor win the Quidditch Cup. After much anticipation, O.W.L. exams begin and Harry excels at Defense Against the Dark Arts and performs generally well overall. During their Astronomy exam, Harry and fellow students watch as Ministry officials arrive at Hagrid’s cabin door and proceed to attack him. When Professor McGonagall arrives for protection, the Ministry representatives stun her without warning. Harry’s world becomes even more chaotic when he falls asleep during his History of Magic exam, only to see a new element in his dreams of the long corridors: Sirius being tortured by Voldemort. Harry assumes his vision to be real and thus mobilizes his friends to save Sirius. Despite Hermione’s cautions, Harry’s friends help him devise a plan to rescue Sirius, only to be caught by Umbridge and a band of students loyal to her. Umbridge frantically attempts to discover Harry’s plans and resolves to use the illegal, unforgivable Cruciatus curse on him. Just then, Hermione intervenes by pretending to confess all to Umbridge.

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Chapters 33–38 Umbridge’s student guards watch the others as Hermione and Harry lead Umbridge into the Forbidden Forest under the guise of revealing their plans. Once in the forest, as Hermione expected, the centaurs circle and attack Umbridge because she is an arrogant adult human. The centaurs would have allowed Harry and Hermione safe exit because of their youth but Hermione upsets them. It is not until Grawp comes to their rescue that the centaurs are driven away. At this point, Neville, Luna, Ron, and Ron’s sister Ginny escape Umbridge’s guards, meet Harry and Hermione in the forest, and plan their mission to save Sirius. Traveling via thestral, the group arrives at the Ministry of Magic only to find that Sirius is not there and that Harry fell into Voldemort’s trap. Harry finds a glass orb with his name on it, which he discovers has a prophecy explaining the connection between Harry and Voldemort. Voldemort desperately wants the prophecy but cannot gain it without Harry’s help. A battle ensues pitting several adult Death Eaters against Harry and his young friends. The Death Eaters chase Harry and friends through many enchanted rooms in the Department of Mysteries, being careful not to damage the prophecy as they battle. The students use their D.A. skills well, but are eventually overtaken by the adult wizards. Neville even faces his parents’ torturer, Bellatrix Lestrange. The Death Eaters are gaining ground when the Order of the Phoenix arrives, saving Harry and his friends. Unfortunately, the fight ends badly with the prophecy shattering and Sirius dying by falling through a magic veil. Harry angrily chases Lestrange, his godfather’s murderer, into the lobby of the Ministry, only to find Voldemort himself waiting for him. When Voldemort attempts to use the deadliest curse against Harry, Dumbledore appears and fights triumphantly to save Harry’s life. Later, in the Headmaster’s office, Harry rages against Dumbledore for not giving him any important information about his connection to Voldemort. Dumbledore humbly agrees, and takes responsibility for Harry’s mistakes and for Sirius’s death. He then says it is time for Harry to know the truth about his past. Harry listens attentively as Dumbledore explains how the prophecy foretells a connection between Harry and Voldemort that caused the evil wizard to attack

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James’s close friend, Sirius serves as Harry’s godfather and closest adult confidant in the series. Harry relies on Sirius for friendship and advice.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released in an unabridged version on audio CD by the Listening Library in 2003. Jim Dale reads the part of Harry Potter. This CD is widely available through bookstores and online merchants.

him as a baby. Although Voldemort only knows half of the prophecy, Dumbledore heard the full prophecy from Professor Trelawney herself and reveals that ultimately Harry and Voldemort cannot coexist: one must kill the other. Harry also discovers that his mother’s bloodlines protect him when he stays with the Dursleys, despite his aunt and uncle’s foul treatment. Still distraught over losing his godfather, Harry prepares to return to the Dursleys for another summer. A glimmer of hope emerges as Luna explains how Harry might speak with Sirius through the veil, but he does not have a chance to try before leaving Hogwarts for the year. The Order of the Phoenix accompanies Harry to the train station, warning the Dursleys against any ill treatment of Harry over the summer. Harry finds some satisfaction in this newfound band of friends.

CHARACTERS Sirius Black Sirius attended Hogwarts with Harry’s father James, his mother Lily, and their close friend. Remus Lupin. Sirius is a fugitive in the wizardry community as he is believed to be a murderer, and follower of the evil Lord Voldemort. Both accusations prove false as he is actually a member of the Order of the Phoenix, a group dedicated to fighting Voldemort. However, Sirius must remain in hiding, often taking on the disguise of a black dog named Snuffles, or risk being sent back to prison. As

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Dobby Dobby is the house-elf that has attached itself to Harry as his loyal servant at Hogwarts. He suggests the secret meeting place that Harry and the others in the D.A. group can use to practice their Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Albus Dumbledore As the most powerful good wizard in the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, Dumbledore plays numerous roles in the wizardry world. He is the Headmaster of Hogwarts School, leader of the Order of the Phoenix, and highly influential advisor to the wizardry world’s governing bodies. Dumbledore also becomes Harry Potter’s mentor early in the series, although that relationship becomes strained in this book. Dumbledore is known as the only wizard Voldemort ever feared, and thus can offer Harry the best protection from the evil wizard. As readers see for the first time in the series, Dumbledore not only knows the answers to many of Harry’s deepest questions but he also remains the most powerful good wizard in the world. For the first time, Harry witnesses Dumbledore’s battle skills when he challenges Voldemort head-on at the end of the novel. Because Dumbledore keeps Harry isolated for much of the story, their usually close relationship does not reappear until the Headmaster apologizes to Harry in the final chapters.

Dudley Dursley Dudley is Harry’s cousin on his mother’s side. He appears at the beginning and end of each ‘‘Harry Potter’’ book because Harry lives with him during the summers between Hogwarts sessions. Dudley is babied by his parents, and baits Harry to get him in trouble. He becomes increasingly fatter and more aggressive in each book, and this year becomes an even bigger bully as he trains as a wrestler.

Petunia Dursley Petunia is Harry’s only living blood relative, his mother Lily’s sister, and thus holds the responsibility for his safekeeping. Much to her dismay, her shared bloodline with Harry’s mother provides Harry protection against

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Voldemort while under her roof. Petunia, like her husband Vernon, hates the mere mention of magic and focuses her attention on coddling her only son Dudley.

Vernon Dursley Harry’s uncle by marriage, Vernon Dursley merely tolerates Harry’s presence at his house each summer. He hates all things magical, and forbids Harry to mention magic or Hogwarts in his home. He much prefers his own son Dudley over Harry, and cannot wait for his nephew to leave every fall for school.

Cornelius Fudge Minister of Magic for the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series thus far, Fudge plays the role of generally incompetent bureaucrat. Often found wearing a green bowler-type hat, his physical appearance matches his equally inept leadership of the wizardry world. Convinced that Dumbledore wants to steal his position, Fudge constantly mocks any mention of Voldemort’s return as a way to undermine Dumbledore’s authority.

Hermione Granger Hermione Granger is Harry’s closest companion at Hogwarts, after Ron Weasley. The three students continue to be inseparable in this book, as they are in the other ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels. Hermione plays the intellectual role to Ron’s sidekick part, always knowing the textbook answer to magic dilemmas. She is a straight A student who makes school and learning a priority, often urging Harry and Ron to be more attentive students. Hermione comes from a non-magic, or Muggle, family where she is the only witch. Although none of the sympathetic characters, such as Harry and Ron, consider Hermione any different, some in the wizardry world regard Muggle-borns as second class. Those who follow Voldemort, for example, use the derogatory name ‘‘mudblood’’ to describe witches and wizards of non-magic descent. As a result of this stigma, readers often witness Hermione’s championing of other oppressed magic creatures, such as the enslaved house-elves. Although Hermione’s strength of character and logical approach frequently extricate Harry and Ron from difficult circumstances, readers recognize that life is about more than books. It takes all three characters, and their gifts of bravery,

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loyalty, and intelligence, to solve the problems in each ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novel.

Rubeus Hagrid A half giant, Hagrid strikes an intimidating figure with his large beard, unkempt clothes, and massive physical presence. He reappears in the fifth ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novel as more of a peer to Harry and his friends than an authority figure, despite his role as Care of Magical Creatures professor at Hogwarts. Harry, Ron, and Hermione feel especially affectionate towards Hagrid, whose rough appearance belies his sensitivity.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named See Voldemort

Kreacher Serving as the Black family house-elf, Kreacher lives with Sirius throughout the novel. He remains loyal to the dark wizards of the Black family, and thus constantly insults Sirius and the Order of the Phoenix members who stay at the house. Because house-elves are bound to their masters, Kreacher cannot leave or disobey Sirius until he receives a direct order. In the end, this loophole allows him to play a key role in trapping Harry Potter into meeting Voldemort.

Bellatrix Lestrange Sirius Black’s cousin, Bellatrix Lestrange has been in prison for fifteen years as a result of her allegiance to Voldemort. In this story, she breaks out of prison and helps provide Voldemort with information to lure Harry into his plot. Lestrange tortured Neville Longbottom’s parents into insanity, and she tortures Neville himself in the book’s final battle.

Neville Longbottom Classmate of Harry Potter’s, Neville is a close friend of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Readers generally feel sorry for Neville because his clumsiness lands him in continually awkward or embarrassing situations. Also, his parents were driven insane by torture when Neville was a baby; his grandmother raised him. Neville appears in all five books, but gains a larger role in this novel as he bravely-but sometimes clumsily- fights Voldemort and the Death Eaters at the end.

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Luna Lovegood

Alastor ‘‘Mad-Eye’’ Moody

A new character in the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, Luna Lovegood enters as a slightly strange classmate of Harry’s who tells odd stories about questionable creatures and events. Known to other students as ‘‘Loony,’’ Luna eventually becomes key to the story’s action when she fights Voldemort at the Ministry of Magic. Her father publishes the slightly offbeat newspaper, The Quibbler.

Another of the former Professors of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, Alastor ‘‘Mad-Eye’’ Moody is named for his magic eye that can see in all directions, even through the back of his head. He is a master of magical defense, and is thus a leader in the Order of the Phoenix. He takes special care of Harry’s safety in this book, and fights in the battle against Voldemort at the end.

Remus Lupin

Harry Potter

A werewolf, Remus Lupin entered Harry’s life as a Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor in a previous book. Because he knew Harry’s parents in school and serves as a member of the Order of the Phoenix, Lupin remains a mentor to Harry throughout his adventures.

Harry Potter is a young wizard celebrating his fifteenth birthday at the beginning of the story. His life has been a difficult one for someone so young: his parents were killed by the evil wizard, Voldemort, when Harry was only a baby, but when the wizard tried to kill him too, he survived. Harry has a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead as a result of this event, which throbs with pain whenever Voldemort is near. The mystery of the story, and the larger ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, asks why Harry was a target in the first place, how he managed to be the lone survivor of his family, and why Voldemort was nearly destroyed in the process. Harry’s achievement made him famous in the wizardry world, earning him the label ‘‘The Boy Who Lived.’’

Draco Malfoy Harry Potter’s chief rival at Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy serves as a constant irritant and bully to characters with whom readers sympathize. Draco represents Harry’s foil as he plays the same position in Quidditch, is a leader of Slytherin House, and attracts many followers because of his strong personality. He verbally taunts Harry and his friends throughout the school year. Also opposing Harry and causing conflict, Draco’s father Lucius follows Voldemort as a Death Eater.

Lucius Malfoy The character of Lucius Malfoy, Draco’s father, appears more frequently in the later ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Malfoy continues to serve Voldemort as a Death Eater and tries to influence the Minister of Magic towards the evil wizard’s cause. In the final battle, Malfoy fights Harry and his friends, only to be sent to prison once his allegiance to Voldemort becomes public knowledge.

Minerva McGonagall Professor McGonagall teaches Transfiguration at Hogwarts, leads Gryffindor House, and functions as Dumbledore’s second-in-command. She appears in every ‘‘Harry Potter’’ book, providing stern but fair friendship to Harry and his friends. She is also a member of the Order of the Phoenix.

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Earlier ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books describe Harry’s past in more detail. Despite Harry’s fame, those closest to him decided he should be raised by his non-magic relatives, the Dursleys, until age eleven. Treated poorly and kept ignorant of his past until then, Harry celebrated his eleventh birthday by discovering he was a wizard and that he would be attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry’s entry into the wizardry world as a young boy unaware of his special powers made him a likeable, humble character to whom many readers could relate. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix takes place during Harry’s fifth year at Hogwarts. Harry’s adolescence becomes apparent in this story; he spends much of his time moody, angry, and isolated. He faces many normal teenage pressures throughout the novel, such as dating, balancing homework and social activities, and considering his future. But he must also face the much larger responsibility of vanquishing Voldemort in order to save the entire wizardry world. In the end, Harry finds out more clues to his past, including the prophecy that predicts

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that Harry and Voldemort cannot coexist, and that one will kill the other. The combination of these levels of stress cause the teenage Harry, normally even-tempered, to remain sensitive and brooding through most of the book.

Tom Riddle See Voldemort

Severus Snape Professor Snape teaches Potions at Hogwarts, although he covets the Defense Against Dark Arts position. Despite his application for that position every year, he mysteriously never receives it. Harry’s least favorite professor, Snape used to follow Voldemort as a Death Eater but has since reformed and become loyal to Dumbledore. Harry doubts Snape’s allegiance in each book, and finds even more reasons to hate him in this one. Snape appears to hate Harry back, as the story reveals that Harry’s father bullied Snape as a schoolboy. Snape expresses his aversion to Harry constantly, docking his grades in class and looking for ways to punish him outside of class.

Nymphadora Tonks Nymphadora Tonks works as an Auror and as a member of the Order of the Phoenix, appearing for the first time in this ‘‘Harry Potter’’ book. She answers only to her last name, and she can change bodily form at whim; she takes on various physical characteristics from short to long hair, small to tall stature, and young to old features. She fights in the final battle to save Harry at the end.

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reigning in the wizardry world, Voldemort nearly died when he tried to kill Harry Potter fifteen years ago. Instead of dying, however, Voldemort maintained various states of existence in each of the earlier ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books. By the fifth installment, Voldemort regains a body and seeks to capture ultimate power by destroying Harry Potter. Born Tom Riddle, Voldemort actually has non-magic bloodlines despite his emphasis on pureblooded magic families. Riddle trained as a Hogwarts student under Dumbledore’s professorship, but turned evil as his talent and power increased. In this story, Voldemort’s cruelty becomes more apparent as readers witness him punishing and killing both foes and allies. Despite Voldemort’s inability to kill Harry by the end of the story, the prophecy foretells that neither can exist together. Rowling sets the stage for larger, more dangerous battles in the final two ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books.

Arthur Weasley Father of seven, Arthur Weasley also plays the role of surrogate father to Harry Potter. Ron brings Harry to his house early in the series, and Arthur makes the famous wizard feel at home for the first time in his life. A member of the Order of the Phoenix and working in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Department of the Ministry of Magic, Arthur also exhibits a special fondness for non-magic people. In this novel, Voldemort’s snake attacks Arthur and sends him to the hospital with serious injuries.

Fred and George Weasley

The latest Defense Against Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts, Umbridge plays the role of informant to the Ministry of Magic. She gains more and more power from the Ministry as the story goes on, eventually becoming High Inquisitor, or chief tattle tale, at Hogwarts. Umbridge attempts to control all activities and information inside the school, cruelly punishing any students who challenge her authority. Harry and his friends fight Umbridge’s new school policies all year long.

Ron’s older twin brothers Fred and George always appear together and provide comic relief throughout the story. They are typical Weasleys, with red hair and freckles, but show a penchant for mischief. Throughout the school year, Fred and George develop practical joke products, such as pills that make students vomit, or bleed from the nose, that they hope to sell in their own joke shop one day. Their elaborate and explosive departure from Hogwarts at the end of the term not only helps Harry in his quest to fight Voldemort, but, although not yet graduated, also marks their permanent exit from school.

Voldemort

Ginny Weasley

The most evil wizard in the world, Lord Voldemort recently returned to bodily form and seeks supreme power throughout this book. Once

Ron Weasley’s younger sister Ginny Weasley becomes less meek in this story than in previous ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books. With her apparent crush

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on Harry in the past, Ginny becomes a stronger presence among the group of students training to fight Voldemort. She is more vocal about her opinions throughout the novel, and fights in the battles at the Ministry of Magic at the end.

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You-Know-Who See Voldemort

THEMES Molly Weasley Mother of the Weasley clan, Molly becomes the surrogate mother to Harry and Hermione while they all stay at Sirius’s family house in this book. Molly plays a stereotypical motherly role as she cooks and cleans for the family, worries about her children constantly, and pesters everyone to behave correctly. Molly is also a member of the Order of the Phoenix. She is an especially lovable character because she cares for Harry as if he were her own son.

Ron Weasley

The largest mystery in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix surrounds Harry’s search for knowledge of himself and his place in the wizardry world. The novel opens with Harry’s constant attention to newspapers and news programs as he looks for any evidence of Voldemort’s return. When he finds nothing in his searches, he looks to letters from Ron and Hermione for information. At Dumbledore’s request, those letters similarly contain little helpful news. Once at the Order of the Phoenix, Harry’s quest for answers becomes partially satisfied as he learns that Voldemort still lies in wait, spending his energies gathering supporters and looking for a new kind of ‘‘weapon.’’ But the larger questions about Voldemort’s long-term strategies and the Order’s plans to defend the wizardry community evade Harry. Members of the Order, led by Dumbledore, contend that Harry should only be told what ‘‘he needs to know’’ and little else.

Ron Weasley, known only to his mother as ‘‘Ronald,’’ continues to play the role of Harry Potter’s best friend in Rowling’s fifth ‘‘Harry Potter’’ book. Tall, lanky, and red haired, Ron comes from a large family with little money, opening him up to constant mocking from his fellow students. Besides helping Harry cope with the larger challenges of Voldemort’s return, Ron also struggles with his own insecurities about school and social activities. Not a stellar student, he breaks into athletics in this book as he becomes the Gryffindor Quidditch team’s goalie. His performance is generally poor until the end of the story, causing the already insecure Ron to doubt himself even more. Readers will notice a romantic undercurrent in the constant bickering between Ron and Harry’s other best friend Hermione Granger. Ron’s greatest weaknesses lie in his envy of the money and skill Harry seems to come by so naturally. But he remains Harry’s loyal companion through all adventures and, even when his magical skills do not compare to the famous Harry Potter’s, Ron’s uncompromising friendship endears him to readers.

Harry’s initial curiosity about Voldemort seems to be unfounded adolescent energy. Many adult readers might agree at the beginning of the novel that, although he did play a key role in the community-altering events of the previous year, Harry indeed should be protected from further involvement because of his youth. In fact, Dumbledore clearly expresses this view in the final scenes of the novel: ‘‘I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth . . . .’’ But Harry’s instincts serve him well; his search for knowledge of Voldemort proved not to be mere teenage arrogance but rather a longing for self-knowledge. Dumbledore explains a great deal to Harry about himself in the end, and gives him many keys to unlock his past and his future. Although some of this knowledge, especially Harry’s destiny to kill or be killed by Voldemort, weighs heavily on the fifteen-yearold. Dumbledore tells him, ‘‘I know you have long been ready for the knowledge I have kept from you for so long, because you have proved that I should have placed the burden upon you before this.’’

Percy Weasley Fastidious son of Arthur and Molly Weasley, Percy spends The Order of the Phoenix estranged from his family. His loyalty lies with his boss, the Minister of Magic, and he turns his back on his father’s work with the Order of the Phoenix.

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Good and Evil The forces of good and evil battle fiercely in each ‘‘Harry Potter’’ book, as Harry and Voldemort square off by the end of each adventure. But as Harry matures, so does his understanding of good and evil forces in the world. As Sirius Black explains ‘‘with a wry smile,’’ there are many ambiguities in the adult world, and that world ‘‘isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters.’’ Delores Umbridge and the Ministry of Magic provide the most compelling examples of the complex moral world in which Harry now finds himself. The Ministry’s mission, led by Minister Cornelius Fudge, should be to use the governmental structures to protect and benefit the lives of witches and wizards. Although the actions of Fudge and Umbridge illustrate character flaws that range from incompetence to cruelty, neither character should be read as wholly evil. Both characters believe they seek the good of the community. Fudge’s attempt to discredit Dumbledore’s story of Voldemort’s return stems from his insecurity and fear of losing power. Yet this discrediting falls far short of Death Eater–type evil. Even Umbridge’s mean-spirited manipulation of Hogwarts students illustrates her own struggles with control rather than indicating a penchant for true evil. Umbridge’s willingness to torture the truth out of Harry only proves the complex relationship that exists between good intentions and evil outcomes. Harry must navigate these cloudy waters as he grows up, doing his best to react appropriately to the sometimes wrongheaded but well-intentioned individuals that populate much of the world, while still recognizing true evil when he faces it. Rowling’s representation of a complex moral atmosphere explains her novels’ broad appeal to both children and adults.

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agree. Voldemort, despite not being pure-blood, draws primary support from pure-blooded wizardry families such as the Malfoys and the Blacks. Keeping the wizardry legacy ‘‘pure’’ drives much of the Death Eaters’ actions and therefore plays a crucial role in Voldemort’s larger plan. From wanting Hogwarts to serve exclusively pure-blooded students, to subjecting lesser orders of magical creatures to servitude, Rowling depicts a world of social segregation much like readers’ own. As Hermione battles attitudes such as Draco Malfoy’s about her heritage, it is not surprising that she becomes an advocate for those in servitude, like the house-elves. Throughout their school year, Harry and Ron watch Hermione attempt to free the Hogwarts house-elves by giving them clothing, and more specifically, by knitting them hats. Rowling demonstrates the complexity of social oppression, however, as many house-elves do not wish to be free and actually resent Hermione’s attempts to trick them into independence. In its attempt to band together against Voldemort’s return, moreover, the wizardry community must pay for injustices done to nonhuman magical creatures. Difficulty with the giants, the centaurs, and even the Dementors present obstacles to a unified front against Voldemort. Dumbledore explains, ‘‘We wizards have mistreated and abused our fellows for too long, and we are now reaping our reward.’’ Social order grows in prominence as a theme in each subsequent ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novel, certainly foreshadowing its role as one of the central conflicts to be resolved in the larger series.

Adolescence

The last few ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels introduce the ancillary theme of social order in the wizardry and Muggle worlds. Indeed, readers learn the difference between what are considered pure-blood wizards and what are negatively labeled ‘‘mudbloods’’ in as early as the second book. Hermione Granger represents the latter as she is the only witch in her non-magical family. Most of the wizardry world overlooks such distinctions but as Voldemort and his followers gain more power, readers see that not all wizards

With whispers of romance beginning during the last school year, this year at Hogwarts sees Harry’s first kiss, and Hermione’s flirtations with Ron and a student from another school. Harry finds courtship to be a rocky road as he attempts to date the pretty Ravenclaw Seeker, Cho Chang. Previously Cedric’s girlfriend, Cho spends much of her time with Harry crying about her former boyfriend’s death. As any teenage boy would, Harry vacillates between feeling terrified and frustrated at the young girl’s constant tears. Even with Hermione’s attempts to translate Cho’s emotional state, Harry is relieved when their brief romance ends. The flirtation between Ron and Hermione, in contrast,

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In a two-page essay, compare the Ministry of Magic to your government: where do you see successes or failures in each? Where do you see abuses of power like those perpetrated by Cornelius Fudge or Delores Umbridge? Where do you see progress being made by leaders such as Albus Dumbledore or Arthur Weasley?

How does your school compare to Hogwarts? In his fifth year, Harry faces extremely difficult standardized exams. Provide examples of characters for which the tests were effective as well as individuals for whom the exams were not a fair judge of talent or intelligence. What is Rowling’s attitude towards standardized tests? How does your school or community evaluate student progress? What are the benefits and shortcomings in each world? Write a one-page summary on your findings.

Professor Umbridge and the Ministry of Magic constantly censor and control the information available to both Hogwarts students and the wizardry community as a whole. Especially through the newspaper, the Daily Prophet, the Ministry attempts to control the messages presented to the community about Voldemort’s return. The Ministry

appears to be growing throughout their fifth year together. Constantly bickering so that Harry is reminded of a married couple, the two cannot admit their attraction to each other yet, but readers clearly see a relationship in their future. Ron’s jealousy at Hermione’s pen-pal relationship with Viktor especially highlights that Hermione is more than just a friend. Not to be left out of the social activity, Ginny Weasley also begins dating during the school year; even though she was previously infatuated with Harry. By the end of the school year, though, they have broken up only for Ginny to

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even goes as far as denying what it knows to be true in an effort to keep the peace. In a one-page essay, compare these governmental strategies with ones you observe today, in the age of terrorism and global threats. How and why might your government attempt to control threatening information? What are the benefits of managing information in this way? What are the dangers?

Analyze Professor Snape’s role in Harry Potter’s life. On one hand, he intentionally singles out Harry and mistreats him. On the other hand, he provides wise advice to him during Occlumency lessons: ‘‘Fools who wear their hearts proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions . . . stand no chance against [Voldemort’s] powers. . . . Control your anger, discipline your mind!’’ How might this direction have helped Harry in the novel? Further, what does Rowling intend for readers to think about Snape? Clearly, Dumbledore and most of the Order of the Phoenix members trust him but Harry does not. What will Snape’s role be in Harry’s future? How should readers understand his character? Write a brief essay explaining your opinions.

date still another boy. Perhaps foreshadowing a relationship in the future, Ron subtly expresses his disappointment that his sister is not dating his best friend Harry. Another adolescent factor in the novel’s focus is Harry’s struggle to master his moods. From feeling sad and alone with his nightmares, to feeling elated and surrounded by true friends, Harry’s emotional states vary widely throughout his fifth year. As many teenagers do, Harry often feels isolated from his peers because of his unique experiences. He becomes angry when other people believe they understand exactly

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what he is going through. In these cases, Harry often spends long periods of time alone, whereas he used to seek the company of his friends. Isolation remains a hallmark of teenage life, and when Harry does find himself with company, he often becomes quickly angry at them. Growing frustrated more often with Ron and Hermione, Harry admits that he ‘‘wasn’t even sure why he was feeling so angry.’’ Rowling describes Harry’s ‘‘temper,’’ like many normal adolescents, as ‘‘always so close to the surface these days.’’ Harry’s moodiness and resulting sarcastic or biting remarks, in addition to his newly growing romantic relationships, place him squarely within the typical teenage world.

STYLE Series From the beginning, Rowling envisioned the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series to be comprised of seven books, one for each year of Harry’s schooling at Hogwarts. The series follow the lives of the same main characters—Harry, Ron, and Hermione—through each novel and continues the narrative from one book to the next. One way to view the series is to consider the overall series as one book, with each novel acting as a chapter. Although each of the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books can stand independently, there are several threads that link the series together, and each subsequent novel moves the characters and the plot forward. The opening chapters of each book include a brief summary of events that have transpired in the previous books, keeping the reader informed of earlier plot action and acting as an introduction to the series for firsttime readers. As the series draws to a close, major plot points and themes begin to move toward the final culminating battle between Harry and Voldemort. Rowling utilizes foreshadowing to hook the reader’s interest in the climax and resolutions to be revealed in the remaining books in the series.

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events from an outside perspective, but reveals the perceptions of one or more characters. As opposed to presenting information through characters’ conversations, their observations, or their activities, Rowling instead allows readers to witness Harry’s thoughts in this novel. While still at the Dursleys, Harry sits quietly on a swing ruminating about Cedric’s death in the graveyard; many scenes echo this first glimpse into Harry’s psychological struggles, as he begins to search himself for answers rather than taking every problem immediately to Ron and Hermione, as in other books. More than once, Harry decides not to talk to his friends until he has thought deeply about his problems. Sometimes Harry is not even certain why he does not want to talk to his friends: ‘‘He was not really sure why he was not telling Ron and Hermione exactly what was happening. . . .’’ Rowling writes, but eventually, he does bring major concerns to his friends, who then discuss strategies for solving those problems.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Government and the War on Terror The ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series can only be understood as creating a cultural phenomenon all on its own. With 80 million books in print by the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as well as the continuing success of each Warner Brothers film adaptation, Rowling’s writing will demand its own account in future history books. But the novels do reflect some of the cultural atmosphere of the early twenty-first century. While the majority of the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series was published during the years of western economic prosperity, the fifth novel follows the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent global war on terror. Some of the darker tone of the fifth novel echoes the more negative global atmosphere present afterSeptember 11th. Additionally, religious protests continue to hound Rowling’s series, as some readers find the magical content morally questionable.

In spite of the fact that the novel is written from a third-person perspective, throughout much of the book Rowling reveals clues through Harry’s perspective. Using third-person limited omniscient point of view, an author presents the

During the years following more terrorist attacks on western targets, political tensions in the United Kingdom increased as Prime Minister Tony Blair supported American President George Bush’s war in Iraq. It would perhaps be an overstatement to say that Rowling

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intended to criticize this specific governmental policy with her plot of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; still, readers may be specifically attuned to the generally critical tone toward authority in the story. The Ministry of Magic, led by fumbling Minister Cornelius Fudge, provides little protection for the magic community as he refuses to release factual information about Voldemort’s return. Further, Delores Umbridge’s militant control of information within Hogwarts castle and The Daily Prophet’s censorship of news reports also provide parallels to the political atmosphere of the time. Readers may recognize a similar attitude of governmental mistrust as both Blair and Bush were criticized for withholding or manipulating intelligence information that led to Iraq’s invasion. Media scandals with the BBC and the New York Times additionally reverberate with action in the novel.

Conservative Opposition Although the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series enjoyed unmatched popularity in the majority of markets, more conservative religious populations continued to raise concerns about the morality of magic. Religious objections about the magic content of the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series ranged from mild concerns about children who solve their problems with magic rather than honest effort, to extreme accusations of evil and anti-biblical representations of devil worship. There have even been several, although not well-received, instances of ‘‘Harry Potter’’ censorship and book burnings. Television shows such as 60 Minutes detailed these protests, but their influence was only marginal compared to the widespread celebration of the novels’ positive influence on children.

Reading Renaissance Generally, Rowling’s books are credited with reintroducing an entire generation of children to the joys of reading. News reports often gleefully cite images of ten-year-olds tearing through 800-page books, and staying up late at night reading. There are even medical reports describing patterns of children complaining of neck cramps caused by excessive time spent reading ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels. On the whole, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix continues to speak to an entire generation of child and adult readers because of their high entertainment value.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Critical reaction to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix reflects significant attention to the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series in general; that is, the largest debate surrounds whether Rowling’s writing earns consideration as quality, valid, adult literature. Critics are asking the same question often asked of any text enjoying enormous popularity: Is it any good? To answer the question of literary merit, scholars approach Rowling’s work from a number of perspectives. Considerations of genre, style, and content provide fodder for both sides of the debate, and establish a considerable argument that ‘‘Harry Potter’’ may not qualify as substantial literature. To the contrary, it should be taken seriously for its literary depth and topical merit. Categorizing Rowling’s writing becomes difficult for several reasons. First, a series of seven books with a maturing main character makes labeling the whole of the work much more complicated. In an effort to understand where these books fit into the world of literature, critics focus primarily on the novels as members of the Fantasy or Great Novel genre. In either case, numerous critics argue that Rowling does or does not fit the standards for that genre. Fantasy, for instance, draws the constant attention of writers because of the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books’ many similarities with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some of the most ardent detractors of Rowling’s work also use Tolkien as their basis of comparison, citing his deep allegorical content as vastly superior to Rowling’s more childlike and humorous stories. Highly prominent writers A. S. Byatt and William Safire join these ranks in their New York Times articles, with Byatt calling the books ‘‘jokey’’ rather than substantial, and Safire claiming the books are ‘‘not written on two levels’’ and therefore, ‘‘prizeworthy culture [they] ain’t.’’ Just as many critics have rallied in Rowling’s defense, however, stockpiling evidence that the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books are as serious contributions to the genres of fantasy and novel as even Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s. Writing for the journal Topic, Miranda Maney Yaggi uses Tolkien’s own guidelines to validate the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, while Steven Barfield, in the same journal, classifies Rowling’s works as a subcategory called ‘‘satirical fantasy.’’ Paige

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Alan Rickman, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe starred in several films based on the series Ó Warner Bros. Pictures/ZUMA/Corbis

Byam, also in Topic, even argues that Rowling’s stories fit into the great tradition of British novels, following in Charles Dickens’s and Charlotte Bronte¨’s footsteps.

out there and serve as valuable examples of what good writing can and should be.’’

Next, many readers evaluate Rowling’s writing style to determine how worthy her texts might be for serious literary consideration. One of the most prominent recent literary scholars, Harold Bloom, famously weighed in on this debate, using the Wall Street Journal to call Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ‘‘heavy on cliche´,’’ ‘‘inadequate,’’ and ‘‘not well written.’’ Because of its ‘‘aesthetic weakness,’’ Bloom relegates Rowling’s work to ‘‘the dustbins of the ages.’’ Philip Hensher agrees, in his Spectator review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, basing his judgment on Rowling’s simplistic writing style that falls short of eloquence. Among the throngs of readers who disagree with Bloom is Kathleen McEvoy, also writing in Topic, who demonstrates the aesthetic beauty of Rowling’s writing style. McEvoy details the intricate organization and assiduously structured form in the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels, stating that ‘‘the beautiful architecture’’ of the books makes them ‘‘as structurally sound as any work

Finally, readers disagree on the appropriateness of the magic content in the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series. Especially as the novels grow darker and more mature, some conservative Christian groups find the magic to be too alluring for young, impressionable minds. The Christian Broadcasting Network website provides several articles showing parents’ and communities’ concerns over how magic in the novels may influence occult practices among their children. Communities and school districts must enter this debate especially since the film versions of ‘‘Harry Potter’’ have debuted, and decide whether to allow or ban the books from their classrooms. In rare instances, the theme of magic in Rowling’s works has been alleged to encourage devil worship and has spawned actual bookburnings. Opposing these opinions, however, many writers detail the positive moral content within Rowling’s texts, and claim they enrich and embolden their young readers’ lives. In response to those who would ban ‘‘Harry Potter,’’ Lee Ann Diffendal argues in Topic that the series actually promotes Judeo-Christian

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standards and ‘‘contains classic philanthropic lessons on loyalty, faith, courage, and friendship.’’ Thus, despite the various controversial aspects of Rowling’s ever popular series, readers and scholars alike find material to bolster both sides of the literary worthiness debate, undoubtedly underscoring the series’ merit and cultural importance.

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THE TRUE GENIUS OF ROWLING’S LATEST ‘HARRY POTTER’ ADVENTURE REVEALS ITSELF IN HER RELENTLESS ATTENTION TO CHARACTER COMPLEXITY, WHICH INDICATES A LEVEL OF LITERARY MERIT. INTELLIGENT ADULT READERS MAY JUSTIFY THEIR LOVE OF THESE BOOKS IN ROWLING’S MATURE AND

CRITICISM

ELABORATE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.’’

Laura Baker Shearer Shearer holds a Ph.D. in American literature and works as an English professor and freelance writer. In this essay, Shearer examines character complexity in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and questions elite scholars who discount the text’s literary worthiness. As Rowling completes each installment in her ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, and as these novels draw more and more readers the world over, substantial scholarship about the popular literature grows. For the most part, critics have become increasingly willing to take the texts seriously, developing numerous literary strategies to interpret and evaluate what were originally considered mere children’s books. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix offers a similarly wide landscape for literary analysis, especially in the area of character development. By this fifth year in Harry Potter’s education at Hogwarts, readers may feel they know the main characters on a deep level. Rowling does not fail, however, to thwart expectations regarding most of the main characters, leaving Harry’s world much less secure than in past books in the series. It is this unexpected complexity that adds rich texture to what may otherwise have been a predictable storyline. A few members of the academic elite still refuse to recognize genuine literary merit in the popular series—possibly because of its very popularity—and ignore the elements that ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books share with the novels of great literature. While their evaluations have some credibility, the wholesale dismissal of a large adult readership as juvenile and regressive raises red flags and calls for a closer inspection. The true genius of Rowling’s latest ‘‘Harry Potter’’ adventure reveals itself in her relentless attention to character complexity, which indicates a level of writing worthy of literary merit. Intelligent adult readers may justify

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their love of these books in Rowling’s mature and elaborate character development. The vivid characters and compelling storyline in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix provide a magnetic, energetic, and engrossing literary experience that overcomes the few artistic flaws some critics address. Suspicious of the series’ large readership, prominent critics such as Harold Bloom, William Safire, and A. S. Byatt believe many adult fans do not use an adequately critical eye when reading ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books. Contrary to these criticisms, the fifth ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novel presents itself as good literature not simply because numerous readers enjoy it but because it provides many avenues for literary inquiry. For instance, Kathleen McEvoy in Topic locates merit in the intricate ‘‘architectural’’ plot Rowling unravels within and across each book. John Leonard of the New York Times finds the literary spark in the veritable ‘‘cluster bombs’’ of creative curses, creatures, and characters with which the book overflows. One may extend literary analysis of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by appreciating the extensive and surprising character development within the story, which sees many of the main characters change in ways that create complexity not only in themselves but in plot development and reader expectations. The series hero, Harry Potter, undergoes an extensive character transformation during his fifteenth year. In addition to the bravery and courage readers expect to find in their favorite boy wizard, they also encounter some less-thanappealing personality traits as he enters the heart of his adolescence. A certain moodiness associated with teenage years is to be expected, but

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Harry’s erratic emotions may strain reader sympathy. Harry lashes out at his best friends, Ron and Hermione, and ultimately at his beloved mentor, Albus Dumbledore. His behavior causes readers, for the first time, to question the series’ protagonist. Readers’ skepticism is justified when, in the end, Harry ignores all warnings and endangers his closest friends. Leading toward the final battle at the Ministry of Magic, readers recognize the mistakes Harry makes as he disengages with his school community and withdraws into the world of his dark dreams. Readers’ sympathy is stretched the farthest when they discover Harry enjoying his ventures into Voldemort’s mind: ‘‘The truth was that he was so intensely curious about what was hidden in that room full of dusty orbs that he was quite keen for the dreams to continue.’’ Even though a certain level of curiosity seems normal, Harry quickly falls into the traps of vanity and selfimportance as he chases after Voldemort’s thoughts. Voldemort capitalizes on Harry’s mistakes and, in the process, Harry causes permanent damage to the wizarding community. Harry had certainly made mistakes in his previous years at Hogwarts, but it is not until his fifth year that his own ego begins to affect his otherwise generally selfless decision-making. Presenting her hero in this more negative light allows Rowling to add depth and drama to her narrative. Harry’s actions also become more difficult for readers to predict, adding interest and complexity to what could have been a simplistic, childish story. Harry’s constant companions, Ron and Hermione, also find different roles in this installment. Usually the loyal sidekick and the brainy bookworm, Ron’s and Hermione’s respective roles fade throughout this school year as a result of Harry’s increasing isolation. Readers expect the three friends to solve the book’s mystery together, as they have in previous novels. This year, however, Harry excludes his friends from his troubles. From the beginning, when they meet again at Twelve, Grimmauld Place, Harry vents his frustrations by yelling at his friends. Throughout the novel, Harry chooses to lash out at Ron and Hermione rather than invite their help in solving his problems. Readers may find this choice distasteful because the three friends have found such success working together in the past. When Harry ultimately

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makes his fateful blunder by believing Voldemort has captured Sirius, Hermione’s remarkably accurate warning echoes in readers’ ears: ‘‘[D]on’t you think you’ve got a bit of a— a—saving-people-thing? . . . Voldemort knows you, Harry! . . . What if he’s just trying to get you into the Department of Myst[eries]?’’ If Harry had not responded to Hermione’s reasonable, and correct, prediction by flying into a rage, perhaps he would have avoided his tragic error. The exclusion of his faithful friends from Harry’s internal struggles, and Ron’s and Hermione’s subsequent reactions, gives readers a new perspective on these well-known and wellloved characters. It also marks the end of Harry’s—and the series’—reliance on the teamwork of childhood and the beginning of his isolation and singularity of adulthood. Dumbledore further confounds readers’ expectations in the novel. Nearly omniscient in every other book, Dumbledore knows all about Harry’s exploits, both legal and otherwise, and seems to hold (and withhold) the answers to all of Harry’s questions. But in this story, Dumbledore’s absence becomes more noticeable than his presence. While Harry excludes his friends from his troubles, he deeply longs for his mentor’s advice. Much to Harry’s disappointment, Dumbledore continues to evade his company. In the end, readers are again disturbed to find that Dumbledore commits an error as fatal as Harry’s: he suppresses crucial information that could have saved Sirius Black’s life. ‘‘For I see now,’’ Dumbledore confesses, ‘‘that what I have done, and not done, with regard to you, bears all the hallmarks of the failings of age. . . . An old man’s mistake.’’ Dumbledore’s god-like image shatters by the end of The Order of the Phoenix as readers witness his fallibility and increasing frailty. This character change forces readers to reconfigure their understanding of Hogwarts as a secure place under Dumbledore’s reign. Rowling’s undermining of Dumbledore’s authority shifts the power structure in the wizarding world, leaving Harry Potter more alone than ever. Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, also undergoes a change in characterization throughout the novel. In the previous books in the series, the mature Black offered Harry his only true father figure. However, Rowling diminishes Black’s reputation in The Order of the Phoenix by depicting him as a moody and selfish adolescent.

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Why does she present Black in such a negative light when he dies at the end? Revealing the chinks in Harry’s godfather’s armor is not at all unexpected, as many critics point out, because Harry must learn to become independent of the godfather whom he resembles so closely. But Sirius represents a small respite from an exhausting and challenging world for Harry. Could Sirius have not left the wizarding world with his godfatherly tenderness intact? Rowling’s presentation of Black’s faults, like Dumbledore’s, causes Harry’s world to become less stable, and readers’ expectations to be continually challenged. Severus Snape embodies a final conundrum. Rowling continues to taunt readers with his mean-spirited treatment of Harry in their public and private meetings, but once readers witness Snape’s own childhood trauma, they feel sympathy towards him, and perhaps even begin to understand why he is what he is. Harry feels a similar, though tentative, connection because of this shared humiliation. In the end, though, Harry refuses their bond, vowing to himself that ‘‘he would never forgive Snape . . . never.’’ Presumably, Harry feels such anger toward Snape, because Snape was unhelpful during the violent battle with Voldemort and the Death Eaters. However, readers may not blame Snape so harshly. It is at this point that they may feel an uncomfortable distance and near-judgment of Harry, whom they have championed and sympathized with since his first year at Hogwarts. Such complex threads of character development keep Rowling’s narrative multidimensional and thus worthy of literary considera-tion. Critics Bloom, Safire, and Byatt deny this achievement, however, citing the text’s popularity as evidence of less-than-discerning readers and citing the work as greatly over-praised and under-scrutinized. They explain away Rowling’s massive adult readership as evidence of immature grown-ups seeking the comforts of childhood. It is, however, in Byatt’s concluding comments about cultural studies that these elite critics’ true objection seems to lie. Byatt blames the Rowling ‘‘phenomenon’’ on ‘‘the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.’’ This obvious aggression toward the inclusive values of cultural studies may explain the threat some critics perceive in Rowling and their wholesale

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rejection of the nearly monopolistic cultural popularity she enjoys. The last thirty years have brought vast changes to the academic world as scholars have sought to break open the closed and maledominated realm of higher education. Wanting to recover female, multi-ethnic, and multiclassed presences for serious study at a university level, academics now examine nontraditional texts with academic standards previously reserved for classics. In literature, for example, critics review letters, diaries, and even recipes of women and people of color as a way to recover and fully understand those voices. Because only the privileged and educated individuals in most societies found time or avenues for artistic endeavor, groundbreaking academics attempt to include marginalized forms and voices to redefine what might be considered art. Part of this movement includes the new practice of reading what the masses read and considering popular work alongside more traditional art. This dynamic is the ‘‘leveling’’ of which Byatt speaks, and it is the threat Rowling presents to the body of so-called great literature. What Bloom, Safire, and Byatt fail to recognize, it seems, is that Rowling’s novels are not considered good literature exclusively or even primarily because of their popularity. Few, if any, serious analyses of Rowling’s texts state that the novels are worthy pieces of literature solely because so many adult readers love them. Some certainly take the cultural studies standpoint that their massive popularity should cause critics to take notice of Rowling’s work, but the final judgment of the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series still depends upon a set of literary criteria. It is not, as Byatt claims, that scholars of Rowling do not believe in ‘‘literary merit’’; it is instead that they believe merit may be found in the most unusual, and potentially popular, places. In his Wall Street Journal article, Bloom contemplates the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books and rightly asks, ‘‘Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?’’ The deeply textured characterization found in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is one of the reasons that the novel can be called greatly enriching. Rowling’s books do not, as Bloom, Safire, and Byatt claim, lull readers into an entertainment haze. Instead, they cause readers to think about how characters have grown over

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1998) is Rowling’s first installment in her series about the young wizard. In it, Harry first discovers he is a wizard; he also learns that the world of magic will offer him a home, a place to find friends, and to fit in. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999) continues Harry’s journey through his second year at Hogwarts. Rowling shows Harry facing Voldemort for the second time and learning he has more in common with the evil wizard than he ever imagined.

The Return of the King were initially published in 1954 and 1955 as three separate installments and have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as a result of its recent Hollywood film adaptations. In his trilogy, Tolkien presents a rich fantasy world, often considered more allegorical and mature than Rowling’s series, that follows the search for goodness in the face of terrible evil.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) follows Harry’s third year at Hogwarts and takes on a darker tone than in earlier books. The evil Harry faces appears greater, but so do his rewards, including a newfound father figure.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) takes the series in a much more mature direction. With action beginning in the early pages, Rowling’s 700-page story introduces numerous new characters and presents adult situations, including a murder.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and

the years and to ponder their unpredictable and potentially precarious fates in the final books. Source: Laura Baker Shearer, Critical Essay on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Page Byam In the following excerpt, Byam argues that the Harry Potter series compares favorably with other classic British novels, and deserves attention and respect for its ‘‘adult’’ literary merits.

Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (2003) is the story of Meggie, whose father Mo has the ability to read characters into and out of books. When one of the evil characters he has accidentally read out of a book called ‘‘Inkheart’’ wants to use Mo’s power for his own wicked plans, Meggie, Mo, and their friends must escape capture and find the author of ‘‘Inkheart’’ to rewrite a new ending.

The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1978) tells the classic story of young King Arthur as he trains under the tutelage of the magician Merlin to become a gentleman and a knight. All of his training leads to the day when he pulls the sword from the stone and becomes the King of England.

first two novels in the series had been published, it was already very clear that their author, J. K. Rowling, had engaged a new generation of readers, especially among the elementary-school-age crowd. It was also apparent that adults were reading the books in huge numbers, and I became interested in this phenomenon—as well as eagerly anticipating each book in the series for my own part.

Often, great success brings controversy: such is the case for the Harry Potter series. After the

However, it is the cult status of the series among adults that has drawn much criticism and created controversy since that time. Many debates, inside of the academy and out, have

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I SIDE WITH THOSE WHO BELIEVE THAT THE HARRY POTTER SERIES NOT ONLY DESERVES THE ATTENTION IT IS GETTING BECAUSE OF ITS IMAGINATIVE QUALITIES AND COMPELLING STORYLINE, BUT ALSO BECAUSE OF ITS ‘‘ADULT’’ LITERARY MERITS.’’

focused on whether or not the Harry Potter books are ‘‘just’’ children’s books, and whether they have literary merit. This controversy erupted most spectacularly in the New York Times’s placing of the Harry Potter books on its ‘‘Best Seller List.’’ Because the huge, long-term success of the Harry Potter books placed the books in the series atop the list and left little room for books aimed strictly at adult readers, the New York Times decided to put them into a newly created children’s best-seller list. Commenting on this decision in July of 2000, Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, stated: The sales and popularity of children’s books can rival and, in the case of the Harry Potter books, even exceed those of adult books . . . With a separate children’s list we can more fully represent what people are reading, and we can clear more room on the adult list for adult books.

Some regarded this as an attempt to quash adult interest in the series by sending out a message to readers that the Harry Potter books are really children’s fiction and that adults were not supposed to read the series. Also, placement on the new children’s list did a disservice to the series by not reflecting how many copies of each book sold each week compared to ‘‘adult’’ best-sellers. At the very least, the New York Times’s decision to create a separate children’s bestseller list was a strategy to shift attention away from the Harry Potter series. At this point in time, 7 July 2000, ‘‘one or more of the three books in the J. K. Rowling Harry Potter series [had] commanded spots on the adult fiction bestseller list for 81 weeks to date.’’ Removing the Harry

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Potter books from the adult bestseller list was a marketing decision designed to obscure the fact that the series was still outselling top adult fiction and that no other children’s book approached it in sales at the time. I side with those who believe that the Harry Potter series not only deserves the attention it is getting because of its imaginative qualities and compelling storyline, but also because of its ‘‘adult’’ literary merits. I will argue here that the Harry Potter series fits well into ‘‘the great tradition’’ of British novels that is still taught in college classrooms, beginning with Samuel Richardson, continued by Jane Austen, and culminating in the efforts of Charlotte Bronte¨ and Charles Dickens. Perhaps it is the sense of ‘‘fun’’ and the comedic element that we encounter—especially in books one to four of the series—that makes some people think that the books are not for adults, and that they do not fit into the ‘‘great tradition’’ of the novel. In many cases, the problems and even tragedies that Harry encounters are resolved or diminished and not left for readers to ponder, as in many other classic British novels. While this pattern of resolution is less typical of ‘‘adult’’ classics, it should not be used as a reason for knocking the Harry Potter series out of the ‘‘adult’’ fiction category. Critics may have judged the series by the first two or three books, prematurely placing it in the children’s literature category. The New York Times’s decision came in July 2000, before Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban could be properly digested, and three years before the publication of the most ‘‘adult’’ book—in terms of content— to date, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Another reason some critics think the Harry Potter books are not for adult readers is simply because the hero is not grown up. True, the character of Harry is an adolescent—but so are Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre, and Charles Dickens’s Pip and Esther Summerson when we first meet them, to name a few. As of yet, the series has not followed Harry to adulthood, but this should not be a ‘‘requirement’’ for adult fiction either. Furthermore, with the publication of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Rowling has introduced us to a ‘‘new’’ Harry— one who is entering turbulent teen years and experiencing all the angst, doubts, and troubles that we see in ‘‘classic’’ British novels.

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A central topos that links the Harry Potter series not only to the archetypal hero in literature, but also to other canonical British novels, is the figure of the orphan. It is no coincidence that King Arthur and Harry Potter are both orphans. The orphan is also a common feature of the Bildungsroman, or novel of education or development, in which a character must develop in society, and find his or her own way in the world. The protagonist of the Bildungsroman is often an orphan, since being parentless enhances his or her necessary independence: the orphan can be exposed to unusual circumstances and is freer to act within them than a ‘‘normal’’ protagonist would be. The orphan has audience appeal because he or she is alone in the world and has often suffered great trauma; the reader thus usually sympathizes with the character and roots for him or her. Harry Potter lives with his aunt, as do Jane Eyre and Esther Summerson (although she does not know it), while Pip lives with his sister. All of these children have a family connection to their lodgings, but they also live in misery because of how they are treated. They are often deprived of food (as in the cases of Harry and Pip) and enclosed both literally (Harry in the cupboard; Jane in the Red Room) and psychologically by their ‘‘families.’’ They must endure cruel behavior: Harry is beaten by his cousin Dudley, Jane is struck by her cousin John, and Pip is physically abused by his sister, Mrs. Joe. In another crucial novelistic motif, the character or characters to be unraveled are, like the protagonist, orphans. Each serves as a literary double or doppelga¨nger of the protagonist. The psychological double does what the other character would like to and acts on similar impulses; the doppelga¨nger represents a spirit that can adapt its form (as Voldemort literally does). The double and doppelga¨nger functions represent a possible future for each protagonist.

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the banished criminal. Furthermore, Orlick’s assault on Mrs. Joe is often interpreted as an acting out of Pip’s psychological desire, just as Bertha’s burning of Thornfield acts out Jane’s own subliminal desires. In the Harry Potter series, Tom Riddle/Voldemort is a double for Harry—they both are parseltongues, they are of mixed muggle/wizard parentage, and they have ‘‘twin’’ wands, both cored with a feather from the same phoenix. Moreover, as developed in The Order of the Phoenix, Harry is privy to many of Voldemort’s thoughts through the scar that Harry received from him. Finally, though James Potter, Harry’s father, is dead, his memory serves as another double for Harry. The protagonist orphans learn key information about themselves from their orphan doubles, but then they must sift through their various inheritances. In Jane Eyre, Jane must learn from Bertha—her rival, double, and antithesis—and decide how she needs to negotiate her place in Rochester’s world. At the same time, she is given her inheritance from her uncle. Pip must come to terms with the criminal identity of his benefactor and the role of love in his life. The secret and tainted money from Magwitch that helps Pip also reveals the social hypocrisy underlying the social strata that Pip must negotiate. In the Harry Potter series, Harry must keep trying to understand the literal and psychological scar that Voldemort has inflicted upon him, he must deal with his fame, and he must learn to traverse two worlds. Harry has tangible inheritances to help him, such as his unexpected fortune in wizarding currency, as well as the unanticipated advantage of the invisibility cloak and the Marauder’s Map. However, these tools only lead him toward understanding, they do not produce it.

The doppelga¨nger motif is prevalent in many ‘‘great tradition’’ novels. In Jane Eyre, Bertha and Jane are psychological doubles in any number of ways, from drawing blood from their victims, to seeing their images in the glass, to their association with fire, and their connection with Rochester. In Great Expectations, Pip’s doubles are Magwitch and Orlick. Perhaps Pip’s greatest challenge is to acknowledge his psychological and literal connection with Magwitch,

Why, then, has there been such a controversy over the status of the Harry Potter books as both children’s and adult literature? As I have already discussed, some of the attempts to categorize them as children’s literature may be chalked up as marketing decisions. Some others may be premature critical decisions, based on knee-jerk responses to the first and, perhaps, second volumes in the series. Although I believe that sophisticated themes have already been developed in the Harry Potter series, it is important to remember that the series is not yet

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complete. Whether or not Harry matures or learns to deal with the coming-of-age adversities that Jane Eyre and Pip ultimately overcome is yet to be seen—although The Order of the Phoenix shows Harry making great strides in maturity. However, even for those critics who have kept up with Rowling’s novels, the fact that the series is currently in flux may contribute to the feeling that the Harry Potter novels are not worthy of being identified as ‘‘adult’’ fiction. For many critics, the type of an ending a novel has tends to dictate its classification, and the Harry Potter series eludes such placement because it currently lacks an ending. In fact, the status of the novels as a series may also have influenced some critics and academic readers to dismiss it from consideration as adult literature. They may believe that its popularity is due largely to the crass commercialization and audience manipulation involved in serial publication. These critics see the serialization of the Harry Potter novels as placing them in the same category as other print and video series that are designed to attract, respond to, and exploit a popular audience. However, it is worth noting that Great Expectations was published in serial form, that the market was a driving force in Dickens’s writing of Great Expectations, and that Dickens ended up writing two different endings to the text in an effort to please his audience. While some might argue that the example of Dickens shows how the novels in the British canon have never been completely divorced from commercial considerations, at the very least, one might conclude from it that great literature can be created within the confines of commercial form. Thus, critics are wrong to dismiss Rowling’s books simply because they are designed to attract a popular audience. Although we have yet to see the resolution of the Harry Potter series, its literary connections to the great tradition of the British novel, and specifically the Bildungsroman, make the books worthy of adult interest. Ultimately, the Harry Potter series is too popular and too important to the future of the novel to be defined exclusively as either children’s or adult fiction. Source: Paige Byam, ‘‘Children’s Literature or Adult Classic? The Harry Potter Series and the British Novel Tradition,’’ in Topic: The Washington & Jefferson College Review, Vol. 54, Fall 2004, pp. 7–13.

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Russian fans crowd into a Moscow bookstore in February 2004 to buy Order of the Phoenix Ó Sergei Karpukhin/Corbis

SOURCES Barfield, Steven, ‘‘Fantasy and the Interpretation of Fantasy in Harry Potter,’’ in Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, Vol. 54, Fall 2004, p. 30. Bloom, Harold, ‘‘Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes,’’ in the Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2000, p. A26. Byam, Paige, ‘‘Children’s Literature or Adult Classic? The Harry Potter Series and the British Novel Tradition,’’ in Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, Vol. 54, Fall 2004, pp. 7–13. Byatt, A.S., ‘‘Harry Potter and the Childish Adult,’’ in New York Times, July 7, 2003, p. A13. Christian Broadcasting Network, www.cbn.com (June 4, 2005). Diffendal, Lee Ann, ‘‘Questioning Witchcraft and Wizardry as Obscenity: Harry Potter’s Potion for Regulation,’’ in Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, Vol. 54, Fall 2004, p. 60. Hensher, Philip, ‘‘A Crowd-Pleaser But No Classic’’ in Spectator, Vol. 292, June 28, 2003, pp. 30–31. Leonard, John, ‘‘Nobody Expects the Inquisition,’’ in the New York Times, July 13, 2003, p. 13.

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McEvoy, Kathleen, ‘‘Aesthetic Organization: The Structural Beauty of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series,’’ in Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, Vol. 54, Fall 2004, p. 21. Rowling, J.K., Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Scholastic Press, 1999. ———, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Scholastic Press, 2000. ———, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Scholastic Press, 1999. ———, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Scholastic Press, 1998. ———, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Scholastic Press, 2003. Safire, William, ‘‘Besotted with Potter,’’ in New York Times, January 27, 2000, p. A27. Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994; originally published separately in 1954 and 1955. Yaggi, Miranda Maney, ‘‘Harry Potter’s Heritage: Tolkien as Rowling’s Patronus Against the Critics,’’ in Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, Vol. 54, Fall 2004, pp. 33–45.

FURTHER READING

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Reviewing over forty different titles, this compilation examines the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series up through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, offering reasons for the books’ controversial reception as well as providing biographical and critical reviews. Colbert, David, Magical Worlds of Harry Potter: A Treasury of Myths, Legends, and Fascinating Facts, Berkley, 2003. Colbert provides a substantial reference guide for the many mythological, literary, and historical references present in all Rowling’s novels. J.K. Rowling’s Official Site, www.jkrowling.com (June 4, 2005). Rowling claims to have authored all the content on this website, directing her comments to her millions of fans worldwide. Information includes details about previous and upcoming ‘‘Harry Potter’’ books as well as biographical information and responses to rumors. Kirk, Connie Ann, J. K. Rowling: A Biography, Greenwood Press, 2003. Kirk focuses on the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels themselves to explain details of Rowling’s life, how characters were developed, and what the characters’ connection may be to Rowling’s own experience. The biography also provides extensive interpretive strategies for the series.

Becker, Beverley C., Hit List for Children II: Frequently Challenged Books, American Library Association, 2002.

Neal, C. W., The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World’s Most Famous Seeker, Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Neal takes an explicitly positive approach to the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels by detailing the moral messages contained in Rowling’s fiction. While written from an overtly Christian perspective, this book provides an answer to religious groups protesting the books’ magic content.

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Anatol, Giselle Liza, editor, Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, Praeger, 2003. This collection of essays offers numerous ways to interpret the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ novels and offers evidence of the series being taken seriously as more than simple children’s stories.

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Here in Harlem Walter Dean Myers is an accomplished and prolific writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for young adults. Most of his prize-winning works explore the experiences of urban youth. Myers often turns to Harlem, his hometown, as a source of inspiration and as a setting for his novels and his poetry. In 1997, he published Harlem, a picture book of poetry illustrated by his son Christopher. The book focused on the representative historical journey of many African Americans from Africa to the southern United States, and then north to Harlem. Here in Harlem: A Poem in Many Voices was published in 2004. It is a collection of fifty-four poems written from the different perspectives of various Harlem residents, each identified by name, age, and occupation. The characters include teachers, ministers, soldiers, students, and an undertaker. Each poem is a snapshot of a particular character’s life, told in that character’s distinctive voice. Together, the voices reflect the community of Harlem, which in the 1930s and 1940s was the epicenter of African American culture. References to historical figures, such as singer Billie Holliday, writer Langston Hughes, and boxer Joe Louis, appear throughout the poems of Here in Harlem. The poems are illustrated with snapshots from Myers’s personal collection of over 10,000 antique photographs and other historical documents.

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In the introduction of Here in Harlem, Myers credits the 1915 book Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters as his inspiration. In Masters’s collection of some 200 poems, the characters are ghosts who deliver poetic monologues in a fictional Midwestern cemetery. Masters’s book became an international popular and critical success. By using the same multi-voiced storytelling technique in Here in Harlem, Myers pays homage to an American classic while recounting the history and culture of his own community.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Walter Dean Myers, a prolific author of books for children and young adults, was born Walter Milton Myers on August 12, 1937, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. As a toddler, he was informally adopted by Florence and Herbert Dean and moved to Harlem. Later, he would take Dean as his middle name in their honor. Growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s, Myers was influenced by the thriving African American community around him. He has set many of his award-winning books in Harlem, including Here in Harlem: A Poem in Many Voices, published in 2004. The Harlem of Myers’s childhood and adolescence was a vibrant community and a melting pot. His foster mother, also his father’s first wife, was the daughter of a German immigrant and a Native American. His best friend was the son of German immigrants who owned a bakery in Harlem. But when Myers reached adolescence, he realized racism would limit his opportunities. He was torn between his life on the street and playing basketball, and his love of poetry and literature. He did not consider writing a viable career, and imagined he might end up a laborer like the other men in his family, not to mention most of the African American men he knew. Although Myers was encouraged early on by teachers to write as a way of surmounting his speech problems, he continued to have trouble in school and attended infrequently, never graduating from high school. To avoid gang involvement, he enrolled in the U.S. Army. Following a three-year stint in the military, Myers held several jobs, including mail clerk at the post office and construction worker. Disappointed with the life he was leading, he turned again to writing and began publishing in magazines. In 1968, he won a contest sponsored by the Council on

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Walter Dean Myers Reproduced by permission of Walter Dean Myers

Interracial Books for Children for his first picture book, Where Does the Day Go?, which launched his writing career. After working seven years as a book editor at the publisher Bobbs-Merrill, Myers was laid off, and only then did he turn to writing fulltime. He eventually returned to school in his mid-forties to earn his degree from Empire State College. Although he has produced a wide range of books, including picture books, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction, and mysteryadventure stories, he is best known for his portrayal of African American teenagers in urban settings, particularly Harlem. Many of Myers’s award-winning books confront important issues such as suicide, bullying, drug use, gun violence, teen pregnancy, adoption and foster care, and parental neglect. Myers has won dozens of awards for his writing, including multiple Coretta Scott King Awards and the American Library Association’s Newbery Honor Book designation, Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the Alan Award, and the Virginia Hamilton Literary Award. Here in Harlem is a recipient of the 2004 Bank Street College of Education Claudia Lewis Award for poetry.

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PLOT SUMMARY In the introduction, Walter Dean Myers writes that he began Here in Harlem by imagining ‘‘a street corner in Harlem, the Harlem of my youth, and the very much alive people who would pass that corner.’’ Among some of these ‘‘much alive’’ people were the celebrated writers Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, along with nurses, ministers, teachers, laborers, children, and the elderly. Myers concludes his introduction by paying tribute to the poet W. B. Yeats, who once advised a young Irish playwright to ‘‘write about a community that he could truly love, whose people would gladden his heart.’’ For Myers, that community is Harlem, and Harlem itself becomes a character in this book. The collection actually begins before the introduction, with a poem by George Ambrose, a thirty-three year-old English teacher. Ambrose’s poem is reprinted on both the frontispiece and the back page of the book, serving as bookends of sorts. In it, the street corner Myers imagined in his mind comes to life, establishing an important thematic connection to Africa: ‘‘My heart must rise and go now, to that / bright Harlem street / Where buildings trued in ragtime and / Congo rhythms meet.’’

Clara Brown’s Testimony: Part I After Ambrose’s poem and Myers’s introduction, the first section of Here in Harlem is ‘‘Clara Brown’s Testimony.’’ Her words are largely in italics, unlike most of the poems by other characters. She also differs from the other characters because she is not given an age when she is first introduced. She addresses the reader in an intimate tone and explains she always talks about Harlem because Harlem is ‘‘like an old friend.’’ This section functions as a prologue to the rest of the book, introducing the character, Clara Brown, as the book’s unofficial narrator. She presents six testimonies throughout the collection. Although Here in Harlem is not divided into chapters, Clara Brown’s testimonies are each numbered with Roman numerals, like chapters, and mark the passing of time in her life. The other poems in between her testimonies are each introduced with the name of a character, the character’s age, and the character’s profession. In a sense, each character, like Brown,

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS Bad Boy: A Memoir was released by HarperChildrensAudio in 2001. It is narrated by Joe Morton. It was also released in 2005 in an unabridged version as a downloadable e-audio by Harper Audio. It is available from PerfectBound, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Fallen Angels was released as an audiocassette by Recorded Books in 2004. It was also released in an unabridged version as a Book on CD by Recorded Books in 2004, narrated by J. D. Jackson. A Handbook for Boys was released as an audiocassette by HarperChildrensAudio in 2002, narrated by Peter Francis James.

Monster was released in an unabridged version on audiocassette by Listening Library in 2000. This version is a full-cast dramatization. It was also released on audiocassette by Recorded Books in 2000, narrated by Peter Francis James.

Scorpions was released as a Book on CD in 1997 by Recorded Books, narrated by Peter Francis James.

Shooter was released in an unabridged version as a Book on CD by HarperChildrensAudio in 2004. It is performed by Chad Coleman, Bernie McInerney, and Michelle Santopietro. It is also available as an unabridged downloadable audio from PerfectBound, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, released in 2005. It is performed by Chad Coleman, Bernie McInerney, and Michelle Santopietro.

offers his or her own testimony in the form of a poem. In fiction, plot is often described as a series of events connected through cause and effect. Most poetry, however, tells a story without relying very much on plot. Here in Harlem has an ‘‘episodic plot,’’ where each character is represented by his or her own poem, and in fact,

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some stories are linked across poems. These kinds of connections occur throughout the book, serving to emphasize particularly important sections.

CHARACTERS ‘‘Mali Evans, 12, Student’’ This short, simple poem follows ‘‘Clara Brown’s Testimony’’ and describes how the young character wants to be like the elderly Mrs. Purvis when she herself is an old woman, with ‘‘her gray / Hair like a halo around her black face / She says it’s her crown, her tiara.’’ This image of the dignified queen in her kingdom is juxtaposed—or placed in such a way for the purpose of creating comparison—with the ‘‘winos’’ who ‘‘smile and bow / Or raise their hands in greeting.’’ Mali, whose name recalls both the ancient African kingdom and the modern African nation, says she would like to be ‘‘an ancient lady / Tree-tough and deep-rooted / In the rich soil of my dark / Foreverness / And the only thing white I would wear / Is the crown about my / Sweet black face.’’ Opposite the poem is a turn-of-the-century photograph of a girl, dressed all in white with a white bow in her hair, demurely holding a bouquet of flowers. She appears dressed for a special occasion, perhaps for church, though even in her formal clothing, there is a gleam of playfulness in her eyes.

‘‘Macon R. Allen, 38, Deacon’’ The deacon proclaims how much he loves ‘‘a shouting church,’’ which are the same words of the elderly man Myers describes in his introduction. He speaks the words Myers had heard as a boy from the elderly man, but the deacon is younger and more agitated, as if he himself is testifying in the church and trying to ‘‘wake up’’ the congregation. The photograph opposite this poem depicts Winnie Mandela holding up her fist in a Black Power salute at a podium decorated with photographs of Nelson Mandela; a crucifix towers in shadows behind her.

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Johnson thinks the man could be Marcus, referring to Marcus Garvey, an early twentiethcentury black nationalist leader. Another man in the barbershop says it could be Martin Luther King Jr., and a third man says it could be Malcolm X. The names of those three political leaders act as the refrain to this poem: ‘‘Could be Marcus, I said / Could be Martin, came a voice from down / the way / Sounds like Malcolm, rang from the shadows.’’ A refrain is a phrase repeated at intervals throughout the poem. In the second stanza, Johnson sits inside Sylvia’s, a celebrated Harlem restaurant mentioned in Myers’s glossary of ‘‘Some People, Places, and Terms’’ at the back of the book. A stanza is the grouping of lines in a poem, much like the grouping of prose into paragraphs. In the restaurant, Johnson sees a second black man ‘‘[s]inging about revolution.’’ Marcus, Martin, and Malcolm are again invoked. In the final stanza, Henry sits inside the Victory Temple Church of God in Christ, which is perhaps the ‘‘shouting church’’ described in the previous poem by Deacon Allen. Henry sees a third black man ‘‘Preaching and teaching / Calling for the congregation / To bring forth a mighty nation.’’ The poem ends with the refrain that mentions the three famous leaders.

‘‘Willie Arnold, 30, Alto Sax Player’’ and ‘‘Terry Smith, 24, Unemployed’’ Arnold’s poem mirrors the fractured rhythm of bebop, a type of jazz music that gained in popularity during Myers’s childhood. A cut-out of a record label, rather than a photograph, illustrates his poem. Following Arnold, Terry Smith’s poem evokes an entirely different mood. It is the Christmas season, and he is unemployed with a sick child by his side. His feelings of despair are clear in the poem’s final lines as hope passes him by: ‘‘Breathe deeply, child / The Magi have gone another way.’’

Clara Brown’s Testimony: Part II

Johnson speaks while sitting inside Ray’s Barbershop and watching the street outside. He sees ‘‘A little black man / Sweat staining his underarms / Glistening on his brow / Fists pumping up the fire / Of the noontime air.’’

After Arnold’s poetic testimony, Clara Brown reappears to tell the story of how her heart was broken when the Cotton Club, a famous Harlem nightclub, refused to hire her. After auditioning to become a dancer at the Club, she was told she was a good dancer, but they would not hire her because ‘‘they only hire light-skinned girls to dance here.’’ Brown’s skin color was too dark for the exclusive club. Brown

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‘‘Henry Johnson, 39, Mail Carrier’’

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ends this section, which resembles a journal entry more than a poem, with the words, ‘‘That was the day I learned that being black wasn’t no simple thing, even in Harlem.’’

‘‘Christopher Lomax, 60, Retired’’ and ‘‘Junice Lomax, 23, Unemployed’’ These two poems are more explicitly connected than others have been. Christopher Lomax watches his daughter from his window as she suffers from the effects of drug abuse on the street below. That daughter, Junice, speaks in the next poem, closing with a description of the emotional ties and the seemingly insurmountable distance between them: ‘‘We are chasmed by the blurring crowd / I hear him calling from below / As I race recklessly across / A thousand frantic highs.’’ There is no photograph illustrating these poems.

‘‘Hosea Liburd, 25, Laborer’’ Hosea Liburd describes how he must leave both his manhood and his identity behind when he goes downtown in search of work. The poem is paired with a photograph of a city street and men looking into the camera, ‘‘their fear-wide eyes ablaze / With quiet cautions.’’

‘‘William Riley Pitts, 42, Jazz Artist’’ and ‘‘J. Milton Brooks, 41, Undertaker’’ William Riley Pitts speaks about his son’s tragic accident, wondering ‘‘[w]hat the boy could have been.’’ The photo accompanying the poem is of a young boy, dressed in a turn-of-the-century sailor’s outfit. His poem is clearly connected to the one by undertaker J. Milton Brooks. Brooks’s words reflect the essence of the boy’s death: ‘‘But there comes a time when I have to weep / It’s when we lay some teenage boy so deep / I close my eyes and pray the Lord to save / Me from watching old men shuffling children to the grave.’’

‘‘John Reese, 70, Ballplayer, Janitor’’ John Reese once played ball in the Negro Leagues. He now works as a janitor, but he describes his past and his feelings about Jackie Robinson’s achievements in ending the segregation of American baseball in 1946. Although Jackie is a hero, Reese’s feelings are bittersweet: with the end of the Negro Leagues, he and his teammates are no longer ‘‘monarchs ruling a joyful world.’’ The poem ends with an image of

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the empty stadium because the Negro Leagues no longer exist.

‘‘Eleanor Hayden, 51, Nanny’’ Eleanor Hayden’s poem is both humorous and caustic because she is taken for granted by her employer, despite her hard work. The accompanying photo shows a stern-looking woman sitting on a park bench with her arms folded, and a baby carriage parked in front of her. She appears to be the baby’s nurse or caretaker.

‘‘Tom Fisher, 38, Blues Singer, Livery Cabbie’’ Tom Fisher appropriately offers a poem that resembles the lyrics of a blues song in style—complete with repetition, like the chorus of a song—and a love letter in sentiment. His ‘‘Sweet Martha’’ is always there to support him: ‘‘I wandered up to Paris, made my way to Rome / Ran out of money, Martha said, ‘C’mon home.’’’

‘‘Dennis Chapman, 40, Laborer’’ In one of the longest poems in the book, Chapman recounts his past, how he left behind his family and his farm in Alabama to live in Harlem. In this poem, Harlem is compared to a tempting seductress who lures a man away from his home. Chapman writes a letter to the woman he left behind, pleading with her to join him, with this text in italics. The poem closes on an ambivalent note, with the woman arriving at the Greyhound station, telling Chapman their crops have died, though there is the chance of ‘‘new growth in the spring.’’ The crops are a symbol of what they once shared and worked for together, perhaps even a symbol of their love. At the end of the poem, the woman’s eyes are already looking beyond Chapman, on the same ‘‘far horizon’’ that once enthralled him so much.

‘‘C. C. Castell, 49, On Disability,’’ ‘‘Reuben Mills, 34, Artist,’’ ‘‘Jimmy Wall, 14, Boy Evangelist,’’ and ‘‘John Lee Graham, 49, Street Historian’’ C. C. Castell describes the bustle of Harlem. Originally from Mississippi, he comments on the arrogant, narrow-minded, ambitious youth who hurry past him on the stoop. Castell’s quiet rumination is followed by the vivid colors of Reuben Mills, who sees the rich beauty even in dangerous, tragic things, for example, ‘‘Orange reflections on a switchblade knife.’’

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Fourteen-year old evangelist, Jimmy Wall, borrows theme and line from Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘‘through a glass darkly,’’ to express his solid faith ‘‘and hope for God.’’ John Lee Graham contemplates Harlem’s African roots, drawing on African cultural references such as the Igbo, the Bantu, the Kalahari, Kikuyu, Songhai, Niger, and Timbuktu. These and other references to African culture reappear throughout the book.

‘‘Negro Quintessential’’ and ‘‘poet Black.’’ Richmond Leake’s poem recounts his dissatisfying experiences in school and the compromises he has made to earn his living.

‘‘Willie Schockley, 23, Street Vendor, Guitar Player,’’ ‘‘Etta Peabody, 60, Insurance Adjuster,’’ and ‘‘Delia Pierce, 32, Hairdresser’’

Helen Sweetland recalls a time of ‘‘taffeta and dreams’’ and punctuates her poem with the rhythm and lyrics of swing music. Joshua De Grosse describes the poet’s struggle to create beauty. In contrast, happily married Betty Pointing offers a poem more like prose, without any rhymes or line breaks. Jonathan Smalls celebrates ‘‘the crazy quilt patterns of the city,’’ while Adam Crooms unabashedly delights in the music he hears at a rent party. Rent parties, where food and drink were sold for a fee to raise money for the host’s rent, were popular in Harlem.

Willie Schockley sings ‘‘those lay-down Harlem blues.’’ Like the bebop style of Willie Arnold’s poem, Myers uses music to express his character’s thoughts and emotions. Etta Peabody speaks about ‘‘Nigger Heaven,’’ the ironically-named area reserved for African Americans in the highest balcony of a theater. Delia Pierce delivers a gossip-filled monologue that is humorous for her insistence that ‘‘I’m not the kind to talk behind nobody’s back.’’

‘‘Helen Sweetland, 27, Party Girl,’’ ‘‘Joshua De Grosse, 19, Student, City College,’’ ‘‘Betty Pointing, 64, Clerk,’’ ‘‘Jonathan Smalls, 29, Urban Planner,’’ and ‘‘Adam Croons, 24, Furniture Mover’’

Clara Brown’s Testimony: Part IV Clara Brown’s Testimony: Part III Delia Pierce’s poem is followed by more of Clara Brown’s testimony. Her words call to mind those from janitor and former ballplayer John Reese. Clara says she is so happy about the ‘‘colored baseball player’’ playing for the Dodgers. When Jackie Robinson began playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he broke the color line in professional baseball and paved the way for the entry of black players into all professional sports.

‘‘Lois Smith, 12, Student,’’ ‘‘Jesse Craig, 38, Salesman,’’ and ‘‘Richmond Leake, 53, Newsstand Dealer’’ Lois Smith wishes she could be so famous that a school would be named after her, so ‘‘young kids would want to grow up to be like me.’’ Her poem is accompanied by a photograph of a young girl wrapped in a fancy coat and hat, smiling charmingly at the camera. Jesse Craig describes seeing Langston Hughes, one of the writers Myers included in his introduction. In tight couplets—two lines of poetry with the same rhyme and rhythm, often expressing a complete thought—the poem pays homage to Hughes, saying Langston was ‘‘no Keats / No fair Shelley’’— nineteenth-century British poets—but instead

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This part of Clara Brown’s testimony is a humorous story about a mouse that, apparently, will only appear when it hears the music of Duke Ellington. On the facing page, a dust jacket from a recording called ‘‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love (Baby)’’ by Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1928 compliments Clara’s ‘‘shake-your-booty’’ musical reference.

‘‘Malcolm James, 16, Student’’ and ‘‘Gerry Jones, 14, Student’’ Malcolm James, when asked what he is going to do with his life, expresses anger and bitterness at the constraints of racism and limited opportunities. On the other hand, Gerry Jones watches life on the street ‘‘whirl and swirl’’ from her ‘‘fire escape tower,’’ while reading a book of poems.

‘‘Mary Ann Robinson, 30, Nurse,’’ ‘‘Ann Carter, 32, Switchboard Operator/ Benjamin Bailey, 38, Building Maintenance’’ Mary Ann Robinson works at Harlem Hospital and describes the scenes of suffering and death she encounters every day on her job. The next poem is a conversation between Ann Carter and Benjamin Bailey. The switchboard

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operator says she has seen Jesus on the streets of Harlem and proceeds to describe what Jesus wore and what he said. When Carter says she has also seen Moses, Bailey ends the conversation. The dialogue is written in rhyming couplets and has the brisk pace and the exaggerated expressions and punctuation of a comedy routine. Implied beneath the humor is a serious question about what these religious figures would make of life in Harlem.

‘‘Ernest Scott, 26, Poet’’ This poem recalls the creative yearning of nineteen-year-old Joshua De Grosse. Ernest Scott makes numerous references to Harlem’s rich literary legacy, including the writers Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. He also mentions James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and W. E. B. DuBois, all of whom were important influences on Myers’s writing. Scott celebrates the poetic voice of all life, good and bad, in Harlem.

‘‘Caroline Fleming, 42, Live-in Maid’’ Caroline Fleming’s words echo the resentment of Eleanor Hayden, the nanny, but there is also an undeniable sense of longing. She spends the day ‘‘smiling too hard’’ for people who are not her own. In ‘‘[a]rranging someone else’s / Tattered life,’’ she feels like she is far from a life she knows.

‘‘Effie Black, 58, Church Organist’’ and ‘‘Marcia Williams, 17, High School Senior’’ Effie Black considers how the chords played on the organ reveal something larger, ‘‘how all those perfect harmonies / Echo the sweet voice of a living God.’’ Marcia Williams lyrically describes falling in love as being like a ‘‘sea creature’’ caught in a fisherman’s net, far ‘‘from love’s dark / Uncertain shore.’’

‘‘Harland Keith, 33, Reporter,’’ ‘‘Lawrence Hamm, 19, Student Athlete,’’ and ‘‘Sam Dupree, 28, Hustler ’’ Reporter Harland Keith also writes poetry but puts ‘‘aside his gentle verses’’ and his ‘‘haunted dreams,’’ and learns ‘‘to love the darkness.’’ The expression of Lawrence Hamm, who enjoys basketball, is similar to the joy experienced by former baseball player John Reese. But Lawrence has not yet experienced the disappointment that John has, and his poem is full of

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power, hope, and anticipation. Sam Dupree is a ‘‘stone-cold hustler,’’ whose smooth words are full of strutting confidence. The accompanying photograph of a charming young man in a suit reinforces this image.

Clara Brown’s Testimony: Part V In this section of Clara Brown’s testimony, the reader senses that time has passed. Brown is now an elderly woman being interviewed by a young college graduate who has heard that Brown is giving away black history books. They sit face to face yet find they are not really communicating: ‘‘We was just two black women, but life had shined her all up and given her a real pert outside, while it had made me strong inside. She was talking to me like she couldn’t see any of that.’’

‘‘Didi Taylor, 14, Student,’’ ‘‘Dana Greene, 18, Education Major, City College,’’ ‘‘Bill Cash, 30, Boxer,’’ ‘‘William Dandridge, 67, Mechanic,’’ ‘‘Charles Biner, 57, Composer, X-ray Technician,’’ and ‘‘John Brambles, 55, Numbers Runner’’ Didi Taylor describes the Harlem made famous by photographer James Van Der Zee, while Dana Greene lyrically describes her love for Harlem. Boxer Bill Cash lies awake in bed with a woman named Letha, thinking about a fight he should have won. William Dandridge thinks about the friends he has lost to death and also mentions Ray’s barbershop, which made an appearance earlier in Henry Johnson’s poem. Charles Biner once dreamed of being a classical composer, which is now a dream he keeps as his ‘‘black secret.’’ John Brambles, in a taut few lines, claims he does not sell dreams, only ‘‘noise, a static buzz / That shuts out the whisper of despair. . . . I sell a way for people / To lie to themselves.’’ His poem is illustrated with the cover of the ‘‘Black Cat Lucky Number Dream Book,’’ which gamblers used to pick their lucky numbers.

‘‘Homer Grimes, 83, Blind Veteran,’’ ‘‘Frank Griffin, 82, Veteran,’’ and ‘‘Lemuel Burr, 81, Veteran ‘‘ The next three poems form the climax of the collection. The first poem is from Homer Grimes, rattling his cup, begging for spare change on the street. This is the same blind veteran mentioned by Myers in his introduction.

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An unidentified man who claims to be an old friend approaches Grimes, but Grimes does not remember his name. Then the unnamed man asks Grimes whether he is bitter. ‘‘What is past bitter?’’ Grimes replies. In the poem that follows, Frank Griffin describes being part of the 369th Infantry, also known as the Harlem Infantry, during World War II. He describes how Grimes saved the lives of fellow soldiers and was ‘‘the greatest soldier I had ever hoped to see.’’ Yet he says Grimes was never properly honored for his courage. Lemuel Burr describes the day that he, Grimes, and Griffin were ready to board a bus to leave Camp Polk in Louisiana. A white woman kissed Homer and Burr worried because ‘‘she was white, and he was black / And when that bus sat there I knew / There was trouble coming.’’ What happens next comes as even more of a shock because of the apparently upbeat rhyming verses of the poem: ‘‘We had saved the world from Hitler / But on that dark road they snatched our prize / They pounded away Griff’s courage / And they tore out poor Homer’s eyes.’’ A verse is a single line of a poem, arranged rhythmically. Like Homer, the blind poet of antiquity, Grimes is given another kind of sight: ‘‘‘What can you see?’ the Negro doctor / Asked as he tried to ease the pain / Homer said he’d been away awhile / Now he saw he was home again.’’ Accompanying the poems is a clip from a newspaper that testifies to the reality of racism and injustice black veterans faced. In it, a blind veteran is pictured next to an article that explains how he lost his sight after being beaten by South Carolina police officers.

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survival of the Middle Passage. This sense of a circular African American journey is suggested in the arrangement of the poems: from Mali Evans, who wished to walk like a queen in her kingdom of Harlem, to John Lee Graham’s view of the African roots in Harlem’s history, to the African connections drawn by Prentiss.

‘‘Clara Brown, 87, Retired’’ The book closes with a poem by Brown. Her age, 87, is finally given to the reader. She has seen a lot of change in her lifetime, but Harlem remains the same to her: ‘‘a pile of years / Keeps sighing and signifying / In my ear like an old friend / About my Harlem / About my Harlem / And it’s all mine, you know.’’ She has born witness to all the lives of Harlem, a poem in many voices.

THEMES African American Life and Thought

Lydia Cruz’s poem is about the attention from young boys she is receiving. Kevin Broderick recalls the yearning and love for Harlem of the earlier poem by Dana Greene. The penultimate poem is by Earl Prentiss, who links Harlem to its African roots through

Here in Harlem is largely devoted to the African American community of Harlem, although other ethnic groups, such as Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans have also made Harlem their home. Except for the poem of Lydia Cruz, their voices are absent from this book. Myers appears more interested in recreating the texture and diversity of the African American voices from his childhood and youth. By providing historical and cultural references throughout his book, he also encourages readers who are unfamiliar with these references to learn more about African American history. Readers can turn to the back of the book for an abbreviated glossary of people, places, and terms. In this way, the poems also serve as an introduction to some important highlights of African American culture and history. Like an anthropologist intent on documenting the life of a community through the diversity of its individuals, Myers includes a variety of historical figures from a broad spectrum of achievement. They include writers Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin; the photographer James Van Der Zee; the jazz bebop musician Charlie ‘‘Bird’’ Parker and the stride pianist James P. Johnson. Paul Laurence Dunbar makes an appearance through the allusions to Dunbar’s ‘‘Sympathy’’ that Joshua De Grosse makes.

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Clara Brown’s Testimony: Part VI After the veterans’ powerful story, Clara Brown talks about being one of the ‘‘old folks,’’ and she tells her long-time doctor not to worry about Harlem, which has seen better and worse days. The memories of the elderly are juxtaposed to the yearnings of the young in the poems that follow.

‘‘Lydia Cruz, 15, Student,’’ ‘‘Kevin Broderick, 20, Pre-law, City College, ‘‘and ‘‘Earl Prentiss, 39, Motorman’’

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Places and objects are just as important, such as the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club, 125th Street and the A Train. Athletes are also featured, specifically Jackie Robinson. His integration of professional baseball in 1946 made him a hero in Harlem, and he is compared to the Greek hero Ajax in John Reese’s poem. Intellectual and political leaders are also referenced, including African American leaders W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In addition to African American history, Myers scatters references to Africa throughout his book, particularly to African kingdoms, peoples, and places. In street historian John Lee Graham’s poem, an explicit connection is made between the Harlem streets and their roots in Africa. Graham has ‘‘captured the moment’’ of an Igbo child playing on the banks of the Ogun river, Bantu herdsmen squatting in the steamy Kalahari, Kikuyu women contemplating Mount Kenya, and Songhai warriors celebrating by the Niger River. Graham has captured all this, it is strongly implied, without his ever having left the streets of Harlem. The penultimate stanza of the poem brings the African past and Harlem together with an image of birds in flight: ‘‘I have captured the moment / When the scholars of Timbuktu / And the sages of Harlem flew together / In lazy circles over the broad Atlantic.’’ The poem from Earl Prentiss also clearly connects Harlem to its African heritage. Prentiss begins his poem with the words, ‘‘My village, my village,’’ and goes on to link Africa with Harlem through ‘‘the same scorch of sun.’’ Though the African languages of their ancestors are no longer spoken by African Americans, the influence of Africa is still felt: ‘‘The language their ancestors dreamed / An eternity before / They dance the dance of the Congo / To a scale that has / Survived the foam and fleck / Of the Middle Passage.’’ Myers’s desire to explore the influence of African heritage on African American culture reflects his own intellectual interests and research. A recent and specific example of this interest is in his 2003 award-winning book of poetry, Blues Journey, which was illustrated by his son Christopher Myers. The book opens by briefly tracing the development of the blues from its roots in Africa. Myers explains that the five-

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tone, or pentatonic scale, is very common in Africa, and it forms the basis for the blues. African musical and storytelling traditions also contributed the call and response pattern, in which a lead singer makes a statement, or ‘‘call,’’ and the chorus responds. This call and response pattern is also evident in many congregations of African American churches, such as the ‘‘shouting church’’ described by Myers in his poem about Deacon Allen, in which he ends his poem by calling out ‘‘Can I get an A-men?.’’ In some ways, Here in Harlem mirrors this pattern of call and response, with Clara Brown acting as the leader to her congregation of Harlem voices. In Myers’s book, Harlem becomes more than an actual place, it is also witness to the living history of a momentous journey from Africa through slavery to freedom.

Limitations and Opportunities Myers has often written of his commitment to writing for people who have suffered from limited opportunities. In a 2005 newspaper article in the Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York, Myers told Laura T. Ryan, ‘‘I’ve got fan clubs in prisons. I’ve got fan clubs in juvenile detention centers . . . . These are the people that read my books, identify with them.’’ At one time, Harlem offered a vast range of opportunities for African Americans that were unavailable anywhere else in the United States. This was one reason for the flood of new arrivals during the Great Migration, a period referring to the movement of African Americans from rural communities in the South to cities in the North. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of African Americans lived in the South. From 1916 to 1970, an estimated six million African Americans relocated from the South to the urban areas of the North and West. Most were in search of economic opportunities and freedom from the repressive racial discrimination, segregation, and violence they encountered in the South. Myers dramatizes the story of this migration in the poem about Dennis Chapman, who ‘‘drunk with bright / light dreams’’ leaves behind his land and his love, in search of more opportunities in Harlem, and he must face the consequences of his decision. Segregation and racial discrimination, both of the legal kind prevalent in the South and the socially-sanctioned variety more common in the North, meant that African Americans were forced to invent and sustain their own

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institutions and businesses. Ironically, this permitted certain African American institutions to flourish because the choices for full participation in American society did not exist. With the advent of integration, these institutions were no longer supported and some went into decline or simply disappeared altogether. An example of this appears in the story of John Reese. Before he was a janitor, Reese was a ballplayer in the Negro Leagues, which included teams like the New York Black Yankees and the Brooklyn Royal Giants. After Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, other professional sports followed, and African American athletes began to be recruited for these leagues and teams. Without the participation of the best athletes and the patronage of fans, and with competition from the Major Leagues, the Negro Leagues lost their ability to support their teams. This is just one of the ironies of the African American struggle for civil rights; in some cases, with greater rights and equal access came the decline of African American institutions and the erosion of some African American communities. This does not mean these opportunities for advancement were not welcome or deserved. However, in examining the history of a community like Harlem, Myers shows the complex effects of integration on this community. While segregation and racism clearly denied countless opportunities to African Americans, they also indirectly helped sustain the vibrant cultural life of a community like Harlem. This was especially true while Myers was growing up. When other opportunities for social mobility through employment and housing became available to more African Americans, many of Harlem’s cultural leaders and more prosperous residents moved away from the community and no longer contributed to its well-being. Discrimination also existed among African Americans, as Clara Brown describes when she is rejected as a dancer at the Cotton Club because her skin is too dark. In many ways, limitations and opportunities played a complex role in the history of Harlem, and Myers explores this theme through the voices of characters like John Reese, Clara Brown, and Dennis Chapman. Throughout Here in Harlem, Myers tells the story of Harlem and its residents in an authentic and nuanced way, never avoiding the paradoxes of this special community.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY Research at least three of the historical figures mentioned in Here in Harlem. Choose one artist, one athlete, and one politician. After your initial research, write a short twoparagraph biography on each. Why do you think Myers included each figure in his book? Choose one of the figures and write a ten-line rhyming poem about him or her. Research two of the African references in Here in Harlem. Who or what are they and why do you think Myers included them in his book? What role does Africa play in Myers’s poems? Write a one-page essay presenting your research and opinion. Be sure to include quotes from the poems.

In a group, each person should choose their favorite poem from Here in Harlem and stage a performance of it for the others. Write your own four-line stanza for this poem in the voice of the character. In a one paragraph explanation below the poem, explain why you choose that particular character. What more would you like to know about his or her life?

Read or watch a video version of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Choose one character from Spoon River Anthology and one from Here in Harlem. Write a one-page letter to the Masters character from the point of view of the Myers character. What has changed in the United States since the time of Spoon River Anthology? How would the character you chose from Here in Harlem describe these changes? Have these changes made life his or her life better? What does your character think the future will bring?

STYLE Multiple Voices Though all of the poems in Here in Harlem are written by Walter Dean Myers, they are each written in a different voice from the perspective

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of individuals in the community. By presenting the poems in this manner, the reader not only gains Myers’s insight and reflections about his neighborhood, but also those of the diverse characters who voice each poem. Myers explores the streets, homes, jobs, memories, and lives of the young and old, male and female, that make-up Harlem’s African American community. The individual voices in the poems reinforce the idea that a generalized description or label of a neighborhood cannot accurately capture the various and unique realities of the people living there.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Diction Diction is the selection and arrangement of words. Myers uses a range of diction to portray the characters of Here in Harlem. Myers’s poems all use first person or personal point of view, which tells a story from the perspective of a single character. By creating many different characters that use the first person point of view, he must create distinctive voices for each character. The young students do not sound like the older veterans, and the hustler does not sound like the deacon. Diction can be formal, informal, colloquial, or slang. All of these styles are found throughout Here in Harlem. The lofty writing in the poem by Joshua De Grosse is an example of formal diction: ‘‘I cannot write of beauty with this blind pen / These gnarled fingers are useless things / Scratchy useless syllables again and again / Cairo cries; the raged word sings.’’ Myers reinforces the formal diction of the poem in its refrain of ‘‘Cairo cries; the raged word sings.’’ This refrain is an allusion to the celebrated poem ‘‘Sympathy,’’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872– 1906), whose final quatrain is punctuated by the refrain, ‘‘I know why the caged bird sings!.’’ In De Grosse’s poem and in others, Myers uses a quatrain, which is a stanza of four lines. In De Grosse’s poem, the first and the third lines rhyme, along with the second and fourth lines. This kind of rhyme is common in poetry. In many of his poems, Myers uses informal diction, commonly found in relaxed but educated conversation. Colloquial diction is the kind of language used in everyday speech. An example of colloquial diction is when Delia Peirce says: ‘‘But I’m not the kind to talk behind nobody’s back.’’ Slang includes the latest phrases and terms not used in formal diction.

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The hustler Sam DuPree says ‘‘If I ain’t getting over, it must mean I died.’’ Myers alters the rhythms and line breaks of his poetry as well. Frequent line breaks and staccato rhythms are typical of the poems by musicians, while many of the students’ poems include lyrical language, simple words, and longer sentences. By varying the diction and forms of his poems, Myers can effectively represent the diverse backgrounds of Harlem’s residents, along with the breadth of depth of his community.

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Harlem’s Roots Here in Harlem includes characters that make many references to Harlem’s long and distinguished history. Although the district of Harlem occupies a large part of the northern island of Manhattan in New York City, it has no fixed boundaries as a neighborhood. It may generally be said to lie between 155th Street on the north, the East and Harlem rivers on the east, 96th Street (east of Central Park), 110th Street, and Cathedral Parkway (north and west of Central Park) on the south, and Amsterdam Avenue on the west. Harlem played such a prominent role in African American history and culture that it is easy to forget its origins. In 1658, the Dutch governor of New Netherland established a settlement named after the town of Haarlem in his native land. The site of a famous battle of the Revolutionary War, Harlem remained largely an agricultural area through the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, fashionable houses were built as summer retreats. It was during the financial crisis of 1893 that property owners began renting to African Americans. With the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, many African Americans arrived in Harlem and other Northern urban centers in search of a better life and freedom from segregation, discrimination, and racial violence. The First World War also opened up some factory jobs for African Americans, who flocked to the cities of the North. With this first wave of the Great Migration, Harlem became a center for political activism, as well as a wellspring of economic opportunity. The Black Swan Phonograph Corporation, for example, was a successful record company that issued records

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by African American performers. Myers included one of its labels as an illustration to the poem by saxophonist Willie Arnold. Madame C. J. Walker, who made her fortune from hair care products, made Harlem her home, and her daughter later hosted a literary salon in her Harlem townhouse.

A Political and Cultural Mecca In 1917, Harlem was the site of a silent protest of 8,000 people marching down Fifth Avenue to decry the race riots of East St. Louis, which occurred when whites became angry over African American employment at a factory, and to protest the continued lynching of thousands of African Americans across the nation. Despite the marchers’ direct appeals to President Woodrow Wilson, lynching was never declared a felony in the American judicial system. During the summer of 1919, increasing competition for jobs and housing helped contribute to bloody race riots that spread across the nation. In Harlem, the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which emphasized pride in Black African heritage and the establishment of an independent Black nation. By 1919, the Association was the largest mass movement of African Americans in U.S. history, with a membership of several hundred thousand. The Jamaican-born Garvey was eventually deported for tax evasion in 1925. Other political movements also sought a home in Harlem. The N.A.A.C.P published a monthly magazine, Crisis, with W. E. B. DuBois as its editor. Crisis published the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with other publications like Opportunity and the Amsterdam News, these publications provided analysis of the important issues of the day and chronicled the achievements of African Americans, who were largely ignored by the mainstream press. With its critical mass of African Americans, and its influential intellectuals and artists, Harlem would attract leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Malcolm X who sought to share their political ideas.

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thinkers such as Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay were among its leaders. Hughes was particularly important to Myers’s writing. He was considered the poet laureate of Harlem, and he was known for his poetry based on jazz and blues rhythms and on the lives of everyday people. Music, dance, theater, and the visual arts also played an important role in Harlem’s cultural life, with jazz in particular finding a home in Harlem venues.

Harlem in the 1940s During the Second World War, there was again a mass migration of African Americans from the rural South. Some 1.5 million African Americans left the South during the 1940s. Harlem faced yet another series of housing shortages, job competition, and racial tension. However, Harlem continued to attract new residents with its promise of opportunity and relative social mobility, especially compared to the vicious system of Jim Crow segregation in the South. In his memoir, Bad Boy, Myers describes his Harlem, a melting pot and potent symbol of the American dream: Harlem . . . is an experience that will always live with me . . . . In Harlem the precise accents of northern-born blacks mixed with the slow drawls of recent southern immigrants and the lilting accents from the islands . . . . Black businessmen walked side by side with black orthodox Jews . . . . Even the white people who came to Harlem were colorful. In Smilen Brothers a bearded white man bent nails with his teeth and talked about the poisons in our foods. White nuns from St. Joseph’s jostled with fat black women in Blumstein’s for bargains, and the butchers in Raphael’s meat market pushed slices of cold cuts across the counter for black children to nibble on while their mamas shopped.

Besides serving as a hub of political activism, Harlem was also an internationally-renowned center for the arts. After the First World War, Harlem hosted a thriving creative movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Artists and

The Harlem of Myers’s youth was also a time when African American soldiers served overseas in segregated units. The 369th Infantry, also known as the Harlem Hellfighters, was one of these units, and the powerful story of three of its veterans comprises the climax of Myers’s book. Myers makes some reference to later cultural figures in Harlem, but the inspiration for Here in Harlem, as he describes in his introduction, is the street corner he imagined as a child, the Harlem in the 1940s.

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The Cotton Club nightclub in Harlem Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Here in Harlem is one of Myers’s many books to be set in Harlem. Like his collection of short stories, 145th Street, it focuses on the residents of Harlem to tell the story of a diverse community without resorting to stereotypes of urban blight, but also without ignoring real and pressing social problems. The characters telling their stories represent a broad spectrum of Harlem society, from those who lived on Sugar Hill, an affluent area of Harlem, to those who lived on the streets. In the School Library Journal Review, Nina Lindsay praises Myers’s skill as a storyteller in Here in Harlem: ‘‘Myers’s skill with characterization and voice are apparent . . . . A complexity of experiences comes through vividly in the varying poetic styles . . . . The rich and exciting text gives readers the flavor of Harlem histories and

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peoples.’’ A review in Publisher’s Weekly is also positive about Myers’s ability to take ‘‘readers [on] a tour of Harlem’s past and present, its hopes and fears, through the voices of narrators young and old . . . . Harlem is indeed home, to all of the people who give voice to its pains and pleasures.’’

CRITICISM Nadine Pine`de Nadine Pine`de has a Ph.D. in history, philosophy, and policy studies in education, specializing in philosophy of education and philanthropic studies, from Indiana University. She is a freelance writer and instructor in history, education, and creative writing. In the following essay, Pine`de considers the importance of Harlem in Myers’s Here in Harlem and throughout his prolific career as a writer of books for young adults and children.

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MYERS IS AN INSPIRED CHOIRMASTER, CREATING HARMONY FROM THE MANY VOICES OF HERE IN HARLEM TO PORTRAY A COMPLEX COMMUNITY REPLETE WITH PARADOX, MUCH LIKE AMERICA ITSELF.’’

Here in Harlem is Walter Dean Myers’s eightieth book. His work has spanned the range of realistic fiction, biography, adventure, science fiction, historical fiction, and poetry. Since the publication of his first picture book for children in 1968, Myers has continued to expand his readership, and he is one of the first African American male authors to achieve success in the field of children’s and young adult literature. Myers has gained praise—and some condemnation—for his often gritty depictions of Black urban life and of the struggles of young African American men. His characters struggle with violence, self-doubt, crime, and corruption, and their dialogue often reflects the urban vernacular. At the same time, Myers’s sense of humor often offsets the grimmer aspects of his urban settings. Myers’s use of the vernacular has been one reason detractors criticize his work. However, as author Rudine Bishop notes in Presenting Walter Dean Myers, ‘‘His characters reflect the full range of Black urban speech, both female and male, from street corner rapping to formal standard English.’’ This is particularly true in Here in Harlem. Each poem is a snapshot of a particular character’s background and perspective presented through his or her use of words. Each poem is written with distinctive diction, reflecting the uniqueness of the individual character. From maids to street vendors, deacons to hustlers, readers can learn about the wide range of people who made and make Harlem their home. As Myers states in his introduction, he wanted to create a cast of living characters and pay homage to a place he loves.

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not exotic, or special. Harlem was just home.’’ He was even disappointed when he saw the renowned Black poet Langston Hughes selling his books on the street, because Hughes looked like an ordinary man and not like the image of what young Myers thought a poet should be. Hughes did not resemble the Romantic poets Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron that Myers was studying in school. The poetry of the Harlem Renaissance movement was not taught in the schools Myers attended. It was not until years later that Myers discovered the voices of Hughes, James Baldwin, and other African American writers, and only then did Myers realize that their depictions of Harlem could help inspire his own. In an interview with Barbara Hoffman in the New York Post, Myers says that the writing of James Baldwin ‘‘gave [him] permission, so to speak, to write about African American life, Harlem, and the experiences of the poor.’’ Among the many important contributions Myers has made to the field of children’s and young adult literature is his use of urban settings, particularly in his depictions of Harlem. For many young readers unfamiliar with Harlem, the word itself may bring to mind all sorts of images. Unfortunately, most of them might be the negative images often disseminated by the mass media: crime, urban decay, drugs, and gangs. By providing a multifaceted portrayal of life in an urban African American community, Myers has helped provide a balance to the stereotypes of Harlem.

Growing up in Harlem, Myers was not always so keen to portray the richness of his community through his writing. He describes his failure to appreciate Harlem as a source of inspiration in his memoir Bad Boy: ‘‘Harlem was

Myers has often said that in writing about Harlem, he wants to be of service to his community. In some sense, Myers’s collection of poetry can be seen as a testament to the life experiences of Harlem’s citizens. The word ‘‘testimony’’ is usually associated with a court of law, and as a verb it means to provide evidence or to bear witness. But testimony has its roots in religion, with the law in question being the divine law. In a religious context, to testify means to profess one’s religious belief. Both senses of the word testimony are evident in Clara Brown, the character whose life provides a frame for the book. In each of the six sections of ‘‘Clara Brown’s Testimony,’’ Brown bears witness to eightyseven years of Harlem life experience; as she says, a long life in Harlem ‘‘made me strong inside.’’

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Furthermore, the many voices of young people in Here in Harlem reflect Myers’s own experiences growing up in this dynamic community. By including a character like Lydia Cruz, Myers also seeks to reflect the changing population of Harlem and the diversity of its newer residents, many of whom are Spanishspeaking immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. These residents have added a new cultural dimension to an already diverse community. Myers’s focus, however, is on Harlem’s special role in African American history and culture, which is evident throughout Here in Harlem and is emphasized by references to the artists, athletes, and politicians who made Harlem their home. Yet it is Harlem’s ordinary people who are most cherished by Myers, whether they are shown congregating in church, chatting in barbershops and beauty salons, or mourning the loss of family. Myers is an inspired choirmaster, creating harmony from the many voices of Here in Harlem to portray a complex community replete with paradox, much like America itself. However, his portraits are not completely romanticized versions of Harlem life. Myers does not avoid showing how Harlem can exert a dangerous power. For Dennis Chapman, who was part of the Great Migration north, Harlem is personified as a lover and seductress who saps the life from him with her glittering but essentially empty promises. Harlem blared a welcome—flashed its smile Rolled its city eyes, blew out its dark city breath Nibbled hungrily at my liver as I Lived it up and boogied down Ran it up, and spun it around Harlem eased me, calmed me, rubbed my chest Held me close on restless nights Whispered in my ear that the blues loved only me And that it was joy, not despair, that spread Like sunrise On the far horizon.

Although Harlem holds seemingly limitless excitement, Dennis Chapman never fully realizes the promises Harlem holds for him, as is evident by that fact that the fun and gaiety leave ‘‘the prison of [his] skin . . . cold, and damp.’’ Yet, Myers portrays Chapman and Chapman’s decision to migrate north with the compassion and respect such a decision deserves. Myers’s Harlem is not simply multifaceted in its populations, but also in its generations and their experiences. Some readers may be confused

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by how the book does not seem to be taking place in the current day, but rather moves back and forth in time. The cultural references to Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Van Der Zee all draw on the Harlem Renaissance. When Didi Taylor, a fourteen-year-old student, says she would love to be photographed by Van Der Zee, and talk to Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., it seems as if she is a contemporary of these early twentieth-century men. This movement between the Harlem of the past—of the years of Myers’s childhood—to its present, adds to the book’s sense of timelessness. In Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, the characters are ghosts. Some of the characters in Here in Harlem also seem to be speaking from beyond, offering their voices as a testimony about Harlem’s past. In the end, Here in Harlem is a nuanced testament to an ever-changing community. When Myers writes about Harlem, he is writing out of personal commitment to that community specifically, but also to a universal human ideal. From his writing, it is clear that he believes that the writer reaches the universal through the particular. In an autobiographical sketch reprinted on the Educational Paperback Association’s website, Myers explains that the Harlem he knew as a child was not the Harlem he encountered in books. Through his writing, Myers has been faithful to the Harlem he knew. The people I knew as a child were not the kind that were being written about. What I wanted to do was to portray this vital community as one that is very special to a lot of people. I wanted to show the people I knew as being as richly endowed with those universal traits of love, humor, and ambition as any in the world. This, I hope, is what my books do. That space of earth was no ghetto, it was home. Those were not exotic stereotypes, those were my people. And I love them.

As both a writer and a person, Myers has fully evolved, from not appreciating Harlem because it was not exotic enough, to appreciating it for its universal humanity. Here in Harlem is a loving testament to a community, honoring its past, its present, and its possibilities for the future. In Myers’s deft poems, Harlem is a community that has both exhausted and exhilarated its inhabitants, all the while sustaining the promise of the American dream.

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When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981), by David Lewis, is an excellent introduction to the cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance. Lewis’s history of Harlem from 1905 to 1935 is an indispensable guide to understanding the importance of Harlem in American history and to the work of Myers.

The Stranger (1946), by the French author Albert Camus, remains one of the most widely-read novels of all time. It is a classic of existentialism, a philosophy that questions how people find meaning in their lives. The story centers on an apparently amoral young man who commits a senseless murder and his subsequent trial. Myers recounts the influence of The Stranger in his memoir, Bad Boy.

Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946) is set in the Harlem of Myers’s youth. It is a story of an African American woman separated from her husband and struggling to raise her eight-year-old son as well as to overcome the violence and racial conflict of Harlem’s streets. Petry received a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her realistic novel,

considered a classic of African American literature. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia (2001), a reference work written by Hans Ostrom and published by Greenwood Press, provides a comprehensive resource for the celebrated African American writer who made Harlem his home. Langston Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a source of inspiration for the poetry of Myers. Myers’s Fallen Angels (1988) is a prize-winning novel about seventeen-year-old Richie Perry. Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam. Myers’s novel Monster (1999) is illustrated by his son, Christopher Myers, and by Catherine M. Tamblyn. A Harlem drugstore owner is shot and killed in his store, and sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon is arrested as the lookout. An amateur filmmaker, Steve transcribes his trial into a movie script, showing scene by scene how his life is unfolding. The novel was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist.

Source: Nadine Pine`de, Critical Essay on ‘‘Here in Harlem,’’Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Celia McGee In the following essay by McGeee, Myers talks about his relationship with Harlem, past and present.

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Street in East Harlem Ó Corbis

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I express these memories through poetry. When you do a picture of an entire community, you need may voices, and poetry works. CE: How do you get others excited about your approach? WDM: Once, I brought in photos to a group of students and asked them to write poems about them, and what their lives would be like. I like to give kids subjects to write about. With Harlem, I could write about a place that I loved, but every child can write about their own community. They can write about the things that they see. Make a list of people in your neighborhood and create a poem about how they were feeling that day, or about a particular event. Source: Celia McGee, ‘‘Harlem Comes Verse with Him,’’ in New York Daily News, November 3, 2004, p. 52.

Jasmin K. Williams In the following interview with Williams, Myers discusses the origins of Here in Harlem. Walter Dean Myers has written plenty of books. His latest one takes a poetic look at his life and memories of Harlem. Classroom Extra: What inspired you to use this unique method of writing about Harlem? Walter Dean Myers: I read Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. He takes a mythical town of Spoon River and writes poems about the people buried there. I read it again as an adult but didn’t like it as much. It was interesting at first, but as an adult, I realized that he didn’t really like the people of Spoon River. When I thought about Harlem, I loved the people. CE: How did you choose the people to write about? WDM: These were people that I encountered, and sometimes they were stories that I remembered as a kid. I remember being in Washington and getting into a cab. I asked the old cabdriver why he looked so tired. The driver said that he was a deacon in his church and he had just buried a young person and he was so tired of doing that.

One of the things I do is challenge them to write a certain amount of lines about a particular subject. Write a poem with rhymes in the middle of the sentence instead of the end. This changes the way they approach language. I heard a rapper do that. CE: What’s your advice on how to get kids excited about reading and poetry? WDM: I tell parents to spend an hour a day reading with your children. My whole family would read the same book. If the children were assigned a book in school, I read it, too. I started off reading the Reader’s Digest and poetry with them. I realized that there weren’t any black stories, so I started writing them myself Walter Dean Myers has written more than 85 books, most geared to children. His three adult children are Michael Dean, Karen Elaine and Christopher. Source: Jasmin K. Williams, ‘‘A Poetic Look at Harlem,’’ in New York Post online edition, February 16, 2005, p. 1.

Charles Scribner’s Sons In the following excerpt from Writers for Young Adults, the author explores Harlem’s influence on Myers and Myers’s influence on Harlem, poetry, and African-American culture.

All the poems come from somewhere. I wanted to give a voice to the people in my memories.

The Harlem where Myers grew up, the one he remembers and portrays affectionately in his early novels, was a gentler, happier place than the Harlem generally portrayed in contemporary media. Four of those early novels—Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975), Mojo and the Russians (1977), The Young Landlords (1979), and Won’t Know Till I Get There (1982)—are humorous accounts of the escapades of groups of young people who get

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I later met a nurse who was very excited about going to work, not because she enjoyed it but because she was useful.

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themselves in and out of trouble, support each other when the going is rough, and generally try to do the right thing. Myers’ talent was recognized early in his career. Fast Sam, his first novel, was cited as an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults, as was The Young Landlords. Critical response to his early novels pointed to what would become accepted as among Myers’ greatest strengths as a writer: his ear for dialogue, his ability to create likable and sympathetic characters, and his ability to write humorously. Many of the themes that recur in his work are evident in these early works as well: African Americans helping each other, the relationships of fathers and sons, the importance of friendship, and the peer group as a small supportive community. These characteristics are notable in The Mouse Rap (1990). The Mouse is fourteenyear-old Frederick Douglas, who lives in Harlem and loves basketball. He and several of his friends become involved in the search for the loot from a 1930s bank heist, rumored to have been left in an abandoned building. Meanwhile, his father, who is separated from his mother, is doing his best to work his way back into the family. Each chapter begins with a rap, such as this one, which opens the book: Ka-phoomp! Ka-phoomp! Da Doom Da Doom!

... You can call me Mouse, ’cause that’s my tag I’m into it all, everything’s my bag You know I can run, you know I can hoop I can do it alone, or in a group.

One of Myers’ most notable skills is his knack for capturing the way urban African American teenagers, especially boys, often talk to each other. Even if the specific expressions threaten to become outdated, the flavor of their talking—the bragging, exaggerating, and image making—does not. These kinds of oral expressions come out of traditional African American discourse styles. Myers often uses this style in the voices of both his narrators and his other characters. This is particularly true when the narrator is the main character, as in The Mouse Rap. Here is Mouse introducing himself to the reader: Me, I can hoop. I can definitely hoop. I ain’t jamming but I’m scamming. You may look great but you will look late. You got the ball against me and you blink and all you got left is

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the stink because I got the ball and gone. I played one on one with my shadow and my shadow couldn’t keep up.

It is easy to undervalue this kind of language, partly because what is current changes so quickly. But this language is the reflection of an important aspect of African American culture, and for young urban African American men, one of the ways they establish themselves among their peers. Typical of Myers’ early humorous novels, The Mouse Rap includes a cast of characters that represents a mix of ages (teenagers, their parents, and their grandparents) and of sociocultural groups (African American, white, and Mexican American). Equally typical, Myers treats his characters with sympathy and affection. It is possible to criticize The Mouse Rap and Myers’ other humorous novel as lacking credibility, but Myers has a good sense of drama, knows how to keep a story moving, and in spite of some serious underlying themes, is playing strictly for laughs. These books are farcical, full of exaggerated comedy, and meant to be enjoyed.

African American Culture and History Myers has a strong interest in African American history and culture, and he has produced a number of books, fiction and nonfiction, reflecting that interest. Now Is Your Time! The African American Struggle for Freedom (1991) is a nonfiction work that combines history, biography, and a bit of Myers’ own genealogy to tell the story of African Americans from Africa to the present. The Glory Field (1994) is a novel that follows one African American family for 250 years, from the Middle Passage (the forced voyage of enslaved Africans to America) to the present. Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse (1993) features old photographs of African American children, accompanied by original verses. It marks Myers’ return to publishing poetry. Myers’ interests and writings continue to deepen and expand. The father of three grown children, Myers is also a grandfather. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he writes fulltime. He considers that if he can produce ten pages a day, he has done a good day’s work. His major contribution to literature for young adults has been to illuminate the lives and

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history of African Americans and to do so with humor and affection as well as with seriousness and great skill. In the process, he offers to readers of any social group insight into the human experiences and emotions that connect us all. Source: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ‘‘The Scribners Writers Series: Walter Dean Myers,’’ in Writers for Young Adults, 1997, p. 1.

SOURCES Bishop, Rudine, ‘‘The Present and the Future: Myers the Artist,’’ in Presenting Walter Dean Myers, Twayne Publishers, 1990, pp. 93–103. Burshtein, Karen, ‘‘Walter Dean Myers, Living Black Poet,’’ in Walter Dean Myers, Rosen Publishing Group, 2004, pp. 67–70. Dunbar, Paul Laurence, ‘‘Sympathy,’’ The University of Dayton’s Paul Laurence Dunbar website, www.dunbarsite.org (July 14, 2005). Hoffman, Barbara, ‘‘‘Monster’ Writer Walter Dean Myers Knocks Out His 80th,’’ in the New York Post, October 23, 2004, p.26. ‘‘In His Own Words,’’ Walter Dean Myers Biography at Walter Dean Myers Official webpage, www.harperchildrens.com (May 30, 2005). Lindsay, Nina, Review of Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices, in School Library Journal Reviews, December 1, 2004, p. 166. Myers, Walter Dean, ‘‘Autobiographical Statement,’’ Educational Paperback Association, www.edupaperback. org (May 30, 2005); reprinted from the Fifth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators, H. W. Wilson, 1983.

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Ryan, Laura T., ‘‘Words to the Rescue: Author Walter Dean Myers Reaches Out to Teen Readers,’’ in the PostStandard, p. 4. Review of Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices, in Publishers Weekly, November 15, 2004, p. 61.

FURTHER READING Bishop, Rudine, Presenting Walter Dean Myers, Twayne Publishers, 1990. Bishop’s book is a combination of literary criticism and biography that places Myers’s work in its historical and cultural context. It provides an excellent introduction to the wide range of Myers’s writing. Masters, Edgar Lee, Spoon River Anthology, Signet Classics Paperback, reprint 1992. Myers gives credit to Masters’s book in helping inspire his own, and it is worth revisiting this classic of American literature to discover the voices of the 244 characters who speak about their lives as well as the social reform movements of their time. Myers, Walter Dean, Bad Boy: A Memoir, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001. Bad Boy is a memoir of Myers’s Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. It explores the conflicts between Myers’s home life with his adopted parents, his life in school and his love of books, and his life in his neighborhood, all set against his struggle for self-realization as a writer.

Review of Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices, in Publishers Weekly, November 15, 2004, p. 61.

Myers, Walter Dean, Now Is Your Time! The African American Struggle for Freedom, HarperCollins, 1991. Myers provides a combination of biographical vignettes and narrative history to recount the story of the African American experience through the voices of various characters, including a freed slave, investigative reporter Ida B. Wells, artist Meta Warrick Fuller, inventor George Latimore, and Dred Scott.

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———, Bad Boy: A Memoir, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, pp. 49, 78–141. ———, Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices, Holiday House, 2004.

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Kira-Kira Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira, published in 2004, is the story of a young Japanese American girl growing up in the 1950s. This is Kadohata’s first book for young adults, following several adult novels. It highlights the work and life experiences of Japanese Americans in the pre– Civil Rights era, as well as their struggles to achieve the American dream. The novel explores the relationship between individual and community identity. In Kira-Kira, community helps to define the individual. The main character, Katie, develops her sense of self through her experiences and relationships with others—friends and family, neighbors, teachers, and peers. Katie chronicles her family’s life in the United States. In her first-person narration she emphasizes the lessons in honesty, love, disappointment, and hope that her sister, brother, and parents teach her. Although the novel recounts the many hardships the family endures—back-breaking work, poverty, racism, illness, and death—it also focuses on those moments in life that are kira-kira, which means ‘‘glittering’’ in Japanese. These are the moments when the characters of the novel experience the things that make life worth living: beauty, happiness, and hope.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Cynthia Kadohata was born in 1956 in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of Japanese

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Whiting Foundation. In 2006, Kadohata will publish Weedflower, another novel for young readers. Weedflower tells the story of a friendship between a young Japanese American girl living in an internment camp and a young Mojave boy living on the reservation. In Weedflower, as in Kira-Kira, Kadohata draws on her family’s experiences. Kadohata’s father was interned with his parents, in a camp that was on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona. Although she derives material from her Japanese American background, Kadohata does not like to be regarded only as an Asian American writer. She believes this label limits her ability to go beyond preconceived ideas that some readers may have about Asian Americans.

PLOT SUMMARY

Cynthia Kadohata AP/Wide World Photos

Chapters 1–4

American parents. She has a journalism degree from the University of Southern California and attended graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. Kadohata believes her writing has been shaped by her family’s experience as Japanese Americans, which included frequent moves across the United States in search of work. Kadohata drew on her family’s experience for Kira-Kira, her novel for young readers which received the 2004 Newbery Medal. Kadohata was hailed as a new voice in American fiction in 1989, with the publication of her first book, The Floating World. Like Kira-Kira, this book also features a young girl’s first-person narration of her family’s moves throughout the United States. The Floating World was widely reviewed and praised for its masterful writing. Kadohata also published In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in the futuristic Los Angeles of 2052. She has frequently contributed short stories to periodicals such as The New Yorker, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and the Pennsylvania Review.

The novel is a first-person narration by Katie Takeshima, the middle child of JapaneseAmerican parents. It chronicles her life from the age of five to her teenage years in southern Georgia. An older Katie tells the story, reflecting on her childhood as well as her relationship with her family and others in the community where she lives. The novel begins when Katie is five years old and living in Iowa. This period of her life is idyllic. She plays constantly with her older sister Lynn, whom she adores. The strong bond with her sister is established here in the opening chapters. Lynn takes care of her while her parents work, and teaches Katie her first word, kirakira—the Japanese word for ‘‘glittering’’—those beautiful things in the world that are sources of happiness, such as the sky, the stars, and flowers.

Kadohata has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Whiting Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles

The first chapter offers a scene that is essential to understanding the themes in the novel. Katie and Lynn are playing near a cornfield and when Lynn runs off into the field to hide. Katie becomes upset and begins to cry. Lynn quickly comes out of the field to comfort her, but a vicious dog charges at them. After the dog tears Katie’s pants and scrapes her leg with his teeth, Lynn manages to distract him and take Katie to safety, but the dog then attacks Lynn. Frightened for her sister, Katie throws a bottle of milk at him, and the dog runs away. Katie believes Lynn saved her life, but in Lynn’s diary

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entry for that day, transcribed in the novel, she writes, ‘‘Later, when the dog attacked me, Katie saved my life.’’ The way the sisters’ love for each other saves them is a recurring theme throughout the novel.

Takeshimas’ youngest son Samson Ichiro Takeshima—Sammy—is born in this early part of the novel as well.

The Takeshimas’ Oriental grocery store fails because there are few Asians living in their Iowa town, and the family moves to Georgia. On the trip from Iowa to Georgia, Katie begins to learn about racism. When the family stops at a motel to spend the night, they are told that they may only stay in the back rooms reserved for Indians. When Katie’s father explains they are not Indian, the woman at the front desk replies that the back rooms are for Mexicans, too. Katie protests that they are not Mexicans, either, but her father quietly fills out the registration card, telling the woman that the back room is fine. He does not argue with the woman at the motel because his family needs a place to sleep.

Katie takes care of Sammy the same way Lynn took care of her, spending all her spare time with him. Lynn practices writing short stories in her diary, mostly about living by the sea. She begins to feel ill and worries that she cannot help Katie with her homework. Lynn is an excellent student who gets As in school, while Katie gets straight Cs. She is bored by schoolwork and does not apply herself.

With the help of her Uncle Katsuhisa, Katie’s parents get jobs in a chicken hatchery and poultry processing plant. Her father sexes chickens—he divides the male chicks from the female—and her mother is responsible for cutting drumsticks off chicken bodies in the processing plant. Their jobs require that Katie’s parents spend many hours away from home and her father sometimes sleeps at the hatchery because the work hours are so long. Her mother often works extra hours and comes home exhausted. Katie, Lynn, and their little brother Sammy must sometimes fend for themselves and take care of each other. Only thirty-one Japanese Americans live in the Takeshimas’ town—Chesterfield, Georgia— and they keep to themselves. The rest of the town’s population does not even seem to understand where they are from. When Katie starts school, the other children ask her ‘‘Are you Chinese or Japanese?’’ and ‘‘What’s your native name?’’ even though Katie has developed a southern accent and has lived in America her whole life. Aside from their questions, the kids at school ignore her, just as Lynn warned that they might. The children at school do not speak to Lynn, either, and the only friends Katie’s and Lynn’s parents have are the few Japanese people living in their apartment complex. Lynn tells Katie that the townspeople believe the Japanese are worthless, ‘‘like doormats—or ants or something!’’ and the two sisters vow to live near each other by the sea when they grow up. The

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Chapters 5–8

When Lynn is fourteen, she begins to make friends at school—because she is so pretty, according to Katie. Lynn becomes best friends with Amber, a white American girl, ‘‘one of those really girlie girls who paint their fingernails and even their toenails.’’ Katie watches as Lynn transforms into a young woman. As Lynn develops an interest in boys and a longing to fit in with her American peers, Katie feels as though she and her sister are growing apart. She resents the fact that Lynn still sees her as a child. Lynn and Amber convince Uncle Katsuhisa to take the family camping so that they can be near some boys from school who are also camping that weekend. Lynn and Amber leave Katie behind to flirt with the boys, and they return to the campsite giggling and whispering. They tell Katie about their evening, ‘‘how Lynn had kissed Gregg, and how Amber had almost kissed the other boy, and how they were the cutest boys in the class.’’ When Katie tells them about her fantasy boyfriend, Joe-John Abondondalarama, they laugh at her. During the summer months when neither Lynn nor their neighbor Mrs. Kanagawa can take care of Katie and Sammy, they go with their mother to the processing plant and wait in the car until their mother finishes her shift. Katie discusses her mother’s work, remarking on the town’s prejudice against the people who work in the poultry industry. She learns about union organizing, and discovers that Mr. Lyndon, the owner, has hired a thug to intimidate workers and prevent unionization at his poultry farms. Her mother opposes unions, believing it is ‘‘wrong to fight the people who are trying to help you.’’ Katie hates seeing her mother work in poor conditions at the factory and vows to one day have enough money to buy the factory and

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treat the workers well. While waiting in the car, Katie meet Sylvia Kilgore—Silly—a girl approximately Katie’s age who does laundry at the plant and who later becomes Katie’s first friend.

Chapters 9–12 Lynn is increasingly weak and nauseous, often sleeping through the day and staying home from school. At first her parents thinks it is only anemia, but the problem appears to be growing more serious and they take Lynn to the hospital. When they return home, her parents tell Katie that ‘‘Lynn’s anemia was ‘acting up’ and she just needed more liver.’’ Katie’s parents apply for a loan to help them buy a house. They feel a house of their own might help improve Lynn’s health. Lynn’s health does seem to improve once they move, and everyone is certain their new house has brought them good fortune. The children plan a picnic to celebrate their new home. They go to the unfenced grounds on Mr. Lyndon’s property, where Sammy’s foot gets caught in an animal trap. Katie frees Sammy from the trap, then she and Lynn struggle to carry him home on a blanket stretched between them. Worried about her brother’s worsening condition and Lynn’s exhaustion, Katie runs to some nearby houses to get help. Ultimately Hank Garvin, a handsome stranger, takes them to a hospital. Katie is surprised that a white person can be so helpful; thanks to his assistance, Sammy is not seriously hurt. Later that year Lynn is hospitalized; because Katie’s mother often stays with Lynn, Katie and Sammy sometimes sleep at the poultry farm with their father. They amuse themselves by playing with male chicks that are unimportant to the business because they cannot lay eggs. Katie even steals a few of them and frees them in a nearby field. Katie and Sammy bring coffee and doughnuts to the workers, and rub their backs as they work through twelve-hour shifts. Katie’s playful adventure at the farm contrasts with the laborers’ lives. She describes the harsh working conditions: how the workers all sleep in the same room, hardly change their clothes, and only get four hours of sleep a night. Katie is worried by how exhausted her father looks.

is especially sad, she tells Katie she wishes she had glittery pink nail polish. Wanting to please her sister, Katie steals the nail polish from a five and dime store. It is the first time she has ever stolen anything, and she escapes from the store successfully even though someone sees her do it. The next day after school, she returns home to find the cashier who had seen her steal the nail polish. Her mother pays the woman for the nail polish and promises she will be punished. Katie’s father orders her to personally apologize to the owners of the five and dime for having stolen their property. He also finally admits why Lynn is sick. She has lymphoma, a word that Katie learns is a type of cancer when she looks it up in the dictionary. She realizes that Lynn might die.

Chapters 13–16 Because of Lynn’s mounting medical bills and their house mortgage, Katie’s parents work all the time, leaving the children alone a great deal. Lynn’s health worsens; she and Katie get into their first fight, each telling the other ‘‘I hate you.’’ Uncle Katsuhisa takes his family, Katie, Sammy, Silly, and Jedda-boy, a land surveyor friend, on a Thanksgiving camping trip to distract them from the sadness caused by Lynn’s illness. On the way to the campsite, they get lost and the truck gets stuck near the edge of a cliff. Once they get going again, Katie falls out of the truck through a loose door without anyone noticing and a few minutes pass before the truck stops and turns around to pick her up. After listening to Jedda-Boy’s stories about his land-surveying adventures, Katie asks Auntie Fumi when Uncle Katsuhisa will become a land surveyor. Fumi answers that no one in Georgia would hire a Japanese man as a land surveyor, so his dream will never be realized. However, she says, ‘‘It’s different for you children. You’re younger, the world is changing.’’

Lynn comes home from the hospital but is so ill she cannot attend school. Katie often stays home to spend time with her, reading to her from a set of used encyclopedias. One day when Lynn

Mrs. Muramoto, a neighbor, holds a big party on New Year’s Eve, the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese. Katie describes the yearly ritual of staying at the party until ten o’clock, returning home to sleep for a few hours, then waking up before dawn to write down her hatsu-yume, ‘‘first dream of the New Year.’’ According to the custom, their family then meets other Japanese families in an empty lot to watch the sunrise, ‘‘the traditional way to celebrate New Year’s in Japan.’’ But this New Year’s Eve, Katie stays with Lynn, and Lynn

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makes her promise that she will get better grades, go to college, and take care of their parents and Sammy. Katie goes out to the empty lot alone to watch the sunrise, and cries. I cried and cried. For a while as I cried I hated my parents, as if it were their fault that Lynn was sick. Then I cried because I loved my parents so much. . . . I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment.

Lynn dies that morning and her family grieves for her. When Katie learns that Lynn died alone, she regrets leaving to watch the sunrise. She thinks, ‘‘I had no idea whether it mattered or not to her that she had been alone at the exact moment she died. But I thought maybe it did.’’ Katie and her mother scour the house for things that belonged to Lynn in order to keep them: stray hairs, a chewed-on pencil, newspapers from when she was alive. Katie cuts a lock of her own hair and ties it around Lynn’s neck. That same day, angry and frustrated that he could not help Lynn, Katie’s father commands Katie to show him the animal trap that hurt Sammy’s leg (the boy still limps from the accident). After finding the trap, he and Katie drive to Mr. Lyndon’s house where, overcome by emotion, he smashes the windshield of Mr. Lyndon’s car with a two-by-four. They drive away from the scene and don’t stop until they reach the next town, where a sheriff questions them about what they are doing. He is looking for the person who damaged Mr. Lyndon’s car. Katie tells him that her sister has just died and that they were on their way to get tacos. The sheriff lets them go. Katie writes a eulogy recounting a special memory of Lynn, which she delivers at Lynn’s funeral. Katie’s father cries at the graveside, the first time Katie has ever seen him do so. With Uncle Katsuhisa’s help, she creates an altar in Lynn’s honor. She places treasured objects that belonged to her sister in a special wooden box, makes a bowl of rice for her, and places both on the altar. Believing that Lynn’s spirit is watching her, Katie tries to do better in school to honor the promise she made to her sister, and she gets an A on her math test. Katie’s father takes her with him to apologize to Mr. Lyndon for damaging his car and is immediately fired from his job. Luckily he gets another job at another hatchery, one not owned by Mr. Lyndon. According to Katie, her father’s apology to Mr. Lyndon was

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Kira-Kira was released in an unabridged version on audio CD by Listening Library in 2005. It is narrated by Elaina Erika Davis.

a defining moment, because he realized that they had a choice about whether to ‘‘be an unhappy family forever, or not.’’ They could determine their own futures. Katie learns that ‘‘even when you’re very, very wrong, if you apologize, you can still hold yourself with dignity.’’ Katie’s mother, resistant to unionizing efforts throughout the novel, joins the union of hatchery workers and they win by one vote. She decides to support the union when she learns that it will give workers paid leave when a family member dies. ‘‘It was a little late for my mother,’’ Katie recounts, ‘‘but if she voted yes, she knew it would not be too late for the next family suffering grief.’’ When the holiday season arrives, Katie’s father decides that the family needs a vacation. Katie suggests they travel to the California coast because it had been Lynn’s lifelong dream to live by the ocean. After a trip to Lynn’s grave, Katie’s father tells her that Lynn wanted Katie to have her diary. As Katie reads it she learns more about Lynn. Katie discovers that she was the ‘‘only person mentioned every single day, even if she just wrote something like, Katie got another C today.’’ Katie decides she will go to college to honor Lynn’s memory. The Takeshimas drive to California and arrive on December 31, near the first anniversary of Lynn’s death. The family walks to the beach on New Year’s Day and Katie wishes ‘‘Lynn could have lived to see the sea with us! . . . I don’t think anyone understood as well as I did how badly Lynn had longed to walk along the water the way my family and I did that New Year’s Day.’’ Although she is sad that Lynn is no longer with them, Katie believes she hears her sister’s voice in the waves, saying kira-kira.

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Uncle Katsuhisa

CHARACTERS Joe-John Abondondalarama Joe-John Abondondalarama is a figment of Katie’s imagination. He is her idea of a perfect boyfriend; she often daydreams about how they will meet and the kind of life they will have with their seven children. Amber and Lynn laugh when she tells them about Joe-John, so she pretends that she is just kidding.

Amber Amber is Lynn’s best friend. She introduces Lynn to an American lifestyle, as well as to her ideas about how girls should behave and how they should interact with boys. Lynn spent all of her time with Katie when she was younger; Amber represents a new phase in Lynn’s life as she is finally accepted by her American peers. Katie does not like Amber and sees her as competition for her sister’s attention. She also thinks that Amber is frivolous and only cares about boys and looking grown-up. Eventually, Amber drops Lynn as a friend when Lynn becomes sick.

Uncle Katsuhisa is Mr. Takeshima’s brother, and uncle to Katie, Lynn, and Sammy. He is boisterous and very active, whereas Katie’s father is a quiet thinker. Katsu is the Japanese word for ‘‘triumph,’’ a word that describes Uncle Katsuhisa well. It is Uncle Katsuhisa who secures employment for his brother and sisterin-law at the hatchery in Georgia when the Takeshimas’ Asian grocery store fails in Iowa. He drives his dilapidated truck to Iowa to help them move, entertaining Lynn and Katie on the drive with silly songs about their names. Although he is happy and economically stable, he has always wanted to survey land instead of working at a hatchery. He feels no one will hire him as a surveyor because he is Japanese. Although he appears rough he is very caring and loving toward all the Takeshima children; he is a source of fun for them because he always takes them and his own family camping. After Lynn dies, he helps Katie confront her grief and build an altar to honor her sister.

Mrs. Kanagawa Auntie Fumi Auntie Fumi is Uncle Katsuhisa’s wife and Katie’s aunt. She is described as a round and loving woman who comforts Katie when she is troubled. She often defends Katie when Uncle Katsuhisa treats her with harsh impatience. Auntie Fumi and Uncle Katsuhisa come over and play board games with Katie and Sammy when their parents are tending to Lynn in the hospital.

Hank Garvin Hank Garvin takes Sammy Takeshima to the hospital when his foot gets caught in an animal trap on Mr. Lyndon’s property. This is Katie’s first encounter with a white man who shows a genuine desire to help her or her family. She is also infatuated with him, despite their age difference. Katie’s parents are grateful that he was able to help Sammy, Katie, and Lynn; they give him a watch to thank him for his kindness. He attends Lynn’s funeral with his wife.

Mrs. Kanagawa is the neighbor who watches the neighborhood children while their parents work. She lives in the same apartment complex as the Takeshimas in Chesterfield, Georgia.

Silly Kilgore Sylvia Kilgore, who goes by Silly, is Katie’s only friend. They meet in the parking lot of the processing plant where Katie’s mother works. Silly works at the plant doing the morning laundry. Silly approaches Katie while she sits in the car; their first conversation takes place through the rolled-down window. Silly’s mother supports the unionization of the processing plant workers, and Katie’s mother tells her to stay away from Silly. Eventually they become good friends and Silly goes camping with the family. It is at Silly’s mother’s union meeting that Katie’s mother decides to join the union.

Sylvia Kilgore See Silly Kilgore

Jedda-Boy

Mr. Lyndon

Jedda-Boy is Uncle Katsuhisa’s friend, a land surveyor who goes camping with the family. He represents what Uncle Katsuhisa wants professionally, but is barred from having because of his race.

Mr. Lyndon is the wealthy owner of the chicken hatchery and poultry business where Katie’s parents work. He is one of the richest men in Georgia and lives in a former plantation mansion. He hires anti-union thugs to intimidate

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his employees and prevent unionization. He does not care about anything or anyone but his own wealth, and his neighbors despise him. He places animal traps on his property when there is no reason to do so, needlessly endangering people. Sammy catches his leg in one of these traps and must be taken to the hospital. On the day of Lynn’s death, Katie’s father—full of rage that is seeking a target—drives to Mr. Lyndon’s house and smashes his windshield. When he apologizes for having damaged Mr. Lyndon’s car, Mr. Lyndon replies that he is sorry about Lynn’s death but does not accept this as an excuse. He fires Mr. Takeshima from his job and orders him to pay for the damages to the car.

Katie Takeshima Katie is the first-person narrator of the novel and its main character. She is the middle daughter of Japanese American parents who move from Iowa to Georgia when Katie is five years old. Katie is very close to her older sister Lynn and protective of her younger brother Sammy. She is a young girl trying to determine her identity and where she belongs. She explores these issues by recounting her experiences with members of her family and people in the community around her. Through Katie’s eyes, the reader learns about responsibility, the importance of love for self and others, and what it means to have a home. Katie tends to Lynn when she is ill and watches over Sammy while their parents are working long shifts. Although she is only a young girl, Katie pulls the family together when Lynn dies of lymphoma. She makes healthy meals, cleans the house, and generally keeps things in order because her parents are too distraught to do so. She also proposes a family trip to California, because her sister had always wanted to go there and see the ocean.

Lynn Takeshima Lynn Takeshima is Katie’s older sister and a principal focus in the novel. Katie’s narration recounts many experiences she has with her sister while growing up. Lynn is intelligent and caring, a straight-A student who watches out for Katie as she grows up. She teaches Katie about racism, friendship, and love, but most importantly, about kira-kira, the things that make life worth living, like ‘‘the beautiful blue sky, puppies, kittens, butterflies’’. Lynn dreams of living with Katie in a high-rise apartment building while they go to college, and then living by the ocean in California. To

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Katie, Lynn seems almost perfect, someone who can do no wrong. The family is constantly trying to please Lynn in an effort to improve her health, and when they move to their new house they consider it ‘‘Lynn’s house.’’ Lynn becomes ill with what the family thinks is anemia. However she also has lymphoma, a form of cancer, and she dies on New Year’s Day. Katie spends much of New Year’s Eve with Lynn, but she leaves to watch the sunrise and is not with her sister when she dies.

Mr. Takeshima Mr. Takeshima is Katie’s father. He is a hardworking, first-generation Japanese American whose main concern is his wife and children. He generally struggles through life without complaining, but sometimes he lashes out at the people he believes are hurting his family. For example, he searches for the animal trap that hurt Sammy and subsequently smashes Mr. Lyndon’s windshield. Nevertheless, he teaches Katie about the importance of being honest, facing responsibilities, and putting family before oneself. Katie has complete faith in her father’s ability to take care of the family. She describes him as a thoughtful and contemplative man, given to reading and thinking rather than talking loudly or sharing opinions like Uncle Katsuhisa. Katie feels that her father is always proud of her, no matter what she does.

Mrs. Takeshima Mrs. Takeshima is Katie’s mother. She is hardworking and strict, but also sensitive: ‘‘She was so delicate that if you bumped into her accidentally, you could bruise her.’’ She cherishes peace and quiet, and often tells her children to keep quiet. She is often dismayed at the way her daughters depart from her ideal of Japanese womanhood, and she considers sending them to Japan to become more feminine. Her only concern seems to be her family; she works in demeaning conditions at the poultry processing plant to earn money for a house. At first she opposes unionization at the plant, but she supports the union after Lynn’s death. Her decision to join the union makes Katie proud, though she leaves her feelings unspoken.

Sammy Takeshima Sammy Takeshima is Katie’s younger brother, whom she treats like a son. His full name is Samson Ichiro Takeshima. Ichiro means

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‘‘first son’’ in Japanese. Katie pays as much attention to him as Lynn did to her growing up, and Katie is his ‘‘special favorite.’’ When Sammy’s leg gets caught in an animal trap on Mr. Lyndon’s property, Katie rushes to get help taking him to a hospital.

THEMES Racism Set mostly in pre–Civil Rights era Georgia, the novel accurately portrays the treatment of Japanese Americans in the United States in the 1950s. Though they are U.S. citizens, the Japanese American characters in Kira-Kira are continuously treated as outsiders and excluded from mainstream society. In several instances, the Takeshimas encounter people who do not even recognize them as Japanese; at the motel, the front-desk woman assumes they are Indian or Mexican, and when Katie starts school the other students ask if she is Chinese or Japanese. They cannot compete with whites for the same jobs, they are relegated to special sections for ‘‘colored people,’’ and are generally regarded with suspicion. The characters experience others’ racism as alienating and isolating. Interestingly, even though much of the novel is set in the South, there is no mention of African Americans or any other ethnic groups who might share similar life experiences with the Japanese Americans. Although the novel does not express any direct opinions about whites as a group, the characters who are not Japanese are viewed with suspicion and often portrayed as less caring or thoughtful than the Japanese characters.

Identity The novel is concerned with the question of identity on many levels. Katie and her family are Japanese Americans living in the American South of the 1950s. Although she was born and raised in the United States, Katie often struggles to reconcile her Japanese upbringing with the customs and traditions of her native country. The question of identity is also explored in regard to gender roles—in Katie’s case, the question of what it means to be a woman. Katie’s mother often berates her and her sister for not being feminine enough because they are growing up in the United States. She tells them that she will send them to Japan to become properly

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feminine, and she curls Katie’s hair in pin curls and dresses her in a party dress on the first day of school. Katie, who is changing from a young girl to an adolescent, wonders about what it means to be feminine. She is annoyed by Amber and Lynn’s preening and gossiping about boys, but she also wants to be a part of it. Identity is also explored in terms of the role that a person occupies within a family. Even though Katie is a middle child whom others sometimes see as irresponsible or childish, she lifts the family out of the depression caused by Lynn’s death. It is she who takes over housekeeping and cooking chores while her parents are working overtime to pay the mortgage and Lynn’s medical bills, and she takes care of Sammy just as well as Lynn took care of her. Various definitions of identity evolve throughout the novel; its meaning changes according to the life experiences of the characters.

Love and Kinship Despite the many hardships the Takeshimas endure in the novel, their love for one another maintains a strong spirit and a willingness to continue living. Love is primarily expressed in the relations between the family members, communicated in the ways they make sacrifices and care for one another, the lessons they teach each other, and even in the legacies they leave behind. The Takeshimas also show love in their ability to see beauty and good in the world, even when the dark and unpleasant side of life seems most prominent. Mr. Takeshima works tirelessly at two jobs to support the family, but he never questions whether the sacrifice is worth it. The children save the nickels their father gives them for snacks, planning to help pay for the house and eventually saving one hundred dollars. Uncle Katsuhisa shares his secret grief over a lost infant son to help Katie gain perspective on the loss of her sister. The characters also perceive love as a saving force. At the beginning of the novel when Katie is chased by a dog, Lynn protects her and is attacked by the dog. Katie comes to her rescue by throwing a bottle of milk at the dog. In the sisters’ different accounts of the story, each speaks of the other girl’s bravery. The love each has for the other saves them both.

The American Dream The American dream is the idea—some might say myth—that hard work and determination result in economic prosperity and social mobility.

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Research the U.S. labor movement in the twentieth century. What segments of the population joined unions? Did some ethnic groups participate in the unions more than others? What were women’s roles in the unions? Write a five-paragraph paper detailing the pros and cons of joining a union. Tell the reader whether you would join one, and include the reasons for your decision.

Keep a diary for a week, and write down your activities, thoughts, impressions of other people, opinions about ideas and news that you heard during the week, and things you would like to do in the future. Write a three-paragraph paper describing anything you learned about yourself from keeping a diary. Interview family members, friends, and people in your community about their thoughts on identity. Ask your interviewees how they define the term ‘‘identity.’’ Does it refer to family heritage, to nationality, to the language(s) they speak, to gender, or to

something else? Write a three-page report detailing your findings and include your own definition of identity in your report. Consider the age, gender, and religious background of the people you interview.

Research an ethnic group in the United States other than your own. What country did they emigrate from, where have they settled geographically, what kind of general experiences have they had in the United States, what are their traditions and customs, and what languages do they speak? Write a two-page essay detailing your findings.

Write a two-page short story in which the narrator is a young girl or boy whose parents were not born in the United States. Write the story using a first-person narrator. Imagine his or her thoughts, feelings, relationships, and activities regarding American culture. Explore differences and similarities between American culture and the culture of your narrator’s parents. How does your narrator cope with these differences?

As immigrants and members of a minority, Katie’s family struggles to achieve the elusive American dream. Even though Katie’s parents work long hours to buy a house, an act that they believe might save Katie’s sister Lynn, they are plagued by medical bills and mortgage payments. The novel shows the Takeshima family achieving limited success; the success they do achieve sometimes requires that they sacrifice long-held beliefs. For example, Katie’s mother realizes that her antiunion view is hurting not only her own family, but other plant workers’ families as well. At the same time, the novel’s focus on economic inequality and racism demonstrates how these forces could make it impossible to satisfy an immigrant family’s basic material needs and desires in 1950s America. Katie’s description of Mr. Lyndon’s house, which ‘‘seemed as big as a castle,’’ illustrates the economic disparities between workers and

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management. His sense of entitlement and ruthless treatment of his workers further confirms this unfairness. However, Mr. Takeshima’s apology to Mr. Lyndon illustrates people can maintain their dignity and integrity even though the material prosperity of the American dream may remain beyond their reach. Ultimately, the novel’s focus on discriminatory social practices presents a critique of the idea that hard work brings economic prosperity. The family’s emphasis on kira-kira shows that perhaps not everyone’s goal should be to achieve wealth. However, the tragedies and hardships that the family endures demonstrate the importance of access to fair wages and equal opportunities.

Hope Kira-Kira is undeniably a story about hope and the power of dreams. Hope is the

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mechanism that drives the Takeshima family, both as a group and as individuals. No matter how desperate or difficult the situation, the Takeshimas see an opportunity for hope and a chance for something better, something kirakira. The promise of a better livelihood leads the Takeshimas from Iowa to a small town in Georgia. Mr. and Mrs. Takeshima work around the clock at exhausting jobs, persisting because it offers the hope of owning a home. After Lynn dies, Katie and Sammy become their parents’ source of hope and their reason to continue their hard work: ‘‘[Mr. Takeshima] needed to think about his children who were still alive, because he was honor-bound to think of the living before the dead.’’ Lynn’s hopes for she and Katie as college students and her dream of them living by the sea come to shape Katie’s aspirations. The Takeshimas trip to the coast at the end of the novel fills Katie with hope, as ‘‘the water started to make [her] feel happy again.’’

STYLE Foreign Language Beginning with the title of the novel, Japanese words and their English translations appear throughout the narration. The use of foreign words has a critical function; Japanese terms and the cultural meanings they connote are woven into the very fabric of Katie’s American life. They show the two halves of her existence: her cultural Japanese roots and her American lifestyle. Whenever a Japanese word is used, its English definition is also provided, allowing readers who are not Japanese to participate fully in the story. Words such as kira-kira (glittering), katsu (triumph), ochazuke (green tea mixed with rice), shizukami (hush), and hatsu-yume (first dream of the New Year), name and translate the Japanese and American characteristics of Katie’s life, for both Katie and the reader.

Point of View The novel is entirely composed of a firstperson narration by the main character, Katie Takeshima. The reader thus learns about events, relationships, feelings, and ideas only through Katie’s eyes. Additionally, Katie is telling this story from a distance, some years after the events have occurred. Because she is somewhat removed from the story, she can use hindsight to

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understand and communicate some events more clearly. The first-person narrative style expresses one of the main goals of the novel: to show life events filtered through the eyes of a young girl just beginning to discover the world around her.

Realism Realism is a method of depicting events accurately and realistically in art and literature, without idealizing or romanticizing what is happening. Realism allows readers to relate to events and emotions and to connect with characters. Description is one of the ways to accomplish a realistic portrayal of a time and place. Much of this novel is dedicated to describing events and environments as they really are, such as people’s physical characteristics, nature, and the minute details of a house’s interior space. Lynn’s death, for example, is not peaceful and lovely with everyone relieved that she is out of pain; instead, it is a messy, life-shattering event in the Takeshima family. Before her death, Lynn’s ‘‘breath [was] catching heartbreakingly, as if breathing had become a hardship for her body. Her hair had grown stringy.’’ Though it would have been poetic to have had Lynn die surrounded by her family and uttering final farewells, Cynthia Kadohata instead approaches her death realistically, as it could possibly have happened in a busy family on a holiday night: Lynn died when no one was in the room. ‘‘‘Who was with her?’ [Katie] asked. [Her] father’s voice broke as he said, ‘Nobody.’’’

Symbol A symbol suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. In this novel, the house serves as a symbol of realizing the American dream. A house means stability and a reward for sacrifices. Katie’s parents work grueling hours doing demeaning work to save enough money to buy a house. Even the children save their allowances, to give the money back to their parents as a contribution toward this goal. When Lynn becomes ill, the house is considered a source of happiness and even seems to contain the possibility of a cure. They believe Lynn will recover when they buy the house because she will be so happy. Another symbol in the novel is the road, which represents the family’s quest for a better

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life as well as each character’s search for his or her own identity. The road is thus a symbol of the space that must be traveled—through life experiences and relationships with others—to get to the desired destination. The Takeshima family travels by car from Iowa to Georgia, and on vacation from Georgia to California. Katie’s mother and father must spend over an hour driving to work each day. When Katie and Sammy have to go with their mother to the processing plant early in the morning, Katie says, ‘‘The road was empty, like so many roads we had driven on in my life.’’ After Mr. Takeshima loses his job at the hatchery, he knows that there are more opportunities down the road: ‘‘I’ve heard there’s an opening at a hatchery in Missouri. If it’s time to move on, it’s time to move on.’’ The road, as a physical space, is where Lynn and Katie often lie in their pajamas as young children in order to look at the stars. It symbolizes the space of imagination and aspiration.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Post–World War II American and Japanese Society The United States entered World War II after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. In 1942, the U.S. government decreed that all Japanese people residing in the United States, including second- and third-generation American citizens, should be placed in internment camps, because it was thought that they might engage in treasonous activities against the United States. Japanese Americans were held prisoner, forced to leave their jobs, property, and possessions until the end of the war in 1945. Millions of dollars in property were lost. Some years later, the Japanese who were interned were compensated at ten cents for every dollar lost. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President George H. Bush, apologized for the internment and offered reparations to thousands of Japanese Americans who were denied their civil and constitutional rights by the U.S. government during World War II. Though neither Katie nor her parents were held in internment camps, they were still subject to the lingering social distrust toward Japanese Americans after the war. Additionally, in many areas of the South, if a person was not Caucasian he or she was considered to be ‘‘colored’’ regardless of

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ethnicity and therefore subject to discriminatory Jim Crow laws.

Asian-American Literature Amy Ling notes in ‘‘Teaching Asian American Literature’’ that Asian American literature often has several broad aims: to remember the past, give voice to a hitherto silent people with an ignored and therefore unknown history, to correct stereotypes of an exotic or foreign experience and thus, as [writer Maxine] Hong Kingston says, to claim America for the thousands of Americans whose Asian faces too frequently deny them a legitimate place in the country of their birth.

Asian-American literature cannot be fully appreciated without some background information on the historical and cultural contexts of Asians in the United States. Nor can the term ‘‘Asian American’’ be understood as a single entity, for it contains myriad nationalities and languages, dozens of religions, and a multitude of races as originating sources. Asian-American literature is considered one of the subdivisions of multicultural or multiethnic literature. According to Gonzalo Ramirez and Jan Lee, there are two kinds of multicultural literature: multiethnic children’s literature and melting pot literature. Multiethnic children’s literature usually addresses the following themes: heritage, the battle against racism and discrimination, everyday experiences, urban civilization, friendship, and family relationships. Cultural problems arise as the protagonist is caught between two cultures and must learn to survive. Melting pot books do not address racial issues but emphasize that Asian Americans have the same lifestyle as any other American. Asian-American literature first emerged in the 1940s, but at that time it was generally nonAsians who wrote books about Asia or Asian Americans. After the end of World War II, there were many Japanese Americans who wrote autobiographies about their experiences in the internment camps in the United States. The first Chinese author to achieve financial success in the United States, C. Y. Lee, was a mentor to many other Asian writers. He wrote The Flower Drum Song in 1955. In the 1970s, criticism began to emerge about the way that Asians were depicted in literature. Critics argued that the literature lacked diverse illustrations and characterization, and that most illustrations of

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Cynthia Kadohata (left) playing cards with her sister, 1967 Courtesy of Cynthia Kadohata Asians were drawn in exactly the same way, without regard for cultural or physical distinctions. These illustrations rarely portrayed Asians living in the contemporary United States, wearing modern clothing and living in modern housing. Instead, they offered a stereotyped and unrealistic picture of Asian-American life. There was a call for Asians to write about their experiences and for illustrators to create more accurate representations of Asian Americans. Since that time, many Asian-American authors have met with mainstream success, and authors and illustrators have created a more accurate picture of the Asian-American experience.

Although Kira-Kira is Cynthia Kadohata’s first novel for young readers, the issues she raises and her narrative style bear many similarities to her previously published works of adult fiction, especially The Floating World. Critics often read her works in the context of Asian American literature published in the United States since the 1990s, especially in reference to gender, nationality, and identity. Kadohata’s first novel, The Floating World (1989), is a kind of road drama featuring a Japanese American family’s attempt to find a place of their own.

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Like Kira-Kira, The Floating World is set in the 1950s and narrated by a Japanese American girl, who recounts her family’s experiences while traveling through the United States in search of good jobs and a home. While they are always included within the Asian American canon, other critics have read Kadohata’s works as postmodern texts because of their emphasis on how gender affects society. Critics note that Kadohata utilizes mother-daughter relationships to emphasize changing views on womanhood in the Asian American community, like other Asian American writers such as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and R. A. Sasaki. Critics often cite Kadohata’s approachable writing style and characterization as an important reason for the uniform critical and popular success of Kira-Kira A review in The Christian Century called Kadohata’s writing ‘‘extraordinary.’’ In School Library Journal, Ashley Larsen notes, ‘‘All of the characters are believable and well developed, especially Katie. . . . Girls will relate to and empathize with the appealing protagonist.’’ Hazel Rochman of Booklist includes Kira-Kira among her top ten historical novels for children and young adults, citing its ‘‘plain, beautiful prose.’’ Winner of the 2005 John Newbery Medal for outstanding writing, KiraKira was praised by Award Committee Chair Susan Faust in Kadohata, Henkes win Newbery, Caldecott Medals’’ as ‘‘a narrative that radiates hope from the inside out.’’

CRITICISM Peter Menard Menard teaches comparative literature. In this essay, Menard considers Kadohata’s book in relation to current debates within American and multicultural literature. Although it is a novel intended for young readers, Kadohata’s Kira-Kira can be read within the author’s entire body of work, which consists primarily of novels for an adult audience. Kira-Kira explores many of the same themes and issues that are present in all of Kadohata’s novels. It is also representative of the debates occurring within American and multicultural literature. In the 1960s, American literature began to move toward inclusion of ethnic, religious, and

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THE AMBIGUITIES THAT EMERGE IN THE EFFORT TO REWRITE AMERICAN LITERATURE AND MAKE IT MORE INCLUSIVE REQUIRE US TO THINK AGAIN AND MORE CAREFULLY ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN.’’

racial groups that had been left out of a traditionally ‘‘white’’ canon. As a result of the experiences of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement, Americans looked for ways to redefine themselves. African Americans, Jewish Americans, and other groups whose experiences had largely been absent from the literary scene began to appear as both authors and characters to tell their stories. Many of these stories focused on the exclusion minorities had endured and their integration into the wider American community. According to Gilbert H. Muller in New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction, the Immigration Act of 1965 was part of a body of legislation and other social forces that helped to rewrite ‘‘the epic of America’’ in ways that emphasized the ‘‘polyglot, multicultural, and transnational’’ (quoted in Klinkowitz). This new epic was an idealized vision of an integrated nation—America as a melting pot of languages, traditions, customs, and ideologies. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, some critics began to question this melting-pot model. These critics saw the multicultural vision as problematic not only because it supposed that the melting pot experience was possible, but because it also made the very notions of identity and difference hard to sustain. If integration relies on the idea of an all-encompassing American identity, what happens to the differences that excluded groups have used to define themselves? That is, what happens to the distinctive features—such as languages, traditions, customs, and religious practices—that made those groups’ differences visible, unique, and valuable? The ambiguities that emerge in the effort to rewrite American literature and make it more inclusive require us to think again and more carefully about what it means to be an American.

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The issues surrounding American ethnic literature are also tied to broader debates in postcolonial studies, a school of criticism that analyzes clashes between cultures and examines mechanisms of oppression and resistance. This school of thought argues that people do not necessarily identify themselves in terms of the places in which they live. For example, in KiraKira, Mrs. Muramoto holds a New Year’s Eve party that features traditional Japanese customs and rituals. Katie says, ‘‘New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese.’’ Though Mrs. Muramoto and the Takeshimas live in America and adopt many ‘‘American’’ ways of life, they identify themselves culturally as Japanese and maintain important Japanese traditions in their American lives. Kira-Kira illustrates many of the ambiguities present in the debates mentioned above. The narrator is a young girl born in Iowa, but her frame of reference—the way in which she views the world—is colored by the language, traditions, and customs of Japan. This is largely because her parents are kibei, which means that they were born in the United States but educated in Japan. The characters of Japanese descent in the novel are defined primarily in cultural terms, that is, they are described in the context of their customs, traditions, myths, and folklore. However, the American characters are defined exclusively in racial terms as white. There are no other non-white ethnicities in Kira-Kira. Because race is the only feature used to describe the other American characters, the novel lacks the cultural components that would define what it means to be anything but a Japanese American. There is never any mention in the novel of ‘‘white’’ traditions, customs, or history; there are only descriptions of how, with few exceptions, whites exclude or look down upon those who are not white. Lynn, the narrator’s sister, presents the conflict concisely as ‘‘us versus them’’: ‘‘Haven’t you noticed that Mom and Dad’s only friends are Japanese? . . . That’s because the rest of the people are ignoring them. They think we’re like doormats—or ants or something!’’ Now she was really angry. . . . She suddenly reached out and hugged [Katie] to her. ‘‘You tell me if anybody treats you like that, and I’ll take care of it!’’

Katie’s sister, Japanese people do not exist for white people, or if they do, they occupy a low position in the social hierarchy. This dynamic makes it difficult to group Kira-Kira within so-called multicultural texts, given that it is only the Japanese who are given a central and valued place in the cultural context of the novel, and the rest of the characters are viewed largely as a menace. When whites are portrayed in a positive manner in the novel, there is often mention of what makes them different from and less admirable than the Japanese characters. The reader can see this as Katie recounts her friendship with Silly, a girl she meets when she accompanies her mother to the processing plant. Silly works part-time at the poultry plant because her uncle makes her earn her own money for school clothes. Katie thinks this is strange and reflects that even though her own parents are poor, they buy her all the school clothes she needs. In pointing out this difference, the narrative implies a judgment about families that fail to help their children in this way. By comparison, Katie’s family stands out as exemplary. Silly’s case also points to the question of class differences in the novel. The discussion of class is based on extremes and stereotypes: the rich characters are evil, while the poor characters are morally upright and worthy of esteem. This characterization of class differences is further complicated by the fact that the rich characters are mostly white. The only white character who cannot be explained in these simplistic terms is Hank Garvin, the man who helps Katie take Sammy to the hospital after he catches his foot in an animal trap. The treatment of class in the novel suffers as a result of this idea that poverty is synonymous with moral virtue. This presupposition threatens the very premise of the novel: a family’s quest for the American dream, which presupposes social and economic advancement.

Lynn’s statement illustrates the way that the Japanese characters in Kira-Kira view white people as a homogenous force threatening their existence as Japanese Americans. According to

Criticism that favors a multicultural perspective is also concerned with the treatment of gender in literature. Gender-based criticism focuses on how males and females are represented, the places they occupy in the community, and their views on sexuality. Before multicultural perspectives became more common, Asian women were often portrayed as exotic objects without voices of their own, and the male point of view predominated. Kira-Kira dismantles this idea. The novel shows how different life

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experiences lead all the women in the novel to acquire voices of their own and become independent individuals who do not depend on men to determine their destinies. Mrs. Takeshima, the mother, exemplifies this point. At the beginning of the novel she is described in stereotypical terms as a ‘‘delicate, rare, and beautiful flower,’’ a fragile person who wishes only for quiet. As the novel progresses, her life-changing experiences—being forced to work under humiliating conditions to support her family, living through the illness and death of her eldest child, and adapting to life in Georgia—teach Mrs. Takeshima to speak for herself. This change has a significant impact on her family and community. Mrs. Takeshima’s transformation is spurred by the prospect of unionization at the poultry processing plant where she works. Initially, she vehemently opposes unionization and sides with the owners because she is afraid of losing her job. However, Mrs. Takeshima attends a union meeting at the end of the novel after Katie tells her:

them say that, because I’d thought it was I who’d taken care of them after Lynn died. But they seemed to think that they had taken care of me.’’

‘‘The union wants to give the factory workers three days off with pay for grief leave, like if a family member dies.’’ [Mrs. Takeshima] pursed her lips and looked at me severely. ‘‘It’s a little late for that,’’ she said. My mother didn’t say anything more. But when the union vote was held the next week, the union won by one vote. That was a surprise, because everyone had expected it to lose by one vote. My mother seemed pleased that the union had won, so I knew how she’d voted.

In the following essay, Wood reviews Kira-Kira, and asserts that Kadohata’s fiction style is similar to that of a memoir.

Mrs. Takeshima’s new-found voice mirrors the changed status that Katie, the narrator, acquires after her sister’s death. At the beginning of the novel, Katie happily lives in Lynn’s shadow and is willing to follow her sister anywhere. Katie is devastated when Lynn dies, but handles her grief by assuming a new role as the oldest daughter and sister in the family:

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The whole family is grief-stricken and each blames him or herself for not being able to save Lynn; it is Katie who assumes responsibility for realizing Lynn’s dream to visit the California coast. In fulfilling her sister’s wish she is able to both mourn and celebrate her, giving her and her family the willpower to go on living. The transformation that she undergoes presents a clear challenge to stereotypical views of Asian women. In spite of its broad generalizations, challenges to stereotypical American identity are the beating heart of Kira-Kira. As the debate over America’s literary canon continues, it is clear that contributions like Kira-Kira are helping to rewrite the ‘‘epic of America.’’ Source: Peter Menard, Critical Essay on Kira-Kira, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Sarah A. Wood

Kira-Kira is a Japanese word that describes things that glitter. It is Katie Takeshima’s first word taught to her by her older sister Lynn as they lie in the empty road outside their house looking at the stars. Lynn teaches Katie everything worth knowing. When their family moves from their Japanese community in Iowa to Georgia, Lynn is the one who must explain why some of the other children won’t talk to them at school.

I was worried that her spirit was watching me every time I cried. I was worried that if she saw me crying, she would be very unhappy and maybe she wouldn’t be able to leave the earth the way she was supposed to. So even though I wanted her to keep watching me, I wished she would forget about me and never see me crying and never worry about me anymore, even if that meant I was now alone.

The setting is 1950s Georgia. Katie’s parents are American-born Japanese, but that doesn’t change attitudes toward the family. Her mom and dad work in a poultry processing plant, in conditions typical of factories in the mid-1950s. Factory workers wear thick pads beneath their uniforms because they aren’t allowed to take breaks to use the bathroom. Workers suffer permanent injury from long hours of performing the same tasks. They aren’t given time off for sickness or family emergencies. Attempts to organize a union lead to beatings and other repercussions.

Katie assumes the role of family caretaker in the wake of Lynn’s death. After her parents give her Lynn’s diary, she discovers that they waited to give it to her because they though it would be too upsetting. Katie says, ‘‘It was odd to hear

When Katie asks her mother about unions, her mother responds, ‘‘A union is when all the workers get together and fight the very people who have provided them with a job . . . It’s wrong to fight the people who are trying to

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Sherry Garland’s Shadow of the Dragon (1993) is the story of Danny Vo, a high school sophomore trying to resolve the conflict between his Vietnamese refugee family’s values and his new American way of life. Kadohata’s first novel, The Floating World (1989), is a young girl’s story of her family’s travels across the United States in search of work. The experiences of Japanese Americans in the 1950s are the principal focus of this book. Finding My Voice (1992), by Marie G. Lee, focuses on Ellen, a young woman who is growing up in a small Minnesota town. Her Korean parents pressure her to go to Harvard, while her classmates and some teachers create pressure with their racism, both subtle and overt. Ellen must learn to cope with these challenges.

explores the feeling of being torn between two countries.

Lois Lowry’s A Summer to Die (1984) also deals with the death of an older sister and a younger sibling’s struggle to cope with the situation. Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey (1993) won the 1994 Caldecott Award. In this novel, a Japanese American man recounts his grandfather’s journey to America and

help you.’’ Katie’s mother is afraid of losing one of the few jobs available to Japanese-Americans. Through the family’s struggle to raise money for a home, it is Lynn who is always providing the link between the old and the new and helping the family to understand the process of assimilation. But when she gets sick, the family begins to fall apart. It is up to Katie to take on the role of big sister and eldest daughter.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) is the story of eight Chinese women. Four are mothers, each forced to leave China for a different reason; the other four are their daughters, each of whom faces a different set of problems in her everyday life. Each chapter is presented from a different woman’s point of view. The most important character is Jing Mei ‘‘June’’ Woo, the daughter of the woman who started the Joy Luck Club. She is asked to join the club and play mah jong with her adoptive aunts after her mother dies.

Child of the Owl (1977), by Laurence Yep, is the story of a young girl named Casey, who has lived on the road with her gambling father. She is eventually forced to move in with her grandmother in Chinatown. Although she is Chinese American, she knows nothing about her Chinese heritage, and her grandmother begins to teach her about the Chinese culture and way of life. Casey learns about Chinese culture, her dead mother’s life, and her own personal history.

The conditions in post-war factories are true; in some places they still exist. The struggles of an American-born Japanese family are true, and the limitations placed on the family are still experienced by many immigrant families in this country. And the relationships in this book are true, especially the bond between Katie and her sister Lynn.

Cynthia Kadohata is clearly a gifted writer. Her prose sparkles with a specificity that makes Kira-Kira read more like a memoir than fiction. There are many things in the book that are true.

Early in the book Lynn tells her sister, ‘‘The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but seethrough both at the same time.’’ She adds that water and people’s eyes have the same quality.

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Chicken farm in Santa Cruz, CA, 1913 Santa Cruz Public Libraries

Good fiction can also have this quality of depth and transparency; Kira-Kira certainly does. Source: Sarah A Wood, ‘‘Review: Kira-Kira,’’ in KidsReads.com, February 2004, p. 1.

Susan Faust In this excerpt, Faust talks to Kadohata about how her experience as a Japanese-American growing up in the South influenced her writing and her Newbery Award-winning novel, Kira-Kira. It was four in the morning on the West Coast, and Cynthia Kadohata’s phone was ringing. This had better not be bad news or a crank caller. Kadohata’s boyfriend grabbed the receiver, listened to the excited librarian on the line from Boston, and passed the phone to her. The next moment, Kadohata was leaping up and down: her first children’s book, Kira-Kira (S & S, 2004), had just won the Newbery Medal, the nation’s most prestigious award for young people’s literature. Since 1981, her than the appeared

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Kadohata began writing fiction in career has had more ups and downs Grand Tetons. Her short stories in The New Yorker. The New York

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Times praised the ‘‘beautiful, clean yet lyrical prose’’ of her first novel, The Floating World (Viking, 1989). And two years later, she won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a $30,000 grant given to a writer of exceptional promise. Then, suddenly, her career hit the skids. Kadohata’s second novel, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Viking, 1992), met with mixed reviews. Her third, The Glass Mountains (White Wolf, 1995), was virtually snubbed. By the late-’90s, the one-time wunderkind was all but forgotten, working as a secretary at a food-processing plant and struggling to write screenplays. An old friend suggested she write for kids. Kadohata resisted, but her friend—Caitlyn Dlouhy, now an editor at Simon & Schuster’s Atheneum Books for Young Readers—persisted. Giving in to Dlouhy’s suggestion turned out to be the best career move Kadohata ever made. Kira-Kira (‘‘glittering’’ in Japanese) tells the tender story of a Japanese-American family that moves from Iowa to rural Georgia in the 1950s. The quiet novel radiates hope as its narrator, young Katie Takeshima, recounts her parents’

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I DIDN’T REALLY THINK THAT I COULD DO IT. IT SEEMED LIKE A WHOLE OTHER WORLD.’’

my brother when he was born, because they had never seen a Japanese baby before. And I had a very heavy Southern accent when I was a little girl. I used to be a really huge taco eater. There’s one point in the story when the sister dies, and Katie eats five tacos. That was definitely something I would have done as a child. Do you have an older sister?

struggles to earn a living and her older sister’s battle with lymphoma. Like Katie, Kadohata was born in the Midwest to Japanese-American parents. She grew up in small-town Arkansas and Georgia, where her father, like Katie’s, worked long hours in a chicken-processing plant. Kadohata spent her teen years in Los Angeles and studied journalism at the University of Southern California and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. Now 48, she and her 20-month-old son, Sammy (whom she adopted from Kazakhstan), live in Long Beach, CA, where we caught up with her. What was your reaction when you found out that Kira-Kira had won? It was just complete, pure, uncomplicated joy. I kept screaming. I’m in my pajamas and robe, and I’m jumping up and down. Sammy didn’t know what was going on. Caitlyn called shortly after I hung up, and then we both screamed. I heard she convinced you to write for kids by sending you a box of children’s books. Why were you so resistant? I didn’t really think that I could do it. It seemed like a whole other world. And then when I read the books, I realized that it’s exactly the same process whether you’re writing for kids or grown-ups. I thought, ‘‘Hey, I should try this.’’ How did the idea for Kira-Kira originate? Maybe with my father, because he worked really hard and many, many long hours. Then came the voice of the girl, Katie. When I’m writing a first-person novel, that ‘‘I’’—that word alone—feels like it does something in my brain; it makes it seem like it’s really me. What events in the story are based on your own life? The feeling of intensity in the family was very real. There are also a few details that are true. Everybody in the hospital did come to see

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I do, and she is still alive. She took care of us a lot, even though she is only a year and a half older than me. She had a maternal quality about her even then. So I always looked up to her. When I told her what the book was about, she got mad at me. I guess she thought that I was ‘‘secretly hostile toward her.’’ Then, after she read it, she was happy. What was it like to be Japanese American in the South during the 1950s and ’60s? We fit in by not fitting into it, by being part of a very small community. When we went to a party, it was almost always with a group of other Japanese or Japanese Americans who worked as chicken sexers, separating male and female chicks in the hatchery. I remember a little girl asking me something like, ‘‘Are you black or white?’’ I really stumbled for an answer. I said, ‘‘I don’t know.’’ Do you remember the first story you ever wrote? When I was 17, I wrote the most idiotic story in the world. It was about all these ducks that had only one leg. They lived on another planet and were a metaphor for humans. I actually sent that story to The Atlantic Monthly and, of course, immediately got a rejection. I don’t think I wrote anything again until I was in college, when I wrote for the school newspaper. When did you get serious about writing fiction? In 1981 or 1982, I started sending short stories to both The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. I wrote 20 to 40 stories, and I got rejections for all of them. But I got letters back that were encouraging, so I kept writing. I remember in 1986, right before I sold my first story to The New Yorker, I told a friend that I didn’t think I was ever going to sell a story; I wondered if I should stop writing. About three weeks later, I got a phone call from an editor at The New Yorker. How did you come up with the title KiraKira?

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Actually, the first title was ‘‘I Wish.’’ Then I played around with another Japanese word, pika-pika. It basically means ‘‘glittering,’’ as well, but a slightly different kind of glittering. It sounds sharper, and so at some point, I thought it just wasn’t the right word. I didn’t know the word kira-kira. Someone who was born in Japan ran a bunch of words by me, and that was one of them. Some people said that either pika-pika or kira-kira would do fine. Then I heard about a commercial in Japan about a toilet-bowl cleaner that goes pika-pika. The toilet gets so clean that it’s shining. That was the beginning of the end for pika-pika. What do you think of when you hear the word kira-kira? Stars. Fireflies. I think the title itself stands for hope in the end. It’s definitely the right word. Source: Susan Faust, ‘‘The Comeback Kid,’’ in School Library Journal, May 1, 2005, p. 38.

SOURCES ‘‘Kadohata, Henkes win Newbery, Caldecott Medals,’’ in American Library Association, www.ala.org (January 17, 2005). Chiu, Monica, ‘‘(Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Writing ,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2, 1998, pp. 407–10. ‘‘Review of Kira-Kira,’’ in The Christian Century, Vol. 121, No. 25, December 14, 2004, p. 24. Chuh, Kandace, ‘‘Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity and the Body ,’’ in Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 337–39. Harris, Violet and Others, ‘‘Multi Cultural Literature,’’ in Language Arts, Vol 70, No. 3, March 1993, pp. 215–24.

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Klinkowitz, Jerome, ‘‘Fiction: The 1960s to the Present,’’ in Symploke, Vol. 12, No. 1–2, 2004, pp. 174–87. Larsen, Ashley, ‘‘Review of Kira-Kira,’’ in School Library Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3, March 2004, pp. 214–15. Ling, Amy, ‘‘Teaching Asian American Literature,’’ Georgetown University’s Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures, www.georgetown.edu/tamlit (July 7, 2005). Muller, Gilbert H., New Strangers in Paradise. The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction , University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Rochman, Hazel, ‘‘Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth,’’ in Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 18, May 15, 2004, p. 1630.

FURTHER READING Brown Diggs, Nancy, Steel Butterflies, State University of New York Press, 1998. This book compares women’s roles in Japan with women’s roles in the United States. The topics discussed include education, ethics, life in the United States, and the past and future status of women in Japan. The book examines family life, women’s responsibilities in the home, women’s community involvement in the United States and in Japan, aspects of Japanese culture that have been kept alive in America, and the experiences of JapaneseAmerican children.

Zia, Helen, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. This is a detailed and personal account of the formation of the Asian American community, which extends from the first major wave of immigration to Gold Mountain (as the Chinese dubbed America during the gold rush) to the recent influx of Southeast Asians, who have nearly doubled the Asian American population in America since 1975.

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The Kite Runner The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini was published in 2003. Initially published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin, The Kite Runner was said to be the first novel written in English by an Afghan writer, and the book appeared on many book club reading lists. The novel is set in Afghanistan from the late 1970s to 1981 and the start of the Soviet occupation, then in the Afghan community in Fremont, California from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and finally in contemporary Afghanistan during the Taliban regime.

KHALED HOSSEINI 2003

The Kite Runner is the story of strained family relationships between a father and a son, and between two brothers, how they deal with guilt and forgiveness, and how they weather the political and social transformations of Afghanistan from the 1970s to 2001. The Kite Runner opens in 2001. The adult narrator, Amir, lives in San Francisco and is contemplating his past, thinking about a boyhood friend whom he has betrayed. The action of the story then moves backward in time to the narrator’s early life in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he is the only child of a privileged merchant. Amir’s closest friend is his playmate and servant Hassan, a poor illiterate boy who is a member of the Hazara ethnic minority. The Kite Runner, a coming-of-age novel, deals with the themes of identity, loyalty, courage, and deception. As the protagonist Amir grows to adulthood, he must come to terms

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with his past wrongs and adjust to a new culture after leaving Afghanistan for the United States. The novel sets the interpersonal drama of the characters against the backdrop of the modern history of Afghanistan, sketching the political and economic toll of the instability of various regimes in Afghanistan; from the end of the monarchy to the Soviet-backed government of the 1980s to the fundamentalist Taliban government of the 1990s. The action closes soon after the fall of the Taliban and alludes to the rise of Hamid Karzai as leader of a new Afghan government in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the setting of much of the action in The Kite Runner. Hosseini and his family moved to Paris in 1976, then immigrated to the United States in 1980 as refugees with political asylum. Hosseini’s parents, a former diplomat and a teacher, settled in San Jose, California, where they subsisted on welfare until his father, working odd jobs, managed to independently support the family. Hosseini received a biology degree in 1988 from Santa Clara University and a medical degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1993. As of 2005, he is a practicing physician, specializing in internal medicine in Northern California. Hosseini published several stories before writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, which was based on an earlier short story of the same title. As a doctor with an active practice and many patients, Hosseini struggled to find time to expand the story, so he wrote the novel piecemeal in the early morning hours. Hosseini contends that treating patients made him a keen observer of people and the ways they express themselves, both verbally and nonverbally. In 2004, Hosseini was selected by the Young Adult Library Services Association to receive an Alex Award, an honor given to the authors of the ten best adult books for teenagers published in the previous year. Also in 2004, he was given the Original Voices award by the Borders Group, and The Kite Runner was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His next novel, entitled Dreaming in Titanic City, is slated for publication in 2006.

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Khaled Hosseini Ó Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission

PLOT SUMMARY Chapters 1–5 The Kite Runner opens in December 2001. The narrator, Amir, meditates on the past, recalling a walk in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and alludes to a more distant moment of crisis in 1976. The narrator considers the way that the past has a way of returning despite one’s efforts to forget it. He mentions the names of several characters slated to appear in later chapters. After this opening, the novel uses a flashback, a device through which the narrator tells about events that happened before the present action of the story. This flashback lasts for many chapters, returning the reader, near the end of the novel, to 2001, the time in which the first chapter is set. The first five chapters sketch the details of Amir’s childhood in Kabul, his daily life with his friend and servant Hassan in his father’s large house, and his burgeoning interest in literature. Hassan and his father live on Amir’s father’s property in a separate servant’s house. They are members of a minority ethnic group in Afghanistan known as the Hazara. Victims of casual discrimination by the privileged classes, the Hazara in The Kite Runner

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are derided for their appearance and generally live as second-class citizens. However, Hassan and his father Ali, servants in Baba’s household, are treated fairly well as members of the family. Ali has known Baba for decades and Hassan and Amir, despite their differences in ethnicity and status, are constant playmates. As if to further emphasize the differences between them, Hassan has a birth defect, a harelip, which gives him the appearance of constantly smiling. The reader sees the relationship between the young Amir and Hassan in several crucial scenes. The most important of these depicts an encounter between the two friends and a group of older bullies led by Assef, a half-German, half-Afghan boy who accuses Amir of being a traitor to the Pashtun ethnicity by playing with a Hazara boy. While Amir is paralyzed with fear, Hassan ignores the racist insults and drives the bullies away by threatening them with his slingshot. Assef and his minions retreat, but not before Assef threatens revenge.

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surviving competitors become fewer and fewer. These detailed descriptions of the practice and strategies of kite-fighting and kite-running lead into a flashback that showcases Hassan’s uncanny talent at running down fallen kites. Encouraged by his father, Amir decides to compete seriously in the kite-fighting competition, in part because he genuinely enjoys the sport, but mostly because he hopes to earn his father’s admiration by winning the tournament.

The narrator meditates on the fun times Amir and Hassan enjoy during the wintertime and describes the events leading up to the 1975 kite tournament in Kabul. Amir describes the annual kite festival, the strategy of kite-fighting, and the importance of ‘‘kite runners’’ like Hassan, who retrieve the kites cut down by the razor-sharp strings of victorious kites as the

On the morning of the kite tournament, Hassan relates a strange dream he has had in which he and Amir swim out into Ghargha Lake, which is said to be inhabited by a terrible monster. In this dream they swim out and return unharmed, despite the dozens of onlookers on the shore warning them to return. Although Amir, irritable from a restless night’s sleep, dismisses the dream, it proves prophetic. The narration shows the reader the excitement and festivity of the streets on the day of the kite tournament as well as the seriousness of the competitors. Amir’s extreme nervousness is compounded by the knowledge that his father is finally supporting him and plans to watch the tournament from his rooftop. Tensions between father and son are so strained that Amir actually wonders whether, if he loses, his father might take pleasure in his defeat. Nevertheless, Amir performs admirably, making many impressive tactical maneuvers until his and another kite are the only two remaining. Amir cuts the last kite out of the sky and sees his father on the roof cheering for him. He also shares the moment of victory with Hassan, who promises to run after the last defeated kite. Hassan is eager to help his friend by retrieving the prize: ‘‘For you a thousand times over!’’ Hassan finds the fallen kite, but is chased by some other boys. Amir follows some noises to an alley off the bazaar where, undetected himself, he discovers a horrific scene: Assef, Kamal, and Wali threaten to take the kite from Hassan; Hassan, unable to fight them off, is raped by Assef while Assef’s friends hold him down. Rather than step in and fight Hassan’s attackers, Amir freezes, remains hidden, and eventually runs away in fear. After the rape, Hassan finds Amir in the street and they return home with the kite without discussing the attack at all, although Hassan is visibly distraught. Amir returns home to a hero’s welcome from his father and his father’s friends.

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The novel details the increasingly turbulent political developments in Afghanistan. As Amir and Hassan grow up, dreaming of being Rostan and Sohrab, the heroes of the Afghan heroic legend the Shahnammah, the events of history invade their world of stories and play. Amir and Hassan get a taste of how politics can affect daily life when they hear gunfire in the streets. Although Ali tells the boys that it is only the sound of fireworks, these sounds foreshadow, or look ahead to, the overthrow of the monarchy by a military coup. Meanwhile, Amir and Hassan continue to play together, but Amir often feels jealous of the attention that Hassan receives from Baba, who treats Hassan less like a servant than like a family member. Indeed, for Hassan’s birthday, Baba pays a surgeon to perform an operation to correct his harelip. As Hassan is healing from his surgery, Amir sees him gingerly smile with his new mouth, an observation that foreshadows tragic events to come.

Chapters 6–7

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Chapters 8–9 Hassan becomes extremely remote, performing his household duties invisibly and avoiding Amir entirely. Neither Amir nor Hassan reveal to Baba what has happened; Amir tries to avoid thinking of his failure to protect his friend. Against the backdrop of this guilt, Amir takes advantage of the opportunity to enjoy his father’s company, now that his father is publicly and unreservedly proud of his accomplishment in the kite tournament. Still, Amir harbors some jealousy when Baba expresses concern for Hassan after noticing that the other boy is withdrawn. Ali reports that Hassan has been ill. Amir’s newfound closeness with his father proves tenuous when Amir, unable to face his guilt about Hassan, suggests that Baba look for new servants to replace Ali and Hassan. Baba angrily rejects the suggestion, insisting that they are not just servants but part of the family. Baba throws a massive celebration in honor of Amir’s thirteenth birthday in the summer of 1976, during which Amir is forced to exchange pleasantries with Assef, who comes to the party accompanied by his parents and bearing a peculiar gift: a biography of Hitler. Unable to bear the festivities, Amir retreats to a quiet place where Rahim Khan finds him, talks to him, and gives him a special gift—a notebook in which to write his stories.

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fearlessness for which he is admired by risking his life to save a woman from rape by a Russian soldier at a checkpoint.

After the party, Amir’s room is piled with unsolicited tributes of both gifts and cash. Overwhelmed with gifts and praise and haunted by guilt, he takes some of the money and a brand new watch and plants them in Hassan’s bed. Unable to bear the false implication that Hassan has stolen from Amir and Baba, Ali and Hassan leave the house in Kabul. While Amir is aware that he is causing great pain to others, including his father who seems devastated by their departure, he does nothing to correct the falsehood he created.

After a sojourn in Pakistan, Amir and his father go to Fremont, California, an area where many other Afghan immigrants have settled. There they have a modest life, living in small apartments. Baba works, Amir studies, and they go to the Saturday flea market to sell their wares alongside other Afghan immigrants. Baba, unable to adjust to life in the United States, works at a gas station so that Amir can go to school and enter college. Meanwhile, Amir helps to smooth over his father’s conflicts with American culture and enjoys his remoteness from a painful past. He falls in love with a young Afghan woman named Soraya Taheri, whom he gets to know at the Saturday swap meets. He asks Baba to ‘‘go khastegari’’ for him, to ask Soraya’s father for her hand in marriage. Meanwhile, Baba, a lifelong smoker, is diagnosed with cancer. Turning down chemotherapy and radiation, he forbids Amir to speak of his illness. Though his cancer has spread alarmingly, he helps Amir perform the traditional Afghan courtship and engagement ceremonies. When Soraya and her father agree to the union, the couple forgoes the traditional long engagement period, knowing that Baba does not have long to live. Baba dies one month after they are married. Amir becomes acquainted with his wife’s family and learns of disagreements between Soraya and her father, particularly relating to the double standards of Afghan gender politics. Amir and Soraya move to a new apartment. Amir works on his writing while Soraya studies to become a teacher. In 1989, just after the Soviets leave Afghanistan, Amir publishes his first novel, a story of a father and son in Kabul. The couple’s happiness is spoiled only by their discovery that they cannot conceive a child.

Chapters 10–13

Chapters 14–16

Taking place six years later, these chapters begin with the traumatic political transition to the Soviet-backed Communist regime of Afghanistan during the 1980s and explain Amir and Baba’s declining fortunes under the new order. In 1981, Amir and his father are compelled to leave everything behind and flee the country for Peshawar, Pakistan inside the tank of a fuel truck, with dozens of other refugees. During this escape, Baba again demonstrates the

Amir and Soraya buy a house in San Francisco. In 2001, Amir gets a call from Baba’s old friend Rahim Khan, who is ill and living in Pakistan. Disturbed by memories of the past he has tried to forget, Amir plans his trip to Pakistan to see him. He considers Rahim Khan’s suggestion that by coming to Pakistan he may have a chance to redeem himself. Arriving in Peshawar, Amir goes immediately to the shabby room where a frail and sickly Rahim Khan is

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staying in the city’s Afghan Town. In his account of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, Rahim Khan describes the violence and factionalism of the Northern Alliance rule from 1992 until 1996. He explains how Afghans saw the 1996 takeover by the Taliban as a harbinger of peace and order, little knowing the repression the Taliban would bring. Rahim Khan tells Amir that he is dying and tells him that Hassan, Amir’s boyhood friend and servant, lived with him in Kabul in Baba’s old house. Told from the point of view of Rahim Khan—the only chapter not from Amir’s point of view—Chapter 16 is another extended flashback that recounts Rahim Khan’s life in Kabul after Amir and Baba went into exile. Living by himself in Baba’s house, Rahim Khan becomes lonely, as more and more of his friends flee the country. In the late 1980s, during the era of the Soviet-backed government, Rahim Khan goes to a small village in Hazajarat to seek out Hassan and to ask him to bring his young wife Farzana back to Kabul to live with him and to help take care of the house. Hassan agrees to the arrangement, settling with Farzana in the old servants’ house of his boyhood. Hassan’s long-lost mother Sanaubar, who ran away in 1964, reappears, abused and starving. After nursing Sanaubar back to relative health, Hassan and Farzana have a baby boy whom they name Sohrab after the Afghan heroic tale of Rostam and Sohrab. In 1995, when Sohrab is four years old, Sanaubar dies. During the infighting and instability of the Northern Alliance period, when Kabul is sectioned off and ruled by competing groups, the little family nevertheless maintains a peaceful haven amid the chaos. Young Sohrab learns to read and attends the winter kite tournament with his father Hassan. The 1996 Taliban takeover leads to repression and violence: the Taliban bans Kabul’s traditional kite tournament and massacres the Hazara population of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Chapters 17–24 Following Rahim Khan’s first-person account, he hands Amir a letter from Hassan and a photograph of Hassan as a young man. After reading it, Amir learns that Hassan and his wife have been executed by the Taliban. The fate of their young son Sohrab is unknown. Furthermore, Rahim Khan reveals, Hassan is not only Amir’s former servant and friend, but his half brother, the offspring of Amir’s father

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and Hassan’s mother Sanaubar. Stunned by these revelations, Amir thinks about his father’s decades-long deception and tries to absorb the fact that Hassan was his brother all along. Though initially overcome by fear, Amir decides to travel to Afghanistan to rescue Hassan’s son Sohrab. Car sick and feeling estranged from the country of his childhood, Amir re-enters Afghanistan, led by his tough-talking guide and driver, Farid. Armed with Afghani currency and a picture of Sohrab and Hassan, Amir also wears a false beard to shield him from the Taliban’s prying eyes. Farid, suspicious of his apparently pampered ‘‘American’’ passenger, updates Amir about the current state of affairs in his home country and awakens Amir to the fact that his class privilege has always shielded him from the reality of life as experienced by most Afghans. Despite Farid’s initial suspicion of Amir’s motives, he decides to help Amir find and rescue Sohrab. Farid drives Amir from Jalalabad, past villages destroyed by the Taliban to the city of Kabul, which, Farid informs him, is much changed. Despite this warning, Amir is shocked when they enter the city and see the signs of destruction and poverty everywhere. Amir has a frightening close encounter with the Taliban who roam the streets in pickup trucks looking for violations of the strict Shari’a law. A beggar who was a former university professor tells Amir the location of the orphanage where he hopes to find Sohrab. From Zaman, a beleaguered orphanage director, Amir and Farid learn that Sohrab has been taken away by a powerful Taliban official who is most likely sexually abusing the boy. Zaman tells them they can find the official at a soccer exhibition. Farid and Amir go to the soccer stadium, where, with the rest of the crowd, they witness a double execution by stoning. Following Shari’a law, the Taliban have sentenced a man and a woman to death for adultery. Before Amir’s horrified gaze, a tall charismatic man in white robes appears, raising his arms in response to the roaring crowd, and personally stones the offenders to death. The Taliban official who throws the stones turns out to be the man the orphanage director described. Frightened and disgusted by what they have just seen, Amir and Farid nevertheless arrange to visit this official. At the official’s compound, Amir discovers that the high-ranking Talib is none other than

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Assef, Hassan’s attacker from decades before. Assef behaves erratically, and Amir observes the marks of a heroin addiction on his arms. Assef boasts about his participation in the 1998 massacre of Hazara people in Mazar-e-Sharif, announcing that the violence was ordained by God. Assef calls Sohrab into the room to meet Amir, and tells Amir he remembers him from their childhood in Kabul. Assef forces Sohrab, who is costumed like a dancing girl, to perform for Amir and his guards. Amir confronts Assef, demanding that he turn over Sohrab. Assef sends his guards out of the room and challenges Amir to fight for the right to take Sohrab away. A long, violent fight between Amir and Assef ends when Sohrab uses his slingshot to blind Assef. Amir and Sohrab manage to escape in Farid’s waiting car. Amir’s injuries from the battle are so grave that he passes out and remains unconscious for two days. He awakens in a hospital in Pakistan, where he thanks a shy and reserved Sohrab for saving his life with the slingshot. Days later, the search for the charity that was to have taken in Sohrab turns out to be fruitless. Rahim Khan himself has disappeared, leaving for Amir only a letter and a key to a safedeposit box.

Chapters 24–25 With no one else to take care of him, Sohrab accompanies Amir to Islamabad, where they go to escape Taliban spies who may be searching for them in Peshawar. Amir asks Sohrab if he would like to come to America to live with him and his wife. Sohrab agrees only when Amir promises never to place him in an orphanage. Amir calls Soraya to ask her to consent to the arrangement. She agrees, but a consultation with a U.S. Embassy official reveals bureaucratic obstacles. An immigration lawyer advises a new course of action, namely, to put Sohrab in a Pakistan orphanage for a year until he can be officially declared an orphan. When Sohrab learns of this plan, he attempts suicide. At the same time, Amir learns from Soraya that a relative who works for the Immigration and Nationalization Service has arranged for a humanitarian visa with which Sohrab can enter the United States immediately. Amir waits for the outcome of the emergency surgery that he prays will save Sohrab’s life. In the urgency of the moment, Amir prays to God for the first time in fifteen years, experiencing a sudden renewal of his Muslim faith. Sohrab survives. After several

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Simon and Schuster released the audio book version of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini in 2003. The author reads the audio book version. In audio form, the novel runs twelve hours and spans eight cassette tapes or eleven CDs.

days’ vigil in the hospital, Amir tells Sohrab about the humanitarian visa. Sohrab decides to go to the United States, but his depression is so profound that he does not speak for a year. His silent remoteness persists for months—through the aftermath of September 11, 2001, including the Taliban’s defeat and the emergence of Hamid Karzai. The novel closes at an Afghan community gathering in Fremont, California in 2002. Amir buys a traditional Afghan kite, complete with glass string, and flies it with Sohrab, eliciting a faint smile from Sohrab, who remembers flying kites with his father Hassan in the wintertime. When their kite cuts down a competitor’s kite, Amir runs to retrieve the fallen kite for Sohrab, echoing the words of Hassan from decades before: ‘‘For you a thousand times over.’’

CHARACTERS Ali Ali is the lifelong servant of Baba’s family. Stricken with polio as a child, Ali endures the ridicule of the local boys for his pronounced limp and gnarled appearance. Steadfastly loyal to Baba and Amir, Ali lives with his only child Hassan in a modest servant’s house on Baba’s property. Ali was abandoned by his wife Sanaubar, who ran away soon after giving birth to Hassan. He belongs to the marginalized Hazara ethnic group, which historically resided in the mountainous Hazajarat region of Afghanistan. Despite this, Ali is a proud man

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who rejects dishonor and leaves Baba’s household rather than live with the shame of his son being thought a thief.

Amir Amir is the protagonist of The Kite Runner. Born into a privileged Pashtun family, Amir grows up in Kabul, Afghanistan raised by his father. His mother died in childbirth. As a boy, Amir is bookish, thoughtful, and unathletic. An introverted thinker, he prefers to write stories in his notebook rather than play soccer, much to his father’s chagrin. Amir indulges in a recurrent fantasy of a warmer understanding with his father and is strongly motivated by the wish to make this fantasy a reality—ultimately with tragic results. Constantly trying to earn his father’s approval, Amir struggles for every scrap of his father’s attention. He becomes jealous when his father pays more attention to Hassan, the son of the family servant Ali. Still, Amir is close to his servant and playmate Hassan. They spend entire days together, especially in the wintertime, and carve their names in a tree behind the house. Torn between affection for his friend and his need for his father’s love, Amir often takes advantage of Hassan’s gullibility and illiteracy. Ironically, his propensity to trick Hassan— making up false stories he pretends to read out of his schoolbooks—inspires him to discover his future calling as a writer. After moving to the United States with his father, Amir becomes a student and later a writer. After marrying a young Afghan woman named Soraya Taheri, he publishes his first novel. However, his childhood betrayal of Hassan haunts his adult life, and he eventually travels back to Kabul in order to make things right.

Assef An older bully who also comes from a privileged family, Assef is the tall, blond-haired son of a German mother and an Afghan father. Flanked by flunkies who assist him in his misdeeds, Assef is a racist with a fascistic streak. He admires Hitler, and even gives Amir a biography of Hitler as a birthday present. Assef believes Afghanistan should be ‘‘purified’’ of the Hazara ethnic group and kept for the dominant Pashtun ethnic group alone. After an encounter with Amir and Hassan in which Hassan forces Assef to retreat with his slingshot, Assef vows payback. Later, with the help of two flunkies, he gets his revenge by raping Hassan in an alley

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on the night of the annual kite-fighting contest. Assef frightens Amir with his apparently sadistic personality; even Assef’s own parents are cowed in his presence as if they, too, fear him. Assef grows up to become a high-ranking official in the Taliban government, when he and Amir meet for a final time.

Baba A stubborn, energetic man and a prosperous merchant, Amir’s father is as well-respected for his commercial successes as for his philanthropic endeavors. A great host, Baba is given to grand gestures and excessive hospitality. After his wife died while giving birth to Amir, Baba finds it difficult to relate to a son who is so different from himself—introverted, tentative, and intellectual instead of outgoing, strong, and decisive. He observes with disgust that when Amir and Hassan get into scrapes with local boys, Hassan, not Amir, stands up to the bullies. Baba never remarried, preferring to surround himself with male friends and business associates in a house more often than not filled with guests. A Sunni Muslim and an ethical man, Baba counsels his son never to steal; yet he opposes organized religion and dismisses the warnings of the mullahs (religious teachers) who provide religious instruction in Amir’s schools. Despite his stern attitude toward his son, he is a loving father. When Baba and Amir move to California, Baba works at a gas station so Amir can complete his schooling. He proudly presents his son to the Taheri family as a prospective husband for their daughter Soraya, and in the end respects his son for who he has become.

Farid A driver and guide introduced to Amir by Rahim Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan. Farid is a tough man who has lost several family members to Taliban violence. He drives Amir to Kabul to rescue Sohrab, Hassan’s son. Suspicious of Amir at first, Farid eventually respects him for risking his life to save a boy he has never met. Although he has responsibilities, with a wife and small children, he chooses to help Amir on an honorable mission.

Farzana A young Hazara woman, Farzana is Hassan’s wife and Sohrab’s mother. After living in Hazarajat, she and Hassan move to Kabul where they live with Rahim Khan in Amir and

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Baba’s old house. When Hassan’s mother Sanaubar appears after a decades-long absence, Farzana nurses the older woman back to health. When she gives birth to Sohrab, Sanaubar serves as her midwife. Farzana, along with Hassan, is shot and killed by the Taliban for being a Hazara in the wrong area of Kabul.

Hassan The son of Ali, Hassan is also a servant at Baba’s house and about the same age as Amir. Fiercely loyal, Hassan is Amir’s constant companion. Although born with a harelip, he is unselfconscious and happy, known for his easy smile. Illiterate but endowed with a sharp native intelligence, Hassan is strong, athletic, and courageous. Incapable of deceit, he cannot tell when Amir is tricking him. His premier talent is running the kites in the annual winter kite tournament in Kabul. Kite runners chase the fallen kites that are the casualties of the contest. Hassan has an uncanny ability to sense where the kites will land. His innocent, trusting nature belies a perceptiveness about Amir’s state of mind. For example, Hassan reassures Amir when Amir is nervous about his performance in the annual kite competition. After Hassan is raped by the bully Assef, Hassan knows Amir saw the attack and did nothing but never raises the subject. Instead, when Amir betrays him a second time by telling Baba that Hassan has stolen from them, Hassan apologizes as if he committed the crime. Hassan and Ali leave Kabul and return to the Hazajarat region where the Hazara people have historically resided, but Hassan never holds a grudge against Amir for his actions.

Kamal One of Assef’s companions who reluctantly helps Assef rape Hassan, Kamal later becomes the victim of a similar attack and dies as he and his father attempt to escape Afghanistan for Pakistan during the repressive Soviet-backed regime.

Rahim Khan Baba’s business associate, Rahim Khan frequently visits with Baba to discuss their common commercial interests, Afghan politics, and personal matters. As his best friend and advisor, Khan frequently steps in when friction between father and son creates misunderstandings. Khan encourages Amir’s interest in writing by giving

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him a journal for his thirteenth birthday and sympathizes with the latter’s desperate attempts to earn his father’s approval. Khan is also the guardian of a serious family secret. After Amir and Baba leave Afghanistan, he lives in their house, hoping to return it to them once the political turmoil in Kabul comes to an end. Later, growing older and lonelier, Khan finds Hassan and brings the latter and his wife to live with him in Kabul. Khan becomes gravely ill and moves to Pakistan. He contacts the adult Amir in the United States, summons him to Pakistan, and relates to Amir the history of Hassan, his wife, and their young son.

Sohrab The young son of Hassan and Farzana, born in Kabul, who survives his parents’ execution by the Taliban. Sohrab is named after one of the heroes of the traditional Afghan heroic tale, the Shahnammah. After his parents’ death, Sohrab lands in an ill-equipped orphanage in Kabul, where the children are preyed upon by lecherous Taliban officials. After escaping from his abuser and going with Amir to Pakistan, Sohrab tries to commit suicide upon hearing he may have to return to an orphanage. When he awakes after emergency surgery, he tells Amir that he is too tired to live. Provided with a humanitarian visa, Sohrab can go to the United States to live with Amir and Soraya, where he lives in silence. He does not utter a word for the first year he is there.

General Iqbal Taheri The father of Soraya, Amir’s love interest, General Taheri is a dignified man well-known in the Afghan community in Northern California. Always clad in a worn, but well-made suit, General Taheri is too proud to work, viewing common work as a contradiction to his former importance in the Afghan government. He goes to the weekly flea market where he socializes with other Afghan immigrants who gather there every weekend, referring to his modest flea market trade as a ‘‘hobby’’ that allows him to keep in touch with friends. His wife and daughter tend their market stall while the General talks politics with their friends and neighbors. General Taheri hopes for the end of the Taliban regime and an offer to return to Kabul to take a post in a future Afghan government.

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Khanum Taheri Also known as Khala Jamila, Khanum Taheri is General Taheri’s wife and Soraya’s mother. Endowed with a bubbly personality and a streak of hypochondria, she frequently worries about her health or her family. Although she was once well-known in Kabul for her beautiful singing voice, her husband now forbids her to sing in public.

Soraya Taheri Soraya is the daughter of the once-prominent General Taheri who had a great deal of influence in the government of the pre-Taliban Afghanistan. An intelligent, beautiful young woman, she adheres to the traditions of the patriarchal Afghan culture, despite her rebellious attitude toward her father’s domineering manner and the double standard of gender dynamics that her father upholds. Like Amir and Baba, Soraya and her family are exiles from Afghanistan who assemble with the Afghan community at Saturday swap meets and other gatherings. Despite a scandalous past when she lived with a man to whom she was not married, Soraya endures the persistent gossip in the Afghan community and dedicates herself to the care of her new husband and father-in-law while pursing her goal of becoming a teacher.

Zaman A struggling orphanage director in Kabul, Zaman tells Amir and Farid where they can find the Taliban official who has abducted Sohrab.

THEMES Identity and Self-Discovery Throughout the novel, the protagonist struggles to find his true purpose and to forge an identity through noble actions. Amir’s failure to stand by his friend at a crucial moment shapes this defining conflict. His endeavor to overcome his own weaknesses appears in his fear of Assef, his hesitation to enter a war-torn country ruled by the repressive Taliban, and even his carsickness while driving with Farid into Afghanistan. Late in the novel, Amir discovers his father’s lifelong deception about his half brother Hassan, a revelation that leads to a deeper understanding of who his father was and how

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he and his father had both betrayed the people who were loyal to them.

Family, Fathers, and Fatherhood In this novel in which family relationships play a great part, mothers are strikingly absent. Although Soraya is a loving mother to Sohrab, Amir and Hassan grow up without their mothers. Meanwhile, the tension of father-son relationships is exemplified by Baba’s treatment of his sons, Amir and Hassan. While Baba is disappointed in Amir’s bookish, introverted personality, to protect his social standing, he does not publicly acknowledge his illegitimate son Hassan whose mother is a Hazara. Likewise, General Taheri is a traditional, highly critical father who chafes at his grown daughter’s sometimes rebellious attitudes. The theme re-emerges in the marriage of Amir and Soraya, who try unsuccessfully to start a family of their own. Their adoption of the troubled and parentless Sohrab at the end of the novel marks an attempt to recreate a complete family based on relationships of love and honesty.

Journey and Quest A novel of immigration and political unrest, The Kite Runner is punctuated by Amir’s departure from Afghanistan as a teenager and his return to his war-ravaged home country as an adult. At the same time, it is a novel of symbolic quest. Amir makes great sacrifices to pursue his quest to atone for past sins by rescuing his half nephew. Symbolized by the bleeding fingers of kite-fighters who cut their competitors’ kites out of the sky with string embedded with glass, sacrifice is an important theme of the novel. Near the beginning of the novel, Amir willingly cut his fingers to impress his father with a kite-fighting victory; at the end he cuts his fingers flying a kite to revive his spiritually wounded nephew from a profound depression. Whereas the young Amir compares Hassan’s resignation to his attackers’ assault to the resignation of a sacrificed animal, by the end of the novel, Amir is prepared to sacrifice much in order to save Hassan’s son from a similar fate.

Heritage and Ancestry Before leaving Afghanistan, Baba fills a snuff box with soil from his homeland. As refugees in the United States, Baba and Amir live in an Afghan immigrant community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Even though much of the

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Hassan that Rahim Khan presents to Amir. Suppose Amir wrote a letter in response. As a group, write a one-page letter in which Amir explains to Hassan how his character, goals, or understanding of the world has changed. Provide specific details from the novel to support Amir’s claims.

Think about Amir’s relationship with Baba as it is detailed in Chapter 2 through Chapter 7. Make a list of the adjectives that describe Amir. Now make a list of adjectives that describe Baba. How are Baba and Amir alike? How are they different? In a short essay, describe the relationship between Baba and Amir, giving at least four concrete examples from the novel to support your points.

Gather in a small group and study the scene from pages 70 to 79. Then review the confrontation between Amir and Assef in Chapter 22. How has Amir changed in the years between the early scene and the later one? Next, think about the letter from

Twice in the novel, the character Assef is associated with Adolf Hitler. Research the early twentieth-century German nationalist movement that led to Nazism. Based on the novel’s depiction of the Taliban regime, make a list comparing and contrasting how citizens responded to the two regimes. How did Nazism affect Germany from the 1930s to the 1940s? How were the effects of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s similar or different? Include specific examples from the novel to support your arguments.

action takes place in the United States, most of the characters there are Afghan, emphasizing how Amir and Baba thrive in and contribute to an immigrant community that reminds them of home. Although Baba dies without ever seeing his home country again, Amir maintains his ties to the Afghan community in Northern California, partly through his wife’s family. Descriptions of Amir and Soraya’s courtship and Baba’s funeral exemplify such ties to traditional cultural values. The reader is treated

to detailed accounts of the khastegari tradition in which the groom’s father requests permission of the prospective bride’s father, and the elaborate traditional ceremony in which Amir and Soraya are married. Although Amir first views living in the United States as a way to forget a painful past, he maintains and revives his ties to Afghan culture and religion. He returns to his country of birth and, after his nephew attempts suicide, re-discovers Islam as a source of strength. The narration and dialogue welcome

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What would have happened if Amir had fought to rescue Hassan from Assef, instead of running away? Would Hassan and Ali have moved with Baba and Amir to California? How would the boys’ lives have been different? Create a timeline of events and milestones for each boy as their lives were presented in the novel, then create a new timeline for each boy to reflect how his life might have changed if Amir had saved Hassan. Return to the middle chapters of the novel, when Amir’s wife Soraya interacts with her father and mother. Think about the ways that traditional Afghan culture, as Hosseini represents it in the novel, appears to have differing expectations of men and women. How have Soraya Taheri and her mother Khanum Taheri been affected by the ways that women’s behavior is constrained by traditional Afghan culture? Write a two-page essay in which you discuss how the politics of gender in Afghan culture affects the characters in the novel, using concrete examples from the book to support your arguments.

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the reader into this ethnic Pashtun and Afghan national identity through running translations of frequently spoken or culturally significant phrases and concepts.

Assimilation and Acculturation From the early twentieth century to contemporary times, new arrivals to the United States have lived and worked in their new homeland, attempting to lead better lives and simultaneously struggling to adjust to a culture that may or may not accept their traditions. When Amir and Baba arrive in Fremont, California, they, too, must start new lives. While Baba works at a humble job in a service station, Amir attends school, graduating from high school at the age of twenty. While Baba (like General Taheri, a man of his generation) dreams of returning to Afghanistan in better times, Amir who has spent much of his teenage years in the United States, adjusts more readily to his new country. For Amir, as for many in the literature of the American immigrant experience, the United States represents a space for new beginnings and a way to erase a dark, violent past. For Baba, the transition is more difficult, and his new life presents a painful contrast with his former position of power and prestige in Kabul.

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the discrimination against this entire ethnic minority. Likewise, he gives voice to this attitude when he attacks Amir for having a Hazara boy for a playmate. In a sense, even Baba condones systematic discrimination against Hazara people by refusing to acknowledge his son with a Hazara woman, Sanaubar.

STYLE Flashback and Foreshadowing Khaled Hosseini frequently uses flashback and foreshadowing. Indeed, most of the novel, which begins in 2001 and ends in 2002, is an elaborate flashback that brings the reader from the narrator’s childhood to his young adulthood to his manhood. Within this overarching structure, Hosseini’s use of time devices provide the reader and the narrator with information about what has happened outside the action of the novel so far, as in Chapter 16, in which Rahim Khan updates Amir on what has happened to Hassan since Amir and Baba left Kabul, or in Hassan’s letter, in which some of the same events are told from a different point of view.

The events of the novel occur against the backdrop of political change, culminating in the rise of the tyrannical Taliban government in contemporary Afghanistan. Assef, Hassan’s rapist and the bully who becomes a high-ranking Taliban official, embodies the consequences of the abuse of power for power’s sake and the violence and repression of the Taliban regime. Assef is a sociopath who thrives in an atmosphere of chaos and subjugation. Interpersonal violence leads to the split between Amir and Hassan; on a national scale, the abuse of power by the Soviet-backed Communist regime in Afghanistan forces Baba and Amir to go into exile. The abuse of political and social power also appears in frequent references to the Hazara people, who are second-class citizens in the quasi-caste system of Afghanistan. At the beginning of the novel, Hazara characters such as Hassan’s father Ali suffer public humiliation for their appearance. When General Taheri demands an explanation for Amir and Soraya’s adoption of a Sohrab, ‘‘a Hazara boy,’’ he echoes

The use of time devices like foreshadowing may also prepare the reader for an imminent event or crisis. For example, during a description of Hassan’s face in Chapter 7, the narrator breaks into the description to tell the reader that this was the last time he would see Hassan’s smile except in a photograph, an interruption of the forward narrative that warns the reader that something momentous is in the offing. Sometimes the use of these techniques appears to signal moments when the lives of individuals are changed forever by violence, death, or the consequences of world events. One example occurs in Chapter 22, when Amir, seated in the house of the Taliban official, nervously eats a grape from a bowl on the table. Amir remarks, ‘‘The grape was sweet. I popped another one in [my mouth], unaware that it would be the last bit of solid food I would eat for a long time,’’ thus preparing the reader for the violence of the imminent confrontation between Amir and Assef. Foreshadowing also plays a part in Chapter 7 when Amir witnesses the attack on Hassan on the night of his victory in the kite tournament:

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I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan—the way he’d stood up for me all those times in the past—and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run.

This internal monologue hints that in the future Amir will suffer from a crisis in identity. Later in the novel, his failure to stand up for Hassan in his moment of need becomes a burden he carries for much of his life, and forces Amir to take drastic measures to recover his sense of himself as a good person.

Diction The dialogue, or quoted conversation between characters, and the narration use a variety of modes to affect the reader. The diction ranges from detailed description to conversational. One feature of the novel’s use of language is its frequent references to Afghan culture and its use of terms from Pashtu and Farsi that denote important concepts in Afghan tradition and in the lives of the Afghan community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Such terms are nearly always translated for non-Pashtu- and nonFarsi-speaking readers in a way that invites the reader to become familiar with Afghan culture while remaining engaged in the flow of action. The writing is peppered with words in Farsi and Dari (which is the version of Farsi commonly spoken in Afghanistan), followed by brief translations set off by commas. In addition to the oftheard greeting Salaam Aleikum and the oath inshallah, the reader learns the meanings of such expressions as ihtiram (respect); nazar (the evil eye); lotfan (please); yateem (orphans); and zendagi migzara (life goes on). For example, when Amir asks his father to ask Soraya’s father for permission for Amir and Soraya to marry, in accordance with Afghan tradition, he says, ‘‘I want you to go khastegari. I want you to ask General Taheri for his daughter’s hand.’’ Similarly, when Soraya tells Amir about a secret from her past, he thinks, ‘‘I couldn’t lie to her and say that my pride, my iftikhar, wasn’t stung at all.’’

Interior Monologue Interior monologue, or the words a character uses to describe his or her own feelings to him- or herself, is an important technique through which Hosseini enables the reader to become acquainted with the narrator Amir,

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and through him, the Afghan culture and history that propel much of the action of the story. Internal monologue is a particularly important device in this work because the action is as much propelled by political developments as by the protagonist’s psychological development.

Imagery and Symbolism The novel invites the reader to view images and symbols in the first part of the novel as mirrored by those at the end. For example, the novel is book-ended by two kite contests. The imagery of kite-fighting dominates the scene that marks the last happy moments Hassan and Amir enjoy together. At the end of the novel, a smaller kite contest between the adult Amir and a young Afghan American boy, as Sohrab looks on, suggests redemption for Amir, who has never forgiven himself for what happened to Hassan on the night of that first kite-fighting contest in Kabul years before. Similarly, Assef’s attack on Hassan as the twelve-year-old Amir looks on is echoed in the battle between the adult Amir and Assef late in the novel

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan and the United States from the 1970s to 2002, presents a story of intertwined personal conflicts and tragedies against a historical background of national and cultural trauma. The early chapters tell much about the richness of Afghan culture as experienced by the young Amir and Hassan in the Afghan capital, Kabul. The novel’s account of the culture of Kabul informs the reader about everything from the melon sellers in the bazaar to the cosmopolitan social and intellectual lives of Kabul elite society during the monarchy, to the traditional pastimes of Afghan children. Detailed descriptions treat the reader to such events as a large extended-family outing to a lake and the annual winter kite tournament of Kabul. Subsequent political developments, however, appear to curtail these relative freedoms, as first the Soviet-backed Communist government, then the Northern Alliance, and finally the Taliban progressively repress the activities of Afghan citizens. The reader learns the effects of the first of these developments through first-person narration; the effects of the Northern Alliance and of Taliban rule emerge in Rahim

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Khan’s, Farid’s, and Hassan’s accounts of Afghan life in the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Starting in the early chapters of the novel, broad political events such as the revolution that overthrows the monarchy come to form not just a background for the action, but to become prime movers of the plot. The sound of gunfire in Chapter 5, for example, initiates a series of political shake-ups that eventually leads to the Communist takeover of Afghanistan and drives Baba and Amir, along with many of the privileged class, into exile. In addition, it marks an end to a period that was— despite being marred by the iniquities of the caste system—relatively idyllic. As Amir observes, ‘‘The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.’’ This observation foreshadows the traumatized condition of Amir’s nephew Sohrab, born in the midst of violence and orphaned and abused by the Taliban. The Kite Runner is one of the first works of fiction to include the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States within the span of its narrative. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Afghanistan was portrayed in popular media as a country whose government allowed a terrorist organization to operate within its borders and committed human rights abuses against its own people. Through a detailed personal narrative, the novel re-focuses attention on Afghanistan through a different lens, correcting this narrow view of a country which, despite its problems, has a fascinating history.

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could help one another and preserve Afghan cultural traditions. Detailed descriptions in the middle and late chapters give the reader a window on some cultural practices, both formal and informal, that help define the Afghan community in Fremont. Amir’s and Soraya’s lives are certainly taken up with the broader American culture. Both attend public schools and (we presume) mix with non-Afghan students; Amir takes creative writing classes in which he must read about the experiences of a diverse group of young writers; and Soraya has a career as a writing instructor at a community college. Still their identities as Afghans or Afghan Americans are defined in part by the ceremonies and practices of their families and their community. The Saturday swap meets, for example, exemplify the well-documented strategy of immigrant groups to adapt already existing institutions in the United States as ways to preserve their cultures of origin.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Kite Runner was published in 2003 to nearly unanimous praise. Said to be the first novel written in English by an Afghan, the novel was instantly popular. Its first printing was fifty thousand copies, it has been featured on the reading lists of countless book clubs, and foreign rights to the novel have been sold in at least ten countries.

The novel also gives a detailed account of how one ethnic group formed a cultural enclave within American culture so that its members

Reviewers admired the novel for its straightforward storytelling, its convincing character studies, and for its startling account of the human toll of the violence that has accompanied Afghanistan’s turbulent political scene in the last thirty years. In his review in World Literature Today, Ronny Noor remarks, ‘‘This lucidly written and often touching novel gives a vivid picture of not only the Russian atrocities but also those of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban.’’ A brief review in Publishers Weekly credited the novel with providing ‘‘an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East,’’ and called it ‘‘a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.’’ The novel was noted for its detailed portrayal of a friendship between two

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Another important historical and cultural context of the novel is the diverse and variegated world of contemporary multicultural America, particularly in California. Hosseini, the son of a diplomat and a teacher, left Afghanistan with his family in 1981, much like Amir. Likewise, Amir’s experiences in the Afghan immigrant community of Fremont, California, familiarly known in the San Francisco Bay Area as ‘‘Little Kabul,’’ may reflect the author’s experiences of the area from arrival in San Jose in the 1980s. Amir’s life as a young immigrant in the multicultural space of the Bay Area illustrates the increased mixing of diverse ethnicities in the 1980s and 1990s within U.S. popular culture.

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Afghan soldiers stand guard as women clad in burqas walk past, Kabul, 2003 Ó Ahmad Masood/Reuters/Corbis

boys that tenuously spans class and ethnic lines. In the New York Times Book Review, Edward Hower praises the novel for its detailed descriptions of life in Kabul in the 1970s: ‘‘Hosseini’s depiction of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan is rich in warmth and humor but also tense with the friction of different ethnic groups.’’ Hower also notes how the class distinctions between Amir and Hassan make their relationship all the more vulnerable: ‘‘Amir is served breakfast every morning by Hassan; then he is driven to school in a shiny Mustang while his friend stays home to clean the house.’’ A few noted with misgiving that the novel occasionally strays from the conventions of realism in contemporary fiction. Hower notes, ‘‘When Amir meets his old nemesis, now a powerful Taliban official, the book descends into some plot twists better suited to a folk tale than a modern novel.’’ Like Hower, Rebecca Stuhr of the Library Journal focuses on the late chapters in pointing out the novel’s ‘‘over-reliance on coincidence.’’ In an otherwise glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement, James O’Brien points out that ‘‘When Hosseini strays from the simple narrative style he prefers, he struggles to retain credibility.’’ Noor argued

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that the novel gives ‘‘a selective, simplistic, even simple-minded picture’’ of the ongoing Afghan conflict, in particular an overly optimistic view of Hamid Karzai’s ability to govern Afghanistan. Overall, reviewers see the novel as a great triumph marred only by rare stylistic flaws.

CRITICISM Maria Elena Caballero-Robb Maria Elena Caballero-Robb earned her Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works in publishing and teaches courses in U.S. literature and culture and composition. In this essay, Caballero-Robb interprets Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner as a work that intertwines the private and public realms of experience. Perhaps what garnered Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner, so much early praise, aside from the political relevance of its subject matter when the book was published in 2003, is its successful intertwining of the personal and the political. The novel has an ambitious agenda: to sketch the maturation of its protagonist from

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IN PASSING THROUGH THIS TRANSFORMING CRUCIBLE, AMIR NOT ONLY ATONES FOR PAST PERSONAL FAILINGS BUT ALSO EMBRACES A HOPEFUL IDEAL OF CITIZENSHIP CAPABLE OF UPHOLDING PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS EVEN IN THE FACE OF REPRESSIVE, FASCIST SYSTEMS.’’

a callow boy beguiled by mythical stories of heroes and to portray the political situation of contemporary Afghanistan. The novel begins to show how the personal and the political affect one another through the peculiar relationship between Amir and Hassan. Indeed, James O’Brien, in his review in the Times Literary Supplement, argues, ‘‘this muddled, unbalanced and ultimately tragic relationship’’ between the privileged Amir and the servant Hassan ‘‘lies at the heart of The Kite Runner and echoes the betrayals and power shifts that begin to shape the country shortly after the story begins.’’ Through the course of the novel, Amir’s personal quest takes him on a decades-long journey from his birth country to the United States and finally back to his country of origin. In passing through this transforming crucible, Amir not only atones for past personal failings but also embraces a hopeful ideal of citizenship capable of upholding principles of liberty and human rights even in the face of repressive, fascist systems. In the first several chapters, the novel’s action revolves around the relationship between Amir and his friend and servant Hassan, and Amir’s constant attempts to earn the respect and love of his father, Baba. Amir describes Hassan as a wise innocent, incapable of deceit, yet uncannily perceptive. Hassan’s character and unschooled intelligence are apparent in his complete loyalty to Amir and his ability to perceive things about Amir that not even Amir is aware of: ‘‘Hassan couldn’t read a first-grade textbook, but he could read me plenty.’’ Indeed, critic Melissa Katsoulis points out in her review in the Times (London), ‘‘Though Hassan cannot read or write, he loves to hear Amir read aloud and is perfectly capable of pointing out the

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gaping hole in Amir’s first attempt at plotting a story.’’ Hassan is also admired for his physical talents—a faultless aim with a slingshot and the ability to predict where a loose kite will drift ‘‘as if he had some sort of inner compass.’’ Baba’s unusually high regard for his son’s servant makes Amir, who cannot seem to please his father, jealous. When Baba pays for an operation to correct Hassan’s harelip and dotes on the boy during his recovery, Amir thinks, ‘‘I wished I too had some kind of scar that would beget Baba’s sympathy. It wasn’t fair. Hassan hadn’t done anything to earn Baba’s affections; he’d just been born with that stupid harelip.’’ Meanwhile, Amir is acutely aware that there is little understanding between himself and his father: ‘‘The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him.’’ He senses that his father blames him for his mother’s death in childbirth; and to compound matters, he overhears his father remark to Rahim Khan, ‘‘If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.’’ While the dynamics of these relationships remain central to the story, in later chapters, the political events outside the limits of the family circle propel the story’s action. The first hint of this transition occurs when Amir and Hassan have an encounter with a violent older boy named Assef, who wants to persecute Hassan for being a Hazara. Assef, who believes Hitler was an ideal leader, tells Amir that he is betraying his Pashtun heritage by treating a Hazara boy as his close friend. While Assef’s bigotry outrages Amir, Amir is unable to think of a response. Ultimately, Hassan stands up to Assef and his lackeys; when Assef and his lackeys threaten to hurt the two younger boys, it is Hassan, not Amir, who saves them both by using his slingshot to drive the bullies away. The boys’ second encounter with Assef is much less victorious. Ironically, the encounter occurs immediately after Amir wins the kite-running tournament, which Amir believes is his chance finally to live up to his father’s expectations: There was no other viable option. I was going to win, and I was going to run that last kite. Then I’d bring it home and show it to Baba. Show him once and for all that his son was worthy. Then maybe my life as a ghost in this house would finally be over. I let myself dream: I imagined conversation and laughter over

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dinner instead of silence broken only by the clinking of the silverware and the occasional grunt.

The novel’s frequent reference to the Afghan heroic tale, the Shahnammah, implicitly creates a comparison between Amir’s relationship with his father and the larger-than-life interactions between the father-and-son warriors Rostam and Sohrab in the myth. When Amir wins the kite tournament, he begins to think of his anticipated reunion with his father in mythical terms: In my head, I had it all planned: I’d make a grand entrance, a hero, prized trophy in my bloodied hands. Heads would turn and eyes would lock. Rostam and Sohrab sizing each other up. A dramatic moment of silence. Then the old warrior would walk to the young one, embrace him, acknowledge his worthiness.

The additional stakes of the kite tournament—the need not just to obtain the last fallen kite, but to win his father’s love—compound the dilemma Amir faces when he finds Hassan being threatened by Assef and the other bullies in an alley. While Amir chooses to run, out of fear rather than to help his friend, he wonders whether he has actually sacrificed his friend for his own ends. Even as Amir sees that Hassan is in danger, he is also focused on the coveted blue kite: ‘‘Hassan was standing at the blind end of the alley in defiant stance. . . . Behind him, sitting on piles of scrap and rubble, was the blue kite. My key to Baba’s heart.’’ Although he is horrified at what happens to Hassan, he allows his friend to become a casualty of his quest to improve his relationship with his father. Amir’s actions mirror the ethnic inequalities between Pashtuns and Hazara that are reflected in a dozen daily occurrences in the first several chapters. He uses Hassan as an instrument to achieve a desired end. Amir’s failure to treat his playmate as a person marks the fatal character flaw that the adult Amir will seek to remedy. The adult Amir moves to remedy this failure by accepting the mission to rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab, from an uncertain end. Amir redeems himself by confronting Assef and assuming responsibility for Hassan’s child. The climax of the novel parallels the earlier violent crisis in which Assef rapes Hassan, but offers a victorious outcome. The battle between Amir and Assef presents Amir with the belated opportunity to fight as he believes he should have fought to save Hassan when they were children. By risking his life to save Hassan’s child from a

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sadistic pedophile, Amir begins to atone for his earlier inhumanities. Throughout the novel, the author uses corresponding symbols and images to emphasize the way that Amir’s adult choices are belated remedies of past failures. After the climactic fight with Assef during his rescue of Sohrab, Amir is taken to a hospital in Pakistan with serious injuries. While he recovers, he discovers that his upper lip has been split clear up to the gum line, forming a harelip similar to the one Hassan was born with. Echoing an earlier scene in a hospital, in which the twelve-year-old Hassan recovers from an operation to mend his harelip, the adult Amir must wait for his own split lip to mend and quickly learns that it hurts to smile. This simultaneously reminds the reader of the moment when Amir sees Hassan smile for the last time. The reader may view Amir’s injury as a moment of belated sympathy between two brothers now separated not only by geographic distance and differing fortunes, but also by death. The novel’s use of literary techniques contributes to a political statement about the relationship between individuals and systems—or the capacities of individuals to combat broad injustice in political systems. The Kite Runner turns on more than one astounding coincidence: when Amir returns to Kabul, he meets a beggar who turns out to have known Amir’s mother; and, most startling, Assef, the childhood bully, turns out to be the prominent Taliban official who has kidnapped and brutalized Hassan’s son Sohrab. While Rebecca Stuhr of the Library Journal finds fault with the novel’s ‘‘over-reliance on coincidence,’’ Hosseini’s use of the device shows how even personal conflicts like Amir’s lifelong struggle with his own guilt are intertwined with world events. This narrative twist also emphasizes the interplay between the present and the past—‘‘the past claws its way out’’—by showcasing the way that the deeds of childhood cast their shadows into adulthood. (In a similar vein, the author’s use of foreshadowing sometimes signals to the reader that an imminent event will have lasting consequences, as when Amir plants money in Hassan’s room in order to implicate him in a theft.) That Amir’s former nemesis turns out to be the Taliban official from whom he must rescue Sohrab lends an allegorical and mythical dimension to the battle between the two men. As a young boy, Assef is already described as ‘‘a

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sociopath;’’ an admirer of Hitler, Assef displays fascist tendencies and openly advocates removing the Hazara population from Afghanistan. Amir, on the other hand, who is by and large a good boy, is self-interested and lacks conviction. If the grown Assef appears to be a nearly cartoonish embodiment of sadism and the desire for absolute power, Amir’s struggle to defeat him and save the young Sohrab appears to be an allegory for a broader struggle for Afghanistan. Whereas Amir had been able to escape the daily violence of contemporary Afghanistan as a result of his relative privilege, his Hazara friend Hassan had no choice but to raise his son among a generation of Afghan children, born into a turbulent society, who ‘‘know nothing but the sound of bombs and gunfire.’’ Interestingly, when Amir, a successful writer, tries to use his privilege to rescue Sohrab by offering Assef money, he is rebuffed; instead he must put his life at risk in order to complete his mission. Amir’s decision to return to Afghanistan to save the son of his forsaken friend represents a choice for the exiled to return to his birth country to confront the problems that drove him away. The Kite Runner focuses more on interpersonal dramas than on political ones; it is a matter of interpretation whether Amir feels responsible for the future of his birth country in the same way that he feels accountable for his nephew’s fate. Still, through Assef’s embodiment of the evil of fascism and Amir’s willingness to fight him for a good cause the reader is presented with a stark contrast between a theocratic regime that starves and crushes the freedoms of its people, and a reluctant but ultimately courageous citizen willing to risk his life for what he believes in. Remarkably, the novel does not allude to the enormous controversy that accompanied the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, including the bombing of Afghanistan in retaliation for the Taliban’s harboring of terrorist camps. If one can discern an author’s view of politics from his fiction, Hosseini views developments in Afghan national politics of 2001 and 2002 with some optimism. In the last two chapters, the narrator speaks warmly of the ousting of the Taliban and the emergence of Hamid Karzai as the new leader of Afghanistan, and describes the hope with which the imminent Loya jirga, the exiled king’s return to Afghanistan, is anticipated by Afghans and Afghan Americans

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alike. This optimistic attitude toward contemporaneous developments in Amir’s home country parallels the novel’s final flicker of hope regarding Sohrab. Afghanistan, the novel seems to argue, so recently brutalized and repressed, may yet survive. Source: Maria Elena Caballero-Robb, Critical Essay on The Kite Runner, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

James O’Brien In the following review, O’Brien discusses the author’s use of voice, and how the two main characters reflect the character of Afghanistan itself. Rare is the exiled author whose remembrances of home resist becoming rose-tinted as the years pass. Given the ravages visited on Afghanistan since the young Khaled Hosseini and his family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980, the foremost of many triumphs in this startling first novel must be that its consideration of cultural, religious and deeply personal upheavals remains cool and considered throughout. Hosseini’s own profession—he is a doctor—perhaps provides a more convincing explanation of his narrator’s unemotional tone than the fictional claim that he has become an English-language author of some repute. Amir is twelve when the novel begins in 1975, but the seeds of his story were sown much earlier. He ‘‘killed’’ his mother in childbirth and, a bookish, somewhat sickly child, has done little since to earn either affection or respect from his father. Amir’s only solace is Hassan, his hare-lipped servant and best friend. It is this muddled, unbalanced and ultimately tragic relationship that lies at the heart of The Kite Runner and echoes the betrayals and power shifts which begins to shape the country shortly after the story begins. The two boys suckled at the same breast—it belonged to a wet nurse; Hassan’s mother quit her humdrum existence in search of glamour shortly after Amir’s quit this life altogether— and so forged a bond which Afghans believe to be unbreakable. Their early life was idyllic, with only the uncaring shadow of Amir’s Baba blighting their days of storytelling, fruit-gathering and kite-running. In Kabul, the kite strings are laced with glass to slice all-comers from the skies until just one remains aloft. Hassan is the finest kiterunner in Kabul, with an unerring ability to

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Farah Ahmedi’s memoir The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky (2003) also recounts a childhood in Kabul. Ahmedi, a high school student in Illinois at the time her book was published, won the opportunity to have her life story published in book form by winning an essay contest sponsored by the television program Good Morning America. Ahmedi’s account of growing up in Kabul in the 1990s offers a nonfiction version of life in 1970s Kabul sketched in The Kite Runner. Before coming to the United States, Ahmedi lost her leg to a land mine and lost family members to a Taliban rocket strike on her home.

culture and the turbulent contemporary history of the Philippines.

Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters (1990), though very different from The Kite Runner, tells the story of a young person’s experiences immigrating from the Philippines to the United States. In Dogeaters the characters struggle to adjust to U.S. culture while maintaining, at times, uneasy ties to Filipino

Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography (1982) recounts the author’s experiences as a child in a Mexican immigrant family. Rodriguez’s account of his attempts to bridge the gaps between his adapted culture and language, and his family’s values and language, resonate with the experiences of Amir in The Kite Runner. Henri J. Barkey’s ‘‘The United States and Afghanistan: From Marginality to Global Concern’’ gives an account of the post– September 11 relations between the United States and Afghanistan and how the United States’ foreign policy affected twenty-firstcentury political developments there. Barkey’s article can be found in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment (2003), edited by David W. Lesch.

predict the progress of these wind-borne tissue creations. It is a gift which proves of little use when Amir, confused, embittered and convinced of his servant’s elevated status in Baba’s affections, sets about severing ties of a different kind.

Amir’s grand betrayal of Hassan and his painful search for redemption across generations is told in a cool, detached voice that provides a counterpoint to the growing sense of tension which is frequently stretched to breaking point as the story unfolds.

The exposure of Amir’s myriad failings is brought starkly home in a scene of breathtaking brutality when he is too cowardly to stop the punishment inflicted on Hassan. This constitutes one of the book’s few flaws. When Hosseini strays from the simple narrative style he prefers, he struggles to retain credibility and, on occasion, leaves Amir sounding like Kabul’s halfbaked answer to Holden Caulfield: ‘‘That was the thing with Hassan. He was so goddamn pure, you always felt like a phony around him’’. These lapses are rare, and for the most part the story of

From exile in America to a clandestine return to Kabul in the grip of the Taleban, the narrative ranges freely across the globe engaging the reader’s emotions. Amir is a difficult hero, largely unlovable but utterly sympathetic, while the plight of blameless Hassan reflects the fate of his country. There are history lessons here; among the deepest of Afghanistan’s wounds is the fact that its past has been largely obscured by its bloody present. There are also questions. Is any bond truly unbreakable? Can sons atone for the sins of fathers?

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Source: James O’Brien, ‘‘The Sins of the Father,’’ in Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2003, p. 25.

Ronny Noor In the following essay, Noor reviews The Kite Runner as a novel about sin and redemption, but contends that it fails to give a complete picture of the Afghan conflict. The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling first novel. It is the very first novel in English by an Afghan, in which a thirty-eightyear-old writer named Amir recounts the odyssey of his life from Kabul to San Francisco via Peshwar, Pakistan. The protagonist was born into a wealthy family in Kabul. Raised by his father, his mother having passed away during his birth, Amir lives a relatively happy life until the Soviet tanks roll into Afghanistan. Then he and his family flee to Pakistan and end up in America. In the United States, his father becomes a gasstation manager, selling junk on weekends with his son at the San Jose flea market. Amir meets Soraya, the daughter of a former Afghan general, and soon ties the knot with her. For fifteen years the young couple tries in vain to have children. Then Amir receives a call from Rahim Khan, a friend and former business partner of his now-deceased father. Amir flies to Peshwar to meet with him. Rahim Khan reveals that Hassan, Amir’s childhood friend, the presumed son of the family servant Ali, was in reality Amir’s half-brother, his father’s illegitimate son with Ali’s wife. Hassan and his wife were killed by the Taliban. Rahim Khan wants Amir to go to Kabul and bring Hassan’s son to Peshwar. After much hesitation, Amir goes to Kabul and frees his nephew from the clutches of an unscrupulous child molester. Later he brings the child to America for adoption. This lucidly written and often touching novel gives a vivid picture of not only the Russian atrocities but also those of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. It is rightly a ‘‘soaring debut,’’ as the Boston Globe claims, but only if we consider it a novel of sin and redemption, a son trying to redeem his father’s sin. As far as the Afghan conflict is concerned, we get a selective, simplistic, even simple-minded picture. Hosseini tells us, for example, that ‘‘Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis’’ were behind the Taliban. He does not mention the CIA or Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter, ‘‘whose stated aim,’’ according to Pankaj Mishra

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in the spring 2002 issue of Granta, ‘‘was to ‘sow [s—t] in the Soviet backyard.’’’ Hosseini also intimates that the current leader handpicked by foreign powers, Hamid Karzai—whose ‘‘caracul hat and green chapan became famous’’—will put Afghanistan back in order. Unfortunately, that is all Karzai is famous for—his fashion, Hollywood style. His government does not control all of Afghanistan, which is torn between warlords as in the feudal days. Farmers are producing more opium than ever before for survival. And the occupying forces, according to human-rights groups, are routinely trampling on innocent Afghans. There is no Hollywood-style solution to such grave problems of a nation steeped in the Middle Ages, is there? Source: Ronny Noor, ‘‘Afghanistan: The Kite Runner,’’ in World Literature Today, Vol. 78, No. 3–4, September– December 2004, p. 148.

Khaled Hosseini In the following excerpt, Hosseini discusses how being a physician gives him a compassionate insight to humanity and makes him a better writer.

Khaled Hosseini. (Physician writers) A blinking little red light. Another voice mail. Didn’t I just go through them? I sat down. I never delay listening to voice mails; call it a compulsion, a personal quirk. I put down Mrs CR’s chart and dialed my answering machine. It was my father-in-law, telling me he had loved my short story, The Kite Runner, but wished it had been longer. At some point between the instant I put down the receiver and the moment I knocked on the door to tell Mrs CR about her diabetic nephropathy, a seed planted itself in my mind: I was going to turn The Kite Runner into a novel. And so it began. For the next 15 months, I tapped away at the keyboard. I created a troubled, 12-year-old boy named Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy Pashtun merchant living in Kabul, Afghanistan, circa 1975, and his angelic friend Hassan, a minority Hazara and the son of Amir’s crippled servant. I developed a deep and unusual friendship between the boys, only to make Amir betray Hassan in an unspeakable way. I shattered the boy’s lives. I watched the brutalised Hassan pay the price for his guileless devotion to Amir, and watched Amir grow into a brooding, haunted, guilt-ridden man in the USA. Then I sent Amir back to Kabul, now

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ruled by the Taliban, on one last desperate quest for redemption. In June, 2002, The Kite Runner was completed. A year later, while on a US book tour to promote the novel, two of the most common questions people asked me were: how do you find time to write as a doctor; and did being a doctor help you writing?

daily practice. Writing, by contrast, is creative. For me, starting the day with an act of creation is therapeutic. It brings me closer to my emotional state and, as a result, I go to see my patients with a positive frame of mind. To be sure, that’s good for me, but far more importantly, it’s good for my patients.

My day at work ranges from busy to frantic. Between prescription refills, referrals, meetings, laboratory reviews, voice mails, and seeing patients, I have developed an appreciation for the concept of free time. And when I go home, I have my wife and two children, not to mention an extended Afghan family life. That leaves the early morning. My free time. And if there is one thing we doctors have been trained for, it’s getting by with less than ideal hours of sleep. So for 15 months, I woke up at 0500 h, drank cupfuls of black coffee, and created the world of Amir and Hassan. Luckily for me, the soulful early morning hours coincided with my creative time.

Source: Khaled Hosseini, ‘‘Khaled Hosseini: Physician writers,’’ in Lancet, Vol. 362, No. 9388, September 20, 2003, p. 1003.

As for the second question, the answer, surprisingly, is yes. A writer, like a doctor, has to be a good listener and observer. Whereas a doctor listens to learn about his or her patient, a writer listens and observes to learn about nuances of dialogue, body language, and the peculiar verbal and non-verbal ways in which people express themselves. My medical practice provides me with ample opportunity for this sort of observation, since in a typical working day, I sit and listen to some 20 stories, all told in unique voices. I listen to them as a doctor and observe them as a writer. Furthermore, it’s essential in both crafts to develop some insight into human nature. Writers and physicians need to understand to some extent the motivations behind behaviour and appreciate how such things as a person’s upbringing, their culture, their biases, shape that person, whether it be a patient or a character in a story. Writers say the more you understand your characters, the better you can write them. Similarly, the more doctors understand their patients, the better they can help them. While on tour, one person raised what seemed a far more important question: did writing help you become a better doctor? It did. I firmly believe that. The medical profession offers satisfying rewards, but for some the challenges of today’s medicine can prove exhausting, or worse—we have all crossed paths with jaded colleagues who have long lost sight of the rewards of healing in the rigorous frenzy of

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SOURCES Hosseini, Khaled, The Kite Runner, Riverhead Books, 2003. Hower, Edward, ‘‘The Servant,’’ in the New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2003, p. 4. Katsoulis, Melissa, ‘‘Kites of Passage’’ in the Times (London), August 30, 2003, Features section, p. 17. Noor, Ronny, Review of The Kite Runner, in World Literature Today, Vol. 78, Nos. 3–4, September– December 2004, p. 148. O’Brien, James, ‘‘The Sins of the Father,’’ in the Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2003, p. 25. Review of The Kite Runner, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 250, No. 19, May 12, 2003, p. 43. Stuhr, Rebecca, Review of The Kite Runner, in Library Journal, April 15, 2003, p. 122. Hosseini, Khaled, Dreaming in Titanic City, Riverhead Books. This follow-up to Hosseini’s extremely successful first novel is set to be published in 2006.

FURTHER READING Lipson, J. G., and P. A. Omidian, ‘‘Afghan Refugee Issues in the U.S. Social Environment’’ in Western Journal of Nursing Research, Vol. 19, No. 1, February 1997, pp. 110–26. The article focuses on the physical and mental health challenges faced by Afghan refugees since they began to arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. Based on an ethnographic study and using quotations from interviews with these newcomers, the article examines stresses caused by the new social contexts within which Afghan refugees find themselves and how they perceive their interactions with American citizens and institutions. Ondaatje, Michael, Anil’s Ghost, Vintage Books, 2000. In Ondaadtje’s fifth novel, the protagonist Anil Tessera is a Sri Lankan forensic anthropologist

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becoming acculturated to the United States. Essays include discussions of such authors as Anzia Yezierska to Jamaica Kincaid.

educated in England and the United States, who returns to work in Sri Lanka. In the course of uncovering gruesome evidence of violence wrought by the civil war there, she re-connects with centuries of Sri Lankan tradition and is confronted with the senseless destruction brought about by interethnic conflict in the country of her birth. Payant, Katherine B., and Toby Rose, eds., The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, 2003. This book contains a collection of essays by various scholars who discuss the ways that North American literature has represented the experiences of immigrant groups entering and

Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Yale University Press, 2000. Ahmed, a journalist in Afghanistan for over twenty years, sketches the Taliban’s rise to power between 1994 to 1999, as well as other countries’ attempts to gain control over the development of Afghanistan. His account discusses the Taliban’s ideological foundations, its well-known repression of women, and its ties to the heroin trade.

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The Last Juror In The Last Juror, published in 2004, John Grisham explores race relations and racism in the American South of the 1970s. Although the title may lead readers to expect a taut courtroom thriller like Grisham’s earlier works, this characterdriven novel follows the growing relationship between twenty three-year-old Willie Traynor, new owner of the Ford County Times, and Calia Ruffin, also known as ‘‘Miss Callie,’’ a fifty nineyear old black woman. She is the mother of eight children, seven of whom have earned Ph.D.s—a remarkable accomplishment for the period. The ‘‘juror’’ of the title does refer to an important legal case that acts as the centerpiece for the book—Danny Padgitt’s explosive trial for the rape and brutal murder of a young local widow. Convicted of the murder but sentenced to life imprisonment instead of death, Padgitt spends ten years in jail. When he gets out, jurors from his case start to die under mysterious circumstances. Over the course of the story, Grisham introduces many of Clanton, Mississippi’s residents and local characters, people like politicians, war veterans, and decaying aristocracy who make the town colorful and unique.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY John Grisham was born on February 18, 1955, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, but for the first

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for three years, getting up early every morning to write before going to work. Though its original print run was five thousand copies, Grisham was satisfied. By then he was working on his second book, a legal thriller titled The Firm. A ‘‘bootleg’’ copy circulated around Hollywood, and the film rights were bought before the book was even published. The Firm became a bestselling novel of 1991. Eventually, Grisham closed his law practice and quit the state legislature so he could become a full-time writer. The Last Juror was published in 2004, making it Grisham’s seventeenth novel in seventeen years. Some of his bestselling legal thrillers include The Client, The Pelican Brief, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, and The Runaway Jury, all of which were made into films. He has also written the autobiographical A Painted House, and the Christmas tale Skipping Christmas, the basis for the film Christmas with the Kranks.

John Grisham AP/Wide World Photos PLOT SUMMARY twelve years of his life, his family moved frequently so his father, a construction worker, could find work. In 1967, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi where he became involved in sports.

Part 1: Chapters 1–5

Grisham’s first book, A Time to Kill, was published in 1988. He worked on it as a hobby

The Last Juror opens with the news that through ‘‘patient mismanagement and loving neglect,’’ the small independent newspaper The Ford County Times is going bankrupt. It is 1970, and Joyner William ‘‘Willie’’ Traynor, a twentythree-year-old college dropout who works as a reporter for the paper, finds himself facing unemployment. Instead, thanks to luck and a wealthy grandmother, Willie buys the paper, intent on making his living. Just months after Willie takes over as editor, Rhoda Kassellaw, a young widow with two small children, is brutally raped and murdered. After seeing the intruder, the children run to their neighbor, Aaron Deece, who finds the dying Rhoda. With her dying breath, she names her killer—Danny Padgitt. In the meantime, Padgitt, who is half-drunk at the time of the murder, flees in his truck. He tries to make it home to Padgitt Island, the family’s private kingdom in Ford County, where wanted criminals can hide and never be found. Driving recklessly, he has a bad accident on the way and is immediately arrested by the police. The incident fuels much gossip. Willie and his photographer Wiley get as much information as possible, which Willie prints, to his advantage. At Danny’s bail hearing, his lawyer Lucien

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After his high school graduation, Grisham enrolled at Northwest Junior College in Senatobia, Mississippi, and for a year played baseball for the school team. Restless, he transferred to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, hoping to become a professional ball player. After the coach at Delta State tactfully pointed out that Grisham was not suited for a baseball career, he transferred to Mississippi State University and studied accounting with the intention of becoming a tax attorney. Shortly after earning his law degree from the University of Mississippi, Grisham and his wife Reneé returned to Southaven. There, Grisham set up a small practice as a defense attorney. In addition, from 1984 to 1990, he served in the Mississippi House of Representatives. The Grishams have two children: a son, Ty, and a daughter, Shea.

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Wilbanks immediately threatens Willy with a libel suit and later calls the judge’s attention to the paper, trying for a gag order on all proceedings. The judge praises the story in front of the packed courtroom and denies Danny bail.

Chapters 6–10 Willie, who is still rather naive about the newspaper business, learns from his senior reporter Baggy Suggs that he will not be sued for libel, since he did not break the law. He also learns Danny is being held in the only decent cell in the decrepit county jail, known as ‘‘the suite.’’ Oddly, he is being given special treatment by the corrupt county sheriff, Mackey Don Coley. After Willie does some investigating, he writes another sensational story about Danny’s unusual privileges. Because the Padgitts and Lucien are unpopular, the people of the county love the story. However, soon after the article runs, a bomb is found in the Times offices. Suspicion falls on the Padgitts, who are known to be experienced arsonists, but the sheriff stalls the investigation. When Wiley is viciously beaten in his own driveway, local lawyer Harry Rex Vonner gives Willie a gun and teaches him to shoot. For a while, Willie carries the gun, but he soon tires of it and leaves the weapon in his car. Lucien holds a hearing for a change of venue for the trial, citing the local newspaper’s biased coverage, and Willie is called to testify. Lucien makes him look ignorant on the stand, and Willie leaves, enraged. Around this time, Willie also meets Miss Calia Ruffin, or Miss Callie as he calls her. She invites him for the first of what will be many lunches.

Chapters 11–15 Lucien withdraws his motion for a change of venue. The District Attorney Ernie Gaddis petitions for a larger and secret jury pool, and the judge grants it. Both the District Attorney and Judge Loomis fear jury tampering by the Padgitts, either through bribes or threats. In the meantime, Willie visits more with Miss Callie, who questions whether he is a Christian and worries about his soul. He learns more about her children, and publishes a two-part front-page series about the Ruffins. Lucien sends him a note praising the story. When the jury summonses go out, Miss Callie learns she is called. She dislikes judging another person, but knows it is her duty. She is the last juror picked, and is proud to be a black juror on such an

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important case. The trial begins, and one of the witnesses for the prosecution is Ginger McClure, Rhoda’s sister. After the opening day’s proceedings, the judge sequesters the jury so they will not be influenced by the newspaper, or easily threatened or bribed by the Padgitts. Later that night, Ginger asks Willie for a drink and they end up spending the evening together. She sleeps at his apartment, but nothing sexual happens between them.

Chapters 16–20 The trial continues, with the State calling all of its witnesses. Its last witness is Mr. Aaron Deece, the man who heard Rhoda’s last words. Lucien begins the defense by painting Danny as an innocent boy who has been framed. He calls as a witness Lydia Vince, a married woman who swears on the stand that at the time of the murder, she and Danny were having sex. On crossexamination, Gaddis reveals information that makes it appear the woman is being paid off by someone, possibly the Padgitts. When the session ends for the day, Willie and Ginger are depressed by the outcome. After getting drunk, they have sex. By the next day, Gaddis has found Malcolm Vince, Lydia’s estranged husband. He testifies that Lydia must be lying, since their marriage broke up over her lesbian tendencies. Lucien, knowing Lydia is a bought witness, tries to fix the damage but gives up. Danny Padgitt insists on testifying on his own behalf, against Lucien’s advice. As Lucien has predicted, Danny is terrible on the stand, insisting that all the physical evidence against him is part of a conspiracy. When he realizes no one believes him, he loses his temper and threatens the jury that he will ‘‘get’’ every one of them. After closing arguments, the jury deliberates for a short time before arriving at a guilty verdict. They must now vote on the penalty—death or life in prison. No one is allowed to tell the jury that, at that time in Mississippi, ‘‘life’’ could mean less than twenty years. While waiting for the jury to decide, Willie and Ginger spend their last night together. He would like to pursue a deeper relationship, but she wants no memories of Clanton. The next day, because the jury cannot reach a decision, the judge is forced to give a life sentence. Miss Callie faints while leaving the courtroom and is rushed to the hospital, where doctors find her blood pressure is too high. She refuses to discuss the verdict. The county is shocked and dismayed by Danny’s sentence.

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Many people blame Miss Callie and say that because she is black, she is the one who would not allow the death penalty. Then Willie reveals to the reader that within twenty-four hours, Clanton has forgotten the trial, as there is something more important to focus on.

Part 2: Chapters 21–25 The people of Clanton discover they will have to desegregate their schools in just six weeks, before they open for the new school year. Many of the white citizens panic, while most of the black citizens appear victorious. Willie is pleased because the announcement is good for his paper’s circulation. The high school football season also helps with both readership and the integration problem as a young black boy leads the football team to glory. Mr. Mitlo, the local men’s clothing store owner, decides to change Willie’s dress style, turning him from a student into a sharply dressed professional. Malcolm Vince is murdered by an unknown sniper but the murderer is never caught. Willie learns that 16-year-old Sam Ruffin, Miss Callie’s youngest child, has had an affair with a white woman named Iris Durant, and must leave town for fear of losing his life. Willie meets Sam and agrees to act as a go-between for Sam and his parents. Willie also offers to send a message to Trooper Durant, Iris’s ex-husband, asking if he will allow Sam to see his parents in Clanton as long as he does not leave the black section of town. Durant does not agree, and repeats his threat to kill Sam if he comes home to Clanton. The rest of the Ruffin children and their families come home to Clanton for Christmas. Willie meets them all and is treated as a part of the family. He realizes how emotionally poor his own family and upbringing was. His mother died when he was thirteen, his father is slightly crazy, and he has no siblings. He spends Christmas Eve with his father, eating at a local Chinese restaurant, and Christmas Day with his grandmother BeeBee and some of her friends. He desperately misses the Ruffins.

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grandmother but she tells him to keep his money. He decides to buy a new printing press and he updates the paper. That July campaigning starts for local elections, and in August the town elects a new sheriff. In November, the first white soldier from Ford County dies in Vietnam, and Willie stirs up a controversy with staunchly anti-war editorials. His landlord, Max Hocutt, dies, and Willie buys the man’s decrepit mansion and old car from the remaining Hocutt sisters, who plan to enter a retirement home. Sam Ruffin receives his draft notice; his family convinces him to dodge the draft and flee to Canada. Willie hires a contractor to renovate the house, which turns out to be uninhabitable. The State Supreme Court affirms the conviction of Danny Padgitt.

Part 3: Chapters 32–35

On a day in late January, a sniper starts shooting up downtown Clanton. The gunman is Hank Hooten, who was an attorney on Rhoda’s case as well as her lover. Hank is diagnosed as schizophrenic and sent to a mental hospital. One year after Willie buys the paper, he has enough money to pay back his

This section starts five years after the end of part two. It is now 1977, and Willie’s mansion is finally ready to be lived in. He has an open-house party to celebrate, with over 300 guests. He also learns that Danny Padgitt is no longer at the maximum-security prison. He has been moved to a nicer prison camp and regularly leaves the camp to go into town for lunch at the diner. No one suspects he is a prisoner. Willie breaks the story of Danny’s transfer in the paper, and it is picked up by the large Mississippi and Tennessee daily papers. Within two weeks, Danny is back in the penitentiary. Willie receives threatening phone calls and notifies the FBI. He leaks his FBI communication to the daily papers so the investigation is made public. Seven years after the trial, he starts to wear a gun again, afraid of retaliation from the Padgitts. As part of his editorship, Willie has a policy of visiting services at every church in the county, and during one of these visits he sees Hank Hooten. Surprised, he tries to investigate Hooten’s movements and his release from the mental hospital, but he is unsuccessful. In September 1978, Willie hears about a secret parole hearing for Danny Padgitt from a fellow newspaperman, and he attends. Contrary to state law, no one in Ford County has been notified, and the press is barred, but Willie gets around this obstacle by serving as a witness for the ‘‘other side’’ that is trying to keep Danny in prison. Though he is the only one there speaking against Danny’s release, parole is denied by the slimmest margin. The news of Danny’s near release makes Miss Callie ill, because she fears him. Still the go-between for the family, Willie

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gives her letters from Sam. Sam has prospered in Canada, earning a degree in economics and saving money for law school. By this time, President Jimmy Carter has pardoned those who evaded the draft, and Sam considers returning to the United States. Willie gets an offer to buy the newspaper, but he is not interested in selling.

Chapters 36–40 Willie learns Danny Padgitt is to have another parole hearing. He tells Sheriff McNatt, who attends the hearing and tries to keep Danny in prison, but Danny is released. Clanton is ‘‘quietly disappointed.’’ Evidence suggests that the Padgitts bribed the local state senator to help secure his parole, but Willie cannot prove it. Sam returns from Canada and makes a brief, secret visit to his family. He plans to go to law school. Miss Callie worries about Danny being out of jail. The people interested in buying Willie’s paper make another offer. Lenny Fargarson, one of the jurors in Danny’s trial, is murdered by an unknown killer, a sniper who shoots from a distance. Everyone remembers Danny’s threat. The sheriff asks Willie for a list of jurors, and they discover that one has died of natural causes, but the remaining ten are still alive. All are warned, and Willie warns Miss Callie himself. She is distraught by the news and it affects her blood pressure, which has worsened in the years since the trial. The sheriff then asks Willie to speak to Lucien, Danny’s attorney, about acting as a go-between for the sheriff and the Padgitts. Willie brings his lawyer friend Harry Rex for support, but Lucien is not interested in helping. Willie spends more time with Miss Callie to protect her. Eleven days after Lenny is killed, a second juror, Mo Teale, is shot by a sniper. The sheriff decides his priority is to protect the remaining jurors. They learn that one moved to Florida after the trial, so eight people remain. The sheriff uses his men, but townspeople also help protect their neighbors. Many of the jurors are hidden by their friends, who patrol the yards of the juror’s homes with rifles in hand. Willie thinks Miss Callie’s home has become an armed fortress. Willie tells his friend Harry Rex that he is thinking of selling the paper, and asks his advice. Harry asks if Willie would move, and Willie says no, because Clanton is home. A few days later, Miss Callie breaks her promise to keep the details of the jury’s deliberations a secret. She shows Willie the list of who voted for and against

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the death penalty. Three jurors opposed: Fargarson, Teale, and Maxine Root. Willie, Sam, and Miss Callie contemplate the odds of coincidence, and wonder whether to warn Maxine Root. Before they can decide what to do, another juror, Earl Youry, offers the same information. The sheriff warns Maxine. Lucien asks Harry Rex to tell the sheriff that Danny Padgitt denies all involvement in the murders, and has witnesses to give him alibis for both murders. The sheriff does not believe it, and works on getting the warrants needed to arrest Danny.

Chapters 41–44 Willie says he is tired of the paper and tired of Clanton, and he suspects that Clanton is tired of him. He enters into serious negotiations about selling. As a treat, Esau, Willie, and Sam bring Miss Callie to Memphis, Tennessee to visit the grave of Mrs. DeJarnette. In honor of her Italian second mother, Willie treats her to a large Italian dinner. None of them wants to leave Memphis, because it is good to get away from the tensions in Clanton. On June 25, 1979, Willie signs the papers selling the Times for one and a half million dollars. He tries to keep it quiet, but ends up telling his employees. He wants to leave town, but feels that he cannot go until the killings stop. As July 4, 1979 approaches, Willie admits his enthusiasm for the annual picnic and fireworks is low. However, the Ruffin family decides to have a family reunion, and Willie offers his five bedrooms to any Ruffin family member who wants to stay. There are now twenty-one grandchildren and a total of thirty-five Ruffins, not counting Miss Callie, Esau, and Sam. Of that number, twenty-three stay at Willie’s Hocutt House. Willie observes that in nine years, he and Miss Callie have missed only seven Thursday lunches. He wants them to continue after he stops editing the paper, though he cannot find a good time to tell Miss Callie of the sale. Maxine Root receives a suspicious package. Travis, a part-time deputy, puts the package on the back porch and shoots it to see if it is a bomb. The resulting explosion badly injures Travis, Maxine, and two spectators. The sheriff immediately seeks a warrant for Danny Padgitt’s arrest. Danny, with Lucien, surrenders peacefully. The people of Clanton are relieved. The next day, much of Clanton turns out for the bail hearing, including Willie and Miss Callie and her family; the Padgitt family is noticeably absent.

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Wilson Caudle See Spot Caudle

Mackey Don Coley

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

The Last Juror was released in an unabridged audio version on CD by Random House Audio in 2004. It is narrated by Michael Beck.

Mackey Don is Ford County’s sheriff at the start of the novel. He has been the sheriff since 1943, and although he is being paid off by the Padgitt family, most people in the county do not mind as long as things are kept safe. His preferential treatment of Danny and his obvious hostility to Willie and the newspaper help turn the people of the county against him, and he loses the election the following year.

Bubba Crockett When Danny is put on the stand, he is shot and killed by someone in the courthouse. After an hour, they find the sniper—Hank Hooten. The shocking events cause Miss Callie to suffer a stroke, and she is taken to the hospital. Willie, by now considered a member of the Ruffin family, shares Miss Callie’s last moments with them. Afterward, he goes to his office and writes his last piece for The Ford County Times: Miss Callie’s obituary.

CHARACTERS The sports reporter/editor on the Times.

BeeBee Willie’s maternal grandmother is a wealthy woman who pays for his college education until his fifth year in a four-year program. BeeBee cuts off funding and tells him to get a job. She does lend him the money to buy the newspaper, however, and refuses the money when he tries to pay her back.

Spot Caudle Spot is in his seventies. He is the editor of the Times when Willie starts working there and the son of the paper’s owner. He has a plate in his head from a World War I wound and concentrates all his efforts on the paper’s obituaries. He has a breakdown after being served with involuntary bankruptcy papers for the Times and dies six months later.

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Aaron Deece Aaron Deece is Rhoda Kassellaw’s neighbor, who hears her dying words about who murdered her. He and his wife take care of the traumatized children that night. Later, he testifies against Danny Padgitt at his trial.

Nicola Rossetti DeJarnette

Davey Bigmouth Bass

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One of Clanton’s Vietnam vets, Bubba introduces himself to Willie when Willie starts writing antiwar editorials. He agrees with Willie’s point of view and introduces him to some other local vets who get together once a week to play poker. Willie joins their games once in a while for a diversion.

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The reader learns about this character in Miss Callie’s stories, as she dies four years before the action of the novel begins. However, she does play an important role in the book. Miss Callie calls Mrs. DeJarnette her ‘‘second mother.’’ Nicola is the daughter of Italian immigrants, and she has married well. Miss Callie’s parents are servants in the DeJarnette house when Nicola arrives as a young bride. Nicola has no children of her own, and when Callie is born, Nicola names the baby and takes her almost as a foster child. She teaches Callie Italian, exposes her to culture, and works on her diction. She also promises to pay for Callie’s college education. Unfortunately, the DeJarnettes lose their money, and Mr. DeJarnette commits suicide before this can happen.

Iris Durant Iris is an attractive woman, married to a member of the state highway patrol and the mother of two teen boys. At forty-one years old, she has an affair with sixteen-year-old Sam

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Ruffin. When the affair is discovered, Iris’s husband beats her and throws her out, vowing to kill Sam. Iris leaves Ford County permanently.

Trooper Durant Trooper Durant is a member of the Mississippi Highway patrol, an ex-Marine and sharpshooter, and Iris Durant’s husband. After discovering his wife’s infidelity, he vows to see Sam Ruffin dead and even puts a bounty on Sam’s head, though he would prefer to do the killing himself. Years later, he refuses to allow Sam to come back to town.

during Danny Padgitt’s trial. At the time of the trial he’s in his forties and twice divorced. According to some of the town’s gossip, he was the secret lover of Rhoda Kassellaw. After Danny’s life sentence, Hank has a breakdown and goes on a shooting spree in the middle of downtown Clanton. He is hospitalized as a schizophrenic but is later released. He is responsible for the murders of the jurors as well as that of Danny Padgitt, and ultimately takes his own life.

Rhoda Kassellaw

Thought of by many in Clanton as ‘‘the cripple boy,’’ Lenny is a member of the jury and the first juror to be killed. At the time of the trial, he uses crutches; by the time of his murder he is confined to a wheelchair. His strong faith in God impresses Willie.

A young widow with two small children, Rhoda is an attractive flaxen-haired woman who lives about twelve miles from Clanton. She’s considered a model widow because she keeps to herself; but in 1970, three years after her husband is killed in a truck accident, she frequents clubs far from home. She is brutally raped and murdered by Danny Padgitt, whom she had rejected at one of the clubs.

Ernie Gaddis

Reed Loopus

Ernie Gaddis is Ford County’s District Attorney at the time of the Rhoda Kassellaw murder and the attorney in charge of the prosecution during Danny Padgitt’s trial. He leaves office in 1975.

The Circuit Court Judge for Clanton, Judge Loopus is known for being pro-prosecution and honest. He is very concerned about the Padgitt reputation for buying law enforcement, so he works hard to ensure a fair trial. By law, he is required to sentence Danny to life imprisonment, but at the sentencing he tells Danny he wishes he could sentence him to a long and painful death.

Lenny Fargarson

Hardy The pressman for the Times, Hardy originally works for Spot Caudle, then for Willie after he takes over as owner. Willie makes sure Hardy’s job will be secure under the new owners.

Gilma Hocutt The seventy seven-year-old Gilma Wilma’s twin and one of Willie’s landlords.

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Max Hocutt Max is owner of the Victorian mansion Hocutt House and the eldest of three siblings. He is eighty-one years old when Willie meets him in 1970. When he dies in 1972, his sisters want to move to a senior home, so they sell the house and Max’s Mercedes Benz to Willie.

Wilma Hocutt

One of the town’s colorful characters, the one-legged Major is a lawyer and drinking buddy of Baggy Suggs. Most of the time, he is drunk or on his way to being drunk, but he still manages to pass valuable legal information to Willie.

Ginger McClure A sexy redhead, Ginger is Rhoda’s sister. She travels from Missouri to be the family’s representative at the trial. While in Clanton she has a brief affair with Willie.

Wiley Meek

The seventy seven-year-old Wilma Gilma’s twin and one of Willie’s landlords.

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Hank Hooten A part-time prosecutor for Ford County, Hank Hooten assists the District Attorney

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Wiley is the photographer for the Times. He advises the naive Willie on the complexities of small-town politics. He is badly beaten by the Padgitts in their effort to get the paper to stop publishing damaging articles about Danny’s trial.

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Calia Ruffin

A Hungarian immigrant who owns Clanton’s men’s shop, Mr. Mitlo is responsible for changing Willie’s style of dress, transforming him from raggedy student to dapper professional.

Senator Theo Morton Morton is Clanton’s secretly corrupt state senator. He is married to a woman from Clanton, which makes him popular in the town. He accepts a bribe for pushing up Danny’s parole hearings, but no one can prove it.

Danny Padgitt The son of Ford County’s biggest criminal family, Danny Padgitt rapes and murders Rhoda Kassellaw in a drunken rage. His anger has slowly built up after she has twice turned down his advances at a dance club. He kills her dog, breaks into her house, and hides in her closet with the intention of raping her. He does not plan to kill her but after he wakes her children he feels he must silence her. He expects that the Padgitts, with their money and corrupt influence over the legal system, will be able to keep him out of jail. At his trial he threatens the jurors, telling them, ‘‘You convict me, and I’ll get every damned one of you.’’ He is sentenced to life in prison but serves only ten years before he is released. When he returns to the family compound, jurors from his trial begin to be murdered. He is arrested on suspicion of murder but is shot and killed during his bail hearing by the real murderer, Hank Hooten.

See Miss Callie Ruffin

Miss Callie Ruffin The ‘‘last juror’’ of the title, Miss Callie is a black woman born in 1911. She is the wife of Esau and the mother of the eight Ruffin children. At the time Willie meets her, she’s ‘‘a stout woman, thick in the shoulders and trunk.’’ Her hair is grey and she looks old, but her smile ‘‘lit up the world with two rows of brilliant, perfect teeth,’’ says Willie. A staunch Christian, she befriends young Willie Traynor, who comes to love her like a second mother. She feeds him incredible Southern cooking during their Thursday lunches, and in her quiet way she teaches him valuable life lessons through the stories she shares. Through her stories, we learn about her interesting girlhood. The granddaughter of slaves and a house servant herself at a young age, she is tutored by her employer, Mrs. DeJarnette, from infancy and learns Italian as her first language. Through Mrs. DeJarnette, she is exposed to knowledge and culture that is not available to most girls in her position. Because of her father’s death Miss Callie leaves school when she is fifteen, but she promises herself that her children will not only finish high school but go to college as well. This is a big dream for a black girl in 1926. Three years later she marries Esau, and in 1931 they have their first child. She raises her children with the expectation that they will excel in life, and they all do. Thanks to her guidance and steely determination, seven of her children earn Ph.D.s, and the eighth is preparing for law school by the end of the novel.

Piston ‘‘One of the village idiots,’’ according to Willie, Piston is a part-time janitor and deliveryman for the Times. His moment of glory in town is finding the bomb in the paper’s offices.

Carlota Ruffin Miss Callie’s and Esau’s sixth child, Carlota holds a Ph.D. in urban studies and teaches at UCLA.

Maxine Root Maxine is one of the jurors in the Padgitt trial who would not vote for the death penalty. She is injured when a bomb is sent to her home, but she survives the murder attempt.

Esau Ruffin

Known as Al to the family, he is Miss Callie’s and Esau’s eldest child. Born in 1931, he has a Ph.D. in sociology and is a professor at the University of Iowa.

Esau is Miss Callie’s husband. A quiet man who does not appear often in the novel, he nonetheless gives Miss Callie much emotional support. He is a carpenter and a part-time preacher, and at times he has also worked as a janitor to support the family. He bought his home in 1940, which was a great accomplishment for a black man at the time. According to Willie this is still unusual even in 1970.

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Gloria Ruffin Miss Callie’s and Esau’s fifth child, Gloria holds a Ph.D. in Italian and teaches at Duke University.

and history, and he advises Willie on the newspaper business and provides Clanton insider information.

Mo Teale Leonardo Ruffin Called Leo by the family, he is Miss Callie’s and Esau’s second child. Leo holds a Ph.D. in biology and teaches at Purdue University.

Called ‘‘Mr. John Deere’’ by Willie and his courthouse friends because of his tractor repair uniform, Mo is a juror in the Padgitt trial. He is the second juror murdered after Padgitt is released.

Mario Ruffin Miss Callie’s and Esau’s seventh child, Mario holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature and teaches at Grinnell College.

Joyner William Traynor See Willie Traynor

Willie Traynor Massimo Ruffin Called Max by the family, he is Miss Callie’s and Esau’s third child. Max holds a Ph.D. in economics and teaches at the University of Toledo.

Roberto Ruffin Called Bobby by the family, he is Miss Callie’s and Esau’s fourth child. Bobby holds a Ph.D. in history and teaches at Marquette University.

Sam Ruffin Sam is Miss Callie and Esau’s eighth and youngest child. He is the only black child between the ages of twelve and sixteen in Clanton’s white schools, and these are difficult days for him. At the age of sixteen he has a brief affair with Iris Durant, and flees town in fear of losing his life. He travels from sibling to sibling, never staying in one place too long. At eighteen he tries to come back to Clanton but is told to stay away. He is then drafted, but on the advice of Willie and his siblings he flees to Canada instead. While there he earns a college degree. When amnesty is declared for those who fled the draft, he returns to the States intent on earning a law degree. He sneaks back to Clanton and spends most of Part Three of the book hiding in his parents’ home. He is the Ruffin child closest to Willie. He is with his mother when she dies.

Baggy Suggs Baggy is the main reporter for the Times before Willie comes along. He is an alcoholic, lazy, and a poor writer. In 1970, Willie observes that Suggs is fifty-two but looks seventy because of his drinking. Baggy is important to Willie, however, because he knows all the town gossip

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Willie is the narrator of the book. At its start he is a twenty-three-year-old college dropout working as a reporter for the Ford County Times. His mother died of anorexia when he was thirteen, and his father is a half-crazy stock and bond broker who rarely leaves the house. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Willie’s considered a northerner by the folks of Clanton. He has also attended Syracuse University in New York State, so they suspect him of being a liberal; or worse, a communist. His appearance does not make things any easier—when he first comes to Clanton he has long hair, wears jeans, and drives a Triumph Spitfire. At college, he drank too much, smoked marijuana and protested the war in Vietnam. By all accounts he is a liberal, and when he buys the newspaper with a loan from his wealthy grandmother he intends to be a reformer. However, he also wants to make money. Over the course of the novel, Willie changes from former student to established businessman and becomes one of Clanton’s ‘‘colorful characters’’ in his own right. He matures, due in part to the influence of Miss Callie in his life, and becomes a Clanton homeowner when he purchases Hocutt House. Though he gradually becomes part of Clanton he never really feels like he belongs there, and after ten years of running the newspaper he realizes he is ready to travel. He sells the paper and makes enough money to buy the financial freedom he longs for. He is a naive young man when he first buys the newspaper, but by the end of the novel he has learned much about life, politics and the dark side of human nature.

Lydia Vince A poor woman from outside Clanton who is bought by the Padgitt family. She testifies that

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she is Danny’s lover and was with him at the time of the murder, but it is a lie. She flees after her testimony and is never seen again.

Malcolm Vince Malcolm is Lydia’s estranged husband. He destroys Lydia’s testimony and is murdered shortly after the trial ends; the murder is never solved.

Harry Rex Vonner Harry Rex is the ‘‘meanest divorce lawyer in the county,’’ who first approaches Willie by telling him that he should carry a gun. He not only gives Willie his first gun, but also teaches him how to use it. A man with a large, fleshy face and messy hair, Harry Rex follows most of the politics and law in Ford County and is Willie’s main advisor. He also becomes Willie’s closest male friend. He is the only one in town who does not hate Lucien Wilbanks, so he makes a useful go-between for the sheriff.

Lucien Wilbanks Though Lucien is from an important family of lawyers and bankers who built up Clanton, almost everyone in town hates him. He is hired as Danny Padgitt’s lawyer, and Willie describes him as ‘‘abrasive and fearless and downright mean.’’ He has a beard, drinks heavily, and is the only white member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Ford County, which according to Willie is enough to get a man shot. By the end of the novel, he is facing disbarment but he is still as mean as he was in the beginning.

Margaret Wright Margaret is the longtime secretary at the Times; she essentially runs the place when Spot Caudle is the editor. A shy, soft-spoken Christian woman, she is fiercely loyal to Willie through all her time with him at the paper. When he tells her he has sold the paper, she bursts into tears, and Willie realizes that in her own way she has come to love him. Willie makes sure she has a five-year contract with the new owners as part of the sales agreement.

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THEMES Southern Life Although Willie Traynor is from Memphis, Tennessee, the people of Mississippi see him as a northerner. Through Willie, Grisham offers a glimpse of Southern life that is both affectionate and critical. On the positive side, Willie praises Southerners for being warm, gracious, and polite. Grisham provides many examples in the book of folks protecting their neighbors, as well as Willie. For example, Harry Rex Vonner brings him a gun and teaches him how to shoot it because he knows just how dangerous the Padgitt family is. Willie also notes that people in Clanton frequently ask about his health and invite him to church. Religion comes across as an important and integral part of Southern life. Willie notices that many Southerners will rush to help other people but are distrustful of outsiders. Willie notes that ‘‘they don’t really trust you unless they trusted your grandfather.’’ Of course, racism is the biggest flaw Willie sees in Mississippi society. Another flaw is the corrupt political system that allows families like the Padgitts to flourish and institutions like segregation to be upheld. As editor, Willie attacks corruption and tries to be a force for positive change in Ford County.

Racism One of the book’s major themes is the racism of the South. At one point, Willie observes that it is not uncommon to see signs reading, ‘‘Still Fighting the War,’’ meaning that for many, the Civil War has not truly ended. There are desegregation battles, and the white parents’ fear of their children attending school with blacks. Grisham also includes Miss Callie and Esau’s story of trying to register to vote, and portrays the ways in which blacks are routinely persecuted in the community. As editor of the paper, Willie tries to change things as much as possible. When he features the Ruffin family on his front page, he is not thinking in terms of a ‘‘colored’’ story, but in terms of a good human interest story. In his personal life, Willie strives for integration as well. He says he wants his housewarming party to be the first integrated party in Clanton.

Social Classes When Willie Traynor moves to Clanton, Mississippi, he learns the difference between ‘‘family money’’ and ‘‘wealth.’’ A number of

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Clanton residents are treated with the respect usually given the wealthy, even though they show no signs of being financially well-off. Spot Caudle is eccentric, as are the Hocutts, but because they have family money they are treated with respect and allowed their eccentricities. Willie realizes family money has nothing to do with wealth. In fact, most of the people with family money in Clanton are poor. However, they come from white families and are usually descended from former plantation owners. Their families own big houses with porches, and they are raised from birth with the notion that they are privileged people. As Willie says, ‘‘Acreage and trust funds helped somewhat, but Mississippi was full of insolvent blue bloods who inherited the status of family money. It could not be earned. It had to be handed down at birth.’’ Grisham is not the first Mississippi writer to write about family money. William Faulkner’s novels and short stories, set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, are full of destitute characters who enjoy prestige because of family money.


While most of the violence in The Last Juror is associated with the Padgitt trial, in reality, desegregation was quite violent in Mississippi. Research Medgar Evers’s and the NAACP’s efforts toward desegregation in Mississippi. What were some examples of the violence faced by these civil rights workers? What kinds of sacrifices did they make? How did their sacrifices benefit all residents of Mississippi? Write a paper detailing the information that you find.

Do some research on Vietnam veterans and draft evaders on the Internet. Why did they make the choices they did? Write a short story from the point of view of a young man facing the draft in 1970. In the story, explain the decision you would make and why.

List some of the differences you might find between the lives of black people and the lives of white people in Mississippi in the 1970s. Would this list be the same in your part of the country? If not, what are some of the reasons for the differences? If the lists are similar, why is that? Compare this list to a list of the differences between the lives of black people and white people today. Has there been a big change? Discuss your findings with your classmates. Watch the film version of A Time to Kill. In what ways do the themes of the film echo the themes of The Last Juror? Write a synopsis for a film version of The Last Juror. Would you make it a thriller like A Time to Kill, or would you focus more on the characterdriven parts of the book? How would you handle the long time period covered in the novel?

Religion While The Last Juror could not be characterized as a religious book, the Ruffin family is a very religious family. Miss Callie’s belief permeates everything she does, and because she is such a central character in the book, religion takes on an important role. According to her children, Miss Callie’s faith in God is one of the reasons they have all achieved so much. Faith in God and in His rules about hatred and judging prevent Miss Callie from becoming bitter over the hatred and racism she has had to face. The Ruffins are not the only characters in the book who are faithful Christians. Margaret Wright and Lenny Fargarson are both described as religious people, and both gain a large measure of peace and comfort because of it. Willie is questioned about his faith by Miss Callie. She worries about the state of his soul, as does Margaret. In addition, people in Ford County are taken aback that Willie does not attend a church. He calls himself ‘‘the most famous derelict in town.’’ It seems that in the South during this time, one must attend church so as not to be seen as a suspicious character in the eyes of the neighbors. Willie decides to visit every church in Ford County and write about it

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on the Religion page of the newspaper. He notes that there are no Catholics, Episcopalians, or Mormons in the county, but that it is heavily Baptist with the Pentecostals in second place.

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Both of these religious communities are quite fractured, however. Willie was raised Episcopalian, so visiting churches with long, emotional services is foreign to him. Willie is a religious outsider in Clanton, and through his experiences and observations Grisham illustrates the complexity and contradiction in the community’s religious life.

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readers understand both Clanton and Ford County. In many ways, Clanton is as much a character in the novel as any other.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Desegregation

STYLE Double Narrative In literature, plot means the pattern of events in a story. Usually, a novel has a main plot and perhaps one or two sub-plots. But The Last Juror seems to have two plots that intertwine with one another. The first plot is the Rhoda Kassellaw murder, which includes all the materials about Danny Padgitt’s trial. The other plot is the Willie–Miss Callie plot, and the slow building of their friendship. Of course, Miss Callie appears in both plots since she is a juror on the Padgitt case. But often Willie seems to be telling two different stories, and readers must be careful to keep the threads of the plots straight. Sometimes the story feels a little disjointed, yet Willie is recounting the events thirty years after they happened. This nonlinear style seems appropriate because it reflects how a person’s memories work. In other places in the novel, Willie’s narrative is unrelated to either the Padgitt case or Miss Callie. These episodes fill out his memory of the time, provide a fuller picture of life in Clanton, and offer insight into Willie’s character.

Episodic Plot An episodic plot is arranged as a series of separate episodes. This allows the writer to shift the place, time and viewpoint of the narrative. One thing that might confuse readers of The Last Juror is the sheer number of characters. The story covers nine years and, in that time, dozens of characters float in and out of the story. Because of the episodic nature of the writing, a character may show up only once and never reappear in the narrative. However, the writing is so vivid that even characters who appear only briefly seem to belong in the story. For example, the story of Mr. DeJarnette’s suicide gives color to the novel, but moves nothing along in terms of plot. However, these minor characters help

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In the 1954 decision Brown v. the Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court struck down the idea of ‘‘separate but equal’’ that had been the country’s guideline for racial equality since the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The Brown decision meant that black children must be granted access to the same schools and facilities as their white peers. However, many places in the deeply segregated South did not intend to desegregate without a fight. In some cases, the National Guard was sent in to protect black students as they entered formerly ‘‘white only’’ schools. Many states fought desegregation through the courts. Mississippi avoided desegregation for a decade in this way. Not until the successful court cases of a number of black families in Mississippi, supported by the NAACP, did schools slowly start to integrate. Schools usually adopted a ‘‘freedom of choice’’ rule, whereby black students could voluntarily choose to go to white schools. Many white citizens fought desegregation with intimidation and violence. Black parents who sent their children to whitedominated schools could lose their jobs, leases, or credit at the bank. Sometimes there was violence, or a burning cross was erected on a family’s lawn. In The Last Juror, Sam Ruffin becomes the only black student in the formerly all-white middle school. He is beaten regularly until he learns to use his fists and fight back. No other black families in Clanton are willing to put their children in the same situation. Mississippi continued to fight desegregation until the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Alexander v. Holmes in 1969. In the case, which involved thirty Mississippi school districts, the court struck down all types of dual-school districts and ordered that desegregation must happen immediately. Many schools in Mississippi actually made the changes mid-school year, but in The Last Juror, the school district desegregates at the beginning of a new school year.

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Vietnam War The Vietnam War was one of the most divisive events in U.S. history in the 1960s– 1970s, and to understand why, one must go back much earlier. Vietnam, then called French Indochina, was a French colony for nearly a century before the Second World War. During the peace talks after that war, Vietnam was divided into two halves, communist (North Vietnam) and non-communist (South Vietnam). The French wanted to hold on to their colony, and for over seven years there was a war between the French and the Vietnamese. The United States gave financial help to the French in order to stop the spread of communism. During peace conferences in 1954, it was decided that the French would give up its claim to Indochina, and Vietnam would be temporarily divided. Ho Chi Minh, President of North Vietnam, promised to reunite the country under a communist banner. Guerrilla fighters called the Vietcong were sent into the south to disrupt the country’s attempts at postwar reconstruction. The United States aided South Vietnam because of its strong stand against communism. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy began sending U.S. troops to Vietnam to act as advisors. Things changed in 1964, when two U.S. ships were bombed in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon B. Johnson retaliated by bombing North Vietnam outposts. Congress also passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave the president broad powers for waging a war in Vietnam. After that, U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam and the United States started bombing North Vietnamese targets. At first, many Americans supported the war, which was seen as a war against communist aggressors. However, this changed in 1968. U.S. troops had fought in Vietnam for over three years by then, with little to show for it. In January of that year, the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive. It was a massive, coordinated attack on the United States Embassy in Saigon, as well as other key cities and military bases throughout South Vietnam. It was not a military success for the North Vietnamese, who were ultimately forced back over the border, but it was a political defeat for the United States. Seeing images on television of the embassy under siege and the fierce fighting taking place, many Americans realized that the

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government’s optimistic predictions about the war’s imminent end were not realistic. Much of the American media, including respected television anchorman Walter Cronkite, spoke out against the war. On campuses around the country, college students held protests condemning the war. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon began withdrawing troops, but later that year the fighting escalated again. In April 1970, President Nixon announced he was expanding the fighting to Cambodia, and students erupted in protest. The protests turned deadly in May 1970, when National Guardsmen were called to Kent State University in Ohio to help control the protesters. The Guardsmen opened fire on the students, killing four and injuring nine. Two weeks later, police shot and killed two protestors at Jackson State University in Mississippi. These two incidents are still bitterly remembered. Vietnam veterans returning from the war often found themselves the enemy in the eyes of their peers. Unlike previous veterans of foreign wars in American history, these men and women were not welcomed home with parades and glory. Many returned to the United States with drug or alcohol problems. Many soldiers in Vietnam wanted to dull both the pain of being in an unpopular war far from home and the fear of imminent death. In The Last Juror, this situation is shown through Bubba Crockett and his friends. All of them are soured by their war experiences. Large numbers of young men publicly burned their draft cards, and thousands who were drafted fled to Canada, Australia, or other countries. Sam Ruffin makes this choice in the novel, spurred on by his friends and siblings. President Jimmy Carter pardoned all draft evaders in 1978—almost 10,000 people. Public protest against the war grew during the early 1970s. In 1973, a formal peace treaty was signed between the United States and Vietnam, and President Nixon began the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The war in Vietnam finally ended on April 30, 1975, when Saigon fell to the Vietcong. The bitterness of the war years has dulled, but the memory has not, which is evident whenever the United States faces a new war. One of the favorite cries of the antiwar movement is inevitably, ‘‘not another Vietnam.’’

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Empty jury box Ó Jose Luis Pelaez, Inc./Corbis

CRITICAL OVERVIEW When The Last Juror was published in January 2004, the book was released to mixed reviews. Critics expecting a ‘‘typical’’ Grisham legal thriller usually gave the book a poor review. But critics open to reading the book as a novel with no expectations for certain genre conventions were more positive. Publishers Weekly gives the book a starred review, indicating the book is considered of ‘‘outstanding’’ quality. The anonymous reviewer says: Grisham has spent the last few years stretching his creative muscles through a number of genres: his usual legal thrillers (The Summons, The King of Torts, etc.), a literary novel (The Painted House [sic]), a Christmas book (Skipping Christmas) and a high school football elegy (Bleachers). This experimentation seems to have imbued his writing with a new strength, giving exuberant life to this compassionate, compulsively readable story of a young man’s growth from callowness to something approaching wisdom.

Grisham tells the sad, heroic, moving stories of the eccentric inhabitants of Clanton, a small town balanced between the pleasures and perils of the old and the new South. The novel is heartfelt, wise, suspenseful and funny, one of the best Grishams ever.

Other critics, such as Ron Berthel of the Associated Press, were not as generous in their praise, but still liked the book. He notes that the book is . . . a homey tale about a small-town newspaper and its young master growing up together, and a social observation of the effects that rapidly changing times—school desegregation, the Vietnam War, illegal drug use and the demise of small businesses at the hands of national ‘‘big box’’ retailers—have on life in a slow-paced Southern town.

And while ‘‘suspense and thrills aren’t the main focus of this novel, Grisham knows how to keep the pages turning.’’

The review concludes with high praise indeed:

Matt Grady of America’s Intelligence Wire would agree. He writes that Willie’s first person narrative provides ‘‘a fresh, vibrant touch to the story.’’ Grady also appreciates ‘‘the comical supporting characters including crooked lawyers and nosy reporters.’’ Grady writes that ‘‘these

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elements combined with foreboding suspense and action make The Last Juror a smooth, entertaining read.’’ Dierdre Donohue, writing for USA Today, argues that there are two Grishams: one who writes ‘‘jet-fueled legal thrillers’’ and another who writes more personal novels about things like ‘‘religious faith and its transformative power.’’ In The Last Juror there is both. Like the reviewer from Publisher’s Weekly, Donohue rates this book highly: ‘‘The novel will satisfy those with an appetite for legal thrillers and those who believe Grisham possesses more talent than those breathless page-turners sometimes reveal. It ranks among his best-written and most atmospheric novels.’’ Donohue does note one flaw in the novel. ‘‘Although the novel’s characters are memorable, Grisham uses a heavy trowel to shape them.’’ She remarks that characters in the book are either saints, like Miss Callie, or devils, like the Padgitts. Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe sees the book as flawed, but showing an improvement in Grisham’s skill as a novelist. He writes that Grisham is expanding as a writer, and suggests Grisham’s ‘‘ambitions and skills aren’t lined up yet, but the ambition is more focused, and the skill is coming along.’’ Some critics were disappointed in the book. Jennifer Reese at Entertainment Weekly writes that Grisham’s attempt to combine a characterdriven novel and a legal thriller is not altogether successful. She calls the book a ‘‘salty snack, a tasty, nonnutritious, and ultimately unsatisfying page-turner . . .’’. New Statesman writer Mark Bearn is even more scathing in his review. He writes, ‘‘Sadly, it is a book without plot, purpose or even any pleasure for the reader, simply page after page of deep-fried Southern cliche.’’ He goes on to attack Grisham’s writing as a whole by saying that ‘‘Despite their clumsy plots, paper-thin characters and shocking grammar,’’ Grisham’s earlier books were ‘‘readable’’ and ‘‘surprisingly effective morality tales.’’ However, he adds, as time goes on, Grisham has become more ambitious as a writer and ‘‘less accomplished.’’ Bearn finds Grisham’s characterizations in the novel lacking. He finds Miss Callie ‘‘absurdly angelic’’ and says that Grisham treats readers to ‘‘a parade of formulaic characters.’’ He finishes his review of the novel with this analysis:

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A plot, or a hard look at the racial divisions that make Mississippi the poorest and most unequal state in America, might have compensated for Grisham’s lack of literary skill. Without either of these we are left with nothing.

CRITICISM Margaret Brantley Brantley is a writer and editor of literary reference and academic subject texts. In this essay, she examines the portrayal of racism in recent-past settings by modern writers, and how John Grisham’s The Last Juror treats the subject in the twenty-first century. In August 2005, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that people’s feelings about something could be changed by manipulating their memories of it. Convinced that they had had a bad experience with strawberry ice cream as a child, adults turned away from the treat they had previously enjoyed. Persuaded that they had once loved asparagus, test subjects reported liking it more than before. The human impulse to believe that what is true today has always been true is by no means limited to such tricks of the taste buds. In 1963, George Wallace became governor of Alabama and proclaimed, ‘‘segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’’ in his inaugural speech. He raised the Confederate Battle Flag atop the state’s capitol dome that year. A generation later, tradition-minded Alabamians fought the removal of the controversial symbol, arguing that it had flown there since the Civil War and to remove it would dishonor their noble Confederate ancestors. Whether through an exercise in propaganda or poetic license, American writers have also shaped their readers’ present perceptions by adjusting their past attitudes. Following in the footsteps of Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell, and Harper Lee, John Grisham reaches into the recent past and retrieves a new memory in The Last Juror. While racism is often mentioned in the book, its presence provides more atmosphere than action. The Last Juror is not a fable with a moral about the wrongness of racism. It is a crime drama. The basic story can be summarized in a few lines: A man kills a woman. A young newspaperman sensationalizes the story to sell papers. A woman has lived a remarkable life

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WHETHER THROUGH AN EXERCISE IN PROPAGANDA OR POETIC LICENSE, AMERICAN WRITERS HAVE ALSO SHAPED THEIR READERS’ PRESENT PERCEPTIONS BY ADJUSTING THEIR PAST ATTITUDES. FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MARK TWAIN, MARGARET MITCHELL, AND HARPER LEE, JOHN GRISHAM REACHES INTO THE RECENT PAST AND RETRIEVES A NEW MEMORY IN THE LAST JUROR.’’

despite hardships. She breaks ground by being selected to sit on the jury in the murder trial. The community is shocked by the outcome. Some members of the jury are murdered—but why, and by whom? If all the players are either black or white, this cast of core characters—the murderer, the victim, the reporter, the juror, and the avenger— may have thirty different configurations and create almost as many race dramas. Or, as is the case in The Last Juror, the color of the participants’ skin proves immaterial to the story’s action. The juror is black, and the other core players are white. There are moments when the reader fears she will be harmed by racist whites in her community, but not only is she not harmed, she is not threatened. The issue of race in The Last Juror is a red herring, used to add suspense and keep the readers guessing. It serves as a misdirection because modern readers are primed to expect race, when mentioned, to be an issue.

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century, masters like Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo were making statements about contemporary politics in Russia and France with stories set during major events in each country’s recent past. Writing just after the American Civil War about events in the years just prior, Mark Twain (1835–1910) used the recent-past technique and a child’s point of view to evoke compassion for African Americans. Immediately after the Civil War, the U.S. government suspended the rights of the rebel states in a period known as Reconstruction. It passed laws to establish civil rights for newly freed slaves, but resistance to such forced progress gave rise to organized racism and violence as defeated white southerners sought to reclaim a sense of power. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, the stage was set for the Jim Crow era, a period of legalized racial segregation designed to systematically oppress African Americans. Published in 1885 and set ‘‘Forty to Fifty Years Ago,’’ Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows the hero’s struggle with his conscience while trying to do the right thing. After faking his death and leaving home, Huck takes up with a runaway slave named Jim, whose friendship and company are the foundation for the novel’s adventures. Although he loves his friend, Huck feels that he should turn in the fugitive slave. He prays for the resolve to turn Jim in but cannot bring himself to do the ‘‘right’’ thing: I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out. . . . I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘‘All right then, I’ll go to hell[.]‘‘

Storytellers have always spun yarns about the long ago and the far away. A culture’s values are both reflected in and supported by its mythology. Heroes like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and King Arthur illustrated lessons of bravery, humility, cunning, hospitality, chivalry, and piety. Each also gave future generations of his countrymen an ancestral hero with a legacy of which to be proud. As literacy and printing technology grew, readers started enjoying adventures and romances set in the present day and written in accessible language, in addition to the myths and fables of yore. By the nineteenth

Huck accepts his inability to betray Jim as a flaw in his own sinful nature rather than a flaw of the society that expects him to regard another human as less than himself. That he does the morally right thing, even when contrary to the legally right thing, reveals something admirable about Huck. Through the brave decision of a thoroughly likeable and fully American character, Twain gives his readers a hero they can identify with, respect, and honor as they, too, do the moral thing. Huck recognizes Jim’s humanity long before the lawmakers in

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Washington try to legislate that recognition. Following his example, Twain’s readers can also be compassionate without feeling like some federal law has told them how to feel. Grisham uses a different tactic to let his readers feel compassion. In one scene in The Last Juror, he describes the contrasting reactions to public school desegregation from both communities it is about to affect: The white parents were angry and frightened and I saw several women crying. The fateful day had finally arrived. At the black school there was an air of victory. The parents were concerned, but they were also elated that their children would finally be enrolled in the better schools.

By representing the black community’s point of view, Grisham underscores the righteousness of the wronged party without preaching or even pointing out which side that is. His readers get to feel good about themselves for knowing that they, too, are on the side of right. Written during the Jim Crow era, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) gave readers license to remember the Civil War in a new way. Mitchell (1900–1949) experienced the beginning of the breakdown of the Jim Crow South as an adult in Atlanta. During the Red Summer of 1919, northern and southern U.S. cities alike witnessed more than two dozen race riots. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld black defendants’ rights to fairness before the law with landmark cases in the 1920s and 1930s in which African Americans were charged with violence against whites. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan peaked in the 1920s, and the poverty and insecurity of the Great Depression of the 1930s fostered animosity toward minorities as people competed for scarce jobs and resources. Gone With the Wind gave readers a picture of benign slavery they could embrace, as well as a dashing, romantic, racist hero to admire. Mitchell’s Rhett Butler is a charming rogue who ignores conventions and lives for his own selfish pleasure. In a line meant to reveal something good about Rhett’s character, the narrator notes, ‘‘Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being ‘uppity to a lady.’’’ The reader understands that being a murderer is preferable to letting a white lady endure a perceived affront. Later, Scarlett, the story’s protagonist, tries to defend the use of white convict labor by comparing it to slavery: ‘‘Ah, but

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that was different. Slaves were neither miserable nor unfortunate. The negroes were far better off under slavery than they were now under freedom, and if she didn’t believe it, just look about her!’’ Regardless of whether Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece served to defend its author’s heritage and justify her beliefs, it did allow its readers to hold their chins up and look down their noses at the idea that there was anything wrong with being a racist. Grisham turns this approach on its head. While Rhett is a likeable racist, Lucien Wilbanks, the defense attorney in The Last Juror, is an unsympathetic progressive. ‘‘He was the only white member of the NAACP in Ford County, which alone was enough to get you shot there. He didn’t care.’’ Wilbanks is mean, unpopular, and one of the novel’s bad guys, but he is also bravely on the right side of the race question. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) was written in the thick of the civil rights movement, between the 1954 decision that outlawed segregation in public schools and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Set in the 1930s in Jim Crow Alabama, the novel was inspired by the case of the Scottsboro boys, nine black teenagers wrongfully convicted of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. All but the youngest one were sentenced to death for the crime, but all were eventually released through appeals, pardons, or parole. In two separate decisions related to the case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the defendants’ right to due process and fair trials. Atticus Finch, the protagonist of To Kill a Mockingbird, is a white lawyer defending an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman. He does not win, nor does he expect to, but he behaves bravely and morally in the face of societal pressure to do otherwise. Finch is a hero like Huck Finn: one that readers can look up to as a model to emulate in a confusing time of change. The idea that all citizens deserved life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was one that some white Americans officially resisted into the 1970s. The message of To Kill a Mockingbird could be that white people are no better and no worse than black people, black people are no less deserving of civil rights than white people, and it is up to white people to look out for black people. The novel lumps African Americans in with simpletons, bugs,

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and birds—all of which deserve compassion and protection from white people. Early in the book, a neighbor explains to Atticus’s son why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird: ‘‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.’’ Later, the boy prevents his sister from killing a harmless roly-poly bug with the argument ‘‘they don’t bother you.’’ The novel ends with the girl agreeing with her father that they should protect their mysterious, emotionally troubled neighbor, because to do otherwise would be ‘‘like shootin’ a mockingbird.’’ Atticus Finch shows the readers how to act righteously while assuring them that they can remain superior. He is painted as a hero to the dignified and stoic black community. He believes they are equal but does not seem to mind keeping them separate. Rather than grief and outrage when an innocent man is sent to prison, the black members of the community stand as a gesture of respect when the white lawyer passes by. This exchange between Finch and his African American housekeeper about the gifts of food the black townspeople leave to show their gratitude underscores the fact that heroic behavior in one generation may not only be inadequate but actually offensive to the next: Calpurnia said, ‘‘This was all ‘round the back steps when I got here this morning. They—they ‘preciate what you did, Mr. Finch. They—they aren’t oversteppin’ themselves, are they?’’ Atticus’s eyes filled with tears. He did not speak for a moment. ‘‘Tell them I’m very grateful,’’ he said. ‘‘Tell them—tell them they must never do this again. Times are too hard.’’

Even if the exchange does not suggest that there are circumstances in which the gift-givers might step out of place, it does say that white people do not owe black people the most basic observance of good manners—to say ‘‘thank you’’ to people who give them gifts and pay them compliments. If Lee was able to convince readers in the 1960s to be more like Atticus Finch, she contributed to progress—not triumph. If Finch had made African American friends with whom he socialized at their homes, at his home, and in public, like the white protagonist of The Last Juror, the bar would have been higher.

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every opportunity in order to prove they are intelligent, evolved, progressive beings. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison claims that ‘‘the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture.’’ Grisham by no means ignores it. He portrays overt racism in 1970s Mississippi as a fact of the setting, like the hot summers or the native drawl, but does not make any specific judgment condemning it. However, The Last Juror is filled with portrayals of racism and its effects. Grisham does not downplay or ignore racism; he simply opts not to make it the center of his tale. He populates his fictional Clanton, Mississippi, with rich, full personalities and makes sure that neither the town’s black citizens nor its white citizens have a monopoly on silliness or dignity, evil or virtue. Through the voice of narrator Willie Traynor, Grisham comes across as clearly anti-racist, but he does not belabor the point. He trusts his twenty-first-century audience to share his feeling and gets on with the story. Grisham does not use The Last Juror to influence his readers’ opinions about race. He paints neither a prettier nor uglier picture of the past, and he does not ask his readers to feel better or worse about themselves or their history. He does not suggest that the fight against racism is won, or even close to over. His debut novel, A Time to Kill (1989), set in present-day Clanton, addresses the issue head on. With The Last Juror, he gives a multifaceted portrayal of life in the small-town South. The Twains, Mitchells, and Lees that came before him made sure he does not have to educate his readers about racism; they already know. Thanks to the modern reader’s sophistication, Grisham is able to reach a new level of complexity and realism in his depiction of the recent past. In his opinion on the 1972 decision that deemed all American death penalty statutes illegal, Thurgood Marshall, the country’s first black Supreme Court justice, wrote, ‘‘In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.’’ In 2004 with the inhabitants of his fictional Clanton, Grisham came closer to paying himself this tribute than most other American writers could imagine.

The Last Juror (2004) offers a new reason to look to the recent past: to reassure readers that they do not need to talk about race at

Source: Margaret Brantley, Critical Essay on The Last Juror, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1988) was his first book, and it is also set in Clanton, Mississippi in the fictional Ford County, so it is an interesting way of seeing some characters’ first appearances in print. It also has similar themes but is more of a thriller. The Summons (2002) is the second book Grisham set in Clanton. Not really a thriller, it has been called a morality play by some reviewers—a story that tells readers how they should behave by showing them characters who do the absolute wrong thing. R. M. Leich’s Not My Father’s War (2004), a novel written by a Vietnam veteran, is the story of a wealthy young man from Nashville, Tennessee who tries to keep up the family tradition of service to country and patriotism, but who learns that Vietnam is unlike any other American war. George C. Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 3rd edition (2001) is the textbook most highly recommended for understanding the Vietnam War. The last chapter, ‘‘The Post-War and the Legacy of Vietnam,’’ has been revised to reflect the dramatic changes of the past decade, and it analyzes the influence that Vietnam continues to have on Americans.

Tina Jordan In the following interview with Jordan, Grisham discusses how his many books, as well as the filmed adaptations of those books, compare to each other. John Grisham’s office, a stunning loft space overlooking downtown Charlottesville, Va., is a long, lean expanse of wood floors studded with curvy red and plum sofas and an imposing conference table. Despite the wood and glass and steel, it’s a warm space, decorated with both the

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expected (movie posters, early reviews) and the unexpected (one of his old Mississippi law firm business cards, encased in a small frame). Grisham, 49, strides in five minutes late, apologetic. He’s driven from his farm, a 204-acre spread south of the city that he shares with wife Renee and daughter Shea (son Ty is away at college). Nursing an Italian coffee, he ponders a list of his 17 best-sellers and 9 movies. ‘‘By the time I’m finished with one book I’m always thinking about the next one,’’ he says, laughing, ‘‘so I can’t remember a lot of detail. But I’ll wing it.’’ He doesn’t have to wing it, of course. Here’s a short list of his favorites—and a few not-sofavorites: Grisham was a small-town lawyer and state legislator in Mississippi when he picked up a pen and pad and started A Time to Kill (1989). ‘‘I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote that book. It’s the only book out of 17 that I wrote without a deadline and without the knowledge that it was going to get published, so I really took my time with it. Still, I go back and look at it occasionally and see a lot of rookie mistakes . . . Too many long sentences and too much flowery prose. Now, 20 years later, I’m really tired of the Ku Klux Klan stuff. When you write about the South it’s got to be about race, and I wish I hadn’t devoted so much of the book to the Klan because they don’t deserve it. That’s one thing I’d change.’’ After spending three years laboring over A Time to Kill—and not having much to show for it—Grisham admits that The Firm (1991) was ‘‘a naked stab at commercial fiction’’: ‘‘If it hadn’t worked the second time, I probably would’ve stopped for a while. I like [The Firm] a lot because I’ve always liked the character of Mitch McDeere, and the hook, and the ending— in spite of what Hollywood did to it.’’ (Grisham ended with the main couple stealing Mob money and going on a permanent Caribbean vacation, while director Sydney Pollack, claiming he was sick of ‘‘yuppie endings,’’ sent Tom Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn back to their Boston roots, poorer but wiser.) The movie: ‘‘I had nothing to do with it. I went to the set twice. Stephen King is a buddy, and he told me a long time ago, ‘They’re just movies. They cannot change a word of what you’ve written. It’s somebody else’s interpretation. Take the money and run.’ . . . I thought

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[Cruise] did a good job. He played the innocent young associate very well.’’ Hoping to capitalize on The Firm’s success, Grisham churned out The Pelican Brief (1992) in two months flat: ‘‘You know the movie Three Days of the Condor, the CIA thriller [directed by Pollack] with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway? The book was a deliberate effort to outspace Condor, to have all this stuff going on, so the reader could not turn the pages fast enough. But I think it shows some damage because it was written so fast.’’ The movie: ‘‘I met Alan Pakula before he bought the film rights, and he wanted my input. I read the screenplay, and it followed the book . . . That’s all you can ask for. The movie was very popular. I though Julia [Roberts] was a good choice . . . I had a problem with Denzel [Washington], not as actor, but in the book he’s a white guy . . . I didn’t write the guy as a black guy in the book. Some of my characters are white and some are black. If you’re going to make a dramatic change, give me a good reason. And there really was no good reason. And I think it was kind of awkward; in the book there was more of a romance toward the end between the two. In the movie it was almost like they couldn’t because one was black and one was white.’’ In its first year out, The Client (1993) sold 3 million copies; it even overtook the behemoth The Bridges of Madison County on the best-seller charts for a few weeks. ‘‘The Client was, by the benefit of 10 years’ hindsight, by far the weakest book . . . because of the kid hiring the lawyer, the kid knowing where the body’s buried . . . There’s a hundred pages of fluff in that book.’’ The movie: ‘‘The Client may be my least favorite book, but it’s a really popular movie. The Pelican Brief and Client were much closer to the books than The Firm . . . I thought Susan Sarandon was wonderful.’’ The Chamber (1994), about a death-penalty case, was a departure for Grisham, the first in which he grappled with social issues: ‘‘It was probably the most difficult book I had to write. Growing up in a strict Southern Baptist household you think capital punishment’s wonderful—line ’em up, shoot ’em, hang ’em. And the book flipped me. I wasn’t expecting that. I spent time on death row, and it had a profound impact on me. It was difficult to write—I just couldn’t get the guy to the gas chamber. And so it became a very long book. The only book I’ve missed the

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deadline on. But it’s a book I like a lot. A book I’m proud of.’’ The movie: ‘‘A disaster. A train wreck from the beginning. It could not have been handled worse by those involved, including me. I made a fundamental error when I sold the film rights before I finished writing the book. It was a dreadful movie. Gene Hackman was the only good thing in it.’’ Next he tackled the insurance industry in The Rainmaker (1995): ‘‘I got to unload on insurance companies, which is a lot of fun. I sued ’em for 10 years when I was a lawyer . . . Rainmaker was . . . the first time I used first-person narration, and I realized I really, really liked it . . . The challenge with Rainmaker, also with The Runaway Jury [1996], is that courtroom stuff of a civil nature is unbelievably dull. And so you weigh the balance of pace with being legally accurate. I hate this television stuff with courtroom scenes that would just make any lawyer want to vomit. I don’t want to do that.’’ The movie: ‘‘To me it’s the best adaptation of any of ’em. [Francis Ford] Coppola really wanted my involvement, for whatever it’s worth. And I love the movie. It’s so well done. And it came out a few weeks before Titanic and got swamped.’’ There’s no moralizing in The Partner (1997), just good writing about a greedy lawyer on the lam: ‘‘It’s one of my favorite stories, one of the trickiest ones, flashing back and then forward, nabbing the lawyer and then watching him wiggle out of it. There are times when my wife says, ‘Would you just stop preaching and tell a story?’ And I listen to that.’’ Grisham tried a new tack In The Brethren (2000)—humor. It’s the tale of three jailed judges who run a blackmailing scam from their cells: ‘‘I thought [Brethren] was hilarious! It was supposed to be hilarious! It’s based on a real story— though obviously I was careful to fictionalize it—at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Brethren was a fun story, fun to write, but one with no redeeming social value whatsoever.’’ Grisham got rave reviews for A Painted House (2001), his first nonlegal thriller: ‘‘Well, probably my best book. The best writing. Probably the best story and the best characters. It’s a sweet childhood memoir, even though it was published as fiction. The first seven years of my life—I was that kid, I lived on that farm, with my grandparents, playing baseball with Mexicans. Once I got all the setting and

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characters in place, I just sort of fictionalized everything . . . ’’ In his new book, The Last Juror—not strictly a legal thriller—Grisham takes readers back to Ford County, the fictional Mississippi county that was also the setting of A Time to Kill. ‘‘I wrote a hundred pages of it in the fall of 1989. I was going to write a Ford County book and a legal thriller, back and forth, and write two kinds of books, so I had the story all mapped out, and then The Firm went crazy, so The Last Juror got shoved to the back burner. But I’ve learned a lot over the years. After 15 years, I have greater expectations for my books.’’ Source: Tina Jordan, ‘‘Grisham V Grisham: John Grisham, undisputed champ of the legal thriller, issues a summary judgment on THE LAST JUROR, his latest novel, along with verdicts on some of his previous bestsellers,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, No. 751, February 13, 2004, p. 41.

Richard Dyer In the following review, Dyer argues that The Last Juror is Grisham’s most literary novel to date, and is more than just a legal thriller.

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‘‘The Last Juror Book Review,’’ in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 251, February 2, 2004, p. 59. Mohr, Charles, ‘‘10,000 Affected Now,’’ in New York Times, January 22, 1977, p. 47. Oberdorfer, Don, ‘‘Tet: Who Won?,’’ in Smithsonian, Vol. 35, Issue 8, November 2004, pp. 117–22. Reese, Jennifer, Losing Appeal? Legal Pyrotechnics and Melodrama Awkwardly Mix in John Grisham’s ‘‘The Last Juror,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, February 13, 2004. p. 74. ‘‘School Desegregation in Mississippi,’’ University of Southern Mississippi’s Civil Rights Documentation Project, www.usm.edu/crdp/html/cd/desegregation. htm

FURTHER READING

John Grisham Online, www.randomhouse.com/features/ grisham/

Appy, Christian G, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, Viking Books, 2003. This book is designed to be an oral history, giving voice to people from all sides of the Vietnam War—officials from both the United States and Vietnam, as well as words from widows of soldiers, civilians who helped in the war effort as well as war protestors. Fireside, Harvey and Sarah Betsey Fuller, Brown v. Board of Education: Equal Schooling for All, Landmark Supreme Court Cases Series, Enslow Publishers, 1994. An objective and well-written book, aimed at giving high school students a solid understanding of this groundbreaking case. To help readers understand, it includes photos, quotations from both sides of the battle and explanations of the judges’ opinions. Galt, Margot Fortunato, Stop This War!: American Protest of the Conflict in Vietnam, Lerner Publishing, 2000. Galt interviewed many former conscientious objectors who give their viewpoint about the Vietnam war. She also gives information about protest groups, the war policies of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and the Kent State killings. Maraniss, David, They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, Simon & Schuster, 2003. This book gives a good overview of the peace movement in America, focusing on Wisconsin and the battle situation in Vietnam. Walter, Mildred Pitts, Mississippi Challenge, Simon & Shuster Children’s Publishing, 1992. Walter writes an objective and thorough nonfiction book in which she outlines the history of blacks in Mississippi from before the Civil War through the mid-1960s. She paints a stark picture, especially of how whites in Mississippi tried to prevent blacks from voting. The book includes good notes and a bibliography.

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Source: Richard Dyer, ‘‘Book Review The Last Juror By John Grisham,’’ in Boston Globe, February 2, 2004, p. E1.

SOURCES Bearden, Michelle, ‘‘An Interview with John Grisham,’’ in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 240, No. 8, February 22, 1993, pp. 70–71. Bearn, Mark, ‘‘Southern Comfort,’’ in New Statesman, Vol. 133, February 23, 2004, pp. 54–56. Berthel, Ron, ‘‘ ‘Legal Thriller’ Only One Way to Describe Grisham’s New Novel,’’ for The Associated Press, February 3, 2004, BC cycle. Blitzer, Charles, ‘‘From the Center,’’ in Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 18, Issue 3, Summer 94, p. 160. Donohue, Dierdre, ‘‘Last Juror is a Tale of 2 Grishams,’’ in USA Today, January 27, 2004,Final Edition, Life Section, p. 1D. Dyer, Richard, ‘‘Book Review, The Last Juror,’’ in Boston Globe, February 2, 2004, Third Edition, Living Section, p. E1. Grady, Matt, ‘‘Perspective of The Last Juror Adds to Grisham’s Writing,’’ in America’s Intelligence Wire, March 11, 2004. Grisham, John, The Last Juror, Random House, 2004. Hunter, Marjorie, ‘‘A Re-Entry Plan,’’ in New York Times, September 17, 1974, p. 1.

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The Lovely Bones In her first novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), Alice Sebold delves into the horror and trauma resulting from by the rape and murder of a young girl. The novel arose from Sebold’s own experience with violence—her rape as an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Similar to her 1999 memoir, Lucky, which details her own rape, its psychological aftermath, and the arrest, trial, and conviction of the rapist, The Lovely Bones refuses to sanitize sexual violence. Yet the novel does not sensationalize violence either; instead, it offers the ordinariness of it. Both the setting in suburban Philadelphia, and the time period of the early 1970s, underscore Sebold’s belief that no one is immune from violence; it touches everyone. More importantly, the story of Susie Salmon and her family exposes the way in which society marginalizes the victims of violence. The Lovely Bones becomes a study of the effects of violence, in this case rape and murder, not only on the victim, but on her family, friends, and community. The Lovely Bones does not focus on evil; it does not attempt to make sense of bad people or bad acts. Instead the novel investigates issues of loss and grief, life and death, identity and self, remembrance and forgetting, womanhood and motherhood, coming of age and rites of passage, and heaven and earth. The readers watch with Susie as her father, mother, sister, brother, and grandmother, as well as her middle school friends, her killer, and the lead detective on the

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case, confront similar issues in their attempts to understand their grief. While the novel raises many questions, it does not, in fact, answer all of them. Sebold examines traditional views, such as those about heaven, sexuality, and the place of women in American society, while simultaneously challenging those views.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Alice Sebold was born in 1963 and grew up in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia. In her essay ‘‘The Oddity of Suburbia,’’ she confesses that she despised suburbia, but after living in both Manhattan and Southern California, she ‘‘realiz[ed] . . . that within the suburban world of [her] upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world.’’ Her novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), reflects her realization that suburbia can and does contain ‘‘a bottomless well of narrative ideas.’’ However, that realization did not occur until Sebold left Philadelphia. In 1981, as an eighteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University in New York, Sebold was severely beaten and raped. Rather than remain quiet about the incident, she was instrumental in the arrest, trial, and conviction of her assailant. While at Syracuse University, Sebold took writing classes with poet Tess Gallagher and fiction writer Tobias Wolff, both of whom encouraged her to remember and write about her rape. Sebold graduated from Syracuse in 1984 and entered, but did not complete, a master of fine arts degree program at the University of Houston. Instead, she moved to New York City, and as she details in the epilogue to her 1999 memoir, Lucky, she turned to alcohol and heroin as she struggled to come to terms with her rape. During these years, Sebold taught writing classes at Hunter College and Bucknell College in New York, worked odd jobs, and wrote. She left New York for California in 1995 and entered the M.F.A. program at the University of California, Irvine, earning her degree in 1998. Sebold began The Lovely Bones during her graduate writing studies, but recognized that until she confronted and narrated her own story, she could not write the story of Susie, the main character and narrator of The Lovely Bones. As many critics rightly note, the two books, Lucky and The Lovely Bones, seem to be companion pieces. The Lovely Bones garnered

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two major awards, the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel and the American Booksellers Association’s ‘‘Book of the Year Award.’’ While at UC Irvine, Sebold met Glen David Gold, a fellow master’s student. They married in 2001, the same year his novel Carter Beats the Devil was published. As of 2005, Sebold and Gold lived in California.

PLOT SUMMARY Chapters 1–2 Fourteen-year-old Susie tells her story from heaven, where she exists after having been raped, murdered, and dismembered in a frozen cornfield by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. She introduces her family—her father, Jack; mother, Abigail; sister, Lindsey; and brother, Buckley— the boy she likes, Ray Singh; the lead detective on her case, Len Fenerman; and her heavenly intake counselor, Franny. Susie begins to acclimate to her heaven and learns that it reflects her desires and wishes, and that everyone’s heaven is slightly different. With Franny’s help, she begins to understand what it means to be dead. She still

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wants to grow up and live, but now, since she cannot experience actual living, she must be content to watch what happens on earth. Three days after Susie disappears, Detective Fenerman tells Jack the police have found a body part. Susie’s parents have difficulty dealing with the horror of their daughter’s disappearance— neither wants to believe that Susie is dead. In addition to the body part, the police find various objects belonging to Susie that indicate she was killed in the cornfield: a copy of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, her biology notes, a love letter from Ray Singh, and her winter hat. This last item convinces the Salmons of Susie’s death. Ray Singh becomes the police’s first suspect. Susie’s family does not believe that Ray killed Susie; nevertheless, the police believe that his absence from school on the day she died, his dark skin, and his rather arrogant attitude make him a viable suspect. Despite his alibi, Ray, already considered an outsider by his classmates because he and his family came from India, becomes more socially isolated at school.

Chapters 3–5 Susie continues watching family and friends, and as they go about the business of living, she narrates both recent and past events. When Susie left earth, her spirit inadvertently brushed against Ruth Connors, a girl from school. This contact initiates a connection between the girls. By following Ruth, Susie remains engaged in the daily routines of adolescence. Through conversations with Franny, Susie realizes her homesickness for her mother. She recalls the candid picture she once took of her mother that captured Abigail as a woman, rather than as Mrs. Salmon, wife and mother. When the film was developed, she did not share this picture of her mother; instead, she hid it in her room. Susie watches now as Lindsey enters Susie’s room and finds that picture of their mother. Like Susie, Lindsey gets a glimpse of Abigail as Abigail. Up to this point, Susie has only watched the living, but now she materializes, revealing herself to her father. She sees Jack smash his collection of ships in a bottle that he and Susie built together. As her father stands amid the wreckage, evidence of his rage and grief, Susie reveals herself in the myriad shards. Susie recounts what happened after Harvey killed her. He dismantles the underground hole

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in the cornfield, carries Susie’s body parts to his house in a cloth sack, and showers to remove her blood from his body. Then he places Susie’s dismembered body in an old safe and drops it in a nearby sinkhole. Returning from the sinkhole, he finds Susie’s silver charm bracelet in his pocket. He drives to an industrial park under construction, removes one charm—the Pennsylvania keystone from her father—and throws the bracelet into the construction site. Susie discovers she was not his first victim. Weeks later, Jack stops to watch Harvey build a ceremonial tent in his yard. Jack volunteers to help with the project, and the two men— Susie’s murderer and her father—work side by side. Susie tries to send her father a message, but fails. However, Jack does feel Susie’s presence and begins to wonder about Harvey. He believes this strange man knows something about Susie’s murder. Each of the Salmons develops ways to cope with his or her individual grief and fear. Jack involves himself in finding Susie’s killer; Abigail isolates herself from her family and turns to Detective Fenerman for answers; Buckley asks direct questions regarding Susie’s absence; and Lindsey struggles with both her desire to claim an identity separate from Susie, the dead daughter and sister, and her tremendous grief at the loss of that sibling. Detective Fenerman talks with Harvey after Jack suggests he might be involved. Harvey expresses his sympathies regarding Susie’s murder and explains to the detective that Jack helped him build a ceremonial bridal tent in honor of his deceased wife. Although Detective Fenerman considers Harvey odd, he seems satisfied with Harvey’s explanations. Jack, however, is not. On Christmas Day, Samuel Heckler stops by the Salmon house with a gift for Lindsey. While Samuel and Lindsey talk in the kitchen and later exchange their first kiss, Buckley plays Monopoly with his father. During the game, Jack explains to his young son that Susie is never coming home.

Chapters 6–10 Susie recalls the first time she and Ray Singh ‘‘almost’’ kissed. Two weeks before she died, Susie got to school late and Ray, who cut his first period class, was sitting atop a scaffold in the auditorium. Susie joined him, and as they talked, she realized that Ray was going to kiss

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her. However, voices from below interrupted them. Susie and Ray watched as the principal and the art teacher chastised Ruth for her charcoal drawings of ‘‘real women.’’ When the adults left, Susie and Ray climbed down, and Susie asked to see Ruth’s sketchbook. Impressed by the drawings, Susie changed her perspective of Ruth, seeing her as special rather than strange. The girls do not become friends, but after her murder, Susie grows to love the girl she touched as she left earth. Ray and Susie kiss a week later by their lockers. After Susie’s death, Ruth and Ray develop a deep friendship, bonding over the death of Susie. In his effort to make sense of Susie’s death, Jack seeks out Ray. At the Singhs’ house, Jack talks to Ray’s mother. When he confesses his suspicions about Harvey, Ruana Singh validates his theory and tells Jack that given the same circumstances, she would kill her child’s murderer. Ruana’s understanding contrasts with Abigail’s lack of understanding, further highlighting the widening chasm between Susie’s parents. While Jack is at the Singhs’ house, Detective Fenerman drops by the Salmons’ home. Susie watches as a subtle but discernable attraction develops between her mother and the detective. Susie’s maternal grandmother, Grandma Lynn, arrives to attend Susie’s memorial. Lynn, an eccentric and flamboyant personality, brings some vitality into the Salmon home. She begins a lively banter with Jack, gives beauty lessons to Lindsey, and prods Abigail into laughter. She realizes, regardless of the family’s tragedy, Lindsey is moving into womanhood and helps her granddaughter by acknowledging this fact. She aids in putting together an outfit for Lindsey to wear to the memorial. Grandma Lynn also answers Lindsey’s questions regarding Jack’s suspicions about Harvey, who, along with the family, school friends, teachers, neighbors, and Detective Fenerman, attends the memorial. Grandma Lynn does something that Susie notes as important: she identifies Harvey for Lindsey.

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how much she misses her sister. She also confesses she loves Samuel. As Lindsey and Samuel move toward sexual intimacy, Susie learns sex can be loving rather than violent.

Chapters 11–12 Susie knows Harvey is a serial killer of little girls and, from her heaven, scrutinizes the interior of Harvey’s house, which has an identical floor plan to that of the Salmons. But while Susie’s house contains markers of family life, Harvey’s holds the trophies of his killings as well as the presence of his victims. Jack becomes more obsessed with finding Susie’s killer. Detective Fenerman tells Jack he must stop phoning the police about Harvey. According to the detective, no evidence exists connecting Harvey to Susie’s murder. Jack, however, refuses to accept the detective’s explanation, as does Lindsey, who overhears the conversation between her father and the detective. One night, Jack sees a light moving toward the cornfield. Convinced the light belongs to Harvey, Jack grabs a baseball bat and heads for the cornfield intent on vengeance. In fact, the light belongs to Clarissa, Susie’s best friend, as she heads to meet her boyfriend Brian. As Jack hollers at whom he believes is Harvey, he hears Clarissa whimpering. Thinking another young girl is in danger, Jack loses all sense of reality. Jack’s rage and Clarissa’s screams spur Brian, who arrives in the cornfield in time to witness what he believes is Jack’s attack on Clarissa, to beat Susie’s father with the baseball bat. The beating sends Jack to the hospital for surgery on his damaged knee. Lindsey arrives at the hospital soon after the incident, expecting to see both her father and mother, but she finds her father alone in his room. Abigail, unable to cope with her collapsing world, seeks out Fenerman. When the detective arrives, he and Abigail go outside onto a small service balcony where physical intimacy enters their relationship.

Chapters 13–16

Lindsey spends a month of the summer at a statewide gifted symposium. Samuel and Ruth also attend the camp. While they do not become friends, Ruth and Lindsey do share a conversation about Susie. Ruth tells Lindsey she dreams about Susie, and Lindsey admits

As the first anniversary of Susie’s death approaches, the effects of her death on the living become more apparent, as do the changes involved with growing up. Lindsey becomes not only the sister of the murdered girl but also the daughter of a crazy man. Buckley enters kindergarten and receives special attention because of

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his sister’s murder and grows closer to his father. He also looks to Lindsey for his needs rather than to his mother. Abigail and Jack become further estranged, unable to find comfort in each other. Whereas Jack turns to his living children, Lindsey and Buckley, to help assuage his grief, Abigail finds solace in her relationship with Len and in private reverie. Although he no longer talks about his certainty that Harvey killed Susie, Jack has not given up that belief, a fact he shares with Lindsey. Lindsey wonders why Fenerman has not arrested him. Jack explains that the police have found no real evidence linking their neighbor to the murder. Lindsey understands the importance of finding something tangible of Susie’s in Harvey’s house. Grandma Lynn arrives for Thanksgiving. She quickly picks up on Abigail’s affair with Fenerman and also understands that Abigail wants to leave her family. Abigail and Lynn go for a walk and share a rare mother-daughter conversation. Lynn seems to understand more clearly Abigail’s desires and disappointments. Lindsey decides to search Harvey’s house. She watches and plans, and when she sees him leave, she breaks a basement window, enters the house, and begins the search. As Susie watches Lindsey in the house, she sees what Lindsey sees and also sees Harvey’s previous victims. While Susie finds supernatural evidence of Harvey’s crimes, Lindsey finds tangible evidence linking him to Susie’s murder—drawings of the hole in the cornfield with ‘‘Stolfuz cornfield’’ written on one of them. Harvey arrives home while Lindsey continues her search. Despite her caution, he hears her in the upstairs bedroom. Lindsey escapes through the window, but he glimpses her leaving his yard—catching the number on her soccer jersey—and he knows it is Lindsey. When Lindsey returns home, she finds her parents and Samuel frantic over her late arrival. She tells her father about breaking into Harvey’s house and shows him what she found. In heaven, Susie meets the other girls Harvey has murdered. Before calling the police, Harvey hides the knife he used to kill Susie and the charms he took from his other victims. As the police talk with Harvey about the break-in, Jack phones Fenerman, but he is not there. At Harvey’s house, the officers seem satisfied with his account of events. Harvey does not, however, mention the stolen drawings. When the officers

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bring them to his attention, Harvey offers the explanation that he was trying to figure out how Susie’s murder occurred. While Jack tries to reach Fenerman and the police talk with Mr. Harvey, Abigail meets Fenerman for a rendezvous, thus the detective misses the call that would have put him on Harvey’s trail. Shaken by the break-in and understanding the implications of the drawings Lindsey took of the hole in the cornfield, Harvey packs up and leaves the area. By the one–year anniversary of Susie’s death, Ray and Ruth’s friendship deepens, moving beyond a platonic attachment to one that includes some degree of physical intimacy. The two friends decide to commemorate Susie’s death with a visit to the cornfield. When they arrive, they find Samuel and his brother Hal already there. Shortly, neighbors gather at the site of Susie’s murder. Some bring candles, lighting up the evening with an impromptu memorial. When Lindsey notices the lights in the cornfield, she urges her mother to attend. Abigail declines, and in the ensuing conversation with her mother, Lindsey realizes her mother plans to leave the family. Lindsey, Buckley, and Jack join their friends and neighbors in the cornfield.

‘‘Snapshots’’ As time progresses, Susie watches the lives of those on earth unfold: Abigail leaves Pennsylvania, ultimately for California; Grandma Lynn comes to stay; Lindsey learns of Abigail and Fenerman’s relationship; Buckley must now deal with the loss of his mother. Samuel’s brother, Hal, using his biker connections, gets a lead on Harvey, which he passes on to Fenerman. The police are finally able to prove Harvey’s guilt, but he has vanished and Fenerman feels tremendous guilt for not having listened to Jack. Ray goes to Penn State University to study medicine, and Ruth moves to New York, taking up a bohemian life, certain that she possess a psychic connection with murdered women and children.

Chapters 17–20 Lindsey and Samuel graduate from Temple University in Philadelphia. Caught in a rainstorm on their motorcycle ride home from the ceremony, they find an abandoned house, where Samuel proposes to Lindsey.

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Buckley, now in seventh grade, uses old clothes he found in the basement to tie his tomato plants to their stakes. As Jack watches, he recognizes the clothes as Susie’s and forbids his son to use them. Buckley lashes out at his father, accusing him of putting the dead Susie before both his living children. As father and son argue, Jack suffers a heart attack. Jack hovers between life and death, with Susie wishing him to join her in her heaven and Buckley holding him to earth. As Susie turns from the events on earth, she meets her paternal grandfather in her heaven; they dance together. Abigail flies home to be with Jack in the hospital. Lindsey, Samuel, and Buckley meet her at the airport. Having not seen her children for almost a decade, Abigail is apprehensive. The reunion is strained, with Lindsey cautious and Buckley angry. Her reunion with Jack proves as tenuous as the first meeting with her children. Abigail struggles with the decision to return to California or to stay with her family. Her introspection reveals that she left because of her inability to cope with the guilt generated by Susie’s death. She realizes she does indeed love Jack and her children and decides to stay. Jack begins to understand he must accept Abigail for who she is. Finally able to talk about Susie, Jack and Abigail cry together.

Chapters 21–23 Ray and Ruth both return home and go to the sinkhole, which is scheduled to be filled and paved over. Harvey also makes his way back to his old neighborhood, hoping to kill Lindsey. He, too, heads for the sinkhole. While at the sinkhole, Susie’s presence overwhelms Ruth, and Susie falls to earth and into Ruth’s body. In the meantime, police have recovered Susie’s keystone charm at a Connecticut murder site; Fenerman returns the charm to Jack and Abigail.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Recorded Books published an unabridged edition of The Lovely Bones on audio CD in August 2002.

and Ruth try to make sense of the events that occur. Susie finally lets go of her family, even though she will always watch over them. Jack leaves the hospital. Individually, the Salmons have each confronted his or her grief, guilt, anger, and fear, thus making it possible for them to reconstruct the family unit. Together and separately, they move beyond Susie’s death.

‘‘Bones’’ The lives of the dead integrate into the lives of the living. Susie’s family members cannot and do not forget her, nor do they allow their memories of her to keep them from moving on. Harvey finally gets justice when he is hit by a falling icicle and falls unconscious into a ravine, where falling snow covers his body.

CHARACTERS Clarissa Clarissa is Susie’s best friend. Her clandestine meeting in the cornfield with her boyfriend, Brian, leads to Brian’s attack on Jack.

Ruth Connors

As Susie inhabits Ruth’s body, Ruth leaves the earth. Ray senses a change in Ruth and comes to believe that somehow Ruth has become Susie or vice versa. Susie, using Ruth’s body, finally experiences the culmination of a developing sexuality as she and Ray make love. Although Susie must once again leave the earth, this time her leave-taking proves gentle and gradual instead of violent and abrupt. Ray

Ruth, the girl Susie inadvertently brushes against as the she departs earth, is artistic and poetic with a feminist sensibility, existing on the fringes of junior high and high school society. She moves to New York after graduation, living a bohemian life of writing poetry, communing with Susie, and recording in her journal the deaths of women and children, deaths that she sees in dreams and visions. Because of her psychic connection to the spirit of murdered women

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and children, Ruth provides the means for Susie to revisit earth and consummate her relationship with Ray. Ruth also develops and maintains a strong friendship with Ray.

Detective Len Fenerman Len Fenerman is the lead detective on Susie’s murder case. A small but tenacious man, Fenerman believes that he will find Susie’s killer. He understands the horror of unexplained death, as his wife committed suicide. Fenerman carries Susie’s picture, as well as the pictures of victims of unsolved murder cases, in his wallet. Although he knows that he should not give in to his feelings for Abigail, he eventually begins an affair with her. Because of his cautiousness regarding Harvey, Susie’s killer, Fenerman fails to arrest him. This failure haunts the detective, and he must bear the guilt of his decisions.

Samuel is Lindsey’s childhood sweetheart and eventually marries her. Samuel helps Lindsey cope with her sister’s death, her mother’s abandonment, and her father’s heart attack. Samuel, along with his brother, Hal, becomes an integral part of the Salmon family. He and Hal treat Buckley, Lindsey’s little brother, like their own brother. Samuel loves carpentry and restoring old houses, a passion that he turns into a career. This passion for fixing broken and battered things parallels his ability to alleviate Lindsey’s pain, name Jack’s overprotectiveness, and deflect Buckley’s anger.

Holly Holly is Susie’s roommate in heaven. Although she and Susie share much of their heaven, Holly also has a heaven to which Susie has no access. Holly helps Susie understand heaven.

Grandma Lynn

Franny Franny, a social worker on earth, is Susie’s intake counselor in heaven. She also serves as a surrogate mother.

George Harvey George Harvey, a thirty-six-year-old single man, is a serial killer who rapes and murders Susie. Although considered odd by his neighbors, Harvey does not draw attention to himself. He builds dollhouses and possesses a fascination with buildings. Taught to steal by his mother and then abandoned by her, and raised by a tyrannical father, Harvey lacks both a conscience and social skills. He fits the profile of a sociopath, reliving the murders in his mind, deriving intense pleasure from the killings, and taking trophies from his victims. When Lindsey breaks into his house and takes evidence linking him to Susie’s murder, Mr. Harvey’s ordered world begins to disintegrate. He leaves town, eventually coming back determined to kill Lindsey, but a combination of circumstances prevent him from doing so.

Hal Heckler Hal is Samuel’s older brother. He rides and repairs motorcycles. After Harvey’s disappearance, Hal uses his network of biker friends to search for him. Hal eventually passes on some key information to Detective Fenerman.

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Grandma Lynn, Susie’s grandmother and Abigail’s mother, is eccentric, colorful and drinks too much. Prior to Susie’s murder, her visits to the Salmon’s upended routines and delighted her grandchildren. Not overly motherly, Lynn has a strained relationship with her daughter. When Abigail leaves, Lynn provides the stability that keeps the family together. She helps Lindsey grow into womanhood, and she helps Buckley negotiate his anger and hurt.

Brian Nelson Brian is Clarissa’s boyfriend. He beats Mr. Salmon with a baseball bat when he mistakenly thinks that Susie’s father is attacking Clarissa in the cornfield.

Abigail Salmon Abigail is Susie’s mother. She is college educated, with a master’s degree in literature and aspirations to teach. In the early years of her marriage to Jack, Abigail possessed a passionate nature but found that the demands of motherhood pulled her away from her husband and from her own dreams. As her family grew, Abigail became less involved with her children and husband. Nevertheless, Susie’s death unsettles her, and she finds no outlet for her grief. She embarks on an affair with Detective Fenerman but does not love him. Her need to find herself, reclaim her place in the world as an individual,

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and escape her intense grief propel her to relocate to California. There she seems to find some solace, working in a vineyard and leaving motherhood and wifehood behind. However, she comes to realize that she can leave neither of those things, and when she returns to Pennsylvania, she also realizes that she viewed Susie’s death as punishment for own failings as a mother. This understanding allows her to rebuild her relationship with her husband and with her children. These things do not prove easy, but Abigail does reclaim her position within the family, albeit a changed family— reconfigured by Susie’s absence as well as by Abigail’s.

Buckley Salmon Buckley is the youngest of the three Salmon children. He is four years old at the time of Susie’s murder and seven years old when his mother leaves. These two events force Buckley to develop emotional defenses in order to survive the pain of abandonment. He believes that he has supernatural encounters with Susie. Both Grandma Lynn and Lindsey act as maternal surrogates, and Buckley develops a close relationship with his father. As he matures, he becomes protective of his father and of Lindsey. When Abigail returns, Buckley is hateful, sullen, and very angry.

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family, he must loosen the bonds, and he does what the living must do in order to go on living— let go of the dead. In addition, Jack does what parents must do: let go of their children. Jack can make these moves only after he turns inward and faces his own fears and weaknesses.

Lindsey Salmon Lindsey is the middle child of the three Salmon children. Bright, articulate, athletic, blonde, and pretty, Lindsey, one year younger than Susie, is amazingly close to her sister, so Susie’s death leaves a deep void in Lindsey’s life. However, she refuses to be the dead girl’s sister, the living daughter, the reminder of the missing girl. Lindsey struggles through the ordinary traumas of adolescence, but Susie’s murder, Abigail’s distance, Jack’s need to find the killer, and Buckley’s dependence all complicate the process for her. With Grandma Lynn’s help, Samuel’s devotion, and her own determination, Lindsey develops into a strong young woman, and she risks her own safety in order to find proof of Harvey’s guilt. Lindsey does not, however, betray her dreams. Unlike her mother, she follows her aspirations. She graduates from college, gets an advanced degree, and takes up a career. Although Lindsey never leaves Susie behind, she does move beyond Susie’s death.

Susie Salmon Jack Salmon Jack is Susie’s father. In the aftermath of her murder, Jack deals not only with his own grief and anger but also seeks to assuage Lindsey’s emotions and protect Buckley from the hurt. Like Abigail, Jack must also work through some guilt generated by his daughter’s death. He questions his position as father and protector when he realizes that he was not there to save his little girl. His frustration at this failure fuels his need to be active in the police investigation. Jack cannot remain passive as the police fail to develop leads. He never wavers in his conviction that Mr. Harvey murdered Susie, and once the police disregard his theories, Jack turns to Lindsey, sharing his thoughts with her. Despite his closeness to Lindsey and Buckley, Jack retains a strong connection to Susie, feeling her presence, talking to her, refusing to let her place in his family’s life fade. Whereas Abigail withdraws into almost a state of indifference, Jack builds ties that may bind too tightly. Finally, Jack understands that in order to have a strong

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Susie, the narrator, is a fourteen-year-old girl and the eldest of the three Salmon children. She is raped and murdered by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, as she walks home from junior high. Susie is spunky and curious, a dreamer with a desire to be a wildlife photographer, and looks forward to high school and to growing up. Susie shares a special relationship with her father—helping him to build ships in a bottle. She and sister Lindsey are close, and she plays mother hen to little brother Buckley. Susie adores her mother and seems to understand her mother’s need for privacy. Seldom is Susie a direct participant in the action; usually, she observes and reflects. Sometimes, however, she makes her presence known to the living—in the shards of glass from her father’s broken ships in a bottle, in a dim appearance at a family gathering, in the body of Ruth Connors. She is with Lindsey as she searches Mr. Harvey’s house, leading her sister into the upstairs rooms. In addition, much of the action takes place because of

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someone’s longing for, search for, or love for Susie. So, indirectly, Susie influences individual decisions and outcomes. Just as Lindsey must figure out how to grow up—what it means to live, Susie must figure out what it means not to grow up—what it means to be dead. She learns that like the living, she, too, must journey. Susie also learns that the dead, like the living, must let go, not easy for a girl who wants so desperately to live. Susie does return to earth. She falls into Ruth’s body, initiated partly by Susie’s longing to kiss Ray one more time and see where that kiss would lead, and also by Ruth’s desire to understand the dead, to see them. Ruth desires to leave earth, and Susie desires to return. After this incident, Susie watches with love and pleasure as her family reconfigures into a new family, one that does and does not include her.

Ray Singh Ray is the boy with whom Susie shares her first kiss. Born in India and raised in England until his family moved to the United States, Ray is dark skinned and well-spoken. He writes Susie a love letter that she never gets to read. This letter, which the police find in the cornfield, initially leads them to suspect Ray of the murder. Like Ruth, Ray inhabits the periphery of junior high society. He finds himself drawn to Ruth’s quirkiness, her love of art and literature, and her connection to Susie. Together, Ray and Ruth speculate about Susie’s murder. Ray maintains a close relationship with Ruth throughout high school as well as after graduation, when he goes to Penn State and Ruth to New York. Susie longs for Ray as she watches him from heaven. When she returns to earth in Ruth’s body, Ray recognizes the change in Ruth, calling her Susie. He makes love to her, and he asks her to tell him about heaven. This encounter affects Ray when he begins to practice medicine; he refuses to consider only medical or scientific explanations regarding death.

Ruana Singh Ruana is Ray’s mother. She is an exotic personality, dignified and calm when the police question her son about Susie’s murder. Ruana possesses deep empathy for the Salmons, and she plays an important role in Jack’s determination to avenge Susie’s death. Ruana listens to his theories regarding Mr. Harvey and legitimizes

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Jack’s desire for revenge. Before Abigail leaves, the two women share a moment together, and Ruana understands Abigail’s feeling of isolation. After Abigail leaves, Ruana often bakes apple pies for the Salmons, which she has Ray deliver.

THEMES Loss and Grief Loss of a loved one and the stages of mourning or grief manifest as overriding themes in The Lovely Bones. Through the voice of Susie Salmon, the fourteen-year-old narrator of the novel, readers get an in-depth look at the grieving process. Susie focuses more on the aftermath and effects of her murder and rape on her family rather than on the event itself. She watches her parents and sister move through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, Alice Sebold makes clear that these categories do not necessarily remain rigid and that individuals deal with grief in various ways. For example, Abigail, Susie’s mother, withdraws from her living children, Lindsey and Buckley, whereas Jack, her husband, draws closer to them. Lindsey, Susie’s sister, vacillates between denial and acceptance, sometimes exhibiting both elements simultaneously. In addition, Sebold expands the definitions of both loss and grief by including Susie herself in the process. If readers limit their understanding of grief to losing and coping with the death of a loved one, then they have trouble accounting for Susie’s emotions. She mourns her own death and the missed opportunity of getting to grow up, but more significantly, Susie grieves over the loss of living people. In other words, the novel extends the grieving process to include the dead themselves. By including Susie in this process and having Abigail leave the family, Sebold investigates the nature of loss and its relationship to grief. The novel suggests change equals loss, which in turn initiates grief. While Susie’s death emerges as the most blatant change in the lives of the Salmons, other significant changes also occur. Lindsey changes from adolescent to adult; Buckley changes from child to adolescent; Jack changes from a man secure in his place in the family to one questioning his ability to hold the family together; and Abigail changes from a woman

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questioning her position as wife and mother to one who redefines and then embraces that position. While each of these changes generates a sense of loss, ultimately each character moves on from the loss and grief. In The Lovely Bones, both the living and dead learn letting go opens up possibilities.

Life and Death On some level, all literature investigates the nature of human experience or the human condition. Certainly life and death constitute the two most significant experiences of being human, and as such, much literature deals with these two issues. The Lovely Bones pointedly asks two questions: ‘‘What does it mean to be alive?’’ and ‘‘What does it mean to be dead?’’ As Susie learns what being dead means, she must deal with what being alive means as well. The fact she can no longer experience the physical world—that she can no longer experience living—emerges as her biggest disappointment. The novel then offers experiencing the physical as an attribute of living. Although denied this aspect of living, the dead Susie can engage in the human condition of wanting, wishing, and desiring. Thus Sebold blurs the lines between what constitutes life and death. Susie clearly understands she is dead. She knows she inhabits a realm different from earth, but in many ways, not completely separate from it. After all, Susie’s heaven looks earthly, not celestial, and she participates in activities that associate much more closely with earth than heaven: eating ice cream, romping with dogs, living in a duplex. The novel presents life as a series of changes, all of which involve the body and the physical environment—physicality seems the defining characteristic of life. The event that allows Susie to move on in her heaven, or to move on in death, is her return to earth. Although she has ‘‘returned’’ in a disembodied form, when she inhabits Ruth’s body, Susie ‘‘realize[s] that the marvelous weight weighing [her] down was the weight of the human body.’’ Yet Susie understands the temporariness of this corporality, but perhaps that realization is precisely one of Sebold’s points.

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of knowledge and experience. In many of these novels, the move into adulthood includes a loss of innocence or the destruction of a false sense of security. The protagonist often experiences a shift from ignorance to knowledge, innocence to experience, idealism to realism, or immaturity to maturity. In addition, coming of age involves rituals or rites of passage. The Lovely Bones focuses on these issues as the author explores the process of growing up. The novel begins when Lindsey Salmon is thirteen years old and ends almost ten years later, with Lindsey as wife and mother. It traces her move through the routines and events of female adolescence—first kisses, shaving of legs, makeup, summer camp, love, friendship, college. The novel, however, also traces Susie’s coming of age. By presenting the development of a dead girl along with a living one, Sebold imbues the experiences of growing up with enhanced significance. Susie cannot move on in death until she finishes ‘‘growing up.’’ Susie’s rape and murder hastens the process of moving from innocence to experience for both girls. Susie learns her suburban and rather ordinary world is not safe—men murder children in this world. She moves swiftly and violently from innocence to experience, and from idealism to realism. Yet this shift does not culminate in her ‘‘coming of age;’’ rather, it initiates a need for her to experience these things more slowly and more naturally. While Susie’s death also hastens Lindsey’s loss of innocence, it does so less dramatically. Although Lindsey understands that her world is not particularly safe, that bad people exist and that these people do bad things, she still participates in the normal rituals of growing up.

The coming-of-age novel involves the initiation of the protagonist into adulthood. This initiation usually occurs through the acquisition

Like many teenage girls, Lindsey experiments with makeup and with finding a style that suits her. She experiences a tender first kiss with Samuel, and they move slowly through the rituals of courtship. She grows into her sexuality, developing a relationship based on trust, gentleness, and understanding. However, Susie’s murder, combined with her mother’s absence, pushes Lindsey into adult roles early in her life. So while acknowledging the naturalness of growing up, Sebold also contextualizes that experience. In The Lovely Bones, moving from a place of innocence to one of knowledge can occur violently and abruptly. Coming of age can happen in circumstances that circumvent the normal, perhaps suggesting a need to rethink normal.

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STYLE Point of View

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross, M.D., developed the five-stage grief model, which outlines and defines the stages that a grieving person goes through while healing. Research this model, list and define the five terms, then write an essay explaining how Jack Salmon, Abigail Salmon, and Susie Salmon in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones progress through each stage. What would have happened if Susie were never killed by Mr. Harvey? Knowing what you do about her desires, interests, and goals, do you think Susie’s life would have turned out more like Abigail’s or Lindsey’s? Would Susie have married Ray, or lived a bohemian life in the city like Ruth? Write a short biography of Susie’s life, including her family, that addresses who Susie might have been if she had not been murdered at age fourteen.

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Using some historical research on the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, explain how Abigail Salmon, Lindsey Salmon, Ruth Connors, and Ruana Singh in Sebold’s The Lovely Bones exemplify elements of that movement. In other words, what aspect of the Women’s Movement does each of these women illustrate? Write an essay incorporating your research into your explanation.

One can easily read Sebold’s The Lovely Bones as a coming-of-age story. Identify which characters ‘‘come of age’’ and why. What does the novel offer as the rites of passage for growing up? Do these rites seem bound by the time frame of the novel? In an essay, compare the rites and rituals of adolescence presented in The Lovely Bones with those of today’s teenagers. Try to account for any differences by addressing relevant cultural, political, or social issues.

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In The Lovely Bones, point of view, the perspective from which the story is told, plays a crucial role in the narrative. Generally, a novel’s point of view consists of one of four traditional stances: first person, second person, third person, and third person omniscient. First person point of view presents the events of the story from the perception of a single character. Second person point of view involves the author telling the story as if it is happening to the reader. With third person point of view, the reader has no insight into the character’s minds; therefore, he or she must make sense of the action as it takes place. Third person omniscient offers a ‘‘godlike’’ perspective, transcending time or place, allowing the reader to see the actions and to look into the minds of the characters to know their thoughts, feelings and motives. Alice Sebold presents a story told from an omniscient first person point of view, the perspective of Susie Salmon, who is dead. Susie, from her vantage point in heaven, sees everything—actions, motivations, thoughts—so her narration functions like third person omniscient, except that she tells the story in first person. Susie’s access to the minds of other characters provides readers with this same access. In addition, as an omniscient first person narrator telling the story from beyond the limitations of earthly time, she also can and does experience many of the characters’ memories. For example, she sees and relates incidents from her killer, Mr. Harvey’s, childhood and his past killings. Because of her omniscience, Susie often glimpses intensely personal thoughts and actions, such as her mother’s first tryst with Detective Fenerman, or her mother’s internal thoughts about motherhood. This combination of third person omniscient and first person points of view proves an innovative move on Sebold’s part. Few novels offer the perspective of a dead protagonist— especially one who has been brutally raped and murdered. However, this new point of view makes the disturbing subject matter bearable and also allows Sebold to inject some humor and lightness into a rather horrifying story. Because she sees everything and because she relates what she sees, Susie provides the reader with opportunities to sympathize and or identify

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with various characters. In addition, because this omniscient viewpoint filters through a first person or personal voice, it also emerges as a specific perspective: sometimes angry, sometimes confused, sometimes spunky, and sometimes humorous, which carries with it a distinctive personality.

Setting Setting includes the time, place, and culture in which the action of the narrative takes place. Time and place emerge as crucial elements in understanding the setting in The Lovely Bones. Traditionally, time can involve three elements: historical period, duration, and the perception of time by the characters. Sebold uses dates at various points throughout the narrative; in fact, the novel opens with a specific date, December 6, 1973. Immediately, the reader understands the historical time—the early 1970s—as well as the seasonal time—winter. However, as the story progresses, the historical periods shift as Susie takes the reader into the past and alludes to the future. For example, after giving us the date of her death, she offers a contemporary reference to the pictures of missing children on milk cartons and in the daily mail. This reference raises questions regarding the time period from which Susie is telling the story. Sebold’s use of time shifts— the narration slides among past, present, and future—ties very closely to elements of place. Like the shifts in time, the location of the story shifts between heaven and earth. Most of the action itself occurs on earth with the telling occurring in heaven. Some action does, however, take place in heaven: Susie meets Mr. Harvey’s other victims in heaven; she and her roommate, Holly, explore; she dances with her grandfather. However, these actions do not necessarily propel the plot (the pattern of carefully selected events), but they do expand the story (all the events which are to be depicted). Both place and time closely relate to the coming-of-age element in the book, as well as to the themes of loss and grief.

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the use of flashback, a device that offers actions that occurred before the beginning of the story. Once Sebold establishes the murder, she has Susie look backward to how the murder occurred. As with point of view and setting, Sebold also complicates the traditional idea of plot. For example, in chapter one, Susie discusses her murder and includes a detail about a neighborhood dog finding her elbow and bringing it home. However, the actual incident of the dog finding the elbow and the police telling her parents about it occurs weeks after the murder. These occurrences in the story are moments of foreshadowing, which create expectation. Through the use of flashback and foreshadowing, Sebold veers away from a strictly chronological unfolding of events; rather, plot becomes more circular even while the narrative progressive chronologically through the 1970s.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Alice Sebold wrote The Lovely Bones in the late 1990s; the book first appeared in print in June 2002; and the story takes place in the 1970s. All of these dates prove significant. At the time of the writing, America was facing both a new decade and a new millennium. By the late 1990s, Americans saw the creation of the World Wide Web; engaged in debates over health care, social security reform, gun control; watched national sex scandals unfold (the Tailhook affair and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski affair); sat riveted to the O. J. Simpson murder trial; and were stunned by the violence of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Sebold penned her story amid a growing awareness of, and concern with, issues of domestic, sexual, and teen violence. In many ways, her novel reflects these concerns as it reflects the cultural climate of the 1990s.

For the most part, Sebold’s novel follows the traditional structure of plot. However, the events do not necessarily unfold in chronological fashion. For instance, the novel opens with Susie’s murder, and as events unfold, establishes a relationship between events. To understand the causality, the reader needs background information, which Sebold presents through

Its publication date, however, carries added significance. The novel, released less than a year after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., speaks directly to a nation’s need for comfort. The Lovely Bones made its debut in an America forever stripped of its belief that terrorism and random violence happens elsewhere. The social and cultural atmosphere at this time radiated fear, distrust, sadness, anger, and grief. Although Sebold

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wrote this novel before the attacks, the subject matter echoes the contemporaneous concerns of America. The novel also draws on the historical, cultural, social, and political issues of the 1970s. In many ways, America ‘‘came of age’’ in the 1970s as social change, discontent with the government, advances in civil rights for minorities and women, environmental concerns, and space exploration defined the decade. The Vietnam War, which sparked antiwar protests and student demonstrations, and the Watergate Scandal, which resulted in the resignation of a president, shattered the last vestiges of a naive America. Other changes arose in the 1970s that added to America’s cultural and social climate, including the women’s movement. Women’s places in American life expanded into political and professional areas, and people began to question the traditional gender roles of women and men. The changes of the 1970s figure into The Lovely Bones in several ways: first, through Sebold’s female characters. Ruth Connors embodies the feminism of the 1970s with her avant-garde approach to her drawings, poetry, and reading. She refuses the constraints of the status quo in these areas as well as in the arena of acceptably feminine behavior and attire. However, whereas Ruth overtly embraces feminism, Susie’s mother, Abigail, struggles to name her discontent. Abigail illustrates many of the women in the 1970s who did not publicly espouse feminism, yet whose desire to transcend the constraints of motherhood and wifehood drew on feminist principles. Secondly, the novel reflects the 1970s concern with the environment through the encroachment of building and industry into the Salmons’ suburban neighborhood. Finally, the disturbing subject matter of a child’s rape and murder, and Susie’s refusal to sanitize the images of her death reflect the horrific pictures of the dead and dismembered of the Vietnam War. During the 1970s, images of violence entered the homes of suburban Americans through the television, and for the first time, Americans watched a war—complete with all of its horrors—from their living rooms. In The Lovely Bones, the tangible marks of violence that enter suburbia are not media images of war dead; rather, those marks are the objects of a raped and murdered girl.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Lovely Bones enjoyed immediate popular success from the time of its publication. The novel, published in June 2002, topped the New York Times bestseller list that summer. Prior its publication, as Charlotte Abbot notes in Publishers Weekly, bestselling author Anna Quindlen told viewers of the Today Show, ‘‘If you read one book this summer, it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It’s destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.’’ For the most part, the novel garnered excellent reviews after its publications, with critics praising the first person omniscient point of view and the stunning opening pages. In a review for Christian Century, Stephen H. Webb argues that Sebold’s reworked point of view ‘‘is the only way to fully comprehend such an intolerable tragedy [the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl].’’ Writing for the London Review of Books, Rebecca Mead deems Susie ‘‘a bright and ironical observer,’’ and Michiko Kakutani, in her front-page review of The Lovely Bones in the New York Times, points out that the narrator possesses a ‘‘matter-of-fact charm.’’ Finally, in his review in the Christian Science Monitor, Ron Charles writes, ‘‘The power of The Lovely Bones flows from this voice, a voice at once charmingly adolescent and tragically mature.’’ Most reviewers identify Susie’s voice as one of the novel’s strong points. Critics also agree on another of the novel’s strengths: the opening pages. Even unfavorable reviews praised Sebold’s compelling opening. In Daniel Mendelsohn’s review in the New York Review of Books, he likens the novel to TV movies of the week—artificial, contrived, and lightweight. However, Mendelsohn also writes, ‘‘The novel begins strikingly. . . . The few pages that follow . . . are the best in the book,’’ and he praises the authenticity of these pages. Writing for the Guardian, Ali Smith slams The Lovely Bones for its timidity and sentimentality, but finds ‘‘the opening chapters . . . shattering and dazzling in their mix of horror and normality.’’ Despite a handful of negative reviews, the novel has been the ‘‘breakout fiction debut of the year’’ that Lev Grossman predicted in the book section of the July 1, 2002, edition of Time magazine.

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CRITICISM Catherine Cucinella Catherine Cucinella, a freelance writer, has edited a reference volume on contemporary American poets and has published articles on poetry and film. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. In this essay, Cucinella analyzes the effects of domestic ideologies on the mother-daughter relationships in The Lovely Bones.

Icicles on a cabin Ó Nik Wheeler/Corbis

Sebold’s novel does, however, exhibit some weaknesses, and even her most ardent admirers recognize them. Kakutani comments that Sebold stumbles in the ‘‘highly abstract musing on Susie belonging to a historical continuum of murdered girls and women,’’ and this critic finds the scenes dealing with Susie’s classmate, Ruth Connor’s, ‘‘belief that she can . . . channel Susie’s feelings’’ unconvincing. Other critics find troubling Susie’s return to earth, which Sarah Churchwell of the Times Literary Supplement calls ‘‘a false move that violates the contract of willingly suspended disbelief.’’ Overall, critics believe that the novel’s strengths outshine its weak moments. In her Washington Post review, Maria Russo considers The Lovely Bones ‘‘utterly original and deeply affecting,’’ and she asserts that Sebold ‘‘manages to put her readers into contact with a throbbing pulse of life.’’ Sebold, says Russo, ‘‘has an unusual flair for both owning and transforming dark material.’’ Katherine Bouton of the New York Times Book Review concurs. Sebold, she writes, ‘‘deals with almost unthinkable subjects with humor and intelligence and a kind of mysterious grace.’’

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Although The Lovely Bones has garnered many reviews, critical work on the novel proves scarce. Most reviewers and critics comment on Sebold’s innovative use of point of view, the omniscient first person narrator, Susie Salmon. These same critics point to Sebold’s mastery in presenting a disturbing subject—the rape and murder of a young girl. More often than not, however, the unsettling elements in the text involve issues of motherhood and mothering. Through her depiction of mothers and daughters, Sebold examines the effects of patriarchy and domesticity on women. The Lovely Bones questions the roles and demands placed on women by society as it presents the consequences that arise for mothers and daughters if these roles and demands remain unexamined. Sebold examines the dictates of patriarchy, the social system in which the father is the head of the family and men govern women and children; and domesticity, the devotion to home life. This examination of the place of women unfolds primarily through the first person omniscient narration, characterization, and through the motif (recurring images in a literary work) of confined spaces. Although the restrictive systems under which each woman must live come to light in The Lovely Bones, the novel makes clear that recognizing these restrictions begins the process of loosening them. Susie’s omniscient perspective affords the reader the opportunity to watch as the Salmon women work through that process. From her heaven, Susie provides insight into the internal thoughts of all the characters. Susie’s insights work within the narrative itself, offering Susie the opportunity to experience the move from girlhood to womanhood. Significantly, the internal musings to which Susie is privy involve her mother’s struggle with feelings of discontent, a discontent that feminist Betty Friedan labeled ‘‘the feminine mystique.’’ According to Friedan,

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THROUGH HER DEPICTION OF MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, SEBOLD EXAMINES THE EFFECTS OF PATRIARCHY AND DOMESTICITY ON WOMEN. THE LOVELY BONES QUESTIONS THE ROLES AND DEMANDS PLACED ON WOMEN BY SOCIETY AS IT PRESENTS THE CONSEQUENCES THAT ARISE FOR MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS IF THESE ROLES AND DEMANDS REMAIN UNEXAMINED.’’

‘‘a strange discrepancy [exists] between the reality of [women’s] lives as women and the image to which [women are] trying to conform.’’ Abigail Salmon, Susie’s mother, provides the clearest example of this ‘‘schizophrenic split’’ and its consequences. On the morning of her eleventh birthday, Susie, awake before the rest of the family, discovers her unwrapped birthday present, an Instamatic camera. Eager to use it she, she hurries to the back of the house and finds the back door open. There in the backyard, Susie comes upon her mother, unaware of her daughter’s presence. Susie narrates: I had never seen her sitting so still, so not there somehow. . . . That morning there were no lipstick marks because there was no lipstick until she put it on for . . . who? I had never thought to ask that question. My father? Us?

Because Susie retells this incident from her heavenly vantage point, she can now read significance into it. Her status as omniscient first person narrator allows her insight that she may or may not have possessed when the incident first occurred. After all, Susie’s narration unfolds after all events have taken place. Significantly, however, Susie makes clear the split between the private, unencumbered Abigail and the woman who assumes a face for the world. Susie’s camera captures this moment, and the picture glaringly reveals the split to which Freidan refers:

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When the roll came back from the Kodak plant . . . I could see the difference immediately. There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to a loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardner. Sunny neighbor.

Thus, Susie catches her mother in the moment before Abigail conforms to an image. This passage further delineates the roles expected of women as it makes clear that Abigail held part of herself apart from those roles. As the narrative progresses, Susie watches and narrates her mother’s struggle to reconcile the need for autonomy with the demands of motherhood and wifehood. Susie’s murder initiates much of Abigail’s unrest. Her grief and unacknowledged guilt over her daughter’s death seem to suffocate Abigail, causing her to withdraw from her husband and children. However, this feeling of confinement predates the murder. As a young wife and new mother, Abigail saw the withering of her dreams: ‘‘the stack of books on [the] beside table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and Dickens, to the works of Dr. Spock.’’ The birth of her third child, Buckley, pushes Abigail further away from the woman who earned a master’s degree in literature, who read philosophy, and who aspired to teach at the college level. She found that she could not ‘‘have it all;’’ she could not even remain in love with her husband. Susie observes poignantly that her parents ‘‘had been deeply, separately, wholly in love— apart from her children [her] mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift.’’ The narrative time in The Lovely Bones spans the 1970s; however, Abigail herself came of age in earlier decades, and she took on the role of new wife and mother in the late 1950s. Therefore, she carries within herself the constrictions of 1950s domestic ideology, an ideology that, according to Nancy Woloch in Women and the American Experience, ‘‘posited fulfillment within the family as a goal to which women of all classes and backgrounds might aspire.’’ In addition, the rise of the suburbs extended the demands of domesticity, an extension clearly visible in The Lovely Bones. Woloch

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explains, ‘‘The domestic passion of the 1950s coincided with a massive exodus to the suburbs, the ideal place for raising families,’’ and federal policies such as low-interest mortgages and veteran benefits, as well as federally funded programs for highway construction, contributed to the suburban growth. These polices, according to Woloch, ‘‘promoted domestic ideals, since suburban life, for women, meant commitment to home and family, to house care and child care.’’ In addition, advertising throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s further promoted a domestic ideology. The message: domesticity equals happiness and contentment. However, as Abigail demonstrates and Freidan’s study confirms, not all women enjoyed these feelings. Instead, this domesticity pushed them into spaces of confinement and restriction. Abigail, then, fails to embrace the dictates of domestic ideology. Even before Susie’s murder, she grows distant from her children, and after the murder, she distances herself physically, as well as emotionally, from her family: avoiding Jack; eating macaroons in a downstairs bathroom hidden away from Jack, Lindsey, and Buckley; having an affair with Len Fenerman, the lead detective on Susie’s case; and finally, leaving the family. However, for Abigail, the repressive aspects of 1950s and 1960s domesticity combine with the changing position of women in the 1970s—changes brought about by second wave feminism—and with the overwhelming grief and guilt attached to Susie’s death. This grief proves just as stifling to Abigail as does her wifehood and motherhood. In California, whenever Abigail ‘‘walked inside a gift shop or cafe´ the four walls around her would begin to breathe like a lung. She would feel it then, creeping up the sides of her calves and into her gut, the onslaught, the grief coming.’’ The image of the shop breathing like a lung evokes earlier images of confinement in The Lovely Bones: the hole in the cornfield where Mr. Harvey rapes and murders Susie, the small hospital balcony where Abigail and Len first kiss, the fort where Buckley shuts himself off from the world, the closet like room in which Ruth Connors lives, the narrow hospital bed in which Abigail and Jack finally cry about Susie. The spaces of confinement that Abigail inhabits simultaneously restrict her and free her. In these places, she confronts her discontent and disappointment, in them she identifies her oppressions and weakness, and within these small spaces, she

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often comes to understandings. The two most significant instances of resolution occur in an airplane and in a hospital room. Susie listens to her mother’s thoughts as she flies to Pennsylvania after Jack’s heart attack, [s]he could not help but think of how, if she were a mother traveling, there would be two seats filled beside her. One for Lindsey. One for Buckley. But though she was, by definition, a mother, she had at some point ceased to be one too. She couldn’t claim that right and privilege after missing more than half a decade of their lives. She now knew that being a mother was a calling, something plenty of young girls had dreamed of being. But my mother had never had that dream, and she had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for never having wanted me.

In order for Abigail to reunite with her family, she must honestly confront her feelings about motherhood, and she must come to realize that she can love her children, living and dead, without sacrificing herself. Maternal love, in and of itself, does not demand the elimination of a woman’s sense of self. As Sebold makes clear in The Lovely Bones, domesticity as constructed within patriarchy makes this demand. Abigail occupies the positions of both mother and daughter, and just as she must work through her feelings about her own mothering, she must also confront the way she was mothered. Like her daughters, Abigail felt closer to her father than to her mother, Grandma Lynn. Lynn and Abigail, though in many ways polar opposites—Lynn flamboyant and frivolous, Abigail vulnerable and serious— exhibit the same ambivalence toward motherhood. Susie provides insight into her mother and grandmother’s relationship: Grandma Lynn embarrassed my mother by insisting on wearing her used furs on walks around the block and by once attending a block party in high makeup. She would ask my mother questions until she knew who everyone was, whether or not my mother had seen the inside of their house, what the husband did for a living, what cars they drove. She made a solid catalog of the neighbors. It was a way, I now realized, to try to understand her daughter better. A misguided circling, a sad, partnerless dance.

Much later, after Susie’s death, after her almost ten-year absence from the family, after her return to Pennsylvania, Abigail accepts Lynn as Lynn: ‘‘[Abigail] was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had

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been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain.’’ This thought process and the realization to which it leads upend the dictates of an idealized motherhood, one generating from the limitations of a domestic ideology constructed in the 1950s and 1960s. Lynn, however, possesses little of the accepted maternal attributes. Her cooking skills run to frozen dinners, and she breezes in and out of her grandchildren’s lives, staying long enough only to upset routines. However, after Susie’s death, she comes to understand her daughter’s needs much more clearly. In a rare motherdaughter moment, Abigail confesses to Lynn the terrible loneliness she felt as a child, and Lynn realizes that Susie’s death took Abigail ‘‘inside the middle of a ground zero to which’’ nothing in the older woman’s experience ‘‘could offer her insight.’’ This realization provides the first glimmer of connection between mother and daughter. When Abigail leaves the family, Lynn moves in and assumes the maternal role. This assumption, similar to Abigail’s eventual return, succeeds because Lynn assumes the maternal role by choice, not because society demands that she does so. Unlike her earlier experience as mother, Lynn understands her motivations; thus she can mother Lindsey and Buckley without risk to her own position as an eccentric and independent woman. Just as Abigail, by understanding her feelings about her own mother, herself as mother, and motherhood in general, can take her place within the family, Susie comes to understand the connection that she shared with her mother in life. By seeing her mother’s internal conflicts and watching Abigail seek ways to erase her loneliness, disappointments, grief, and guilt, Susie realizes that she wants and needs her mother. She ‘‘hears’’ her mother calling her for dinner as Mr. Harvey rapes her; she repeatedly describes her mother’s ‘‘ocean eyes;’’ she recalls her mother’s stories; she names her mother’s loneliness and need. Referring to Franny, her intake counselor in heaven, Susie says, ‘‘Franny was old enough to be our mother—mid-forties—and it took Holly and me a while to figure out that this had been something we wanted: our mothers.’’ Letting go of the living and accepting herself as dead emerges as Susie’s major quest throughout the story; however, the need to accept her

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mother for who she was proves another significant task for Susie. The reconciliation between Susie’s parents makes clear the nature of acceptance. Reconciliation depends upon an unconditional acceptance. In the hospital after his heart attack, Jack wakes in the early morning hours to find Abigail sleeping, her hand in his. Susie’s omniscient position reveals her father’s thoughts: ‘‘She was here, and this time, despite all, he was going to let her be who she was.’’ Susie comes to this acceptance along with her father. Watching Abigail’s flight from and return home, Susie learns to see her relationship with her mother from outside the confining parameters of socially mandated motherhood. When Abigail can finally say aloud, ‘‘I love you, Susie,’’ Susie acknowledges, ‘‘I had heard these words so many times from my father that it shocked me now; I had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from my mother.’’ Susie continues, ‘‘She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time.’’ Susie’s sister, Lindsey, inhabits the middle ground in these mother-daughter configurations. Susie’s death moves Lindsey from middle child and younger daughter to older child and only living daughter. Gradually, she also moves into the position vacated by her mother. In the chaos that ensues when Jack is rushed to the hospital after being beaten in the cornfield, Abigail sees Buckley turn to his sister rather than to his mother. The maternal role falls on Lindsey. Susie observes, ‘‘My sister felt more alone than she had ever been but also more responsible. Buckley couldn’t be left by himself,’’ and after her mother leaves, Lindsey’s maternal role expands. However, unlike her mother, Lindsey does not push aside her own aspirations for family. Admittedly, Lindsey is not Buckley’s mother, but that fact does not lessen the responsibility that Lindsey bears. Whereas Abigail illustrates 1950s and 60s domestic ideology, Lindsey embodies the promises of 1970s feminism. Bright and ambitious, she takes an active role in both her home and in the investigation of her sister’s murder. When the police fail to find evidence linking Mr. Harvey to the crime, Lindsey breaks into his house and steals drawings that he made of the underground room where he killed Susie. Lindsey participates in gifted symposiums, graduates from Temple University, earns a master’s

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degree in counseling, and starts a career with that degree. She also marries her high school sweetheart, Samuel. Lindsey accomplishes most of these things during her mother’s absence, an absence that Lindsey saw coming. On the first anniversary of Susie’s death, Lindsey asks her mother, ‘‘Are you going to leave us?’’ As Susie narrates, ‘‘‘Come here baby,’ my mother said, and Lindsey did. She leaned back into my mother’s chest, and my mother rocked her awkwardly on the rug. ‘You are doing so well, Lindsey; you are keeping your father alive.’’’ Lindsey does not have the benefit of Susie’s all-encompassing perspective; Lindsey does not know her mother’s thoughts, but she does understand that her mother will not stay, and somehow, Lindsey seems to accept her mother’s need to go. When Abigail returns, Lindsey poses yet another question. Referring to Buckley, she asks, ‘‘Are you going to hurt him again?’’ Abigail hears a challenge in the question, a challenge glaring from her daughter’s eyes. ‘‘I know what you did,’’ Lindsey tells her mother. This mother-daughter relationship, Abigail and Lindsey, perhaps the most tenuous of all those depicted in the book, manifests as the most honest. Lindsey has always accepted Abigail for who she was, and she seems able to accept their relationship for what it is— desiring nothing more. The Lovely Bones holds motherhood, along with mothers and daughters, up to scrutiny, and in the end the narrative offers a new understanding of those bonds by demonstrating the importance of examining the ideologies behind them. The novel reinforces the connection of generations through women with the closing image of a strong and confident young mother, Lindsey, with her daughter, Abigail Suzanne. Source: Catherine Cucinella, Critical Essay on The Lovely Bones, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Daniel Mendelsohn In the following excerpt, Mendelsohn argues that the general failure to recognize the book’s weaknesses says something about the cultural climate in which it was first published.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Lucky (1999) is Sebold’s memoir of her 1981 rape. In it, she details the rape itself and chronicles the arrest, trial, and conviction of the rapist. She also addresses the emotional aftermath and consequences of the attack. Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees (2003) is a coming-of-age story. Set in the 1960s, The Secret Life of Bees deals with tragedy, the absence of a mother, and the protagonist’s need to look backward and then to let go in order to move on. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003), by Mitch Albom, follows the protagonist, Eddie, through his last moments on earth, his funeral, and the days after his death. Then the story shifts to Eddie’s arrival at and experiences in heaven. Aimee Bender’s first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), is about a girl named Mona who deals with her father’s mysterious illness by withdrawing from the things she likes to do: eating dessert, playing piano, spending time with her boyfriend. She grows up to become a second-grade math teacher, and must use her own experiences with illness to help a student through her mother’s cancer.

Family (1991), by J. California Cooper, is narrated by a dead main character. Clora, a pre–Civil War slave, escapes slavery through suicide. After her death, her spirit narrates the story of her children and grandchildren as they live through slavery and the Civil War.

The Afterlife (2003), by Gary Soto, is the story of Chuy, a murdered seventeen-yearold boy. Now deceased, Chuy must solve the mystery of his murder and come to terms with his new identity in death.

On May 22 of this year, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold’s debut novel [The Lovely Bones], which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who’s been raped and murdered, the novelist and former

New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared of the Today show and declared that if people had one book to read during the

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AND YET DARKNESS, GRIEF, AND HEARTBREAK IS WHAT THE LOVELY BONES SCRUPULOUSLY AVOIDS. THIS IS THE REAL HEART OF ITS APPEAL.’’

summer, ‘‘it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It’s destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.’’ Viewers did what they were told and seemed to agree. Within days of Quindlen’s appearance, Sebold’s novel had reached the number-one position on Amazon.com, and her publisher, Little, Brown, decided to increase the size of the first printing from 35,000—already healthily optimistic for a ‘‘literary’’ first novel by an author whose only other book, a memoir of her rape, was a critical but not commercial success—to 50,000 copies; a week before the book’s official publication date, it was in its sixth printing, with nearly a quartermillion copies in print. In an interview with Publishers Weekly at the end of July, when the true extent of the book’s success was just coming into focus, Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, suggested that the book’s appeal lies in its fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of ‘‘dark material’’: ‘‘grief, the most horrible thing that can happen in a life.’’ And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak is what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal. Sebold’s decision to have the dead girl narrate her story—a device familiar from Our Town, a sentimental story with which this one has more than a little in common—suggests an admirable desire to confront murder and violence, grief and guilt in a bold, even raw new way. And yet after its attention-getting opening, The Lovely Bones shows little real interest in examining ugly things. Indeed, the ultimate horror that Susie undergoes is one for which the author has no words, and chooses not to represent. In the first of what turns out to be many evasive gestures, the author tastefully avoids the murder itself, to say nothing of the dismemberment. ‘‘The end came anyway,’’ she writes, and there is a discreet dissolve to the next chapter.

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I use the word ‘‘dissolve’’ advisedly: it is hard to read what follows in The Lovely Bones without thinking of cinema—or, perhaps better, of those TV ‘‘movies of the week,’’ with their predictable arcs of crisis, healing, and ‘‘closure,’’ the latter inevitably evoked by an obvious symbolism. Equally soft-focus are the novel’s sketchy attempts to confront the face of evil that Susie, and Susie alone of all these characters, has looked on directly: the killer himself, Mr. Harvey. Sebold perfunctorily provides some sketchy information that never quite adds up to a persuasive portrait of a sociopath. Harvey’s father abused and eventually chased away his wild, rebellious mother, whom the boy sees for the last time, dressed in white capri pants, being pushed out of a car in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He sometimes kills animals as a means of avoiding homicide. And Sebold grapples with punishment—with, that is, the moral meaning and consequences of the crime at the heart of her book— as weakly as she does with the crime itself. At the end of the novel, in what is apparently meant to be a high irony, Harvey, who has managed for years to elude Susie’s increasingly suspicious family and the police, is killed accidentally: as he stands at the edge of a ravine, plotting to attack yet another girl one winter day, he falls when an icicle drops onto him. So having the murder victim be the protagonist offers no special view of evil, or guilt. I asked myself, as I read The Lovely Bones, what could be the point of having the dead girl narrate the aftermath of her death—what, in other words, this voice could achieve that a standard omniscient narrator couldn’t—and it occurred to me that the answer is that Susie is there to provide comfort: not to those who survive her, to whom she can’t really make herself known or felt, but to the audience. The real point of Sebold’s novel isn’t to make you confront dreadful things, but, if anything, to assure you that they have no really permanent consequences. This is most evident in the author’s vision of the ‘‘healing process’’ that takes place after the murder, a process that furnishes the book with the bulk of its matter. Susie herself must undergo it, we learn: she has to be weaned of her desire to linger in the world and ‘‘change the lives of those I loved on Earth’’ in order to progress from ‘‘her’’ heaven to Heaven itself. (The cosmology is vague—more shades of Our Town here—but

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that’s the gist of it.) But The Lovely Bones is devoted even more to the aftermath (which is to say healing and closure) of her death as it is experienced by her friends and family. That a novel with the pretensions to moral, emotional, and social seriousness of this one should end up seeking, and finding, the ultimate salvation and redemption in a recuperative teenage fantasy of idyllic sex suggests that cinema, or television, is the wrong thing to be comparing it to. Sebold’s final narrative gesture reminds you, indeed, of nothing so much as pop love songs, with their aromatherapeutic vision of adult relationships as nothing but yearnings endlessly, blissfully fulfilled—or of breakups inevitably smoothed over and healed with a kiss. Just after Ray and Susie/Ruth make love, Susie’s estranged parents are reunited on her father’s hospital bed, weeping and kissing each other. That Sebold’s book does so little to show us a complex or textured portrait of the evil that sets its action in motion, or to suggest that the aftermath of horrible violence within families is, ultimately, anything but feel-good redemption, suggests that its huge popularity has very little, in fact, to do with the timeliness of its publication just months after a series of abductions and murders of girls had transfixed a nation already traumatized by the events of September 11. It is, rather, the latter catastrophe that surely accounts for the novel’s gigantic appeal.

Snow covering a field of corn stubble Ó Richard Hamilton Smith/Corbis

or indeed of death, as the place, or state, that allows you to indulge a recuperative fantasy or great sex?

Confidence and grief management are what The Lovely Bones offers, too: it, too, is bent on convincing us that everything is OK—whatever, indeed, its author and promoters keep telling us about how unflinchingly it examines bad things. ‘‘We’re here,’’ Susie’s ghost says, in the final pages of the novel. ‘‘All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.’’ The problem, of course, is that it does have to be sad and scary; that you need to experience the badness and fear—as Sebold’s characters, none more than Susie herself, never quite manage to do—in order to get to the place that Sebold wants to take you, the locus of healing, and closure: in short, Heaven. And yet what a Heaven it is. In the weeks following September 11, there was much dark jocularity at the expense of those Islamic terrorists who, it was said, had volunteered to die in order to enjoy the postmortem favors of numerous virgins in Paradise. But how much more sophisticated, or morally textured, is Sebold’s climactic vision of Heaven,

That for Sebold and her readers Heaven can’t, in fact, wait is symptomatic of a larger cultural dysfunction, one implicit in our ongoing handling of the September 11 disaster. The Lovely Bones appeared just as the first anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was looming; but by then, we’d already commemorated the terrible day. September 11, 2002—the first anniversary of the attacks, a day that ought to have marked (as is supposed to be the case with such anniversary rituals) some symbolic coming to terms with what had happened—was not a date for which the American people and its press could patiently wait. Instead we rushed to celebrate, with all due pomp and gravitas, on March 11, something called a six-month ‘‘anniversary.’’ In its proleptic yearning for relief, and indeed in its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of victimhood, its pseudo– therapeutic lingo of healing and insistence that everything is really OK, that we needn’t really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary, Sebold’s book is indeed timely—is indeed ‘‘the novel of the year’’—although in ways that none

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of those now caught up in the glamour of its unprecedentedly high approval ratings might be prepared to imagine.

Smith, Ali, ‘‘A Perfect Afterlife,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Guardian, August 17, 2002, Guardian Unlimited, www.books.guardian.co.uk (August 17, 2002).

Source: Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘‘Novel of the Year,’’ in New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 16, 2003, pp. 4–8.

Webb, Stephen H., Earth from Above,? in Christian Century, Vol. 119, No. 21, October 9–22, 2002, p. 20. Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience, 3d ed., McGraw-Hill, pp. 508–09.

SOURCES Abbott, Charlotte, ‘‘How About Them Bones?’’ in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 249, No. 30, July 29, 2002, pp. 22–23. Bouton, Katherine, ‘‘What Remains,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Times, July 14, 2002, Final edition, Section 7, Column 3, p. 14. Charles, Ron, ‘‘‘If I Die Before I Wake, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Take’: In Alice Sebold’s Debut Novel, the Dead Must Learn to Let Go, Too,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 2002, p. 15. Churchwell, Sarah, ‘‘A Neato Heaven,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Times Literary Supplement, No. 5186, August 23, 2002, p. 19. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, W.W. Norton, 1997, p. 9. Grossman, Lev, ‘‘Murdered, She Wrote,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in Time, Vol. 160, No. 4, July 1, 2002, p. 62. Kakutani, Michiko, ‘‘The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Times, June 18, 2002, Section E, Column 4, p. 1. Mead, Rebecca, ‘‘Immortally Cute,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the London Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 20, October 17, 2002, p. 18. Mendelsohn, Daniel, ‘‘Novel of the Year,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 16, 2003, pp. 4–5. Russo, Maria, ‘‘Girl, Interrupted,’’ Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Washington Post, August 11, 2002, p. BWO7. Sebold, Alice, The Lovely Bones, Little Brown, 2004. ———, ‘‘The Oddity of Suburbia,’’ in The Lovely Bones, Little Brown, 2004, pp. 2–3.

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FURTHER READING Baily, Beth L., and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies, University Press of Kansas, 2004. America in the Seventies is a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field. These essays address such issues as the cultural despair of the decade; analyze elements of seventies’ culture such as film, music, and advertising; and discuss the attempt by Americans to redefine themselves in the 1970s. Douglas, Susan, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, Three Rivers Press, 1995. This book focuses on media images of women in the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Douglas’s discussions regarding the 1970s help in contextualizing the cultural atmosphere of Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Evans, Sarah, Born for Liberty, Simon & Schuster, 1997. This one-volume history of American women examines the changing role of women in this country. The later chapters, particularly chapters 11–12, prove helpful in understanding Abigail Salmon and Ruth Connors in Sebold’s novel. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, Norton, 1963. The Feminine Mystique, a foundational feminist text, examines the discontent of white, educated, suburban wives and mothers. Although published in the early 1960s, Friedan’s study seems relevant to Abigail Salmon’s conflicting feelings in The Lovely Bones. Ku¨bler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying, Scribner, 1969, reprint, 1997. This book, written in plain, understandable language, introduces and explains the five stages of grief. It remains a classic in understanding both the dying and grieving processes.

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Mystic River Mystic River (2001) established Dennis Lehane as more than a mystery writer. Lehane had previously written a successful series of novels centered around two detectives named Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie; Mystic River was his first stand-alone novel.

DENNIS LEHANE 2001

Like most of Lehane’s novels, Mystic River is set in Boston, the city he grew up in and eventually returned to as an adult. Lehane’s familiarity with the area allowed him to create authentic dialogue and speech inflections. His background also afforded him insight into how the working class of Boston’s neighborhoods really thought and lived. He spent nearly ten years thinking about Mystic River before actually writing it. In Mystic River, three young boys—Dave Boyle, Sean Devine, and Jimmy Marcus—are linked for life after Dave is kidnapped while Sean and Jimmy watch. Dave’s subsequent molestation scars him deeply and leaves the other two boys with conflicting feelings over how close they came to being victimized. Twenty-five years later, the three are thrown together again when Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old daughter Katie is murdered. Sean is the state trooper investigating the crime, while Dave becomes a lead suspect. Mystic River explores the nature of the tightly knit neighborhoods and families of Boston, and their response to outsiders. This close-knit environment serves as

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the backdrop for a story that spotlights how one incident acts as a thread that can be woven into so many lives. Mystic River was popular with readers, spending several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Critics also gave it generally good reviews. Clint Eastwood directed the acclaimed film version of the novel, which was shot in Boston. Sean Penn won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Jimmy Marcus, and Tim Robbins won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Dave Boyle.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Dennis Lehane, the youngest son of Irish immigrants, was born August 4, 1965, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a working-class neighborhood of Boston. Growing up in Dorchester during the 1970s, the author witnessed his close-knit, insulated neighborhood undergoing some radical changes, sometimes violently, while still retaining its core values. As a child, Lehane was an avid reader. He was attracted to writing by the time he was eight years old, and began creating short stories by the age of seventeen. After graduating from high school, he attended two colleges in Boston, Emerson College and the University of Massachusetts, but dropped out of both. In 1985, Lehane finally found a program that suited him. He moved to Florida to study writing at Eckhard College. In 1986, while a student there, he took a job that would inspire his later work. He became a counselor at a state facility for children that were emotionally disturbed, developmentally delayed, and mentally handicapped. Lehane graduated from Eckhard in 1988 with a degree in English. He left the counseling job in 1991 when he entered Florida International University’s creative writing M.F.A. program. He graduated in 1993, returned to his hometown of Boston, and spent two years working as a valet and limousine driver at a hotel, jobs that allowed him ample time to pursue his writing. Though Lehane had focused on dark short stories while he was a student, he decided to try his hand at writing a mystery/crime fiction novel. The result was his first published book, A Drink Before the War (1994). The novel, which

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Dennis Lehane Ó Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission

featured a pair of Boston-based detectives named Angela Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie, was well received and won a Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel in 1995. The success of Drink Before Water led Lehane to an unexpected career as a mystery novelist. Gennaro and Kenzie are the primary characters in four more novels, all of which were popularly received: Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), Sacred (1997), Gone, Baby, Gone (1998), and Prayers for Rain (1999). Lehane made the transition from mystery novelist to stand-alone fiction novelist with Mystic River (2001). Like his other books, this novel is set in Boston and is about crime. However, the stand-alone work—his first novel without the characters of Gennaro and Kenzie— is much deeper than his previous works. Mystic River focuses on the effect a crime has on three friends, as well as a working-class Boston neighborhood. The novel soon became a bestseller and won the Anthony Award and the Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. In 2003, Lehane followed Mystic River with another novel about Boston called Shutter Island. Set in an insane asylum in the 1950s, it

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centers on a missing patient who is criminally insane. After the publication of Shutter Island, Lehane began working on another novel, which focuses on the 1919 Boston police strike. Beginning in 2004, Lehane wrote scripts for the HBO series The Wire. As of 2005, he has been contributing articles to various magazines.

PLOT SUMMARY Part 1: The Boys Who Escaped From Wolves (1975) Mystic River opens in 1975 and introduces three young boys who are ten and eleven years old and live in East Buckingham, a workingclass part of Boston. Two of the boys, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle, live in the Flats area, while Sean Devine lives in the nicer Point area. Sean’s father works as a foreman in a candy factory, where Jimmy’s father is also employed. Dave tags along wherever Jimmy goes, including the Saturday visits that Jimmy and his father make to Sean and his father. After an incident where Jimmy, the daredevil of the group, jumps onto the subway tracks to retrieve a lost ball and has to be dragged off the tracks, Sean’s father tells Sean he can only play with Jimmy in front of their home. The next time Jimmy and Dave visit Sean’s house, Jimmy is not as exuberant. His father has lost his job. Dave tries to lighten the mood by telling a joke, but his efforts are ignored by the other two. Jimmy suggests they find a car with its keys under the seat and take it for a joyride. He asks Sean which cars on the block would be best to take, but internally Sean does not like this idea. He suggests to Jimmy that they do this some other time. Dave punches Sean in the arm for his suggestion, and Sean punches him back, hard. Sean and Jimmy get into a physical confrontation. As Sean and Jimmy are fighting, a car, ‘‘square and long like the kind police detectives drove,’’ stops near them. The driver, who looks ‘‘like a cop,’’ gets out and asks the boys where they live. Jimmy lies and says he lives in the neighborhood, but Dave tells him that he is from the Flats. The man insists that Dave get in the car with them, warns the boys about fighting, and tells them that Dave will be taken home to his mother.

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After the car leaves, Sean’s father learns of the incident and immediately realizing that it is a kidnapping, calls the police. The men in the car were not police officers, but kidnappers. Sean feels guilty about not getting in the car and wonders what has happened to Dave. Jimmy feels resentful of Sean and does not believe he will ever see Dave again. Apparently, the kidnappers leave Dave alone at one point and he escapes. Four days after his abduction, Dave is found alive. His neighborhood is overjoyed at his return and throws a block party. Dave looks shell-shocked and withdrawn. Seeing him at the party, Jimmy knows that something has changed in Dave. Though Dave initially receives support from his neighbors, his classmates harass him when he returns to school. He does not fully understand what happened to him, especially why the men picked him and not Sean or Jimmy. He relives part of the experience and tries to come to terms with what happened to him. As they grow up, Jimmy and Dave no longer see each other very much. Jimmy steals a car and is sent to another school. Meanwhile, Sean cannot stop dreaming about the experience. One year after the incident, he learns that one of the men who abducted Dave has been caught and killed himself. Before his suicide, the man reports that the other kidnapper died in a car accident the previous year.

Part 2: Sad-Eyed Sinatras (2000) It is now twenty-five years later and Brendan Harris, the secret boyfriend of Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old daughter Katie, is preparing for the couple’s elopement to Las Vegas the next day. Brendan’s preparations and hopes for life are contrasted with background about Jimmy’s life since that fateful day in 1975. Jimmy still lives in the Flats. He has served time in prison, during which his first wife, Marita, died of skin cancer, leaving him a single father. He later remarries and has two more daughters. After serving his time, he leaves his life of crime behind for Katie’s sake. That same night, Dave, who also still lives in the Flats, is preparing for a night out. His wife, Celeste, is having her girlfriends from work over to watch the movie Stepmom, while their young son Michael sleeps in his room. As Dave walks to a local bar, he worries about having to move away from the neighborhood. Yuppies and

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college students have been moving into the area, raising property values and rents.

from the blood in the vehicle that the victim has been murdered.

Katie goes out with her best friends, Diane Cestra and Eve Pigeon, to celebrate her impending marriage. They go to dinner, then to a number of bars. Dave’s evening intersects with Katie and her friends. He watches the Boston Red Sox baseball game at the same bar where Katie and her friends drink and dance on the bar top. After a night of drinking, Katie drops off her friends at Eve’s house. As she drives home, she hits something in the street and stops the car. Someone familiar approaches the car, but he is armed with a gun.

During and after Nadine’s communion service, Jimmy is angry that Katie has not shown up, but he is also worried. He reflects on his past again, revealing that he was a very clever criminal who had his own crew. He went to prison to protect the others in his gang.

Meanwhile, when Dave returns home to Celeste, he is cut across the chest, has an injured hand, and is bleeding profusely. Dave tells Celeste that he was mugged, and he beat the attacker so badly that he might have killed him. Celeste does not believe his story, but still takes care of him, agreeing not to call the police or take him to a hospital. She immediately washes Dave’s bloody clothes and plans to destroy all evidence from Dave’s attack. Though she is scared of what has happened, she is protective and fiercely loyal to Dave. The next morning, Jimmy learns that Katie has not shown up for her Sunday morning shift at the Cottage Market, the corner store he owns. Jimmy is especially tense because it is the morning of the first communion of his youngest daughter, Nadine. As he dresses to go into the store, his wife Annabeth is annoyed that her stepdaughter has created tension on Nadine’s special day. Jimmy reflects on the loss of his first wife and his early days with Katie when he was unsure how to be a father. While Jimmy covers Katie’s shift at the store, he makes calls to try and find her. Brendan drops by the store with his younger brother, a mute named Ray, and tries to learn where Katie is without attracting suspicion. Jimmy does not like Brendan and has forbidden his daughter from ever seeing him. Sean re-enters the narrative as a state trooper working homicide after a week-long suspension. His personal life is in disarray because his wife, Lauren, has left him. He is put on a case after two kids call 911 to report a car covered in blood near Penitentiary Park in the Flats. At the scene, Sean meets with his partner, Whitey Powers, a veteran in homicide. Though a body has not yet been found, the authorities assume

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When Celeste wakes up on Sunday morning, she is still worried about what actually happened to her husband the previous evening. She is certain he lied to her about the incident. She knows something happened to her husband as a child, but he has never told her exactly what the experience was. The tension increases between Celeste and Dave. Jimmy, on a hunch, follows the police cars to the area where the car has been found. When he sees that Katie’s car is involved, he knows in his heart that she is dead. Jimmy asks to see Sean, who is reluctant to talk to him. When they meet, Sean informs him that she has not been found yet, but Jimmy cannot accept that answer. Rather than wait on the police, Jimmy decides to find his daughter on his own. The police find Katie’s body behind an old drive-in movie theater screen in the middle of the park. She has been shot in the head and beaten. As Sean surveys the location, Jimmy and his brother-in-law, Chuck, enter the park through a back entrance and approach the murder scene. Jimmy learns that his daughter is dead. Sean and Whitey are the lead investigators of the crime. After Jimmy identifies Katie’s body at the morgue, Sean and Whitey question him and Annabeth. Jimmy brings up what might have happened if he and Sean had gotten into the car with Dave. Though internally Sean reflects on the fact that he has asked himself the same question over the years, he keeps focus on the case at hand. As Whitey and Sean begin their investigation, Sean tells him what happened with Dave all those years ago. At Jimmy’s home, Jimmy has another brother-in-law, Val, look into the possibility that Katie’s ex-boyfriend, a criminal named Bobby O’Donnell, had a hand in her death. Whitey and Sean question Eve and Diane, and learn that Katie was going to elope to Las Vegas with Brendan. The next day, they question Roman Farrow, a friend of Bobby’s. He reminds them that Bobby could not have killed Katie

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because he was already in jail on a DUI charge. Whitey and Sean go to Brendan’s house and he confirms his and Katie’s plans to elope. When Sean returns home, he reflects on his life. He had met Lauren in college, and now she works as a stage manager for traveling shows. The couple has been growing apart for some time, and she has had an affair. She becomes pregnant around the same time, and Sean is unsure if the child is his. Lauren calls, but as always, she is silent on the line and says nothing.

Part 3: Angels of the Silences The next morning, Celeste is staying with Annabeth, her cousin, to help her out with family and friends that have come to pay their respects. Celeste observes how grief has affected the family. Jimmy struggles deeply with the loss of his daughter, but keeps his grief internalized. Sean and Whitey continue their investigation by questioning Dave. They know that he was at one of the bars that Katie and her friends were at on the night she was murdered. Dave lies to them, saying he left the bar at about 12:45 a.m. and went straight home. He tries to hide his injured hand in his pocket. After Sean and Whitey leave, Dave reflects on his past. He struggles with what happened to him as a child and calls this part of his personality ‘‘The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up.’’ He takes his son to Jimmy’s house. When Jimmy asks Dave what happened to his injured hand, Dave tells him that he cut it helping someone move a sofa. Sean and Whitey discuss the state of their case and fear it could be a random crime. Whitey suggests that Dave could be a suspect, though Sean is dismissive of that possibility. When they present their findings to their superiors, they mention that there was a suspicious car seen in the parking lot of the bar, the Last Drop, where Katie was last seen alive. There was also blood in the parking lot. The authorities are unsure how these facts relate to Katie’s death. Sean and Whitey park near Jimmy’s house. Dave is outside, heading into the nearby convenience store. When Whitey asks about Dave’s injured hand, Dave tells him a pool cue smashed it into the wall while he was making a difficult shot. Whitey and Sean notice a dent on Dave’s car that matches the description of the dented car in the parking lot of the Last Drop.

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They do not believe his story about the night Katie was killed. Celeste overhears the conversation between Dave, Sean, and Whitey. She is worried that her husband is involved with Katie’s death. When Sean talks to Celeste alone a short time later, he tries to get her to tell him what time Dave came home that night. Celeste becomes confused and defensive, and she lies, telling Sean she was asleep when he came home. Sean knows that she is scared, and thinks that she knows more than she is saying. Sean talks to Jimmy alone and informs him that his daughter was dating Brendan and planning to elope. Jimmy is surprised. Sean asks why he hates Brendan so much, and Jimmy tells him that he had issues with Brendan’s father, who was known as Just Ray. When Sean and Whitey talk again, Whitey is more convinced that Dave is a leading suspect, but Sean is reluctant to completely agree. Whitey asks Sean if there is a conflict of interest with him being on the case of a friend’s murdered daughter with another friend as the lead suspect. Sean assures him that he is after the killer, whoever it is. Off the clock, Sean spends some time with Annabeth, sharing his marital troubles to get her mind off her own problems. When Celeste returns home from dropping off Katie’s dress at the funeral parlor, Dave is angry at her and accuses her of thinking that he killed Katie. She tells him that she overheard Whitey and Sean talking. She wants Dave to tell them the truth about what happened to him on the night of Katie’s murder. Dave has a breakdown and tells Celeste what happened when he was kidnapped and molested as a child. He tells her, ‘‘The kid who came out of that cellar, I don’t know who the f—k he was— well, he’s me, actually—but he’s sure as s—t not Dave. Dave’s dead.’’ He does not think that he trusts himself anymore. Dave walks in his neighborhood, reflecting on what happened on the night that Katie was murdered. He admits to himself that he sometimes fights the urge to molest children as he himself was molested, but he will not cross that line. When Dave goes out, Celeste takes her son and leaves her husband.

Part 4: Gentrification Whitey tells Sean that he has towed Dave’s car as evidence. Blood was found in the front

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seat and the trunk. He also tells Sean that the gun used to kill Katie was also used in a 1982 robbery, which Sean says points away from Dave. Whitey brings Dave in for questioning. The troopers confront him on inconsistencies in his story. Dave eludes them, telling another lie about his injured hand, saying that he fell against a ragged chain-link fence in his backyard. In the interrogation room, Dave grows smug in the knowledge that they cannot pin Katie’s murder on him and that he has a secret: he murdered someone else and no one can prove it. He is released when a witness cannot pick him out of a lineup. Sean investigates the gun used to kill Katie. Just Ray, Brendan’s father, is linked to the weapon. Just Ray was an associate of Jimmy’s who disappeared in 1987. Sean and Whitey learn that Just Ray had ratted on Jimmy when Just Ray was arrested in the 1980s, which is why Jimmy ended up in prison. They figure that Jimmy must have had a hand in Just Ray’s disappearance, either murdering him himself or ordering someone to do it. After Jimmy buys the headstone for his daughter’s grave, he and Val talk about what Val has learned through the informal investigation Jimmy has asked him to undertake. Val verifies that the murderer could not have been Bobby O’Donnell or Roman Farrow. He mentions that Little Vince, a child prostitute known to hang around the Last Drop, suddenly left town. Jimmy learns that Dave has been taken in for questioning. Celeste finds Jimmy and tells him that she has left Dave. She relates everything that has happened, and says that she believes Dave killed Katie. In the meantime, Sean questions Brendan again, asking about his father and his father’s gun. Brendan does not believe his father is dead because he sends monthly checks postmarked from New York. When Sean asks Brendan if his father kept a gun in the house, Brendan denies it. They can connect the gun to Katie’s murder through its use in an earlier robbery, and arrest Brendan on suspicion of murder. When Dave gets home, he starts drinking. He thinks back to what actually happened the night Katie was murdered. He happened upon a man with a young male prostitute in his car, and Dave, consumed with rage over his own abuse, beat the man and then shot him. In the melee, Dave was injured. He first put the body in his

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trunk, then moved it to the man’s Cadillac. Dave’s motive was not only rescuing the boy prostitute, but also rescuing the Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves living inside him. Whitey and Sean learn that the suspicious car from the bar had been towed. They find the body of the man that Dave killed and link this murder to him. Sean returns to question Brendan, but Brendan demands a lawyer and is soon released. After listening to the 911 call tape again, Sean and Whitey realize that the boys who called about Katie’s abandoned car had actually seen her while she was still alive. In the meantime, Dave runs into Val, who invites him to lunch. Jimmy shows up at the restaurant and joins them. As they drink, the tension between Dave and Jimmy is palpable and makes Dave sick to him stomach. When Dave goes outside to vomit, Jimmy and Val follow. Jimmy tells Dave that he killed Just Ray on principle for betraying him, even though he did not want to. When Val pulls a gun and Jimmy pulls a knife, Dave insists he had nothing to do with Katie’s death, telling them that he killed a child molester that night, not Katie. He then tells Jimmy that he did kill Katie, believing that Jimmy will let him live if he tells him what he wants to hear. Jimmy stabs Dave in the abdomen and then shoots him in the head. Jimmy and Val dump Dave’s body and the murder weapons in the Mystic River. When Brendan returns home from the police station, he looks for his father’s gun in the place he knew it should be. It is not there. At the same time, Whitey and Sean figure out that it was Brendan’s brother, Ray, and his friend Johnny O’Shea that the witness saw and heard in the street before Katie’s car stopped. They were the ones who made the 911 call. Brendan confronts his brother and Johnny, beating both of them. Sean and Whitey arrive to find Johnny holding Brendan at gunpoint. After a tense stand-off during which Johnny points the gun at Sean, Sean diffuses the situation and takes Ray and Johnny into custody for Katie’s murder. Sean goes to Jimmy’s house and informs him that they have caught Katie’s killer. Sean also tells him about the murder of a child molester and asks if he knows where Dave is. Jimmy realizes that he has killed the wrong man. Sean can see in Jimmy’s face that he killed both Just Ray and Dave. He vows to collect enough evidence to

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CHARACTERS Big Wolf

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Mystic River was released in an abridged version on four audiocassettes by Harper Audio in 2001. The text is read by David Strathairn. Mystic River was adapted as a film in 2003. Brian Helgeland wrote the screenplay and Clint Eastwood directed the production. The film starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon as Jimmy, Dave, and Sean. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two. It was also named Best Film of 2003 by the National Board of Review.

arrest him but knows that Jimmy is too smart to have left any evidence behind. Sean calls Lauren and they reconcile, and he learns the name of his daughter, Nora. When Jimmy returns home, he confesses everything he has done to Annabeth, who tells him he did the right thing to protect his family from those who are weaker than they are.

Epilogue: Jimmy Flats (Sunday) On Sunday morning, a parade is about to take place in the neighborhood. Jimmy reflects on the events of the past two days as he wakes up from a deep sleep. Celeste had come to Katie’s wake, screaming that Jimmy was a murderer. The gravity of Jimmy’s crime weighs on him, as does his past. He decides that with Katie dead, his reason for going straight is gone, and he returns to his former criminal lifestyle.

Big Wolf is the name Dave gives Henry, one of the men who kidnapped him when he was a boy. Big Wolf, the driver of the car, and his partner Greasy Wolf pose as police officers and force Dave into their car. Big Wolf is never caught for the kidnapping and molestation of Dave. Later, he allegedly dies in a car crash.

Celeste Boyle Celeste is Dave Boyle’s wife, the mother of Michael, and the first cousin of Annabeth Marcus. Celeste is loyal to Dave but is greatly troubled when he comes home one night, bloodied and injured. She does not believe the story he tells her about being mugged and fighting to defend himself. Eventually, she fearfully concludes that her husband murdered Katie. When Celeste tells Jimmy her fears, it confirms his suspicions and he murders Dave. Not knowing her revelation would end in murder, Celeste later regrets her actions and blames Jimmy for her husband’s death.

Dave Boyle Dave Boyle is the feeble childhood friend of Jimmy and Sean, neither of whom seems to like Dave. Like Jimmy, he lives in the Flats, the lower working-class area of East Buckingham, Boston. Sean knows Dave only because he tags along with Jimmy when Jimmy visits Sean’s house. Dave is fighting in the street near Sean’s house, when two men posing as police officers kidnap him. They put Dave into the back of their car and tell him they are taking him home to his mother. Instead, Dave endures sexual abuse at the hands of the men he nicknames Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf. When they leave him in a cellar alone, Dave manages to escape and returns home after four days. The incident greatly scars Dave.

Sean and his wife reconcile, and Sean meets his infant daughter, Nora, for the first time. They attend the parade. Celeste appears in the crowd and tells Sean that Jimmy murdered her husband. Sean promises to prove Jimmy did the crime and bring him to justice. Sean and Jimmy make eye contact across the crowd. Sean hopes that Dave has achieved some peace in death.

He is married to Celeste and has a son named Michael. He does not tell her exactly what happened to him as a child. Internally, Dave struggles with his own desires to molest, though he vows never to act on them. Instead, his inner conflicts reveal themselves when, after a night of drinking, he murders August Larson. Dave comes upon Larson engaged with a young male prostitute and takes out all his pent-up rage on Larson. Though Dave is injured in the

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incident, he does not tell anyone the truth about what happened. Because of Dave’s unexplained injury, his wife suspects him of killing Jimmy’s daughter, Katie, and she leaves him. Jimmy also suspects Dave of killing Katie. Dave finally tells him the truth about killing August Larson, but Jimmy does not believe him. After Dave is killed, his body is weighted and sunk to the bottom of the Mystic River.

Michael Boyle Michael is the eight-year-old son of Dave Boyle and his wife Celeste. Like his father, he is a very talented baseball player who plays the catcher position.

Diane Cestra Diane is one of Katie Marcus’s best friends. Along with Eve Pigeon, she spends a last night on the town with Katie before Katie is supposed to leave for Las Vegas. Instead of driving home with Katie, she spends the night at Eve’s house, leaving Katie to drive home alone in the car.

After Sean graduates from college, he becomes a successful state trooper. However, his marriage to Lauren is troubled by an affair she has with another man. Just before the action of Mystic River begins, Sean has served a suspension and probation for giving his wife’s lover unearned parking tickets. The murder of Katie Marcus is his first case back with his partner, Whitey Powers. The pair investigates the case while Sean struggles with the past, especially the fact that he did not get in the car with the pedophiles. Unlike his partner, Sean is somewhat reluctant to consider Dave Boyle as Katie’s murderer. Sean finds the clue that points the investigation to the true murderers: mute Ray Harris and his friend, Johnny O’Shea. Arresting the boys and facing the gun that Johnny aims at him puts Sean’s life in perspective and allows him to make the first step towards reconciliation with his wife and child. Sean also realizes that Jimmy killed Dave and vows to arrest him someday for the crime.

Greasy Wolf Lauren Devine Lauren Devine is the wife of Sean Devine. The couple met in college, and she works as a stage manager for traveling shows such as Lord of the Dance. Sean and Lauren are separated for much of the book, in part because she had an affair with another man. The couple has a daughter, Nora, though Sean is not sure he is the father until the end of the book. Throughout the novel, Lauren calls Sean from the road, but she does not speak. He talks to her, but she does not say anything back. After Sean faces the gun held on him by Johnny O’Shea, he takes the first steps towards reconciliation, which she accepts. By the end of the book, the couple has reunited.

Sean Devine When Mystic River opens, Sean is about ten years old and living in the Point, an upper workingclass neighborhood in the East Buckingham section of Boston. He is playmates with Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle. The boys play together only on Saturdays because Sean goes to a Catholic school, while the other two go to public school. Sean is sometimes put off by Jimmy’s wildness and Dave’s clinginess. However, when Dave is kidnapped right in front of him by men who are posing as police officers, Sean develops a lifelong guilt over the incident.

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Greasy Wolf is the name that Dave gives to George, one of the men who kidnapped him when he was a child. George was the passenger in the car that stopped on Sean’s street, posing as a police car. He was eventually caught by the authorities but committed suicide before he was prosecuted.

Brendan Harris Brendan Harris is the older brother of Ray Harris and the son of Esther and Just Ray Harris. He is about nineteen years old and in love with Katie Marcus. The pair have been secretly dating and plan to elope in Las Vegas. When Katie is found murdered, Sean Devine and Whitey Powers briefly consider Brendan as a suspect, though neither ultimately believes he killed her. In the end, Brendan realizes that his brother and friend killed Katie just as Sean and Whitey arrive at the door to arrest them.

Ray Harris Jr. Ray is the mute younger brother of Brendan, and son of Esther and Just Ray Harris. His father ratted out Jimmy Marcus, which led to Jimmy’s prison time and eventually to Jimmy murdering Just Ray. With friend Johnny O’Shea, Ray murders Katie because he does not want to see his brother move away.

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Ray Harris Sr.

Jimmy Marcus

See Just Ray

Just Ray Though Just Ray does not appear as a living character in Mystic River, his presence is felt nonetheless. Just Ray is the husband of Esther Harris, and the father of Brendan and Ray Harris, Jr. Just Ray was a criminal in league with Jimmy Marcus but also held a few legitimate jobs along the way. He disappeared in 1987 while his wife was pregnant with Silent Ray. His family thinks he just moved away and abandoned them, primarily because each month they receive five hundred dollars in an envelope with a New York postmark. In reality, Jimmy murdered Just Ray because he gave the police information that led to Jimmy’s arrest and prison sentence. Jimmy is the one who sends the monthly checks. Because of Jimmy and Just Ray’s negative relationship, Jimmy does not like Brendan and has forbidden his daughter from ever seeing him.

August Larson August is the man whom Dave murders. He is in the company of Little Vince, a local child prostitute, when Dave comes upon them and kills August. Dave first puts August’s body in his trunk but later moves him to the trunk of the man’s own Cadillac, where it is late found.

Little Vince See Vincent

Annabeth Marcus Annabeth is Jimmy Marcus’s second wife and the mother of two of his daughters, Sara and Nadine. She is also the only daughter of Theo Savage, sister to the Savage brothers including Val and Chuck, and the first cousin of Celeste Boyle. Throughout the story, Annabeth’s severe nature is highlighted. At one point, Sean asks her, ‘‘Anyone ever tell you that you’re a hard woman?’’ She replies, ‘‘All the time.’’ Annabeth is very supportive of her husband and immediate family. She allows Celeste and others to take care of her after Katie’s death, although she despises weakness. Annabeth knew Jimmy was going to kill Dave and could have stopped him, but she does not because she regards Dave as feeble.

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At the beginning of Mystic River, Jimmy is about eleven years old. He is an only child and lives in the lower working-class neighborhood of the Flats in East Buckingham. Jimmy is a wild child who takes extreme risks. Yet he also allows Dave Boyle, who was easily led and without many friends, to tag along with him. Jimmy’s street smarts prevent him from being kidnapped. When two men posing as police officers pull up, Jimmy saves himself by lying, saying that he lives nearby. The men kidnap Dave, and Jimmy does not believe Dave will be coming back until he actually shows up. Even as a child, Jimmy resents Sean and his wealth. After the kidnapping, Jimmy steals a new baseball mitt off Sean’s bed when he leaves Sean’s house. This resentment colors their relationship as adults. Unlike Sean and Dave, Jimmy does not succeed at school. He is expelled from one school after stealing a car, and bussed to another one. By the time he is seventeen years old, Jimmy is the head of a criminal gang. He meets and marries his first wife, Marita, the mother of his first daughter, Katie. However, Jimmy is betrayed by one of his associates, Just Ray Harris, after a robbery. Refusing to turn in the rest of his friends, Jimmy goes to prison for a few years. During his time inside, Marita dies of skin cancer. Upon his release, Jimmy becomes a single father to Katie. He later remarries and with his new wife, Annabelle, has two more daughters, Nadine and Sara. To take care of them, he leaves his life of crime behind and runs a legitimate business, a corner store. He exacts his revenge on Just Ray by executing him in secret. But Jimmy also arranges for money to be sent monthly to Just Ray’s family, in part so they will think he is still alive. Jimmy is extremely close to Katie and her death devastates him. He relies on family, like his crazy brothers-in-law Val and Chuck Savage, to help him find out who killed her. When Celeste shares her belief that Dave killed Katie, Jimmy murders Dave. Jimmy feels slight remorse when he learns the truth but will not admit to his crimes. Instead, he decides to make a return to his criminal past.

Katie Marcus Katie is the nineteen-year-old daughter of Jimmy Marcus and his first wife, Marita. She is

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the stepdaughter of Annabeth Marcus. Katie and her father are extremely close. Her mother died while her father was in prison, and after his release, Katie and Jimmy build a strong bond. Despite this closeness, Katie does not tell her father that she is dating and planning to elope to Las Vegas with Brendan Harris. Before Katie can put this plan into action, she is murdered by Brendan’s brother, Ray, and his friend Johnny O’Shea. Her death drives the plot in Mystic River.

Marita Marcus Marita is Jimmy’s first wife and Katie’s mother. She dies while Jimmy is serving his prison sentence. Her loss haunts him throughout the novel, and he secretly admits to himself that he loved her more than he loves Annabeth.

on the case, including his ties to Jimmy and Dave. However, Whitey also uses these links to help solve the crime.

Val Savage Val Savage is the son of Theo Savage, brother of Annabeth Marcus, and brother-inlaw to Jimmy Marcus. Like all the Savage brothers, he is very short in stature and somewhat psychotic. Val is involved in criminal activities. He used to be in Jimmy’s gang before Jimmy went to prison, and remains very loyal to him. Val helps Jimmy murder Dave and dump his body in the Mystic River.

Silent Ray See Ray Harris Jr.

Vincent Bobby O’Donnell Bobby is a twenty-something small-time crime boss who, among other things, runs some prostitution rings and acts as muscle in the neighborhood. Bobby had been dating Katie Marcus. As far as she is concerned, the relationship has ended, but Bobby does not necessarily agree. Because of their relationship, Bobby is an early suspect in her death but it is discovered that he was in jail on a drunk driving charge at the time.

Johnny O’Shea Johnny is Silent Ray’s friend. He takes part in the murder of Katie Marcus. When Sean and Whitey figure out that Ray is involved in the crime and go to the Harris apartment to confront him, Johnny holds a gun on Sean before he is arrested. This experience leads Sean to reconcile with his wife.

Eve Pigeon Eve is one of Katie Marcus’s best friends. She and Diane Cestra celebrate Katie’s last night in Boston, and then they spend the night at Eve’s house while Katie drives away alone. Eve reveals to Sean and Whitey that Katie was planning to elope with Brendan.

Sergeant Whitey Powers Whitey is Sean Devine’s partner in the investigation into Katie Marcus’s murder. A sergeant, Whitey is very experienced with similar crimes and diligent in his pursuit of the truth. Whitey questions Sean’s motivations for being

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Vincent is a young male prostitute known as Little Vince. An encounter between Little Vince and August Larson prompts Dave to murder August. After August’s murder, Little Vince disappears from East Buckingham.

THEMES Power of the Past A primary theme of Mystic River is the power the past can have over people’s lives. While the friendship between Sean, Dave, and Jimmy is not particularly deep, Dave’s kidnapping and molestation tie them together for life. Both Sean and Jimmy are aware that their lives would have been very different had they gotten in the car that day. Dave does not understand why the kidnappers picked him and does not talk about what happened to him. Sean has always been much more troubled by the kidnapping incident than Jimmy. It affects his thoughts, concerns, and motivations. Jimmy does reflect from time to time on what could have been, but he does not dwell on it as heavily as Sean and Dave do. Just after he identifies his daughter’s body, Jimmy and his wife are giving Sean and Whitey initial information for their investigation. He tells Sean, ‘‘If we had gotten in that car, been driven off to God knows where and had God knows what done to us. . . . I think I would have been a basket case.’’ Dave’s kidnapping and molestation have colored his entire existence. He has shut this

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part of himself off from everyone else. Most people who know what happened treat him differently. The few times when Dave thinks or talks about what happened, he talks about his own desire to molest, which he has been curbed successfully. However, Dave’s rage gets the better of him when he sees a man having sex with an underage male prostitute. Dave’s continual battle with his past ultimately costs him his life.

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worried that the men will return for him. As an adult, Dave marries Celeste and they have a son. Celeste’s difficult mother, Rosemary, lives with them until her death. Dave keeps a part of himself hidden away from his wife as well as from the rest of the world. He does not trust even his wife to fully understand what happened to him as a boy and how it has tainted his whole existence.

Neighborhood and Community Family and Familial Relations Another prominent theme in Mystic River is the importance of family. Each of the three main characters has families and familial relationships that provide depth and motivation for their actions. For example, Jimmy’s entire adult life has been focused on providing for his family. Upon his release from prison, he is a single father to young Katie. They develop a very deep, loving bond, broken only by her death. Instead of returning to a life of crime after his release, Jimmy opens a corner store, remarries, and has two more daughters. He lives in an apartment below some of his in-laws, who help him when he decides to conduct an informal investigation into his daughter’s death. Jimmy even reconnects with Dave when Dave marries his wife’s first cousin, Celeste. After Jimmy kills Dave, Annabeth defends his actions by telling him he was protecting his family. She tells their children that they never have to worry about being safe because ‘‘Daddy is a king, not a prince. And kings know what must be done—even if it’s hard—to make things right.’’

Related to the theme of family is the strength and importance of the neighborhood in Mystic River. The bulk of the action takes place in a part of fictional East Buckingham called the Flats. It is a working-class neighborhood with many Irish American families. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and many people in the neighborhood go to Jimmy’s corner store. A key clue to Katie’s murder is the fact that she said ‘‘hi’’ to one of her killers. Many who live in the Flats feel protective of the neighborhood and resent the yuppies and college students who are gentrifying the area and raising the cost of living for long-time residents. Dave rants on several occasions about how these people negatively affect both him and the others who live in the Flats. Nearly every character in Mystic River has spent his or her whole life in the neighborhood and fears being forced to leave by economic factors.

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Dave was raised by a single, overprotective mother, with his uncles acting as his male influences. After his kidnapping and molestation, his mother becomes even more protective of him,

Petty crime and violence are facts of life in East Buckingham. While the narrative shows how crime and violence have lasting detrimental effects, it also shows that crime can be committed with honorable ends. The novel’s catalyst is the kidnapping and molestation of Dave Boyle in 1975. As the victim of a horrible crime himself, Dave acts violently. The trauma of his molestation causes him to kill August Larson, a man who is having sex with a child prostitute in a car. Dave commits a crime, but given the atrocity of his victim’s actions, readers are unlikely to feel that what Dave has done is really wrong. Jimmy was a successful criminal in his youth, and his inlaws continue to live on the wrong side of the law. Jimmy does not trust the authorities to bring Katie’s killer to justice. He takes matters into his own hands and murders Dave in cold blood because he believes Dave killed his daughter. After this incident, Jimmy plans to return to his criminal ways. At the same time, the fact that Jimmy kills Just Ray and then sends money to

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Sean’s and Dave’s family relationships are more fractured than Jimmy’s, yet still important to who they are and how they act. Sean has a distant relationship with his parents, especially his father, and cannot communicate well with them. Though Sean fulfills their expectations and goes to college, his marriage to Lauren, a college sweetheart, is temporarily broken by infidelities. She continues to contact him, calling him from the road, but does not say anything. He talks to her, hoping to re-connect. When Sean calls her after Johnny pulled a gun on him, the couple reunites and their family is restored. Sean becomes a loving father to his infant daughter, Nora.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) is another novel by Dennis Lehane that deals with pedophiles and children. The effects of these attacks also have long-term repercussions. The novel is part of Lehane’s series featuring the detectives Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie. The Wanderers (1974), by Richard Price, is a book that Lehane cites as influential in his writing career. The story focuses on a gang of teenagers living in the Bronx in the 1960s. Lehane’s Shutter Island (2003) is another stand-alone novel. Like Mystic River, the book focuses on a criminal investigation, which is conducted by two federal marshals. This case involves a missing patient from a mental institution who is criminally insane. National Book Award nominee Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) is a novel by Dorothy Allison. The story focuses on a young girl who is sexually abused.

Gone, Baby, Gone (1998) is another novel by Lehane that focuses on a missing girl. The novel also features the detective team of Kenzie and Gennaro, who are investigating her disappearance.

Dark Harbor (2005), a murder mystery by David Hosp, features a story set in Boston with characters from that city’s neighborhoods.

his victim’s family shows how he has some integrity. Sean’s job as a trooper is to investigate acts of crime and violence, so though he is not the victim or the perpetrator, he is still affected by their consequences nonetheless.

Strength and Weakness An underlying theme of Mystic River is the strong versus the weak. From the beginning, the book presents Dave as a weak person. He is first

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described as ‘‘a kid with girl’s wrists and weak eyes.’’ The narrative implies that Dave’s needy weakness contributed to his kidnapping; in fact, Dave often thought, ‘‘How had they known he’d climb in that car, and that Jimmy and Sean wouldn’t?. . . . Those men . . . had known Jimmy and Sean wouldn’t have gotten into that car without a fight.’’ Dave wants to be strong as an adult but never achieves this goal around Jimmy and those he has known his whole life in the Flats. At the same time, though the murder he commits derives from his personal pain and demons, the act does exhibit some strength of character, as he is attempting to protect a child from a fate similar to his own. When Jimmy confesses to Annabeth the murders of Just Ray and Dave, she admits she knew what was going on with Dave but did not prevent Jimmy from murdering him. She tells Jimmy, ‘‘They . . . are weak.’’ She then clarifies her statement by saying ‘‘Everyone. . . Everyone but us.’’ Later, she says, ‘‘We will never be weak.’’ Both Jimmy and Annabeth are strong, domineering people who have gotten their way and seemingly will continue to do so.

STYLE Third-Person Point of View The point of view describes the perspective from which the story is told, while structure is the way the author sets up the plot of the story. These qualities are linked in Mystic River. Lehane uses a third-person omniscient point of view, allowing readers to see every character and action from an all-knowing perspective. This allows the reader insight into characters’ motives and thoughts. Lehane uses this technique to create a structure of shifting perspectives. Mystic River is told in brief episodes that move between the characters and their thread of the story.

Inner Monologue Conversation between characters is called dialogue, while a character’s thought process is an inner monologue. Lehane uses a significant amount of revealing dialogue between characters in Mystic River, but also discloses Sean’s, Dave’s, and Jimmy’s innermost thoughts and motivations through their internal voices. The characters do not talk to themselves; instead, Lehane describes what each character is thinking

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about themselves, their pasts, and their presents. The style of each monologue reflects each character’s psychology. Sean and Jimmy’s thoughts are usually organized, reflective, and reactive. At times, especially when Dave is thinking about his abduction, his inner monologue is chaotic and rushed.

Triple Protagonist A protagonist is a primary, driving character in a story. Mystic River, employs three protagonists, Jimmy, Sean, and Dave. All three characters play significant parts in the development of the novel’s story. None dominates the story individually, and each has his own strengths and weaknesses. Jimmy could be considered the villain, Sean the hero, and Dave the victim. However, Jimmy has many redeeming qualities, including love for his family, while Sean is plagued with self-doubt and fear in his personal life. Alternatively, all three of the men could be considered both victims and survivors. It is the collective qualities of Sean, Jimmy, and Dave that make a complex single protagonist in Mystic River.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Child Abduction, Victimization, and Pedophilia Though child kidnapping and rape are not new crimes, the methods predators use to find victims have changed over time. In Mystic River’s prologue, set in 1975, Dave is taken by two strange men in a car. The fear of men looking for random victims on the street was a common one in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s came the realization that children were generally sexually abused by people they knew rather than strangers. The focus of public education campaigns gradually changed to reflect this knowledge. Laws were also passed to help protect children. The 1978 Sexual Exploitation of Children Act made illegal obscene materials (primarily sexually explicit magazines and other types of pornography) that feature minors.

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Internet in the early 2000s. While these numbers continued to increase, the same article also stated that ‘‘most child sexual abuse occurs with family members or adults known to the child.’’ Though children are still kidnapped off the street or from their homes, by both strangers and family members, the Internet allows pedophiles and other sexual criminals to build a relationship with their victims. Whenever a child is online, he or she can be easily and unknowingly approached by someone seeking a sexual relationship. A 2000 study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children revealed that almost one in every five Internet users in the United States between the ages of ten and seventeen has been approached. This means that millions of children have been approached: by 2002, more than twenty-eight million children in the United States have used the Internet.

Gentrification Gentrification occurs when population shifts, upgraded housing, and a surge in investments transform an older, working class neighborhood into a more affluent one, displacing the working class people who live there. The idea of gentrification underlies the story in Mystic River, and was indeed a motivation for Lehane writing the novel. He told Bob Minzesheimer of USA Today that he pondered ‘‘what would happen to [a working-class Boston] neighborhood once the Saabs outnumbered the Chevys and the corner store became a Starbucks.’’

In the early 2000s, when Mystic River was written, many children were being lured into sexual situations in a different way: over the Internet. According to an article in CQ Researcher, the FBI investigated at least 1,500 cases of the exploitation of children via the

In Boston, this process was accelerated in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a hot real estate market and increasingly high housing costs. Campus housing for the many institutions of higher learning in the city was often in short supply. College students and young urban professionals moved into neighborhoods like the one depicted in Mystic River because housing was cheaper than in other locations. As these new tenants moved into the area, rents increased. The newcomers were willing to pay more than the working-class people that had been living there. This action forced out longtime residents, who had a hard time finding new housing. City officials, including Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and activist groups worked to provide affordable housing solutions for lower income families.

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Oil barges sit docked on the Chelsea, Massachusetts side of the Mystic River, with downtown Boston in the background Neal Hamberg/Bloomberg News/Landov

poetic, and his descriptions convey feeling and detail without wasting a word.’’

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Mystic River is regarded by many critics as Lehane’s breakthrough novel, and it received generally positive reviews. Though the author had seen success with his five previous novels, a crime fiction series featuring the detectives Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie, Mystic River is widely regarded as being of a higher quality than his Gennaro-Kenzie books. Critics praised many literary elements of the novel, including character, setting, and writing style. Carol Memmott of USA Today wrote, ‘‘Lehane has let loose with a standalone novel of depth and fervent passion.’’ A particular aspect of Mystic River that a number of critics commented on was the complexity of his characters. David Pitt wrote in Booklist, ‘‘Lehane is one of the small group of crime writers whose novels reveal a deep fascination with people, with motivation and inner turmoil and the subtle things that make characters walk off the page.’’ Others noted how carefully Lehane crafted his text. In Charleston, South Carolina’s Post and Courier, Mindy Spar claimed, ‘‘Lehane has created a writer’s crime novel. His style is almost

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Some critics found fault with Mystic River, including a few who admired his previous works. Bella English of the Boston Globe wrote, ‘‘Mystic River is neither as fast-paced nor as tightly written as his Kenzie-Gennaro series. Lehane fans no doubt will miss the chemistry between those two.’’ While praising some aspects of Lehane’s work, including his style and character development, Washington Post writer David Corn commented, ‘‘Lehane does a better job creating the threads than weaving them together.’’ Even the somewhat negative reviews had positive aspects to them, and most critics regarded Mystic River as an artistic triumph for Lehane. Thomas Mackin in World of Hibernia states, ‘‘Singular adjectives fail to capture the engrossing power of this murder mystery.’’

CRITICISM A. Petruso Petruso is a freelance writer and editor, with an undergraduate degree in history and Master’s

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degree in screenwriting. In this essay, Petruso considers how the idea of insider versus outsider manifests in the characters of the novel, as well as the dynamics of their neighborhoods. In Mystic River, a palpable tension exists between insiders and outsiders—people who belong and people who do not. Although the events in the novel blur the distinction between insider and outsider, the tension between these two conditions plays as important a role in the plot as it does in the daily lives of the novel’s characters. The communal characteristics of the Flats neighborhood create opportunities for safety, victimization, criminalization, and absolution, and thus, this theme drives the action of the story. Nearly all the residents of the Flats have spent their entire lives in the neighborhood, with the exception of a few who have served prison time. These residents are insiders; everyone else is an outsider. As the definitive representative of the Flats, Jimmy understands the unwritten rules of living in his tight-knit community. The rules appear to be that one insider cannot betray another; an insider criminal should not inform on a cohort; an insider should not kill another insider’s child. Jimmy’s actions show one of the major features of insider status: community members understand and follow a set of rules different from the authority of law. Jimmy kills Dave because he thinks Dave killed his daughter. Yet when Jimmy learns the truth about who Dave killed and why, he has no problem with what Dave did. In one respect, this may be because of the atrocious act August Larson commits. On another level, however, it seems that an insider killing an outsider is okay. Summarizing this idea, Bella English of the Boston Globe writes, The novel . . . underscores the clannish, skewed morality in the neighborhood: It’s no big deal to bash in the brains of a suburban man who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, while killing a local teenage girl is a capital offense.

The underlying insider/outsider tension plays an important role in the moment that ties Jimmy, Dave, and Sean together for life. The three are not particularly close friends as tenand eleven-year-old boys. They play together on a few Saturdays because Sean’s father and Jimmy’s father work together, and Dave always tags along with Jimmy. Dave and Jimmy, residents of the Flats, possess a neighborhood

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AS MYSTIC RIVER UNFOLDS, IT IS AS IF SEAN MUST WORK THROUGH KATIE’S MURDER CASE TO ATONE FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO DAVE. AS SOMEONE WITH A PERSONAL STAKE IN THE CASE, SEAN PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE PULLED HIMSELF OFF THE CASE BUT COULD NOT.’’

identity that eventually would have caused them to drift away from Sean, a resident of the nicer Point area. Had it not been for Dave’s abduction, Sean, Dave, and Jimmy probably would not have considered themselves more than passing acquaintances. One might argue that Dave’s outsider status in the Point neighborhood contributes to his victimization. Only Dave, who does not say that he lives in the Point, is kidnapped and molested. To evade the pedophiles, Jimmy lies and says he lives nearby, and the incident happens in front of the relative safety of Sean’s house. The tragedy is a thread that links the three and affects them in a way that those outside the situation can never fully understand. Ironically, the event assigns Sean a quasiinsider status, in spite of the fact that he is set up as an outsider from the beginning of the novel. He lives in the Point, a neighborhood distinct from the Flats, though part of the same general area of Boston called East Buckingham. While the Point is working class like the Flats, people consider the area a little better off than the Flats. ‘‘It wasn’t like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons. . . . But people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented . . . . and the Point and the Flats didn’t mix much.’’ While Jimmy and Dave attend a public school, Sean attends private parochial school. Later, Sean goes to college, while Dave has his glory years in public high school as a baseball star and Jimmy becomes an accomplished criminal who is brought down only by another’s betrayal. Ultimately, Dave’s kidnapping further emphasizes Sean’s outsider status. Sean never goes to the Flats to see Jimmy and Dave.

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Although Sean does not invite them, Jimmy and Dave visit Sean in the Point. They leave the familiar environment of their neighborhood and, as a result, Dave suffers the consequences of going to an outsider’s place. Because he is not in his own neighborhood, the men are able to convince Dave to get in their car. As someone from a neighborhood where ‘‘families went to church, stayed together, and held signs on street corners during election months,’’ Sean makes choices in his life that continue to make him an outsider to those he once knew in the Flats. He graduates from college and while a student, he meets Lauren, the daughter of hippie liberals who served in the Peace Corps. The couple marries and though they have marital problems that create tension, they ultimately get back together and work on their marriage and family. One of the most important choices Sean makes to cement his outsider status is becoming a state trooper. The cases he investigates take him many places, including the same neighborhoods he has been trying to leave his whole life. Though it is not stated directly in the text of Mystic River, it would seem that Sean made the choice to become an authority figure because of what happened to Dave and how helpless Sean had felt when it happened. Though Sean was too young at the time to investigate that crime, as an adult he can make a difference in other cases. Given his background, it is fitting that he chooses to do so using the upstanding, legal path. As Mystic River unfolds, it is as if Sean must work through Katie’s murder case to atone for what happened to Dave. As someone with a personal stake in the case, Sean probably should have pulled himself off the case but could not. While Sean is an outsider to the Flats, Dave’s kidnapping ties him to Jimmy and Dave, and by extension, to their community. Because of his connection to Jimmy and Dave, Sean’s participation in the murder investigations of Katie and of August Larson borders on conflict of interest. His partner, Whitey, asks him early on if he is too personally invested in the case, but Sean dismisses his concerns. He is determined to see justice in the case involving his friends, perhaps to atone for what happened when they were children. The police and other authorities are not exactly trusted in the Flats. The way Lehane writes it, many Flats insiders consider those on

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the opposite side of the law more trustworthy than the police. As an insider, Jimmy earns more respect in the community for his career choices than Sean does. Jimmy’s first job is as a professional criminal, until someone he trusts, Just Ray Harris, rats him out. After an honorable prison sentence—taking the fall so no one else would have to—Jimmy leads a relatively straight life but does so as a neighborhood insider. He supports his family by owning a corner store, an institution that can be the heart of a neighborhood. Though he lives a straight life, Jimmy’s inlaws are still criminals, and Jimmy himself still has power derived from criminality in the area. Early in the novel, insider Dave Boyle complains on several occasions about how yuppies are taking over the neighborhood and causing rents to rise. He worries he will lose his home and perhaps have to leave East Buckingham. He tells Whitey and Sean that the neighborhood needs a good crime wave to make it unappealing to the outsiders who are steadily encroaching. Interestingly, the man Dave murders is a suburbanite who was in the area specifically to have sex with a young male prostitute. While Jimmy Marcus, a consummate neighborhood insider, shares some of Dave’s anxieties that gentrification will permanently change the neighborhood, he is not as hostile to outsiders as Dave. His first marriage was to an outsider, a Puerto Rican woman named Marita. Although she died of cancer while he was in prison, he admits that he loved her more than he does his second wife, who is a neighborhood insider. After his daughter Katie’s death, he remembers a time when he and Katie saw a production of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and how Katie spent the next six months expressing her desire to live in Italy after high school. Jimmy was dismissive of her dreams. He considered her a resident of the Flats for life; an insider, just like himself. The tension between outsiders and insiders contributes to the underlying drama in the novel and helps add depth to the plot. This tension which manifests itself in the character of Sean without much detriment to him, takes a much greater toll on Dave. He is simultaneously an insider and an outsider and cannot reconcile that conflict. While Dave is definitely an insider in the Flats, as an adult he questions that status because of his abduction and its consequences. It is as if he is an outsider because of what

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happened to him as child. He is the boy taken away from his neighborhood, his mother, and his friends, and abused by two men he dubs wolves. The fact that he struggles with the compulsion to victimize other children, the ultimate betrayal of a community’s integrity, makes his status as a solid community member uncertain. By the time he reaches adulthood, his accomplishments on the baseball field in high school have caused people’s memories of him as a child victim to fade. As far as most people in the Flats are concerned, Dave is one of them. But he cannot let the incident go. Dave’s kidnapping raises an important related question: What if the incident had happened in front of Jimmy’s home? Would the Flats, depicted as being more close-knit than the Point, especially in 1975, have been quiet enough for this incident to occur? After the kidnappers force Dave into their car, Sean’s street becomes ‘‘empty again . . . gone mute with the slam of the car door.’’ Furthermore, only one witness heard anything the night of Katie’s murder because the street it occurred on was empty, burned out, and lost in the urban shuffle; only one old woman lived there. In 1975, the street had been more vital. While Sean’s street was not exactly vacant, Lehane depicts those who live in the Point as more concerned with their own well-being than that of the neighborhood as a whole. When Dave returns to the Flats after his kidnapping, the narrator compares the lively block party he receives with what might have occurred in the Point: ‘‘They had block parties, sure, but they were always planned, the necessary permits obtained, everyone making sure everyone else was careful around cars, careful on the lawns. . . .’’ In the Flats, neighbors are the same as family; people who live there are less concerned with the privacy of others. Flats residents are insiders because their community encourages it. They possess a unified identity of extended family. Point residents appear to have no community to be inside of at all, and therefore are a neighborhood of outsiders. When Dave returns, it seems everyone who lived in the Flats attends his party. Although crime and violence seem to be commonplace in the Flats and the Point neighborhood may contain more law-abiding citizens, the investment that Flats insiders have in their community may have made it a safer place to live.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY In a one-page essay, compare and contrast the film version of Mystic River with the book. What aspects of the novel changed when it was adapted to film? Would you have left in these parts? What was lost and what was gained by adapting the book into a movie? Which version most effectively depicts the basic story? Look up the definition for ‘‘feminism in literature’’ and in a one-page essay, examine the complex way in which women are depicted in Mystic River. Would you consider Lehane a feminist author? Are any of the women feminist in nature? How would you describe the kinds of women depicted in the book? The issue of social class underscores the story in Mystic River. Most of the characters in the book are working class. Throughout its history, Boston has been known for its class tensions. Find a book or film that explores this topic. Make a one-page list that compares and contrasts how the book or film you find and Mystic River deal with social class.

The ending of Mystic River leaves open the possibility of a sequel. Sean has yet to prove that Jimmy killed Just Ray and Dave Boyle, while Jimmy plans a return to the criminal life. If you were going to write a sequel to the novel, where would you take the story? How do you see the drama playing out based on what you know? Write a one-page summary of the sequel, giving the second book an original title.

Source: A. Petruso, Critical Essay on Mystic River, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Adam Dunn In the following essay, Dunn visits the south Boston neighborhoods on which Mystic River’s fictional Buckingham is based to learn about Lehane’s impetus to write and how his experiences in those neighborhoods inspire his fiction.

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couple of years ago, my father was still telling me when the postal exams were, just in case.’’ THE FRAGMENTATION AND DENIAL WITHIN DAVE’S MIND IS ILLUSTRATIVE OF WHAT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE IN MYSTIC RIVER.’’

Dennis Lehane did not want to work for Boston Gas. Nor did he want to work for Boston Edison or the post office. He had no ambitions to enter the priesthood or politics. Instead, he wanted to write. His parents (who emigrated to Boston from Ireland in the 1940s) were duly horrified. Fortunately, Ann and Michael Lehane’s son seems to have made the right decision. Mystic River, his sixth novel, finds the author transcending the genre label of crime novelist that his earlier books have earned him, placing him at the intersection of crime and literary fiction. Mystic River is a mystery novel that pushes up out of the genre, a book that uses the whodunit premise to delve deeply into the conundrum of how people who are supposedly ‘‘close’’ are actually as far from one another as distant planets whirling through the void. The book which has strong backing from publisher William Morrow, is a Book of the Month Club Main Selection and has had its foreign rights already sold in five countries—could put Lehane’s rising literary star into a whole new orbit. Not bad for someone whose most lucrative job, not so long ago, was parking cars. Lehane’s journey has had its snags. Prior to the publication of his first novel, the path of his writing career resembled a bungee jump from Massachusetts to Florida, with the recoil snapping him back: ‘‘I went to two colleges, two different majors, and dropped out of both of ’em,’’ admits Lehane, who at thirty-five still looks like a frat boy lost on the way to the party. ‘‘I was twenty and I said, ‘I really suck at everything. The only thing I’ve ever been good at is writing.’’’ His parents wanted their restless son to settle into a more secure profession. ‘‘It’s the immigrant dream,’’ Lehane says, slouched in a chair in what is best described as a writer’s fantasy office: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, wall-towall desk space and no telephone. ‘‘Get the secure job. Get the pension. Lock it in. Until a

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While Lehane was growing up, South Boston and neighboring Dorchester (where he lived) were reeling from poverty, street violence (particularly against forced busing), lethal street drugs (cheerfully supplied by the notorious IrishAmerican gangster James ‘‘Whitey’’ Bulger and his ilk) and an alarming suicide rate. Yet both South Boston and Dorchester were some of the most tight-knit, closed neighborhoods in the city, where outsiders were distrusted and visitors unwelcome. Over beer, and under the eyes of his two faithful bulldogs, Lehane explains the dynamics of Dorchester in the 1970s in a subdued but frank voice. ‘‘When I was growing up it was, ‘We are all Irish, we are all Polish, we are all Catholic—all others, stay the f—k out.’ Boston’s neighborhoods went through explosive tensions, not always racial. A lot of times it was just, ‘Outsiders, go away.’’’ That grim take on neighborhood communality forms the backdrop of Lehane’s serial novels, as well as the fictionalized world of Mystic River. ‘‘Dorchester is one of many built-in neighborhoods in Boston, and sometimes neighborhood pride has a dark side,’’ says Lehane’s high school friend Chris Mullen (whose name Lehane used for a drug dealer character in his fourth novel, Gone, Baby, Gone). ‘‘Not quite a Charlestown code-of-silence pride, but akin to that. My family moved out of Dorchester during busing. Dennis’ didn’t, and I think from his point of view, there was a constant tension. Within a block of his home, things got very dicey during the busing era—for a while that whole neighborhood was going in the wrong direction. I can see the basis for some of the crimes he writes about. I think that when Dennis portrays the neighborhood in his books, and especially when he writes dialogue, his voice rings truer to me than many other writers, because he was there.’’ Lehane convinced his worried parents that he’d be able to take care of himself as a writer. ‘‘I’d been doing it since I was eight. I said I wanted to major in writing, that I could get a degree and teach, so I could always make a living doing that.’’ Lehane got a scholarship and left crowded Dorchester, heading south to Eckerd College, a small school on the Gulf of Mexico in St. Petersburg, Florida—an area he now refers to as ‘‘paradise.’’ ‘‘I remember stepping on the

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campus and thinking, This is it. This is my life. All I wanted to learn was how to be good.’’ Eschewing the concerns typical of many young writers, Lehane hunkered down in his newfound paradise and began to do the hard work necessary to become a ‘‘good’’ writer. ‘‘I didn’t care about publishing. I didn’t even like hearing about publishing in workshops—it’s putting the cart before the horse. I still get annoyed by that. It’s a very simple theorem: Learn how to write, write a good book, it’ll get published. You’ll get published—just learn how to write first. There’s no other method that I know of.’’ Lehane’s early attempts involved short stories, which he believed to be his niche. Some of his teachers and classmates encouraged him to send some of his best to The New Yorker; he decided against it and continued working on his craft, a decision he does not regret. ‘‘I look at people who can do it well—like Andre Dubus or Denis Johnson or Thom Jones or Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore—and there’s still a little part of me that wishes I could do that. But I’ve always been lucky in that I have a very good instinct and very little sentimentality about seeing my own limitations. I thought, If I can’t write a short story as well as Dubus, then why the hell am I doing this?’’ While earning his MFA at Florida International University, Lehane casually tried his hand at mystery writing, a genre he always enjoyed as a reader. The book he began to write turned out to be the first draft of A Drink Before the War, the debut novel of his highly successful Kenzie-Gennaro detective series, which centered on a brutal gang war with nods to the Charles Stuart race killing. It took him three weeks to write (but months to rewrite before it was ready for publication).

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being a chauffeur—a job he says is well suited for writers. ‘‘I wrote a lot of Darkness, Take My Hand and most of Sacred from the front seat of a limousine,’’ he chuckles. Lehane laughs a lot, which, given the course of events in his life, is not surprising, though it does belie an intensely serious creative drive that has seen him through six books and innumerable short stories. Lehane’s first novel, A Drink Before the War, was followed at the pace of about one per year by Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Prayers for Rain (all of which share Dorchester and South Boston as common settings). After the success of Prayers for Rain (film rights for which were purchased by Paramount Pictures, with Lehane writing the script), the author decided he needed a break from the Kenzie-Gennaro detective series. He wanted to go deeper into the streets and secrets of the neighborhood of his youth than he ever had before. ‘‘When I first started writing short stories, when I was around seventeen, I’d come up with this little world in my head, which I discarded sometime in college. I thought, OK, if we’re going back to third person, just step back as a writer to a place I’d once been very comfortable, let’s go all the way. Let’s do Buckingham.’’ What may have been plain boredom with the first-person point of view of his earlier books gave way, unexpectedly, to something far richer: the world of Buckingham, a fictitious amalgam of the Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, South Boston, Charlestown and Brighton, described in Mystic River as ‘‘a neighborhood of cramped corner stores, small playgrounds and butcher shops where meat, still pink with blood, hung in the windows.’’

‘‘Coming from the world I was in, writing very esoteric short fiction, when I wrote a mystery, I knew exactly what boundary I was stepping over. I was leaving one camp and stepping into another, and I had no illusions about it,’’ the author says.

What better place to set a crime novel than amid the various crime scenes one has witnessed in childhood? The day after the original interview, Lehane offers a drive through ‘‘Buckingham,’’ a tour that would likely never pass muster with Boston’s tourism bureau.

After receiving his master’s, Lehane returned to Massachusetts, where he found work best suited for someone of his qualifications—parking cars. ‘‘I needed to do that,’’ he says. ‘‘I got ragged on a lot—‘Hey, how’s that master’s workin’ for ya?’—but it was fun. It was my last little-kid job.’’ By the time Lehane’s first book had been published, he had upgraded to

Various points of interest include the bleak, sloping grounds near St. Margaret’s Church, where one childhood acquaintance murdered another over a pair of sneakers, and the Southie convenience store where a friend’s night shift unexpectedly ended with a shotgun blast at pointblank range. (The store sits in the middle of a busy intersection, and no one claims

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to have seen a thing.) Lehane refuses to stop or even slow down his truck when we come upon the Old Colony housing projects, still a major source of South Boston’s drug trade. We drive slowly by the intersection of Gannon and Bakersfield streets, site of the child abduction at the outset of Mystic River that reverberates throughout the lives of its three protagonists. Our final stop is by the tangled girders beneath the Tobin Bridge, where even full sunlight cannot reach through the maze of steel. Lehane describes this final destination as ‘‘a good place to die.’’ Clearly, he has no shortage of background material from which to draw Buckingham. But he believes there was enough room in Mystic River to explore such deeper issues as marriage, parenthood and self-determination. The three protagonists struggle to make sense of a sudden murder in their midst (which takes place in a theater in a park that Lehane still refuses to enter alone), and proceed to make a fine mess of it. These thematic interests, as well as Lehane’s extraordinarily fleshed-out characters (whom Claire Wachtel, his editor at William Morrow, calls ‘‘ten-dimensional’’), will signal to attentive readers early on that Mystic River is no workaday whodunit story. The novel also breaks from Lehane’s previous books, with its stark attention to real-life details within real-life situations. ‘‘The private-eye novel is limited to a certain structure,’’ he says. ‘‘You’re dealing with an archetypal form; it’s basically what replaced the Western. There are certain laws to that form, and the more you write about those characters, the less they can do, the more confined they become.’’ Gone are the wild shoot-outs and chase scenes from the Kenzie-Gennaro series. With help from Trooper Robert Manning of the Massachusetts State Police Homicide Bureau (a connection arranged by Lehane’s brother-in-law, Sgt. Mike Lawn of the Watertown Police Department), Lehane was able to depict the police investigation in Mystic River with incredible detail and accuracy: ‘‘I think Dennis, without speaking for him, was looking for concrete specifics on how a case is completed from start to finish, instead of some fictionalized account that’s dramatized,’’ Manning says. Lehane’s attention to detail forced him to revisit some difficult experiences of his own. While still in school he drifted into social work and eventually worked with abused children.

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‘‘Every summer and Christmas I’d come home, and all my friends were working with the handicapped, because overtime wasn’t a problem. Eighty-hour weeks weren’t a problem.’’ Lehane does not elaborate much on his short career working with abused children, save to imply that the overall experience was unpleasant. But it reverberates throughout his serial novels, culminating in Mystic River’s Dave Boyle, a man with a secret of childhood abuse that is slowly and horrifically resuscitated over the course of the novel. The fragmentation and denial within Dave’s mind is illustrative of what happens to everyone in Mystic River. The murder at the heart of the book sets the stage for a collision between the novel’s three main characters, themselves childhood acquaintances and witnesses to a terrible crime twenty-five years earlier that tore their friendship apart. As adults, they are adrift and isolated, from themselves and everyone around them, ever since a car that ‘‘smelled like apples’’ rolled down Gannon Street, changing things forever. ‘‘I have an obsession with innocence lost,’’ Lehane says. ‘‘I try to get rid of it, but I can’t. What I can do, as a craftsman, is not repeat the details. Pedophilia is done. I’ve done it in three books. Now I’ve said all I have to say about it. There’s a fine line between writing about something and exploiting it.’’ With Mystic River flowing on course, Lehane’s thoughts are with his next novel, in which he plans to return to the Kenzie-Gennaro series. ‘‘The series isn’t over, but I thought that the characters needed a break,’’ he says. ‘‘In Prayers for Rain, I wrapped up some character lines that have been hanging there since the first book.’’ The new Kenzie-Gennaro novel will be the second in a five-book contract with William Morrow, of which Mystic River was the first. Lehane seems on firm ground with his direction. ‘‘The perfect balance,’’ he says, ‘‘would be to do a series book, then do a standalone and so on in that sequence. It keeps the characters fresh.’’ Source: Adam Dunn, ‘‘A Good Place to Die,’’ in Book, Vol. 52, March 2001, p. 52.

SOURCES Corn, David, ‘‘Lies and Whispers,’’ in the Washington Post, March 4, 2001, p. T09.

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Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, stars of the 2003 film version of Mystic River, flank the film’s director, Clint Eastwood, at a party following the 2004 Academy Awards AP/Wide World Photos

English, Bella, ‘‘River Doesn’t Flow Like Earlier Novels,’’ in the Boston Globe, February 22, 2001, p. D2. Hansen, Brian, ‘‘Can Internet Child Sexual Exploitation Be Controlled?’’ in CQ Researcher, Vol. 12, No. 8, March 1, 2002, pp. 1, 2, 10. Lehane, Dennis, Mystic River, William Morrow, 2000. Mackin, Thomas, ‘‘The Critical Reader Review of Mystic River,’’ in World of Hibernia, Vol. 7, No. 2, Autumn 2001, pp. 20–22. Memmott, Carol, ‘‘Mysteries Probe Modern Hearts of Darkness River Runs Through Life’s Nether Regions,’’ in USA Today, February 8, 2001, p. 8D. Pitt, David, Review of Mystic River, in Booklist, Vol. 97, No. 6, November 15, 2000, p. 588. Spar, Mindy, ‘‘Mystic River well-crafted,’’ in the Post and Courier, April 15, 2001. Stillinger, Alice, ‘‘Can’t Take Dorchester Out of the Writer,’’ in the Boston Globe, March 25, 2001, p. 3.

This work contains a number of essays that consider the economic and social history of Boston, focusing on the twentieth century and its impact on residents and businesses in the city. Fass, Paula S., Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America, Harvard University Press, 1999. This nonfiction work explores the history of child kidnappings in the United States from 1874 forward and includes analysis of major public cases. Lanning, Kenneth V., Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2001. Lanning, a profiler with the FBI, analyzes in depth what makes a child molester tick. Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Routledge, 1996. In this book, Smith expounds on many aspects of gentrification and its effect on cities.

Bluestone, Barry, and Mary Huff Stevenson, The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in An American Metropolis, Russell Sage Foundation, 2000.

Tarbox, Katherine, Katie.com, Plume Books, 2001. This memoir features the story of the author who was lured by an online sexual predator when she was fourteen years old. Tarbox describes the experience that ultimately led to her sexual assault by the man.

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America When one is charged a little bit at a time until the expense grows beyond expectations, that is called being ‘‘nickel and dimed.’’ In 2001’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, essayist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich applies this notion to minimum-wage workers. She argues that their spirit and dignity are chipped away by a culture that allows unjust and unlivable working conditions, which results in their becoming a de facto, or actual without being official, servant class. Spurred on by recent welfare reforms and the growing phenomenon of the working poor in the United States, Ehrenreich poses a hypothetical question of daily concern to many Americans: how difficult is it to live on a minimum-wage job? For the lower class, what does it take to match the income one earns to the expenses one must pay? Rather than simply listen to other people’s accounts, Ehrenreich herself assumes the role of a minimum-wage worker. In different states and in several different jobs, she attempts three times to live for one month at minimum wage, giving up her middle-class comforts to experience the overlooked hardships of a large sector of America. While she freely admits that hers is an unusual situation, she stresses it is also a bestcase scenario; others face many more difficulties in their daily lives, such as the lack of available transportation. Due to an accessible style and subject matter, Nickel and Dimed became a bestseller that helped restart dialogue on the current

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BARBARA EHRENREICH 2001

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state of American work, American values, and the consequences of letting a national emergency remain unacknowledged for too long.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Though Barbara Ehrenreich is best known for her 2001 investigation of the working poor, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her career as a journalist and social critic spans three decades. Barbara Alexander was born August 26, 1941 in Butte, Montana, the daughter of New Deal Democrats. (The New Deal was legislation presented by President Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression. It was based on the idea that the government should intervene to help stabilize the economy.) She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical physics from Reed College in 1964 and a Ph.D. in cell biology at Rockefeller University. While at Rockefeller, she met her first husband, John Ehrenreich, and became involved in both the antiwar movement and the cause for improving health care for low-income families. This led to two collaborations between the Ehrenreichs: Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (1969) and The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics, a Report from the Health Policy Advisory Center (1971). With Deirdre English, she wrote two more books on health care and one about advice literature, For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years of the Experts’ Advice on Women (1978). With husband John, she wrote the influential essay ‘‘The ProfessionalManagerial Class,’’ which explored the importance of having left-leaning, or liberal, middle-class intellectuals work with the traditional left of the lower-income working class. She would return to this topic in 1989’s Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, examining the professional-managerial class’s retreat from liberalism (political ideal that the purpose of government is to ensure individual liberties) and the growing rift between classes. As the conservative Reagan era ushered in the 1980s, Ehrenreich maintained a vigorous liberal perspective while breaking into mainstream media, contributing to the New York Times since 1983 and writing a regular column for Time from 1991 to 1997. Her concerns about feminism, class, and social injustice were expressed in such books as The Hearts of Men: American

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Barbara Ehrenreich AP/Wide World Photos

Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983), and Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex (1986). In the 1990s, Ehrenreich wrote a fiction novel, Kipper’s Game (1994), and published two essay collections: The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990) and The Snarling Citizen (1995). Published in 1997, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War was an ambitious, far-ranging look at violence and its role in society. Ehrenreich married her second husband, Gary Stevenson, in 1983. She has two children from her first marriage. She has served as vicechair and honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States.

PLOT SUMMARY Introduction: Getting Ready The idea for Nickel and Dimed is hatched when Barbara Ehrenreich lunches with Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham. She suggests that somebody should investigate living on minimum wage from the inside: that is, actually living on a

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minimum wage and reporting the experience. Lapham agrees and says the person should be Ehrenreich herself. The assignment involves working at minimum-wage jobs for one month at a time to see if she can match her earnings to her expenses. Ehrenreich has misgivings. She is from a working-class background and has no desire to return to her roots. People around her suggest that she can recreate the situation of minimum wage without going through the actual hardships. However, she finally agrees to the assignment by imagining it as a scientific experiment. In this spirit, she sets up ground rules: first, she cannot rely on skills derived from her education or her work as a writer; second, she must take the highest paying job possible and actually work; and third, she must find the cheapest living conditions for herself. In retrospect, she admits these rules were not always observed. Ehrenreich sets up other parameters as well: she will always have a car, will never go homeless, and will not go hungry. Ehrenreich acknowledges that she is different from many of the people she will be working with. She is financially comfortable and can walk away from her experiment if she wants. She is white and a native English speaker. She has a car. As for whether the people she deals with can tell she is different than they are, Ehrenreich confesses that the opposite was closer to the truth. Her lack of experience means she is less skilled in many situations. She does not merely pose as a minimum-wage worker; for a period of time, she is, in fact, a minimum-wage worker. The nature of every job she takes, each of which involves some form of physical labor, means that doing the job is never pretend. This fact is brought home by the anticlimactic responses from co-workers when she tells them she is really a writer. Ehrenreich makes no claim for the typicality of her experience; however, she stresses that hers was a best-case scenario and many others live in far worse situations.

One: Serving in Florida Ehrenreich decides to stay close to home for her first experiment, looking for work in Key West, Florida. She begins by finding a place to live: staying in Key West is too expensive, so she finds an efficiency apartment thirty miles away. Next, she sets out to find work, filling out

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applications at various hotels and supermarkets. She aces a computerized exam for a Winn-Dixie supermarket but declines to take a drug test, feeling the pay Winn-Dixie offers is not worth the indignity. After three days of searching, she is hired as a waitress at the Hearthside family restaurant. On the first day of the job, she is trained by another waitress, Gail, who fills her in on the complexities of both the restaurant’s policies and her own life. As a waitress, Ehrenreich is driven by her work ethic and a growing attachment to the customers she serves. Unfortunately, her hopes for a steady month of working as a waitress are disrupted by two things. First, the restaurant’s management is perceived by the rest of the staff as serving corporate interests instead of customers. When a mandatory meeting is called, it is so the manager, Phillip, can complain about the messiness of the break room. Four days later, another meeting is called regarding a report of drug activity during the night shift. This necessitates drug tests for all future hires as well as random tests for current employees. The gossip among staff is that assistant manager, Stu, was the one caught with drugs. Second, Ehrenreich realizes that, despite taking home tip money every night, she will not be able to cover expenses on her current income. Her first and most important concern is housing, and Ehrenreich explains the different problems her fellow Hearthside employees endure in that department. Some live with family or a mate; others live with multiple roommates; and still others live in their cars or rent hotel rooms on a nightly basis. This last choice seems unwise to Ehrenreich and she says this to Gail, who is considering leaving her roommate and moving into a room at the Days Inn. As Gail points out, however, she is not able to get an apartment of her own without a month’s rent and deposit in advance—an impossibility on her income, and something Ehrenreich was able to manage only by starting her experiment with $1,300 in her pocket. Ehrenreich seeks out a second job and ends up working as a waitress at Jerry’s, a family restaurant attached to a motel chain. While much busier than the Hearthside, Jerry’s is an unclean restaurant that lacks both a staff break room and proper facilities for employees to wash their hands. The one reprieve for employees

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seems to be smoking, as seen by constantly-lit cigarettes awaiting quick puffs between orders. Ehrenreich is hurt by the coldness of her fellow waitresses on her first day but discovers it is because most people do not last more than one day at this job. Ehrenreich is determined to work at both the Hearthside and Jerry’s but finds herself too exhausted to do so and chooses to stick with Jerry’s. Work at Jerry’s is tiring in itself, and Ehrenreich decides to handle each day as a onetime, shift-long emergency. Unfortunately, she must also deal with work-related pain, including an old back injury that has returned. When she briefly returns to her regular life, she finds herself increasingly disassociated from the ‘‘real’’ Barbara Ehrenreich and ‘‘that’’ Barbara’s relatively lavish lifestyle. Ehrenreich befriends some of the staff at Jerry’s, including a young Czech dishwasher named George, whom she teaches English. Ehrenreich also decides to move to a trailer park closer to Key West in order to save time and gas, making a new second job possible. The situation at Jerry’s worsens when George is accused of stealing from the dry-storage room. Ehrenreich does not speak up in his defense—a change in her personality that troubles her deeply. She gets a second job housekeeping for the hotel attached to Jerry’s. She is assigned to train with a woman named Carlie. Ehrenreich discovers the one solace in cleaning hotel rooms is watching television. She leaves her housekeeping job to wait tables at Jerry’s, but the night goes badly. The cook, Jesus, is overwhelmed by the rush of orders, as is Ehrenreich when she deals with four tables arriving at once. She leaves the restaurant mid-shift and does not return. Her one regret is not giving George her tips.

Two: Scrubbing in Maine For her next experiment, Ehrenreich chooses Maine: unlike other places, she can blend in as a minimum-wage worker despite not being a minority. She arrives on a Tuesday and books a room at a Motel 6. After some searching, she secures an apartment at the Blue Haven Motel, where she can move on Sunday.

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weekend assignment as dietary aide at the Woodcrest Residential Facility nursing home and a weekday job at The Maids. She accepts both. She starts work at Woodcrest on Saturday and discovers that being a dietary aide involves serving meals and cleaning up afterwards. She befriends Pete, a cook, but decides to keep her distance when he seems romantically inclined toward her. On Monday morning, Ehrenreich begins work at The Maids by watching a series of videotapes describing how to clean according to company policy. She is struck by the emphasis on creating an orderly appearance over actual cleanliness, as evidenced by the very small amount of water used when cleaning. The next day, she discovers work is much faster than depicted in the videos: a certain time is given per house, based on size and whether or not it is a first-timer needing special attention. Her co-workers do not have the same housing worries as those in Key West, but many are still at the edge of poverty. On Friday, one of her team’s assignments includes the home of Mrs. W, who ends up watching Ehrenreich as she cleans the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. Ehrenreich develops a rash but is not sure where it comes from; further, the aches and pains from her job take their toll. She makes observations on the physically damaging nature of maid work, as well as the ostentatious nature of the houses she must clean. By the second week, Ehrenreich works regularly under team leader Holly. One day, when Holly seems ill, she confesses to Ehrenreich that she may be pregnant. Ehrenreich tries to assume more of the work to make things easier for Holly. Holly resists, though she does accept food. At one house, Ehrenreich has an accident while cleaning the kitchen, breaking a fishbowl and spilling water everywhere. Her first week’s pay is held back as a matter of policy at The Maids, so she contacts several agencies to secure much-needed free groceries. That weekend, while working at the Woodcrest as a dietary aide, she has to handle the Alzheimer’s ward by herself.

She applies at various places for a job, including taking personality tests at both WalMart and The Maids, a housecleaning service. Two days later, she gets two job offers: a

During Ehrenreich’s third week with The Maids, Holly has an accident and injures her knee. Ehrenreich threatens a work stoppage and talks to her employer Ted about getting help for Holly, but neither Ted nor Holly will

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allow this. On the car ride back to the office, Ehrenreich loses her temper and embarrasses her co-workers by dismissing the Accutrac personality test’s ability to screen out unfit workers. The next morning, Ted sends Holly home to recuperate. Two days later, Ted picks up Ehrenreich for a special assignment. On the drive there, he gives her a raise and talks about Holly’s situation. Ehrenreich wonders why the other workers rely so heavily on Ted’s praise and realizes he is the only person who will acknowledge their value.

morning. When she does, she is told she will be paid ten dollars an hour. Roberta from WalMart contacts Ehrenreich to tell her she passed the drug test and will be paid seven dollars an hour. While Menards is the better choice, Ehrenreich attends Wal-Mart’s orientation out of caution and curiosity. She finds the day-long process intimidating: the history and unmatched growth of Wal-Mart is conveyed along with the service-oriented philosophy, anti-union policy, and the importance of preventing time-theft, or doing anything non-work related during a shift.

On her last day at The Maids, she reveals to co-workers her real reason for working there. They do not seem to understand completely, but Ehrenreich takes the chance to ask how the women feel about their job and clients. The responses are not angry; they are either resigned to their lot in life or aspiring to the same lifestyle as those clients.

Ehrenreich goes to her first day of work at Menards; she discovers she must work elevenhour shifts and that ten dollars may not be her hourly pay rate after all. Ehrenreich refuses these conditions and opts for Wal-Mart, something she will rationalize in the coming weeks. She leaves her friends’ apartment, but finds the Twin Lakes has rented her reserved room to someone else. This forces her to stay at the Clearview Inn for a week, which is cheaper than Twin Lakes but also less safe.

Three: Selling in Minnesota Ehrenreich chooses Minneapolis for her last experiment, based on news of its robust job and housing markets. She initially stays at the apartment of friends who are away on a trip, in exchange for watching their pet cockatiel Budgie. Deciding to explore factory or retail work and become more aggressive with the application process, Ehrenreich succeeds in getting jobs at a Wal-Mart and a Menards housewares store. Unfortunately, both require a drug test, and Ehrenreich has recently smoked marijuana. She tries to detoxify by drinking a great deal of water and buying products designed to clear one’s system. Although her initial search for housing is discouraging, Ehrenreich takes time out to meet Carolina, a relative of a friend. Carolina has done in real life what Ehrenreich pretends to do with her experiments: relocated from one state to another to start a new life at minimum wage. Ehrenreich and Caroline bond and become friends. On Monday, Ehrenreich goes to her drug tests and, still unsure of the results, goes to a group interview for a company seeking independent sales staff. The search for affordable housing grows more desperate, but she is promised an apartment at the Hopkins Park Plaza when it opens up. Meanwhile, she reserves a room at the Twin Lakes, a residential hotel. Menards contacts Ehrenreich and tells her to report for orientation on Wednesday

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The following Monday, Ehrenreich reports for work at Wal-Mart and is assigned to the women’s clothing department. Her task is to keep the area orderly, something that requires a familiarity with the department layout as well as the different brands and styles. While the task itself is not difficult, the volume of clothes to sort and order can be overwhelming. Her shift is changed in the second week from 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. to the closing shift of 2:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m., and the shopping takes on a more frenzied pace. Though Ehrenreich resents customers, concentrating on the clothing gives her a sense of focus and dedication. An incident where a co-worker criticizes her performance has Ehrenreich worried that the person she is becoming under these work conditions is not the same person she is in real life. On the day Ehrenreich believes she can move into the Hopkins Park Plaza, she is told she cannot move in until the following week. Again without a home, she stays at a Comfort Inn for two nights. She seeks housing advice from the Community Emergency Assistance Program, where she is simply told to live in a shelter until she can afford an apartment. The following Saturday at Wal-Mart, Ehrenreich makes a breakthrough and finds herself not needing to think so much in order to accomplish her tasks. This leaves her the time to wonder why

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people do such work in the first place. Ehrenreich now tries to change the opinions of her co-workers and galvanize them to change the company. She talks about the importance of a union to co-workers individually as well as at a staff meeting. Though Ehrenreich does not truly believe that a union is possible, she is given hope when she hears of a strike being held at several hotels. Ehrenreich commits time-theft to follow up on possible housing, but with no results. She decides to end her experiment prematurely and quit Wal-Mart. She tells her co-worker Melissa of this and of the book she is writing, and Melissa decides to quit as well. On her last break, she watches TV news about the hotel strike, and a co-worker in the break room suggests a union would be good for Wal-Mart as well.

Evaluation Ehrenreich assesses how she did in the three experiments. She concludes that she did well at her jobs, stressing that there is no such thing as unskilled labor, as every job has specific demands and skill sets that must be learned. Her ability at work, however, is distinct from how she did in making ends meet; she believes she came closest in making earnings match expenses in Maine and was least sure of this goal in Minnesota. Ehrenreich then examines the general social issues underlying her experiences. The constant problem of housing is caused by the rich competing with the poor for living space, with the rich inevitably coming out on top. And though market forces drive rent up, the same cannot be said for wages available to the lower class. While the legal minimum wage and actual wages earned have both risen for the lowest ten percent of workers, Ehrenreich believes it is not nearly enough. Employers will do anything to avoid raising wages, such as providing minor benefits that can be taken away more easily when costs tighten. Further, minimum-wage employees do not have the same resources as other workers to allow independent comparison of wages and job markets. Even if they did, their ability to change work situations is often restricted by outside concerns such as home environment, transportation, and second jobs. An innate desire to please management helps keep low-wage workers compliant; further, common infringement on civil liberties such as drug testing and searches of

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Nickel and Dimed was adapted as a theatrical stage play in 2002 by playwright Joan Holden. Originally presented in Seattle by director Bartlett Sher and artistic adviser Anna Deavere Smith, it has since been performed by various companies across the nation.

private property help to psychologically intimidate workers. In effect, Ehrenreich argues that low-wage workers inhabit a world that is neither free nor democratic, despite the common idea of America as a land of choice and opportunity. In order to lead a secure and comfortable (but by no means extravagant) life, she estimates that a family of one adult and two children requires $30,000 a year. This is twice as much as low-wage workers actually earn. Ehrenreich concludes that the top twenty percent of American earners, which includes the professionalmanagerial class, exerts an unequal amount of power over America than the rest of the nation. They set the country’s agenda, and they have decided to hide the plight of the working poor. In setting aside their own concerns for the concerns of the people they serve, Ehrenreich claims that the working poor ‘‘are in fact the major philanthropists of our society’’ and will someday resist this role. After the turmoil of this predicted revolt, everyone will be better off.

CHARACTERS B.J. B.J. is a manager at Jerry’s restaurant, where Ehrenreich holds her second waitressing job. She has a blunt, thoughtless demeanor. She advises Ehrenreich that interaction with customers is slowing her down and that customers must be treated as a sort of enemy to getting the job done.

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Though its owners gave the bird a different name, Ehrenreich gave the name Budgie to the cockatiel she must watch in return for temporary housing in Minnesota.

beliefs and perspective. For example, the Ehrenreich in the experiment is afraid of tunnel vision regarding her work—something the narrator Ehrenreich notes but does not herself suffer.

Carlie

Gail

Carlie is a housekeeper at the hotel attached to Jerry’s restaurant. She trains Ehrenreich to be a housekeeper after the author takes on a second job to make ends meet. An older African American woman, Carlie is resigned to her job and seeks solace in the television shows she watches while cleaning the rooms.

Gail is a waitress at the Hearthside restaurant whom Ehrenreich befriends. She, along with most of her co-workers, has difficulties finding acceptable housing; this limits her ability to secure a better job. When Ehrenreich leaves Key West, she turns over to Gail her deposit and house key to the trailer she had been renting.

Carolina

George

Carolina is the aunt of a friend of Ehrenreich’s who had done what Ehrenreich is attempting with her move to Minnesota: Carolina actually moved across the country to start a new life. She boarded a Greyhound bus with her two small children and left New York for Florida, all on a minimum-wage salary. She is the only worker whose home life Ehrenreich describes in detail.

George is a nineteen-year-old Czech dishwasher at Jerry’s restaurant whom Ehrenreich befriends and teaches English. When he is accused of stealing from a dry-storage room, Ehrenreich does not come to his defense.

Budgie

Holly

Colleen is a cleaner for The Maids. She states that she is not jealous of her clients’ lifestyles but wishes her own life was slightly easier.

Holly is a team leader for The Maids. She is pregnant and sick but refuses to stop working. Her refusal to give in to illness or weakness comes from several factors: fear of the consequences if she does not work, financial need, pride in the work that she does, and a desire to please her employer, Ted.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Howard

Colleen

The author and narrator, Ehrenreich is also the central character in the book: the journalist conducting experiments on survival through minimum-wage employment. She is the only character to appear in more than one chapter, since each chapter takes place in a different city and work situation. Ehrenreich is a staunch supporter of progressive left, or liberal, values; she believes in fixing inequities in American society that harm groups such as women and the lower class, even if these remedies compromise unregulated capitalism and democracy. While her background in science makes her approach her investigations as experiments, there are other motivations behind her actions worth noting. She is curious about her own ability to survive and also wishes to illustrate how difficult it is to live under minimum-wage conditions. Due to the nature of her experiment and the changes in her personality from the work and living conditions, the character of Barbara Ehrenreich is at times quite different from the narrator in her

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An assistant manager at Wal-Mart, Howard is an enforcer of company policies and an example of the way corporations implicitly encourage the intimidation of employees.

Jesus A young, inexperienced cook at Jerry’s restaurant, Jesus’ failure to keep up with incoming orders reinforces Ehrenreich’s decision to leave her job mid-shift.

Joy Joy is a manager at Jerry’s restaurant whose abrasive treatment of employees contributes to Ehrenreich leaving the job in the middle of a shift.

Lewis Lapham Lapham is Ehrenreich’s editor at Harper’s magazine. He is the one who takes her idea for a story about somebody trying to live on

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minimum wage and suggests that person should be Ehrenreich herself.

Linda Linda is Ehrenreich’s supervisor at the Woodcrest Residential Facility. She is approximately thirty years old and works with Ehrenreich on her first day as they serve breakfast to the residents in the locked Alzheimer’s ward.

Lori Lori is a cleaner for The Maids who befriends Ehrenreich and aspires to live a life as good as her clients.

Marge Another cleaner for The Maids who befriends Ehrenreich, Marge is resigned to her work situation and refuses to assist Ehrenreich’s attempt to help Holly after she is injured and needs time off.

Melissa A Wal-Mart employee assigned to the ladies’ wear department, Melissa befriends Ehrenreich and leaves the company at the same time Ehrenreich does.

Paul Paul is the listless manager in the personnel office of Menards who interviews and hires Ehrenreich. She turns the job down when she learns that she will have to work eleven-hour shifts for less money than she was originally told.

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Stu Stu is an assistant manager at the Hearthside restaurant who is rumored by the staff to be taking drugs at work. She later learns that he has been fired.

Tammy Tammy is the office manager of The Maids; she is the person who deals with clients and their requests. In Ehrenreich’s view, she keeps the clients from having to deal with the harsher, more intimate realities of employing people to clean one’s homes.

Ted Ted is the owner of The Maids franchise for which Ehrenreich works. He believes himself to be a fair employer and his workers seek his approval, yet the policies he enforces are not as fair to his employees as he thinks. Ehrenreich suspects that he is trying to use her to get information on troublesome employees.

Mrs. W Mrs. W is a client of The Maids who is present when Ehrenreich’s team comes to clean her house. For Ehrenreich, she is a symbol of the worst impulses of the upper and middle class— unconcerned with the suffering of minimumwage workers as long as they make her own life easier.

THEMES

Pete

Employment and Economics

Pete is a cook at the Woodcrest Residential Facility who befriends Ehrenreich and initially has romantic inclinations toward her.

A manager at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Roberta hires and helps train Ehrenreich. She is an example of a true believer in Wal-Mart and its philosophy, which she says is the same as her own.

Nickel and Dimed focuses squarely on the workplace of the lower class: minimum-wage jobs that often involve providing service for others. All the other themes in the book spring from concerns about employment—work conditions, management styles of those in charge of low-wage workers, and the problem of minimum-wage work and whether it is possible to survive in modern America at that level of earning. The book also explores the humane side of economics, asking the question, how does one survive on a minimum-wage job in America? The very title of the work suggests that even the smallest changes in finances can have a debilitating effect for the lower class, whether it is the pay one earns or the cost of everyday living expenses. This is often illustrated in the dollars-and-cents

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Phillip Phillip is the West Indian manager of the Hearthside restaurant who hires Ehrenreich. His lack of concern for or connection with Ehrenreich is emblematic of the disregard management often holds for low-wage employees.

Roberta

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accountings Ehrenreich gives of how much she earns, how much she spends on necessities such as rent and food, and the minor extra expenses she cannot help, such as medicine and painkillers for work-related injuries. Ehrenreich believes that some basic human needs are not met for lower-class workers, even if they have full-time jobs. The amount earned does not match the actual expenses incurred, most notably in housing. Minimum-wage work makes it difficult to gather the funds for a lease on an apartment, and compromises of various sorts are often made. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich scrambles to find the right balance in her housing: affordable, close to work, and safe. Often, at least one of these criterion ends up being forfeited, as she depends on trailer parks and resident hotels to provide reasonable housing. Further, the extreme measures of screening and surveillance often imposed on workers make just keeping a job a stressful affair and encourage a more compliant workforce. Workers are, thus, not only unsure if their jobs can truly support them, they are also unsure if their jobs will always be there.

Culture Clash Ehrenreich perceives cultural differences between classes, enough that her forays into lower-class life feel like a different world to her. Within the experiences that encompass lowerclass life, she is further concerned about fitting into every workplace of which she is a part, and every workplace is a unique microcosm to which she must adapt. If anything, Ehrenreich’s true life as a middle-class writer has made her fit into minimum wage even more alienating, calling up a different set of behaviors and assumptions that she comments upon throughout the book. She understands that being accepted by her co-workers is essential in order to survive, and that a support system within the workplace is one of the tools that make minimum-wage jobs tolerable, if not desirable.

Pain and Suffering Ehrenreich stresses the physical difficulties in the kind of labor she performs for these experiments. Her health is often in jeopardy, and yet she cannot do everything in her power to heal and become well. She is limited to what she can afford and what she can access after work hours. She often relates how a minor injury that could be nurtured into recovery in her

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middle-class life can become a major crisis for the lower class, who have fewer options in health care and are more reliant on hourly wages that can be lost if they take time out to recover. This particular point is brought home by Holly of The Maids, whose sickness and injury demand better care than she allows for herself—partly because she cannot afford decent health care, but also because her commitment to her job, misguided as it may be, does not allow her to stop working.

Empathy Ehrenreich believes that the way to address the issue of the working poor and lower-class survival is to look at the people, not the demographics and statistics. Many minimum-wage jobs are of a service nature, and Ehrenreich implies that lower-class citizens have become a de facto servant class in a nation that claims to treat all its members equally. The purpose behind Nickel and Dimed is to illustrate, in vividly human terms, the difficulties and suffering of this overlooked group. However, Ehrenreich’s empathy often wears thin as she grows tired of the apparent complacency of her co-workers, even in the face of unjust employment practices. Ehrenreich is alarmed at how basic human dignity is taken away by the working conditions of the lower class. The search of personal possessions, scrutiny through personality tests, and especially drug testing are, in Ehrenreich’s mind, all violations of civil rights. She finds a deep, troubling irony that a nation that prides itself on freedom encourages such strong-arm authoritarian tactics on a majority of its citizens. This tension between empathy and exasperation is, arguably, emblematic of the progressive left’s relationship with the working class.

Identity and Self Ehrenreich is troubled by the changes that occur during her experiences leading a workingclass life. A middle-class woman who came from a working-class background, she believes that the person she is now is quite different from the person she would have become if her family had remained working class. While working at WalMart, however, she believes that she meets the ‘‘original Barb’’ in herself, ‘‘the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real’’ if her life had gone differently. Barb, Ehrenreich thinks, is not like the ‘‘real’’ her: ‘‘she’s meaner

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Compare Nickel and Dimed as a work of investigative journalism to another well-known work where the author goes underground to experience the truth of a disenfranchised group, such as Jack London’s The People of the Abyss or John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. How does Ehrenreich compare as an investigator in the commitment to getting to the truth? What does each investigator do to become a part of the group? How does assuming this new role change the way each author understands society? In what way does this new role change the understanding of self and identity? Write a three-page report comparing and contrasting these two books. Research the history of welfare in the United States from President Roosevelt’s Social Security Act of 1935 to the 1996 reform and the present. What are the major landmarks in this history? What changes have occurred, and what brought about those changes? What assumptions seem to underlie welfare in each stage of its history? Based on your research, what future do you see for welfare in America? What role can welfare play in our nation? What role should it play? Create a detailed timeline that not only measures the landmarks in welfare, but notes

and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I’d hoped.’’

possible social assumptions and political concerns that informed them.

How are minimum-wage workers portrayed today? Consider as wide a range of depictions as you can, from news to movies to music to video games. Are there any patterns in terms of race, gender, or work situation? Are there any specific character traits given to minimum-wage workers that set them apart from other people? What communities or settings are they found in and, if a particular example has a plot, what is their role in the story? Create a five-minute presentation of two specific depictions that includes visual aids and, when helpful, plot synopses.

Pick a group that you would like to investigate by immersing yourself into its world, as Ehrenreich did with minimum-wage workers. How would you go about performing a similar investigation? What would you need to change—or hide—about yourself to be able to immerse into the group? What methods would you employ to get the information? Write a one-page investigation plan that lays out your investigative preparations in detail, along with what you hope to accomplish through your investigation.

people she encounters in the book are not as lucky, often working and living in conditions that have not improved for years and may never improve.

Limitations and Opportunities Ehrenreich argues that minimum-wage work is the best that many lower-class citizens can hope to achieve in their lives. As a result, there is a clear limit to the lifestyle they can lead and the opportunities that are open to them. Ehrenreich consciously deprives herself of many of the comforts in her life, but she does this only temporarily and out of choice. The

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STYLE Episodic Chapters The structure of Nickel and Dimed is straightforward: each of her month-long experiments takes up a single chapter, making each

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chapter an episode in an extended quest. This helps reinforce the idea that each month-long experience is a distinct world of its own and that all these worlds are separate from the reality of Ehrenreich’s normal life. These three main chapters are bookended by two considerably shorter chapters. ‘‘Introduction: Getting Ready’’ explains the genesis, or origin, of the experiment, as well as the rules Ehrenreich applies to her project. In the final chapter, ‘‘Analysis,’’ Ehrenreich presents what she learned from all three experiments and proposes changes that could help make life at minimum wage more manageable and humane. The two bookend chapters take place within Ehrenreich’s real life as a writer and social critic. ‘‘Introduction’’ involves a meeting with an editor, while ‘‘Analysis’’ describes briefly her return to that life and the sense of dislocation at how her experimental lives have vanished. In this way, the structure of the book is similar to a quest: the action begins with the assumption of a goal (an answer to the question of matching minimum-wage earnings to a minimum-wage lifestyle); the main character—Ehrenreich herself— makes three excursions to alternate worlds as the goal is sought; and the book ends with a return to normalcy as the goal is completed.

Investigative Journalism Investigative journalists expose injustice through extensive investigation and then propose a remedy to eradicate it. In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich sets her sights on the plight of the working poor. Though investigative journalism does not always call for the writer to fully immerse himself or herself into the situation or event he or she is covering, Ehrenreich’s firstperson experiences bring verisimilitude, or a quality of truth, to the book. She does not pay much heed to journalistic objectivity, in part because she is immersed in her situation, but also because she has clear political beliefs that are at the heart of her career as a social critic and essayist.

Scientific Experiment Ehrenreich repeatedly frames her investigation as a scientific experiment and, less often, herself as the test subject. This not only emphasizes Ehrenreich’s training as a biologist but also provides a necessary distance between herself and her experiences. The distance allows her to write more objectively, but it is also an unstated

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admission that her experiences are artificially constructed. She acknowledges that she is unable to mimic completely the realities of minimumwage life, in part by refusing, even for the sake of the experiment, to go without food, a home, or a car. And because it is an experiment, her experiences as a low-wage worker are not a lifestyle, like so many people she encounters, but a research trial with a defined end-date. At times throughout the book, she carefully categorizes aspects of her lower-class lifestyle or minimum-wage job—often to humorous effect, but also to convey the complexity of her situation and her work assignments. For example, Ehrenreich explains how being a waitress is not simply about serving meals; it is about all the different tasks involved in keeping a restaurant orderly and prepared. If these tasks are not taken care of in a timely manner, serving meals becomes much more difficult when the dinner rush arrives. In this way, she shows that life for the working poor is not a haphazard situation but a set of definable factors that influence one another, often with unforeseen consequences.

Memoir Ehrenreich is not only the narrator but, in a sense, the protagonist, or main character, of the book. Thus, Nickel and Dimed also works as a kind of memoir, an account of a very specific phase in her life. Indeed, Ehrenreich spends the three different months conducting experiments as belonging to the life of another Barbara—the one who would have existed if her parents had never made the transition from lower class to middle class. This Barbara, eventually dubbed Barb after her Wal-Mart name tag, develops concerns and behaviors different from the ‘‘real’’ Barbara she left behind. While it is the ‘‘real’’ Barbara who narrates the novel, we are given many insights into how Barb thinks and feels, often in an embarrassing and self-revelatory manner.

Humor as Criticism An accomplished essayist, Ehrenreich often makes her best and most accessible points about the difficulties and injustices of her minimumwage experiences by describing them in a humorous fashion. Often, she uses self-deprecation to describe her difficulties at learning a new job and to deflate her middle-class assumptions. Since she is intent on discovering the larger meaning of her situation, she often employs hyperbole, or

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exaggeration, and reductio ad absurdum (reducing a statement or belief into a logical absurdity) to expose the injustices committed in the workplace. For example, she makes fun of personality tests to highlight how they are phrased to elicit contradictory impulses that best suit a compliant workforce (e.g., having enough initiative to not be lazy but not so much initiative as to be a threat). By focusing on the more amusing aspects of her experiments, Ehrenreich is able to provide respite from the grim truths about lower-class life, making her account of those truths more palatable to a wide audience.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Prosperity in America Nickel and Dimed was written during a time of great economic prosperity for the United States. This is best exemplified by the Internet boom that resulted in young entrepreneurs becoming overnight millionaires. Whether one is an Internet wizard, rap recording artist, stockbroker, or entrepreneur, the notion of selfinitiative leading to unbridled success has never been more evident than in recent decades. Technology has created a wider range of comforts and productivity tools for those who can afford them, while changes in social mores, or attitudes, have made individual independence a more important value than the needs of the community. This notion of rising through the classes, from lower-class origins to upper-class success, was first made popular in the books of Horatio Alger. These dozens of books, with titles like Struggling Upward and Risen from the Ranks, published from 1867 through the dawn of the twentieth century, all share the same theme: a poor young man, through virtue and hard work, can become a rich man. Although Alger himself never became a rich man, his books were found in a large number of Victorian homes. He has also been noted as an early influence for many entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century. In addition, the main theme of his books—that through hard work, anyone can succeed in America—has been adopted as a distinctly American ideal.

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Security Act in 1935 and has helped support the American poor in the decades since. Ehrenreich was partially inspired to write Nickel and Dimed by changes in welfare laws that were passed in 1996. The Personal Responsibility Act more than halved the number of people receiving welfare: in 1996, there were 12.2 million recipients, while in 2001, when the book was published, there were 5.3 million. This would seem to indicate a success in making lower-class workers more self-sufficient, but that is not how critics interpret the results. As Sharon Hays argues in Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform While 84 percent of desperately poor (welfareeligible) families had received benefits prior to the passage of the Personal Responsibility Act, by 2001 less than half of them did. This means that millions of parents and children in America were living on incomes lower than half the poverty level and not receiving the benefits for which they were technically eligible.

Further, the number of working poor, meaning people who have full-time jobs but still live at or near the poverty line, has grown in recent years as the support of welfare is no longer readily available to assist them.

Corporate Dominance After an 1886 Supreme Court decision granted corporations many of the rights previously held only by individual citizens, corporations have flourished in the United States. This corporate personhood can provide many business advantages, though critics have long argued that it gives too many rights to corporations. This, as recent corporate scandals attest, can lead to great profit without anyone being personally responsible for how the profit is generated.

A national welfare program was instituted as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Social

As corporations began to dominate American industry, smaller businesses had a difficult time competing in an aggressive marketplace. As more and more small businesses vanished, corporations became ever-present to fill consumer needs. Wal-Mart, the largest retailer and employer in the United States, is a perfect example of this corporate dominance. Indeed, this phenomenon has even been referred to as the Wal-Marting of America. Corporate advocates argue that big companies like Wal-Mart provide a consistent, affordable consumer experience that just cannot be matched by

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Robynn Rodriguez as Barbara in a 2003 production of Nickel and Dimed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN Ó Michal Daniel

small businesses. Critics argue that corporations, driven solely by profit, sacrifice employee well-being for increased earnings. Through their decision-making executives, these same corporations actively resist the federal increase of the minimum wage and explicitly discourage the formation of employee labor unions. Some communities, including several in California and Illinois, have successfully rallied to bar the opening of Wal-Marts in their area. Wal-Mart has also faced numerous charges of unfair business practices, including the largest

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class action suit in U.S. history for sexual discrimination of its female workers.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Nickel and Dimed fits clearly in a tradition of investigative journalism where the writer infiltrates a marginalized group, posing as one of them to find out what life is truly like. The best-known examples of such works are Jack London’s People of the Abyss, George Orwell’s

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The Road to Wigan Pier, and John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. All are mentioned by various critics when assessing Ehrenreich’s book. Many critics praise Ehrenreich for writing about the plight of the working poor, calling attention to a facet of America that is often overlooked and underrepresented. Joni Scott from the Humanist considers the book an ‘‘important literary contribution and call to action that I hope is answered.’’ Scott also states that the book ‘‘should be required reading for corporate executives and politicians.’’ In Off Our Backs, Kya Ogyn notes that the author ‘‘succeeds beautifully’’ in demonstrating that ‘‘the problem lies in the system of low-paid work, not in the workers.’’ Moreover, Ehrenreich does this with an approach and style that make her topic engaging. As Steve Early notes in the Nation, ‘‘Ehrenreich has long been a rarity on the left— a radical writer with great wit and a highly accessible style.’’ Scott Sherman, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, is among those who see Nickel and Dimed as an evolution in Ehrenreich’s abilities as a writer: For Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed is something of a literary triumph. Her essays, while frequently incisive and hilarious, seem onedimensional when read in large doses. And while her books are absorbing and original, the writing isn’t always stylish. Nickel and Dimed, however, shows us a veteran journalist at the very top of her game. The book has a sturdy architecture: four tight, compact chapters in which the prose achieves a perfect balance between wit, anger, melancholy, and rage.

However, some have questioned whether Ehrenreich’s work does anything more than state the obvious. As Julia M. Klein writes in the American Prospect: In the end, what has she accomplished? It’s no shock that the dollars don’t add up; that affordable housing is hard, if not impossible, to find; and that taking a second job is a virtual necessity for many of the working poor. Ehrenreich is too busy scrubbing floors to give us more than a passing glimpse of the people in that world.

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directives for what the now-properly-chastised affluent reader should do.’’ Several other criticisms have also been raised. Yager notes that the idea of a well-off woman pretending to be poor ‘‘could easily seem self-indulgent and offensive’’ in much the same way that Black Like Me has been criticized. In addition, Yager points out that readers may leave the book with the misguided notion that ‘‘if American low-wage workers are worse off now than they were 30 years ago, this must just be because bosses have become nastier individuals.’’ Also, despite her recognition of Ehrenreich’s accomplishments, Ogyn states that ‘‘the book contains numerous disdainful comments’’ about overweight people.

CRITICISM Ray Mescallado Mescallado has studied literature and pop culture, writing extensively on these topics for academic and popular venues. In this essay, Mescallado considers Ehrenreich’s book in terms of bridging the gap between the middle and lower class. What looks on the surface to be an attempt to erase class differences actually reinforces them. For all the compelling claims Barbara Ehrenreich makes in Nickel and Dimed about the working poor of America, there is one issue she is oddly quiet about: what can be done to bridge the gap between classes. The book seems to address this with its very premise; deciding to work and live as one of the lower class, Ehrenreich made more of an effort than most middle-class people would even consider. Upon close reading, however, Nickel and Dimed often reinforces class tensions instead of erasing them. Class is not only about different degrees of wealth, but also different perspectives and experiences. For all her success as a worker and survivor, Ehrenreich is still a middle-class woman in a lower-class world, and that influences how she tells her story as well as how we read her book.

Jane Yager, writing in Dollars & Sense, raises another issue. Although the book is an effective portrayal of low-wage living, Yager states, ‘‘It’s hard to figure out what the book aims to accomplish.’’ Beyond making wealthy readers feel bad, ‘‘the book offers no specific

Nickel and Dimed is a personal book about a public problem; that is a key part of its appeal. Time and again, Ehrenreich mentions the physical pain she suffers as a result of her work. All of us can sympathize when bodies are forced beyond their limits. She writes to great effect about human dignity, something robbed too

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CLASS IS NOT ONLY ABOUT DIFFERENT DEGREES OF WEALTH, BUT ALSO DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES AND EXPERIENCES. FOR ALL HER SUCCESS AS A WORKER AND SURVIVOR, EHRENREICH IS STILL A MIDDLE-CLASS WOMAN IN A LOWER-CLASS WORLD, AND THAT INFLUENCES HOW SHE TELLS HER STORY AS WELL AS HOW WE READ HER BOOK.’’

often by the draconian, or extremely harsh, measures imposed on such workers. We all want to keep our self-respect and have others respect us as well. Unfortunately, even these aspects of life are not understood the same way by different classes. One of her clients at The Maids, a physical trainer, tries to be friendly and suggests that cleaning house is a good workout. Ehrenreich laments that she ‘‘can’t explain that this form of exercise is totally asymmetrical, brutally repetitive, and as likely to destroy the musculoskeletal structure as to strengthen it.’’ This encounter highlights the difficulty of crossing class lines, as Ehrenreich describes in her 1989 book, Fear of Falling: Even the middle-class left, where the spirit is most willing, has an uneven record of reaching out across the lines of class. Left and right, we are still locked in by a middle-class culture that is almost wholly insular, self-referential, and in its own way, parochial. We seldom see the ‘‘others’’ except as projections of our own anxieties or instruments of our ambition, and even when seeing them—as victims, ‘‘cases,’’ or exemplars of some archaic virtue—seldom hear.

Despite being aware of the problem, Ehrenreich falls into this trap repeatedly in Nickel and Dimed. As alarming as the trainer’s attitude is, Ehrenreich believes herself unable to say what she thinks, to speak in terms that the woman can understand. It is an opportunity when Ehrenreich can bridge the gap between classes but fails to do so. This reluctance is rooted in part by her own class anxieties, as fear of slippage weighs heavily throughout the book. When she gets hired for her first minimum-wage job and is told to report the next

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day, she becomes uneasy: ‘‘[S]omething between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, ‘Thank you for your time, sir, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my actual life.’’’ Towards the end of her three-city quest for working-class insight, she ponders how different her working-class self is from her professionalmanagerial class self. She draws a clear distinction between the Barbara of her normal life and the ‘‘Barb’’ of her Wal-Mart assignment: ‘‘Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you’re left with is the original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real.’’ She notes that Barb is like a slightly less-civilized version of herself, ‘‘meaner and slyer . . . and not quite as smart as I hoped.’’ If there is any ongoing conflict between characters, then, it is the tense standoff between Barb and Barbara. Ehrenreich’s experiences are so compelling to herself and her readers that we often do not notice—or at least, we do not find it odd—how she does not hear her co-workers as much as she simply describes her own woes. Thus, what makes Nickel and Dimed an engaging read also reduces the urgency of these issues. If this were an account of a truly lower-class person working a permanent minimum-wage job, the story would be different, perhaps even inaccessible to middle-class readers who resist the unvarnished truth about the working poor. Members of the actual working class are disposable in Ehrenreich’s narrative: the episodic traveling account means all characters besides Ehrenreich are dropped at the end of a chapter, paving the way for a new cast in the next city. The only one whose personal history earns an extended telling is Carolina in Minnesota, who is not a co-worker but a relative of a friend in Ehrenreich’s real life. None of Ehrenreich’s work compatriots are described beyond a couple of personality traits and statistic-affirming situations. For the middle-class readers who have long been her audience, Ehrenreich provides a buffer. She is a spy in the house of drudge, an outsider who manages to work her way in. To sympathize with her during this ‘‘scientific experiment’’— which in itself is another distancing effect: How many working-class people would describe their lives as ongoing experiments in matching wages to expenses?—is to know that all the hardships will soon enough fade for our heroine, disappearing down ‘‘the rabbit hole.’’ Ehrenreich is

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Alice in low-wage Wonderland, and waking from this dream is as simple as returning to her real life. Like Alice, her adventures through the lower class are odd, amusing, and at times grotesque. This brings to mind Scott Sherman’s observation in the Columbia Journalism Review: A striking feature of immersion narratives like London’s People of the Abyss and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier is the extent to which compassion and sympathy co-exist uneasily with revulsion and disapproval. . . . Passages of this sort tell us something about the immutability of class boundaries; but they also stand as examples of reportorial honesty and, in Orwell’s case, narrative sophistication.

Ehrenreich often feels outrage at the indignities she must experience, which she sees as the indignities suffered by all workers in her chosen situation. However, this outrage is matched with an unmistakable exasperation about the lack of resistance her co-workers show against their working situations. Ehrenreich never claims that her co-workers deserved the poor treatment they received, but she often comments at how much of it they tolerate—more than she can, as is proven time and again. That said, she at least tries to understand the lower-class characters she encounters, to rationalize—if not excuse—their lack of progressive fervor. While she encounters many unlikable co-workers and customers in her account, Ehrenreich often explains the bad behavior or finds a reason to like the person; that is, if the person is lower class. Ehrenreich is considerably less forgiving with the upper- and middle-class homes she cleans for The Maids, exposing the hypocrisy and lack of good taste of various clients. One might wonder why a staunchly working-class hero does not emerge in her narrative—or at least a sympathetic middle-class character besides the princess-in-disguise that is herself. Consider Ted, the franchise owner of The Maids. Of all the middle-class characters in the novel, he is the least offensive, if still nowhere near heroic. When told there is no key to get into a client’s house, his reported response—‘‘Don’t do this to me!’’—is selfish but not aggressive or mean-spirited. In this book, the lack of malice in any kind of manager is striking. After Holly injures herself on the job, Ehrenreich convinces her to call Ted from the next house. She then

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insists on speaking to Ted and what follows is an angry tirade by Ehrenreich: I can’t remember the exact words, but I tell him he can’t keep putting money above his employees’ health and I don’t want to hear about ‘‘working through it,’’ because this girl is in really bad shape. But he just goes on about ‘‘calm down,’’ and meanwhile Holly is hopping around the bathroom, wiping up pubic hairs.

The scene Ehrenreich paints is both amusing and troubling, an excellent example of her gifts as a writer but also of the problems brought about by her aggressively partisan class consciousness. Holly the lower-class worker persists at her job, no matter how humiliating it is or how silly she appears. As the mediator, Ehrenreich vents her anger at the middle-class employer. And Ted, this representative of the middle class, rewards her. She is afraid she will be fired but her co-workers assure her she will not and, indeed, she is not. Instead, he concedes some ground, as Holly is forced to take off the next day—an action Holly considers unjust and which she blames on Ehrenreich’s meddling. When Ted later pays extra attention to Ehrenreich, picking her up for a special assignment and giving her a raise, she believes she is being recruited as a stool pigeon. Ted fishes for the names of problem employees, hoping that Erhenreich will supply them now that he has given her a raise: ‘‘This must be my cue to name a few names, because this is how Ted operates, my co-workers claim—through snitches and by setting up one woman against another.’’ Ehrenreich’s assumptions are odd, as she is the one who complains about Holly’s situation, even ‘‘threatening a work stoppage.’’ A kinder interpretation of the situation is that Ted admires her willingness to look out for her coworkers, but does not want grief directed his way. What may be a veiled bribe for Ehrenreich to stop being so abrasive is instead seen as a more malicious ploy, based primarily on ‘‘what my co-workers claim.’’ In effect, Ehrenreich plays into the class tensions, the underlying conflict between worker and employer—more so than the other maids, who profess to admire Ted and seek his approval— instead of trying to mediate the two sides. Considering the resentment Holly ends up feeling for Ehrenreich, perhaps there is some truth in Ted’s statement that ‘‘you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.’’ Ehrenreich explains in the ‘‘Analysis’’ chapter

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why the lower class accept low pay, poor working conditions, and legalized violation of civil rights. However, she never addresses how to help those who do not want to be helped. Instead, she fantasizes about a working-class revolt, a day when minimum-wage earners ‘‘are bound to tire of getting so little in return and . . . demand to be paid what they’re worth. . . . and we will all be better off for it in the end.’’ Is Ehrenreich imagining a people’s revolution in classic Marxist fashion (Marxism is the political idea that socialism will lead to a classless society), where the proletariat overthrow the ruling class? Or something less grandiose, a general strike that will force legislation that better serves the needs of all workers? If she is considering the less radical revolt, how will this come about? And why assume that everyone will be better off ? As Sherman discovers in his interview with Ehrenreich in the Columbia Journalism Review, she places little faith in her book causing any real changes in policy; perhaps her time in the servant-class has made her more sharply aware of the realpolitik (politics based on the practical rather than on morals or standards) of the poor. Nickel and Dimed opened a dialogue that does not gloss over the difficulties of class tensions—which in itself is a brave, important act. Having experienced the patchier side of the fence, though, Ehrenreich is now grateful to remain on the greener side, to embrace a middle-class perspective even as she works for her progressive beliefs. Source: Ray Mescallado, Critical Essay on Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Scott Sherman In the following essay, Sherman analyzes Ehrenreich’s complex and often contradictory attitude toward the people she writes about. A striking feature of immersion narratives like London’s People of the Abyss and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier is the extent to which compassion and sympathy co-exist uneasily with revulsion and disapproval. Jack London possessed a deep empathy for the slum dwellers of turn-of-the-century England, but he still allowed himself to describe them as ‘‘stupid and heavy, without imagination.’’ Orwell, recalling his stay in a squalid lodging house in the industrial north of England, confessed: ‘‘On the day when there

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Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (2002), edited by Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, is a collection of essays examining injustices regarding low-wage female workers around the world. It includes an essay by Ehrenreich, ‘‘Maid to Order,’’ which expands on her study of maid work in Nickel and Dimed.

Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling (1989) is a study of the middle class and their retreat from liberalism. It complements Nickel and Dimed on a thematic level, considering the tension between social classes from another angle. Jack London wrote The People of the Abyss (1903) after spending several months investigating slum conditions in London’s East End. A work of journalism very similar to Nickel and Dimed, it serves as a useful contrast to Ehrenreich’s investigative technique and style and is an illuminating historical document of the poor from another time and culture.

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), by George Orwell, was written from a similar desire to examine the plight of London’s poor at the time. After examining the living conditions of the lower class, Orwell devotes the second half of his book to socialism as an ideal and how it compares to the reality of socialism in his times. Along with London and Orwell’s works, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961) is the book most often compared to Nickel and Dimed. It describes how Griffin dyed his skin black and experienced firsthand what it was like to be an African American in the racially segregated South.

was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me.’’ Passages of this sort tell us

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something about the immutability of class boundaries; but they also stand as examples of reportorial honesty and, in Orwell’s case, narrative sophistication. Nickel and Dimed, too, is streaked with contradictory sentiments. Ehrenreich, for instance, writes with considerable feeling about Gail, a ‘‘wiry middle-aged waitress’’ who can’t afford a security deposit for an apartment, so she sleeps in her car. ‘‘When I moved out of the trailer park,’’ Ehrenreich writes, in the closing lines of her waitressing chapter, ‘‘I gave the key to number 46 to Gail and arranged for my deposit to be transferred to her.’’ But in many other places, Ehrenreich’s compassion degenerates into spite. An Alzheimer’s patient who threw milk on Ehrenreich is ‘‘a tiny, scabrous old lady with wild white hair who looks like she’s been folded into her wheelchair and squished.’’ A woman whose home is cleaned by Ehrenreich’s crew is ‘‘an alumna of an important women’s college, now occupying herself by monitoring her investments and the baby’s bowel movements.’’ At Wal-Mart the sight of an obese woman fills Ehrenreich with disgust. ‘‘Those of us,’’ she writes, ‘‘who work in ladies’ are for obvious reasons a pretty lean lot . . . and we live with the fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passage from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths.’’ More illuminating, perhaps, is the anger Ehrenreich directs at some of her co-workers, especially the other maids in Maine, who are bereft of class consciousness and self-esteem. Indeed, the docility and fatalism of the working poor is a primary theme of the book: ‘‘For the most part,’’ she writes, ‘‘my co-workers seem content to occupy their little niche on the sheer cliff face of class inequality.’’ Even when injured on the job, they prefer to talk about recipes instead of retribution. There is a harrowing moment when ‘‘Holly,’’ a maid on her crew, falls into a hole and hurts her ankle; Ehrenreich insists that she get an X-ray immediately—and even calls for a ‘‘work stoppage’’—but all Holly can do is whimper and go back to cleaning bathrooms on her injured ankle.

Robynn Rodriguez as Barbara and Sarah Agnew as Holly in a 2003 production of Nickel and Dimed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN Ó Michal Daniel

Ehrenreich can think of nothing but the accident, but Holly, still reeling from the pain, ‘‘starts up one of those pornographic lateafternoon food conversations she enjoys so much. ‘What are you making for dinner tonight, Marge? . . . Oh, yeah, with tomato sauce?’’’ Marge, another maid, is previously described as someone ‘‘who normally chatters on obliviously about the events in her life (‘It was the biggest spider’ or ‘So she just puts a little mustard right in with the baked beans . . .’).’’

Holly’s passive response to her injury—she is, first and foremost, terrified of losing her job— leaves Ehrenreich in a red-hot fury: ‘‘All I can see is this grass fire raging in the back of my eyes.’’ At the end of the day, on the car ride home,

These expressions of anger and frustration are the most honest and unsettling portions of Nickel and Dimed honest because Ehrenreich— whose original PMC essay envisioned a working class that could ‘‘alter society in its totality’’— despises blue-collar apathy, superstition, and conservatism; and unsettling because they remind us that the works of our most humane chroniclers of the poor—Jonathan Kozol, Katherine Boo, the late Michael Harrington— possess a generosity of spirit that is not always evident in Nickel and Dimed.

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Source: Scott Sherman, ‘‘Class Warrior: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Singular Crusade,’’ in Columbia Journalism Review, Vol. 42, No. 4, November–December 2003, p. 34.

Joni Scott In the following essay, Scott posits that Ehrenreich’s book is an important literary and social contribution. Nickel and Dimed exposes the anti-America of flophouses, multiple house sharing, employees sleeping in cars, and the homeless who work forty hours or more weekly. Those who used to be middle class, despite often working two jobs, now endure a daily scramble to prioritize such needs as food, housing, childcare, and health care. One extra expense—like dental work, work uniforms, medication, school supplies, and the like—can ‘‘break the camel’s back.’’ So I can’t fault Ehrenreich for having stock options and a pension plan while publicly admonishing the excesses of the wealthy. She ponders whether the exurb queens whose houses she and her newfound comrades clean ‘‘have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect?’’ She queries, ‘‘Would they be bothered if they did know or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased— boasting to dinner guests for example that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?’’ And regarding the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) patrons she serves during her Key West server stint, she writes: they ‘‘look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do (and they don’t tip) as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene’s original profession.’’ Another poke at hypocrisy comes when Ehrenreich describes how ennui moves her to investigate a Saturday night ‘‘tent revival.’’ This passage plunges into a commentary about Jesus being ‘‘out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole’’ thereby stifling his message of Christian charity. Mostly, she delivers a profoundly poignant description of people, such as a hopeful Czech dishwasher living with a crowd of other Czech ‘‘dishers.’’ He can’t sleep until one of them goes to work, leaving a vacant bed. On that note, I hear the ghost of social reformer past, Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter who wrote of and extensively photographed the poor in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Riis’

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words could apply to this century: The gap between the classes in which it surges unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless is widening day by day. No tardy enactment of law, no political expedient can close it . . . I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts. By the end of Nickel and Dimed I felt thankful to Barbara Ehrenreich for this important literary contribution and call to action that I hope is answered. I believe this book should be required reading for corporate executives and politicians. A bumpersticker once read, ‘‘He who has the most toys at the end wins.’’ Is this to be our legacy? Source: Joni Scott, ‘‘Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Review),’’ in Humanist, Vol. 61, No. 5, September 2001, p. 40.

Julia M. Klein In the following essay, Klein weighs the ultimate worth of Ehrenreich’s book. In the end, what has she accomplished? It’s no shock that the dollars don’t add up; that affordable housing is hard, if not impossible, to find; and that taking a second job is a virtual necessity for many of the working poor. Ehrenreich is too busy scrubbing floors to give us more than a passing glimpse of the people in that world. Nor can she really transform herself into just another waitress or maid. She is both a prickly, self-confident woman and the possessor of a righteous, ideologically informed outrage at America’s class system that can turn patronizing at times. Still, Nickel and Dimed is a compelling and timely book whose insights sometimes do transcend the obvious. It’s important to know, for instance, that low-wage workers, while often taking pride in their jobs, are routinely subjected to an authoritarian regime that ranges from demeaning drug tests to bans on ‘‘gossip’’ with other employees. The result, Ehrenreich argues, is ‘‘not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality.’’ And our most appropriate response, as members of the well-meaning middle-class? Not guilt, she tells us, but shame, for relying on the underpaid labor of others—a habit the living-wage movement is now trying to help us break. Source: Julia M Klein, ‘‘Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. (Review),’’ in American Prospect, Vol. 12, No. 13, July 30, 2001, p. 43.

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Kya Ogyn

Jane Yager

In the following essay, Ogyn offers some possible insight into the author’s intent in writing this book.

In the following essay, Yager attempts to find the Ehrenreich’s message and intended audience in Nickled and Dimed.

I think the actual purpose of Ehrenreich’s experiment becomes clear when identifying the intended audience. What we have is a successful, affluent writer addressing members of her own class. Her intent is to tell people who have never experienced it something of what it is like to work at jobs that do not pay enough to live on. Even more importantly, her intent is to say that her experience ‘‘is the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy’s lower depths.’’ Nickel and Dimed is a needed work—engaging, well-researched and written in a directly personal style. Ehrenreich succeeds beautifully in conveying to her middle-class audience that she is just like them and that since she could not support herself, never mind a family, on the jobs available to her, the problem lies in the system of low-paid work, not in the workers. However, beyond my regret that Ehrenreich was perhaps correct in considering her authoritative, middleclass voice necessary to make this point, I have two problems with this book. One is that, although she writes, ‘‘low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright,’’ she comes to the conclusion that Barb, who works for Wal-Mart, is ‘‘meaner and slyer’’ than Barbara the writer, and ‘‘more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I’d hoped.’’ Although poverty can have a brutalizing effect on some people, there are demonstrably grudge-holders among the rich and powerful who are not very smart. My second problem lies with Ehrenreich’s attitudes toward fat people. The book contains numerous disdainful comments and one very disturbing rant—‘‘we live in fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passage from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths.’’ It is unfortunate that a political writer of her caliber has not only not examined fat hatred, but has contributed to it. Source: Kya Ogyn, ‘‘Can You Live On It?’’ in Off Our Backs, Vol. 35, January–February 2005, p. 44.

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Source: Jane Yager, ‘‘Poverty: A National Emergency,’’ in Dollars & Sense, January 2002, p. 42.

SOURCES Early, Steve, ‘‘Prole Like Me,’’ in the Nation, Vol. 272, No. 23, June 11, 2001, p. 52. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Metropolitan Books, 2001. Hays, Sharon, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 8. Klein, Julia, Review of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in the American Prospect, Vol. 12, No. 13, July 30, 2001, p. 43. Ogyn, Kya, ‘‘Can You Live On It?,’’ in Off Our Backs, Vol. 35, Jan-Feb 2005, pp. 44–46. Scott, Joni, Review of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in the Humanist, Vol. 61, No. 5, September-October 2001, p. 40. Sherman, Scott, ‘‘Class Warrior: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Singular Crusade,’’ in Columbia Journalism Review, Vol. 42, No. 4, November-December 2003, pp. 34–42. Yager, Jane, ‘‘Poverty: A National Emergency,’’ in Dollars & Sense, January-February 2002, pp. 42–44.

FURTHER READING Bergdahl, Michael, What I Learned From Sam Walton: How to Compete and Thrive in a Wal-Mart World, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004.

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Though oriented to readers of business advice, this book is highly instructive in seeing Ehrenreich’s story from a different perspective. In business terms, it discusses the success of Wal-Mart and what Bergdahl feels companies should do to compete against them. Featherstone, Liza, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart, Basic Books, 2004. Using the landmark Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. class action suit as her focus, Featherstone examines the Wal-Mart culture and the inequities allegedly perpetuated within the company toward women and others. Hays, Sharon, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform, Oxford University Press, 2003. Combining in-depth arguments with anecdotal stories about actual welfare offices and clients, Hays looks at the impact of welfare reform legislation on women and their families. Newman, Katherine S., No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, Knopf, 1999. Refuting the idea of an unmotivated and lazy lower class, Newman examines in depth the lives of the urban working poor. She interviews workers who describe the specific difficulties faced when work is hampered by outside concerns such as crime, drug abuse, and poor schooling. Shulman, Beth, The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and Their Families, New Press, 2003. Using statistics and personal stories, Shulman looks at the lives of workers in low-paying jobs, examining a wide range of occupations and experiences.

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A Northern Light Jennifer Donnelly grew up on the outskirts of the Adirondacks hearing tales and ballads of the 1906 murder of Grace Brown, a pregnant nineteen-year-old drowned by her lover in Big Moose Lake. Donnelly’s great-grandmother had been working at a hotel on the lake when the murder took place. Her firsthand account, reinforced by Donnelly’s reading of Theodore Dreiser’s novel concerning the same murder, stirred Donnelly’s curiosity. Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy, renders the couple’s plight as a dark outcome of the American dream gone awry. What captured Donnelly’s imagination, however, was Grace herself and how she could have been any nineteen-year-old girl. Upon reading the transcripts of Chester Gillette’s trial and hearing Grace’s voice through the letters used as evidence, the presence of the young woman haunted Donnelly. She felt a genuine grief which was alleviated through writing Grace’s story and giving it fresh meaning. Out of that need was born the character of Mattie Gokey, the sixteen-year-old hotel employee who witnesses Grace’s body being pulled from the lake the evening after Grace asks her to burn her love letters. In piecing together the story of Grace’s life and death through the letters, Mattie comes to understand and solve many of the problems standing in the way of her own happiness and independence. A Northern Light, published in 2003, transcends genre boundaries and was praised by Courtney Williamson of the

JENNIFER DONNELLY 2003

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Christian Science Monitor for ‘‘unflinching honesty in its portrayal of loss, poverty, racism, and pregnancy.’’ It was an overnight success in both the United States and Great Britain (where it was published under the title A Gathering Light). It has since earned several major awards in young adult fiction, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Carnegie Medal.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Jennifer Donnelly was born in 1963 in Port Chester, New York. She spent some of her childhood in Lewis County, New York, just about an hour from Big Moose Lake, the setting of her novel, A Northern Light. Her paternal grandfather immigrated to upstate New York during the Irish potato famine and struggled to support his family by farming. Because of the harsh land and the short growing season, the family was poor, very much as Donnelly imagines the Gokey family in A Northern Light. In these trying circumstances, the family’s chief means of entertainment was storytelling. Donnelly recalls her great-grandfather reading voraciously on his deathbed because he had never had time to read while working the land. Her mother, orphaned during World War II, often told stories and read books to her daughter. In an interview with Update magazine, Donnelly attributes her love of stories to her upbringing: ‘‘Hearing the older generation sit and talk, you absorb how to do pacing and suspense, and structure, how to hold your listeners rapt, how to deliver a good punch line.’’ Although she did not grow up believing she would be a writer, Donnelly’s adolescent years were full of literary inspiration. In her late teens, she lived in London and spent every available minute in the East End, absorbing the city that would shape her first novel, Tea Rose. In 1986, she graduated from the University of Rochester with degrees in English and European history. Donnelly began writing in her twenties and worked on her first novel for ten years. In the spring of 2001, after a long search for a publisher, the author finally published three of her works in quick succession: a children’s picture book, Humble Pie, (2002); her adult novel, Tea Rose (2003); and A Northern Light (2003), a young adult novel that became an overnight sensation.

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Jennifer Donnelly Ó Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission

As of 2005, Donnelly lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, daughter, and two greyhounds.

PLOT SUMMARY Introduction A Northern Light opens with a crisis. A young guest of the Glenmore Hotel is pulled from Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks after going boating with her lover. The young narrator, Mattie Gokey, a waitress in the hotel, is astonished to discover that the dead woman is Grace Brown, who earlier in the day had given Mattie a bundle of letters to burn. In the bustle of her daily duties, Mattie has forgotten about the letters in her apron pocket. Now she is struck by a mysterious complicity with the dead woman and an uncanny certainty that her own life will be forever changed because of the events that are unfolding. The narrative moves back and forth between two timelines, one tracking Mattie’s efforts to understand the circumstances behind Grace Brown’s death through reading her letters, and one tracing the events in Mattie’s life

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which led to her employment at the Glenmore Hotel. She is trying to find the financial means to attend Barnard College in New York City, where she will break free of her expected role as eldest daughter to a widowed father and fulfill her ambition as a writer. Each chapter is headed by a word-of-the-day that the young writer savors in an effort to deepen both her vocabulary and her understanding of the world.

Chapter 1 Mattie introduces the reader to a day in the life of the Gokey family, and chaos reigns as she and her three younger sisters try to run the household. The central tensions of the novel are touched upon: Mamma’s death from cancer seven months before, followed by the inexplicable disappearance of Mattie’s older brother Lawton; Mattie’s longing to go to Barnard College, where she has been offered a scholarship, challenged by a promise made to her dying mother; Mattie’s desire to join her friends working at the Glenmore Hotel, countered by her father’s disapproval and general denial of her need for further education; and the plight of Emmie Hubbard, a widow with seven children who seems to have gone crazy and can no longer adequately care for her home or children.

Chapters 2–6 Mattie has two best friends, Weaver Smith and Minnie Compeau. Minnie left school at the expected age of fourteen and is married and pregnant when the narrative begins. Weaver is her school companion and word-dueling partner. The first freeborn son in his family, Weaver is headed to college in New York City. Mattie is also experiencing the first flush of romance as she is pursued by the handsome Royal Loomis, a man she can hardly believe is interested in her. Mattie’s tendency to romanticize young love is evident when she flashes forward to the death of Grace Brown and envisions the young woman as the victim of a kind of Romeo-and-Juliet tragedy—the two lovers dead at the bottom of Big Moose Lake. When Mr. Eckler’s floating grocery store/lending library arrives in Eagle Bay, he alerts Mattie to the availability of a new book, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Mattie discovers a beautiful composition book for sale and impulsively spends most of the money she has earned picking fiddlehead ferns on the extravagant purchase, even though she knows her father will punish

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her for doing so. She speculates that characters in books cannot change their fates, but wonders if real people may be able to.

Chapters 7–10 Pa discovers that Mattie has spent the money she owes him on the expensive composition book. Without Lawton around for heavy chores, the farm is not producing as it once did and money is tight. Pa hits Mattie to punish her for wasting family resources. Mattie gets an acceptance letter from Barnard College, but wonders how she will pay for it. While housecleaning for her wealthy Aunt Josie, Mattie gathers the courage to ask her for the financial help she needs to get to college. Aunt Josie tells her she is as selfish as her brother for wanting to abandon her family; she need only read the Bible to understand God’s intentions for her. Mattie also shares her plans to go to college with Royal, who claims he does not understand why she would want to do such a thing. He kisses her, and her identity and needs become even more conflicted. Weaver struggles with his identity when a white man assumes he is a porter at the rail station just because he is black. Minnie gives birth to a boy and girl, and Mattie helps with the delivery. At the Glenmore, Mattie draws parallels between her promise to burn Grace Brown’s letters and the promise she made to her dying mother to stay at home to raise her sisters. She wonders how binding such promises should be.

Chapters 11–13 Pa’s brother Uncle Fifty shows up with a bundle of cash from a lumberjacking expedition. Weaver and Mattie take their exit exams to graduate from high school and Uncle Fifty is the first person besides Miss Wilcox, their teacher, to show enthusiasm for Mattie’s plans to go to Barnard. He promises to give her the thirty dollars she needs to make the trip and get settled. He gives her a fountain pen and buys the other Gokey children lavish gifts. Miss Wilcox approaches Mattie’s father about her successful exams and the importance of sending her to college. Pa blames Miss Wilcox for Mattie’s inappropriate ambition, and tells Mattie that if she leaves the family to go to Barnard she will never be welcome back in his home. Mr. Eckler announces that Uncle Fifty has skipped town. Mattie realizes that her Pa is the only person in her life she can trust, and she is ashamed for wanting to leave him. Reading Grace Brown’s

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letters, Mattie realizes Grace’s beau Carl Graham—who took Grace out boating and has not been seen since—is really a man named Chester Gillette. She conveys this knowledge to the hotel manager, Mr. Morrison. A wire from Albany confirms that no such man as Carl Graham exists.

Chapters 14–16 Aunt Josie intercepts a letter from the postmistress that the tax collector, Arn Satterlee, has written to Emmie Hubbard. Mattie overhears her aunt gossiping about Emmie’s failure to pay back taxes and the imminent auction of her land. Mattie goes boating with Royal and realizes they are officially dating. She loves being in his arms. Others have caught onto their courtship and tease and envy Mattie. She is proud to be seen as Royal’s girlfriend. Miss Wilcox invites Mattie to her home and offers her books, including one by a feminist poet named Emily Baxter, whom Mattie has heard is indecent. Mattie discovers the poems merely celebrate a woman’s independence; she does not understand why they are so controversial. As she continues to read Grace Brown’s letters, she realizes Grace was pregnant.

Chapters 17–19 Mattie is now working for Miss Wilcox on Saturdays, organizing her books. She arrives one day to discover her teacher in a heated argument with a man. Miss Wilcox confesses the man is her husband, Teddy, whom she has left and who is trying to coerce her into returning to him. She also admits she is the scandalous poet Mattie has been reading—Emily Baxter. Mattie longs to tell someone about Miss Wilcox’s true identity but remains loyal to her teacher. Royal makes sexual advances toward Mattie and promises her that his intentions are honorable, that he will marry her and he wants to buy her a ring. Mattie is concerned because Royal has never told her that he loves her; still, the pull toward marriage is strong. Mattie learns from Tommy Hubbard that his mother Emmie is upset because Arn Satterlee has set the date to auction her home. When Mattie goes to Emmie’s house to console her, she discovers Emmie being sexually violated by Royal’s father, Frank Loomis. She speculates that three of Emmie’s children must have been fathered by Frank Loomis. Reading Grace Brown’s letters, Mattie realizes Chester Gillette

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must have brought Grace to the Glenmore with the intention of murdering her.

Chapters 20–22 When Pleasant the mule dies, Mattie finally gets her father’s permission to work at the Glenmore Hotel in order to earn money for a new mule. Mattie is trained as a waitress and becomes acquainted with the hotel’s employees and guests. Mr. Maxwell, a guest at the hotel who sits at table six in the dining room, exposes himself to Mattie and later leaves her a dollar tip. She is too embarrassed to talk about what has happened, but the other waitresses have likewise been harassed by him. Henry, a German under chef, leaves jars of milk on the stove and they explode. It comes to light that Henry has lied about his identity and that he was never a chef in a fine European restaurant. He is demoted to menial labor. Weaver is beaten up by three trappers after he stands up to them for calling him a nigger. The world beyond home seems dangerous to Mattie and she decides her place is in Royal Loomis’s arms.

Chapters 23–26 Reading Emily Dickinson, Mattie realizes all of the authors she admires are spinsters and wonders if marriage is incompatible with being a writer. She begins to mistrust her need for Royal Loomis and is further challenged by a visit to Minnie, who is struggling with her infant twins. Minnie’s inability to cope is evident in the squalor of her home, and she is depressed and defensive, claiming to hate her own babies. When the trappers who beat Weaver are caught and brought to justice, Weaver’s self-esteem is restored, and Mattie imagines the lawyer he will someday become. Mattie’s entire family becomes violently ill with grippe and she must leave the hotel for a week to care for them. The cows are also ill from neglect and two die of infections. Royal and his mother come to Mattie’s assistance and she feels so obligated to them that marriage again looms as her salvation. She accepts Royal’s proposal and the ring he has chosen. She later compares her love for Royal to Grace Brown’s misguided love for Chester Gillette.

Chapters 27–30 Miss Wilcox/Emily Baxter sends Mattie a copy of her new book, Threnody, and a note with a five dollar bill inside. Her husband has

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followed through with his threat to expose her identity and she has lost her job at the school. She plans to flee to Paris before he arrives to take her back home. Mattie and Weaver borrow a horse so that Mattie can see her teacher before she leaves. She tells Miss Wilcox that she is not going to Barnard but intends to marry Royal instead, and Miss Wilcox is visibly disappointed. Weaver tells Mattie she may as well marry a horse. At the Fourth of July picnic, Mattie observes wives hanging on the arms of their husbands and witnesses an argument between Royal and his old girlfriend Martha Miller. Martha confronts Mattie with her belief that Royal is marrying Mattie because he wants her father’s property, adjacent to the Loomis property. Mattie also learns that Royal was the one to inform Arn Satterlee of Emmie Hubbard’s failure to pay back taxes, because he wants Emmie’s property for himself. Mattie begins to acknowledge that Royal does not really love her—he has never said the actual words. Weaver confronts Mattie about her need to face the truth concerning her situation with Royal. Mattie has nightmares about Grace Brown.

Chapters 31–33 Mattie and her friends at the Glenmore plot revenge on Mr. Maxwell for his sexual harassment of them. One of the girls lures him to the lake, and the others trip him with a rope so that he falls into a pile of dog excrement, after which the humiliated Mr. Maxwell retreats into his room. Pa brings news that Weaver’s mother’s house has burned down. The trappers who beat up Weaver got out of jail and set the fire, and also broke Mrs. Smith’s arm and stole Weaver’s college money. Emmie Hubbard invites Mrs. Smith to stay with her so she can nurture her friend back to health. Weaver declares his intention to forgo college so he can help his mother rebuild her life. Mattie mourns the death of the lawyer Weaver could have become, and begins to see the death of potential as a literal kind of death, such as what Grace Brown has suffered. Reading Grace Brown’s last letter, Mattie realizes she cannot erase Grace Brown’s voice from history. Her responsibility to the truth and to justice exceed her responsibility to Grace Brown and the promise to burn the letters.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

A Northern Light was released in an unabridged version on audiocassette by Listening Library in March 2003. It is narrated by Hope Davis.

Josef Von Sternberg’s 1931 film An American Tragedy is an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel about the murder of Grace Brown. It stars Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sydney.

Softening the naturalistic aspects of the earlier film based on Dreiser’s novel, George Steven’s A Place in the Sun (1951) won six Academy Awards for its stunning characterizations of Grace Brown (Shelley Winters) and Chester Gillette (Montgomery Cliff). The film also features Elizabeth Taylor as the woman Chester chose over Grace. ‘‘The Ballad of Grace Brown and Chester Gillette’’ is a folk ballad based on the murder. The lyrics for the ballad can be found in Harold W. Thompson’s Body, Boots and Britches, published by Syracuse University Press, 1939, 1967.

Emmie Hubbard is a changed woman now that she has found a companion in Mrs. Smith.

The arrangement is good for both women and hints at the possibility of a new kind of happy ending that is not a lie or contrivance. Other happy endings result from the two women helping each other. Tommy Hubbard can now help Mattie’s Pa with the farm and Weaver can go to Columbia University assured that his mother will be taken care of. Mattie has earned enough money working for both Miss Wilcox and the hotel to cover her travel expenses to New York and help others secure their futures. Before she departs for New York, Mattie leaves Grace Brown’s letters on Mr. Morrison’s desk, along with three letters of her own: one with money for Pa to pay for the new mule, one to Weaver’s mother with money for Emmie Hubbard’s back taxes, and one to Royal Loomis with the engagement ring inside. She bids farewell to the corpse

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of Grace Brown and gives Weaver the money he needs to get to New York, encouraging him to leave immediately while their mutual resolve is strong. She boards the train for her future in New York City.

CHARACTERS Aunt Josie Aber Aunt Josie, Mattie’s mother’s sister, is married to a sawmill owner, Uncle Vernon, and is therefore wealthy enough to help Mattie with her travel expenses to Barnard. The aunt, however, is a house-proud and frivolous gossip, who spends her money on expensive figurines and discourages Mattie from reading any book other than the Bible. When Mattie asks her aunt for financial help, Josie belittles her for being ‘‘on a high horse.’’

Cook Cook is what everyone who works at the Glenmore Hotel calls Mrs. Hennessey. She is chief cook and supervises Mattie and her fellow employees who work in the dining room. A warm, maternal figure, Cook voices her concern over the girls’ flippant ways with men and directs them to heed the fate of Grace Brown as they negotiate their romantic relationships.

Charlie Eckler

Emily Baxter See Miss Emily Wilcox

Belinda Becker Belinda is the fiancee´ of Dan Loomis, Royal Loomis’s older brother. She represents for Mattie the qualities that good wives are supposed to have: a certain giggly, glib social grace, and not much intelligence.

Grace Brown The character of Grace Brown is based on an actual woman of the same name who was murdered by Chester Gillette in 1906 on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. The author weaves into her fictional narrative excerpts from actual letters Grace wrote to Chester upon learning that she was pregnant with his child. The circumstances of Grace Brown’s death are accurately portrayed in the novel and serve as a cautionary tale for the fictional Mattie Gokey, who is on the brink of her first romantic relationship. Grace entrusts her letters to Mattie the morning before her disappearance and death, asking her to burn them.

Minnie Compeau Minnie is Mattie’s best girlfriend who is already married and pregnant when the novel opens. When Mattie assists in the birth of Minnie’s twins, and later watches her friend struggle with nursing and housekeeping, she

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recognizes that literature lies about the realities of childbirth and motherhood. Mattie is challenged on many levels by her friend’s ordeal. Foremost is her recognition of how difficult, if not impossible, combining motherhood with a career as a writer will be; secondly, she sees that it is crucial for writers to tell even harsh truths about the daily realities they confront. Through Minnie, Mattie realizes that marriage to Royal may not provide the happiness she seeks.

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Mr. Eckler is the captain of the pickle boat that serves the community as floating grocery store and lending library. He provides Mattie with novels and fresh composition books for her writing.

Uncle Fifty Uncle Fifty is Pa’s younger, reckless brother and Mattie’s uncle, who shows up drunk and passes out face down in the manure pile after an absence of several years. He encourages Mattie in her pursuit of college, giving her generous gifts and promising monetary help in getting to Barnard College. He is, however, an irresponsible man on the run because of some undisclosed crime. He skips town before he can deliver on his promise to Mattie.

Francois Pierre Gauthier See Uncle Fifty

Chester Gillette The character of Chester Gillette is based on the historical figure who killed Grace Brown. Chester was the poor nephew of the well-to-do owner of the Gillette Skirt Company in Cortland, New York, where Grace Brown was employed as a pattern cutter. Grace was one of many women whom the handsome young man courted, and her pregnancy was a dire inconvenience to both his social climbing and his need to make a financially prosperous future. Grace

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petitioned and threatened him with letters, hoping that her lover would take heart and save her from a life of disgrace as an unwed mother. Under the alias of Carl Graham, he lured Grace to the Glenmore Hotel, took her out in a rowboat and drowned her. He was convicted of murder in the first degree and executed in Auburn Prison on March 30, 1908.

Abby Gokey Abby is Mattie’s 14-year-old sister, the peacemaker in the Gokey family. Quiet and hardworking, she encourages Mattie to pursue her dream of going to college.

Beth Gokey Beth is Mattie’s five-year-old sister, the youngest of the Gokey siblings.

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between the apparent safety of a conventional marriage and the self-fulfillment that she believes attending college and becoming a writer will bring. The death of Grace Brown and Mattie’s intimate involvement with Grace through her letters inspire Mattie to live out the potential that the dead woman was denied. She discovers a means toward self-fulfillment and a way to care for the families she must leave behind.

Carl Graham Carl Graham is the false identity that Chester Gillette assumes when he checks into the Glenmore Hotel to murder Grace Brown. See Chester Gillette

Hamlet

Ellen Gokey See Mamma

Lawton Gokey Lawton is Mattie’s older brother who abandons the family soon after their mother’s death. Lawton’s disappearance is a compelling mystery for Mattie, as well as a hardship that makes it more difficult for her to consider leaving her widowed father alone to tend the farm. In the course of the novel, she comes to understand why her brother renounced the difficulties of farm life. This understanding helps Mattie arrive at her own decision to leave.

Hamlet is the Great Dane Mattie is hired to feed and walk everyday at the Glenmore Hotel. The dog becomes instrumental in her and her friends’ plan to discourage Mr. Maxwell’s sexual harassment of the Glenmore waitresses.

Mrs. Hennessey See Cook

Henry Henry, or Heinrich, is the under chef in the kitchen at the Glenmore Hotel.

Lou Gokey

Emmie Hubbard

Lou is Mattie’s 11-year-old tomboy sister. Mattie worries Lou will get into trouble or run away like Lawton. Lou is very close to Pa until he becomes distant and withdrawn after Mamma’s death.

Mattie is the sixteen-year-old narrator and principal character of A Northern Light. Academically talented and ambitious, she finds herself at a crossroads when she is offered the opportunity to marry the handsome and industrious Royal Loomis. Mattie must choose

Emmie Hubbard is a mother of seven children who, because she cannot pay back taxes on the house she lives in, is at risk of losing her home in a public auction. She is thought by many to be crazy. Mattie discovers that Emmie is a victim of sexual abuse by her future father-in-law, Frank Loomis, and that Royal, Mattie’s own future husband, has petitioned for the lien on Emmie’s home so that he might buy her property at little cost. Royal’s lack of compassion for Emmie Hubbard’s struggle is a factor in Mattie’s decision not to marry him. Mattie raises money to pay Emmie’s back taxes for her, thereby saving Emmie’s household. Emmie can then provide a home for Weaver Smith’s mother after their family shack burns down, enabling Emmie and Mrs. Smith to live in an atmosphere of mutual support and safety while freeing Weaver to leave home for college.

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Lousia Gokey See Lou Gokey

Mathilda Gokey See Mattie Gokey

Mattie Gokey

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Tommy Hubbard

Mr. Maxwell

Tommy is Emmie Hubbard’s eldest son and a regular guest at the Gokey dinner table. He is ultimately hired to help Pa with the farm, making it easier for Mattie to leave the family.

Mr. Maxwell is a pervert who sits alone at table six in the Glenmore Hotel dining room, exposing himself to young waitresses and tricking them into leaning over so he can peer at their breasts. The women seek revenge by luring him into a trap that causes him to fall into dog feces.

Frank Loomis Frank Loomis is Royal’s father. He owns ninety acres of property adjacent to the Gokey farm. Mattie stumbles upon him violating Emmie Hubbard in her kitchen, and realizes he is the father of three of her seven children. The startling encounter deepens her recognition that no one is precisely who he or she seems to be.

Royal Loomis Royal Loomis is Mattie’s handsome but dull-witted suitor. He has no understanding of Mattie’s desire to go to college, nor can he understand the value of reading. He cannot appreciate Mattie for herself, but only for what he hopes she will become as a wife, and what she will provide as a dowry—her father’s property. As the second son in his father’s household, he is not entitled to his father’s property and believes he must find a wife of means. He has snubbed the Reverend Miller’s daughter Martha for Mattie, but he is still emotionally tied to his former love. His greed is also behind his alerting Arn Satterlee about Emmie Hubbard’s inability to pay back taxes on her property, with hopes that he will be able to buy the land at public auction and ensure a solid foundation for his future.

Mamma Ellen Gokey, Mattie’s mother, dies seven months before the story begins, exacting a promise from Mattie that she will stay on the farm to help her father and raise her younger sisters. Mamma haunts the story. The memory of Mamma’s competence reinforces Mattie’s recognition of her lack of skill in domestic matters. She must also figure out the extent to which her promise to her mother is binding. Mamma was the one member of the family to encourage Mattie’s writing and reading, though the books she passed on to Mattie were traditional Victorian fare that reinforced domestic values. Through the promise Mattie makes to Grace Brown soon before her death—to burn her letters—Mattie learns even a deathbed promise can be circumstantial.

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Martha Miller Martha Miller is the daughter of the local Reverend, a man known to live beyond his financial resources. She was Royal Loomis’s girlfriend before his attentions shifted to Mattie. The couple was, in all likelihood, a more compatible match than Royal and Mattie are, but her lack of a dowry deterred Royal from seeking marriage with her.

Pa Michael Gokey, Mattie’s father, is a bereaved widower, surly and distant after the death of his wife and subsequent flight of his only son, Lawton. He manages his farm with great difficulty and his profits are waning. He is especially needful of his eldest daughter and burdens her with responsibility for the family. His conventional views of a woman’s place and his disregard for Mattie’s talents and ambitions are obstacles to her achieving her dreams.

Miss Parrish Miss Parrish is Miss Wilcox’s predecessor at the Inlet Common School. She represents the Victorian view that literature should uplift the heart and turn the mind toward cheerful and inspiring topics. She discourages Mattie’s writing, claiming that her stories are morbid and dispiriting.

Arn Satterlee Arn Satterlee is the tax collector who sends Emmie Hubbard two letters warning that her house will be sold at public auction if she does not pay her back taxes.

Aleeta Smith Aleeta Smith is Weaver Smith’s mother, who takes great pride in her academically talented and ambitious son. She has worked hard as a laundress and cook for employees of the railroad in order to save money to send Weaver to college. When three trappers burn down her house, break her arm, and rob her of her savings, she moves into Emmie Hubbard’s

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home and the two women create a happy home for themselves and Emmie’s seven children.

Weaver Smith Weaver Smith is Mattie Gokey’s best friend and school companion. A bright, resourceful and ambitious young man, Weaver has been offered a scholarship to Columbia University, where he plans to study law. The first freeborn child in a family of former slaves, Weaver has the support of his hardworking mother; but racism, a fire that destroys his mother’s home, and the theft of his college funds threaten to prevent him from living his dream. Mattie and Weaver’s friendship enable them both to tap into the depths of their potential and find paths toward fulfillment.

Emily Wilcox Miss Wilcox is the teacher at the Inlet Common School. She has recognized Mattie’s gifts as a writer and the academic talents of both Mattie and Weaver. She is the driving force behind their staying in school long enough to earn high school diplomas and scholarships to Barnard College and Columbia University. A modern woman of some means, Miss Wilcox drives around in a fancy car smoking cigarettes, her red hair flaming in the breeze. Over the course of the novel, she reveals herself to be a renegade wife and a poet with a scandalous reputation, disparaged in magazines for her indecency. She is forced to flee to Paris when she loses her job, after her husband exposes her identity to the school in an effort to drive her back to dependency upon him.

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years old, like Mattie’s friend Minnie Compeau. Mattie’s flirtation with Royal Loomis, the pull of her emerging sexuality, and the social expectation that her life will progress in a pattern similar to Minnie’s and Belinda’s make up the foundation of Mattie’s emotional struggle. It is not surprising that Mattie suffers such deep ambivalence after she is offered a scholarship to Barnard. She longs to go to college, be a writer, and live a life of the mind. The scholarship is a dream come true. At the same time, her emerging womanhood calls for definition and reliable markers that will help her make sense of her emotional conflicts. The conventional literature for women is of no help. She cannot find her story in the stories society believes are suitable for women. Miss Wilcox and Weaver Smith certainly support and encourage Mattie, but they are also struggling to find their ways. Mattie must therefore develop a heightened consciousness and savvy that will help her navigate her passage to adulthood alone.

Duty and Responsibility

Coming-of-age novels map the turning points in an individual’s transition from child to adult, and are often characterized by specific rites of passage enacted universally by children of a certain age within a given culture. At the turn of the century, for a woman of Mattie Gokey’s class and region, the rite was most often courtship and marriage. In rural America, where households full of children were valued for the labor they could provide the farm, it was not unusual for a woman to marry and bear children at fourteen or fifteen

Much of women’s behavior has traditionally been based on the powerful dictates of duty and responsibility toward father, husband, children and home. In the farming culture of upstate New York, the effort to yield a harvest from harsh land during a short growing season contributed to a heightened sense that one’s very survival was dependent on meeting daily responsibilities. One need only imagine the Gokey farm when Mattie returns to it from the Glenmore Hotel after her father and sisters fall sick to grasp how crucial it was for people of that time and place to stay on top of daily chores. After only two days of neglecting the milking, the cows get sick from infection and the Gokeys lose two of them, as well as substantial income from milk and future calves. Mattie’s older brother has already abandoned the family, and the lack of a young man on the property to help clear land and otherwise manage the daily work is truly a hardship. The daily progress of life seems crucially dependent on individuals accepting their lots in life and giving their utmost to the immediate needs of the family. With this awareness, reinforced by the promise she has made to her dying mother, Mattie is hindered in believing she has any right whatsoever to live an independent life and follow a dream. Her sense of calling and responsibility to a higher good must be powerful indeed to propel her past this impasse.

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THEMES Coming of Age

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Appearance versus Reality ‘‘Things are never as they seem,’’ Mattie Gokey acknowledges at the crucial moment she learns she will indeed get her father’s permission to work at the Glenmore Hotel. The insight comes after a long series of rude awakenings. She has recently learned that her beloved teacher, Miss Wilcox, is actually a renegade wife hiding behind an incognito identity. She is actually the scandalous poet Emily Baxter, a supposedly indecent woman. Mattie has also walked in on her boyfriend’s father having sex with a woman thought to be crazy. Mattie had always believed Frank Loomis visited the woman to be kind and helpful; now she recognizes he must have fathered three of her children. In the course of the novel, many of the characters will reveal that they are not at all who or what they had once appeared to be to the naive, self-preoccupied young Mattie. Through Mattie’s efforts to get below the surface of understanding the death of Grace Brown, she begins to penetrate the hidden lives of those around her and to understand the rich stories each individual is living. She further recognizes that because things are not as they seem, the possibilities of life are even richer than she had once imagined.

Marriage and Courtship In trying to understand how to behave in her courtship with Royal, Mattie turns to her aunt’s copies of Peterson Magazine and finds the traditional illustration of what it means to be married: a man should be the center of a woman’s universe, he should be her purpose, and her every thought should revolve around him. In the course of Mattie’s courtship with Royal, however, she finds herself chafing against her need to be recognized and understood as a separate person. She loves books but Royal does not understand her love of books, and therefore does not understand her. She is hopeful when he delivers a package to her for her birthday that must be a book, but the gift proves to be a cookbook; further training for how to be a good wife. Mattie’s conflict between her needs and the expectations of marriage permeate the story as she examines the marriages in her immediate community and reminisces on her dead mother’s difficult life with her father. The problem of marrying for love (as Grace Brown longed to do) versus marrying for social convenience or advantage (as Royal aspires to do) seems less perplexing to her than the mystery of why

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Pregnancy among unmarried women is not as stigmatized in contemporary culture as it was in the early twentieth century, when Grace Brown found herself so desperately alone. However, teenage pregnancy and teen sexuality are still complicated and controversial social issues. In a group, discuss how the emotional issues surrounding teen pregnancy have or have not changed in the past century. Consider additionally attitudes toward sexuality, birth control, abortion, and abstinence initiatives.

As a voracious reader, Mattie is heavily influenced by the books she reads, and none makes a bigger impact on her than Emily Baxter’s poetry book, Threnody. In a two-page essay, write about a book that has had a big impact on your life. What about the book that inspired you, and what did it inspire you to do? Use specific examples from the book and from your life. Word duels are a creative aspect of Mattie’s relationship with Weaver. Make a list of the challenging vocabulary words that head each chapter in the novel, and see how many synonyms you can find for each word. Challenge a partner to a duel with synonyms from your list until you exhaust the possibilities. Also, try using each word from your list in a sentence.

Mattie is saddened by the recognition that characters in novels cannot change their fates. Is there a character in A Northern Light whose fate you would like to change? Choose a character other than Mattie, and rewrite the script of what happens to him or her in a two-page essay. Discuss how the change might have impacted Mattie’s life and the general outcome of the novel.

women marry at all if, in either scenario, they will inevitably wind up losing themselves. She recognizes none of the women she hopes to

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emulate or the writers she admires within the structure of marriage. She has never known any woman capable of being both a wife and a writer; or a wife and a happy woman. Such insights are crucial factors in her finding the resolve to strike out for New York.

STYLE Voice In her author’s note, Jennifer Donnelly states that the impetus for her novel was the voice of Grace Brown as it reached her through her letters—the same voice that at Chester Gillette’s murder trial moved people to tears. Donnelly used the transcripts from the trial in her research and included Grace’s actual letters in her narrative, thereby bringing Grace’s voice to the readers of the novel. When Miss Wilcox tells the young Mattie that voice is not just the sound which comes from one’s throat but feelings which come from one’s words, she touches on a quality essential to the impact of the novel. The voice of Mattie Gokey is direct, intimate, and searching, a counterpoint to the often desperately beseeching and plaintive voice of Grace Brown. In addition to the powerful voices of the two women whose stories are central to the novel, there are the voices of the many characters who populate Mattie’s world. Donnelly gives even minor characters full embodiment and memorable presence through the skillful use of dialogue.

Double Narrative Critics have marveled at the grace with which Donnelly integrates the two narrative timelines in the novel, oscillating gracefully between Mattie’s all-night vigil with the corpse of Grace Brown and the period leading up to her gaining permission from her father to work at the Glenmore Hotel. Ultimately, the two narratives merge at precisely the moment Mattie when delivers Grace’s letters to the world and claims her own life. Furthermore, the chapters are structured around the obscure vocabulary words that Mattie explores in an effort to understand their meanings. Each word serves as a pivotal concept, linking images and content from past and present to give unity to chapters that often jump around in time.

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Cross-genre Donnelly’s novel transcends most genre boundaries. It is historical fiction, coming-ofage story, romance, thriller, mystery, and journalistic account of an actual crime. The book does not fit cleanly into audience categories. Though Donnelly targeted adolescent girls as her audience, the universal themes have made the story popular for both young adult and adult readers. In Great Britain, where no such category as young adult fiction exists, the novel is considered crossover fiction.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Racial Oppression Weaver Smith is identified as the first freeborn son in a family of former slaves from Mississippi. His mother is keenly determined to help her son get an education so he can succeed in the white man’s world, but as Weaver tells Mattie, ‘‘Freedom promises more than it delivers.’’ His ambition to become a lawyer is challenged by a culture that still sees him as a nigger or a porter on a train, and by the rage that threatens to destroy him. At the turn of the twenty-first century, resolving the power struggle and healing the rage rooted in generations of victimization are prime issues in racial peacemaking initiatives. Affirmative action and other programs to help empower the marginalized in the United States are also controversial strategies for rectifying social imbalance. Donnelly’s novel brings social issues concerning race down to an intimate scale through her handling of the characters of Weaver and Mrs. Smith

Women’s Issues Through the poet Emily Baxter, Donnelly offers a glimpse into some key themes of early and contemporary feminism: the choice of celibacy over marriage, the choice of same sex households, the feminization of God, and a woman’s general right to define and create her own culture. The novel also examines universal problems of womanhood that have not changed much in the past century, most notably, the sexual double standard and a woman’s conflict between the need for self-fulfillment and the compelling biological need to reproduce and nurture offspring. The voice of Grace Brown that reaches across a century to contemporary

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readers is far from quaint and old-fashioned. Grace and Mattie both speak to the timeless issue of a woman’s struggle for integrity.

The Nontraditional Family Debate persists in American culture as to what constitutes a family. Conservatives contend that the traditional family is in crisis because moral values have been undermined. They argue that the way to save society is to save its basic unit through a religious agenda and through social programs and tax laws that will reinforce the bonds of conventional family life. Liberals argue that the breakdown in the family is a result of cultural forces much larger than the intent of individuals, and that healing human relationships in general is key to building a healthier society. They assert that families can be found and created anywhere love nourishes human bonds. Donnelly subtly evokes a vision of the latter possibility through the unconventional living arrangements that begin to crop up where need and human caring meet without prejudice, most notably in the home of Emmie Hubbard and Aleeta Smith.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW After ten years of struggle, waking up at four or five in the morning to write before heading to her day job, Jennifer Donnelly finally found success in 2001. Three books, each targeting entirely different audiences, were accepted for publication within months of each other. The first was a picture book for young children entitled Humble Pie. Soon after, Donnelly’s historical romance novel Tea Rose, which had been making the rounds for years, sold as well. If that were not accomplishment enough for a writer accustomed to rejections, her third success was most decidedly the charm. After reading only thirty pages and an outline at an auction, Harcourt Brace outbid three other presses for A Northern Light. Editors at Harcourt compared the book to beloved novels Drowning Ruth and Little Women. Early reviews of the novel were unanimously enthusiastic. Courtney Williamson of the Christian Science Monitor deemed the novel the ‘‘quintessential coming of age story. . . . unflinching in its portrayal of loss, poverty, racism, and pregnancy.’’ Sandy MacDonald of the New York

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Times emphasized the ‘‘distinctive characters who ring rich and true,’’ as well as the author’s capacity to ground the story ‘‘in often horrific realities of rural life a century ago.’’ Others extol the originality of voice, the multi-layered narrative structure, and the novel’s transcendence of genre. Virtually all reviewers found the first person narrator, Mattie, the most appealing factor of all. Mattie strives to see clearly and act well, Dierdre Baker of the Toronto Star pointed out, citing also her earthly vigor, honesty, and humor as qualities that endear her to readers (quoted on Jennifer Donnelly’s website). We share her desires, if not her unique challenges, on every page, writes Williamson. British audiences were as enthralled as their American counterparts with the novel. Within weeks of the initial sale to Harcourt Brace, Donnelly’s agent took the novel’s outline to London, where it was purchased by Bloomsbury Press and published under the title A Gathering Light. According to the Review page of Jennifer Donnelly’s website, the Times (London) regarded the book as one of the year’s best young adult novels. Bloomsbury Magazine notes that Dinah Hall of the Sunday Telegraph credited Donnelly with capturing period and place with almost supernatural skill. By the fall of 2003, the novel was shortlisted for nearly every book award in the young adult category. It won Best Book of the Year from the School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly annual selections. Booklist, Book Sense, the Junior Library, and countless other judges of young adult fiction included it among their annual ten best. The fervor had not waned in 2004, when the novel was honored with a Michael J. Prinz award, Borders Original Voices Award, and the L.A. Times Book Prize. Finally, it was awarded the 2003 Carnegie Medal, the most prestigious British award for children’s literature. Beil notes in her interview with Donnelly that, though the author claims to have written A Northern Light for girls Mattie’s age to empower them to make their own choices, the novel has been considered a crossover success, appealing to adults as well as to the audience for which it was intended. Rights to the novel have been sold in Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Serbia.

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Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, a 1951 film based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which inspired Donnelly in the writing of A Northern Light Paramount/The Kobal Collection

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CRITICISM Cynthia Clough Cynthia Clough has a Ph.D. in English, specializing in the novel, from Florida State University. In this essay, Clough explores Mattie Gokey’s need—and her hesitance—to find the unique story and narrative of her own life. Early in A Northern Light, Mattie Gokey expresses pity for characters in novels who cannot break out of their stories and change their fates. She fears that the same can also happen to people in life, and that she herself is stuck in a relentless story that no amount of ambition, hope, or courage can help her escape. Her mother will haunt her all her life if she breaks the promise she made at her mother’s deathbed to help raise her sisters. Pa needs her to run the house; the farm is losing profits since older brother Lawton ran away; who else can tend the cooking, the laundering, and other chores? And if her binding commitments to home and family will not prevent her from accepting a scholarship to Barnard College, maybe the flush of first love will be the force that will carry her straight to marriage with Royal Loomis, who is ready to settle down and start a farm of his own. Several of Mattie’s friends have already succumbed to marriage. It’s her turn; and it’s her time, although she never had imagined that such a handsome and capable man would ask for her hand. What makes the novel such a compelling read is how convincingly Jennifer Donnelly renders the conflicts in Mattie’s emotional life as she navigates her way toward her decision to go to college. The reader may see it as the only viable choice for the young woman; we may root for her to cast off her shackles and board the train for the big city, but still the pull of the alternative remains disturbingly real. According to an article in The Bookseller, the author expressed that her intention was to sustain the plausibility of both choices as viable for Mattie; as a modern woman writing from another era, she had felt some regret that her career had forced her to postpone marriage and family for so long. The novel is so universally appealing because of the timelessness of the central dilemma. But the tension is not merely a matter of choosing between this and that alternative in life. It speaks to the difficulty people have in breaking out of the cultural narratives imposed on their lives, the

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THE NOVEL IS SO UNIVERSALLY APPEALING BECAUSE OF THE TIMELESSNESS OF THE CENTRAL DILEMMA. BUT THE TENSION IS NOT MERELY A MATTER OF CHOOSING BETWEEN THIS AND THAT ALTERNATIVE IN LIFE. IT SPEAKS TO THE DIFFICULTY PEOPLE HAVE IN BREAKING OUT OF THE CULTURAL NARRATIVES IMPOSED ON THEIR LIVES.’’

myths and stories that define their identities and map out for them the rites of progress. For Mattie, the narratives that are both shaping and impeding her progress come from several sources, including her literary inheritance, her mother’s history, the alternative choices Miss Wilcox is urging her to explore, and the story of Grace Brown, which ultimately has the power to liberate her. Mattie’s foundations as a reader come from the books her mother and aunt had to offer, namely the Waverly novels and Peterson’s Magazines that still fill the shelves of the Gokey household. Mattie’s mother was an avid reader, and was in fact described as eloping with Pa carrying a carpetbag filled with books rather than clothes (the same carpetbag, by the way, that Mattie will take when she strikes out for New York). The books that her mother brought to the marriage were the conventional Victorian narratives offering larger-than-life examples of how a woman should live and behave in order to sustain the Victorian ideal. During the era of the Bildungsroman (novel of self development), women did turn to literature to learn how to live, to find example and instruction. The heroic biography was prevalent—lives polished to a shining ideal—and periodicals were saturated with edifying articles on morals and manners. When Mattie consults Aunt Josie’s Peterson’s Magazine for instruction on how to behave around Royal, she, like her mother before her, is capitulating to the era’s prevailing notion that an individual comes to full selfhood only through emulating the ideal, and the ideal is imparted through example and instruction.

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Mattie’s mother elopes with a carpetbag full of books because she knows she will need them to become an adequate, perhaps exemplary, wife and mother. Mattie, however, considers her rather heroic and ambitious, and assumes her mother read for the same reasons she herself does. To some extent Mamma does share Mattie’s native love of language and was responsible for cultivating it in her daughter, she encourages Mattie and is entirely supportive of her earning a high school diploma. Still, it is clear that Mamma is less concerned with Mattie fulfilling her gifts and ambitions than she is anxious to offer her instruction and perhaps the companionship of books that will help her survive her destiny as a farm wife. Mamma must recognize the wild, rebellious side of Mattie as something she, too, once possessed and learned to harness through proper guidance. She would not have felt so compelled to exact the deathbed promise from Mattie had she not sensed the strength of Mattie’s desire to break away and deemed it inappropriate. Mamma knew that staying would be a struggle for Mattie, a struggle that would require the help of edifying literature. Miss Parrish, Mattie’s first teacher at the Inlet Common School, is likewise an arbiter of the Victorian ideal. She tries to instill in Mattie her belief that the proper function of literature is to uplift the spirit and be ‘‘cheerful and inspiring’’; she also tells Mattie that her stories are morbid and dispiriting. Mattie is influenced enough by Miss Parrish’s beliefs to toss her composition book in the woods. Through the intervention of Miss Wilcox, however, she gains strength of mind to rail dramatically against the Victorian aesthetic, claiming that she will never write a story with a happy ending, because real life has no happy endings. The darker, ostensibly more honest, literature that reaches her through Miss Wilcox and even Charlie Eckler may validate Mattie’s rebellion against Victorian sentimentality, thereby pointing the way to fresh possibilities for her writing. At the same time, these books are hardly alternative guide books for navigating the terrain of adolescent longing and intellectual ambition. The novels that Miss Wilcox claims are more dangerous than guns stem from an 1890s movement known as naturalism. Naturalism sprang up when innovations in science made the universe seem suddenly godless and

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mechanistic. Naturalists believed that if there were a god, he would at best be a prime mover who had set the universe in motion and then abandoned it. He certainly did not have an intimate or moral interest in what happened in an individual human life. God had wound up the mechanistic clock of the universe and then left it to wind down in entropy, a slow downhill slide into nothing. There were certainly no happy endings for the naturalists. For the naturalist, the self was a dark unknown. In 1859, Darwin had made his voyage on HMS Beagle and had written The Origin of Species claiming that man was kin to the apes. By the 1880s, Freud’s theories of the unconscious were also becoming well known. Freud claimed that much of human psychological life was determined by unconscious motivations deriving from an inner entity called the Id, which was comprised of all the socially unacceptable impulses the Superego had stuffed down deep inside the mind. For Victorians, so much had been considered unacceptable that popular imagination made a veritable monster of the newly charted unconscious—an animal monster, part product of Darwin, part product of Freud. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) best illustrates the popular conception of the ‘‘other’’ that dwelt within us and determined behavior—the scientist and his evil, animalistic twin. Dualism and the notion that man’s behavior was determined by forces greater than he was became the foundation of much of turn-of-the-century literature. Miss Wilcox offers Mattie novels by Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola, two powerful voices of the naturalist movement. Mattie may be tired of happy endings and contrived examples, and she is certainly grateful to her new teacher for offering her a view of literature contrary to the inhibiting views of Miss Parrish. But as Mattie’s story progresses, it becomes clear that the naturalist point of view does not mesh with her vision of reality either. Such a dark, deterministic view certainly cannot help Mattie learn to trust the impulses within herself. A case in point is the novel Mr. Eckler offers Mattie when she boards his floating grocery/ lending library. Mattie has just come from fiddlehead picking with Weaver and Minnie, and is dismayed over what a lethargic lump her friend Minnie has become in her pregnancy. Mr. Eckler greets her with news of a new book in the library

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that he has set aside for her: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the story of Lily Bart, naturalism’s most tragic spendthrift who rejects suitor after suitor despite an inability to support herself and winds up overdosing on sleeping pills. Mattie is flattered that Mr. Eckler acknowledges her as the reader and writer that she is, which in turn inspires her to buy an expensive composition book. Mattie takes the sixty cents she has earned picking fiddleheads and spends forty-five of them on the fancy composition book. She knows she should not spend the money that her father needs to run the household. The Wharton book she holds in her other hand offers a caveat: take heed the spendthrift Lily Bart. Women who turn down opportunities for marriage wind up incapable of supporting themselves. They are doomed and we, too, may be doomed. The books Miss Wilcox offers Mattie point the finger of doom in another direction, toward women who are victims of their sexuality. For women of the Victorian era, the dark other within was most often the sexual side of her nature. There were legitimate reasons for women to fear their sexuality. Pregnancy for an unwed woman carried irreversible consequences that led to her social and economic downfall more often than not. There was no place in Victorian society for a ‘‘fallen woman.’’ No man would marry her and no employer would hire her. Many novels of the era touched on the social injustice of women ruined by men who seduced and abandoned them. Mattie mentions several such stories she has read, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which Miss Wilcox offers as an example of the new writing. In the character of Tess, Mattie certainly finds a cautionary tale that pertains to her own situation with Royal, whose social ambitions and lusty advances mirror Alec’s in the novel. Tess’s story also foreshadows Grace Brown’s story, as does the Zola novel Miss Wilcox hands her, Thea´rea`se Raquin, which concerns a lover’s triangle wherein Thea´rea`se conspires with her lover to drown her husband in a lake. Miss Wilcox delivers instructing tales to Mattie warning her not to trust her sexuality. Miss Wilcox is indeed Mattie’s champion. She has fought for Mattie by convincing her mother that she must get a high school diploma, and she

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has tried to convince her father to allow her to go to Barnard. Miss Wilcox genuinely believes in Mattie’s gifts. As a mentor she is certainly Mattie’s means to a viable future. At the same time she is in and of herself a mixed message, a fugitive hiding beneath a false identity and a poet regarded as an indecent threat to womanhood. One can certainly understand why Mattie, identifying with Miss Wilcox and her love of books, and even with the poems she discovers and finds hardly indecent, would be reluctant to entrust herself to the world Miss Wilcox urges her to discover. Mattie sorts through the many stories that have been imposed on her experience while she holds her vigil over the corpse of Grace Brown, reading her letters. When Grace is first pulled from the lake, before Mattie has confirmed the identity of Chester Gillette, she imagines a Romeo-and-Juliet tragedy for the young couple. The couple was eloping; their parents disapproved of their marriage; they both drowned and were eternally joined at the bottom of the lake. Later she embellishes the story, burying the lovers side by side in a graveyard, giving it the kind of happy ending she has promised Miss Wilcox she will never write, ‘‘the kind that stitches things up nicely and leaves no ends dangling and makes me feel placid instead of all stirred up.’’ She acknowledges that in order to come up with such a story, she must overlook certain aspects of things that have happened, such as the tearstained face of Grace Brown as she handed Mattie her letters. The corpse of Grace Brown lies in the parlor of the Glenmore Hotel, too palpable, too real to deny. Eventually Mattie does admit one dark piece of evidence after another until she figures out the truth about what happened to the young girl, but she is not content to leave her stuck in a story of bleak determinism. Her impulse is to make Grace’s life count by preserving her voice for history and living to the fullest the life that Grace Brown has been denied. Through facing the death of Grace Brown and the hard truths of Grace’s life, Mattie is able to change her own fate, and live and write a story authentically her own. Ironically, the story does have a happy ending, but it is entirely original and uncontrived. She does not succumb to the rake Royal, but neither does she shuffle out of her circumstances leaving behind those for whom she feels responsible. In saving herself

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1869) features four sisters in New England after the Civil War. The protagonist, Jo March, is a strong, independent person who refuses to give up her dream of becoming a writer just because she is a woman pursuing a traditionally male profession. Anne of Green Gables (1908), by L. M. Montgomery, is a novel about an orphan who goes to live on a farm and gets into mischief because of her wild imagination. This is the first novel in a series of eight that follow Anne as she grows into an independent young woman.

The novel Little House on the Prairie (1935) is part of a series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote about her childhood experiences as a pioneer in the Midwest in the mid1800s. Laura is smart and observant, and like Mattie in A Northern Light, dreams of someday becoming a writer. The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston, follows Janie Crawford’s physical and spiritual journey from rural Florida to the all-black town Eatonville, Florida to a place called the Florida ‘‘muck,’’ and finally, back to Eatonville. Through her three marriages, Janie faces trials that many African American women faced in the early twentieth century, but she remains a self-respecting, strong-willed female protagonist.

she is able to save others in her community as well. Freed from the conventional narratives of how things ought to be, she is able to see fresh possibilities everywhere. She envisions a new social order in which women can establish households with other women, black men can go to Columbia University, and racism does not beat a soul down. In her friendship with

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Weaver, there is a suggestion of the possibility of healthy male/female relationships based on common interests, shared enterprises, and mutual respect and support. Mattie sees the lawyer in Weaver and the sane person in crazy Emmie, and she sees how to make thirty dollars spread thin enough to help all those in need. Pa’s mule is paid for and Tommy Hubbard comes to help him with the farm, she pays off Emmie Hubbard’s back taxes so she and Mrs. Smith can have a home, and she also offers Weaver the train fare he needs to get to Columbia. She ‘‘stitches things up nicely and leaves no ends dangling,’’ but each happy ending she helps to create is freshly coined and transcendent. Source: Cynthia Clough, Critical Essay on A Northern Light, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals In the following essay, Donnelly explains to Update how a century-old murder led her to write the Carnegie Medal-winning novel, A Northern Light.’’ Note that A Northern Light was published under the name A Gathering Light in Great Britain. In A Gathering Light, which has won this year’s Carnegie Medal, Jennifer Donnelly tells the story of a young girl, Mattie Gokey, who has to choose between her family, struggling to help her widowed father make a backbreaking living farming in the foothills of the Adirondack mountains, and her own dreams of studying literature in New York. Interwoven is the true story of a young, pregnant woman, Grace Brown, murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1906. The case achieved notoriety at the time. Grace’s lover was arrested and tried for the murder on the strength of her letters recovered subsequently. The story was re-told fictionally in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and made into a film twice, first in the 1930s, then again in 1951 as A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. The murder was local history for Donnelly, whose own grandmother had worked in a hotel on Big Moose Lake where the body was recovered. Her family reminisced about it. And it haunted Donnelly herself—‘Grace wouldn’t leave me alone.’ She read Dreiser, and a factual account of the murder. But the letters themselves

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THE POWER OF A GATHERING LIGHT COMES FROM ITS DILEMMAS, WHICH ARE UNIVERSAL: THE DESPERATE WISH TO BREAK FREE FROM THE HARD LABOUR AND GRINDING POVERTY OF THEIR LIFE ON THE LAND; THE CONFLICT BETWEEN LOYALTY TO FAMILY AND WHAT ONE KNOWS, AND THE ATTRACTIONS OF DREAMS AND ASPIRATIONS.’’

were what really clinched the matter: ‘Her voice, her words. It tore me apart. I started grieving for her, even though she lived 100 years ago.’ What Donnelly could not stand was that Grace had been murdered at 19 for being pregnant, for not fitting in. Her letters were so vivid and evocative of their time that she decided she had to work out her own emotions ‘by writing, telling the story in a new way, fictionalised, from my point of view’. In a piece for the Guardian, she describes her anger: ‘During a summer that saw the headlines in America full of violence against girls and women, things didn’t seem to have changed much.’ The power of the story— and the power in the telling—is not an accident in Donnelly’s family. Her father’s ancestors were Irish immigrants who escaped the famine in 1848. They were very poor farmers, who settled in upstate New York to eke out a living, farming in what is still ‘a brutal place’. Summers were short and, once over, ‘it was a matter of life and death to get through the winter. You had to be smart, self-reliant, strong, to weather the remoteness and the loneliness’. The landscape—of ‘staggering beauty’—has produced ‘a strong silent people, independent, proud. And used to do doing what they want, non-conformists’.

was a culture of reading when she grew up. ‘I didn’t think about it at the time, but I suppose that part time I was picking up the value of stories, the importance of early tradition.’ And not only that. ‘Hearing the older generation sit and talk, you absorb how to do pacing and suspense, and structure; how to hold your listeners rapt, how to deliver a good punch line.’ The ability to listen and hear the words talk was another thing, reflected in the dialogue, the word-games (and some dialect) of A Gathering Light. And in one of the book’s central messages—the power of words to overcome adversity, to make people feel. Donnelly has always been fascinated by language. She lived in London in the early 1980s and ‘spent every spare moment’ in the East End of London. ‘I used to go to Brick Lane early on Sunday. Costermongers would sing their wares. Wide boys would hand jewelry back and forth and pull out wodges of cash. There were cockles and pickled whelks, and jellied eels. It was as close to the London of Hogarth and Dickens as I would ever get. The sellers made theatre out of words, out of their patter.’ She thinks that Cockneys have a lot in common with northern New Yorkers: ‘One is an urban culture, one rural, but they were both cultures of the poor. If they like you, they tease you. It is wrong to be openly affectionate. Maybe it isn’t good to be too open. To survive, to be successful, you had to be tough.’

The power of words

A Gathering Light has become a successful ‘cross-over’ novel, particularly since being chosen by the Richard & Judy show as one of their ‘Summer Reads’. But it was originally written with young girls, not adults, in mind. Donnelly wanted to show them that they have choices in life, but that choosing is never easy. She wanted to reach them before they made choices that set the course for their lives. ‘Mattie adores her sisters and loves her father. She sees the attraction of family. Royal [who becomes her beau, and wants to marry her] is a good-looking, capable guy. He has a passion for farming and the land. People like him are valued still.’

Storytelling was a tradition after meals. It was the only entertainment they could afford and, during the long winters, it helped to overcome the isolation. The whole family, she says, ‘are born storytellers’. Her mother (in fact a German, orphaned during the war, who emigrated to the US) told her own stories too, and read to her. And the whole family read—there

Much of the novel is about the tug of war in Mattie’s heart between her feelings of loyalty to family and place, and her longing to study and to read and be a writer (which her family cannot understand). She wants to go to college, to be like the literature teacher at school, who encourages and inspires her. (The teacher, Miss Wilcox, is based on Emily Dickinson and one of

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Donnelly’s high-school English teachers.) Mattie is encouraged, too, by her black schoolfriend Weaver, himself determined to overcome poverty and racial discrimination by getting a good education and becoming a lawyer. It is Mattie’s work in a local hotel (To earn money to be able to pay to go to college? Or support her father and the family? Or save to get married?) that brings her into contact with Grace Brown and her letters, and a story that she cannot ignore. As Mattie learns more, she gradually finds the courage and strength to make her own choices. But there is no wish—or attempt—by Donnelly to preach. ‘I didn’t want to say that Mattie’s choice is the best or only choice.’ Mattie is pulled in two directions, as was Donnelly herself, until recently too much influenced by earlier feminist voices to find time in her life for as many children as she now wishes she could have—a source of regret.

Universal issues The power of A Gathering Light comes from its dilemmas, which are universal: the desperate wish to break free from the hard labour and grinding poverty of their life on the land; the conflict between loyalty to family and what one knows, and the attractions of dreams and aspirations. It is why the book appeals to adults too, though one could add that Donnelly’s sensitivity to social injustice gives urgency to the narrative, without ever leading to stereotyping, or making her didactic. After all of this, it comes perhaps as a surprise that Donnelly herself ‘had a fortunate childhood, parents who pushed me hard to do my best.’ Never any real deprivation, then. Even when she fell in with a much wealthier bunch of friends, her father merely advised her, if she wanted what they had, to ‘Work. Get an education. Make something of yourself.’ And that she did, getting up at 4:30 in the morning or 5, to write for a couple of hours before going out to earn a wage. Her writing was ‘years and years in the making’ before she found a publisher, or achieved recognition. She went through years of depression and despair to get there, even though she had been telling stories since childhood and ‘inflicting them’ on her family. Even after 10 years when she had finished The Tea Rose, her first novel, it took a while to

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find a publisher. But her agent is ‘as stubborn and persistent as I am’.

Sense of privilege Perhaps some of the drive comes from a sense of privilege at what she has—and her great-grandparents had not. Her great-grandfather would have loved an opportunity of education. ‘He was taken out of school at 12 to drive mules and make money for the family. He died young and was bed-ridden before he passed away. All he wanted to do before he died was read. His children had to keep bringing him books. What would his life have been if he had had a few of the opportunities I had?’ When she was researching for the book, she once asked her grandmother (an inspiration for the character of Mattie) if she had minded not having had time to read or study. To which she retorted that there was not time—there was so much work to be done, just to put food on the table. ‘To live you had to grow your own food. Your survival depended on your ability to farm.’ Colin Brabazon, Chair of the Carnegie judges, praised ‘the striking luminosity’ of A Gathering Light’s prose, ‘its tangible sense of place and the integrity of its vision’. Perhaps it was inspired, too, by some of the imagery of Donnelly’s Irish Catholic upbringing. She thinks that the obligatory attendance at church (‘it was an accepted part of your life’) gave her a good basis for storytelling. ‘I sat and listened to the Gospel. I wanted Judas to have a change of heart. It was amazing stuff—about loyalty, and betrayal, and faith. The stories gave you a lot of things to think about at 7 or 8 years old, sitting in church, bored out of your skull!’ The sense of wonder, of the miraculous, a heightened feeling of excitement and expectation, has stayed with her, though she does not describe herself as religious. Donnelly is pleased—and surprised— about the interest the novel has aroused across the generations (and the gender divide thanks to Weaver). She thinks that ‘literature’ is very much adult-oriented. ‘Teenagers tend to look to adult characters and situations, but it means a tremendous amount to them if adults repay the favour, by occasionally venturing back.’ She thinks this sends a very powerful message—‘that we value their stories and their concerns. It means the world to a kid to have someone take an interest in what he or she is interested in.’

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Lake in the Adirondacks Ó James L. Amos/Corbis

Nonetheless, it is probably the sense of conviction conveyed by the writing, the universal dilemmas and the power of the story-telling in this book that appeal to adults as well as young people. It is ironic and apt that it was oral tradition that attracted Donnelly to prose, and the power of shared stories that is driving readers back to narrative fiction—perhaps one of the most striking features about the current ‘crossover’ phenomenon. Though the characters in the novel came to her ‘out of the mist’, it is real voices that inspire Donnelly. She loves the historical research. ‘I went to the library of the Adirondack Museum. I’d sit down and tell the librarian what I was after, and he would go back and forth, bringing collections of this and that—diaries, menus from the great camps, old newspapers, a lock of Grace Brown’s hair—a writer’s treasure trove.’ This took her on paths she never knew existed. ‘He’d say: ‘‘Do you know about this?’’ or ‘‘Try that.’’ I am sure many, many authors owe huge debts to librarians and archivists for their work. I know I do!’. Source: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, ‘‘Haunted by Grace,’’ in Update, September 2004, p. 1.

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SOURCES Baker, Dierdre, Review of A Northern Light in Jennifer Donnelly Reviews, www.jenniferdonnelly.com/jd_reviews (September 20, 2005); originally published in the Toronto Star. Beil, Karen Magnuson, ‘‘Jennifer Donnelly Sifts through Adirondack History in A Northern Light, Recipient of the Printz Honor Award,’’ Children’s Literature Connection, www.childrensliteratureconnection.org (May 16, 2005). ‘‘Carnegie Winner Offers Message for Teens,’’ in The Bookseller, Issue 5137, July16, 2004, p. 30. Donnelly, Jennifer, A Northern Light, Harcourt, 2003. Glenn, Wendy J., Review of A Northern Light, in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Vol. 47, Issue 3, November 2003, p. 265. Hall, Dinah, Review of A Northern Light, in Bloomsbury Magazine, www.bloomsbury.com/ezine/Articles/Articles. asp?ezine_article_id=862 (May 30, 2003); originally published in the Sunday Telegraph, July 2003. ‘‘Haunted by Grace,’’ CILIP Update Magazine, September 2004, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, www.book.guardian.co.uk/ print10.3858.4966913.110738.00html (May 15, 2005). MacDonald, Sandy, Review of A Northern Light in the New York Times, September 21, 2003, Section 7, Column 4, Page 27.

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Odanaka, Barbara J., ‘‘‘I’m Just Loving Life Right Now’: Author Jennifer Donnelly Talks about Her Really Big Two-Book Deal,’’ in Authorlink, www.authorlink.com (July 2001). ‘‘Murder on Big Moose Lake,’’ in The Bookseller, January 24, 2003, p. 30. Reviews of A Northern Light, in Jennifer Donnelly Reviews, www.jenniferdonnelly.com/jd_reviews (September 20, 2005). Stiles, Kristina, ‘‘The History of Grace Brown,’’ at www.ovcs.org/district/brown.htm (May 15, 2005). Williamson, Courtney, Review of A Northern Light,’’Christian Science Monitor, www.csmonitorservices. com (July 31, 2001).

FURTHER READING Alkalay-Gut, Karen, Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey, University of Georgia Press, 1988. Donnelly invokes the presence of Adelaide Crapsey in her epigraph, and the poet is clearly the model for Emily Baxter Wilcox. A 1901 graduate of Vassar College from Rochester, New York, Crapsey studied Classics at the American Academy in Rome, taught in New England prep schools, and died fairly young of tuberculosis. She is best known for formal

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verse, especially the cinquain, a five line syllabic poem similar to haiku, which she devised to suit her poetic temperament. Brandon, Craig, Murder in the Adirondacks: ‘‘An American Tragedy’’ Revisited, North Country Books, 1986. Brandon is a journalist who thoroughly researched the Gillette-Brown murder, investigating especially the family backgrounds of Grace and Chester. The book is a compelling read and an insightful resource for factual information about the case, the couple, and the environment in which the events took place. Dreiser, Theodore, An American Tragedy, Signet Classics Reissue edition, 2000. Dreiser saw the Gillette-Brown murder of 1906 as a direct consequence of the American dream gone wrong. His novel, which inspired Jennifer Donnelly to explore the murder through Mattie’s eyes, focuses more on the psychology of Chester Gillette (through the character Clyde Griffiths) and the social forces that drove him to commit the murder. Myer, Ruth, A Farm Girl in the Great Depression, Busca, 1998. Donnelly drew on this first-hand account by a woman who grew up on an Upstate New York farm during the depression for the character of Mattie Gokey.

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Seabiscuit: An American Legend Seabiscuit: An American Legend is the first booklength work published by Laura Hillenbrand. While suffering from a debilitating illness, Hillenbrand wrote short pieces and feature articles for a variety of equestrian magazines before becoming captivated by the tale of Seabiscuit and the men who believed in him. She found that his story was a triumph over adversity that mimicked her personal predicament in many ways. Though nonfiction, the book pushes the reader forward using narrative elements more commonly found in fiction novels, as lives and situations intersect and diverge. The plethora of detail is a testament to Hillenbrand’s thorough research. The book takes place between 1929 and 1940, a period during which the world changed dramatically. In the United States, a stock market crash heralded the decade-long Great Depression that mired the country in despair and hopelessness. During those dark days, average citizens clung to even the smallest diversion that afforded hope or escape from their daily lives. An unlikely hero—a short, squat, and seemingly unfit racehorse—offered one such distraction, becoming a media darling and capturing the national imagination. In fact, in 1938, as the word teetered on the brink of World War II, the majority of news coverage was devoted not to politicians or warmongers but to one knobby-kneed horse nearly past his prime. Seabiscuit became a cultural icon,

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according to Hillenbrand, and offered hope to a generation of disadvantaged people: if he could overcome adversity and become a winner, so could they. From his initial outings in the dust of Tijuana to his grudge match with Triple Crown winner War Admiral, Seabiscuit epitomized the rags-to-riches American dream for millions of impoverished citizens who wondered whether the dream was still possible. Although the horse became the focus of public attention, it was the convergence of the unique men contributing to Seabiscuit’s success that piqued the interest of the media reports of the day, just as it is for Hillenbrand’s book. The unlikely matching of a self-made business tycoon, a taciturn cowboy horse trainer, and a gangly, half-blind jockey rounded out the quartet that captured the hearts of an eager public, as well as the imagination of Hillenbrand.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

College in Gambier, Ohio, getting good grades and planning to spend her junior year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, when she became suddenly and inexplicably ill. Thinking it was merely a case of food poisoning, she ignored the symptoms and waited for the illness to go away. Instead, the illness worsened, and other symptoms arose. These eventually became so debilitating that Hillenbrand was bedridden; ultimately, she dropped out of school and returned to her family in Fairfax. She visited many doctors, who variously diagnosed her as suffering from the EpsteinBarr virus, bulimia, and nothing at all. Finally, at Johns Hopkins, Hillenbrand was told she was suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—a disease often referred to as the ‘‘yuppie flu’’ for its prevalence among upwardly mobile overachievers. Even though she had a diagnosis, there was no known cure; as the symptoms worsened, she was essentially bedridden from August 1991 until the summer of 1994.

Laura Hillenbrand was born in 1967 in Fairfax, Virginia. Her parents separated when she was a child, leaving her mother, a psychologist, to raise four children. A bright and athletic young woman, Hillenbrand was attending Kenyon

In an effort to find something to fill her days, Hillenbrand parlayed her interest in horses and horseracing into short magazine articles, which were published in periodicals such as Equus and Turf Flash. During her research,

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Hillenbrand stumbled across a name from her childhood: Seabiscuit. Her favorite book as a child was Come on Seabiscuit! by Ralph Moody (1963), about an underdog horse who made it big. Intrigued, she collected everything she could find on the horse and its jockey to construct an article for American Heritage. She soon realized she had entirely too much information for a short article and decided to write a book instead. Seabiscuit: An American Legend was published by Random House in 2001. Almost from the outset, the book took the nation by storm, topping the bestseller lists and staying there for weeks. Among other accolades, the work was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the 2001 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and received ‘‘best of the year’’ honors from such notable publications as New York magazine, the Economist, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Because of the success of the book and the sentimental nature of the subject matter, the bid for film rights came quickly. The film was produced under Hillenbrand’s close supervision, even though her illness kept her far from Hollywood. The film, adapted for the screen and directed by Gary Ross, was released in 2003.

PLOT SUMMARY Chapter 1: The Day of the Horse is Past

Horses and people flee. Snatching opportunity in the midst of adversity, Howard offers his previously useless Buicks as ambulances and transport, proving the worth of the automobile and eventually creating enormous wealth for himself.

Chapter 2: The Lone Plainsman Tom Smith is an archetypal cowboy, an original against which all others are compared. He is a man of the open plains who drifts from job to job and is more comfortable in the company of horses than he is with humans. While working for the garrulous and gargantuan Charlie Irwin, owner of the largest racing stable in the country, Smith learns that the horse with the fastest breakout from the starting gate is usually the winner. Irwin notes Smith’s way with animals and makes him a trainer. After Irwin’s untimely death in an automobile accident, Smith drifts from job to job until he is introduced to Charles Howard.

Chapter 3: Mean, Restive and Ragged Howard wants to increase his thoroughbred holdings, but he is more intrigued by spirit than by breeding. In 1936, he sends Smith east to scout for horses. After attending several auctions and discounting numerous possibilities, on June 29, Smith is standing by a paddock when the perfect horse finds him. An unlikely descendant of champion lines, the horse surveys the trainer with haughty indifference, and Smith knows he has found his winner. The horse has attitude.

In 1903, Charles Howard leaves his home and family in New York and travels west to seek his livelihood. Arriving in San Francisco with twenty-one cents in his pocket, he uses his charm to borrow enough money to open a small bicycle repair shop. Soon, locals who had been foolish enough to purchase a new contraption— the horseless carriage, or automobile—appear at Howard’s door, seeking his advice on repairing the machines. A visionary, Howard notes the advantages the steel beasts have over the current mode of transport, the horse. He travels to Detroit to convince Will Durant, the chief of Buick and future founder of General Motors, to give him the company’s automobile sales franchise for San Francisco.

Chapter 4: The Cougar and the Iceman

On April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake, registering 7.8 on the Richter scale, alters the course of Howard’s life. The earthquake causes hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, fractured streets and roads, and major fires.

The candidate for jockey is almost as unlikely as the steed. Johnny Pollard, dubbed Red for his carrot-colored hair, is an oversized intellectual who, Hillenbrand remarks, ‘‘is one of the worst riders anywhere.’’ After a rocky start,

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The horse’s current trainer, James Fitzsimmons, is, according to Hillenbrand, ‘‘the only man whom Smith ever regarded with awe.’’ Fitzsimmons had trained Hard Tack, a Triple Crown winner and the son of the legendary Man o’ War. Consequently, he had inherited Hard Tack’s sons, Grog and Seabiscuit, both of which had little resemblance to their sire. Fitzsimmons notes the two things Seabiscuit did best were sleep and eat; his assessment of the animal’s ability is that he is lazy. But Smith, and later Howard, see potential. The sale is finalized and they begin searching for a jockey.

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Pollard signs on as an apprentice jockey or ‘‘bug boy,’’ so named for the asterisk beside a novice’s listings in the race program that looks like a bug. During this time, most bug boys are young runaways or orphans who are overworked, barely paid, and bulimic in order to maintain weight requirements. They are frequently traded, sold, or lost in card games without their consent. As Pollard’s skill with difficult mounts becomes obvious, his lack of skill as a rider is overlooked and he is viewed as a specialist who could ride any steed offered to him. In addition to a growing reputation, Pollard gains his first real friend, veteran jockey George Woolf, nicknamed the Iceman for his unflappable style.

Chapter 5: A Boot on One Foot, a Toe Tag on the Other The life of a jockey in these early days of racing is not an ideal one. Their lives are chained to making a successful impost, the weight each horse is permitted to carry in a particular contest. From purgatives to laxatives to starvation, the young men fight to stay thin while they are often housed in the corner of the horse stall. These conditions produce not only malnutrition and dehydration but also lead to weakened immune systems and a tendency to be accidentprone. In addition to their physical condition, the riders live in constant fear of being thrown from or pinned under their huge mounts. Yet, through it all, they maintain an illusion of invincibility.

Chapter 6: Light and Shadow In 1928, Pollard and Woolf parlay their friendship into racetrack legend. With Pollard as the tamer of wild beasts and Woolf as the charismatic media darling, they become racetrack celebrities in Mexico. As their reputation in the Tijuana circuit grows, however, so do their personal problems. For Woolf, a diagnosis of Type I diabetes produces bouts of sleepiness and a tendency to gain weight; for Pollard, a small rock or clump of dirt launched into his eye by a passing horse results in permanent blindness on his right side. Keeping their conditions secret, the jockeys continue to ride. The racing culture in Tijuana crumbles in 1934 when Mexico bans gambling. By then, however, California has reinstituted pari-mutuel betting, which offers the state a percentage of the take, and has sanctioned the opening of Santa Anita Park. After returning to the United States,

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the friends part ways; Woolf ’s career grows, resulting in better and faster mounts, while Pollard backslides into oblivion. Two years later, Pollard, destitute and broken, wanders into Detroit, begging for jobs. Trainers laugh him away as he wanders from stall to stall until Tom Smith extends his hand and introduces the jockey to Seabiscuit.

Chapter 7: Learn Your Horse When horses are as skittish and temperamental as Seabiscuit, one trick of the trade is to give them a companion. The first stall mate Smith tries is a nanny goat, which Seabiscuit launches over the stall door. The second is a lead horse called Pumpkin that becomes the thoroughbred’s constant companion. Smith determines that most of the horse’s reactionary behavior is due to previous ill treatment, and decides he can produce results by getting the steed to trust him and the jockey. Seabiscuit is limited by not only his physicality and his temperament but also by his age. Because the Triple Crown—the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes—is limited to entries three years or younger, the four-year-old thoroughbred does not qualify. However, the horse proves himself at smaller venues from east to west, and even earns a private sleeping car on the train that transports him.

Chapter 8: Fifteen Strides In 1936, Smith and Howard decide it is time to unleash their well-kept secret; they enter Seabiscuit in the Bay Bridge Handicap at Bay Meadows. The horse quickly reduces the field, shocking spectators and reporters alike. By December, Howard and Smith know the horse is ready for the hundred-thousand-dollar Santa Anita match. There he must face the formidable Rosemont, the thoroughbred considered the best horse in the world by most racing enthusiasts on the West Coast. Unfortunately, at a decisive moment in the contest, both Pollard and Seabiscuit lose momentum, producing a photo finish between the two horses. The final decision goes to Rosemont.

Chapter 9: Gravity In 1937, the United States is in the throes of economic and social upheaval. Unemployment and poverty are rampant and citizens seek any means of escape from the reality of their dreary

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lives. The combination of legalized track betting and the availability of affordable radios offer that escape. Radio reporters prowl the tracks, seeking to scoop their peers, and Smith, always circumspect, makes a game out of eluding them by exercising Seabiscuit at different venues or times. When he is aware newsmen are around, he substitutes Grog, the horse’s twin brother, to foil the persistent reporters.

Chapter 10: War Admiral Owned by racing aficionado Samuel Riddle, who also owned his sire Man o’ War, War Admiral is the pride of East Coast racing. A Triple Crown winner, War Admiral is considered the fleetest mount on the circuit. Temperamental and eager as the others in his line, the horse is allowed to start outside the starting gates because his jockey, Charley Kurtsinger, cannot keep him from crashing through the boards. Consequently, War Admiral is the horse to beat. To secure Seabiscuit’s national reputation, Howard enters him in the Brooklyn Handicap, where he finally demolishes Rosemont. From there the team moves on to Massachusetts, where Seabiscuit sweeps the field; he is followed closely by a young filly named Fair Knightess. Howard is so impressed by her energy that he purchases the filly—not only to race but to breed with Seabiscuit after his retirement.

three months away. To add insult to injury, sportswriters select War Admiral as Horse of the Year. The state racing board upholds Pollard’s suspension, and Howard reacts by pulling his entries in all state races until the jockey is reinstated. By February, Pollard is back in the saddle and Seabiscuit is entered in the San Carlos Handicap; once again, the track conditions are muddy and the horse is scratched. Pollard opts to ride Fair Knightess, which proves to be a fatal error. Mid-track, the filly loses her footing and goes down with another horse directly behind her. The other horse plows into Fair Knightess, flipping her massive frame on top of Pollard. The left side of Pollard’s chest is crushed, and he is told he cannot ride for at least a year. The Santa Anita, also known as ‘‘the hundred grander,’’ is just around the corner, and although Howard wants to pull the horse from the race, Pollard will not hear of it. He recommends that Howard hire his old friend, George Woolf, for the mount.

Chapter 12: All I Need Is Luck

Racing fans, urged on by the press, clamor for a match between Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Both horses are entered in the Washington Handicap, but the track is wet; Seabiscuit is scratched, or removed from competition, to prevent injury from racing on the muddy track. The supporters of War Admiral chide that Howard is afraid to pit Seabiscuit against the champion, pushing the man harder to arrange a one-on-one match. Despite a lucrative offer, Riddle refuses to match the horses.

Adding to Pollard’s bad luck, Smith becomes ill and there are rumors of a kidnapping plot against George Woolf. Despite it all, Seabiscuit appears at Santa Anita to compete once again for the title of greatest money winner of all time. During the race, however, the horse Count Atlas pulls alongside, pushing Seabiscuit toward the wall. The act is an obvious foul, but the horses are out of view of the reviewing stand, so the foul goes undocumented. As Woolf pulls away, his first reaction is to whack the other jockey with his whip. It works, and regaining his competitive spirit, Seabiscuit dives down the track, neck and neck with another contender, Stagehand. The horses hit the finish line at exactly the same time; once again, Seabiscuit is denied the photo finish.

Chapter 11: No Pollard, No Seabiscuit

Chapter 13: Hardball

In December 1937, Pollard, riding the colt Exhibit, accidentally brushes another horse, and the horse’s rider complains to officials. Although Pollard was not at fault, the stewards, the track racing commission, suspend him from the venue and recommend he be suspended from all California tracks for the rest of the year. The news is particularly shocking since Seabiscuit is scheduled to meet War Admiral in March, only

While turmoil swirls around the Seabiscuit camp, negotiations with Riddle continue. The bout between Seabiscuit and War Admiral is finally set for Memorial Day, with a $100,000

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After the race, a group of reporters petition to have the race video reviewed to establish the foul committed against Seabiscuit. Although the tape reveals the foul, it also reveals Woolf striking the other jockey. Woolf is suspended.

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purse. Only one condition remains. Howard wants Pollard to ride; if the jockey is not physically up to task, the event will be canceled.

Chapter 14: The Wise We Boys Since War Admiral starts outside the gate, Smith has to train Seabiscuit to do the same. Using the classical conditioning of Pavlov, who trained dogs to salivate whenever they heard a bell in anticipation of food, Smith teaches Seabiscuit to react to the starting alarm. Once again, the trainer plays hide-and-seek with the eager press to keep his training tactics secret. Then, the unforeseeable strikes: Seabiscuit develops soreness in his knee. Smith cables Howard to come immediately. Once again, the race is called off. In June, Riddle and War Admiral head for Suffolk Downs in Massachusetts, and Howard and Smith follow.

Chapter 15: Fortune’s Fool Shortly before the Massachusetts match, Pollard runs into an old friend from his Tijuana days, Bert Blume, who is in a bind because his exercise rider has failed to show up. As a favor, Pollard offers to take his friend’s horse for a workout. Things go smoothly until something spooks the horse, who crashes through the rail and gallops off toward the barn with Pollard still astride. With momentum carrying him, the horse skids and slams into the side of the barn. By the time horse and rider come to a stop, Pollard has damaged most of his right leg below the knee. Hospitalized and told he will never ride again, Pollard buries his pain and disappointment in alcohol. Woolf is summoned to ride Seabiscuit. Just as it appears that the thoroughbred will at last meet War Admiral, Seabiscuit develops pain in his leg and has to be scratched once again.

Chapter 16: I Know My Horse Back in California, Smith nurtures Seabiscuit and readies him for Hollywood Park. Track officials want to send veterinarians to examine the horse for soundness. Smith refuses, stating he knows the horse, and he alone will make that decision. Seabiscuit races, and takes home the gold trophy.

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Chapter 17: The Dingbustingest Contest You Ever Clapped an Eye On The eldest Howard son, Lin, creates a racing partnership with singer and actor Bing Crosby, part owner of the new Del Mar racetrack near San Diego. To promote the track, the younger Howard pits his best racer, Ligaroti, against Seabiscuit. During the match, Ligaroti lags behind until his jockey pulls alongside Seabiscuit and grabs the blanket under the horse’s saddle. Woolf and his mount literally drag the other horse and rider along. At the finish line, Woolf knows he needs to act; he reaches for Ligaroti’s bridle, raising the horse’s head so that Seabiscuit goes under the wire first. There is an inquiry, and Woolf is again in danger of suspension.

Chapter 18: Deal As Woolf faces suspension, the injured Pollard falls in love with his nurse, Agnes Condon. At the same time, Alfred Vanderbilt, a friend of Howard’s and owner of the Pimlico racetrack, attempts to renegotiate with Riddle for a two-horse match between War Admiral and Seabiscuit. Riddle finally agrees, but only if both owners put up a $5,000 forfeit fee in case the match is called off again. The race is the talk of the country, lauded as East versus West, and is scheduled to take place at Pimlico in Maryland. It rains for days before the event. Knowing that this is the last chance for Seabiscuit to race War Admiral, Woolf memorizes the track and discovers a hard-packed path that would be perfect for Seabiscuit’s footing.

Chapter 19: The Second Civil War On November 1, 1938, before a sold-out crowd, Seabiscuit and War Admiral face off. When the dust clears, Seabiscuit is declared the winner, finishing three lengths in front of War Admiral. In addition to winning, the horse breaks a Pimlico track record that was set shortly after the Civil War. With such a decisive victory, Seabiscuit is voted Horse of the Year. War Admiral runs only two more races before retirement. Everyone asks Howard if the same will happen to Seabiscuit, but Howard wants to try again to win the Santa Anita.

Chapter 20: All Four of His Legs Are Broken When Pollard is released from the hospital— bankrupt, homeless, and unemployable—Howard

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invites him to move into his home. In the meantime, Woolf rides in the Santa Anita; during the match, Seabiscuit stumbles, rupturing a suspensory ligament. However, the Howard stable does finally win the coveted prize at Santa Anita, but with a new purchase, Kayak II, instead of Seabiscuit.

Chapter 21: A Long, Hard Pull Once he is settled on the ranch, Pollard sends for Agnes and they are married. Seabiscuit comes home to recuperate and is placed in Pollard’s care as Smith travels east with Kayak II. Over time, both Pollard and the thoroughbred begin to heal. They both make remarkable recoveries, and in the fall of 1939, the Howard team once again leaves for Santa Anita.

Chapter 22: Four Good Legs Between Us With three months to prepare for the race, Seabiscuit once again becomes the focus of an inquisitive media and the talk of the nation. Merchandising stands spring up, and the horse’s likeness is everywhere. Pollard rigs a brace for his still-injured leg; he is allowed to exercise the horse, but he wants more. If Seabiscuit is ready to win the race that has long eluded him, Pollard wants to be on his back in the winner’s circle. Howard is less enthusiastic; the doctors have already emphasized that another break will cripple Pollard for life.

Chapter 23: One Hundred Grand Still indecisive about who will ride, Howard consults Woolf. The jockey thinks it would be better to break a man’s legs than his heart. On the day of the race, Pollard is astride Seabiscuit in front of the second-largest crowd ever to attend a horse race. Not only does the stallion finally win the elusive prize, he sets a new track record for speed and a new world record for monies won.

Epilogue In 1940, Seabiscuit retires from the track and sires a foal named First Biscuit. Away from competition, Seabiscuit becomes restless; Howard decides to harness the energy by teaching the horse to herd cattle. In 1947, Seabiscuit passes away and is buried in a secret place on the Howard ranch. As for the others, Woolf garners a reputation as the best rider in the country. Soon after,

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Seabiscuit: An American Legend was adapted into a film by writer-director Gary Ross in 2003 and was released by Universal. The film stars Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, and Tobey Maguire. The film is available on DVD through MCA Home Video. The film is spliced with actual footage from the 1930s, which adds to the authenticity of the historical narrative.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend was released in an abridged version on audiocassette and compact disc by Random House Audio in 2003. The book is read by Campbell Scott and is widely available.

his health deteriorates, and he suffers a fatal accident while racing at Santa Anita. After having to leave his post with Howard while recovering from back surgery, Smith leaves the west to train horses for cosmetics mogul Elizabeth Arden Graham; he dies in 1957. Pollard, ravaged with illness and alcoholism, leaves racing, only to return years later with less and less success. He passes away in 1981; his wife, Agnes, succumbs to cancer only two weeks later.

CHARACTERS James Fitzsimmons James Fitzsimmons grows up in Brooklyn and spends a great deal of time at the Coney Island Jockey Club. By age ten, he is working odd jobs at the track and trying his hand at being a jockey. Deciding that aspect of the sport is not for him, Sunny Jim, as he is called at the track, carves his place in the industry as the best conditioner of thoroughbreds in the country. Fitzsimmons trains Hard Tack, the roguishtempered father, of Seabiscuit until it becomes evident that Hard Tack is literally untrainable. His owner, Gladys Phipps, offers him at stud,

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but when no one accepts her free offer, she mates the horse with one of her own mares. The result is Seabiscuit and Grog, neither of which have their father’s temperament or their champion grandfather’s zeal. By virtue of his work with the lineage, Fitzsimmons is entrusted with the training of the offspring. After determining that Seabiscuit has speed but is lazy, Fitzsimmons suspends his no-whip rule, literally lashing the horse into submission. The method succeeds and Seabiscuit is raced constantly, tripling a normal workload.

Charles Howard The ultimate owner of Seabiscuit, Charles Howard is handsome and well-mannered with a charismatic energy that draws people to him. Over six feet tall, he is trained as a military horseman and tries to serve in the Spanish American War, but he contracts dysentery and has to remain in camp. Howard’s father was a scandalous playboy who abandoned his family, so Howard is raised by his mother in a structured, upper-class environment. According to Hillenbrand, Howard ‘‘made himself into his father’s antithesis,’’. Stifled by life on the East Coast, at age twenty-six, Howard leaves his wife, Fannie May, and two young sons in New York while he journeys to San Francisco to seek his fortune. Arriving with only a few pennies in his pocket, he wheedles enough money to open a bicycle repair shop. Since the automobile is a novel invention and no auto mechanics are available, owners of automobiles begin bringing them to Howard for repair; it is not long before automobiles are part of his vision for the future. Thusly inspired, he goes to Detroit to visit Will Durant, the founder of Buick and General Motors (GM), and convinces the man to give him the San Francisco dealership for his automobiles. After Howard uses the vehicles as emergency transport following the San Francisco earthquake, public opinion of the ‘‘horseless carriage’’ begins to shift favorably.

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fifteen-year-old son, Frankie, in a car accident. After Frankie dies, his somewhat unstable marriage deteriorates and he begins frequenting Tijuana, Mexico, where a growing market caters to U.S. citizens escaping the Prohibition of the 1920s. In 1929, Howard meets Marcela Zabala, the sister of his daughter-in-law, and despite their age difference, the two are married. Marcela is a veteran horsewoman, and with her encouragement, Howard begins purchasing racehorses. That year also marks the crash of the stock market, which may have contributed to the re-legalization of horse racing in California. Throughout the book, Howard’s encounters with others are marked by his empathy, kindness, and almost resigned acceptance of fortune’s ebb and flow. He has a strong sense of public image and engages in philanthropic causes, including providing a home for Pollard, his wounded jockey. In a sense, Pollard becomes a surrogate son to Howard, replacing the son he lost. Howard is vocal and craves media attention, but under the braggadocio, he is a kind and genteel man.

Lin Howard Charles Howard’s oldest son Lin partners with Bing Crosby to create a stable of thoroughbreds and challenge his father’s dominance of the circuit. His wife is Marcela Zabala’s sister, and it is Lin and his wife who introduce Marcela and Charles.

Marcela Zabala Howard Marcela, Charles Howard’s second wife, is his daughter-in-law’s sister. A striking brunette, the young actress and former Salinas, California, Lettuce Queen is full of grace and charm. Marcela is half Howard’s age; however, they are well-matched. They share an effervescent empathy, a love of horses and the spotlight, and a zest for life.

Agnes Pollard

To make himself more publicly and promotionally visible, Howard begins racing cars. This increases his sales and, in 1909, he is awarded sole GM distributorship for all of the western states. As his fortune grows, he engages in philanthropic endeavors and purchases a ranch, Ridgewood, for his wife and four sons. The turning point in Howard’s life is the death of his

Agnes Pollard is Red Pollard’s nurse during his convalescence after a near-fatal riding injury. Eventually, despite the vast differences in their social classes and educational levels, she becomes his wife. They have two children, Norah and John. In addition to being his longsuffering nursemaid and soul mate, Agnes understands her husband’s need to pursue his profession, despite his physical catastrophes.

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She dies of cancer only two weeks after Red’s death in 1981.

seen as Seabiscuit’s primary rival by most enthusiasts of the sport.

Johnny Pollard

Seabiscuit

See Red Pollard

Red Pollard Seabiscuit’s primary jockey, Johnny ‘‘Red’’ Pollard is an elegant and muscularly honed intellectual with bright orange hair. Born in 1910 in Edmonton, Canada, as one of six children, Pollard grows up in a wealthy home until a flood wipes out his father’s brick factory and the family fortune. Although he is a bright child with a love of literature, Pollard is much too restless and adventurous to become an academic. Instead, he develops an early appreciation for the two sports that would define his life: riding horses and prizefighting. One of his brothers is a champion boxer, but Red’s role in the ring is too often as a punching bag for betterequipped fighters. At fifteen, he immigrates to the United States and begins his career in the bush leagues, a no-holds-barred, unregulated, and sometimes illegal form of horse racing. Although he learns quickly, he fails to win races and is forced to use his only other athletic skill, prizefighting, to earn enough money to fend off starvation. Rising from relative obscurity as a gangly, unlikely jockey, Red earns a reputation for working well with difficult mounts, and drifts into the lives of Howard, Smith, and Seabiscuit. It is a perfect match between man and horse until a series of freak accidents forces Pollard into convalescence, where he is told he will never ride again, and into subsequent battles with alcohol and drug addiction. However, Pollard, like the horse he rode, refuses to surrender. He creates a brace for his impaired leg and returns to the sport in spite of his disability, winning the Santa Anita Handicap riding Seabiscuit.

Seabiscuit, the unlikely hero of the book, is a three-year-old mud-colored colt that brings the principal characters in the story together. Though it is not initially evident from his scruffy appearance, Seabiscuit descends from champion lines; he is the grandson of award-winning Man o’ War, and the son of Hard Tack. Unlike his storied ancestors, the colt is squat, rectangular, and low to the ground with a short tail, square knees, and stubby legs. He looks nothing like a winner. In fact, his favorite pastimes are eating and taking long naps—very un-thoroughbredlike behavior. When he gallops, he moves from side to side rather than straight ahead, and he habitually trips over his own hooves. Prior to his encounter with trainer Smith, Seabiscuit, literally whipped into shape by prior trainers and riders, is at the point of burnout from a grueling schedule. Underneath his sad and shaggy façade, however, the horse has attitude—the quality Smith and Howard are seeking. After liberal doses of kindness and care from both Smith and Pollard, the horse learns to trust people. Despite injuries and setbacks, he prances directly into the national spotlight, breaking records for both speed and monies earned, and charming the hearts of the American racing fans.

Tom Smith

Samuel Riddle

Tom Smith wanders on the periphery of two worlds, with his heart in the cowboy days of the old west and his body in a rapidly industrializing world. The grizzled wrangler spends the majority of his life with animals, taming mustangs for the British cavalry and job-hopping through ranch foreman positions and Wild West shows. Taciturn and withdrawn, he rarely speaks to people and lives outdoors or in barn stalls where he develops a way of communicating with horses.

Samuel Riddle is the owner of Man o’ War and War Admiral, Seabiscuit’s main rivals. Riddle embodies the elderly, stern, and wealthy East Coast racing establishment. Although the book has no outright villain, Riddle is depicted as an obstinate businessman and hardnosed negotiator. He is the mirrored opposite of Howard, and the two clash repeatedly throughout the book. Riddle’s horse, War Admiral, is

By the 1930s, Smith looks older than his late fifties and projects an air of virtual invisibility. He is a forgettable man with gray hair, perpetually clad in a gray felt fedora. Even as a child, Smith preferred the company of animals to men; he devoted his growing years to hunting deer, tracking mountain lions, and driving cattle across the plains. As the Wild West grows tame, Smith wanders from the vanishing frontier

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onto the Unaweep Cattle Range in Colorado where he works for twenty years as ranch foreman. The ranch is sold in 1924 and the cowboy, aging and unemployed, joins the sideshow antics of Charlie Irwin’s Wild West Show, where his talent as a trainer is noted and blossoms. By the time he encounters Howard and faces Seabiscuit, Smith is considered a miracle worker with difficult mounts.

Sunny Jim See James Fitzsimmons

War Admiral The son of Man o’ War—who also sired Seabiscuit’s father—War Admiral is the best racehorse in the eastern United States, and becomes Seabiscuit’s archrival. Jet-black and regal, the horse topples the Triple Crown, smashing his sire’s track record and setting an American record for speed. With those records to his credit, he is the horse to beat in the mid1920s and 1930s.

Alfred Vanderbilt Alfred Vanderbilt is the youthful owner of the Pimlico racetrack in Maryland, home of the Preakness Stakes. He succeeds in arranging a one-on-one match between Seabiscuit, representing the new breed of western racing, and War Admiral, the pride of the eastern establishment. Vanderbilt serves as mediator between Howard and Riddle, setting the purse and convincing Riddle of the worthiness of the match.

George Woolf Seabiscuit’s backup jockey, Woolf is the epitome of a professional cowboy. Outfitted in cartoonish western regalia, Woolf, nicknamed the Iceman, offers a commanding presence, unperturbed by the opinions of others, and unrattled by the dips of an unstable lifestyle. A consummate perfectionist, Woolf surrenders his ambition to become a Canadian Mountie and uses his talents instead in the racing arena. He studies the sport, the competition, and the tracks and becomes one of the best jockeys in the country. Woolf and Pollard are friends, bonded by their intellect and sense of humor. When Pollard is physically incapable of riding, he recommends Woolf to Howard as his replacement; it is Woolf who rides Seabiscuit when the stallion finally faces off against War Admiral and wins.

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THEMES Catharsis Seabiscuit’s meteoric rise in the national consciousness represented a type of catharsis, or cleansing of emotion, of all that was negative in an era marked by economic downturn, mass unemployment, and hardship. According to Hillenbrand, ‘‘America was desperate to lose itself in anything that offered affirmation.’’ People of that time identified with Seabiscuit, an unlikely hero that was a victim of situations beyond his control. With his determined success, they were afforded a vicarious victory for themselves, and a temporary release from their own troubles. Release was more than psychological, however, for horseracing provided an inexpensive form of entertainment, as well as the lure of quick riches through potentially winning bets.

The American Dream Seabiscuit personified the American dream, the belief that the underdog—human or beast— can overcome adversity and through persistence, intelligence, and hard work, rise to the top. The American dream is a concept with its roots in early European settlers who immigrated to America, seeking not only religious and political freedom but also the riches they were certain the land contained. The concept became ingrained in world consciousness, enticing countless immigrants to seek out their fortunes in the New World. Popularized by the writer Horatio Alger, Jr., the idealization of the American dream and its entrenchment into popular culture has long served as a literary theme. Seabiscuit was the embodiment of persistence and pluck, the criteria often cited as fundamental to achieving the American dream; thus, he served as a role model of sorts. The horse became ‘‘a cultural icon that transcended sport.’’ In addition to Seabiscuit’s impact on the American psyche, Charles Howard also epitomized the potential of the rags-to-riches myth. Howard parlayed twenty-one cents into millions of dollars through intelligent investing, self-marketing, and entrepreneurial thinking. Though often overshadowed by his prize horse, Howard embodied the American dream as well.

Popular Culture Although popular culture is a fairly recent avenue of study, its origins sprang from the advent of radio, which was more immediate

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than print media and allowed for the instantaneous transmission of news. During those early years of mass media, families gathered around radios to hear the latest on world events, serialized programs based on fictional characters, and live coverage of sports. For the first time, it allowed spectator sports to be followed in real time without having to actually attend the event. Further, Hillenbrand writes of Seabiscuit that in 1938, ‘‘no individual had known fame and popularity that was as intense and far-reaching.’’ As further proof of the horse’s effect on popular culture, the author notes, when the number of newspaper column inches was tallied at the end of 1938, Seabiscuit ‘‘had drawn more newspaper coverage . . . than Roosevelt . . . Hitler . . . Mussolini . . . or any other newsmaker.’’ In addition to the impact of radio, the decade heralded the advancement of trends like merchandising, marketing, and celebrity endorsements. Seabiscuit’s likeness graced everything from ashtrays, parlor games, cards, hats, and wallets to the front of a military bomber. There were even Seabiscuit Limited trains to transport fans to the track. At the extreme end of the merchandising phenomenon was a request to use the horse as an exhibit during the San Francisco World’s Fair, and gargantuan-sized billboards of the racer’s likeness draped on Manhattan skyscrapers.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY How has the experience of receiving news changed for people since the time of Seabiscuit? Compose a two-page paper discussing the attributes of radio in the early part of the twentieth century and the attributes of television today, and how each has affected society in different ways. No one thought Seabiscuit was a worthy horse until he met Tom Smith, Charles Howard, and Red Pollard. Think of a time when you overcame adversity or accomplished something that no one thought you could do. What was the situation, and how did you overcome it? Was there someone who believed in you and encouraged you? How did your accomplishment feel? Write a two-page essay about your accomplishment, and be sure to include details.

Research the history of the automobile. In a small group, discuss how the automobile changed the world. Consider what it did for mobility, for the structures and stability of families, for business prosperity, for city structures, and for the convenience of all. Create a list of pros and cons about automobiles and horse-drawn carriages. In your group design two advertisements: one advocating the advantages of the automobile, and the other recommending rather the advantages of the horse-drawn carriage.

Research three famous thoroughbred American racehorses. Some good examples would be horses that have won the Triple Crown (the Preakness Stakes, the Kentucky Derby, and the Belmont Stakes). Select one of the three and write your own one-page biography of the animal. Include any humans—trainers, jockeys, owners—that have been a part of the horse’s success.

The Sporting Life Sport has long been an obsession for many Americans, as the abundance of published works on a variety of athletic contests will attest. Obviously, in a work that revolves around horseracing, the sporting life is a central theme. From the high life enjoyed by the ones who could afford to own competitive thoroughbreds to the lowly existence of stable boys and the grueling pace of unseasoned jockeys, Hillenbrand depicts a rounded and vivid picture of the sport of kings. The life of jockeys is displayed in detail, as is the adrenaline-filled excitement of the races. Seabiscuit shows the sacrifices that athletes are willing to make for the love of the sport. According to Hillenbrand, ‘‘A jockey’s life was nothing short of appalling.’’ The controlling factor in a jockey’s life was the scale; he and his mount were allowed only so much weight in order to compete. Riders literally starved themselves and used purgatives in order to lose weight. Hillenbrand writes, ‘‘Most walked

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around in a state of critical dehydration and malnutrition and as a result were irritable, volatile, light-headed, bleary, nauseated, gaunt, and crampy.’’

The Wounded Hero The theme of the wounded hero is one in which the hero overcomes great adversity— physical, mental, or emotional—in order to fulfill his or her destiny. Each of the protagonists in Seabiscuit deals with individual demons as well as some type of physical or psychological injury. Howard suffers through the death of his son and the subsequent guilt he feels at supplying the means of that death, the automobile. Smith surrenders his isolation and resistance to social involvement to deal with the press and the fans. Seabiscuit and Pollard both overcome mistreatment and extensive physical injuries to triumph in the end.

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characters, as well as the vast numbers of others who cheer the horses to victory. Hillenbrand’s passages about the time period offer readers familiarity not only with the life of the racetrack circuit but also the popular culture, styles, and values of the 1930s. Hillenbrand researched Seabiscuit’s story by watching old newsreel footage, interviewing dozens of persons who were involved in racing during the decade, and piecing together newspaper clippings. She employs an omniscient third-person narrator, one who stands outside the story but can wander in and out of the thoughts of her characters. Although some of the actual dialogue was recreated and some of the thought processes derived, she endeavors to be true to the historic context as well as to the character makeup of the persons about whom she is writing.

Sense of Place STYLE Biography Traditionally, a biography represents the life or a portion of the life of a single person, usually someone of import or historical significance. Although there are fictional predecessors, such as the classic children’s book Black Beauty (1877) by Anna Sewell, Seabiscuit is unique as the biography of a real horse. Hillenbrand broadens the definition, however, to include biography of the three principal humans who played important parts in Seabiscuit’s life— Charles Howard, Tom Smith, and Red Pollard.

Historic Nonfiction Seabiscuit is a work of nonfiction, reporting on the lives of real people and setting those lives in the historical context of real events. Although nothing is fictionalized, Hillenbrand’s style moves with the pace of a fiction novel. Her book uses some of the traditional elements of a fictional novel, such as characters, scenes, narrative arc, and climax. The story is driven by the characters and events, with few exceptions, as the lives of the men and the animals intersect and overlap. Seabiscuit is filled with social history and socioeconomic characterizations. The stratifications of class structures both before and after the Depression era are present in the main

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Since the book covers over forty years, the timeline shifts with each chapter—from the rough-and-tumble old west to the beginning of World War II. Encompassing most of the continental United States as well as Tijuana, Mexico, the primary setting of the work is the racing circuit, and the major scenes are played out in horse barns or on racetracks. Hillenbrand creates a sense of place so vivid that the reader can almost experience the aroma of the track and the barn. In essence, the setting the author creates serves as another character in the work, rather than merely as a backdrop for the action.

Anthropomorphism Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to things that are not human, a device Hillenbrand employs throughout the work. She illustrates Seabiscuit’s moods in purely human terms, discussing his pride, shame, and boredom among other qualities. She notes at various points that Seabiscuit had a ‘‘gleam in his eye’’ or that he ‘‘seemed . . . amused.’’ The other horses in the book—notably Pumpkin, Fair Knightess, and War Admiral— are also anthropomorphized. By giving the horses human characteristics, Hillenbrand creates characters that readers can identify with and root for.

Imagery Imagery is the effect of using words to paint a vivid picture in the mind of the reader.

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Hillenbrand creates imagery masterfully in her description of locale, such as when she describes the racetrack in Tijuana: ‘‘The colorful racing world that had spun itself around Tijuana withered and blew off into the sagebrush deserts.’’ She also uses vivid language in her depiction of people like Smith, who ‘‘had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility.’’ She also notes that he ‘‘had the ethereal quality of hoof prints in windblown snow.’’ Many of the images she creates, of course, relate to horseracing and to the men perched on top of the mounts. Hillenbrand writes that ‘‘to pilot a racehorse is to ride a half-ton catapult,’’ and that ‘‘jockeys squat on the pitching backs of their mounts, a task much like perching on the grille of a car while it speeds down a twisting, potholed freeway in traffic.’’ The use of images, metaphors, and similes aids readers in deeply experiencing the story.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Great Depression In 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed, and practically overnight, persons of wealth were turned into paupers. Millions of Americans lost their fortunes, their jobs, their homes, and their hope in the years that followed. Although the stock market plummet may not have precipitated the Depression, it certainly contributed to the economic misery of the period. The primary factors leading to the Depression, however, were an uneven distribution of wealth (a small group of people controlling a disproportionate amount of money and power), accumulated war debts from World War I, and the expansion of credit and installment purchasing. Although some relief was offered under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, particularly in the form of Social Security, welfare, and employment, the Depression lasted until shortly before World War II. By 1937, the year of Seabiscuit’s acclaim, the United States was in the throes of serious economic despair, few regions of the nation spared. Factories were closed in the cities, many as the result of the more than four thousand mass labor strikes during the year. Farmers and ranchers in the Midwest suffered through waves of replanting and relocation as the decade-long Dust

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Bowl wiped out crops and dislocated families. The Revenue Act increased taxes for small businesses, while offering tax breaks to larger ones, which affected many small towns. Unemployment statistics reached a staggering 20 percent, and hunger marches on state and federal capitols became commonplace. As the economic situation worsened, World War II loomed on the horizon and the Dies Committee (later named the House Un-American Activities Committee) was created, triggering pervasive paranoia among people about the possibility of Communists infiltrating groups, particularly labor unions.

Prohibition Beginning in 1919 and ending in 1933, the selling or consumption of any alcoholic beverage was illegal in the United States. Because the social climate favored moral reform, bans were also instituted for gambling and cabaret dancing. The Prohibition helped facilitate the rise of organized crime, as trafficking illegal substances became a quick way to make money. Alcohol was thus readily available if one knew where to go and had the cash to cover the purchase. Racetrack gambling, on the other hand, was somewhat more difficult to conceal; thus, thoroughbreds, their owners, and their fans began visiting wide-open Mexican border towns like Tijuana, where both gambling and alcohol were legal. When California politicians realized that much-needed revenue was leaking out of the state, they reinstituted betting at the state’s racetracks, with the government keeping a cut of all profits.

Horseracing and Betting Horseracing is one of the oldest competitive sports, dating to the domestication of the animal in prehistoric times. By the time of written records, the sport was organized in all major civilizations and was included in the first Olympic games in ancient Greece. Part of the appeal of the sport is betting on the outcome of the races, which led to the growth of the industry in the United States. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, antigambling sentiment caused many racetracks to lose revenue and close their doors. This created a subsequent wave of horseracing enthusiasts that crossed into Mexican border towns, particularly Tijuana. In the post–Depression recovery

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Chris McCarron as Charley Kurtsinger and Tobey Maguire as Red Pollard in the 2003 film version of Seabiscuit Universal/The Kobal Collection

period, states not only condoned but encouraged a resurgence of racetrack betting as long as the betting was pari-mutuel, which afforded the state coffers a share of the profits.

one of the best of 2001 by National Public Radio, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and Amazon.com, among others.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend has sold more than three million copies and topped the New York Times bestseller list for forty-two weeks. In addition, the book won a variety of awards, and was a finalist for the coveted National Book Critics Circle award. The book was also named

Critical appraisal could find little wrong with Hillenbrand’s first book-length effort. Patsy Gray, writing in Library Journal, writes, ‘‘This story of trust, optimism, and perseverance in overcoming obstacles will appeal to many readers.’’ Todd McCarthy of Variety contends that part of the work’s allure is due to the horse being ‘‘a commoner among racing’s royalty, which ultimately became the source of his mass appeal.’’ A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called the work a ‘‘captivating account of one of the sport’s legends’’ rendered in ‘‘simple, elegant prose.’’ Dennis Dodge, writing for Booklist, proclaimed the work ‘‘a remarkable testament to what four years of meticulous research and a writer’s gift for storytelling can accomplish.’’ Others noted Hillenbrand’s craft, imagery, and poetic word choice. Even Business Week, not known for flowery praise, included a glowing review that complimented the author as ‘‘a deft storyteller whose descriptions of such races are especially good, filled with images of pounding hooves and splattering mud.’’

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During the Depression, affordable diversions and hobbies were few. The chasm between rich and poor broadened, with the middle class largely swallowed up by the economic downturn. Those who were hit the hardest sought any means of diversion offered to them. Bargain seating at sporting events provided one form, and the sudden affordability of radio provided another. The most economical sporting events to attend were baseball and horse racing. Spectator numbers for both sports increased dramatically during this era.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

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A significant number of reviewers noted the parallels between Hillenbrand’s own condition (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and the perils illustrated in the work. One of the more thorough analyses, penned by Tim Morris in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, noted the success of Hillenbrand’s work as unlikely as the success of its protagonist, and compared the reading public’s encouragement of Seabiscuit to overcome the odds against him to Hillenbrand’s need to defeat her disease. Morris explored fans’ online postings to Hillenbrand and discovered a significant ‘‘crossing over’’ of the fan base from those who enjoyed the work to those who were aware of her condition. The essayist pointed out, ‘‘The book evokes a culture that has vanished for good, where noble animals and noble men and women commanded the nation’s attention by competing in a pure and elemental sport.’’ Rarely does any work garner such positive reinforcement from both the reading public and professional critics alike. Seabiscuit filled a nostalgic void much needed in the modern world, and reinforced a nation’s belief in persistence as the route to ultimate success.

CRITICISM Joyce Duncan Dr. Joyce Duncan is the Managing Editor of the Sport Literature Association, the editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, and a faculty member at East Tennessee State University. In this essay, Duncan analyzes Hillenbrand’s book as it reflects the history of a horse and an era, as well as the sentiment, innocence, pathos, and stock characters presented in the work. Seabiscuit: An American Legend is unique in many ways from the books that tend to top the bestseller lists. In an age consumed with self-help genres, reality television, and video games, Seabiscuit stands out as a work of refreshing naivete´. There is an almost childlike innocence to the narrative as Hillenbrand evokes a world where it becomes evident that the nice guy will finish first, that goodness will triumph over adversity, and that comeuppance will be served to those who deserve it. Even for those who are unaware of the true historic ending of the tale, Hillenbrand creates an aura of predictability wherein the reader, though able to guess the

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SEABISCUIT: AN AMERICAN LEGEND TRANSCENDS THE PIGEONHOLED GENRES CREATED BY CRITICS AND ENGLISH PROFESSORS; IT IS A STORY OF CREATING POSSIBILITY FROM IMPOSSIBILITY, A LAUDING OF PERSISTENCE AND A CELEBRATION OF LIFE.’’

outcome, continues reading not to find out what happens next but to achieve a satisfying closure. Echoing her quality of innocence, there is a strong sense of sentiment, and one wonders how much of Hillenbrand’s own autobiography ripples through the pages. There is a sticky sweetness attached to her characterization of the principals in the story and Hillenbrand appears to identify not only with Seabiscuit, but also with his jockey, Red Pollard. The young man is constantly pitted against physical ailments and psychological despair, but rises time and again to face the odds and become a winner. It is obvious that the author has empathy toward Pollard, even excusing such weaknesses in him as his addiction to alcohol. Despite his failings, Pollard is illustrated as a man of honor with a sympathetic heart. Through her renderings of Pollard and Seabiscuit and their numerous improbable comebacks, the author arouses pathos, feelings of pity and sympathy, accompanied by ultimate jubilation in her readers. Reading nonfiction so well-crafted that it flows like the best of page-turning fiction, propels the reader forward, figuratively running his or her own race to the end of the work. Although the book is definitely penned with polished, if somewhat reserved, language, it is reminiscent of two children’s books that preceded it. The first is the somewhat obscure Come on Seabiscuit! by Ralph Moody, originally published in 1963. Hillenbrand has in fact mentioned the Moody book as a childhood favorite, and it clearly serves as at least one source of inspiration for her more sophisticated rendering of the story. An additional tale that frequently goes unmentioned, by both Hillenbrand and her reviewers, is Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, written over a six-year period in the mid-1800s and

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depicting another biography of a horse, albeit a fictional one. There is something reminiscent of Sewell’s sympathetic approach to the treatment of horses present in Seabiscuit; however, the comparison is not restricted to the subject matter or the writing styles of the two authors. Ironically, perhaps, the commonality spills over into their lives as well. Sewell, like Hillenbrand, wrote Black Beauty, her only published major work, while she was bedridden with illness. For both women, success came quickly and book sales were phenomenal. The 1930s was not a period of calm and good feeling in the United States. However, the book, while maintaining historical accuracy, creates a portrait of a simpler time when heroes and villains were easily discerned, when camaraderie was abundant, and when families gathered round their radio together for an evening’s entertainment. Hillenbrand deftly leaves her readers nostalgic for the past. Strangely, while she writes about an earlier population seeking escape from their dreary lives, she creates a need for escapism into the past for the modern reader who covets a more pastoral moment. Recreating history can be an arduous task, particularly if information is obtained primarily through the oral recounting of events from those who lived through the period. Oral history, and particularly retrospective oral history, must always be somewhat suspect due to the passage of time and the age of those reporting. Witnesses and participants often embellish the banality of their actual experience. On the other hand, their anecdotes add a measure of local color and a sense of immediacy that help the reader almost feel the movement of the horse, the pounding of the hooves, the cheers and boos of the fans, and the aroma of the stalls. If the people had not really existed and if the book were fiction, it would be a simple task to critique the author for dealing in stereotypes and for creating flat characters that represent certain attributes or characteristics. Although the cast was not created as such, Hillenbrand imbues each with a humanity and moral quality that raises the principals in the story from the dust of history. Yet, each is representative of something bigger than a single individual. Among other stock characters in the work, there is the outsider, living on the periphery of civilization (Smith); the waif, surviving by his wits (Pollard); the self-made millionaire, personification of the

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American dream (Howard); and the underdog, who conquers all the odds against him and succeeds due to sheer pluck and perseverance (Seabiscuit). It was a time when men were men, an era when people could live off the land, outside the confines of cities and materialistic trappings. The trainer Smith, although precipitously balanced between two eras, is the archetypal cowboy, the strong and silent Gary Cooper type, as well as the original ‘‘horse whisperer.’’ Balancing his gruff and taciturn demeanor around other people, his tender coaxing of animals reveals his thinly veiled gentle nature and warm heart. From Hillenbrand’s depiction, Smith could be the prototype for every cowpoke who ever stumbled into Dodge City. Pollard, as a virtual orphan and a young man of literary acumen, is cast upon an uncaring world to make his own way. A graduate of the school of hard knocks, he is categorized as the quintessential underdog, arousing pathos and empathy and becoming an easy character to cheer to victory. Even Howard, the owner of Seabiscuit and one of the nation’s wealthiest men at the time, is depicted as one who struggled to make his way, a self-made man created through grit and ingenuity, the cornerstones of the American dream. They are rough-and-tumble men whose lives collide in a rough-and-tumble world, thus illuminating the survivor theme present in all great western motifs. In addition, the hero of the piece, an irascible thoroughbred built, Hillenbrand says, like ‘‘a cinder block’’ and enamored of eating and sleeping, rises from obscurity to become a national treasure. It is the stuff from which fairy tales and Hollywood are made. More than a happy little book about perseverance, though, Hillenbrand has created a portrait of an era—a time in which the media began to infiltrate lives and living rooms to create a nation of spectators. Much of modern popular culture, from twenty-four-hour sports channels to the merchandising of athletes, can trace its origins to the period about which she writes. In addition, the work reveals the breadth of the chasm among classes through clearly delineated verbal portraits of each of the primary characters. Hillenbrand also delves into the darker side of the sport as she explores in graphic detail the life behind the track. Jockeys, treated much like

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slaves, were frequently little more than commodities and often suffered illness or disability due to the self-imposed abuse required to meet weight requirements. It is ironic that while the horses were being pampered and catered to, the humans who guided them across finish lines were encouraged to starve themselves, forced to sleep in barn stalls, and used as currency in games of cards between stable owners.


The Horse Whisperer (1995), by Nicholas Evans, is a fictional tale of a man, much like Smith, who uses his soothing voice and kind words to communicate with horses.

Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral (2003), by Kat Shehata, is a book for young readers. The work presents a lively, illustrated, and factual account of the famous match between the two thoroughbreds.

Come on Seabiscuit! (1963), by Ralph Moody, was republished in 2003 by Bison Books after the success of Hillenbrand’s book. This work is designed for young readers and served as an inspiration for Hillenbrand and countless other readers.

The Seabiscuit Story: From the Pages of the Nation’s Most Promising Racing Magazine (2003) was edited by John McEvoy. The book would have importance for anyone interested in the news coverage of the horse’s career as it was actually taking place.

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) is about the adventurous and often difficult life of an English horse. It is considered a classic work of children’s fiction and was the first popular book to use an animal as its narrator. The book also paints a vivid picture of all aspects of society, both good and bad, in Victorian England. The Black Stallion (1941), by Walter Farley, is another of the most popular books ever written about a horse. In this tale, a boy and a horse are shipwrecked on an island together, where they form a long-lasting bond that culminates in a showdown not unlike the ‘‘Seabiscuit/War Admiral’’ showdown that took place just a few years before the book was published.

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Man O’ War (1962), another title by Walter Farley, is written in the tradition of Sewell’s Black Beauty. Farley tells the story of Seabiscuit’s legendary grandfather in this fictional biography.

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Although a book about the sport of horse races and expertise is typically aligned with sport literature, and a book that features an animal as its central figure is typically aligned with children’s literature, Seabiscuit is much more than either category would suggest. Seabiscuit: An American Legend transcends the pigeonholed genres created by critics and English professors; it is a story of creating possibility from impossibility, a lauding of persistence and a celebration of life. If it were not based in fact, the entire tale might be embraced as imagination of the highest caliber. Source: Joyce Duncan, Critical Essay on Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Tim Morris In the following excerpt, Morris draws parallels between author Hillenbrand, a sufferer of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and the against-all-odds champion she chronicled. The best-selling American sports book of the year 2001—and one of the year’s bestsellers in any genre—is Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand. The success of the book is as unlikely as the success of Seabiscuit himself. How does a book about a half-century-dead racehorse become a publishing sensation? Sales of the book don’t depend much on nostalgia, since most Americans are too young to have seen Seabiscuit race. Nor is Thoroughbred racing the cynosure of media attention that it was when Seabiscuit briefly dominated the sport in the 1930s. One can barely imagine selling such a book to a publisher in 2001, let alone to hundreds of thousands of readers. But the Biscuit always beat the odds. Overmatched at ages two and three, Seabiscuit never entered a Triple Crown race. Yet he had great success at age four, and was Horse of the Year at five (in 1938). Even then, some of his most famous races were hard-fought losses. He had a knack for coming in second in the

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WHILE ROOTING FOR THE HORSE TO COME BACK AND WIN IN THE TEXT, PEOPLE ROOT FOR THE AUTHOR TO OVERCOME DISEASE IN REAL LIFE.’’

prestigious Santa Anita Handicap; he didn’t win the race till his final outing in 1940. His story is one of continual comeback against adversity. The author of Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand, has also fought adversity. As one visitor to Hillenbrand’s on-line guestbook at www.seabiscuitonline.com says, ‘‘YOU are the Seabiscuit of us invalids!’’ Afflicted with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Hillenbrand became America’s most famous sufferer of the illness, especially after an interview on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show in April 2001. Before April 2001, entries in her guestbook center on the inspirational qualities of the horse. After April, the entries follow two main threads—one about Seabiscuit, the other about the inspiring quality of Hillenbrand’s life. The threads become entwined, even confused. While rooting for the horse to come back and win in the text, people root for the author to overcome disease in real life. The author, lovely, frail, spirited, is embraced by hundreds of readers and nonreaders who imagine themselves the cure to her problems—perhaps none so invitingly as one ‘‘fellow CFSer’’ who signs himself ‘‘Tom Smith’’ and prescribes that Hillenbrand ‘‘curl up in the hay and get the rest you need.’’ Laura Hillenbrand hardly set out to invoke such readerly concern and affection. Yet the way her readers feel about her is analogous to the way she feels toward the horses and people she writes about. As her readers summon up images of the author curling up in her bedding, or think aloud about ministering to the hair behind her ears, they more or less consciously echo passages in Seabiscuit where Hillenbrand conveys an immediate, visceral sense of the sufferings of her heroes. Time and again in the story, Seabiscuit and jockey Red Pollard achieve great things, only to be brought to earth again by the fragility of their

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bodies. In 1938, Pollard, immobilized by an injury, must watch George Woolf ride Seabiscuit in the match race against War Admiral: ‘‘He was sure he would be able to ride again. A glance at his emaciated body, jutting out a harsh angles from under the sheets, testified to the contrary.’’ Later, in 1939, it is Seabiscuit who is incapacitated as another Santa Anita Handicap approaches: The veterinarian took radiographs, which would take a while to develop. All they could do now was wait. The Howards spent their time sorting through myriad sympathy notes from fans, some of whom enclosed bottles of remedies for the horse.

You can’t send bottles of Tahitian Noni Juice through cyberspace, but in most other respects the parallel between Seabiscuit laid up in 1939 and Hillenbrand laid up in 2001 is remarkable—not least because of the outpouring of public sympathy and love. The love that the readers of Seabiscuit bear its author has precedents in literary history and sport history, if not perhaps in the genre of sport literature: one thinks of Willa Cather’s devoted circle of reader-critics, of the loving crowds worldwide that attended Muhammad Ali, of the deep connection cancer survivors feel to Lance Armstrong. Such love suggests that one reason for the success of the book is the fluid relationship among author, text, heroes, and reader that allows Hillenbrand’s audience to imagine their way into inspiring, validating, and romantic situations. ‘‘I was so taken by your story today, and would like to give you my services for free,’’ says one reader; ‘‘I would like to illustrate, paint, draw, scribble, or attend to your yard work for you.’’ Such readers claim to center their experience of literature, and possibly of life, around Hillenbrand and Seabiscuit. Even allowing for the hyperbole of fan-letter discourse, these readers feel something special. One goes so far as to reverse the coat-tails of the book’s spring publication, claiming that Hillenbrand has done more for the Triple Crown races than the Triple Crown has done for Seabiscuit: ‘‘With your emotion packed words I am sure you and you alone are responsible for the increase in interest re the Derby (up 40%) and the Preakness (up 56%).’’ Just as significant in establishing a sense of the ‘‘horizon of expectations’’ that characterizes

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Seabiscuit’s readership are remarks that connect Seabiscuit to other reading experiences. Jim Lewandowski says that Seabiscuit is ‘‘the best since I read ‘Undaunted Courage’ by Stephen Ambrose,’’ a prodigiously unironic bestseller from 1996. Andrew Abruzzese, a restaurateur, admits that ‘‘I have finished reading two books in my life. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and yours.’’ By such central measures of canonicity as this—the sense that a book is the best, or even the only, exemplar of literary quality— Seabiscuit is poised to become canonical in a way so deep as to evade the notice of academic discourse. Not all readers go as far as Sandy Mendez, who tells Hillenbrand that ‘‘I have requested your book accompany my burial.’’ But among all the tears and sighs, real or virtual, that season readers’ responses to Seabiscuit on-line, is the sense that this book has given them something irreplaceable: an inspiration, a reason to go on living, to follow a dream. This might be the moment for a scholarly puncturing of illusions, for some demonstration of the false consciousness of Hillenbrand’s farflung readership. But it may be better just to note a recurrent dynamic that drives interest in sport literature: the need for an unadulterated hero. This need—documented in founding studies in the academic field of sport literature like Michael Oriard’s Dreaming of Heroes and Robert J. Higgs’s Laurel & Thorn—continues to be felt in the 21st century. Possibly the only heroes left without feet of clay are those with shoes of iron. In tracing the appeal of Seabiscuit to its construction of an unironic hero, and to the apparently unorchestrated coupling of authorial image with that of the hero, questions of literary value seem beside the point, as they so often become in academic criticism. But Seabiscuit is clearly more than an exploitation of an available niche in American cultural discourse. It’s a nonfiction masterpiece. Such a straightforward statement seems ingenious. But without good writing, the other factors that align to produce the Seabiscuit phenomenon would not be enough. The very ingenuousness of such a bald assertion of critical value will trigger, for many academic readers, a hermeneutics of suspicion: what is wrong with this picture? Everyone is having far too good a time.

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But occasionally, the books that are revered by ‘‘naı¨ ve’’ readers can also be those that stand critical scrutiny from the most jaded readers. Honestly, I couldn’t put Seabiscuit down, either. While it is unlikely to make the Oprah Winfrey list (it is non-fiction, and its author will probably be unable to appear on the Oprah TV show, two strikes against it), Hillenbrand’s book is akin to the tales of survival and redemption preferred by Winfrey and her staff. And just as there is literary merit aplenty on the Oprah list—in the work of Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, and others—so there is exemplary imaginative writing in the work of Laura Hillenbrand. Even if one’s preferred mode is irony, there’s something to be said for the occasional splash of earnestness. Source: Tim Morris, ‘‘Seabiscuit? Come On . . . ,’’ in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Vol. 14, No. 1, Fall 2001, pp. 79–90.

Lynn Andriani In the following interview with Publishers Weekly, author Hillenbrand discusses the appeal of Seabiscuit and the people who helped the horse become a part of history. Source: Lynn Andriani, ‘‘PW Talks with Laura Hillenbrand,’’ in Publisher’s Weekly, Vol. 248, January 1, 2001, pp. 3–15.

PW: Your book Seabiscuit is about a legendary racehorse. What makes Seabiscuit’s story so special? LH: He’s unique because of the time he was in. It was the Depression, and people were trying to find ways to escape, and this ‘‘rags to riches’’ horse answered their yearning for something like that. Seabiscuit was the single biggest news-maker of 1938, and that was a really momentous year. During that time, even people who didn’t give a damn about horse racing were following him. PW: Why had, no one yet written this book? LH: In the 1930s, journalism was a lot less personal; journalists tended not to say very much about the people involved. But when I started looking into the life of Seabiscuit and the lives of those around him, I found fascinating people living a story that was improbable, breathtaking and ultimately more satisfying than any story I’d ever come across. I had to tell it.

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PW: A lot of people haven’t heard of Seabiscuit. Given that, was it difficult to sell the book? LH: I originally sold a story to American Heritage magazine, and that started everything rolling. People started saying, ‘‘You really ought to make a book out of this.’’ PW: Seabiscuit is largely a story of three men (an owner, a trainer and a jockey) with distinctly different personalities and temperaments coming together to produce a winning racehorse. How did these disparate characters affect your research? LH: One of the things I love is just how improbable it is that these three people would get together. It’s just amazing. But they all got along really well. There were times when I found conflicting stories from other people and in the press. But one of the beautiful things about horse racing is that there are extremely thorough records about races. And there were witnesses. Most of them are in their 80s and 90s, but I got a lot of first-hand accounts and I found a lot of film and photographs that could settle disputes. PW: The culture of horse racing was very different in the 1930s and ’40s than it is today. Other than the Triple Crown, many races today have only an elite following, nothing like the mass audiences of the past. Will that decrease in popularity affect the book’s readership? LH: The racing audience certainly has shrunk. Back then, everyone in America followed Seabiscuit. But I’ve tried to write this book for a general audience and I think its biggest appeal is not the sports angle; it’s the human angle. I think these people are absolutely fascinating—and would have been even if I didn’t care about horse racing.

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Dodge, Dennis, Review of Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in Booklist, Vol. 97, January 1, 2001, p. 900. Gray, Patsy E., Review of Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in Library Journal, Vol. 126, No. 6, p. 106. Hillenbrand, Laura. ‘‘A Sudden Illness—How My Life Changed,’’ in the New Yorker, Vol. 79, No. 18, p. 56. Hillenbrand, Laura, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Random House, 2001. Laura Hillenbrand, www.seabiscuitonline.com/ author.htm (May 18, 2005). McCarthy, Todd, ‘‘Well-Groomed Horse Tale,’’ in Variety, Vol. 391, January 1, 2001, p. 26. Morris, Tim, ‘‘Seabiscuit? Come On . . .,’’ in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall 2001, pp. 79–91. Review of Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 348, No. 1, p. 74.

FURTHER READING Hillenbrand, Laura, ‘‘A Sudden Illness—How My Life Changed,’’ in the New Yorker, Vol. 79, No. 18, July 7, 2003, p. 56. This article recites the origin and progression of Hillenbrand’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and notes how writing both changed and saved her life. Bowen, Edward, At the Wire: Horse Racing’s Greatest Moments, Eclipse Press, 2001. Bowen’s work chronicles many of the most famous contests in the sport, including those featuring Man o’ War, Seabiscuit’s randfather. Terkel, Studs, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, W. W. Norton, 2000. Terkel offers verbal biographies collected from dozens of persons who illustrate firsthand accounts of their lives among the turbulent socioeconomic conditions of the 1930s.

‘‘A Runt that Dominated the Sport of Kings,’’ in Business Week, No. 3725, p. 27.

Morgan, Bert, Horse Racing: The Golden Age of the Track, Chronicle Books, 2001. Morgan offers a visual compilation through his photographs that depict Triple Crown events from the 1930s through the 1960s, including Hard Tack, Seabiscuit’s father.

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The Secret Life of Bees The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, was published by Viking Press in 2002. It was the first novel by Kidd, who had already found success writing inspirational personal memoirs such as The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996). A bestseller, the novel has become a favorite of book clubs around the country, including the ‘‘Read This!’’ Book Club sponsored by the ABC network morning show, Good Morning America. The Secret Life of Bees is the story of Lily, a fourteen-year-old girl who runs away from her unloving father to search for the secrets of her dead mother’s past. The setting of the novel is South Carolina in 1964, a time when racial tensions were inflamed by the civil rights movement and white racists’ frequently violent responses to it. Against this backdrop, Lily and her housekeeper, Rosaleen, find shelter in the home of the eccentric Boatwright sisters, three African American beekeepers who worship before the statue of a Black Madonna they call ‘‘Our Lady of Chains.’’ In the Boatwright household, Lily finds love and acceptance and begins to come to terms with the guilt she feels over her mother’s death. In the novel, Kidd addresses the sometimes painful divide between races and generations through a rich tapestry of religious symbolism, imagining for the Daughters of Mary (as the Boatwrights and their small circle of fellow

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worshipers call themselves) a nurturing, personal alternative to the Catholic faith.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Sue Monk Kidd was born on August 12, 1948, and raised in the small town of Sylvester in southwestern Georgia. Her love of stories and writing developed early, inspired by her father’s storytelling and the encouragement of English teachers. During adolescence, she wrote her first stories and kept a journal, but she set aside writing to study nursing at Texas Christian University. She graduated in 1970 and worked for most of the next decade as a registered nurse and as a college instructor. During this time she married Sanford Kidd, a theology student, and had two children, Bob and Ann. Kidd rediscovered her interest in writing while living in Anderson, South Carolina, in the 1980s. She took writing courses at the local college where her husband was teaching. A personal essay that she wrote for class was accepted by Guideposts magazine and reprinted in Reader’s Digest. She soon became a successful freelancer, publishing several hundred articles of personal, inspirational nonfiction in publications such as Guideposts and serving as a contributing editor to that magazine. Kidd began publishing full-length works in the style of a spiritual memoir in 1988. In God’s Joyful Surprise, she describes the process by which she came to embrace contemplative Christianity and converted from Southern Baptism to the Episcopal Church. A second volume of memoir, When the Heart Waits, was published in 1990, and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which reflected Kidd’s growing interest in feminist theology, followed in 1996. The next year Kidd began writing The Secret Life of Bees, which was published by Viking in 2002. The novel was phenomenally successful: it spent eighty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than three million copies, and has been translated into twenty languages. It has become a favorite of book clubs since its publication, most notably the club sponsored by the ABC network morning program Good Morning America. The Secret Life of Bees also earned Kidd the recognition of her peers: it was awarded the BookSense paperback book of the year in 2004 and was nominated for the British Orange Prize.

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Sue Monk Kidd AP/Wide World Photos

Kidd published a second novel,The Mermaid Chair, to positive reviews in 2005. As of 2005, she and her husband were living in Charleston, South Carolina, where she was writer in residence at the Phoebe Pember House and an adviser to Poets & Writers, Inc.

PLOT SUMMARY Chapter 1 Lily Owens remembers the summer of 1964, when she turned fourteen years old. She begins by describing the way she would wait in her bedroom each night for the arrival of bees. Though these bees are imagined, Lily’s emotional attachment to them makes the reader wonder if they might be real. Lily’s caretaker, Rosaleen, has told her that bees swarming are an omen of death. Lily is preoccupied with death, since her mother, Deborah, died when Lily was four. She thinks often of the day her mother died and shares the incident, as well as her own guilt, with the reader. She remembers sitting on the floor of the closet as her mother hurriedly packed a suitcase. She remembers her father, T. Ray, coming home and her parents arguing.

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Then T. Ray shoved Lily, and her mother grabbed a gun from the closet shelf. The gun ended up in T. Ray’s hands, then on the floor, then in Lily’s hands. Lily remembers the sound of the gun going off. Her mother was dead. Unpopular in school and unloved by her father, Lily relies only on Rosaleen. She treasures a few objects connected to her mother: a photograph of Deborah, a pair of her white gloves, and a picture of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary mounted on wood, with ‘‘Tiburon, S.C.’’ written on the back. She keeps these items buried in a tin box in her father’s peach orchard, digging them up and imagining what sort of woman her mother was. Lily remembers that the day before she began first grade, T. Ray told her she had accidentally killed her mother. On July 2, 1964, Rosaleen is overjoyed to learn President Lyndon Johnson has signed the Civil Rights Act into law. That night, needing to feel close to someone and something, Lily heads for the orchard to dig up her tin box. T. Ray catches her outside, assuming she is meeting a boy. He punishes her in a way Lily particularly hates: by making her kneel on the kitchen floor in a pile of Martha White grits, small grains that cut into her knees. Lily accompanies Rosaleen to a Fourth of July voter-registration rally in Sylvan. Before she can register, however, Rosaleen attracts the attention of a group of men playing cards. They bait her with racial insults, and she responds by pouring tobacco juice on their shoes. A scuffle results, and Rosaleen is arrested for assault.

Chapters 2–3 The Civil Rights Act has obviously not reached Sylvan, as policeman Avery Gaston allows the locals who attacked Rosaleen to attack her again. Lily is released into T. Ray’s custody, but Rosaleen must stay behind. T. Ray tells Lily that Rosaleen will likely be killed by Franklin Posey, a notoriously vicious racist, who is one of the men she offended. Furious at his daughter’s actions, T. Ray tells Lily that her devotion to her dead mother is misplaced. Deborah had run away and left her family and, on the day she died, had planned to pack her belongings and leave permanently. Distraught and disbelieving, Lily decides to break Rosaleen out of police custody. As her world crumbles, she needs to be needed and appreciated.

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When Lily returns to town, she is told that Rosaleen has been taken to the hospital. She sneaks into Rosaleen’s hospital room, where Rosaleen admits she was beaten by Posey and other men. Lily and Rosaleen slip past the guard posted in front of her room. The two hitch a ride with driver of a cantaloupe truck who happens to be traveling to a location near Tiburon, the town noted on the back of the Black Madonna portrait. Since the picture belonged to her mother, Lily decides she will find answers there. Rosaleen and Lily quarrel when Rosaleen realizes Lily left Sylvan to pursue her own interests as much as to save her. They separate briefly but reunite and apologize to each other in a nearby creek. After spending the night sleeping in the open air, Lily and Rosaleen continue their walk into Tiburon. They come to a general store, where Lily goes to buy food. Behind the counter, she notices jars of Black Madonna Honey, decorated with the familiar image of the darkskinned Virgin Mary. The store’s proprietor tells her the honey is made by a local woman, August Boatwright, whose bright pink house is impossible to miss.

Chapter 4 Lily and Rosaleen find August’s house. A woman in the front yard is tending to boxes of bees. They are met at the door by August’s sisters, June and May. Inside their house, Lily sees a carving of a woman that resembles a ship’s masthead. Three feet tall, the woman is mostly black but has a faded red heart painted on her chest. Lily feels immediately drawn to the statue. When August enters, Lily tells her that she and Rosaleen have run away from home and have no place to go. August immediately offers to let them stay. Lily continues to lie to August, pretending she is an orphan who, with her housekeeper Rosaleen as a chaperone, is headed to a relative’s house in Virginia. August seems to accept their story and shows them around her honey-making operation. She offers them two cots in the ‘‘honey house’’ for them to use. The next morning, Lily rises early and surveys the Boatwright property. She discovers a rock wall with slips of paper stuck in its crevices.

Chapter 5 A week passes at the Boatwright household. August buys new clothes for Rosaleen, and May

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and June clean her wounds from her beating. Lily describes the role honey plays in the Boatwrights’ life: they eat it, bathe in it, take it as medicine, and make candles from it. Lily enjoys learning how to tend to August’s honeymaking machinery, and Rosaleen develops a special rapport with May. They learn May is acutely sensitive to the suffering of others. She even leads insects outside the house rather than killing them, which reminds Lily of a similar habit her mother had.

At the end of the service, the Daughters of Mary and Rosaleen touch the heart painted on Mary’s chest while June plays her cello. Lily longs to reach out to the statue, but June stops playing when she tries. Again Lily realizes her whiteness sets her apart from the others. She faints, August believes, because of the heat. In fact, Lily was both overheated and overwhelmed by the experience.

Lily’s happiness with the Boatwrights is marred only by June’s antipathy to her presence. Lily overhears June and August discussing her; for June, Lily’s whiteness makes her particularly objectionable. Lily’s self-consciousness is reinforced when she gathers around the television with Rosaleen and the Boatwrights to watch news reports of racially motivated violence. In the evening, the women say prayers in front of the black statue of Mary, which the Boatwright sisters call ‘‘Our Lady of Chains.’’

August’s assistant and godson, Zach Taylor, returns to work. Lily instantly likes the athletic and scholarly young man, and Zach reciprocates. He plans to be a lawyer, although as a black man he is pessimistic about his chances at success. He and Lily have an opportunity to spend a day alone together when August sends them to check on some of her remote hives. Lily is nervous and moody because of her attraction to Zach. Eventually, she breaks down crying, and Zach, confused, comforts her.

August lets Lily visit the hives she has stationed around nearby farms and swamps. She shows Lily the queen of one of the hives. One evening Lily asks August about the stone wall in the backyard. August explains that May built the wall as her own personal wailing wall. She tells Lily about their other sister, April, who was May’s twin. April struggled with depression after being mistreated by a racist store owner and eventually killed herself at age fifteen. May’s hypersensitivity to the misfortunes of the world resulted from the loss of her sister.

Chapter 6 Neil, June’s longtime suitor, visits the Boatwright household. June seems to love Neil, but because of an earlier disappointment in love, she cannot commit to him. The next day, a small group of Daughters of Mary arrive at the house for their Sunday religious service. August tells the story of Our Lady of Chains: originally a ship’s masthead that washed up near a South Carolina plantation, it became a source of strength and inspiration for the plantation slaves. In response, their white masters tried to take the statue away, but fifty times Our Lady escaped and returned to the slaves’ praise house without any help. It became known as ‘‘Our Lady of Chains’’ because chains were unable to hold it.

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When they return to the Boatwrights’ home, Lily finds that Rosaleen is moving from the honey house into May’s bedroom in the house. June and Neil, nearby in the garden, get into another argument, which ends with Neil leaving and June telling him not to come back. Lily is distracted by the realization that she is falling in love with Zach. Alone at night in the honey house, she looks at herself in the mirror and fantasizes about him. After Zach and Lily work closely together on the honey harvest, he gives her a gift—a notebook, to help her with her aspirations to be a writer—and they share an embrace.

Chapter 8 While they put the labels on honey jars, August informs Lily that the picture she uses on the label is one of many Black Madonnas she knows from her mother’s Catholic prayer cards. When Lily asks her why she puts the Black Madonna on her honey labels, August remembers how the Daughters of Mary reacted when they first saw the labels: ‘‘it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can come in dark skin.’’ August explains how she and her sisters inherited Our Lady of Chains from their mother, whose mother had kept it before that. To August, it represents the presence of Mary in everything. She remembers her grandmother,

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Big Mama, who first taught her beekeeping and from whom the sisters inherited their property in Tiburon. Lily and August go out on bee patrol together, and August shows Lily some of the bees’ secrets: how, for example, each member of the hive has an individual role to play. When August opens one of the hives, the bees swarm over Lily, and she not only feels the ache of losing her mother but also feels comforted by the bees. When the bees settle back in their hives, August tells Lily it is time for them to have a talk, but Lily avoids her by going inside for lunch. At lunch that day, Zach relates that the town is stirred up over the rumor that actor Jack Palance is coming to Tiburon and bringing an African American woman with him. The locals plan to stand guard in front of the town movie theater. Lily accompanies Zach to town to finish his honey deliveries. At the office of lawyer Clayton Forrest, she uses the office telephone to make a collect call to T. Ray while Zach and Forrest are occupied. T. Ray cannot answer the one question Lily called him to ask: does he know what her favorite color is? That evening Lily writes a letter to T. Ray, raging against him for his meanness, but tears it up. She prays to Our Lady of Chains for consolation and, alone with the statue in the dark, presses her hand to its heart.

Chapter 9 In particularly hot weather, August and Lily must go and water the hives. Back at the house, the women play in the sprinkler to beat the heat. When Lily gets in a tug-of-war over the sprinkler with June, the two ultimately share a laugh over the absurdity of their quarrel, a first sign that tensions between them may be thawing. Later, Lily notices May trying to lead a cockroach out of the kitchen instead of killing it, just as Lily’s mother used to do. On a hunch, Lily asks if May knew Deborah, and May tells her that Deborah once stayed in the honey house. Zach invites Lily to drive to town with him, where they find tension developing between white men guarding the movie theater and a group of young black men nearby. As Zach talks to the young men, one of them throws a bottle at the white racists. Zach is arrested with the others when he refuses to reveal which one threw the bottle. At the Boatwright household, the women decide to keep the news from May for

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fear of upsetting her. May soon finds out, though, and announces that she needs to visit her wall.

Chapter 10 When May does not return, August and the other women go outside to search for her. They find her submerged in a nearby creek, a suicide like her twin sister. Later, the police come; they interview Lily, who embellishes the cover story of why she is staying with the Boatwrights. The policeman advises her to leave the Boatwright house soon, since a white girl living in a black household is not natural. May’s body is returned to the Boatwright home, and the women hold a vigil in their living room. Zach returns from jail, anguished that his legal problems provoked May’s suicide. August tells him May made her own choice. The Daughters of Mary arrive to participate in the vigil, and Lily finally feels accepted as one of the group. On the second day of the vigil, August finds May’s suicide note. In it, May writes that she is ‘‘tired of carrying around the weight of the world’’ and tells her sisters to live. August urges June to follow her sister’s advice and marry Neil.

Chapters 11–12 While August and June mourn, Lily is left to read and write. When Zach visits, they continue their flirtation, although since his arrest he has become preoccupied with going to law school and joining the civil rights movement. The women prepare to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption, which they call Mary Day. Neil arrives to propose again, and this time, June accepts. The Mary Day festivities proceed that evening, with the Daughters of Mary performing their own version of Communion and chaining their statue of Mary in the honey house as a reenactment of the original Our Lady of Chains story. That night, Lily tells Zach she worries that he will become hardened by his anger; they share a kiss, and Zach promises Lily that one day they will be together. Lily decides she can no longer postpone her talk with August. August admits she knew Deborah was Lily’s mother all along because of the resemblance between the two of them. She tells Lily that she was the housekeeper for Deborah’s family in Virginia. Lily tells August the whole truth, about T. Ray’s abuse, Rosaleen’s run-in with the law, and, most

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painfully, the fact that she killed Deborah. August reassures her of the love everyone in the Boatwright household has for her. August tells Lily more about her mother, who moved from Virginia to South Carolina to be closer to August. She met T. Ray and married him when she became pregnant with Lily. Lily is upset to realize her mother married T. Ray because of her. August tells her that when Deborah left T. Ray, she came to stay with August, without Lily. Feeling abandoned, Lily claims she hates her mother. August admits Deborah made a terrible mistake but tried to make up for it and was returning for Lily when she died.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

The Secret Life of Bees (2002) is available on audio cassette and audio CD in both abridged and unabridged versions. An audio version can also be downloaded from audible.com. A movie adaptation of the book is forthcoming from Fox Searchlight.

Chapters 13–14 The next day, the Daughters of Mary remove the statue from the honey house and together lift the chains from it. Then they all, including Lily, anoint the black Mary with honey. After lunch, they wash off the statue and return it to the parlor. August gives Lily a hatbox full of her mother’s possessions, including a pin and a picture of Lily with her mother. Looking at the picture, Lily can finally believe her mother loved her. Lily spends her days by the river, pondering her mother’s life. Rosaleen, meanwhile, has decided to finally register to vote. Lily calls Zach, who tells her he plans to attend the white high school at the start of the next school year. August takes her out to the beehives to show her what happens to a hive when the queen has died. She wants Lily to understand that Our Lady of Chains resides inside her and will always be a source of strength.

August as a small sign that he wants what is best for her. As fall arrives, Lily finds peace in her new life in Tiburon. Forrest works to clear the charges in Sylvan against her and Rosaleen, and she attends high school with Zach, who weathers the taunts of white classmates. Lily keeps May’s wall now and prays in front of the Mary each day.

CHARACTERS August Boatwright

Lily is alone one afternoon at the Boatwright house when T. Ray shows up. He traced the collect call she made to him. He sees a pin of Deborah’s that August gave Lily and recognizes it as the birthday present he gave to his wife years ago. Overwhelmed by memories of Deborah, T. Ray temporarily confuses his daughter for his wife and hits Lily. He recovers his senses but insists she must come home with him, despite her wishes. August returns, flanked by the Daughters of Mary, and when she asks T. Ray to let Lily stay, he relents. Lily chases after T. Ray as he drives off, needing to ask him once more if she truly killed Deborah. T. Ray tells her she did not mean to, but she did pull the trigger. Lily tries to take his leaving her with

August Boatwright is the oldest of three sisters who live together in the town of Tiburon, South Carolina. August raises bees and sells their honey. The picture of the Black Madonna on the label of her honey jars leads Lily and Rosaleen to her home. As a young woman, August was housekeeper to the family of Lily’s mother, Deborah, who shortly before her death lived with the Boatwright sisters in Tiburon when she left Lily’s father. August is the head of the Boatwright household and also the leader of the small group of worshipers of Our Lady of Chains, a ship’s masthead that became a symbol of the Virgin Mary and of resistance to slavery. The statue and its story, as well as their bright pink house and the beehives, are all inheritances from August’s grandmother, Big Mama. August’s spiritual beliefs and general outlook on life are influenced greatly by her beekeeping. She is also an avid

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reader, whose bedroom is filled with books about beekeeping, mythology, and the Virgin Mary. She tells Lily that though she had once been in love, she had loved her freedom too much to marry. By the end of the novel, she has become a mother figure to Lily, having taken the teenager into her home, fed and nurtured her, enrolled her in school, and bought her new clothes and furniture.

June Boatwright June Boatwright is the middle Boatwright sister. She plays her cello in the hospital rooms and homes of local people dying of terminal diseases, but is guarded with her emotions. She is a teacher who has never been able to commit to her longtime suitor, Neil, because a fiance´ left her at the altar when she was a young woman. Unlike her sisters, June initially resents the presence of Lily in the Boatwright household. She reacts badly when Lily, a white girl, reaches out to touch Our Lady of Chains during one of the group’s services. Eventually she comes to accept Lily, however. After May’s suicide, and with August’s encouragement, June finally agrees to Neil’s marriage proposal.

from field hand to caretaker of his daughter, Lily, after the death of Lily’s mother. A large, assertive woman, Rosaleen threw out an unreliable husband years ago, steals fans from a church on a hot day when the minister is too stingy to give them to her, and stands up to racists who jeer her when she attempts to register to vote. She is arrested and beaten while in police custody; once Lily helps her escape, the two of them are compelled to leave town on the journey that takes them to Tiburon. Although she is initially suspicious of the Boatwrights’ pink house, Rosaleen is readily accepted into their circle. She develops a particularly close relationship with May Boatwright, sharing May’s bedroom that May once shared with her twin sister, April. Despite grumbling over Lily’s behavior sometimes, Rosaleen is a loyal friend to the young woman and keeps her secrets until Lily is ready to come clean. After she and Lily establish themselves in Tiburon, Rosaleen finally gets her voter registration and proudly announces her intention to vote for President Lyndon Johnson’s reelection.

Clayton Forrest May Boatwright May Boatwright is the youngest Boatwright sister. Ever since the death of her twin sister, April, by suicide, May has been morbidly sensitive to the suffering of others. Watching the evening news broadcast, for example, leads to her sobbing and tearing at her hair. Her sisters try to protect her from any bad news that might upset her. As a form of therapy, May has built herself a wailing wall in the woods behind the Boatwright house; when distraught, she writes a prayer for the afflicted on a slip of paper and inserts it between the rocks of her wall. She is against hurting any living thing, and her habit of leading bugs outside instead of killing them suggests to Lily that her mother had once been in the Boatwright house. Despite her sisters’ attempts to shield her, she is devastated by the news that Zach has been arrested. She commits suicide by using a heavy rock to pin herself under the water of a nearby stream.

Rosaleen Daise Rosaleen Daise is an African American woman, around fifty years old (according to Lily she gives differing years for her birth dates), who was promoted by T. Ray Owens

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Clayton Forrest is a lawyer who sells jars of August’s honey to his clients. He has taken an informal interest in Zach’s legal aspirations and accepts visits from the young man in his law office. He comes to Zach’s aid after he is arrested, and his daughter, Becca, becomes a friend of Lily’s. He also works to clear up Lily and Rosaleen’s legal troubles in Sylvan.

Avery ‘‘Shoe’’ Gaston Avery Gaston is the policeman who arrests Rosaleen and drives her and Lily to the police station. Despite being an officer of the law, Gaston allows racist thugs to beat Rosaleen while she is in his custody.

Brother Gerald Brother Gerald is the minister at Lily’s church, Ebenezer Baptist Church. He displays a notable lack of Christian charity: he disapproves of Lily bringing a black woman, Rosaleen, into the church when they need a rest during their walk to Sylvan, and denies them fans to keep themselves cool. He attempts to press charges when Rosaleen takes two fans anyway.

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Neil Neil is the long-suffering suitor to June Boatwright, who refuses to marry him because a previous suitor left her at the altar. Neil first tries to break things off with June, but during the celebration of Mary Day, he proposes one more time. June, whose outlook on life has been changed by May’s suicide, finally accepts.

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T. Ray catches up to Lily in Tiburon, she realizes he loved her mother and was embittered by losing her. Facing a daughter who has come to resemble her mother, T. Ray briefly hallucinates that she is Deborah. He comes to his senses but is unrepentant in his bitterness. Lily tries to construe his consent to let her stay in Tiburon with August and Rosaleen as a last, unprecedented act of kindness toward her.

Lily Owens Lily Owens, the narrator of the novel, is fourteen years old and lives with her father, T. Ray, on his peach farm in the small town of Sylvan, South Carolina. Haunted by the death of her mother and abused by her brutish father, Lily runs off with her caretaker, Rosaleen, led only by a picture of a Black Madonna somehow connected to her late mother. Lily yearns for the nurturing maternal figure she never had, which she finds in August Boatwright. She is also conscious of becoming a young woman, particularly in her romantic interest in August’s assistant, Zach Taylor. Although Lily can sometimes be self-absorbed to the extent of not appreciating the difficulties other characters are facing, she shows courage and loyalty to Rosaleen in helping her escape from vengeful racists. Under the care of August and the healthful effects of honey and working outdoors, Lily begins to blossom into womanhood. She is drawn to the worship of Our Lady of Chains as a way to fill the emptiness she feels inside, although initially she is too selfconscious to touch the statue except by herself late at night. Over the course of the novel, Lily finds the motherly love she has been lacking and, more importantly, understands that a nurturing, feminine spirit already resides within her. She is thus able to begin to forgive herself for the guilt she feels over her mother’s death, as well as forgive her mother for abandoning her.

Franklin Posey Franklin Posey, according to T. Ray Owens, is Sylvan’s most notorious racist. When Rosaleen pours the juice from her snuff jug on his shoes, Posey resorts to brutal tactics to make her apologize.

Zach Taylor Zach Taylor is August Boatwright’s godson and assistant at her beekeeping business. An academically gifted teenager, Zach develops romantic feelings toward Lily, which, considering he is black and Lily is white, could have dangerous consequences for him. After Zach is arrested for being present when an acquaintance of his throws a bottle at a group of white men, he is strengthened in his resolve to become a lawyer and join the civil rights movement. As a first step, he attends the formerly segregated local high school with Lily at the start of the new school year. He promises Lily that one day, when social circumstances are different and he has made a name for himself, they will be together.

THEMES Race Relations

T. Ray Owens is the father of Lily Owens. A peach farmer, T. Ray is a strict, uncaring, and frequently abusive father. His favorite punishment is making Lily kneel in a pile of Martha White dry grits, and he administers it with little provocation. Lily’s only memory of her dead mother is inextricably intertwined with T. Ray’s violent temper; Lily’s mother drew a gun to protect her daughter and herself from his assaults, only to be shot accidentally in the struggle. Since his wife’s death, T. Ray shows affection only to his hunting dog, Snout. When

In South Carolina in 1964, people of different races lived in strictly separate worlds. The Secret Life of Bees is set in the months following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July of that year; appropriately for that summer, much of the novel is seen through the prism of race. Rosaleen’s troubles begin when she is harassed by racists on her way to register to vote, and social conventions of the segregated community keep Zach and Lily from acting on their affection for each other. Our Lady of Chains gets her name because the chains of slavery were unable to hold her. Lily initially is too self-conscious of her whiteness to touch the statue of Our Lady

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and feels she can only do so secretly. Sue Monk Kidd offers a range of responses to issues of race among her characters. Lily decides that ‘‘everybody being colorless together’’ would be the ideal situation. Zach, on the other hand, after he is arbitrarily arrested and held for days by the racist local police, becomes more dedicated to fighting racial injustice. April Boatwright killed herself after years of depression that began when she was not allowed to eat ice cream in a whitesonly establishment, and her twin sister, May, kills herself in the wake of Zach’s racially motivated arrest. By the end of the novel, race relations are changing in positive, individual ways. Rosaleen eventually registers to vote, and Zach leads the way in integrating Tiburon’s formerly segregated high school.

Search for the Mother For a child, the loss of a mother is one of the most profound of traumas. If that child has an uncaring father and no other maternal figures, the damage is compounded. In the novel, Lily’s solution is creating an elaborate fantasy about her mother, whom she imagines she will see one day in heaven. She runs away to Tiburon and finds August Boatwright because of the need to fill an emptiness within her—a ‘‘motherless place.’’ August and her sisters are part of a small group of worshipers called the Daughters of Mary, who consider their spiritual mother to be Our Lady of Chains. As a kind of controlling maternal presence, she is also symbolized in the novel by the queen bee, mother of the entire hive, who gives the hive purpose. Lily blossoms under the maternal care of August, who also teaches her that the divine mother, the Virgin Mary, is accessible everywhere, most especially inside her own heart.

The Natural World The natural world holds much symbolic and actual importance for the characters in Kidd’s novel. Rosaleen and Lily bathe in a river and sleep under the stars before they reach the Boatwright household, where August’s beekeeping has made her especially acute to the rhythms and secrets of nature. Each chapter of the novel begins with a quotation from a nonfiction work on bees and beekeeping that comments on the action that follows. The honey the bees produce is a vital part of life for the Boatwrights, who use it for its healthful properties, sell it for their livelihood, and include it in the religious rituals of the Daughters of Mary. The bees also provide

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August and Lily with life lessons about the roles people play in society and how, as a queen bee gives life to her hive, so motherhood brings life and purpose to society. Even the names of the Boatwright sisters, May, June, and August, seem to suggest a connection to the natural world and its seasonal changes as well as a love for the fertility of nature associated with warm weather.

Community of Women Through the Daughters of Mary, Kidd depicts a feminist, matriarchal alternative to the racist white male religious and civil authorities who otherwise dominate the town of Tiburon. The Boatwrights and the other Daughters worship a divine feminine presence, the Virgin Mary. The Virrgin’s nurturing qualities stand in sharp contrast to Brother Gerald, the Baptist preacher at the church in Sylvan. The Daughters’ worship revolves around shared meals and communally treasured rituals. By the end of the novel, Rosaleen and Lily both have found a place for themselves in this mostly female community, which is guided by principles of strength and grace—as when August and the Daughters stand up to T. Ray when he comes to claim Lily, firmly but without threats or violence.

The Importance of Ritual The characters in Kidd’s novel use rituals to stay connected with others as well as with the past. Early in the novel, Lily attaches ritual importance to the few items of her mother’s that she possesses. She keeps them buried in a particular spot outside and looks at them only in secret. She has a pair of gloves that she wears to imagine what her mother must have been like. May Boatwright has developed her own ritual to cope with the anxiety she feels over the misfortunes of others. She writes a prayer for the suffering party on a slip of paper and inserts the paper in a wailing wall she constructed behind the Boatwright house. After May dies, Lily takes over maintaining the wall. The most important rituals in the novel are those pertaining to Our Lady of Chains. When August tells the story of Our Lady, it is clear that the other Daughters have heard the story many times. On their annual celebration of Mary Day, they follow a ritual of chaining the statue, then anointing it with honey. They also share a Communion using honey cakes. The rituals of Our Lady connect the Daughters to the first slaves who drew strength from her, as well as

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STYLE Religious Symbolism


Each chapter of the novel begins with a quotation or quotations about bees and beekeeping. Pick a chapter and explain how the quotations from the beginning relate to the events of that chapter. Identify the character in the novel you think is the ‘‘queen bee’’ and explain why. In the novel, there are a variety of references to factual events that occurred in 1964, the year in which the novel is set. Identify one of these references and prepare a news report for the class like the ones the characters watch in the novel, explaining what has occurred. Zach and Lily promise each other that someday they will be together. Write a scene in which they meet today in their sixties. Would they end up together? Would the social conventions that kept them apart before still keep them apart today? Find another creative work—a novel, story, movie, poem, or painting—in which bees appear. What do the bees represent in that work? Explain three ways in which the symbolism of the bees in the work you found is similar to or differs from their symbolism in Kidd’s novel. May’s wailing wall behind the Boatwright house helps her cope to some extent with the traumas that occur in her life and with life generally. The Boatwright sisters also have their daily prayers and weekly services before Our Lady of Chains as important rituals in their home. What are some examples of rituals, religious or otherwise, in your own home? What functions do they serve? Write a scene that describes your family following these rituals.

In The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens is introduced to a group of women who formed a religious faith founded on the perseverance of their slave ancestors and a black wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. The symbols of their religion— not just the Madonna, but the honey from August’s hives and the chains that represent a resistance to slavery—are important to them and to the novel as a whole. Lily has actually been aware of the Black Madonna since her childhood. One of the few possessions she has to associate with her mother, who died when Lily was four years old, is an icon—a picture of a dark-skinned Mary glued to a small wooden plaque. As she comes to learn from August Boatwright, that image of Mary is only one of many dark-skinned representations of her around the world. Late in the novel, Lily looks at a book filled with these Black Madonnas and sees that the Archangel Gabriel is frequently pictured as presenting a lily to Mary to symbolize the coming birth of Jesus. Lily’s name is a religious symbol itself. This realization on her part goes along with her growing sense of self-worth.

Nature Symbolism

the generations who have passed before them. For August, particularly, they connect her to the mother and grandmother from whom she learned the rituals.

Nature symbolism is an important feature of The Secret Life of Bees, most obviously in the form of the bees August Boatwright keeps. Much of August’s understanding of life comes from the years she has spent tending to and observing the bees. She shows Lily that the bees have a ‘‘secret life,’’ that each bee has a purpose in the functioning of the hive, and that without a queen bee—the ‘‘mother of thousands,’’ as August says—the rest of the hive loses its purpose. Lily understands that what she learns about the bees can be applied to her own life. The honey the bees produce is also vital to the Boatwright household. They take it medicinally, shampoo and bathe in it, and use it for their religious rituals. The nature symbolism and religious imagery in the novel are inseparable. The bees, August explains, represent death and rebirth. Early Christians used drawings of bees to communicate in code with each other. The names of the Boatwright sisters themselves— August, May, and June—symbolize their closeness to nature and love of life, associated as they are with the warm, fertile months of the year (another sister, April, died as a teenager).

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Coming-of-Age Novel The coming-of-age novel has a rich history in Southern literature. The pains of adolescence and self-discovery that Lily undergoes are similar to those experienced by the young female main characters of other twentieth-century novels by Southern women, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946). (Those novels have other similarities to The Secret Life of Bees as well: To Kill a Mockingbird also explores racial intolerance in a small Southern town during the days of segregation, and the central relationship in The Member of the Wedding, between Frankie and her family’s housekeeper, Berenice, is much like the relationship between Lily and Rosaleen.) In these coming-of-age novels, a girl makes the first awkward steps toward maturity and gains some wisdom about the world around her. Lily’s path to maturity involves an acceptance of her conflicted feelings about the mother who abandoned her, and a spiritual awakening that allows her to discover the nurturing presence of the Black Madonna in herself. It also involves a tentative realization of her sexuality, in the form of her first romance with August’s godson and beekeeping assistant, Zach Taylor. Zach’s ambitions and the fact he is black and Lily is white lead them to promise each other that they will be together in a more tolerant future.

Storytelling Storytelling is a vital part of Southern literature, dating back at least as far as Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘‘Uncle Remus’’ stories and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883). For Southerners, storytelling can be a pastime, a folk art, and a way to pass down family histories. Kidd has said in interviews that one of her earliest inspirations as a writer growing up in Georgia was her father’s knack for storytelling. In The Secret Life of Bees, August uses stories to teach Lily. In the story of Sister Beatrix, a nun who grows tired of the convent and runs away and returns years later, disappointed with life in the outside world, to find that the Virgin Mary has been filling in for her at the convent the entire time. August later tells Lily that she intended Sister Beatrix to represent Lily’s mother, Deborah, and hoped Mary could fill in for her, providing Lily the mother figure she desperately desires. August also tells the story of the Black Madonna, Our Lady of Chains, as

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a way of reaffirming the sense of community that the Daughters of Mary feel and reminding them of the courage of their slave ancestors. The statue, originally a ship’s masthead discovered by a slave on a coastal plantation, became a source of comfort and strength to the other slaves, particularly when it shrugged off the chains the plantation owner attempts to use to lock it in the barn for fifty straight nights. August also tells Lily of the story of Aristaeus—the first beekeeper, according to Greek myth—whose bees were killed by the gods but then reborn in the body of a sacrificial bull. After that, August explains, people believed bees had the power over life and death.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Book Clubs and Inspirational Literature Book clubs have grown in popularity in the twenty-first century thanks to high-profile reading projects such as Oprah Winfrey’s televised monthly club and promotion by publishers and bookstores. Previously unknown authors have found themselves propelled up the bestseller lists through book-club promotion.The Secret Life of Bees received a similar boost after its publication in 2002 when it was selected as the Good Morning America ‘‘Read This!’’ book for October of that year. In 2003, the Penguin paperback edition of the novel was published in a format friendly to book clubs, with an author interview and questions for discussion appended to the end. Sue Monk Kidd’s novel was well poised for success as a book-club favorite because of its focus on issues of interest to women readers, the majority of book-club participants. Its predominantly female cast of characters, smalltown setting, and themes of motherhood and female friendship link it to other novels popular with reading groups, by authors such as Toni Morrison and Rebecca Wells. The book deals with race, a perennial subject of interest, but through the eyes of its white protagonist, perhaps making the issue more accessible to a broader audience. The Secret Life of Bees also appeared at a time when literature explicitly about spiritual matters was viewed with renewed interest—four months after September 11, 2001, as Laura T. Ryan points out in her article on Kidd in the Syracuse Post-Standard. Kidd’s novel is very

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much in the spirit of her earlier inspirational writing, with her main character learning to reconnect her soul to an inner feminine presence. Its success among book clubs and its inspirational message seemingly combined to give the novel enormous mainstream appeal.

Civil Rights–Era South The South in the 1960s is the setting for a large number of plays, movies, novels, and stories. Southern writers who are old enough to have lived through that era have frequently attempted to come to terms with their experiences of racism and the progress and disappointments of the civil rights movement from both sides of the color line.The Secret Life of Bees is set specifically during the immediate aftermath of the signing of Civil Rights Act in July 1964, a time marked by often brutal, racially motivated violence in the South, which is also alluded to in the novel. Lily finds in May Boatwright’s wailing wall a slip of paper that says ‘‘Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead,’’ a reference to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Alabama the previous year, in which four girls were killed. The Civil Rights Act put the force of federal law behind the constitutional rights of African Americans, particularly with respect to public accommodations such as restaurants, stores, and hotels. Voter-registration rallies such as the one Rosaleen plans to attend in the novel were common after state laws set up to make it difficult for black people to vote were struck down. Tens of thousands of black South Carolinians registered to vote in the first half of the 1960s. Still, for some African Americans, social progress did not come quickly enough. Young black men such as Zach Taylor in Kidd’s novel were increasingly drawn to more-militant groups such as Malcolm X’s Organization of AfroAmerican Unity, which he founded in 1964. Zach becomes preoccupied with the activities of such groups after his arrest.

Honeycomb with bees Copyright Ó by E. S. Ross. Reproduced by permission

its upbeat message of the power of love. Jarrod Zickefoose, writing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, suggests that the reader must force sympathy for Lily, but that ‘‘August’s deep spirituality, her security and her wisdom form a character that permeates the pages.’’ In the April 2002 Women’s Review of Books, Rosellen Brown ultimately concludes that the novel ‘‘has less sting in the end than its swarm of griefs would seem to promise,’’ but admires Kidd’s vision of ‘‘a sort of beloved community, part Oz, part ashram, part center for racial reconciliation.’’ The novel was well received in England as well, as indicated by Rachel Simhon’s review in February 23, 2002, edition of the Daily Telegraph. Simhon describes the novel as ‘‘by turns funny, sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up magic.’’

The Secret Life of Bees was met with generally positive reviews when it was published in 2002. Sue Monk Kidd had already established a reputation for herself as a writer of inspirational literature, and many reviewers seemed to approach the novel in that spirit, praising it for

As the novel became a success in book clubs and reading groups around the country, it continued to garner positive notices. Ann-Janine Morey, writing in the February 22, 2003, issue of Christian Century, observed that the racial plot of the novel was ‘‘imperfectly integrated’’ with the story of Lily’s spiritual journey, but recommends ‘‘this captivating first novel about love and forgiveness’’ to both adult and younger readers.The Secret Life of Bees sold 3.5 million

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copies and spent nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and a motion-picture adaptation is in the works. SHROUDED IN MYTH, OUR LADY OF CHAINS COMES TO REPRESENT, OVER THE COURSE OF THE

CRITICISM

NOVEL, THE MYSTERIES KIDD PORTRAYS AS THE MOST POWERFUL OF ALL: THOSE OF THE HUMAN HEART.’’

Charles Brower Brower is an editor and freelance writer. In this essay, he discusses the importance of mysteries in the characters’ lives in The Secret Life of Bees. As suggested even in its title, the driving forces behind the characters’ actions in Sue Monk Kidd’sThe Secret Life of Bees are mysteries. They may be mysteries that characters cherish—as with the kind represented by the supernatural events of the story of Our Lady of Chains recited ritually by her worshippers, the Daughters of Mary—or ones that they want desperately to resolve, as with Lily Owens’s pursuit of answers about her mother’s life and death. Characters keep secrets even from those they love, and nature seems to withhold its secrets from all except those who know how to look for them. Lily’s relationship with her mother, Deborah, whom Lily accidentally shot and killed when she was four years old, exists only in the imagination of the now fourteen-year-old teenager. Her abusive father, T. Ray, does not discuss his dead wife. Other than her memories of the day of Deborah’s death, Lily has only a few mementos of her mother—a photograph, a pair of white gloves, and, most significantly, an icon of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary—which she keeps buried in her father’s peach orchard. She digs them up occasionally and uses them to spin elaborate fantasies about the sort of woman Deborah was. The significance of the Black Madonna icon is a complete mystery to Lily, and the inscription on the back in her mother’s hand, ‘‘Tiburon, S.C.,’’ is what draws her to that small Southern town and the Boatwright sisters. Lily learns who the Black Madonna is almost immediately upon arriving in Tiburon, but this knowledge only involves her in greater mysteries. The figure of Mary that August Boatwright and her sisters call Our Lady of Chains was originally a masthead, washed up, according to their legend, from an unknown ship near a plantation on the South Carolina coast in the days of slavery. It communicated in secret with the slaves of the plantation, exhorting them

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to furtive acts of flight and resistance. Amazingly, under its own power it repeatedly escaped the chains the plantation owner used to lock it in the barn. Shrouded in myth, Our Lady of Chains comes to represent, over the course of the novel, the mysteries Kidd portrays as the most powerful of all: those of the human heart. The person who initiates Lily into these mysteries is August, beekeeper and apparent leader of the Daughters of Mary. As Lily keeps secrets from August—the truth about her life and especially the reason she has come to Tiburon—so August keeps from Lily the fact that she recognized her almost immediately from her resemblance to her mother, for whose family she served as housekeeper when Deborah was a child. Only when Lily is willing to be honest with August—and, more importantly, with herself—does August tell her about her mother. Mysteries, indeed, are a vital part of life to August. As a beekeeper, she appreciates that the life of the hive is mostly hidden within the wooden bee boxes she has spread throughout the area. Taking Lily on as a sort of apprentice, she explains to her the inner workings of the hive, ‘‘the secret life we don’t know anything about.’’ Lily imagines that she loves ‘‘the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living,’’ but her glimpse at this hidden life seems to have an overwhelming effect on her. Lost in a cloud of bees after August opens a bee box, Lily drifts into a trance in which her anguish about the ‘‘motherless place’’ within her is soothed by the queen bee, ‘‘the mother of thousands,’’ as August tells her. Other secret aspects of nature are cherished by August, for whom the advances of scientific knowledge can also mean ‘‘the end of something.’’ After watching a news report about the imminent launch of the unmanned rocket Ranger 7 to the moon, August remarks: [A]s long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it.

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She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark. . . . Now it won’t ever be the same, not after they’ve landed up there and walked around on her. She’ll be just one more big science project.

As August’s mother’s story suggests, the mysteries of nature and those of the Black Madonna are inextricably intertwined. The origins of the story of Our Lady of Chains that the Daughters of Mary listen to August recite on their annual celebration of ‘‘Mary Day’’ (the Feast of the Assumption) are unclear. August says of their worship of Our Lady of Chains that she and her sisters ‘‘take our mother’s Catholicism and mix in our own ingredients.’’ August learned the story from her grandmother, as it had been passed along through generations along with the black wooden statue. The Daughters become entranced when August tells the story, chanting at the climactic, supernatural explanation of the statue’s name—and as she does later when surrounded by bees, Lily is overwhelmed by the experience and faints. The emotional, religious, and nature themes of The Secret Life of Bees all appropriately come to a climax around the same point of the novel. Having been prevented from talking to August by her and June’s period of mourning after sister May’s suicide, Lily finds the courage finally to come clean during the Daughters’ celebration of Mary Day, when the story of Our Lady’s unsuccessful imprisonment is reenacted, the black statue wrapped in chains overnight and then anointed in honey the next day. Lily has to share her sleeping space in the honey house with the chained effigy the night after learning that her mother had abandoned Lily, at least temporarily, to her father; she lashes out violently, shattering the glass jars stored there, seething with anger over her mother’s betrayal:

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life inside her beehives, so August seems to be, more than any of the other Daughters, keeper to the secrets of Our Lady of Chains. Thus, the most important lesson she has to teach Lily about Mary is that the nurturing power of her divine motherhood—to Lily she is, like the queen bee, ‘‘mother to thousands’’—is actually located within: You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. . . .You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.

Lily’s recognition of this symbolic importance of the Mary statue enables her to begin to forgive herself for killing her mother, as well as forgiving her mother for abandoning her (an abandonment that became permanent when Deborah came back to collect Lily and, in the ensuing scuffle with her enraged husband, was accidentally shot by her daughter). Even so, in this healing process there is the acceptance of mystery: Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

With her worst fears about Deborah confirmed, Lily looks even more desperately to Our Lady and to August to fill the motherless place within her. As she is the keeper of the secrets of

Lily’s spiritual development to some extent mirrors Kidd’s own embrace of a feminist spirituality, as described in her 1996 spiritual memoir The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, the book that she wrote immediately preceding beginning work on The Secret Life of Bees. Kidd was a practicing Southern Baptist for most of the first forty years of her life but had a spiritual awakening that led her to reconnect with her feminine soul, as she terms it—‘‘a woman’s inner repository of the Divine Feminine.’’ Lily is nominally a Baptist in Kidd’s novel, but the leader of her Baptist church, Brother Gerald, is mean and cowardly. As Lily has her own spiritual awakening, she finds nourishment in the mysteries of Our Lady and the secrets of nature, as opposed to the tyranny of white authority, represented by corrupt police, an un-Christian minister, and her abusive father. Thus the novel ends with an abundance of mothering for Lily, with her summer of discovery turning into an ‘‘autumn of wonders.’’ Lily’s last line of the novel—‘‘They are the moons shining over me’’—explicitly calls to mind her and August’s conversation earlier in the novel about the mysteries of the moon and the Virgin Mary’s presence in it. With the

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I felt a powerful sadness, not because of what I’d done, as bad as that was, but because everything seemed emptied out—the feelings I’d had for her, the things I’d believed, all those stories about her I’d lived off of like they were food and water and air. Because I was the girl she’d left behind. That’s what it came down to.

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Sue Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (1996) is an account of the author’s spiritual development that suggests an autobiographical component to Lily’s development in The Secret Life of Bees. Kidd describes her dissatisfaction with the conservative Southern Baptist faith in which she was raised and her embrace of a feminist spirituality.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is the only novel by Harper Lee. Like The Secret Life of Bees, it is the story of a young girl coming of age in a racially divided Southern town. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a popular, Oscar-winning motion picture in 1962. Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) offers a different perspective on the Virgin Mary than Kidd’s in The Secret Life of Bees.

acceptance of mystery comes a measure of serenity in Lily’s life. Source: Charles Brower, Critical Essay on The Secret Life of Bees, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Anne-Janine Morey In the following essay, Morey discusses how Kidd mingles historical realism and fairy-tale elements in the novel. Ten years ago Sue Monk Kidd was a traditionally grounded Christian writer. But like her engaging narrator Lily Owens, Kidd is on a spiritual journey, heralded by her 1996 nonfiction work The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and confirmed in this captivating first novel about love and forgiveness. Guided by bees and a group of women devoted to a black Madonna, 14-year-old Lily Owens embarks upon a

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Warner, who is also a fiction writer, discusses many symbolic usages of the image of Mary throughout history, including Black Madonnas, and argues that most portrayals of Mary in the Catholic tradition have been used to make women feel inferior. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (1989), compiled by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, is the companion volume to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. It offers firsthand accounts from real-life counterparts to Rosaleen and Zach Taylor, African Americans who stood up for their rights to vote and patronize public establishments.

Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey— The Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World (2005), by Holley Bishop, is a history of beekeeping, a description of life inside a hive, and a personal account of the author’s obsession with bees and honey.

spiritual quest that carries her through the shadow of racism and her own spiritual suffering and brings her to adulthood. The context for her quest is South Carolina in 1964, a transformative year for civil rights. America had survived the fury and sorrow of 1963: the murder of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The next year brought the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the murder of three civil rights workers. Against this backdrop and often in conversation with these events, Lily and Rosaleen, a black woman who acts as her stand-in mother, flee the dubious charms of Sylvan, South Carolina. Lily is running away from her father, T-Ray, who seems to care more for his dog than his daughter. She is an articulate, socially awkward teenager whose memory of her mother comes

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from her fourth year, when her mother was killed in a domestic dispute. Lily suspects she may be partially responsible for her mother’s death, and her guilty hunger for parental love is the emotional axis of the novel. When Rosaleen gets arrested during her attempt to register to vote, Lily liberates her from the hospital where she has been incarcerated, and the fugitives make their way to Tiburon, South Carolina. There a trio of beekeeping sisters, May, June and August, whose self-sufficient business produces Black Madonna honey and a remarkable alternative religious community, takes them in. In the sitting room of the house is a wooden statue of a black Madonna, rescued from an old ship prow. A faded red heart is painted on her breast, and she extends her fisted arm ‘‘like she could straighten you out if necessary.’’ Every evening the sisters kneel and pray before this figure, whom they call ‘‘Our Lady of Chains,’’ creating their own liturgy and rituals from a blend of Catholicism, slave stories, African traditions, Judaism and any number of meditative traditions. Every year the household observes ‘‘Mary Day,’’ and the legend of the chains is reenacted with music, dance and food. Lily, a sometime Baptist, is captivated by the woman-centered practices of the ‘‘calendar sisters.’’ She learns that traditionally the Madonna is sometimes associated with honey and beekeeping, and she discovers how the creative life of the hive becomes a symbol of the living heart of the great Mother. The hum of the hive is the ‘‘oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.’’ Once August’s mother heard the bees ‘‘singing the words to the Christmas story right out of the gospel of Luke.’’ Indeed, the hidden throb of the hive swells from the place where ‘‘everything is sung to life.’’ Like the life-force of bee-hum, Mary’s spirit is ‘‘hidden everywhere. Her heart a cup of fierceness tucked among ordinary things,’’ observes Lily. Imperfectly integrated with her spiritual journey is Lily’s account of racism, as Rosaleen prepares again to register to vote, and a neighbor is arrested on trumped-up assault charges during an altercation with local racists. Because Lily is so absorbed in her own emotional deprivation, these events finally take on secondary importance, and there is a tidiness to the novel’s conclusion that does not do justice to the powerful forces that have been invoked. It’s

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understandable why sister June might have been suspicious of this white girl who wants to listen into their lives and finally take up residence. It’s still all about her at the end. Despite the historical realism of the novel, there is a fairy-tale quality to it. Three wise black women rule a magical universe of sweetness and organic communion and offer their healing to weary travelers. Lily is an appealing narrator, but sometimes she seems much younger than 14 and sometimes much older. August is given to speeches telling us wise things we might better have seen than heard, and I found Mary’s identity as the mother of sorrows unconvincing. But these are minor criticisms. Though adults will findThe Secret Life of Bees a satisfying read, the clarity of the novel’s prose will make it appealing to a younger audience as well. I’ll be passing it on to my middle-school daughter for its warm invitation to think about mother love and forgiveness. Source: Anne-Janine Morey, ‘‘The Secret Life of Bees,’’ in Christian Century, Vol. 120, No. 4, February 22, 2003, pp. 68–70.

Heide Schlumpf In the following excerpt, Kidd discusses the religious symbolism of the Black Madonna and the theme of racism in the novel. Sue Monk Kidd was happily writing inspirational essays for Christian magazines, driving carpool for her two kids, and generally being a good Southern Baptist wife and mother when she found herself in the midst of a feminist awakening. That spiritual journey led her to join the Episcopal Church and affected nearly every aspect of her life, including her writing. But she could have never imagined where she would end up—on the bestseller list. After chronicling her transformation in two spiritual memoirs—When the Heart Waits (1990) and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996), both by HarpersSanFrancisco—she turned to her first love: fiction. Her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, published last year by Viking, has sold more than 1 million copies and been on the bestseller list for the better part of a year. Although ostensibly about a young girl’s coming of age in the South in the 1960s, it also has been called ‘‘one of the more interesting books about Mary’’ by Publishers Weekly.

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THERE IS NO IMAGE THAT CREATES AN ADEQUATE PICTURE OF GOD, BUT WE HAVE TO HAVE A WAY TO SPEAK ABOUT GOD, AND IN ORDER TO DO THAT, WE HAVE TO USE IMAGES AND FORMS AND SYMBOLS AND METAPHOR AND LANGUAGE.’’

It’s a pivotal thing for a woman, psychologically and spiritually. They often are able to break free of a lot of silence, dependence, even self-hating. I have seen this, and it is true in my own life. It has profound and pervasive implications for women and for little girls. As a Protestant, how did you become so close to Mary?

Our Lady of Czestochowa, or the Black Madonna Nicolas Sapieha/Art Resource, NY

Mary had been left out of my experience completely. When Lily in the novel says, ‘‘We didn’t allow Mary in our church except Christmas,’’ that was really Sue speaking, and that was true of my experience. I had no relationship really with Mary other than this sort of Christmas figure that appeared now and then.

My understanding of the divine is that God is neither male nor female. I believe that God is beyond gender. As theologian Sallie McFague says, ‘‘God is she, he, and neither.’’ I really believe that is true.

When I had my own feminist spiritual awakening, as I describe in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, I went on a quest for images of the divine feminine. Mary wasn’t one of the first images I found. But then I began to wonder about the Christian tradition, because my roots there are deep and important. So I looked at the threads of the sacred feminine in our tradition. Sometimes I wish they were stronger, but they’re there.

There is no image that creates an adequate picture of God, but we have to have a way to speak about God, and in order to do that, we have to use images and forms and symbols and metaphor and language. The crux of it is we want these images and forms and symbols to be inclusive. Religion has mostly told us that there was only one form or one image, and that is male, so we’ve had a rather limited picture of God.

I first discovered icons of the Black Madonna at a Greek Orthodox convent in Greece, and later at a Benedictine monastery in Switzerland, where this very dark-skinned Black Madonna was enthroned and they sang ‘‘Salve Regina’’ to her. I saw in their faces how this symbol functioned within the Catholic Church, how it kept alive this enormously important feminine aspect within religion.

It’s very important, as August pointed out, for us to understand that the image of God can be in a feminine form, too, or a feminine symbol. When that happens, women are able to wake up in profound ways to their own spiritual depths.

Then I began to cultivate my own relationship with the Black Madonna and with Mary in general. I began to read about her, put icons of Mary in my study, in my prayer room. I bought a rosary. As a Protestant, it was really quite new. I

So do you believe God is a woman?

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was sort of a blank slate, because I didn’t have all this background with Mary. I saw her as carrying such a fierce independence, almost a dissidence, about her.

be long and painful but ultimately very freeing. Often we have to let go of so many things, and at the time it feels like loss. But in essence we’re really stepping into our destiny.

Of course, that is not how most Catholics see Mary. They have experienced a very white madonna.

I think dissidents and mystics are kind of like first cousins. A mystic is one who encounters and follows the divine voice within him or herself, even when it veers from tradition or the convention. I think a dissident does the same thing. Dissidents listen to the dictates of their own conscience. A dissident is one who must come to know what his or her truth is, which is really difficult, and then have the courage to stand by that truth and voice that truth, sometimes even in the face of enormous backlash.

Yes, a lot of Mary’s independence has been whitewashed in the white Mary. She got herself tamed, and that was not particularly helpful for a lot of women in the church. The Black Madonna is a whole other story. Her darkness has great power in it. She becomes a flashpoint for independent spirit, for women conjuring up their own strength and their own power, being their own authority. Which is why in the novel the masthead Black Madonna has her fist balled up. I didn’t mean that as an image or symbol of aggression; I meant it as an image that could reflect this great sense of dignity and empowerment and authority that the Black Madonna has. She also has a subversive streak in her, which I resonate with. Yes, I’m a Christian, but I’m pretty much a dissident sort of Christian in a lot of ways. The Black Madonna is not submissive. You rarely will see her with the dipped chin, the lowered eyes, that kind of handmaiden look. In most other images she looks directly at you with a stare that rattles your bones. She has that powerful, fierce look about her. In many cases she was the Madonna of oppressed people. I think we have a large frontier here, ways to begin to develop and understand powerful divine feminine images that come right out of our Christian tradition and see how they can begin to reflect what is missing to us. You often describe yourself as a dissident. What does that mean to you? In some ways I’m not particularly dissident at all. I was always the ‘‘good girl.’’ But then I began to wake up to all kinds of things about Christianity, things that had been left out, the lack of inclusion. I was on the threshold of entering my 40s, and I began a long process of looking at my life as a woman and what it meant to be spiritual as a woman.

Do you think things have improved since the ’60s? We have come a long way since 1964. At the same time, we have so much farther to go. We still have not figured this out the way we need to, but we have made strides. One thing we need are new images, images of unity and inclusion. As a human family we have to expand our hearts. That’s why I put the heart on the Black Madonna in the novel and had the characters come and touch it. What I was suggesting is that there is a wisdom in the heart of the Black Madonna and we must make contact with this or we are not going to survive. I think it’s urgent that we begin to widen out our hearts and become more compassionate. You have written two books of spiritual memoir. Now that you’re written a novel, how do you feel about memoir? I want to write another memoir. In my spiritual journey I need to give voice to what’s going on in my soul. Sometimes I wish that wasn’t so because it makes me feel very vulnerable and exposed, and that’s not exactly comfortable. I’m an introverted, contemplative person who loves her solitude, but I have this really strong soulful compulsion to write about my spiritual experience. So many things I’ve experienced become somehow finished for me when I’m able to write them in a memoir.

It was a profound awakening, and initially very tumultuous, as I describe in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. It was not a comfortable place for me to find myself, and yet I was compelled to follow my own truth. The journey can

It sounds so selfish to be focusing on your own experiences in writing, poring over them and dissecting them. But I found it so freeing. It helps us transcend our experience; it frees us from the ego in a strange way. I guess it is a paradox.

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Is that why spiritual memoir has become such a popular genre these days? Yes. People really respond to it. We want to read other people’s experience in order to understand our own. And writers are writing it to understand it in order to step beyond it. There are common themes in both your fiction and your nonfiction. Is that intentional?

Kidd, Sue Monk, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

I think I really am at heart a fiction writer who took a side trip with my non-fiction writing for a while. I’m sure I will write other nonfiction books, but at my core I’m a fiction writer. And as a fiction writer, I must tell a true story that comes out of my own depths, my own unconscious. It won’t be factually true, but true to life, true to the deep human pathos we all experience and also the kind of overcoming and healing that we can experience. I didn’t set out to include themes from my nonfiction in my fiction. I don’t think we should set up a social agenda for fiction writing and then try to write a story to make a point. That was never in my mind. But if you write your most authentic story—what you’re put here to tell—it does weave together your own experiences and ideas. It’s just a natural process. I’m a spiritual person. My orientation to the world is very spiritual. So if I write authentically it’s going to reflect my own spiritual orientation and view. As a person with a spiritual slant, I don’t just want to mirror a society or culture that is lost and filled with hopelessness. There are enough books about that. I think writers can reflect the reality of the world we live in, but we can go beyond that and also say there is hope, and there is transformation, and there is this transcendent power of love that can change our lives.

Simhon, Rachel, ‘‘Honey Is the Balm,’’ Daily Telegraph (London), www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/ arts/2002/02/24/bobees23.xml (February 23, 2002)

Source: Heidi Schlumpf, ‘‘All Abuzz about the Black Madonna: An Interview with Sue Monk Kidd,’’ in U.S. Catholic, Vol. 68, No. 11, November 2003, pp. 26–30.

SOURCES Brown, Rosellen, ‘‘Honey Child,’’ in the Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 19, Issue 7, April 2002, p. 11.

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———, The Secret Life of Bees, Penguin, 2003. Morey, Ann-Janine, ‘‘The Secret Life of Bees,’’ in Christian Century, Vol. 120, Issue 4, pp. 68–70. Ryan, Laura T., ‘‘A Dream No Longer Deferred,’’ in the Syracuse Post-Standard, March 13, 2005, p. 4.

Zickefoose, Jarrod, ‘‘Alternate Worlds, Past Passions in These Coming-of-Age Stories,’’ in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 17, 2001, p. J11.

FURTHER READING Begg, Ean C. M., The Cult of the Black Virgin, Penguin, 1997. Begg identifies some five hundred occurrences of Black Madonnas around the world. The author associates the dark-skinned Madonnas with paganism and Gnostic Christianity. Flynn, Nick, Blind Huber, Greywolf, 2002. Flynn’s poetry collection is based around the life of Frenchman François Hubert, a seventeenth-century blind beekeeper, whose lifelong study of bees was responsible for much of the understanding of bees’ behavior. Johnson, Elizabeth A., She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, Crossroad, 1992. Johnson’s collection is considered one of the best basic works on the subject. It explains many of the feminist underpinnings to Kidd’s portrayal of Our Lady of Chains in the novel. Moody, Anne, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Doubleday, 1968. Moody’s firsthand account of growing up as an African American in the segregated South and participating in civil-rights protests is a vivid depiction of events referred to in The Secret Life of Bees. Tate, Linda, A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South, University of Georgia Press, 1994. This survey of Southern women fiction writers since World War II helps put Kidd’s novel into a context of the Southern novel in general.

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The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah Published on June 8, 2004, Song of Susannah is not the type of stand-alone horror novel that made Stephen King one of the world’s bestselling authors. Instead, it is the sixth book of a seven-volume series titled ‘‘The Dark Tower.’’ The series was completed over the course of more than thirty years; King wrote the first sentence of what would become the series’ first volume, The Gunslinger, in 1972, and the final volume, itself titled The Dark Tower, was published on September 21, 2004. The series has its share of what readers have come to expect from King: page-turning suspense, horrifying evil in the form of both humans and monsters, gore, and often unpleasant fates for both good characters and bad.

STEPHEN KING 2004

But there are many other elements mixed in, including a J. R. R. Tolkien-style fantasy realm called Mid-World, where King presents large-scale battles, sorcery, and strange creatures like Oy, a kind of talking dog called a billy-bumbler. Also influential are 1960s spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood, on whose ‘‘man with no name’’ King drew for the series’ gunslinger hero, Roland Deschain. There are borrowings from science fiction, including robots and a thematic concern with the dehumanizing effects of modern technology. And there is realistic drama: one main character, Brooklyn-born Eddie Dean, must overcome heroin addiction.

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All these styles and genres merge into an epic quest, pitting Roland against evil forces that would topple the Dark Tower and destroy the universe.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Probably the best-known, bestselling, and most prolific writer of his time, Stephen King was born to working-class parents in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. When King was two, his father, a vacuum salesman, left the house for a pack of cigarettes and never returned, abandoning his wife and two sons. King’s mother, Ruth, worked long hours at low-paying jobs to support her family. She also managed to introduce her sons to reading, giving King his first taste of horror fiction, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, at age seven. Later, King discovered other books, including horror stories by H. P. Lovecraft and original short stories his father had written and left behind in his aunt’s attic. In elementary school, King was already writing his own stories and selling them to his schoolmates during recess. In high school, he often gathered friends at his home and entertained them by reading his work. King studied English at the University of Maine at Orono and wrote a regular column called ‘‘King’s Garbage Truck’’ for the school newspaper, in which he reviewed movies, music, and books. He also composed a sci-fi novel, The Long Walk, which he would publish under the pseudonym Richard Bachman ten years later. In 1971, King married Tabitha Spruce, whom he had met at the University of Maine. The couple soon had children, and the family lived in a modest trailer in Hermon, Maine. Most of their meager income came from King’s earnings as a high school English teacher, but he also sold some short stories to men’s magazines. In 1973, he sold the novel Carrie to Doubleday. The novel tells the story of a vengeful high school reject with telekinetic power. Although his original advance for the book was only $2,500, the paperback rights to Carrie sold to Signet for an astounding $400,000. An

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Stephen King AP/Wide World Photos

unprecedented run of bestselling novels and short story collections followed, including ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Cujo (1981), The Tommyknockers (1987), Hearts in Atlantis (1999), and From a Buick 8 (2002). Many of King’s works have been adapted into high-profile movies and television miniseries. Once a heavy drinker and smoker, King swore off drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s. In 1999, a van struck and critically injured King while he was walking near his home. After his recovery, he resumed work on an ambitious fantasy series that many readers regard as his greatest accomplishment. Started in 1972 but not published until 1982, the first volume, The Gunslinger, introduced readers to the world of the Dark Tower. King wrote the next four volumes of the series over a period of twenty-one years, between numerous other novels and writing projects. The final two volumes, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower, were published within months of each other in 2004.

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PLOT SUMMARY The chapters of Song of Susannah are called ‘‘Stanzas,’’ reflecting a musical theme that recurs throughout the narrative.

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This chapter, and each one that follows, ends with a pair of rhyming, sing-song four-line verses, the first called a ‘‘stave’’ and the second a ‘‘response.’’

Stanza 2: The Persistence of Magic Stanza 1: Beamquake Song of Susannah picks up where the previous volume of ‘‘The Dark Tower’’ series, Wolves of the Calla, left off. The hero Roland Deschain and his followers—Eddie Dean, twelve-year-old Jake Chambers, and Catholic priest Donald Frank (‘‘Pere’’) Callahan—are in the fantasy realm called Mid-World. They have just saved a town (or ‘‘calla’’) from an army of robot wolves. But they remain in a state of anxiety because one of their number, Eddie Dean’s wife Susannah Dean, is pregnant in supernatural fashion with what they believe to be a cannibalistic monster and is no longer in Mid-World. She has gone through a magic portal, and entered New York City in the year 1999. The group confers with the Manni, town elders who possess magical powers, about the possibility of opening a portal to the other world; then Jake and Father Callahan could follow Susannah and try to stop her from bearing the child. Roland and Eddie would also cross over from Mid-World, but would enter at Maine in the year 1977. Their task would be to purchase a vacant lot in Manhattan owned by a book dealer named Calvin Tower before it is secured by their enemies. On this lot grows a rose essential to the preservation of the Dark Tower, which is the ultimate goal of Roland’s quest. The sinister-sounding Dark Tower is not evil, but rather serves as a linchpin for the entire universe, including Mid-World, In-World (where Roland originates), and all other worlds. If the Dark Tower falls, there will be nothing left but Discordia, or chaos. The Dark Tower will fall if the six beams that support it are broken. Beings called ‘‘breakers’’ are attempting to do just that, and after Roland gets the Manni to agree to help them cross over from Mid-World, one of the beams that supports the Dark Tower is broken. Mid-World is shaken; buildings collapse. The success of Roland’s quest, already urgent, becomes absolutely crucial.

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Roland, Eddie Dean, Jake with his pet billy-bumbler Oy, and Father Callahan meet up with Henchick, head of the Manni, and forty men. The Manni will accompany them to the magic portal called the Unfound Door that lies in the Cave of Voices. Before they depart, Callahan wonders about his existence; he has discovered a book called ’Salem’s Lot, by a man named Stephen King. This novel describes Callahan’s life back in a small town in Maine fighting vampires. On their way to the portal, Roland and company pass the place where they defeated the robot wolves. The wolves’ bodies, they discover, have been removed from the battlefield by the townsfolk and piled up in preparation for an enormous funeral pyre. They also pass Susannah’s empty wheelchair. (Susannah lost her legs in an earlier volume, when pushed in front of a subway by a villain named Jack Mort.) The group climbs a path and arrives at the Cave of the Voices. They wonder whether enough magic remains in Mid-World to open the portal, and Henchick reassures them. An elaborate ritual ensues, with Jake swinging a magic ‘‘plumb-bob.’’ The portal opens, and Jake and Callahan are whisked into New York City, 1999.

Stanza 3: Trudy and Mia The chapter begins with Susannah’s entry from Mid-World into New York in 1999, as witnessed by a passerby, Trudy Damascus, on June 19, between 1:18 and 1:19 in the afternoon. In that moment, Trudy turns from hardheaded skeptic absorbed in her work as an accountant into someone who, as she walks along Second Avenue, personally sees a woman appear out of thin air. The woman she sees is African American; at first she has no legs, but then she grows legs which are, surprisingly, those of a white person. The white legs are a symptom of her being possessed by a (white) demoness named Mia. She carries a bowling bag. She has no shoes. She demands Trudy give her the shoes

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she carries and threatens her, telling her not to report to the police what she witnessed.

removes this same turtle from the lining of the bowling bag.

Still, Trudy reports what she saw to a disbelieving police officer, then returns to work. Later, she revisits the spot where Susannah appeared and hears a mysterious humming sound. This takes place near the vacant lot where the red rose grows—the rose that Roland must help to preserve. The lot is next to a skyscraper, 2 Hammarskjo¨ld Plaza, which is also one form the Dark Tower takes in this world.

This magic turtle allows Susannah to hypnotize and control an expensively dressed man named Mathiessen van Wyck, assistant to the Swedish ambassador for the United Nations. Susannah takes his cash and orders him to reserve a room for her at the Plaza Park Hotel, then commands him to forget everything.

Stanza 4: Susannah’s Dogan Susannah recalls her recent past, the fight with the robot wolves, and Mia dragging her through the portal from Mid-World into New York. She now sits on a park bench talking with Mia, who is pregnant and shares her body. They both experience labor pains. Susannah looks at a newspaper and discovers the year: 1999. She recalls her distant past, in the 1960s, when she took part in the civil rights movement, and realizes many people she knew then are now likely dead. Susannah Dean is actually three people, including Mia. The other two, both African American, are Odetta Holmes, a civil rights activist, and Detta Walker, a former prostitute. When the latter speaks the voice is harsh, profane, slangy, and aggressive. The labor pains intensify. Mia tells Susannah she needs to delay the birth. Susannah retreats to her Dogan, a kind of imagined mental space full of dials and monitors that allow her to observe herself on screen. Turning one of these dials allows her to put the baby inside her to sleep. She uses a microphone to send a message to her husband, Eddie Dean, telling him where she is. Susannah returns from the Dogan. Mia insists on helping her find a private space and a telephone. Susannah agrees.

Stanza 5: The Turtle Mia and Susannah discuss whether they should return to Mid-World for a palaver, or a chat, to exchange information. Then Susannah has a vision of Eddie Dean and Callahan from before the battle with the robot wolves. They have the bowling bag she now carries, and they discover something hidden in the lining—a small ivory statue of a turtle. Back in New York, she

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Susannah goes to the hotel, which she discovers has recently been bought by North Central Positronics, a corporation run by the evil forces who wish to topple the Dark Tower. At the hotel, she uses the turtle to hypnotize a desk clerk, takes the elevator to room 1919, and puts her bowling bag in the room’s safe. While waiting for Mia to receive her phone call, they agree to have their palaver.

Stanza 6: The Castle Allure For their palaver, Mia transports herself and Susannah Dean to what Mia tells her is Discordia or End-World. They are separate— Susannah legless in a cart, Mia a beautiful pregnant woman. In exchange for Susannah’s promise of continued help, Mia reveals she is a demon, and her child, or chap, is Roland’s; the child will be called Mordred, and will serve the Crimson King. The Crimson King is a kind of Satan, and will rule in the chaos that follows the toppling of the Dark Tower. Mia also explains that the Crimson King’s power has increased because humans have replaced faith and magic with rationalism and machines, which will eventually run down. Susannah tries to convince Mia that the beings who made her pregnant cannot be trusted, but their palaver is interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. Back in the hotel, Mia answers. It is an agent of the Crimson King named Richard P. Sayre. Sayre reassures Mia and tells her where she must go to have her baby: a Manhattan restaurant called the Dixie Pig. The name Dixie associates Sayre with the racists Susannah fought during the civil rights movement. Sayre also says that Roland and Eddie Dean will soon be dead.

Stanza 7: The Ambush Back in Mid-World, Roland and Eddie Dean are left in the Cave of the Voices after

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Jake and Callahan go to New York. They travel through the portal to a Mobil station in East Stoneham, Maine, 1977, where an unidentified assailant shoots at them. It is obvious that someone knew they would show up there and waited for them; it is a group of armed men under the command of Jack Andolini, against whom they fought previously. A battle ensues.

lives nearby. Eddie also asks whether the ‘‘walk-ins’’ increased after King moved to the area. Cullum agrees that they might have.

Two female bystanders are killed, while a man near them escapes just in time. Eddie is shot in the leg. A tractor-trailer with a load of logs crashes, giving Roland and Eddie a chance to retreat behind a store near a kerosene pump. The man who ducked and survived, John Cullum, helps them fill a room with kerosene. They lure Andolini’s men inside, light the kerosene, and escape in Cullum’s boat. Eddie receives the message Susannah sent him in stanza 4.

An angry letter from Callahan (sent two weeks before the battle in stanza 7) warns Tower to hide because he is not safe from Andolini in Maine. However, Tower ignores this warning. John Cullum easily leads Eddie and Roland to Tower’s rented lakeside cabin. Roland tells Cullum his own life is now in danger from Andolini, and convinces him to leave town. He and Eddie then enter the cabin and find Tower’s attorney, Aaron Deepneau.

Heading toward his boathouse, Cullum asks if Roland and Eddie are like these ‘‘walk-ins’’ who show up from another reality, mainly mutants who speak an unknown language. They admit they are, though Eddie is originally from Brooklyn. But Eddie also finds evidence that his Brooklyn is not the Brooklyn of this world.

They discuss the possibility of Tower selling the vacant lot with the rose in it. Deepneau thinks Tower will refuse even though he has promised to sell, because Tower has trouble giving up his possessions. Tower shows up and does refuse, but Eddie and Roland remind Tower that if he does not sell, he will remain in danger from Andolini and Andolini’s boss, Balazar, who also want the lot. Tower reluctantly agrees.

Stanza 8: A Game of Toss

Following the discussion, John Cullum lends Eddie a car. Cullum drives his truck and leads Roland and Eddie to Calvin Tower.

Stanza 9: Eddie Bites His Tongue

Roland, Eddie, and John Cullum are in John Cullum’s cottage. Eddie remembers Brooklyn in the mid-1980s, when he lived with his brother Henry, read The Lord of the Rings, and developed a heroin addiction. Cullum asks him about his leg, where he was shot, and offers him some painkillers. Eddie talks with Cullum about his collection of signed baseballs, then tells him about a man he and Roland need to find, a book dealer named Calvin Tower.

Talking with Deepneau, meanwhile, Eddie learns that Co-Op City, where he grew up, is in the Bronx in this world. Perhaps, he thinks, Stephen King put Co-Op City in Brooklyn by mistake when writing one of his novels.

Tower’s store in Manhattan was destroyed by Jack Andolini. Tower is supposed to be hiding out in Maine, keeping a low profile, but Cullum knows immediately who Eddie is talking about and where he is staying. He will take Eddie and Roland to Tower, but before they leave, Eddie asks him questions concerning the writer Stephen King. King wrote ’Salem’s Lot, in which Eddie and Roland’s companion Father Callahan was a fictional character. Eddie wonders whether they are all fictional characters from books by Stephen King. He asks where King lives and Cullum tells him he

Stanza 10: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine

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Roland removes the bullet from Eddie’s leg with a paring knife. Eddie sends Susannah a message telling her to ‘‘burn up the day,’’ which means stall for time, because help (in the form of Callahan and Jake) is on the way.

Back at the Plaza Park hotel, Susannah hears voices that list the deaths of great people from the past thirty years; she remembers being jailed for participating in a civil rights protest, again associating the evil she fights with real historical events. She then returns to her Dogan to check the dials, and receives Eddie’s message to ‘‘burn up the day.’’ Mia, meanwhile, is controlling Susannah’s body, trying to get to the Dixie Pig so she can bear her child. She asks for Susannah’s help. Susannah agrees in exchange for another

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discussion, partly to waste time as Eddie instructed. For this discussion they are transported to an Old West theme park run by North Central Positronics. It contains a building where children’s brains are fed to servants of the Crimson King. Mia tells Susannah more of her personal history, and of the fall from a time of magic and faith to a time of rationalism and machines. She also says the child they carry, Roland’s son Mordred, will grow up to kill Roland. Their discussion over, Susannah gets Mia out of the hotel. A street preacher named Reverend Earl Harrigan helps them into the cab that will take them to the Dixie Pig.

as possible, but when Harrigan helped Susannah into a cab she left a message for them: they must go to the hotel first. At the hotel in room 1919 they find Susannah’s bowling bag. Inside it is Black Thirteen, a magic ball of value to the Crimson King. Almost driven insane by the strange song it plays, they manage to take the ball to a storage locker in the World Trade Center. Jake and Callahan take a cab to the Dixie Pig. Limousines are lined up in front. Inside, Susannah is about to deliver the baby, surrounded by powerful followers of the Crimson King. They will likely die in there, Callahan realizes. Some hope is provided when they find the magic ivory turtle in the gutter, where Susannah dropped it for them.

Stanza 11: The Writer Aware that they are nearing the end of their long quest, Roland and Eddie decide to seek out the author Stephen King to discover whether or not he created them. They also wonder if he has any special relationship to the Dark Tower or the rose, and if he might be some kind of god. Soon after arriving at King’s unexpectedly modest house, they surprise the writer as he rounds a corner. King immediately recognizes Roland (but not Eddie, whom he will not write about until later). Deeply frightened at the prospect of facing a fictional character he created, King runs away. Roland and Eddie corner King and calm him down. A question-and-answer session follows. King reveals that he created Roland and began the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series several years before but gave up because he found Roland and his story too disturbing.

Stanza 13: ‘‘Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother’’ The cab drops Susannah off a block away from the Dixie Pig. She walks past a folk guitarist performing the song ‘‘Man of Constant Sorrow.’’ She stops to listen and sing along; she is reminded of singing during the civil rights movement. She feels the goodness of the people she knew then, and sorrow for civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi. Mia feels this along with Susannah, and begins to understand the difference between good and evil. She realizes Susannah was correct to warn her against trusting the figures who now await them in the Dixie Pig. Nonetheless, they enter.

Wondering how he could be this apparently unexceptional man’s creation, Roland hypnotizes King. He discovers that his story came to King unbidden from ‘‘Gan,’’ which is the good (or at least non-Discordian) side of the universe. Satisfied, Roland orders King to resume the series, working on it when he is inspired, until it is finished.

The Dixie Pig is a scene of horror that only confirms Mia’s growing suspicions. What appear to be people are actually giant rats. Also present are vampires and a man with a hawk’s head. Mia begs Richard P. Sayre to keep his promise and let her raise her son; he makes her lick his boots. He then leads her through a door with a North Central Positronics sign on it, into a large room filled with beds and medical equipment. There she gives birth to Mordred.

Stanza 12: Jake and Callahan

Coda: Pages from a Writer’s Journal

This stanza begins where stanza 2 left off, with Jake and Callahan being whisked into New York City in 1999. Jake immediately gets into a fight with a cab driver and draws a gun on the man. Reverend Earl Harrigan, from stanza 10, defuses the situation. Jake and Callahan realize they must go to the Dixie Pig as soon

Having placed himself in the story as the author, King adds fictionalized diary entries from 1977 (when Roland and Eddie visited him in stanza 11) through 1999, when Song of Susannah concludes. Included are references to other King works like Pet Sematary, along with incidental scenes from King’s life; he also

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Song of Susannah was released in an unabridged audio version on CD by Audioworks in 2004. The narrator is George Guidall. Information and interviews about Song of Susannah and the rest of the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series can be found online at Stephen King’s official website, www.stephenking.com.

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train by the villain Jack Mort in an earlier ‘‘Dark Tower’’ volume. He subsequently becomes an apprentice gunslinger under Roland’s tutelage. He is a person with both adult and childlike qualities. He also has the ability to read thoughts. When he and Callahan are about to enter the Dixie Pig and battle the forces of the Crimson King, Jake takes control of the situation and lays out a strategy. Despite all of this, he remains a preadolescent boy; this is perhaps best evidenced by his close relationship with Oy, a ‘‘billy-bumbler,’’ which is essentially a Mid-World version of a dog. Unlike a dog, Oy can speak some words; like many dogs, he is utterly attached to his young master. Oy and Jake take on their adventures together, and when Jake leaves Mid-World through the magic portal, Oy follows him even though Jake has reluctantly commanded that he stay behind.

The Crimson King describes the unusually fast and easy composition of the previous ‘‘Dark Tower’’ volumes. The last diary entry is dated June 19, 1999. On this date, the real Stephen King was hit by a van and severely injured while walking along a road near his home. In the book, an excerpt of a newspaper article reports that King was killed in the accident.

The Crimson King is a mysterious and powerful figure who is trapped inside the Dark Tower. His ultimate goal is to destroy the Dark Tower so he will be free to rule the darkness that will engulf the world thereafter. Throughout the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, The Crimson King is considered Roland’s ultimate enemy; however, he does not actually appear in Song of Susannah. Instead, Richard Sayre appears as a representative of The Crimson King in his dealings with the demoness Mia.

John Cullum

CHARACTERS

A twelve-year-old boy when Song of Susannah takes place, Jake Chambers ended up in Mid-World after being thrown in front of a

A resident of East Stoneham, Maine, John Cullum is a laborer/caretaker with a heavy New England accent. A confirmed bachelor, he enjoys his motorboat and his large collection of signed baseballs. Though uneducated and modest in his needs, Cullum is clever and adaptable; he can even handle himself in a sudden gun battle, as shown when Roland and Eddie are ambushed at the East Stoneham Mobil station. He is a good judge of character, recognizing immediately that Roland and Eddie are good people despite the violence. He is also a keen observer, quickly recognizing that Roland and Eddie are after Calvin Tower. He takes the two men to Tower’s rented cottage. Cullum also shows himself surprisingly open to fantastic events: Eddie and Roland’s appearance from some kind of alternative universe does not faze him.

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Donald Frank Callahan The Catholic priest Donald Frank ‘‘Pere’’ Callahan originally appears in an earlier Stephen King novel that is not part of the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series. In ’Salem’s Lot (1976), Callahan helps battle vampires in Jerusalem’s Lot, a small town in Maine. In the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, he enters Mid-World, sets up a church in the town Calla Bryn Sturgis, wins converts, and fights alongside Roland in the battle against the robot wolves before joining Jake on his trip to New York to help save Susannah.

Jake Chambers

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Trudy Damascus Her last name refers to the road to Damascus on which St. Paul is converted to Christianity in the Bible. Trudy is a very practical-minded accountant, but her view of life is radically altered when she witnesses Susannah Dean appear as if out of thin air.

Eddie Dean Roland’s main follower Eddie Dean is from the Brooklyn neighborhood Co-Op City, which in reality is in the Bronx. This discrepancy is the fault, as Eddie discovers in Song of Susannah, of Eddie’s creator, Stephen King. Earlier ‘‘Dark Tower’’ volumes detail Eddie’s difficult, parentless youth under the guidance of his irresponsible older brother Henry, as well as his descent into robbery and drug dealing. He is saved from a life of crime by Roland, who takes Eddie under his wing and makes him a lethal fellow gunslinger. Where Roland is stoic and taciturn, however, Eddie is talkative and has trouble keeping his emotions in check. When he and Roland confront Calvin Tower, Eddie gets so angry that he bites down on his own tongue and draws blood. Eddie’s talkativeness, passion, and intelligence prove helpful throughout Song of Susannah. He earns John Cullum’s trust with his interest in baseball. He also continues interrogating Cullum when Roland wants to get moving. By doing so, he gains crucial information about mutant ‘‘walk-ins’’ in the area, who seem to be servants of the Crimson King crossing over from another world. He also learns about the author Stephen King. This information is important to the success of the quest to save the Dark Tower. The one thing that keeps Eddie from focusing exclusively on the quest is his relationship with his wife, Susannah Dean. He worries about her throughout the novel. Despite their separation, they manage to send each other reassuring mental messages confirming that they are both still alive.

Henry Dean Henry Dean is Eddie’s older brother from Brooklyn. He is an important figure in Eddie’s life before Eddie joins up with Roland. In the 8th Stanza, Eddie recalls Henry’s girlfriend Sylvia Goldover, a petty

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thief with bad hygiene. Henry mocks Eddie for his interest in fantasy literature like Lord of the Rings. Henry is also mentioned by Susannah, who blames him as a bad influence on Eddie.

Susannah Dean The legless, wheelchair-bound Susannah Dean is actually two personalities in one, both African American. She is Odetta Holmes, college-educated daughter of a dentist and active participant in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She is also the vicious, uneducated Detta Walker, a former prostitute who hates white people. In an earlier ‘‘Dark Tower’’ volume, Roland forces these two distinct personalities to acknowledge one another and coexist in the single person that he names Susannah. The name Dean is added after she marries Eddie. The personality of Odetta Holmes appears to be the one most clearly identified with Susannah. It is Odetta who talks to Eddie from her Dogan, remembers her mother, and holds to the values of the civil rights movement. Susannah suppresses the personality of Detta Walker, though she comes out during times of extreme stress. Detta’s profane and confrontational outbursts are useful to Susannah insofar as they intimidate adversaries like Mia and Richard P. Sayre. Susannah is possessed by a third personality during Song of Susannah, a demoness named Mia who grows a pair of legs so she, and Susannah, can walk around. The fact that these legs are white emphasizes the issues of identity and race that are being explored in the character of Susannah Dean. She finds she can escape temporarily from Mia through a visualization technique in which she imagines herself in her Dogan, a room with monitors and dials where she can see herself on screen and take measurements of what is occurring inside her body, including the progress of her pregnancy. She can also use the knobs in her Dogan to influence her situation. Susannah’s Dogan begins to deteriorate over the course of the novel.

Aaron Deepneau Calvin Tower’s attorney, Deepneau is an amiable man who warns Roland and Eddie that Tower will renege on his promise to sell

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them a vacant lot. He then helps them deal with Tower, and writes up the contract for the sale. Deepneau is suffering from cancer.

Roland Deschain Roland Deschain is the hero of the entire ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series. His quest is to save the Dark Tower, as well as discover exactly what the Dark Tower is and who occupies it. Over the course of the series, he recruits three people to help him on this quest: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, and Jake Chambers. The quest is his ‘‘ka,’’ or destiny, and they are his ‘‘ka-tet,’’ with their own destinies bound to his. Roland is a gunslinger—the type of character who might have once been played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood in western movies. He is generally a man of few words, allowing his gun to speak for him. He rarely laughs or even smiles. He is obsessed with his quest. Although basically a good man, he will not hesitate to kill anyone who opposes him, or even sacrifice innocent bystanders if doing so will improve his chances of completing his quest. This makes sense to him because all of humanity hangs in the balance; sacrificing a few innocents can be justified in order to save the rest of humanity. It is, however, a responsibility few would readily shoulder. Indeed, in the 11th Stanza, King explains to Roland that he stopped writing the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series partly because he became afraid of Roland when Roland let a young boy fall to his death. Roland could have saved him, but doing so would have cost time and might have jeopardized his quest. Roland is largely relegated to the background in Song of Susannah. Nonetheless, he remains a strong presence in the narrative, influencing events at crucial moments. While young Jake tries to open the magic portal, Roland ensures that the necessary rituals are performed without delay. Similarly, Eddie gets murderously angry at Calvin Tower for his reckless behavior and his unwillingness to sell the vacant lot as promised, but Roland is able to change Calvin’s mind.

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meaning of their own existence. King is portrayed as a somewhat confused man who smokes Pall Malls, guzzles beer, and is absorbed with daily family concerns. He has no real grasp of the earth-shaking importance of the story he started five years before and then shelved. Roland hypnotizes King and orders him to finish the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series; however, in a coda, or conclusion, to the novel, King is struck and killed by a van before he can do so.

Reverend Earl Harrigan A street preacher who ignores the parking tickets he regularly receives, Reverend Harrigan quotes the Bible and offers salvation to passersby. In his car are piles of pamphlets identifying him as the head of the Church of the Holy God-Bomb. He helps Susannah into the cab that takes her to the Dixie Pig, and later helps Jake and Callahan when they get into a fight with a cab driver.

Mia Originally a stunningly beautiful, immortal demoness who knows almost nothing about herself and who hungers solely for sex, Mia realizes her life lacks something essential when she sees a human couple with their child. This leaves Mia vulnerable to the inducements of Walter, a representative of the Crimson King, who offers to let her bear a child in exchange for her becoming mortal. He promises her that she will raise the child for the first seven years of the child’s life. For this to occur, Mia must take over Susannah Dean’s body. The pregnant Mia cares about nothing but bearing and raising her child, whatever the consequences might be for others or for the universe as a whole. However, she is rattled by Susannah’s assertions that she will not be allowed to raise the child. She seems to gain an awareness of right and wrong through sharing Susannah’s memories.

Richard P. Sayre

The author of Song of Susannah makes an appearance as a character in his own novel when two of his own creations, Roland and Eddie, seek him out to try and grasp the

The smooth-talking, manipulative Sayre is a powerful follower of the Crimson King. Sayre calls Mia on the telephone at the Park-Plaza hotel and allays her suspicions about the deal she has made with Walter; he also meets Mia at the Dixie Pig and oversees the birth of her son Mordred.

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Calvin Tower A book dealer, Tower owns the vacant lot where the rose that connects all worlds together grows. In an earlier volume in the series, Tower promises to sell the lot for one dollar in exchange for Roland and Eddie’s help. However, he is selfish and miserly and tries to renege on his promise. Roland ultimately convinces him to make the sale.

THEMES Good and Evil While the reader of Song of Susannah might sometimes wonder whether the characters that King presents as heroes are entirely good, there is little doubt that King’s evil characters are purely and entirely malevolent. In stanza 10, Susannah describes her enemies as eating the brains of children. When Mia rips the fake flesh from the followers of the Crimson King in the Dixie Pig, she discovers they are actually monstrous rats disguised as humans. The name Dixie Pig itself might reflect the historical malevolence of the Southern whites against African Americans. The greeting Mia receives upon entering the Dixie Pig, ‘‘Hile Mia,’’ echoes the Nazi salute, ‘‘Heil.’’ The presence of purely evil figures in Song of Susannah means that anyone acting against those figures is good almost by definition. This includes Roland, Eddie, Jake, Callahan, and Susannah, as well as those who help them, like John Cullum and Reverend Harrigan. However, while the evil figures are purely evil, the good are not so straightforward. While Roland is good, he is also cold, distant, and a remorseless killer. While Eddie is good, he is also a former heroin addict and thief who has trouble containing his anger. And while Susannah is good, she is also the vicious former prostitute Detta Walker. The problem they all face is how to best deal with the evil that is within them—whether to suppress it, or try to harness it without becoming evil themselves.

Quest The struggle of good against evil gives meaning and shape to Roland’s quest to enter the Dark Tower and save the universe from

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falling into chaos. This structure places Song of Susannah in a long line of quest literature extending as far back as ancient Greece. The poem by 19th century poet, Robert Browning, ‘‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’’ (1852), which directly inspired King’s ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, also deals with a quest. However, Browning never states why the hero Childe Roland comes to enter the Dark Tower or what he finds there. Quest literature, as Browning’s poem suggests, may be less about good and evil and more about the search for the meaning of human existence. Certainly, this seems to be King’s understanding of Roland’s quest. In stanza 2 of Song of Susannah, Henchick asks Roland to pray. Roland answers that he does not ‘‘hold to any God,’’ only ‘‘to the Tower, and I won’t pray to that.’’ Roland does not assume that there is a god or that the Tower is good or worth praying to— only that the Tower is necessary and significant to life, the meaning of which is what he arguably seeks.

Religious Faith If Roland refuses to believe in anything but the Tower, he also fears he will not find anything there worth believing in. As he admits to Eddie in stanza 11, he worries that the top room of the Dark Tower will be empty and that the ‘‘God of all universes’’ is either dead or nonexistent. Roland’s doubts have to do with a general loss of religious faith associated in Song of Susannah with the modern world. In stanza 6, Mia tells Susannah that when ‘‘faith fails . . . you replace it with rational thought,’’ and that this is the exchange made when religion is replaced by science as the method people use to understand the world. Mia argues further that where faith is eternal, rationalism is loveless, temporary, and dead. Roland’s quest might be read as a response to this problem, an attempt to determine in an empirical manner—by actually entering the Dark Tower—if faith can be justified.

Machines In stanza 6, while denouncing rationalism, Mia also denounces the loss of magic from the universe, and the use of machinery instead. Machines, she says, eventually run down. In Song of Susannah, machines are generally portrayed as being on the side of

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Critic Harold Bloom maintains that King’s greatest strength as a writer is his use of evocative images that build up over the course of a novel to create a central, overpowering image. Pick out three of the images used in Song of Susannah. Examples might include the white legs on the African American Susannah, and the man with the head of a bird in the Dixie Pig. Consider these images individually: do they grab the reader’s attention and why? What do they suggest? Do they add up to anything greater when considered together? Write a paragraph about each image. One notable moment in Song of Susannah occurs when Stephen King appears in his own book as a character. He engages in a lengthy dialogue with other characters in the book—all characters he created. At the end of the book, he includes diary entries that conclude with a fictionalized account of his death. (King was struck by a van in real life, but obviously survived.) How do these mixtures of real life and fiction contribute to or take away from your understanding of the rest of the novel?

evil. They are the robot wolves that attack a town prior to the start of the book, and they are the android prostitutes in the Wild West theme park from stanza 11. The theme park is also where a group of children is brought to have their brains mechanically removed and fed to servants of the Crimson King; and where, in a room full of sinister machinery, Mia will bear Mordred.

Write a three-page story in which you, the writer, interact with characters you have created.

Susannah, arguably the most important character in Song of Susannah, recalls at various points in the narrative her experiences as a participant in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Write a five-paragraph report about one of the incidents mentioned in the book. Some notable examples are the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ‘‘Mississippi Burning’’ murders.

A hallmark of King’s fiction over the years has been the way he forces his characters to act in ways that are morally significant, whether for good or evil. Pick three characters from Song of Susannah, and list at least five ways in which King reveals the moral character of each in the book. Use specific examples from the book. Write a one-paragraph introduction to the lists describing how King seems to define good and evil.

wondering whether there is enough magic left to open the magic portal from Mid-World. It is also significant that Susannah uses a magic totem, the small ivory turtle, to get shelter when in New York.

Fantasy

Magic, Mia informs Susannah, is what created the universe, including the six beams that support the Dark Tower. It is significant, in this context, that the novel opens with Roland

Magic, a force for good in Song of Susannah, is also a hallmark of fantasy literature like J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, which Eddie Dean remembers reading at the beginning of stanza 8. Song of Susannah itself, like the entire ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, is an

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example of fantasy literature. Mid-World is a realm of fantasy not unlike Middle Earth in Tolkien’s series. However, whereas Tolkien’s entire story takes place in Middle Earth, the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series juxtaposes, or compares, the realm of fantasy with places like Maine and Brooklyn. King makes no firm division between fantasy and reality, though. Instead, the two intermingle throughout Song of Susannah.

Music Like magic, music in Song of Susannah represents a force for good. The novel’s title, the use of the term stanza instead of chapter, and the song-like poems that end each section all serve to reinforce the significance of music. In stanza 3, when Trudy Damascus returns to the place where she saw Susannah appear as if from nowhere, the humming she hears is a sign of the goodness of that particular spot. A man tells her, ‘‘That’s not humming, that’s singing,’’ and goes on to explain how, when he was young, the same singing helped clear up a bad case of acne. Music is also a force for good in stanza 13, when a street musician’s rendition of ‘‘Man of Constant Sorrow’’ reminds Susannah of her participation in the civil rights movement.

STYLE Metafiction In metafiction, the author intentionally calls attention to the fact that the reader is reading a created work. This self-awareness is a conscious and deliberate contrast to the typical escapism of most literary works, wherein authors attempt to create worlds so believable that the reader can overlook the fact that the worlds of the story are, in fact, an artificial creation. In Song of Susannah, King uses metafictional devices on several levels. Throughout the book, the main characters realize that one of the ka-tet, Father Callahan, appears as a literary character in a book written in the ‘‘real world’’ by an author named Stephen King. Indeed, Callahan was a primary character in King’s ’Salem’s Lot. This leads them to wonder if they all might be characters in some book. Additionally, the novelist himself appears as

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a character in the book and interacts with his fictional creations. Finally, King ends the book with a fictionalized journal that includes entries from throughout his career; he intermingles fact with fantasy, and discusses at length his work on the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series.

Epic The epic, which includes such works as Homer’s The Odyssey and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is among the most ambitious of literary forms. Epics are stories that celebrate heroic feats and legendary events. The ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series in general can be considered epic in scope because it addresses such all-encompassing themes as the existence of God and the creation of the universe. Placing such themes within the context of a highly eventful adventure story, which takes place over an expansive stretch of time and geographical space, also gives the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series an epic feel. Like J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, King’s ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series combines epic scope with the conventions of the fantasy novel, including invented worlds, magic spells, and imaginary creatures. Both series also use an invented language. In Song of Susannah, for example, Roland and his ka-tet (followers) employ such terms as ka (destiny), calla (town), todash (empty space between worlds), and gunna (possessions). Epics tend to use a very poetic and formal language. In Song of Susannah, King generally maintains a colloquial tone. In other words, he uses common terms in an everyday voice, easily recognizable as contemporary American English. King uses both profanities and slang terms and also limits the use of stilted or formal language to the speech of characters such as Henchick, the town elder in stanza 1.

Foreshadowing King creates suspense in the novel through the use of foreshadowing, or the suggestion of events to come. For example, Susannah learns of the Dixie Pig and its evil spectators long before she actually enters the restaurant’s door. The reader also learns that Jake and Callahan have gone to 1999 New

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Gunslinger in reenactment of gunfight Ó Richard A. Cooke/Corbis

York several chapters before they are shown arriving there.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Civil Rights Movement

Allusions Song of Susannah is full of allusions, or indirect references, to other works of literature, as well as many non-literary sources. When Mia discusses a plague, she calls it the Red Death; Susannah recognizes this as being from an Edgar Allan Poe story. One of the beams that hold up the tower is named Shardik, after the gigantic bear in the Richard Adams novel of the same name. Allusions are also made to Patrick O’Brian’s novels, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the Bible. There are also nonliterary references to Bill Gates, the 1986 World Series, and the television soap opera General Hospital. The use of so many references to different aspects of modern culture arguably makes the novel more grounded in reality. It also underscores the story’s ambitious, epic quality: this book, King seems to be saying, is about everything.

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Probably the most obvious historical event King uses in Song of Susannah is the civil rights movement, which is referenced on several occasions in the narrative. In stanza 13, for example, Susannah recalls taking part in protests in Mississippi in the early 1960s. She laments the deaths of ‘‘James Chaney, twentyone; Andrew Goodman, twenty-one; Michael Schwerner, twenty-four; O Discordia.’’ These three were actual historical figures; Schwerner and Goodman were white men from New York, and Chaney was a black man from Mississippi. All three were working on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality in support of integration issues. They were murdered by members of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. The discovery of their bodies several weeks later prompted one of the most famous FBI investigations of the era, dubbed Mississippi Burning. (A movie based on this

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investigation, Mississippi Burning, was released in 1988.)

The Sixties King also references the violence and upheavals of the 1960s at the start of stanza 10. In particular, King mentions the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. These events defined for many the distress and chaos of the decade. In stanza 10, King writes of President Kennedy’s assassination, ‘‘America’s last gunslinger is dead. O Discordia!’’ He seems to suggest that Kennedy might be considered a forerunner of King’s own Roland Deschain. In this way, King also implies that since the 1960s, our world (or at least the United States) has descended ever closer to chaos, just as MidWorld has. Both worlds have experienced a loss of innocence and wonder, and both are now on the verge of destruction.

The Attack on the World Trade Center King sets much of Song of Susannah in New York City in 1999, where Susannah and Mia will give birth to Roland’s evil son Mordred. The late 1990s in America was a time of relative peace and strong economic growth. However, as King knew while composing the novel in 2003, America (and New York in particular) was just two years away from a devastating terrorist attack. To emphasize the point that troubled times lay ahead, when Callahan and Jake need to hide the evil bowling ball-like totem known as Black Thirteen, they place it in a coin-operated locker in the World Trade Center for long-term storage. This bit of metafictional foreshadowing seems to be intended to suggest that Black Thirteen may have acted as some sort of beacon for evil, though King stops short of spelling this out (perhaps for fear of trivializing such a tragedy).

CRITICAL OVERVIEW While there are collections of academic essays dedicated to Stephen King’s work, academia as a whole has been dismissive of his writing. The ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series in general and Song of Susannah in particular has received little attention among literary scholars. However, this sixth volume of the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, like most of

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King’s fiction, has received a great deal of attention from mainstream reviewers. On the positive side, Matt Thorne of The Independent, an enthusiastic fan of the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, called Song of Susannah ‘‘by far the best in the series so far.’’ The book, he argued, has ‘‘none of the bagginess’’ of other ‘‘Dark Tower’’ volumes, and ‘‘almost works as a stand-alone novel.’’ Thorne said it should appeal especially to those readers who like King at his most ‘‘metafictional,’’ referring in particular to King placing himself as a character in his own work. A similar point was made by Michael Berry in the San Francisco Chronicle. Berry described the move as ‘‘an audacious gambit’’ that could have easily disrupted the story, but ultimately lends even more life to an already exciting tale. Berry further maintained that Song of Susannah is significantly focused on the theme of death, noting that at the conclusion ‘‘every major character’’ is ‘‘in terrible jeopardy.’’ In the Boston Globe, Erica Noonan agreed with Thorne and Berry about the book’s metafictional quality, arguing that the fictional diary entries that make up the book’s Coda section are ‘‘the most entertaining 20 pages of the novel.’’ Noonan also noted the story’s ‘‘feverish, page-turning ending’’ is alone ‘‘enough to prompt one to keep reading’’ the series to its conclusion. Similarly, Phaedra Trethan, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that King ‘‘leaves you dangling from the precipice of what’s next.’’ Dorman T. Shindler, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, argued that the novel works despite many unexpected story developments, odd combinations of genres, and metafictional devices: ‘‘King brilliantly juggles all the plot elements.’’ On the negative side, the New York Times Book Review afforded Song of Susannah no more than a capsule review by Ben Sisario. Sisario wrote that King’s ‘‘attempt at a Tolkien-like epic’’ has in this sixth volume ‘‘become dauntingly overstuffed and complex,’’ and that King’s prose is ‘‘indulgent.’’ Michael Agger’s New York Times article, ‘‘Pulp Metafiction,’’ offered a more thorough condemnation of the novel, along with the entire ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series. Agger accused King of relying on cliche´s, ‘‘hackneyed’’ scenarios, an overly complex plot, and one-dimensional characters. Detta Walker, he argued, ‘‘speaks in a guttural ebonics,’’ implying that she is an offensive stereotype of an African American. And while Agger agrees that King’s

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The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004), follows Song of Susannah and concludes the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series. Earlier volumes, from I to V, are: The Gunslinger (1982; revised and expanded version published by Viking, 2003), The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), Wizard and Glass (1997), and Wolves of the Calla (2003). King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975) introduces one of the characters in Song of Susannah, father Donald Frank Callahan. Like Song of Susannah, the book deals with supernatural creatures. In ’Salem’s Lot, vampires destroy the populace of a small town in Maine. King’s The Stand (1978) is a massive novel about a plague similar to the one described in stanza 10. In The Stand, most of humanity is left dead; the novel tells of the struggles of the few survivors who must get along with one another to re-establish civilization. ‘‘The Masque of the Red Death’’ (1842), a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe, is discussed in relation to the plague in stanza 10. It describes a luxurious masked ball held

use of himself as a character adds life to the book, he thinks it does so only because the book as a whole is generally weak. As a character, Agger writes, King ‘‘instantly becomes’’ the entire ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series’ ‘‘most believable element.’’

while a plague destroys much of humanity. The partygoers incorrectly think they will be spared. Poe’s many horror stories are an important influence on King’s writing.

Shardik (1974), by Richard Adams, is mentioned several times in Song of Susannah. King even names one of the six beams that supports the Dark Tower after the title character. Shardik is a giant bear worshipped as a god by a fictional tribe. Like the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, the novel is a fantasy adventure dealing with issues of religious belief.

Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison, is alluded to on several occasions in Song of Susannah. Invisible Man is a fictional and often allegorical account of an African American man’s attempts to find a place for himself in a racist society.

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (1987), by Juan Williams, is based on a PBS special of the same name. It provides a detailed historical account of the civil rights movement recalled by Susannah on several occasions in Song of Susannah.

magic plays a key role in the novel and popular literature.

Gordon Theisen is a freelance writer with a Ph.D. in English literature from Binghamton University. In this essay, Theisen discusses King’s use of a wide variety of popular media genres and how

Song of Susannah sometimes seems like an unwieldy bag stuffed with ideas taken from a variety of different popular literary and movie genres. Stephen King draws from spaghetti western-era Clint Eastwood as a model for his hero, Roland Deschain, and western movies, in general, for the lengthy shootout in stanza 7. He also includes creatures and plot devices from countless monster movies and horror novels, including vampires, an army of wolves, bizarre machinery, trances, demonic possession, split personalities, and magic totems with which a character might turn any passerby into a virtual slave. He creates a separate fantasy

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CRITICISM Gordon Theisen

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SONG OF SUSANNAH MIGHT EVEN BE CONSIDERED KING’S TESTAMENT TO THE VALUE OF POPULAR GENRES OFTEN DISMISSED AS UNWORTHY BY MORE SERIOUS-MINDED CRITICS AND READERS WHO REGARD HIS BESTSELLERS WITH DISDAIN.’’

realm called Mid-World with its own special language, not unlike J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the invented worlds of numerous other fantasy novels. He also makes use of a classic science fiction motif—robots in disguise—in a couple of places in the book. The common thread in all of these genre devices is the idea of magic, the element that is holding Mid-World together and without which, Chaos will reign. But magic is also responsible for the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series in the first place. The character of Stephen King in the book understands the indefinable—in a word, magic—process of writing, and that he must surrender to it in order to create. The magic of creation is as essential to Song of Susannah as the magic that takes place within the story and unifies the various genre devices. There is little wonder, then, that Ben Sisario, writing for the New York Times Book Review, called Song of Susannah ‘‘dauntingly overstuffed and complex.’’ It seems like a hundred other books and movies put through a blender. However, King manages to corral his many influences into a single, coherent, suspenseful narrative that keeps readers engaged. The novel presents elements borrowed from a surprising variety of popular genres combined with deeply serious themes. This is not unusual in popular fiction, and is a constant in King’s own work from early in his career. For example, King’s first novel Carrie deals with the same themes of adolescence as classics like A Clockwork Orange and The Catcher in the Rye, but within the conventions of a supernatural horror novel. Though popular fiction may not aspire to the standards of high art, it often

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takes on social issues of great importance and reaches a wider audience. In the case of Song of Susannah, King most notably addresses the issue of racism in the character of Susannah. She is an African American woman with three radically different personalities contained within her: one is a civil rights activist who has experienced firsthand the ugliness of deep-seated racism; one is an inner-city miscreant whose life has been shaped by less overt ‘‘economic racism’’; and the last is a once-immortal demon who knows nothing of compassion and equality. However, this is not the only hint that King believes popular fiction can deal with deep issues, or be as worthy as loftier fiction. In addition to the subject of racism, King examines problems of faith, as well as the existence or nonexistence of God. In stanza 6, the demoness Mia denounces the entire modern era for its rationalism, and its celebration of and reliance on technological advances and machines. Rationalism is a school of thought that encourages finding truth through reason rather than through religion or faith. Mia’s complaints echo concerns that have been expressed by serious writers and philosophers since the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. They also call to mind the great modernist writers of the twentieth century, such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, who have garnered serious scholarly attention. In fact, the title of an earlier ‘‘Dark Tower’’ volume, The Waste Lands, is a nod to a famous poem by Eliot from 1922. This connection is made clear by King himself in the ‘‘October 9th, 1989’’ entry of the fictionalized diary that makes up the Coda section of Song of Susannah. Eliot’s poem ‘‘The Waste Land’’ is famously difficult to understand, because the author gives the reader no obvious story line or explicit theme to grasp for meaning. Instead, he provides the reader with an onslaught of various powerful images. This is in part because the poem is meant to reflect the chaos of a civilization that has lost any strong moral center in the wake of World War I. Instead, civilization has come to rely on the very machines that caused so much death and destruction during the War. The entire ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, like Eliot’s poem, also deals with the idea of the universe

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falling into a state of chaos after too much trust is put in machines to keep things working in Mid-World. In the novel, Chaos will consume the universe if the Dark Tower topples, and the Dark Tower will topple if the six beams that hold it up are broken. Two beams have already broken before the start of the book, and a third is lost in stanza 1. As Mia tells Susannah, these beams were created through magic. If that magic came from God, then perhaps God himself was made by magic. This passage, in stanza 6, introduces a creation myth into Song of Susannah, making its scope even wider than most popular or literary fiction. In doing so, King marks magic as the most important and fundamental force in the entire universe. Magic is a common plot device in popular fiction, though King, despite his frequent use of supernatural elements in his stand-alone books, has seldom used the notion to any great extent outside the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series. Magic appears in many other forms throughout Song of Susannah. It is required to open the portal between Mid-World and the real world in stanza 1, and it suffuses the ivory turtle Susannah uses to hypnotize a passing diplomat and a hotel desk clerk in stanza 5. Magic is the subject upon which the novel opens, with the hero Roland Deschain asking the Manni leader, Henchick, ‘‘How long will the magic stay?’’ Magic is a mainstay of horror fiction, and of fantasy stories like J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, which Eddie Dean recalls reading in stanza 8. Magic is what holds together Mid-World, the site of much of the action in the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series. Magic might even be a metaphor for the artistry of popular writers like King, who create imaginary worlds and make them believable and significant to their legions of readers. That King consciously intended his readers to take magic as a metaphor for at least his own artistry is especially evident in the meeting in stanza 11 between Roland and Eddie and their creator—the novelist Stephen King, known as ‘‘The Writer.’’ By this point, Eddie is already convinced he is the creation of a writer from a world very much like his own—the most notable

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exception being that Co-Op City, where he grew up, is located in the Bronx instead of Brooklyn. He is also aware that a man he knows as a real person, Father Callahan, is actually a fictional character from another novel by this same writer (’Salem’s Lot). Eddie discovers that he comes from Brooklyn simply because of a mistake: King thought Co-Op City was located in Brooklyn when he created Eddie and discovered only later that he was wrong. This suggests that writing might be a form of magic. It allows a mortal, error-prone man to create his own version of the world, shaped by his own unique, and sometimes faulty, viewpoint. King lives humbly, as Roland and Eddie discover, in ‘‘the sort of house real-estate agents call a ranch,’’ and is mainly worried about making sure he picks up his son on time. He drinks, he smokes, and he is, at first, struck with fear, and then merely confused, at meeting Roland. This Stephen King is an earlier version of the King who is writing the book we are reading. He is evidently not aware of his wizard-like status, of writing as magic, or that the worlds he makes with words take on their own existence. For this reason, his answers to Roland and Eddie’s questions about the Dark Tower and their own fate are unsatisfactory. Roland ends up hypnotizing King to try to get at the truth about their mission, their fate, and the Dark Tower. It is at this point that King, the character, reveals that he is in touch with a deep force of which he is not consciously aware. This force (referred to as ‘‘ka’’) is related to Roland’s quest and to the Dark Tower; it is also crucial to the salvation of humanity, and to the very same magic that Roland wonders about on the novel’s opening page. As the character King puts it, ‘‘ka comes to me, comes from me, I translate it, am made to translate it.’’ He is not consciously aware of this because, in the end, it is not Stephen King, the man, who has special access to a magical realm where words become reality; it is only Stephen King, the writer. The older, wiser King, the author of Song of Susannah, has arguably become more aware of how and why magic might be a useful metaphor for writing. The novel’s multifaceted narrative demonstrates that writing

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allows him to use those unreal realms defined by lowbrow novel and movie genres to create something at least real enough to keep readers turning pages. This also seems to hold true for other creators of popular fiction, no matter how they may be regarded by academics and serious-minded literary critics. In Song of Susannah, King makes numerous allusions to popular writers like himself, some with literary prestige and some without, from Edgar Allan Poe and Frank Oz to Richard Adams and Patrick O’Brian. He does so in a context that emphasizes the importance of such writers’ contributions to culture, through a story that explicitly deals with issues such as racism, rationalism, science, technology, faith, and the fate of humanity. In his literary masterpiece Ulysses (1922), James Joyce used allusions to the myths and literature of ancient Greece, in particular Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, as a way of organizing a wealth of detail from the modern era. This helped give the confusions, ambiguities, and moral crises of the twentieth century a coherence they seemed to lack at the time, and gave his readers a deeper sense of the significance of human life. In Song of Susannah, the conventions of genre fictions, including westerns, horror, fantasy, and magic, play a similar role. They bestow upon readers a sense of coherence that may be otherwise lacking in their own lives and in the world around them. By revealing order where none appears to exist, the familiar genre conventions may even help keep the universe from falling into chaos. Source: Gordon Theisen, Critical Essay on The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006

SOURCES Agger, Michael, ‘‘The Dark Tower: Pulp Metafiction,’’ at www.nytimes.com (May 17, 2005), originally published in the New York Times, late edition, October 17, 2004, Section 7, Column 1, p. 14. Berry, Michael, ‘‘Every Story Ends with Death: Mortality Drives Latest Book in Stephen King’s Opus,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, www.sfgate.com (June 20, 2004). Bloom, Harold, Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Stephen King, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1998, pp. 77–86.

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Davis, Jonathan P., ‘‘The Struggle for Personal Morality in America,’’ in Bloom’s BioCritiques: Stephen King, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002, pp. 81–94. Dyson, Cindy, ‘‘Biography of Stephen King,’’ in Bloom’s BioCritiques: Stephen King, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002, pp. 3–48. King, Stephen, The Dark Tower IV: Song of Susannah, Scribner, 2004. Magistrale, Anthony, ‘‘The Shape Evil Takes: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited,’’ in Modern Critical Views: Stephen King, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1998, pp. 77–86. Noonan, Erica, ‘‘King Injects Himself into ScienceFiction ‘Song,’’’ Boston Globe, www.boston.com (July 1, 2004). Russell, Sharon A., Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 2002. Shindler, Dorman, T., ‘‘The Dark Tower VI,’’ in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, www.stltoday.com (June 6, 2004). Sisario, Ben, Review of The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, in New York Times Book Review, www.nytimes.com (June 20, 2004). Thorne, Matt, ‘‘Song of Susannah by Stephen King,’’ in The Independent enjoyment.independent.co.uk (June 6, 2004). Trethan, Phaedra, ‘‘Do Not Be Afraid That King’s ‘Dark Tower’ Series Will Never End,’’ in The Philadelphia Inquirer, www.philly.com (June 20, 2004).

FURTHER READING Beahm, George, The Stephen King Story, Andrews and McMeel, 1991. The Stephen King Story is a biography of the bestselling writer. While it was published in 1991, predating many of King’s novels and long before he wrote Song of Susannah, the book provides a detailed portrayal of King’s childhood, his literary influences, his struggle to become a writer, and his rise to fame. Bloom, Harold, editor, Bloom’s BioCritiques: Stephen King, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. A collection of essays elucidating important themes in the novels of Stephen King, many of which are relevant to Song of Susannah, though none discuss it or the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series specifically. Included in the volume are an introduction by Harold Bloom, who dismisses King’s work as unreadable, and a biographical essay on King. Furth, Robin, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance, 2 Volumes, Scribner, 2003 and 2005. Furth’s concordance for the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series includes an alphabetical index to

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Russell, Sharon A., Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 2002. This collection of critical essays on King’s novels includes a biographical sketch and a rare treatment by an academic of any volume of the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, on Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass.

Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors, Conversations with Stephen King: Feast of Fear, Carrol & Graf Publishers, 1989. This collection of interviews with Stephen King offers his opinions on writing, movies, Hollywood, himself, and a host of other subjects. Vincent, Bev, The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus, New American Library, 2004. Vincent’s study includes summaries of every volume in the ‘‘Dark Tower’’ series, descriptions of traits and backgrounds of all the major characters, critical appreciations of King’s work, and a glossary of invented terms used in the fantasy realm of Mid-World. The book was written with King’s approval and assistance.

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significant words along with genealogies of major characters and maps. King, Stephen, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Scribner, 2000. King’s well-received nonfiction book about writing, On Writing, is both an autobiographical account of his writing career and a more general attempt to explain the art of telling stories.

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State of Fear Before publishing State of Fear in 2004, Michael Crichton spent three years researching the novel. He pored over numerous texts dealing with the environment, pollution, global warming, and environmental policy. Though Crichton’s novel is a work of fiction, it relies heavily on scientific data and research. He employs dozens of footnotes and graphs throughout the novel that go hand in hand with the fiction. In the novel’s preface, he writes that ‘‘this is a work of fiction. . . . However, references to real people, institutions, and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.’’ State of Fear couples Crichton’s scientific research and data with a fast-paced plot in which a small group of individuals attempt to thwart the actions of an eco-terrorist group. The eco-terrorists are attempting to create a series of apparently natural disasters and fool the public into believing that the events are the result of the adverse effects of global warming. The terrorists plan a series of five disasters, including breaking off a huge chunk of Antarctica, causing a flash flood in Arizona, creating a large hurricane, and finally using explosives to cause a large tsunami. Aside from the entertaining action in State of Fear, Crichton also introduces important social issues especially relevant to the twentyfirst century, including the influence and role of both corporations and media outlets in scientific research and public opinion. The novel contains an ‘‘Author’s Message,’’ in which Crichton

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shares his point of view on the various issues addressed in the book. This includes an appendix entitled ‘‘Why Politicized Science is Dangerous,’’ a short essay in which Crichton suggests fundamental changes in the way that environmental research and environmental policy is undertaken and understood, warning against the dangers of ‘‘politicized science.’’

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY John Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 23, 1942, to John Henderson and Zula (Miller) Crichton. Crichton grew up in Roslyn, New York, and as an adolescent distinguished himself both inside and outside of the classroom. Crichton was six feet, seven inches tall by the time he was sixteen years old and was a valuable member of the Roslyn High School basketball team. Inside the classroom, Crichton’s teachers marveled at his intelligence and his remarkable writing talent. At the age of fourteen, Crichton published his first piece, a travel article, in the New York Times. Crichton’s early success at writing led him initially to pursue a writing career, studying in the English department at Harvard University. Upset by a professor’s lukewarm reactions to his writing, Crichton soon became disillusioned with the Harvard English department and switched his academic focus. He graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1964. In 1965, Crichton continued his education at Harvard Medical School, and to help pay his medical-school tuition expenses, he started writing novels under various pseudonyms. In 1966, he published his first novel, Odds On, earning him two thousand dollars. Crichton published four more books under a pseudonym in medical school before publishing The Andromeda Strain, his first runaway success, under his own name in 1969. The book became a bestseller and was released as a movie by Universal Studios in 1971. After graduating from medical school and following the success of The Andromeda Strain, Crichton abandoned his pursuit of a medical career in favor of writing. After The Andromeda Strain, he continued to publish successful ‘‘techno-thriller’’ novels. Crichton is credited with inventing the ‘‘techno-thriller’’ genre, which combines technology (often bio-technology), suspense, and social commentary. In the 1970s and

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Michael Crichton Ó Douglas Kirkland/Corbis 1980s, Crichton produced a number of acclaimed and bestselling thrillers including The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, The Terminal Man, Congo, and Sphere. In 1990, Crichton published Jurassic Park, which critics lauded as his best novel to date; he followed with a sequel, The Lost World, in 1995. Both novels were turned into blockbuster Hollywood movies, helping cement Crichton’s stature as one of the most successful and recognized American writers of his time. In 2004, Crichton again topped several bestseller lists with the publication of his novel State of Fear, a technological thriller dealing with the science and controversy concerning global warming. In addition to his numerous science fiction books, Crichton co-created the hit television show ER and has written a historical novel, film scripts, and works of nonfiction. Crichton has won numerous awards including an Academy Award, an Emmy, and a Peabody Award.

PLOT SUMMARY Part 1: Akamai The novel opens on a May afternoon in Paris, France. Jonathan Marshall, a graduate student in physics, has met an attractive young

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woman named Marisa at a cafe and has taken her back to the wave mechanics laboratory that he is working at for the summer. Marisa pretends to be very interested in Marshall and his work, asking seemingly naive questions about the lab equipment and the security cameras in the lab. Marisa then takes Marshal back to her apartment where she seduces him. Soon after, three men burst into the apartment. The men hold the naked Marshall down on his stomach and inject something into his arm. They quickly leave and Marisa claims that they are merely friends of her boyfriend Jimmy, playing a cruel trick on them. Marshall soon begins to feel ill and decides to leave for home. Marisa agrees to drive him home, but on the way to her car, Marshall’s condition deteriorates until he is eventually unable to move at all. After Marshall becomes completely paralyzed, Marisa throws him into the Seine River, where he drowns. The narrative next shifts to a rain forest in Malaysia. Charles Ling has flown in from Hong Kong the night before to pick up a potential customer who identifies himself as Allan Peterson and claims to be a geologist from Canada. Ling sells cavitation machines that are able to create pits or cavities in solid substances by means of focused sound waves. He takes Peterson into the rain forest where he demonstrates the operation of one of his machines, leveling two sections of cliff. Peterson quickly agrees to buy three cavitation units and has Ling take him back to the airport. In London, an American man has come to the office of Richard Mallory to pick up a secret package. The package is a box of wire. As the box weighs some seven hundred pounds, Mallory helps the American load the wire into his delivery van. After they load the wire into the van, the van’s driver, a woman dressed in military attire, attacks the American and pierces his neck with something that she has hidden behind her back. He curses and runs away from the van toward the street outside. Mallory is shocked by the woman’s actions, but she warns him to keep quiet and go back to work and then drives away. Mallory returns to his office but soon hears sirens. He walks outside and sees that a pedestrian has been hit and fatally injured by a bus. The pedestrian is the American man who just fled from the delivery van. The next scene takes place in Tokyo at the offices of the IDEC (International Data

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Environmental Consortium). Akira Hitomi, the IDEC director, presents information to John Kenner and Sanjong Thapa about the results of his company’s latest research. The IDEC is the world leader in accumulating and manipulating electronic data. Hitomi summarizes the data collected from the last twenty-one days. He reports increased cellular traffic and heavily encrypted email transmissions pointing to a large secretive project in the works that is ‘‘global in scope, immensely complicated, extremely expensive.’’ In Vancouver one week later, Nat Damon, who works for Canada Marine RS Technologies, signs a nondisclosure agreement with a new client, Seismic Services. Damon’s company rents research and remote submarines to energy companies. While discussing the client’s needs, Damon becomes suspicious when the men answer his questions vaguely. They tell him they want to place external devices on the ocean floor. The men pay the expensive fee for renting the submarine up-front, and Damon feels as though there is more to their story than they are letting on. The next scene takes place in Iceland. Philanthropist George Morton, NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) director Nicholas Drake, and lawyer Peter Evans have flown into Reykjavik and driven out to a remote glacial research site. Morton has personally funded this particular research project and the group has come to analyze the progress of the research. While Morton and Evans are distracted by the presence of two beautiful local graduate students, Drake gets into a confrontation with Dr. Per Einarsson, the lead scientist on the research project, about what specific findings he will publish concerning the research. After returning from Iceland to Los Angeles, Evans and Morton meet with Thapa and Kenner, who advise Morton to hold off any further contributions to Drake and NERF. At Morton’s insistence, Evans visits the offices of NERF’s Vanutu litigation team; they are planning to sue the United States over rising sea levels caused by global warming, which is threatening the low-lying atolls of Vanutu. He meets the famous litigator John Balder, who is in charge of the team, and his assistant, Jennifer Haynes, who the reader later learns is Kenner’s niece. Drake has planned a well-publicized charity event in which he gives Morton NERF’s Citizen of the Year award. However, upon accepting the

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award, a drunken Morton mysteriously and publicly lambastes Drake and NERF before driving off in his Ferrari. Evans attempts to follow Morton and comes upon the scene of Morton’s wrecked Ferrari, and although there is no body, pieces of Morton’s clothing are found. It is assumed that he has been swept away by the ocean. After the accident, there are a series of unexplained break-ins and mysterious attacks. Recalling Morton’s last words to him, Evans uncovers a hidden piece of paper with a set of coordinates. Kenner and Thapa realize the coordinates represent geographical locations, and the first one on the list is Mt. Terror, Antarctica.

Part 2: Terror Part 2 opens with Kenner, Evans, Sarah Jones, and Thapa on a long flight to Antarctica. During the flight, Kenner explains to Jones and Evans that intelligence has uncovered information that members of ELF (Environmental Liberation Front) have been purchasing some very expensive equipment, including military equipment and experimental technology to enact an as-yet-unknown plan. The four on the plane are traveling to Antarctica to try to find out more about what ELF has in the works. After landing on the runway at Marso del Mar, the team is transported to Weddell Station, the base nearest Mount Terror. Kenner has learned of a scientist who has recently arrived and set up a camp south of Mount Terror, calling himself James Brewster. After investigating his credentials, Kenner finds the man to be an impostor. The team sets out to investigate his camp, traveling over the dangerous Antarctic shear zone in snowtracks, a special kind of treaded automobile designed to cross the rugged, icy landscape. A local researcher calling himself Jimmy Bolden leads the way. Upon arriving and inspecting the camp, the team finds that Brewster has set a number of PTB (precisiontimed blast) cones at regular intervals along an Antarctic shelf, and Kenner explains, ‘‘I think there’s no question of what he intends. Our friend Brewster is hoping to fracture the ice for a hundred miles, and break off the biggest iceberg in the history of the planet.’’

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to camp, Bolden tells Jones and Evans that they will take a short cut. Traveling down this new route, a transmission comes across the radio from Weddell Station that Jimmy Bolden has been found unconscious in a maintenance room. Evans and Jones realize that their guide is actually an ELF operative in disguise. The impostor calling himself Bolden has led them out to a dangerous ice shelf. When they try to escape, the ice cracks and the two tumble down a crevasse along with their vehicle. Evans and Jones manage to climb out of the crevasse and attempt to walk back to camp in the freezing temperatures. Just before the two succumb to the elements, they come across a small NASA vehicle with a transmitter, through which Evans is able to relay their location back to Weddell Station. The two are rescued and brought back to the station. Through computer investigation, Kenner and Thapa determine that the man who identified himself as Brewster is actually David R. Kane, a graduate student from the University of Michigan. Upon going through Kane’s belongings the team finds a photograph with coordinates and containing the caption ‘‘Scorpion B.’’ They determine that it shows the site of another ELF operation in a place called Resolution Bay in the Solomon Islands. The team boards a plane back to Los Angeles.

Part 3: Angel On the flight back to Los Angeles, Kenner informs Evans that he needs him to plant a bugged listening device in Drake’s office in order to further monitor the NERF/ELF communications. Evans is reluctant at first, but finally agrees at Kenner’s insistence. After arriving in Los Angeles, Evans returns to his apartment, where he meets a private investigator who claims he was hired by George Morton. He tells Evans that he will return later that morning with ‘‘something important,’’ and asks Evans to leave his apartment door unlocked when he leaves.

Kenner directs the team to split up, and he follows Brewster’s tracks in his snowtrack while Jones and Evans follow Bolden back to Weddell Station in their snowtrack. Along the drive back

Kenner and Jones go to a military surplus store. Kenner has learned that ELF purchased a large number of rockets from the store. When questioning a store employee, Jones spots the man known as ‘‘Brewster’’ and chases after him. Jones and Kenner tail Brewster until a man driving a blue pickuptruck picks him up. It turns out the man driving the truck is the Bolden impostor. Kenner and Jones follow the

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truck to a private airfield. In a building near the airfield, Kenner and Jones discover a kind of testing facility in which an engine is repeatedly struck by lightning. While they are inspecting the testing machinery, Bolden and Brewster lock them in the test chamber and restart the testing sequence, intending to electrocute Kenner and Jones. Bolden asks how long they can survive, and Brewster answers, ‘‘One bolt, maybe two, but by the third one, they’re definitely dead. And probably on fire.’’

Part 4: Flash Finding themselves locked in the testing room with only seconds before the lightning starts striking, Kenner quickly tells Jones to strip off all of her clothes, especially anything containing metal. Kenner likewise strips and piles all of their cast-off clothing on the engine where the lighting will strike. Next, he tells Jones to lie flat on the floor, close her eyes, and not get up. Soon the next ‘‘test’’ begins and lightning starts blasting the engine. Their clothes catch fire, which in turn creates smoke, activating the emergency sprinkler system. Though Jones suffers singed hair and some body burns, the two survive the near-death experience relatively unharmed. Evans returns to his apartment to find the private investigator whom he had been expecting sitting on his couch. However, Evans soon realizes that something is terribly wrong, as the investigator does not respond and cannot move or even blink his eyes. Evans calls an ambulance. After talking to a detective about the man’s condition and denying any knowledge of what happened to him, Evans discovers a DVD left behind by the investigator. He inserts the DVD into his player and views a recording apparently made with a hidden camera in a NERF conference room. The tape shows Drake and NERF PR director John Henley arguing about the organization, funding, the upcoming conference, and how they can manipulate the public. Evans removes the DVD and goes to Drake’s office. He visits with Drake and purposefully leaves behind a bugged cell phone. Evans then goes back to his apartment and watches more footage on the DVD before he is interrupted by a phone call from Thapa informing him that they must leave immediately.

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Part 5: Snake As Thapa and Evans fly over the Arizona desert in a helicopter, Thapa explains to Evans the latest data that has come in concerning the ELF/NERF operation in Arizona. Intelligence has learned that operatives are planning to launch about one hundred and fifty rockets in the air to an altitude of about one thousand feet; however, Thapa, in the presence of the helicopter pilot, will not reveal what the operatives are trying to accomplish. In a Flagstaff restaurant, Kenner explains the Arizona operation that ELF/NERF is planning: they will shoot the rockets into a developing thunderstorm in an attempt to strengthen it, creating a devastating flash-flood that will engulf campers in nearby national and state parks. The next day, near McKinley State Park, Evans and Jones are driving in an SUV when they see the same battered blue truck that Bolden picked up Brewster in. The pickup truck rams the SUV once and then drops back. Soon after, lightning begins striking the SUV directly, as if something on the vehicle is attracting all the lightning in the area. As the lightning strikes to the SUV become more frequent and damaging, Evans and Jones abandon the vehicle and seek shelter first in the forest and then in an old building. Despite their efforts to avoid the lightning, it continues to strike around them and eventually Jones is struck directly, knocking her unconscious. Kenner, in his own SUV, finds himself attracting lightning strikes just as Evans and Jones did, but he soon realizes what is causing the unnatural strikes. The radios that the team is using to communicate with each other have been tampered with and implanted with a mechanism that attracts the lightning strikes. Upon realizing this, Kenner tells the others and orders them to throw their radios away. Evans discards his radio and administers mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Jones, bringing her back to consciousness. Though Jones and Evans never reach their intended rocket array, both Thapa and Kenner reach their respective arrays. They get into gunfights with the ELF/NERF operatives, and have limited success in stopping the rocket launches. The park begins to flood; Jones and Evans, having returned to their SUV, find themselves being swept away in the rushing water. Just before their SUV topples over an overpass, the two

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manage to climb out and safely transfer to Thapa’s SUV. Thanks to the efforts of Kenner, Jones, Evans, and Thapa, as well as a local state trooper, all the innocent campers escape the flood safely. Jones is treated for her lightning strike at a Flagstaff hospital and the group returns home to Los Angeles. Back in Los Angeles, Evans meets with Jennifer Haynes, who shows him several sets of environmental and temperature data to explain the complexities of the Vanutu litigation. Haynes reveals to Evans that NERF cannot possibly win the case in court, and that the whole set up and press conference that is about to take place announcing the lawsuit is merely for publicity. NERF never actually intended to take the case to trial. During the press conference, Drake reports from loudspeaker, ‘‘I have an extremely sad announcement to make. I have just been handed a note that says the body of my dear friend George Morton has been found.’’ Evans is summoned to identify the body of Morton, but the report is that the body has been partially devoured by sharks. When inspecting the body, Evans looks for familiar identifying signs. Though he has some doubts, he concedes that it is most likely Morton’s body. After arriving back at his apartment, someone attacks Evans, hitting him on the head with a blunt object. He is held as his assailants produce a small octopus that bites Evans on the arm. As the assailants flee, Evans struggles to a chair and his condition rapidly deteriorates:

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

State of Fear (2004) is available in unabridged audio on both cassette and CD through Harper Collins Audio. The novel is narrated by George Wilson.

‘‘fearmongers.’’ Evans is charged with keeping Hoffman occupied to avoid further disruption of the proceedings; he takes Hoffman aside and talks with the scientist about his various theories and views. During the conference, Kenner deduces that ELF/NERF operatives are planning to create a massive tsunami originating in the Solomon Islands off the coast of Resolution Bay. Shortly after learning this new information, Kenner, Thapa, Evans, Jones, Haynes, and Ted Bradley depart by plane to Resolution Bay.

Part 7: Resolution

Evans’s sometimes-girlfriend Janis arrives at his apartment to find him in an unresponsive state; soon after, Jones arrives and calls an ambulance. Under hospital care at UCLA medical center, Evans survives; he is told that he was bitten by a blue-ringed octopus, whose potentially deadly poison has no known antidote. Once recovered, he is able to attend Drake’s much publicized conference on abrupt climate change. Among the audience members of the conference is the notorious Dr. Norman Hoffman, who attempts to disrupt the proceedings by defaming Drake and the other promoters of the conference, whom he calls

The team is transported by helicopter to a landing site near Resolution Bay, but they soon realize that they have been double-crossed by their pilot as soldiers emerge from the jungle shooting at them. While attempting to hike into the operation site, all of the team except for Thapa is captured by local rebels. A grisly scene ensues in which Bradley is bound with ropes and beaten by a frenzied crowd before being eaten alive in a cannibalistic ceremony. Kenner and Evans manage to escape with the help of Morton, who, the reader learns, faked his death and has been working to thwart ELF/NERF’s efforts since he first went missing. Together, the team sabotages the creation of the massive tsunami. The novel ends on the flight back to California, during which Morton excitedly spells out his vision for the future of environmental activism and research.

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He could not lift his head. He could not move his arms. He could not even move his eyes. He stared and the fabric of the chair and the carpet on the floor and he thought, This is the last thing I will see before I die.

Part 6: Blue

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Nicholas Drake

CHARACTERS John Balder Balder is a famous litigator. He has been hired by George Morton to lead the legal team on the Vanutu suit. His nickname is the ‘‘Bald Eagle,’’ and he always dresses in blue: a blue suit, shirt, and tie. Balder is extremely confident, bordering on arrogant, and enjoys his fame and reputation.

Barry Beckman Beckman is a famous litigator who has been hired to defend the United States against the Vanutu litigation. He is something of a law prodigy, having become a professor at Stanford Law School at the age of twenty-eight. Crichton writes, ‘‘Beckman had an incredibly agile mind, a charming manner, a quick sense of humor, and a photographic memory.’’

Drake was a highly successful litigator who retired to become the director of NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund), an American environmental activist group. Drake has spent the last ten years heading NERF, attempting to raise funds and public awareness about what he describes as an imminent global crisis: global warming. Although Drake usually assumes a reserved and calm public demeanor, he is easily angered and loses his temper periodically throughout the novel.

Per Einarsson Einarsson is a leading geological researcher working at a glacial site in Iceland. He refuses to have his reputation compromised by reporting the findings of his research in language dictated by Drake. Einarsson values his academic reputation in the scientific research community above all else and refuses to compromise at all with Drake.

Jimmy Bolden Bolden is a researcher working at Weddell Station in Antarctica who is attacked and placed in a maintenance room by ELF/NERF operatives. One of the operatives assumes his identity and repeatedly attempts to kill Evans, Kenner, and Jones.

Ted Bradley An actor friend of Peter Evans, Bradley accompanies the team to the Solomon Islands. When they are captured by local rebels, Bradley is beaten by a mob and then eaten alive in a cannibalistic ceremony.

James Brewster The real James Brewster in the novel is a professor at the University of Michigan. One of his graduate students, an ELF/NERF key operative named David R. Kane, impersonates him, and thus the other characters in the novel refer to Kane simply as ‘‘Brewster.’’

Nat Damon Damon owns and operates a company called Canada Marine RS Technologies, a company that leases research submarines to clients around the world. He is murdered by ELF/ NERF after securing a submarine lease for them.

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Peter Evans Evans is a twenty-eight-year-old junior associate at the Los Angeles law firm of Hassle and Black. Morton considers Evans his favorite lawyer and often solicits his counsel in legal and other matters. As the novel progresses, Evans learns of the plot by NERF to cause a series of ‘‘natural’’ disasters to coincide with Drake’s much publicized conference on global warming. He helps John Kenner in his attempt to thwart Drake, nearly getting killed several times in traveling to Antarctica, Arizona, and the Solomon Islands as he helps sabotage the efforts of the NERF/ELF operatives.

Jennifer Haynes Haynes is an associate of John Balder. She is working for Morton on the Vanutu lawsuit. As the novel progresses, she works closely with Kenner, Evans, and Thapa on trying to prevent the would-be natural disasters. Like her uncle, John Kenner, she possesses a remarkable bearing, competence, and extensive and varied knowledge.

John Henley Henley is the head of Public Relations for NERF. In several scenes, it is suggested that Henley is the mastermind behind the secret NERF/ELF operations.

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Akira Hitomi Hitomi is the director of the IDEC (International Data Environmental Consortium), a group that monitors data and communication transmissions around the world. He is employed by John Kenner to monitor a network of wouldbe environmental terrorists.

Norman Hoffman Hoffman is an eccentric professor emeritus from USC. He studies what he terms the ‘‘ecology of thought’’ and is one of a few academics publicly criticizing the current environmental movement. He fancies himself a kind of scientific prophet crying out in the academic wilderness.

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the EPA, the Department of Defense, the government of Nepal, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. He is an expert skier and mountain climber. In addition to all his accomplishments, it becomes evident throughout the novel that he is a kind of jack-of-all-trades and has a vast and assorted knowledge on a host of unrelated subjects. Through his experiences with tracking ELF/NERF and his conversation with Dr. Norman Hoffman, Kenner comes to see global warming very differently.

John Kim Kim is the bank manager at Scotiabank in Vancouver, and one, among several, of Morton’s bankers around the world.

Jimmy Jimmy is one of the eco-terrorist conspirators; in Chapter 1, he pretends to be the hotheaded boyfriend of the beautiful Marisa, who lets herself be ‘‘rescued’’ by an unsuspecting scientist; after Marisa seduces the scientist and extracts information, the eco-terrorists execute him. Jimmy and Marisa later try to lure George Morton in the same way, but fail.

Sarah Jones

Margaret Lane See Margo Lane.

Margo Lane Margaret Lane, who also calls herself Margo, is one of Morton’s mistresses. Crichton describes her as ‘‘an ex-actress with a bad temper and propensity for litigation.’’ She is extremely fickle and demanding, and often makes demands, not just of Morton, but also of Evans as his attorney. After Morton disappears and is assumed dead, Margo is attacked by eco-terrorists and is hospitalized.

Jones is Morton’s personal assistant. As Kenner and Morton begin to work together to thwart the operations of ELF/NERF, Jones travels with Kenner, Thapa, and Evans and acts as a key player in the team’s attempts to sabotage the operative’s plans. She has a romantic interest in Peter Evans and thus becomes jealous of Jennifer Haynes.

Charles Ling

David Kane

Herb Lowenstein

Kane is a graduate student at the University of Michigan and an ELF/NERF agent. He assumes the identity of one of his professors, James Brewster, and other characters in the novel often refer to him as ‘‘Brewster.’’ Kenner and his team find Kane posing as Brewster in Antarctica and discover he has set a line of explosives there that will cause an enormous chunk of ice to break off into the ocean.

Lowenstein is a lawyer at Hassle and Black. He is a senior partner on George Morton’s account and handles mostly estate management. He is fond of pulling rank and disparaging Evans at the law firm.

John Kenner Kenner is one of the most heroic and enterprising characters in Crichton’s novel. At thirty-nine years old, he can boast a number of accomplishments. He has a doctorate in civil engineering from Caltech as well as a law degree from Harvard Law School. He is a consultant to

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Ling is based out of Hong Kong and sells cavitation machines, instruments that create large cavities in the earth using sound waves.

Richard Mallory Mallory is the owner of a London graphics shop called Design/Quest. Mallory supplies the ELF/NERF network with half a million feet of wire that will eventually be used in ELF’s Arizona operation.

Marisa Marisa is a sexy, exotic young woman who seduces Jonathan Marshall and aids in his murder. She later attempts to seduce Morton but her

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efforts are thwarted with the unexpected arrival of Morton’s assistant, Sarah Jones.

THEMES Function of Fear

Jonathan Marshall Marshall is a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in physics working at the Laboratoire Ondulatoire wave mechanics laboratory north of Paris. At the beginning of the novel, he is fooled into allowing two ELF operatives access to the lab, and unwittingly provides them with scientific data that will be used in a future project. Marshall is poisoned and drowned in the Seine River, the first victim of the ELF/NERF network.

George Morton Morton is a millionaire philanthropist. After gaining his fortune, he has devoted much of his time to various environmental causes. He has a penchant for beautiful women and expensive foreign racecars. As the novel progresses, George goes from a relatively naive foundation donor to a visionary environmental philosopher with novel and radical ideas for creating a more effective and less corrupt string of environmental action groups.

Allan Peterson Peterson is the alias given by an apparent ELF/NERF operative who arranges for the purchase of the cavitation machines from Charles Ling.

Lisa Ray Ray is Herb Lowenstein’s personal assistant, ‘‘a bright-eyed twenty-seven-year-old, and a dedicated gossip.’’ Evans relies on Ray to find out the latest gossip and office information.

Miguel Rodriguez Rodriguez is an Arizona State Trooper who works with Kenner to save the lives of campers caught in the Arizona flash flood.

Sanjong Thapa Thapa is Kenner’s Nepalese colleague and right-hand-man. Kenner met Thapa during one of his mountain climbing trips and soon after found Thapa indispensable. Thapa is compact, resourceful, and agile. He has an unspecified but considerable amount of military training. Thapa is a whiz with gadgets, firearms, and computers.

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As the title of Crichton’s novel suggests, a major theme in the novel is fear and societal reactions and behaviors associated with fear. Toward the end of the novel, Dr. Norman Hoffman says to Evans, ‘‘I study the ecology of thought . . . [a]nd how it has led to a State of Fear.’’ Crichton explores the condition of modern society, a geographic and psychological State of Fear. One of the central ideas of the novel is that environmental crises are largely overstated and sensationalized, if not entirely fictional. Collective societal fears about pollution, global warming, severe weather patterns, and the threat of natural disaster result not so much from a true understanding of the scientific research and findings of the last century, but from largely irrational and emotional fears fed by a media that profits from sensational and fear-inducing reporting. Dr. Hoffman argues that the central fear that occupied Americans before 1989 was the threat of ‘‘The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire,’’ but the toppling of the Berlin Wall created a kind of fear vacuum that was soon filled by widespread but largely unfounded fears about the state of the environment. Hoffman questions both Evans and the reader: Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? . . . Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. . . . they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion—a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear.

Although it would be a mistake to equate the views of the character of Dr. Hoffman with those of the author Crichton, both Crichton and Hoffman clearly share a profound concern about the deluding effects of fear, especially as propagated by the mass media. For example, John Kenner, clearly a likeable and level-headed character in the novel, at one point addresses the misleading function of fear: Remember African killer bees? There was talk of them for years. They’re here now, and apparently there’s no problem. Remember Y2K?

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Everything you read back then said disaster was imminent. Went on for months. But in the end, it just wasn’t true.

In State of Fear, Crichton does not advocate that readers should remove fear completely from society and media reports, as he sees fear as something inherent in the functioning of every society. What he does argue for is a greater awareness of how fear functions, especially through the media and the academic realms, in the hopes of a more informed and better educated public. At the end of the novel, in a section labeled ‘‘Author’s Message,’’ Crichton writes of respect for ‘‘the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalizations, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.’’ Though Crichton claims that modern society currently lives in a rather bleak state of perpetual and unfounded fears, he holds out hope of a better society through education, unbiased information and research, and the willingness to change.


A fundamental concern in Crichton’s novel State of Fear involves the question of whether or not global warming is indeed taking place at all. Conduct research in order to formulate your own personal position on global warming. Is it an actual phenomenon or merely a scientific theory lacking any solid evidence? Present a fiveminute oral presentation outlining your position and your reasons for it.

After the actual novel ends, Crichton includes a section entitled ‘‘Why Politicized Science is Dangerous.’’ Why does he include this section at the end of the novel, and what specifically does Crichton cite as dangerous about ‘‘politicized science?’’ Write a twopage paper detailing the negative consequences that could result from scientific research tied to politics and politicians.

The Limits of Knowledge Apart from the function of fear, perhaps the next most pervasive theme in the novel involves the limits of human knowledge. Crichton opens his ‘‘Author’s Message’’ with the assertion that ‘‘[w]e know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it.’’ In this single sentence, Crichton sums up much of the environmental debate that pervades the novel. Characters from John Kenner to Sanjong Thapa to Jennifer Haynes catalog the mixed and contradictory findings of the past years of scientific research, and the assumptions about the environment held by the public and reported in the news. Although various ‘‘experts’’ claim to have various solutions to the environmental problems, phenomena such as global warming and scarcity of natural resources may not actually exist. Likewise, the track record of environmental preservation has been a dismal one, filled with blunder after blunder. In the end, Crichton advocates a renewed focus on improved research and caution, always taking into account modern society’s very limited knowledge of the complexity of the environment. He writes: We haven’t the foggiest notion how to preserve what we term ‘‘wilderness,’’ and we had better study it in the field and learn how to do

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Perhaps one of the most interesting and memorable of Crichton’s characters in State of Fear is Dr. Norman Hoffman. One might easily find disagreement about whether or not Hoffman is a likeable character. Create a character sketch of Hoffman, listing all of his beliefs about fear and global warming. In a three-paragraph essay, try to answer the question of whether or not he is meant to be a likeable character. Two characters in State of Fear undergo significant ideological changes between the beginning of the novel and the end: both Peter Evans and George Morton shift perspectives by the novel’s end. Discuss exactly how the two change. Do their transformations in any way reflect your experience as a reader encountering the novel from beginning to end? Write a one-page essay examining both the characters’ changes and your own.

so. I see no evidence that we are conducting such research in a humble, rational, and systematic way.

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Doubt As a facet of both fear and the limits of knowledge, doubt plays a large role in the novel, beginning with Crichton himself, who doubts popularly-held world views on global warming. From his initial doubt and rejection of conventional science on the subject of ecology and global warming, he writes a novel in which several main characters express their own doubt about the same issues. The most notable doubter is Dr. Hoffman, who expresses his doubt over the ‘‘State of Fear’’ in which the world lives. His doubt over the dire state of the environment leads him to create a philosophy in which he determines that fear is the motivating factor in most political and ideological decisions: ‘‘social control is best managed through fear.’’ Crichton is not suggesting that readers abandon their beliefs in existing issues, or even change their stances on them. Doubt is actually a good thing when it comes to politics and policies. It is through doubt, he suggests, that individuals come to see the issues in a new light. After Evans’s conversation with Dr. Hoffman, he too becomes skeptical of the idea of global warming. While he does not thoroughly reject it like Hoffman, he views it with a new skepticism.

STYLE Episodic Form State of Fear consists of a number of short sections or episodes, often only a few pages in length. Episodes are scenes in a narrative that function independently, yet must be connected to other episodes in order to create the larger story. In structure they function similarly to episodes of a television program. This style can present a challenge to the reader; though the sections proceed chronologically, they frequently jump from one location to the next. Thus, the reader is forced to piece together a series of initially disconnected narratives and characters. This technique contributes to the sense of several events happening at once, and adds suspense as the reader pieces together the different stories and threads. At times, the connections are obvious; at other times, they are very subtle, and the reader must use his or her power of deduction, picking up on clues to put the large puzzle of the narrative completely together. For example, the characters of Jimmy

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and Marisa seem to disappear from the novel altogether after their brief appearances in the first pages of the story. However, they reappear in the middle of the novel, at first glance as random, unnamed characters in a cafe. By picking up on small clues such as physical descriptions and behaviors, however, a reader can discern that Jimmy and Marisa have returned and are trying to trap Morton in the same way that they fooled John Marshall at the beginning of the book.

Humor Another distinctive feature of Crichton’s writing style in State of Fear is his use of subtle and, at times, dark humor. He uses humor to lighten the subject matter, which in some places can be heavy and dense with information. In his ‘‘Author’s Message’’ Crichton writes, ‘‘we need more scientists and many fewer lawyers.’’ In fact, throughout the novel Crichton makes a number of jibes at lawyers. For example, when Evans and Jones are riding in an SUV and Jones is feeling insecure about Evans’s abilities in a dangerous situation, he reluctantly admits that his physical activities and hobbies are of no use in their situation: ‘‘I don’t shoot guns . . . I’m a lawyer, for Christ’s sake.’’ In another, darker example of Crichton’s humor, Ted Bradley, in the plane en route to the Solomon Islands, states: ‘‘I mean, all that talk about cannibalism. Everybody knows it is not true. I read a book by some professor. There never were any cannibals, anywhere in the world. It’s all a big myth.’’ After landing on the island and extolling the beauty and virtues of ‘‘village life,’’ Bradley is eaten alive in a massive cannibalistic ceremony. Crichton’s use of humor here juxtaposes, or compares, the rejection of a theory—in this case, cannibalism—and the theory’s reality. In this way, he is perhaps poking fun at his own rejection of commonly held social beliefs.

Suspense Crichton’s use of an episodic plot is just one way in which he builds suspense in State of Fear. Suspense is the rising tension and drama in a novel, which creates uncertainty in the reader as to what will happen next. Suspense is an integral part of many of Crichton’s works, and is the primary tool for turning a book about global warming into a page-turning thriller.

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For example, when Morton’s Ferrari is found smashed in an accident, only a shred of his clothing is left. Without a body to confirm his death, readers may suspect that he is not dead at all. Authorities assume that he was swept away by the ocean. When his body is supposedly found and Evans must identify it, he struggles to find any physical characteristics that would definitively identify the corpse as Morton. Once again, Crichton builds the reader’s suspense by leaving open the possibility of doubt. This thread of suspense lasts until the end of the novel, when Morton rescues Evans and Jones from the rebels in the Solomon Islands and reveals that he faked his own death. Crichton often withholds information from the reader to create suspense. For instance, when Nat Damon meets with ELF/NERF leaders about leasing a submarine, he does not know their true identity. Though he is suspicious of their plans and their inability to give specific information about their need for a submarine, he does not speak up and assumes that his suspicion is unfounded. However, his questioning of the men raises doubt for the reader, and builds suspense as to who the men are and what their plans for the submarine could truly be. These answers can only be found by continuing to read the novel.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Political Climate Crichton’s novel takes place in the relatively short historical span of five months, from May through October of 2004. Although Crichton sets his novel in 2004, the most important historical event that concerns the novel occurred three years before with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, nineteen men who were operatives of the militant Islamic group al-Qaeda hijacked four American airliners. Two planes were crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The third plane was crashed into the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Many commentators and historians have noted that the hijackings of September 11 mark the most lethal terrorist acts ever carried out on United States soil.

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historical and cultural environment. Central to the novel’s action are descriptions of a complex network of data gathering agents and international intelligence agencies. For example, in Part 1, Akira Hitomi, the head of IDEC, informs John Kenner and Sanjong Thapa that ‘‘cellular traffic is accelerating. E-mail is heavily encrypted. STF rate is up. It is clear there is a project underway— global in scope, immensely complicated, extremely expensive.’’ After September 11, the media reported extensively on how intelligence agencies gather data and assess the risk and threat of terrorist activities, often by picking up on increased cellular and electronic ‘‘chatter’’ exactly as described in the above passage from the book. This likewise equates the ELF/NERF group in the book with terrorists.

The Kyoto Protocol The Kyoto Protocol is an amendment to an international treaty aimed at reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases that may contribute to global warming. The original treaty was drafted in 1992. The Kyoto Protocol came about in 1997 as an attempt to set specific goals and deadlines for achieving a reduction in greenhouse gases. This agreement officially went into effect on February 16, 2005, with 141 countries having ratified its conditions. As of 2005, only a handful of countries had signed the protocol but not yet ratified it, the two largest being the United States and Australia. If a country does not ratify the protocol, it cannot be held accountable by other signatory nations. Since the United States is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, the international community considers it imperative that the country agree to the protocol’s terms. At the time the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, President George W. Bush made it clear that he would not ratify the amendment because he believed it would have a negative impact on the United States economy. President Bush has also cited uncertainty regarding the science in support of global warming, undoubtedly referring to the same skeptics Crichton mentions in his footnotes and bibliography.

Environmental Overview

While there is minimal mention of the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, Crichton’s novel clearly takes place in a very specific ‘‘post 9/11’’

The year 2004 was marked by significant and highly publicized natural disasters. Seventeen earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.0 or above on the Richter Scale produced varying degrees of

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Factory smokestacks emitting pollution Ó Royalty-Free/Corbis devastation and destruction. Even more notably, the deadliest tsunami in recorded history occurred on December 26, 2004. Waves from the tsunami caused massive damage and loss of life in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, the Maldives, and along the east coast of Africa. As of 2005, many communities are struggling with rebuilding their homes and lives amid water and food shortages and slow government response. State of Fear eerily brings to mind this catastrophic event as ‘‘eco-terrorists’’ attempt to artificially create a deadly and much-publicized tsunami that coincides with Nicholas Drake’s conference on global warming.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Of all the novels that Crichton has published in his long career, none have met with as much controversy as State of Fear. A number of critics, both literary and environmental, attacked Crichton about the theories posited in his novel. Ronald Bailey, writing in Reason, calls it ‘‘The Da Vinci Code with real facts, violent storms, and a different faith altogether.’’ Many reviews indicate that Crichton has a clear agenda in the novel. Chris Mooney writes in the Skeptical Inquirer that the book is ‘‘a novel in name only.’’ Instead, he writes, it is a ‘‘thinly disguised political commentary, in which a

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wildly implausible plot . . . serves as an excuse for a string of . . . dialogues about climate science.’’ In his review in the New American, Dennis Behreandt writes that the book is solely a vehicle for ‘‘Crichton’s concerns about global warming alarmism.’’ Despite this, he says, because of Crichton’s popularity, ‘‘it will almost certainly lead a vast number of readers to question, finally, the lies and myths perpetuated by the global warming cartel.’’ Noted environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben, in ‘‘Stranger than Fiction,’’ reflects a commonly held critical view of the novel. He notes that the novel is part cliche´, part scientific treaty, ‘‘directing readers to journals like Nature and The Lancet, along with the same small set of studies the climate skeptics have been promoting for years.’’ He calls Crichton’s idea of a manmade tsunami ‘‘laughable.’’ The novel was also condemned for its pulp structure and questionable science by critics in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and a host of environmental and science magazines. Despite the considerable negative press the novel received after publication, it was a bestseller and was popular among Crichton’s fans.

CRITICISM Greg Wilson In the following essay, pop-culture writer Wilson discusses Crichton’s use of classic elements of espionage fiction in State of Fear. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear has been described by the publisher as an ‘‘eco-thriller,’’ implying a new breed of suspense fiction hitherto unknown to the reading public. In truth, Crichton’s novel recycles many familiar (and cliche´d) conventions from Cold War spy fiction and simply places them into a modern setting, despite the fact that many of the conventions lose their original intent in the transition. The first chapter of the novel takes place in France. It is a short vignette that ends with the viewpoint character’s death. Never again does the story return to France, and the other characters introduced in this first chapter make only brief, insignificant appearances elsewhere in the book. Crichton continues this trend in the next five chapters, which take place in five more widely scattered locations: Malaysia, England, Japan, Canada, and Iceland. None of these

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AT ITS HEART, THE CONSPIRACY IS MUCH LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER TALES OF SPY FICTION: THE VILLAINS ATTEMPT TO CREATE GLOBAL CATASTROPHE FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT. TO STOP THIS IMPENDING DISASTER, THE PROTAGONISTS MUST JOURNEY ACROSS THE GLOBE TO PLACES LIKE THE SOLOMON ISLANDS AND ANTARCTICA—AGAIN RECALLING THE ROMANTICIZED POPULAR VIEW OF COLD WAR ESPIONAGE.’’

locations figures heavily in the rest of the book. This is a classic technique in espionage fiction, meant to show that the events of the story take place on a global scale and, therefore, have global significance. It also provides a sense of exoticism and worldliness often associated with popular spy fiction, most likely due to the mainstream success of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. It is not until the sixth chapter that the main protagonist, Peter Evans, is introduced. The first five chapters give the reader a sense of the sweeping conspiracy that Evans and company will face in coming chapters. Conspiracy is, of course, a standard ingredient in espionage fiction. In the Cold War era, the fictional conspirators were often high-level members of foreign governments. This is the primary way in which Crichton abstains from convention, since his conspirators are scientists and environmentalists (though they are heavily involved in politics). At its heart, the conspiracy is much like countless other tales of spy fiction: the villains attempt to create global catastrophe for their own benefit. To stop this impending disaster, the protagonists must journey across the globe to places like the Solomon Islands and Antarctica—again recalling the romanticized popular view of Cold War espionage. One of the most colorful (and absurd) genre conventions Crichton employs is the villains’ use of unique methods of assassination. In the first chapter—and several more times throughout the book—Crichton’s villains place a blue-ringed

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octopus on a victim and coax it into biting him or her. The toxin in the blue-ringed octopus’s saliva causes paralysis, which can ultimately lead to cardiac arrest. (The deadly blue-ringed octopus also appears in the James Bond film Octopussy. Although the film is loosely based on several of Fleming’s short stories, Crichton seems to be borrowing at least some of his genre elements from secondhand sources.) Unfortunately, death by octopus proves to be only mildly successful at best. Evans survives an attack, and two others are hospitalized with fates unknown. Another unique assassination method attempted by the eco-terrorists involves targeting lightning at a specific source. This culminates in Sarah Jones, the lead female protagonist, being struck by lightning but surviving. While the idea of environmentalists using the natural world as a weapon is intriguing, the notion of undetectable assassination is an ill fit. In the context of political espionage, it makes sense to disguise a single murder so that it might go unsuspected. In State of Fear, at least three landlocked people are stung by a blue-ringed octopus in the Los Angeles area in the same week. This hardly seems an effective tactic for avoiding suspicion. The literary use of a dying declaration—a revelatory message from someone just before death—has been common in mystery stories ever since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes. In Cold War spy fiction, where the most valuable item in a story is often information, the use of dying declarations achieves a new significance. Crichton uses this technique frequently in State of Fear. After being attacked by villains, Margo Lane speaks of a ‘‘blue ring of death’’ before succumbing to complete paralysis. Millionaire George Morton utters a cryptic statement that is nevertheless rich in information (‘‘All that matters is not remote from where the Buddha sits’’) just before his car is found demolished on a desolate mountain highway. The main problem with this technique as adopted by Crichton, is that the people making these declarations generally do not die. This leaves the reader wondering if perhaps there was not a more sensible way to convey the information. Like the dying declaration, the use of coded messages goes back to the earliest mystery stories of the nineteenth century. Also like the dying

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declaration, the coded message becomes even more significant in the context of espionage. When trafficking in sensitive information, the true meaning of the information must be kept secret by being disguised in some way. The aforementioned cryptic message by George Morton, which sounds to most like the ramblings of an insane man, is meant to lead Evans to a secret location. In that location, Evans discovers yet another coded message composed of long strings of symbols, letters, and numbers. This code is immediately recognized by Professor John Kenner as a list of coordinates for six geographic locations. Later, Evans discovers aerial photographs that appear, at least to an untrained eye, coded. They are negatives of actual images, so that the ocean appears white as snow and clouds look like dark rock outcroppings. Crichton, knowing that this particular bit of visual trickery would lose its impact through mere description, embeds reproductions of the aerial images in his text. In two of the three instances above, however, the messages are coded only insofar as the reader must possess a certain level of available knowledge to understand them. In the same way, any message written in a foreign language is coded to people who cannot read the language. This dilutes the traditional notion of a secret code, which is meant to be truly inaccessible to all but the sender and the receiver. The use of impersonation is a standard element in espionage fiction, to the point that it has become cliche´ in literature (although it is still encountered frequently in films and television shows). Crichton uses this technique when his characters visit Weddell Station in Antarctica. Unbeknownst to them, one of the station’s researchers has been replaced with an impostor who aims to blow off a chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf. Crichton’s use of this genre convention is a better fit than his use of most of the others; still, one has to wonder if Crichton could have devised a way other than impersonation for his villains to go undetected. Assuming the eco-terrorists were aiming to keep their actions secret, an easily detected impersonation seems like a poor choice. The familiar ploy of a staged death is also used by Crichton, though the justification seems shaky here as well. Millionaire George Morton appears to die in a car wreck early in the book, only to return in the final few chapters to help defeat the villains. As he told Evans, Morton’s

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rationale for faking his own death was ‘‘to get me free . . . and find out what [the villains] were doing.’’ Before his ‘‘death,’’ however, Morton appears to have no trouble avoiding both his lawyer and the villains for weeks at a time as he accompanies Kenner across the globe. In traditional espionage fiction, a staged death represents a chance at new life. It is used by those who must abandon their identities in order to survive—an agent whose cover has been blown, for instance, or a would-be defector seeking freedom. In State of Fear, staged death is merely a parlor game for a rich man who wishes to not be bothered for a while. One of the defining elements of espionage fiction that Crichton avoids is implicit nationalism. By its very nature, spy fiction—especially that written during the Cold War—is based on the notion that spies and government officials for one country are good, while those of another country are bad. Since the novel mainly depicts a conflict between professional ideologies (politicized science vs. pure science), Crichton does not fall victim to nationalism. In fact, he seems to favor the notion of international cooperation in a manner seldom encountered in traditional espionage fiction. Despite his global idealism, all but one of the book’s main characters are white Americans. The single foreigner, Kenner’s assistant Sanjong Thapa, is less a character and more a mouthpiece for conveying scientific information. The fictional elements discussed here are not representative of the finest examples of espionage fiction. Like many genre conventions, they are motifs encountered only occasionally in the body of literature. However, these conventions have captured the attention of mainstream readers and serve as low-level descriptors of work that can be distinctively identified as espionage fiction. Some of these genre conventions seem somewhat implausible, even within the context of the Cold War. In fact, taken out of the context of the Cold War, many of these elements do not even make sense. Assassins carrying around delicate octopuses as (not very) deadly weapons? Environmentalists wreaking havoc with the environment they seek to protect, just so they can say ‘‘I told you so’’ to the minority that doubts them? The result is machination without purpose—a replica weapon prop from a spy movie that looks the part but fires only blanks when the trigger is pulled.

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Michael Crichton’s first novel, The Andromeda Strain (1969), is a science fiction novel about a deadly encounter with extraterrestrial organisms.

Crichton’s Congo (1980) is a thriller that opens with the gruesome murders of eight American geologists on an expedition in the African jungle. A trained gorilla named Amy is enlisted to head a new expedition into the mysterious Congo.

Crichton’s novel Prey (2002) is an exciting science-fiction thriller involving nanotechnology and tiny machines that become selfaware.

In Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (2004), John Houghton presents in a single volume a look at the science and controversy surrounding one of the most familiar and debated environmental phenomena of recent years.

In Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (2004), Patrick Michaels expounds upon a central premise of Crichton’s State of Fear: the necessity for science free from bias and distortion.

Source: Greg Wilson, Critical Essay on State of Fear, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

John Stone In the following excerpt, Stone argues that Crichton’s State of Fear is much more than casual reading, and includes important messages about global warming and the environment. State of Fear . . . is not merely a good airport bookshop thriller, but also—and indeed more importantly—a tract conveying some serious messages for our media-driven times. To render the themes of that tract even clearer, Crichton includes . . . an Author’s Message so that the

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Lagoon and coral atoll Ó Douglas Peebles/Corbis

reader may know ‘‘where, exactly, the author stands on these issues’’. Space precludes its reproduction, but a few points from it may illustrate his broad conclusions: • ‘‘We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment . . . ’’ • ‘‘Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause’’. [This, I may interpolate, is probably the only statement about which the global warming zealots and their critics agree; and even then, note that penultimate word ‘‘probable’’. The question of whether an increasing level of carbon dioxide poses any threat whatsoever to mankind is of course an entirely separate matter.] • ‘‘We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a 400 year cold spell . . . ’’ • ‘‘Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon.’’ • ‘‘We have not the foggiest notion how to preserve what we term ‘wilderness’ . . . ’’ • ‘‘I am certain there is too much certainty in the world’’.

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Let me note a good example of the kind of thing Crichton is getting at. Among the many reference works cited in the 21-page bibliography is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), one of the most influential books to have been published in the 20th Century, and one which perfectly illustrates his point about the dangers of pursuing seemingly good environmental causes without thinking through the costs (in the broadest sense of that term) of doing so. In retrospect, it is now possible to say quite unequivocally that Carson’s book has been responsible for killing more people than Mein Kampf. It is true that, unlike Adolf Hitler, Carson did not set out to kill people. Nevertheless, the road to the malarial Hell which was paved with her doubtless good intentions in demanding the banning of the use of D.D.T. (previously widely and effectively used for control of the malarial mosquito) has been just as deadly for the two million people— more than half of them children—who these days die from malaria each year in her name. . . . As one whose first venture into academia was an Honours degree in Mathematical Physics, I have always retained an interest in scientific debates even though it is over fifty years since I last laboured in that vineyard.

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The feature therefore of the global warming controversy which I have long considered most important is well summed up in the final component of those thirty-six additional pages of Crichton’s book, namely his Appendix entitled Why Politicized Science is so Dangerous. He is right. It is: and for that Appendix alone, State of Fear is worth reading.

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CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE IS A COMPLEX TOPIC, NOT EASILY REDUCED TO SHORT SUMMARIES.’’

Source: John Stone, ‘‘Michael Crichton on ‘Global Warming’,’’ in National Observer, Vol. 64, Autumn 2005, pp. 31–34.

argument is more interesting and provocative, though ultimately unpersuasive as well.

David B. Sandalow

1. Climate Science

In the following excerpt, Sandalow suggests that Crichton’s State of Fear is an accessible tool for readers and the public to learn about the possible effects of global warming, and could possibly have a broad impact on the public’s understanding of the issue.

Crichton makes several attempts to cast doubt on scientific evidence regarding global warming. First, he highlights the ‘‘urban heat island effect.’’ Crichton explains that cities are often warmer than the surrounding countryside and implies that observed temperature increases during the past century are the result of urban growth, not rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

How do people learn about global warming? That—more than the merits of any scientific argument—is the most interesting question posed by Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. The plot of Crichton’s 14th novel is notable mainly for its nuttiness—an MIT professor fights a well-funded network of eco-terrorists trying to kill thousands by creating spectacular ‘‘natural’’ disasters. But Crichton uses his book as a vehicle for making two substantive arguments. In light of Crichton’s high profile and ability to command media attention, these arguments deserve scrutiny. First, Crichton argues, the scientific evidence for global warming is weak. Crichton rejects many of the conclusions reached by the National Academy of Sciences and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change— for example, he does not believe that global temperature increases in recent decades are most likely the result of human activities. In challenging the scientific consensus, Crichton rehashes points familiar to those who follow such issues. These points are unpersuasive, as explained below. Second, Crichton argues that concern about global warming is best understood as a fad. In particular, he argues that many people concerned about global warming follow a herd mentality, failing critically to examine the data. Crichton is especially harsh in his portrayal of other members of the Hollywood elite, though his critique extends more broadly to the news media, intelligentsia and general public. This

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This issue has been examined extensively in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and dismissed by the vast majority of earth scientists as an inadequate explanation of observed temperature rise. Ocean temperatures have climbed steadily during the past century, for example— yet this data is not affected by ‘‘urban heat islands.’’ Most land glaciers around the world are melting, far away from urban centers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, using only peer-reviewed data, concluded that urban heat islands caused ‘‘at most’’ 0.05 C of the increase in global average temperatures during the period 1900–1990—roughly one-tenth of the increase during this period. In contrast, as one source reports, ‘‘there are no known scientific peer-reviewed papers’’ to support the view that ‘‘the heat island effect accounts for much or nearly all warming recorded by land-based thermometers.’’ Second, Crichton argues that global temperature declines from 1940–1970 disprove, or at least cast doubt on, scientific conclusions with respect to global warming. Since concentrations of greenhouse gases were rising during this period, says Crichton, the fact that global temperatures were falling calls into question the link between greenhouse gas concentrations and temperatures. Crichton is correct that average temperatures declined, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, from 1940–1970. Temperature is

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the result of many factors, including the warming effects of greenhouse gases, the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation and more. (Think of a game of tugof-war, in which the number of players on each team changes frequently.) The fall in Northern Hemisphere temperatures from 1940–1970 reflects the relative weight of cooling factors during that period, not the absence of a warming effect from man-made greenhouse gases. Should we at least be encouraged, recalling the decades from 1940–1970 in the hope that cooling factors will outweigh greenhouse warming in the decades ahead? Hardly. Greenhouse gas concentrations are now well outside levels previously experienced in human history and climbing sharply. Unless we change course, the relatively minor warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases in the last century will be dwarfed by much greater warming from such gases in the next century. There is no basis for believing that cooling factors such as those that dominated the temperature record from 1940–1970 will be sufficient to counteract greenhouse warming in the decades ahead. Third, Crichton offers graph after graph showing temperature declines during the past century in places such as Puenta Arenas (Chile), Greenville (South Carolina), Ann Arbor (Michigan), Syracuse (New York) and Navacerrada (Spain). But global warming is an increase in global average temperatures. Nothing about specific local temperature declines is inconsistent with the conclusion that the planet as a whole has warmed during the past century, or that it will warm more in the next century if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to climb. Crichton makes other arguments, but a point-by-point rebuttal is beyond the scope of this paper. (A thoughtful rebuttal of that kind can be found at www.realclimate.org.) Climate change science is a complex topic, not easily reduced to short summaries. But a useful contrast with Crichton’s science-argument-withinan-action-novel is the sober prose of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The opening paragraph of a 2001 National Academy report responding to a request from the Bush White House read: Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and

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subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century. Secondary effects are suggested by computer model simulations and basic physical reasoning. These include increases in rainfall rates and increased susceptibility of semi-arid regions to drought. The impacts of these changes will be critically dependent on the magnitude of the warming and the rate with which it occurs.

Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, National Academies Press (2001). Time will tell whether this report or Crichton’s novel will have a greater impact on public understanding of global warming.

2. Climate Fad This raises the second, more interesting argument in Crichton’s novel. Crichton argues that concern about global warming has become a fad embraced by media elites, entertainment moguls, the scientific establishment and general public. In Crichton’s view, many assertions are accepted as fact without critical analysis by the vast majority of those who have views on this issue. On the last point, fair enough. There are indeed fewer people who have sorted through the minutiae of climate change science than have opinions on the topic. In this regard, global warming is like Social Security reform, health care finance, the military budget and many other complex public policy issues. As Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky once wrote, ‘‘Most people don’t think about most issues most of the time.’’ When forming opinions on such matters, we all apply certain predispositions or instincts and rely on others whose judgment or expertise we trust. Of course this observation applies as well to the economics of climate change. The perception is widespread in many circles that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be ruinously expensive. How many of those who hold this view have subjected their opinions to critical analysis? Crichton never musters outrage on this topic.

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Crichton’s complaints are particularly striking in light of the highly successful efforts to provide policymakers and the public with analytically rigorous, non-political advice on climate science. Since 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has convened thousands of scientists, economists, engineers and other experts to review and distill the peer-reviewed literature on the science on global warming. The IPCC has produced three reports and is now at work on the fourth. In addition, the National Academy of Sciences has provided advice to the U.S. government on this topic, including the report cited above. Crichton’s view that the American media provides a steady drumbeat of scary news on global warming is especially hard to fathom. Solid data are scarce, but one 1996 analysis found that the rock star Madonna was mentioned roughly 80 times more often than global warming in the Lexis-Nexis database. Certainly one could watch the evening news for weeks on end without ever seeing a global warming story.

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David B Sandalow, ‘‘Michael Crichton and Global Warming,’’ in Brookings Institution, January 28, 2005, pp. 1–4.

SOURCES Bailey, Ronald, ‘‘Michael Crichton Tells the Truth,’’ in Reason, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 51, 53, 55, 57. Behreandt, Dennis, ‘‘Facing Our Fears,’’ in the New American, Vol. 21, No. 7, pp. 23–25. Crichton, Michael, State of Fear, Harper Collins, 2004. Leggett, Jeremy, ‘‘Dangerous Fiction,’’ in New Scientist, Vol. 185, No. 2489, 2005, pp. 50–53. McKibben, Bill, ‘‘Stranger Than Fiction,’’ in Mother Jones, Vol. 30, No. 3, p. 38. Mooney, Chris, ‘‘Bad Science, Bad Fiction, and an Agenda,’’ in Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 53–55.

FURTHER READING

Crichton’s most serious charge is that ‘‘open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed’’ in the scientific community. As ‘‘proof,’’ he offers the assertion that many critics of global warming are retired professors no longer seeking grants. Whether there is any basis for these assertions is unclear, but if so Crichton should back up his claims with more than mere assertions in the appendix to an action novel.

Abbey, Edward, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000. This classic novel from environmental writer Edward Abbey presents a highly comic and entertaining story of a rag-tag group of environmental crusaders. The novel helped spawn a movement of disruptive eco-pranksters around the world. Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, Mariner Books, 2002. Carson’s book represents a landmark in writing about the environment. Perhaps no single book has been as influential and widely read in terms of environmental writing as Silent Spring, which first appeared in 1962. Crichton, Michael, Adventures, Harper Collins, 2002. In this autobiography, Crichton traces significant episodes in his development as a writer and thinker. Crichton describes his numerous adventures and experiences, including his days spent in Harvard Medical School and his extensive travels which have taken him all over the world. Foreman, Dave, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Three Rivers Press, 1993. In this book, Foreman, founder of the controversial environmentalist group EarthFirst!, offers entertaining descriptions of some of the groups more extreme methods and offers Foreman’s own views on the need to conserve and preserve the natural world.

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Furthermore, the print media’s ‘‘on the one hand, on the other hand’’ convention tilts many global warming stories strongly toward Crichton’s point of view. As Crichton would concede, the vast majority of the world’s scientists believe that global warming is happening as a result of human activities and that the consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions could be very serious. Still, many news stories on global warming include not just this mainstream view but also the ‘‘contrarian’’ views of a very small minority of climate change skeptics, giving roughly equal weight to each. As a result, public perceptions of the controversy surrounding these issues may be greatly exaggerated.

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Trickster’s Choice Trickster’s Choice is the first in a four-part series about Alianne, the daughter of Alanna the Lioness, Champion of the King of Tortall and protagonist of Tamora Pierce’s ‘‘Song of the Lioness’’ quartet. Like the protagonists of Pierce’s many other novels, Alianne—Aly for short—is a strong young woman in a book full of capable, empowered female characters. Trickster’s Choice takes Aly from her home in Tortall to Lombyn, where she is offered an opportunity to help restore a raka queen to her rightful throne, and prove her abilities to her skeptical parents. Set against the backdrop of racial turmoil between the copper-skinned raka and the paleskinned luarin, Aly’s struggle to find her place in the world is a difficult one. As the daughter of a legendary warrior (her mother Alanna) and a master of spies (her father George), she is intelligent, inquisitive, clever, and charming. But she is also of aristocratic blood, and her parents believe the life of a spy, one that she has chosen, is beneath her. Pierce has said that she writes for teenagers because she likes to help those who feel, as she did at that age, misunderstood or alienated. For Aly, the experience of being kidnapped and sold into slavery actually becomes the opportunity Aly has hoped for. In her young protagonist, Pierce offers a heroine who is both textured and genuine.

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Trickster’s Choice, however, is more than an adventure novel. Aly’s success depends on her ability to negotiate a harrowing landscape of political and racial animus, and she must overcome obstacles created by both humans and immortals. In the end, her choice is a familiar one to readers of Pierce’s other works: should she embrace a risky opportunity for greatness, or revert to a more comfortable life of wealth and privilege?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Tamora Pierce was born in 1954 in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania, deep in the heart of coal country. Pierce’s mother pursued her college degree while Tamora and her two sisters, Kimberly and Melanie, were still very young. Pierce’s father worked for the phone company, a job that resulted in the family’s relocation to San Mateo, California, in 1963.

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This original book, titled Song of the Lioness, eventually became the four-volume ‘‘The Song of the Lioness’’ series. The book was rewritten and expanded, and the intended audience was shifted from adults to teenage readers. The first volume, Alanna: The First Adventure, was published in 1983 by Atheneum Books. The Hand of the Goddess was published in 1984, followed by The Woman who Rides Like a Man in 1986. The final volume of the quartet, Lioness Rampant, was published in 1988. Following the ‘‘Song of the Lioness’’ quartet, Pierce wrote the ‘‘Immortals’’ quartet, the ‘‘Circle of Magic’’ quartet, the ‘‘Protector of the Small’’ tetralogy, and the ‘‘Circle Opens’’ quartet.

PLOT SUMMARY Chapters 1–4

Pierce developed a love of reading at an early age. Her poor but supportive family supplied her with books of all types, which she readily devoured. Recognizing her love of good stories, Pierce’s father suggested she try writing her own. She began writing short stories when she was in the sixth grade. She credits her seventh grade English teacher for introducing her to J. R. R. Tolkein’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy. Through these books she discovered the power of fantasy fiction to transport readers into imaginary realms. However, even as she sought solace in worlds of fantasy during the emotionally trying times of adolescence, she recognized the lack of strong female protagonists in the books she read. This realization planted the seeds for the heroes of her novels. Pierce and her sisters moved back to Pennsylvania with their mother when her parents divorced in 1969. Her affinity for fantasy and science fiction grew as she looked for momentary escapes from her tumultuous family life. She excelled in school and was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania. In her junior year in college, Pierce wrote ‘‘Demon Chariot,’’ the first short story she had written in five years. When she took a creative writing course the following year, her teacher recommended that she work on a novel. After a failed attempt to write a book about her childhood, Pierce returned to the fantasy stories she had loved since she was an adolescent.

Trickster’s Choice opens with Aly returning to her home in Tortall after a sojourn. Her father, George of Pirate’s Swoop, the secondin-command of spies, greets her. From her first appearance on the page, Aly is playful, precocious, and witty. She is also brilliant. Having been taught the tradecraft of a master spy by her father from the time she was a little girl, Aly, now sixteen, is eager to become an agent in the service of the king. Her father scoffs, believing the life of a spy is not suitable for his little girl. Her mother Alanna the Lioness— King’s Champion, legendary warrior, and the first female knight in the kingdom of Tortall— reacts similarly upon her return from the battlefront in Scanra.

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Alanna’s visit to Pirate’s Swoop marks the first time Aly has seen her mother in a year. Alanna and George cannot imagine why their daughter would want to be a spy. Instead, they believe her stated desire is a smokescreen masking her lack of ambition. Aly is frustrated and disheartened by her parents’ wariness; she decides to set out on her own for several weeks to give her parents some time alone before her mother is called back to the war. Aly’s fortunes take a turn for the worse when the ship on which she sails is caught by pirates, and she is sold into slavery. After weeks in a holding pen, Aly is sold to the house of Duke Mequen Balitang in Rajmuat on Kypriang Island. Luckily, the duke and his family are

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amiable royalty who treat their slaves and servants with dignity and respect. Bad news comes to the Balitang family by way of Prince Bronau from the Copper Isles. The family is forced to leave their home in Rajmuat because the ailing King Oron believes the duke is plotting against him. The family must move to a distant land holding. Aly is selected by the Balitangs to go with the family rather than be put back on the slave market because, as Aly finds out, the god Kyprioth has chosen her to help protect the family from harm. Kyprioth offers Aly a wager: if she protects the family, then he will tell her father of her abilities as a spy. Aly accepts the agreement, and along with the family, moves to the Lombyn. Aly begins to suspect the true nature of her challenge along the road to Tanair. The island is inhabited by the copper-skinned raka people, who are deeply wary of the pale-skinned luarin because of the luarin history of oppressing the raka. Aly, a luarin, does not know what to make of the animosity between the two groups. The Balitangs are luarin as well, but the duke’s two daughters—Dove, an inquisitive twelve-yearold, and Sarai, a beautiful sixteen-year-old— are half-raka. While Mequen is their father, their mother was Sarugani, a raka queen to whom the duke was married. Sarugani died prematurely in a riding accident. As the caravan proceeds on the road to their new home, Aly notices the raka people taking great interest in the girls. Although she is initially concerned, the raka are merely fascinated by the half-raka Sarai and Dove.

As they settle into their new environment, Sarai and Dove frequently come to Aly to hear stories about Tortall. They want to know about her family; rather than tell them that she is daughter of the famed Lioness, she says her mother is a traveling musician. The girls are very interested in the Lioness, and Aly realizes that Dove, the younger of the two sisters, is as curious and intelligent as her sister Sarai is beautiful. Aly is also befriended by Nawat, a crow who has transformed himself into a boy. Nawat teaches Aly to speak the crow’s language and shows her how to use the crows as allies in her quest to protect Dove and Sarai. In time, Aly and Nawat become good friends, and Nawat practices kissing with Aly as he has seen other humans do. Kyprioth comes to Aly and, in her dreams, shows her scenes from home. In one, Aly sees her mother positioned at her military post. Alanna has learned that Aly is missing, and is angry with George for not telling her sooner. Her mother’s concern is frightening to Aly, because she knows her mother needs to concentrate on her preparations for war. One slight misstep and her mother could be injured or killed. Aly suddenly worries that she might have endangered her mother by leaving home. Aly maintains her cover as a slave until she discovers four raka servants meeting and discussing a conspiracy. She reveals herself to Ulasim, Chenaol, Fesgao, and Lokeij and learns the true nature of her charge. She is meant to protect Dove and Sarai, not the duke and duchess. The girls are raka royalty, and must someday reclaim their throne.

Chapters 5–8 Duke Mequen and Duchess Winnamine have discovered that Aly is the god’s messenger. They offer to remove the metal collar from around her neck and free her from slavery. Aly, however, knowing her responsibility to watch over the family, decides it would be beneficial for her to maintain the disguise of a slave. According to Aly, she can move more freely throughout the castle and the lands as a slave because very few people will suspect her of grander schemes. She is assigned to carry messages for the duke and duchess at night, and to herd goats during the day; this gives her full access to both the castle and the territory surrounding it.

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Chapters 9–12 Aly and the raka conspirators decide that it is best for Aly to be armed. Aly has been thoroughly trained in daggers, so Chenaol, the head cook at Tanair, obtains a set of knives for her. Aly meets Junai Dodeka, a mysterious raka woman who appears to be following her. She learns that Junai is the daughter of Ulasim, and is a fierce warrior. Aly is unsure of why Junai is watching her, but assumes she is also part of the team of raka protecting Dove and Sarai. As Aly herds the goats, she is met by Dove, who has come to see her and discuss her mistrust of Prince Bronau. Although the prince is attempting to make inroads with the family under the

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guise of courting Sarai, Dove believes he has scandalous ulterior motives. Aly rides with Dove, Sarai, Prince Bronau, and their servants into the countryside in Pohon. The people of Pohon are known to have a deepseated hatred of the luarin because of the luarin’s oppressive regimes. To protect the Balitangs, Aly believes they must find a mage that can avert any magical attacks. The Mage of Pohon is known to be powerful and wise. She is also known to hate the luarin fiercely. Aly disguises herself by darkening her skin, and slips away from the riding party to find the mage. She is attacked in the village, but to her surprise, Junai intervenes, revealing herself to be Aly’s guard. Junai tells the raka in the village that Aly has been chosen by a trickster to protect Dove and Sarai. Although she does not meet the mage, Aly finds out that Ochobu, the Mage of Pohon, is actually Junai’s grandmother and the mother of Ulasim. Both Ulasim and Junai tell Aly that Ochobu will never help a luarin, even if it means coming to the aid of the raka girls who would be queen. Soon after her trip to Pohon, Aly uses her gift of sight and spots a group of merchants approaching Tanair. Four undercover assassins are traveling with the merchants. Aly identifies them by their rugged appearance and scars from battle. Aly works with Ulasim and Fesgao to come up with a plan to protect the family. She notices herself becoming nervous for the first time, but when the assassins make their move, Aly, the raka conspirators, the family, and menat-arms are ready. They kill all but one of the assassins. The last of the assassins springs out, and Sarai runs him through with her sword before her father can be killed. Aly questions her own effectiveness during the attack. She thinks she should have been in position to save the Mequen herself. During the exchange, the duke and duchess learn that Veron, their sergeant-atarms, is a spy for King Oron. However, they decide not to kill him right away as Aly suggests. After the assassination attempt, the duke and duchess, as well as Aly and the rest of the family, turn their attention to Prince Bronau, who is becoming increasingly affectionate toward Sarai. During a secret rendezvous, Prince Bronau tells Sarai that he is in love with her and wants to marry her once he establishes himself back in the Copper Isles.

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Kyprioth transports Aly to watch the death of King Oron. He does so because the king’s death will result in turmoil for Sarai, Dove, and the rest of the Balitang family. The raka do not like Sarai being courted by Prince Bronau, and Mequen and Winnamine believe that the prince is really only interested in gaining the crown. If he marries Sarai, he will be the next in line should the duke assume his position as King Oron’s successor. Bronau returns to the Copper Isles. Sarai is upset with her family for being so intrusive, and for doubting her ability to handle her own personal life. Aly is convinced she must persuade Ochobu to join her in her quest to protect the girls. She rides to Pohon with Nawat, Ulasim, and Junai. The mage does not receive Aly amiably, but Kyprioth appears and engages in a sharp confrontation with the mage. Aly is steadfast, showing little fear in the face of the mage’s hostility and revealing her own resolve to protect the girls. Kyprioth and Ochobu get into an argument about Kyprioth losing the battle with the luarin three hundred years before. In the end, Kyprioth is forced to demonstrate his power, making the old woman double over in pain. Ochobu comes back to the castle with them to protect the future raka queen.

Chapters 13–16 During the summer, it is common practice for Dove, Sarai, and their entourage to go for long horseback rides where the girls can greet the adoring raka people. Aly becomes a full time member of the riding party so she can watch over the girls. On one of these rides through the countryside, Dove tells Aly and Sarai that she is worried about Prince Bronau. She says that he is not trustworthy. Aly agrees, and in Sarai’s ambivalence toward him, she realizes that Sarai might have been angry with her parents because they did not trust her—not because they prohibited her relationship with Prince Bronau. When the riding party returns, Ochobu tells Aly that she knows of the agreement she has with Kyprioth. The two have a long conversation about the state of the raka, and Aly learns of many atrocities committed by the luarin people as they conquered the raka. Nawat and Aly’s affection for each other grows. They do not have an official or exclusive relationship, but Nawat says he will follow Aly anywhere. He says that he belongs with her. Aly

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thinks Nawat is a great friend, and likes the attention from the attractive and awkward crow-boy. She also recognizes his ability as a warrior. He plays games with the archers in which he snaps arrows from the air. Sarai is amazed by Nawat’s prowess, and as he makes mage-killing arrows with stormwing feathers, Aly knows Nawat is preparing for a major battle. Over the course of the summer, Aly and the raka conspirators continue their battle preparations. Kyprioth sends Dove and Sarai on more horseback rides on Lombyn to expose them to the raka people. Many people come out of their homes to see the beautiful girls that they know will someday be the rulers of their land. In the heart of the summer, however, the Balitang family receives messages and gifts from Prince Bronau. He sends a beautiful necklace to Sarai intended to seduce her from afar. In a vision, Kyprioth transports Aly to Fort Mastiff, Tortall, on the Scanran border. There, Aly watches her mother spar with Keladry of Mindelan, the first woman to be considered for knighthood since her mother. A messenger says that Aly’s father is going to Rajmuat, because he has heard news of Aly’s whereabouts. Aly believes it is only a matter of time before her father tracks her down and takes her back home. In a later dream, Kyprioth takes Aly to recently crowned King Hazarin’s bed chamber. As Aly and the trickster watch, the king wakes with a start, gasps for air, and then dies. Aly talks to Hazarin’s ghost before the Black God comes to take the spirit away. He says that he is happy to be dead, away from the petty bickering, jealousy, and envy in the king’s court. Following the death of Hazarin, Dunevon, King Oron’s youngest child, is made king. The new king is just a child. Aly is stunned as she watches Bronau attempt to kidnap the young king. Bronau is stopped before he can take the child, but he manages to flee without being apprehended. Kyprioth and Aly are frightened as the trickster’s powerful brother (Mithros) and sister (The Great Goddess) appear. The two question their brother’s involvement in the Copper Isle affairs, but Aly protects Kyprioth by saying that she is the one interested in the events, not him. Kyprioth is grateful to Aly, and in return for her good deed, he offers to call off the wager and take her back home. After much contemplation,

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Aly does not accept. She decides that she should see the bet through so her father will know her skills as a spy. She also wants to help the raka queen reach her rightful throne. The vision in which Aly watches the king’s death and Bronau’s grab at power is no ordinary dream. Aly wakes up after five days of sleep, fully expecting Bronau to come to Tanair to hide out after his failed kidnapping attempt. Aly is correct, but it takes Bronau several weeks to do so. As they wait, Aly directs the family and men-at-arms in weapons training. A young Rittevon family messenger boy on a winged horse delivers the news from Rubinyan that Prince Bronau is being sought and charged with treason. It is news that Aly has suspected all along. The duke and duchess, however, do not want to believe the truth about their old friend. Days later, Prince Bronau shows up and tells the family that he suspects that his sister-in-law, Imajane, may have done something to poison King Hazaran. He says that he was attempting to protect the new young king, not harm him, and Mequen agrees to return with him to Rajmuat to help the prince plead his case. Prince Bronau stays at the castle for a week before trying to convince the duke to take his place as the heir to the throne. The duke refuses, so Prince Bronau takes action. The duke and duchess are in bed when Bronau attacks. There is a fierce battle; in the climactic conflict, Prince Bronau and his men are all killed. Dove and Sarai are safe, but the duke dies from his wounds. Aly declares that she will put a halfraka queen on the throne if it is the last thing she ever does. Following the duke’s funeral, Rubinyan retrieves his brother’s body and invites Winnamine and the girls to come back home. Winnamine says that she wants to wait until spring. Rubinyan’s party is followed by a merchant caravan, and a man of indistinguishable origin. The man says he wants to buy Aly and requests to see her. When Aly arrives to meet the merchant, she realizes it is her father. George talks to Kyprioth and demands that Aly be allowed to go home. Kyprioth agrees, acknowledging Aly’s victory in the wager and confirming for George her masterful skills as a spy. Aly, however, decides to stay in Tanair. She has found her place in the world and a worthwhile mission to which she can dedicate her efforts.

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Dovasary Balitang

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Trickster’s Choice was released in 2003 as an unabridged audiocassette format by Listening Library Audio. It is narrated by Ora Pierce and Trini Alvarado.

Dovasary, usually referred to by her nickname Dove, is the daughter of Duke Mequen and his first wife, the raka queen Sarugani. She is the younger sister of Saraiyu (Sarai) and shows the skills and inquisitiveness of a young spy. Dove possesses a keen instinct for understanding people’s motives. She frequently eavesdrops through doors and down dark hallways. Dove befriends Aly, and Aly decides that, although Dove is crude in her methods, she can be much more than a passive participant in her own defense. Dove is a strong young woman who will one day be a tremendous leader in her own right.

Dove Balitang

CHARACTERS

See Dovasary Balitang

Alan of Pirate’s Swoop The son of Alanna the Lioness and George of Pirate’s Swoop, and Aly’s twin brother. He is sixteen years old, and is a page.

Alanna of Pirate’s Swoop Although not a central figure in this novel, Alanna is a towering figure in the culture of Tortall and in the life of her daughter, Alianne. Alanna, the protagonist of Pierce’s ‘‘Song of the Lioness’’ quartet, was the first female knight in the kingdom of Tortall, and has risen to the high position of King’s Champion. Alanna is a legend in Tortall and the surrounding kingdoms, and Aly has difficulty finding her own identity in the shadow of such a remarkable figure.

Elsren Balitang Elsren is the son of Duke Mequen and his second wife Winnamine. Aly is charged at various times with taking care of Elsren and his siblings.

Mequen Balitang Mequen is a duke in the luarin line of succession to King Oron’s crown. Duke Mequen is regarded as a fair man who treats servants and slaves with dignity and respect. Mequen trusts Aly and her wisdom as a master spy, even though she is only sixteen years old. He is assassinated at the end of the story by Prince Bronau, who betrays Mequen’s goodwill and trust.

Alianne of Pirate’s Swoop Aly, as she is called throughout Trickster’s Choice, is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of the novel. She is the daughter of Alanna the Lioness and George of Pirate’s Swoop. Aly has learned all of the skills of a master spy from her father, who is second-in-command of spies. In the beginning of the story, however, neither her father nor mother take her ambitions to become a spy seriously. When she is sold into slavery and taken away from everything she has ever known, Aly is not disheartened by the hardship. Instead, she takes her adventure as a challenge to prove herself. She is able to protect the raka heiresses in the Balitang family from harm and win a wager with Kyprioth, the trickster.

Aly of Pirate’s Swoop See Alianne of Pirate’s Cove

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Petranne Balitang Petranne is the first child of the duke and duchess. Aly takes care of Petranne and Elsren as part of her responsibilities in the Balitang household.

Saraiyu Balitang Saraiyu is a leading character in Trickster’s Choice. She and her sister Dove are considered the heirs to the raka throne. Protecting Sarai is Aly’s primary responsibility. She is a beautiful, intelligent girl who is pursued desperately by Prince Bronau. She also shows surprising prowess with a sword when she kills an assassin who attacks her father. Sarai is a complex character, and reveals a clever maturity in her relationship with the scheming Prince Bronau.

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Sarai Balitang

Fesgao

See Saraiyu Balitang

Winnamine Balitang Duchess Winnamine is married to Duke Mequen, and she is the mother of Petranne and Elsren. She is Dove and Sarai’s stepmother, and although there is tension between Winnamine and the half-raka daughters, she proves to be a great ally in protecting them. Dove comes to respect Winnamine and her keen insights about people. After the duke’s death, Winnamine assumes the head of the household and decides to stay in Tanair through the winter.

Fesgao is one of the four conspirators protecting the two half-raka girls, Dove and Sarai. At Tanair, he serves as man-at-arms for the Balitangs.

George of Pirate’s Swoop George is Alianne’s father and the husband of Alanna the Lioness. He is a caring, noble man, and he is also the second-in-command of spies. George uses his vast network of contacts to find Aly on Lombyn. Disguised as a merchant, he comes to get Aly at the end of Trickster’s Choice, but not before he learns from Kyprioth of her successes as a spy and military leader.

Chenaol

Gurhart

Chenaol is a central figure in the raka plan to protect Dove and Sarai. She serves as a weapons smuggler for the raka, since her position in the kitchen allows her to buy and transport knives without raising suspicion. Chenaol befriends Aly early in the novel and protects her from harm from the other slaves.

Gurhart is a merchant that leads a caravan into Tanair. The assassins that first attack the family are hired on by Gurhart when his regular workers go missing. They ride into the castle as part of Gurhart’s caravan.

Junai Dodeka Junai is the mysterious raka who reveals herself as Aly’s guard when Aly is forced into battle. Junai is the daughter of Ulasim, who is of one of the four primary raka conspirators protecting Dove and Sarai. Junai is a fierce warrior, and proves to be invaluable in helping Aly contact the Mage of Pohon to obtain protection for Dove and Sarai.

Ochobu Dodeka Ochobu is known as the Mage of Pohon, and is as inhospitable as she is powerful. With the help of Kyrioth, Aly convinces Ochobu to help protect Sarai and Dove; Ochobu moves to Tanair to help fend off a possible attack against the girls from other mages. Ochobu is Ulasim’s mother and Junai’s grandmother. She has lived hundreds of years and has seen the destruction caused by the luarin conquerors.

Ulasim Dodeka Ulasim is a central member of the raka conspiracy to protect Dove and Sarai. He works as the Balitangs’s footman. He is also the father of Junai and son of Ochobu. Ulasim helps Aly convince his mother to join them in their quest to put a raka queen on the throne.

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Hazarin Hazarin is the luarin heir to King Oron’s crown, and the king’s half-brother. Shortly after assuming the crown, Hazarin dies under suspicious circumstances. Aly sees King Hazarin’s ghost before he is whisked away by the Black God. King Hazarin says he is glad to be dead, spared from the duplicitous dealings of the king’s court.

Husui Husui is a slave that works in the Balitangs’s kitchen. She is also a spy for King Oron. When Chenaol finds out that Husui is a spy for the crown, Aly advises her to keep her in the kitchen and provide false information about the dealings of the Balitangs when necessary.

Prince Bronau Jimajen He is known as Prince Bronau throughout the novel; however, he is not in the royal succession to the throne of the Copper Isles. Bronau is a handsome, rugged figure who befriends the Balitang family and attempts to seduce Sarai. He betrays Duke Mequen Balitang, and his greedy ambitions for power are exposed in a climactic battle.

Imajane Jimajen Imajane is married to Prince Bronau’s brother, Rubinyan. She is King Oron’s half-sister

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and enemy of Prince Bronau. Bronau accuses Imajane of being behind a plot to poison King Hazarin when he assumes the crown from King Oron.

Rubinyan Jimajen Rubinyan is Prince Bronau’s brother and sworn enemy. He is married to Imajane and is in the royal line of succession. Mequen is friends to both Rubinyan and Prince Bronau. Rubinyan comes to Tanair at the end of the story to retrieve his brother’s body, and invites Duchess Winnamine to come back to Rajmuat.

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crows, and organizes them to help protect the Balitangs. Over the course of the story, Aly and Nawat become close friends, and Nawat practices kissing with Aly. He is an awkward boy who walks strangely and picks bugs from Aly’s hair, but he is also a fierce warrior who can catch a flying arrow right out of the air.

Pembery Pembery is a slave who, among other tasks around the household, helps care for the children.

Rihani

Jonathan of Conte´ Jonathan is the king of Tortall, Aly’s homeland.

Keladry of Mindelan Known as Kel, Keladry trains with Aly’s mother and aspires to be the next female knight. Kel is a formidable warrior and Aly admires not only Kel’s fighting ability, but also the relationship she has with Alanna.

Kel of Mindelan See Keladry of Mindelan

Kyprioth Kyprioth is the trickster god referred to in the novel’s title; he challenges Aly to protect Dove, Sarai, and the rest of the Balitang family in exchange for her own family’s recognition of her deeds. He is the less-powerful brother of Mithros and The Great Goddess, both of whom chastise Kyprioth for involving himself in the affairs of the Copper Isles. Kyprioth transports Aly to various locations during the story as a means of showing her important events that she needs to be aware of to protect the girls effectively. When Aly wins the wager, Kyprioth keeps his end of the bargain and tells George about Aly’s achievements as a spy and raka protector.

Rihani is a healer who lives with the Balitangs at Tanair. She is not a very good healer, and Aly frequently worries that she is not up to the task of facing a more powerful mage, or caring for the family should a major battle result in serious injuries.

Oron Rittevon Oron is the ailing king of the Copper Isles. His paranoia causes him to believe Mequen is plotting to kill him; he is the cause of the Balitangs’s exile to Lombyn. Oron’s impending death throughout much of the novel drives the political intrigue involving Prince Bronau and Duke Mequen.

Sarugani of Tamaida Sarugani is the mother of Sarai and Dove, and Mequen’s first wife. She was raka royalty, and she died tragically in a riding accident. It was after Sarungani’s death that he married Winnamine.

Maude Tanner Maude is the housekeeper of Pirate’s Swoop. Although she is a healer and has great respect in the family, Aly frequently plays jokes on her.

Thayet of Conte´

Lokeij Lokeij is an old raka man who serves as the Balitangs’s hostler. He is also one of the four raka conspirators protecting Dove and Sarai.

Thayet is the queen of Tortall. She and her husband King Jonathan rule the kingdom together.

Nawat Crow

Thom of Pirate’s Swoop

Nawat is a crow that befriends Aly as she herds goats, and then turns himself into a young man. Nawat teaches Aly the language of the

Thom is Aly’s brother, and son of George of Pirate’s Swoop and Alanna the Lioness. He is eighteen and in training to become a mage.

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Veron

Gender Roles

Veron is a luarin and the sergeant of the men-at-arms under the Balitangs. He is also a royal spy for King Oron. When Duke Mequen discovers Veron’s duplicity, he is tempted to kill the spy. Aly, however, convinces the duke that Veron can be of help to them, since he is a committed defender of the Balitangs even as he reports to King Oron. Veron is killed in battle with Prince Bronau’s men.

Aly is the latest in a long line of Pierce’s female protagonists. Unlike her mother Alanna the Lioness, Aly rarely uses her physical power and strength to battle the enemies of the Balitangs. Instead, she uses her wits and cunning to protect the family from harm. It could be argued that Aly’s father does not allow her to be a spy because she is not a boy; what makes this a particularly interesting twist on gender roles is not the obstacles that Aly must overcome as a young female spy, but what she does not have to overcome.

Visda Visda is Chenaol’s young niece, and a goat herder. She proves valuable as she keeps Aly’s goats while Aly goes on rides to various parts of the island with Dove and Sarai.

THEMES Ethnic Conflict Race relations between the raka and luarin play a crucial role in the political backdrop of the story. The luarin are the ‘‘pale-skinned easterners’’ that have ravaged the dark-skinned rakas’ land for centuries. The raka nobility was removed from power; the raka people were then tricked out of their land and riches, brutally killed, or enslaved as a means of perpetuating luarin power. Aly gets an opportunity to view race relations between the luarin and the raka firsthand during her enslavement, and the wager in which she engages with Kyprioth is intended to return a raka queen to the throne. Aly is an intelligent observer of the racial dynamics in the Copper Isles, but being a luarin, she is not passive in her considerations on the matter. She has complex beliefs about race relations, and this adds depth to her character. Pierce’s strategy of using the relationship between the raka and the luarin as a metaphor for race relations in contemporary culture is a clear one. The history of the warring cultures mirrors that of the Europeans and Africans, and the present uneasy stasis, or balance, that is reflected in contemporary America. The book calls for the triumph of a half-raka, half-luarin queen, and an integrated society in which both cultures are celebrated.

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Once Aly is recognized as the trickster’s choice, she has the complete trust of the family and raka with which she conspires. As in many novels that explore gender roles from a woman’s perspective, women frequently hold positions of power in the novel. Chenaol is the head cook, but she is also a fierce warrior and master of weapons procurement. Ochobu, the mage of Pohon, is perhaps the most formidable character in the story because of her magical power. Mequen is acknowledged to be the head of the Balitang household, but he defers to Aly on most issues of importance concerning the family’s security. When he chooses not to heed Aly’s advice and gives Prince Bronau sanctuary, he dies. Aly has very few obstacles put in her way specifically because of gender, and perhaps that is what makes Trickster’s Choice a fresh view of the feminist heroine. In her essay ‘‘Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction,’’ Joanna Russ writes that earlier heroines of fantasy and science fiction shared worlds with men who assumed power ‘‘without intelligence, character, humanity, humility, foresight, courage, planning, sense, technology, or even responsibility.’’ Aly possesses each of these qualities, and therefore, is able to overcome all challenges presented by man or woman. Two issues complicate this notion, however. Aly’s primary objective is still to convince her father of her worth—not so he will love her as a daughter, but so he will accept her in her chosen calling. George maintains the position of authority as second-in-command of spies, and it is to that position which Aly appeals. Secondly, it can be argued that Aly’s path to authority is free from male obstruction in Tanair not because of the culture’s celebration of gender equality, but because she has the blessing of Kyprioth, a male god.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY How might the events in the story be different if the protagonist were a teenage boy? Would he face the same kinds of obstacles that Aly faces in the novel? Would the other characters treat a male protagonist in the same way? Create a male character with attributes and skills similar to Aly’s. Identify four scenes in the novel that might be altered by the presence of a male protagonist and rewrite the scenes. Compare the relationship between the raka and luarin in Trickster’s Choice with the relationship between different ethnic groups and races in the United States. Write a twopage essay in which you compare the history of the raka people as outlined in the novel with the history of African Americans in the United States. Make sure to address what lessons might be learned about the relationships between African and Anglo Americans by studying Pierce’s metaphor of the raka and luarin in the novel.

point of view, exploring issues such as why her parents try to discourage her from becoming a spy, whether they are being good parents in doing so, and how her parents are either being supportive or unsupportive.

Aly desperately wants her mother and father to acknowledge her remarkable abilities and recognize her desire to become a master spy. Write a one-page journal entry from Aly’s

In the end, the story is not one in which a young woman must fight her way to reach a social position she should rightfully maintain; instead, she assumes that position and operates effectively from it without her abilities being called into question.

Womanhood, Motherhood, and Family

In your opinion, what is the value of setting a story about a young girl and her adventures in a fantasy world? Research the life of a real woman who has achieved greatness in some way. Write a two-page essay in which you compare Aly’s experiences to that of your research subject. As you are writing, think of why an author might choose to use the fantasy genre to tell a story about a dynamic young woman. What does fantasy allow the author to do that other genres or even nonfiction might not?

Aly is very young to be in charge of security for the Tanair estate. Make a one-page list of how Aly’s age affects her ability to protect Dove and Sarai. In what ways does it make her more effective? In what ways is it a hindrance? Use specific examples from the book.

masculine military world. She did not succumb to traditional ideas of romance and sexual propriety; instead, she blazed a trail that earned her knighthood and a position as the King’s Champion. Because Trickster’s Choice introduces Alanna’s sixteen-year-old daughter as the main character, the reader views Alanna as a mother for the first time. It is a role that highlights some fascinating challenges for the archetypal feminist heroine.

In the Song of the Lioness quartet, Alanna the Lioness assumed an archetypal, or an original model after which similar things are patterned, place in feminist fiction. She was the physical embodiment of power, fighting her way with both fist and cunning through a

When Trickster’s Choice opens, Aly has not seen her mother in a year. Aly does not appear distraught or affected by her mother’s absence in any remarkable way; she is, however,

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concerned that her mother does not know her very well or understand her career goals. Alanna’s inability to understand her daughter’s desire to become a spy contributes to Aly setting sail on her own. Alanna’s role in the family is somewhat like the traditional role of a male in that she is expected to be away from home often, and therefore cannot be the primary caregiver. Unfortunately, Aly’s father George does not play a traditional caregiver role, either. Although he lives at home, his position as second-in-command of spies does not lend itself well to this role. Perhaps this is a uniquely modern conception of the fantasy family; nevertheless, Aly’s upbringing consists of various housekeepers, nursemaids, and part-time parents that help her along the way. A poignant moment in the story occurs when Alanna becomes a noticeably worried mother, wringing her hands over the fate of her daughter. Alanna is certain of Aly’s abilities, which comes as a surprise to Aly; however, she cannot overcome her natural concern as a mother. This image does not touch Aly; instead, she is concerned about her mother’s ability to prepare for war—a traditionally male role— when she is busy worrying. While this might emphasize Alanna’s roles as both mother and warrior, Aly seems to believe that the two are not entirely compatible.

Romance There is a central tension in the story between Aly’s coming of age as a spy and that of her coming of age as a young woman. As a spy, Aly seems far more mature in her development than her sixteen years would warrant. She is capable of developing complex military strategies, orchestrating guard duties and searches, and setting traps for suspected assassins. As a teenager, however, she wears her infatuation with Nawat, the crow-boy, in a manner as awkward as any young person might. This is a difficult point to negotiate. On one hand, Aly refers frequently to her considerable, if not innocent, experiences with boys at home. On the other hand, Aly’s lack of sophistication in her romantic relationship with Nawat suggests the awkwardness of adolescence. These complexities make Aly more engaging and authentic.

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STYLE Third-Person Limited Point of View The novel is told from a limited third person point of view, with the reader following events in the story as Aly sees and interprets them. The author’s choosing this point of view allows the story to unfold before the reader just as it does for the main character, and provides opportunities for the author to expand on certain aspects that would not be available to the reader in a first-person narrative. The point of view of the story enables the reader to become deeply engaged in the young girl’s understanding of race relations, gender roles, and intimate relationships. Aly seems somewhat removed from the events around her. This makes her appear both emotionally strong and emotionally distant. When she finds herself in a slave holding pen, for example, she seems to barely recognize the dire nature of her situation. Instead, she views it as an opportunity to use her skills to escape and, ultimately, impress her parents. This narrative distance enables Aly to think analytically in the face of such danger, and resolve to use her training to gain the respect of her parents. Although magic does not play a major role in this novel, Pierce uses Kyprioth’s ability to transport Aly through her dreams across various kingdoms as a means of informing both Aly and the reader of events that will have a significant impact on Aly’s mission. Pierce uses this technique effectively to address the concerns of her main character and those of the reader. In essence, it serves as a way of providing the main character and the reader with material normally associated with an omniscient point of view. Instead of switching to an omniscient point of view, the author uses the trickster as a mechanism for providing information that would otherwise be unknown. Kyprioth has the ability to take Aly to wherever she would most like to be, as when he takes her to see her mother and father while they discuss Aly’s disappearance. He also takes her to places where she must go in order to understand the political turmoil occurring outside Tanair, which will ultimately determine the events back in the castle.

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Plot Frame The events in Trickster’s Choice begin on March 27, 462 H . E . (Human Era) and conclude almost five months later at the end of the summer. The wager between Kyprioth and Aly, in which Aly agrees to help the Balitang family for the duration of the summer, is established early in the novel as Aly begins her new life as a slave. The wager serves as an organic narrative frame for the events of the story, meaning it signals the beginning and ending of the plot. This frame provides a propulsive element to events, so even as the plot pitches and shifts, the reader senses that the action will culminate in a major climax before the term of Aly’s wager has expired.

Fantasy The success of a fantasy story depends in part on whether the reader finds the setting of the story believable. Fantasy books often take place in other worlds full of mystical creatures, characters, and events. However fantastical, these books also have a familiar element that allows readers to identify with the story. In order to ensure the setting’s authenticity, Pierce textures the story with copious detail, capturing the sensual essence of her scenes. The book includes maps of The Copper Isles and the Kingdom of Tortall, a ‘‘Cast of Characters’’ section that gives a brief description of all characters, and a glossary of terms and places to help the reader follow along in the novel’s unfamiliar world. Pierce introduces every character, no matter how secondary, by describing the physical appearance of each in thorough detail.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Feminist Movement Following in the turbulent wake of the civil rights movement, the Second Wave feminist movement in the 1970s marked an effort to ensure equal pay for women who performed work equal to that of men. To address this fundamental issue of equality, feminists first had to challenge preconceptions about women’s capabilities in the workplace.

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specifically mandated by the Constitution. As gender roles were being challenged by more women moving into the workplace, the notion of men’s and women’s roles in fantasy fiction were being called into question as well. Feminist writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of the ‘‘Darkover’’ novels, and C. J. Cherryh, who wrote Gate of Ivrel (1976), influenced a score of young writers and readers. The works of these authors were groundbreaking because the books featured strong female characters as the protagonists; this challenged the traditional preconceptions of gender roles, and power. This movement was something completely liberating for a community of writers and fans that had known only men in positions of authority. Myra Jehlen writes in her essay ‘‘Gender’’ that Americans were awakening to the ways misconceptions and faulty assumptions about gender were being perpetuated, and art and literature were helping expose the patriarchal formulations of power. Just as the biological determinism was being tested and dispelled, so too were those traditional roles granted to feminine characters in fantasy and science fiction. To that end, it is difficult to determine whether the broader cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s served as the impetus for a new feminine hero, or whether feminine heroes in fantasy literature and elsewhere were actually facilitating change in the cultural landscape. Perhaps the best argument, as Jehlen writes, is that literature reflects the cultural pulse of the time by lending itself to challenging the reader’s own points of view. The central conflict of the fantasy fiction hero in the 1970s is the same conflict at the core of gender dynamics in American culture, and therefore, the two are impossibly intertwined.

Colonialism in Hawaii

According to Susan Estrich’s Sex and Power, feminism scored a major victory in 1972 when the Supreme Court of the United States first recognized that legal rights for women were

The history of the Hawaiian Islands bears at least some resemblance to the history of the Copper Isles in Trickster’s Choice. The archipelago collectively known as Hawaii was originally inhabited by a large native population composed of warring chiefdoms. These warring factions were united under a royal family led by King Kamehameha the Great at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, American businessmen backed by military forces had gained control of the government and stripped the royal family of

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its power. These businessmen were interested in obtaining Hawaii’s valuable resources, especially its fertile land. The vast majority of native Hawaiians were subsequently denied the right to vote, while wealthy foreigners were allowed to vote simply because they bought large amounts of Hawaiian land. An attempt to reinstate the royal family failed, and the United States assumed the island group as an official territory in 1898. Hawaii’s rich history was largely suppressed and undervalued for many decades; now, however, it is recognized as one of the main assets of the state’s largest industry: tourism.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Many reviewers of Trickster’s Choice have found the novel to be a promising fantasy tale for young adults, and a worthy successor to Pierce’s ‘‘Song of the Lioness’’ quartet. Numerous critics have commented on the charismatic appeal and texture of Alianna, the complexity of the fantasy world the author creates, and the depth generated by the issues of race and colonialism tackled in the book. Kirkus Reviews refers to the novel as ‘‘a ripping good yarn that introduces a new series.’’ Critics also noted a major difference between Alianna and her mother Alanna, the heroine of Pierce’s ‘‘Lioness’’ quartet. Alianna depends on her wits and intelligence to overcome the difficult challenges she faces, while her mother relies on her physical skills and magic. In showcasing Aly’s skills as a spy, writes Kathleen Karr in Children’s Literature, ‘‘Pierce overcomes her former over-emphasis on magic and allows the non-gifted Aly to solve each challenge through sheer intelligence alone (mostly).’’ At the core of the novel is the same type of strong female protagonist that has made Pierce’s other books critical and commercial successes. As Elizabeth Devereaux writes in the New York Times, Pierce’s heroines are appealing because ‘‘they faithfully reiterate an ideal—of feminine power that relies on brains, not beauty; of feminine attractiveness that relies on competence, not helplessness; and of feminine alliances that grow stronger, not weaker, in the face of conflicts.’’ Kirkus Reviews refers to Aly as ‘‘an accomplished flirt—and brilliant at the intelligence work learned from her spymaster father.’’

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Duel between pirates Ó Bettmann/Corbis

Some reviewers have mentioned that the characters may not exhibit enough depth or growth. According to Kirkus Reviews, ‘‘Unlike Pierce’s earlier protagonists, Aly arrives fully formed, a snarky, talented uber-heroine.’’ Anita Burkam writes in Horn Book Magazine that the fullness of Aly’s talents, which might strike some readers as implausible, are sufficiently explained by the author as the product of her upbringing. What Burkam considers problematic, however, are the anemic descriptions of the secondary characters in the novel, which inevitably consist of simply ‘‘the person’s height, eye and hair color, and clothing.’’ In Burkam’s view, the banal descriptions slow the narrative force inherent in Aly’s adventures on Lombyn. Nevertheless, Burkam concludes that the author firmly establishes a set of characters that will continue to intrigue readers for the extent of her newest quartet. In addition, while there are conflicting opinions about the author’s use of characterization in the novel, there is almost unanimous praise for the plot. According to Kirkus Reviews, ‘‘Aly’s difficulty with the complexity of colonialism adds surprising, welcome depth.’’ This is a sentiment repeated in many reviews of Trickster’s Choice.

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CRITICISM Harry Harris Harry Harris is an English instructor at The Ohio State University. In this essay, Harris examines the relationship between racial identity and character development in Pierce’s novel.

THE READER’S CHALLENGE IS TO RECONCILE THE HEAVY THEMATIC OVERTONES OF RACIAL RECONCILIATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE WITH THE

In a critical scene in Trickster’s Choice, Aly, the protagonist of the novel, tints her pale luarin skin with brown sap so she can go undercover in the raka village of Pohon. Aly believes she must enlist the Mage of Pohon to protect the Balitang family from other powerful mages who might try to bring harm to her charges, Dove and Sarai.

SOMEWHAT MORE MODEST AMBITIONS OF A YOUNG

The dark-skinned raka have endured centuries of oppression from the luarin. Even with her darkened skin, Aly has no chance of convincing the Mage of Pohon to help her without the support of her raka conspirators. At one point, five villagers attack Aly, and her raka traveling companions must intercede. Eventually, the raka people allow her to pass and give her their trust. However, this is only after Junai, her bodyguard, convinces the attackers that her intentions are good and that she has been chosen by the trickster to protect the future raka queen.

seeking, first and foremost, to prove herself to her parents.

Trickster’s Choice is a novel full of metaphor, but no metaphor is more fully wrought than the one illustrated in the scene in which Aly darkens her skin to pretend to be raka and find the mage. While Aly’s story in the novel is one of self-discovery and individual empowerment, it is set against a tragically vivid backdrop of inequality, oppression, and racial tension. Aly is brilliant, witty, skilled, and clever, but she will not succeed without the collaborative relationships she must forge with her raka conspirators. Triumph is defined for Aly as her success in reinstating the raka queen to her rightful place as the monarch of the Copper Isles.

GIRL SEEKING, FIRST AND FOREMOST, TO PROVE HERSELF TO HER PARENTS.’’

Tamora Pierce describes the relationship her fantasy stories have to the real world this way in an interview on Powells.com: You serve them (the audience) and yourself best by making everything as real as possible. That way, when you ask them to make that big suspension of disbelief, when you ask them to believe, at least for the space of the book, that this sort of magic works, they’ve saved all their imaginative energy for that particular leap.

This quote effectively captures Pierce’s approach to storytelling. Her world is one in which stormwings—mythical creatures with the heads of humans and legs and wings of birds— inhabit the same landscape as ordinary animals like goats and squirrels. Her crows can turn into boys, and although Aly does not possess magical abilities, she has sight that enables her to view far-away occurrences as if they were happening in her own room. Pierce’s rendering of racial conflict is no different. The people in Lombyn are novel as raka and luarin, but they are as familiar to the readers as people in their own neighborhoods.

The message of racial reconciliation and cooperation is ever-present in Trickster’s Choice, but its power depends on young Aly’s evolution and the way her character develops an understanding of this broader social theme. While this definition of success for Aly is a powerful one, it is somewhat incongruous with the definition of success that Aly, as a character, maintains for herself. The reader’s challenge is to reconcile the heavy thematic overtones of racial reconciliation and social justice with the somewhat more modest ambitions of a young girl

The parallels to the real world do not end there; in her use of a trickster figure, Pierce draws on tropes from the cultures that she finds analagous, or similar. The trickster figure is a staple of African folklore and became an integral part of the African American slave narratives and folktales, according to Lawrence Levine in Black Culture and Black Consciousness. In slave folklore, the trickster had the ability to shift shapes, frequently taking the form of an animal. These figures frequently subverted the power of oppressors and communicated messages of hope and rejuvenation to slaves aware of the hidden

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messages. Kyprioth, the trickster in Pierce’s novel, has the same ability to speak to selective listeners, and to use his powers to manipulate conventional hierarchies. In drawing on the trickster trope, Pierce makes clear her analogy between real world and fantasy world racial tension. Still, although her novel uses fantasy to explore real world issues from a fresh perspective, her protagonist never fully comprehends the racial dynamics in the fantasy world of the novel and, therefore, never understand that her own purpose is much more than simple selfdiscovery. Pierce’s world is one in which the luarin rule, often tyrannically, and oppress the raka for the sake of perpetuating an imbalanced and unjust power structure. These are cultural dynamics that Aly has only studied in textbooks. As she leaves her home at Pirate’s Swoop and is taken into the tumultuous world of slaves and masters, the reader experiences race relations in a fresh manner, right along with the young protagonist. This experience is strengthened and made resonant by the author’s use of the limited third person point of view. The relationship between the raka and the luarin springs to life when Aly is sold as a slave to the Balitangs in the city of Rajmuat. For a welleducated girl of royal descent, meeting people of various backgrounds and gaining valuable experience outside the confines of Pirate’s Swoop is intriguing. Some of what she has learned from books about the real world is accurate, and some of it is not. She is continually forced to reconsider the beliefs she holds true: ‘‘After years of lessons in the Isles’ history, detailing the thorough job of conquest done by the luarin, or white, ruling class [Aly] had expected to find all luarin in service and all the brown, or raka, folk as slaves.’’ Instead, Aly found a world that challenged her expectations from the beginning. Not all raka were slaves, nor were all luarin free. She is a slave-of-all-work, meaning she is the lowest of the low. She learns much about the luarin and their oppressive manner, but her own journey is complicated by the fact that her status is not as low as some, as she is bought by the fair and just Duke Mequen and Duchess Winnamine. When Bronau meets Aly for the first time, he says that he does not ‘‘like the precedent, keeping luarin slaves. It gives the raka ideas . . . you can’t trust the raka to behave themselves unless they

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know there’s a whip close to hand.’’ In response to Bronau’s racism, Aly thinks to herself, ‘‘Bronau obviously didn’t know that Chenaol, who could juggle razor-sharp cleavers with ease, had discouraged most problems of that sort.’’ This is a revealing passage, because the author at once shows Aly’s fond relationships with the raka slaves as a means of contrasting her experiences with her expectations, and as a means of contrasting the young girl with the prince. However, her response shows that she understands that Bronau’s ideas are factually wrong, but it does not show that she has a sense of the inherent inappropriateness of Bronau’s statements. For a book rife with racial tension, Aly seems untroubled about the need for social justice in the boorish, racist behavior of other characters. Aly’s lack of concern is present throughout the novel, and as such, ultimately undermines the author’s broader message of justice. Pierce calls her writing process a ‘‘paleontological method of writing,’’ and states, ‘‘You sit there with a little brush and maybe a little pick, and you keep excavating until suddenly you discover you’ve dug up a T Rex. . . . Then you can go back and saturate the metaphor.’’ The racial metaphor in Trickster’s Choice has been sufficiently saturated, exploring many aspects of race relations between the white luarin and the darkskinned raka. In the end, however, Aly lacks any true conversion or deeper understanding that her role is not just putting a raka queen on the throne, but also healing the deep wounds of history. It is this missing element that undermines the book’s powerful message of racial reconciliation. Even as the novel pulses with an overarching theme of social justice, Aly does not seem moved by it. Instead, it is her own ambition to prove her self-worth that seems to inspire her to remain with the raka in the end. Pierce has written a complex character in Aly; perhaps her obliviousness to the larger questions at hand is meant to convey the character’s emotional immaturity. Nevertheless, the relationship between theme and character in the novel seems to be a tenuous one. Is Aly’s story a frame on which Pierce hangs her views of race relations in contemporary America? It is virtually impossible not to feel the heavy hand of the author’s convictions at work in the plot. Or is it the other way around,

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In Trickster’s Queen (2004), Tamora Pierce returns to the saga of Alianne and the Balitang family. Following the death of Mequen, the Balitangs return to their home in Rajmuat with Aly serving as Dovasary’s maid. A raka rebellion has begun, and Aly must put the skills she learned in Lombyn to use in the treacherous political world of the king’s court.

Pierce’s first book in the ‘‘Immortals’’ quartet, Wild Magic (1992), introduces readers to a brave young heroine named Daine. She is a thirteen-year-old orphan who has a burgeoning special ability to communicate with animals. Daine is a sullen girl and must learn to trust adults again following her own abandonment. As she grows, she develops her own power and learns to use it to defend the kingdom against the vicious stormwing creatures. The heroine of First Test (1999), the first in the ‘‘Protector of the Small’’ quartet, is Keladry of Mindelan, a ten-year-old who begins her rigorous knight training as a page in Tortall. Keladry’s story as a knight reflects those of most young people. She faces torment from boys in her class and doubt from her teacher (in this case, the

with the backdrop of racial discontent and inequality being the best vehicle for author to tell Aly’s coming of age story? The complexity of these issues make Trickster’s Choice a rich read, and one in which Aly’s adventure may not be the most exciting part of the novel after all.

trainer of knights). Although Keladry will eventually become a worthy successor to Alanna the Lioness, her first year in training is anything but easy. Keladry must develop maturity beyond her years to survive on the battlefield and in the schoolhouse. In Lady Knight (2002), the fourth book of the ‘‘Protector of the Small’’ quartet, Keladry of Mindelan has been knighted, and the Kingdom of Tortall is under attack by a mysterious man using an army of insect-like creatures that subsist on the souls of dead children. Keladry is put in charge of the refugees in the kingdom, a posting that disappoints her. Soon, however, she finds her hands full as she must defend children and families from the creatures. When she recklessly pursues the nefarious villain and his creatures alone, she is in for more adventure than she bargained for. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) is the fist book of the ‘‘Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy. Tolkien’s work is often cited as the inspiration for many fantasy and science fiction writers, and it has seen a resurgence in popularity in the 2000s with the success of the ‘‘Lord of the Rings’’ movies.

In the following essay, Devereaux examines the author’s emphasis on heroic female leads as role models for young female readers.

If you have not heard of Tamora Pierce, chances are that you do not have a preadolescent girl in your life. Enormously popular, Pierce is a best-selling and prolific author of girls’ fantasy novels, loved for her strong female heroines and quasi-medieval magical realms. Her characters are not literary cousins to Harry Potter (whom they precede, having first appeared in 1983) but a more particular type, featured also in the works of Robin McKinley and others: the girl warrior. They know their way around dragons and shape-shifters, jousts and to-the-death battles, and they are relative strangers to anxieties about their looks, status and power.

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Source: Harry Harris, Critical Essay on Trickster’s Choice, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Elizabeth Devereaux

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WHILE TRICKSTER’S CHOICE DOES NOT WHOLLY EXPLOIT ITS POTENTIAL, IT’S UNLIKELY THAT FANS WILL MIND.’’

To date, Pierce’s novels have come in ‘‘quartets,’’ or series of four; three linked quartets have followed three girl warriors in the land of Tortall (two other quartets, set in a different world, are for slightly younger readers). Alanna, subject of the first cycle, The Song of the Lioness Quartet, typifies the model. Like so many leading characters in children’s books, Alanna is liberated from the tyrannies of family life, with her mother long dead and her father distant. First met at 10, Alanna easily figures out a way to switch roles with her twin brother: he wants to go to the convent to learn sorcery, and she wants his place at court, to train for knighthood. Disguising herself as a boy, she earns her knight’s shield, and Pierce eventually lets her have a romance (and sex) with the handsome crown prince. But Alanna’s love life takes second place to her stirring performances on heroic quests and on the battlefield, and she declines to become a queen. Instead, she chooses an unconventional husband and keeps her career as king’s champion, the best knight in the land. Like Daine, the orphaned heroine of Wild Magic in The Immortals Quartet (who can communicate with and heal animals and, eventually, take on animal forms), and Kel, of the Protector of the Small books (the first girl to openly enroll for knighthood at the Tortall court), Aianna is loosely constructed, more a set of ideals than a flesh-and-blood character. Readers can’t compare themselves to these girls. Their physical attributes are undistinguished or impossible (Alanna, for example, has purple eyes), and they regard their bodies as assets to be managed (they train for strength and bind up those inconvenient breasts). They are said to have their faults. Alanna’s chief fault is a hot temper. Free from psychological conflict and with extra freedoms granted by magic, these characters are easy vehicles for vicarious adventure. With Trickster’s Choice, it is Alanna’s 16year-old daughter, Aly, who generates the

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action, and suddenly Alanna is a problem, a critical mother who wishes Aly would make something of herself, while vetoing her wellfounded desire to become a spy like her father. Aly has to achieve distance from her mother (and father) and to grapple with the examples they have set. But Pierce quickly collapses the motherdaughter tensions and casts Aly as even more of a superheroine (or ‘‘shero,’’ in the parlance of the dedicated followers of the Web site Pierce maintains with Meg Cabot, author of such pro-feminist fantasies as The Princess Diaries) than her counterparts. Aly sails off on her boat, only to be unceremoniously captured by pirates and sold into slavery in the far-off Copper Isles. Does Aly gnash her teeth, or even weep? No—she looks at her enslavement as an opportunity to prove her talents as a field agent. She keeps a preternaturally cool head, even arranging to be disfigured in order to ward off slave buyers looking for a ‘‘bed warmer.’’ She has unswerving faith in her abilities, even before the trickster god of the Copper Isles shows up to tap her for a pivotal role in the kingdom’s embattled history. The god’s appearance will not puzzle or even startle readers, who, thanks to a preface, will know more about the trickster’s plans than Aly does. The Copper Isles, once inhabited only by ‘‘raka’’ (dark-skinned people), have been conquered by ‘‘luarin’’ (whites from other lands) and, over the 300 years of luarin rule, the raka have been steadily oppressed and the trickster god banished. But, as Aly slowly discovers for herself, the trickster god has secretly promised the raka that a scion of the old raka kings and queens will reclaim the throne. Aly realizes that she has been charged with the care of the One Who Is Promised; the only question left is which of two sisters the One might be. Knowing the outcome of a plot line does not necessarily diminish the suspense (does anyone doubt for a moment that Cinderella will land the prince?), but in this case being a step ahead of the heroine causes problems. Aly, after all, is heroic by dint of her brains—where Alanna, Daine and Kel engage in all manner of combat, Aly’s weapons tend to be cerebral, ranging from her understanding of diplomacy and spycraft to the use of her magic ‘‘sight.’’

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Alanna, Daine and Kel work within the ordered structure of their kingdom; Aly has to discern the rules of a foreign land for herself. Giving readers a leg up on Aly compromises the alacrity ascribed to her; to some extent, it also slackens the narrative tension. And while luarin-raka relations sound close enough to Western history to serve as a political theater for modern conflicts or issues of race, Pierce does not develop the theme. Instead, she relies on her time-tested material. The trickster god sends Aly dreams that supply news of the other Tortall heroines. Aly also gets a suitor, a magical crow who assumes human form, but Aly develops more chemistry with the trickster god; her divine confidence marks Aly as worthy of a supernatural partner. While Trickster’s Choice does not wholly exploit its potential, it’s unlikely that fans will mind. The lure of the Tortall heroines is not in their infinite variety nor is it in their verisimilitude. Rather, they faithfully reiterate an ideal—of feminine power that relies on brains, not beauty; of feminine attractiveness that relies on competence, not helplessness; and of feminine alliances that grow stronger, not weaker, in the face of conflicts. Given the utopian quality of that ideal, is it surprising that Pierce needs magical creatures and mythical gods to bring it to literary life? Source: Elizabeth Devereaux, ‘‘Woman Warrior: Trickster’s Choice,’’ in New York Times, November 16, 2003, p. 39.

Tamora Pierce In the following excerpt, Pierce herself likens fantastic literature to ‘‘fuel’’ essential for the imaginations of young minds. I wonder why readers choose to read fantasy; rather, I wonder why more of them don’t. Until they reach school age, children are offered little else on almost a continuous basis. The groundwork for a love of the fanciful is laid by children’s literature, from A. A. Milne to Dr. Seuss, and from Curious George to Max and his Wild Things.

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imagination they find in everything they read. They haven’t spent years butting their heads against brick walls; the edge of their enthusiasm, and of their minds, is still sharp. Some of the most perceptive social and political commentary I’ve heard in the last eight years or so has come from my readers. Young people have the time and emotional energy to devote to causes, unlike so many of us, losing our revolutionary (or evolutionary) drive as we spend ourselves on the details and chores that fill adult life. They take up causes, from the environment, to human disaster relief, to politics. We encourage them, and so we should: there is a tremendous need for those who feel passionately and are willing to work at what they care about, whatever their cause may be. YAs are also dreamers; this is expected and, to a degree, encouraged as they plan for the future. Their minds are flexible, recognizing few limits. Here the seeds are sown for the great visions, those that will change the future for us all. We give our charges goals, heroes whose feats they can emulate, and knowledge of the past, but they also need fuel to spark and refine ideas, the same kind of fuel that fires idealism. That fuel can be found—according to the writings of Jung, Bettelheim, M. Ester Harding, and Joseph Campbell—in the mighty symbols of myth, fairy tales, dreams, legends—and fantasy. Haven’t we felt their power? Remember that flush of energy and eagerness we felt as Arthur drew the sword from the stone? It’s the same as that which bloomed the first time—or even the fifth or sixth time—we heard Dr. King say, ‘‘I have a dream.’’ An eyedropper’s worth of that energy can feed days of activity, hard and sometimes dirty work, fund raising, letter writing. It can ease an idealist over small and big defeats.

One of the things I have learned about YAs is that they respond to the idealism and

Here is where fantasy, in its flesh and modern (i.e. post-1990) forms, using contemporary sensibilities and characters youngsters identify with, reigns supreme. Here the symbols of meaningful struggle and of truth as an inner constant exist in their most undiluted form outside myth and fairy tale: Tolkein’s forces of Light fighting a mind-numbing Darkness: Elizabeth Moon’s lone paladin facing pain and despair with only faith to sustain her (in Oath of Gold [Baen, 1989]); Diane Duane’s small choir of deep sea creatures holding off the power of death and entropy at the risk of the world’s life and their own (Deep Wizardry [Delacorte, 1985]). These

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Once children enter school, however, emphasis shifts from imaginative to reality-based writing, and many youngsters grow away from speculative fiction—but not all. Those who stay with it do so for many reasons, and it comes to fill a number of needs in their lives.

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stories appear to have little to do with reality, but they do provide readers with the impetus to challenge the way things are, something YAs respond to wholeheartedly. Young people are drawn to battles for a discernable higher good; the images of such battles evoke their passion. (I would like to note here that some of the writers mentioned herein normally are considered to be adult writers. Fantasy, even more than other genres, has a large crossover audience, with YAs raiding the adult shelves once they deplete their part of the store or library, and adults slipping into the youth sections.) Fantasy, along with science fiction, is a literature of possibilities. It opens the door to the realm of ‘‘What If,’’ challenging readers to see beyond the concrete universe and to envision other ways of living and alternative mindsets. Everything in speculative universes, and by association the real world, is mutable. Intelligent readers will come to relate the questions raised in these books to their own lives. If a question nags at youngsters intensely enough, they will grow up to devise an answer—to move their world forward, because ardent souls can’t stand an unanswered question. Source: Tamora Pierce, ‘‘Fantasy: Why Kids Read It, Why Kids Need It,’’ in School Library Journal, October 1993, p. 50.

Locus Online, www.locusmag.com (May 2002). Pierce, Tamora, Trickster’s Choice, Random House, 2003, pp. 34, 39, 61. Pierce, Tamora, www.tamora-pierce.com (June 2005). Review of Trickster’s Choice, in Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2003, Vol. 71, p. 1129 Russ, Joanna, ‘‘Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction,’’ in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, University of Indiana Press, 2005, p. 43. School Library Journal, Review of Trickster’s Choice, in School Library Journal, August 2004, Vol. 50, p. 78. Welch, Dave, ‘‘Philip Pullman, Tamora Pierce, and Christopher Paolini Talk Fantasy Fiction,’’ at www.Powells.com (July 31, 2003).

FURTHER READING Bradley, Marion Zimmer, Darkover Landfall, Penguin Group, 1972. The ‘‘Darkover’’ series begins when a Terran ship crashes on the planet of Darkover and alien cultures collide, throwing relations between worlds into deep turmoil. Cherryh, C. J., Gate of Ivrel, Penguin Group, 1976. This novel introduces Cherryh’s seminal character Morgaine as a central feminist heroine in a novel that explores bizarre time-space gates left over from an extinct alien race.

SOURCES Burkam, Anita, Review of Trickster’s Choice, Horn Book Magazine, January-February 2004, Vol 80, p. 90. Devereaux, Elizabeth, ‘‘Children’s Books; Woman Warrior,’’ in the New York Times, November 16, 2003, Section 7, Column 1, p. 39. Estrich, Susan, Sex and Power, Riverhead, 2000, pp. 51, 91. Harlan, Judith, Feminism: A Reference Handbook, ABCCLIO, 1998, pp. 6, 37. Jehlen, Myra, ‘‘Gender,’’ in Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, University of Chicago Press, 1990. Karr, Kathleen, Children’s Literature, www.bn.com (June 2, 2005). Levine, Lawrence W., ‘‘‘Some Go Up and Some Go Down’: The Animal Trickster,’’ in Black Culture and

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Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 102–103.

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Pierce, Tamora, Alanna: The First Adventure, Atheneum Books, 1983. This is Pierce’s first novel, and the one that introduces Alanna the Lioness. There has never been a female knight in the land of Tortall, so Alanna must hide her gender to train and become the warrior she knows she is meant to be. She is brilliant in battle, but must face discrimination and apprehension her male brothers-in-arms need not worry about. Pierce, Tamora, Lioness Rampant, Atheneum Books, 1988. The fourth book in the Song of the Lioness quartet follows Alanna as she becomes the King’s Champion, and finds unexpected love in George of Pirate’s Swoop.

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True History of the Kelly Gang Since the publication in 1974 of The Fat Man in History, Australian novelist and short story writer Peter Carey has often played with the literal truth, blurring the line between history and fiction and combining fact with fable. True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is no different. It is the fictional first-person account of Ned Kelly, the notorious nineteenth-century bushranger and outlaw who is as well-known to Australians, and as fascinating to them, as Jesse James is to Americans or Robin Hood is to the English.

PETER CAREY 2000

In True History of the Kelly Gang, Kelly is writing a series of letters to his unborn daughter. In these letters, he attempts to explain why he first became an outlaw—because he had no choice, he says—and provide her with a true history because, he explains, he knows ‘‘what it is to be raised on lies and silences.’’ His own father was an Irish convict, shipped along with his mother to Australia during the Great Transportation. The past has long been dead or silenced for the transported, as if the memory of what was left behind is too painful to talk about. Kelly himself is painfully aware of what that means for him and his culture: they are a people with no cultural memory, adrift, rootless, and left without any meaningful future. Kelly’s ‘‘letters’’ are urgent, raw, and largely unpunctuated, but they are vivid and uniquely written. He speaks the rough language of an Irish Australian and makes easy references to stories and myths that might be lost on a

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contemporary audience—or on the daughter whom he addresses—if Carey were not so careful to place them in context. Carey’s decision to write Kelly’s story in Kelly’s voice gives readers an opportunity to understand the man behind the legend.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Peter Carey was born May 7, 1943, in the town of Bacchus Marsh in the Australian state of Victoria. He was the youngest of three children, and his parents, Percival Stanley and Helen Jean Carey, owned and operated a local automobile dealership. Carey attended Geelong Grammar School, a private school, and enrolled in a science program at Monash University in 1961. He performed poorly there and left after his first year. In 1962, he took a job as an advertising copywriter in Melbourne, and in 1964, married Leigh Weetman. From 1967 to 1970, Carey lived in London and traveled throughout Europe. Between the time he left Monash University in the early 1960s until he left London at the beginning of the 1970s, he had finished three novels that were never published. He returned to Melbourne and took another job in advertising. In 1973, he finished a fourth novel that was accepted for publication, but Carey withdrew it before it went to press. That same year, Carey and Weetman separated, but his career as a writer was about to take off. In 1974, his first book of short stories, The Fat Man in History, was published by the University of Queensland Press and earned Carey critical praise as well as an enthusiastic readership. Shortly after the book’s publication, Carey moved yet again, this time from Melbourne to Sydney for a senior position in advertising. In 1977, Carey published another book of short stories, War Crimes, which established him as an important young writer on the Australian literary scene. It also established his signature style; he writes with a dark humor, often twists historical events, and includes absurd elements in otherwise realistic tales. Bliss, Carey’s first novel, followed in 1981, and he adapted it for a film version, which was released in 1985. In that same year, Carey married theater director Alison Summers. Since then, Carey has published nine more novels, including: Illywhacker (1985); Oscar and Lucinda (1988), for which Carey won England’s

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Booker Prize, and which became a motion picture starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; The Big Bazoolhey (1995), a children’s novel; Jack Maggs (1997), a reworking of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations; True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), which earned Carey his second Booker Prize; My Life as a Fake (2003); and Wrong About Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son (2005), a nonfiction account about a trip to Japan with his twelve-year-old son. Additionally, in 1992 he wrote the screenplay for German director Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, and he has taught writing at New York University and Princeton University.

PLOT SUMMARY Prologue True History of the Kelly Gang opens with an anonymous and handwritten third-person account of Kelly and his gang’s last stand in the town of Glenrowan. Kelly himself provokes the battle at Glenrowan when he lures the police, or the ‘‘traps,’’ into a shootout. The account describes the moment that defines Kelly in the

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Australian imagination: Kelly and his boys appear on a hotel veranda, clad in homemade body armor and bucket-shaped helmets, and Kelly declares himself ‘‘The Monitor,’’ after a famous iron-sided battleship in service during the American Civil War. The document has an acquisition number and purports to be housed in the Melbourne Public Library, which serves to establish historical authenticity.

Parcel 1: His Life until the Age of 12 Shortly before the end of his career, the historical Kelly composed what has come to be called the ‘‘Jerilderie Letter,’’ an 8300-word account of his life, his motivations, and his hopes for the future; which he wanted to have printed in a newspaper, any newspaper. The document was lost or ignored and was never made available to the public, which infuriated Kelly. The True History of the Kelly Gang alleges to be Kelly’s second effort as an author, a series of letters to his unborn daughter that ‘‘will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.’’ Kelly begins his tale with the transportation of his father, John ‘‘Red’’ Kelly, from Ireland to Van Dieman’s Land, a small island near Australia known today as Tasmania, for crimes about which Kelly never heard his father speak. Constable O’Neill, a sinister representative of the local police, tells Ned Kelly a story about ‘‘A Certain Man,’’ who plotted with others back in Ireland to murder a landowner whose policies they thought unfair. Eventually, this ‘‘Certain Man’’ was caught and transported to Van Dieman’s land. Kelly understands this Certain Man’’ to be his father. Later, O’Neill tells Kelly about the night he saw Red Kelly wearing a dress, which Kelly does not believe until he accidentally finds the dress, exactly as it was described by O’Neill, buried in a metal trunk. Kelly depicts his mother, Ellen Kelly, as resolute and tough. She alternately fights with and entertains the police in her home. She stands up to the law for her family, above all else. Late in Parcel 1, Kelly commits his own first crime when he kills a neighboring farmer’s calf to put food on the Kelly table. Despite Kelly’s admissions of guilt, his father is arrested and jailed for poaching, and he later dies as a result of his stay in prison.

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Parcel 2: His Life Ages 12–15 Kelly’s family, led by their mother, moves to Greta, leaving Kelly and his brother Jem behind to work for their mother’s sisters. After the arrest of her brother James and other injustices, Ellen Kelly’s dreams of a more prosperous future are dashed. Now that her husband is dead, Ellen Kelly begins to take a number of unsavory suitors. Harry Power, a bushranger and outlaw, appears at the Kelly’s one night. He becomes one of Ellen Kelly’s suitors briefly, and then he becomes Ned Kelly’s mentor. Power has escaped from Pentridge Prison, where he knew Ellen Kelly’s brother James, and he gives Ellen Kelly money to hire a better lawyer for him. Kelly and Jem follow their mother, sisters, and little brother to Greta. Kelly reveals that Ellen Kelly’s dream of fertile land, domestic peace, and a prosperous, legitimate livelihood have taken root in him as well. It is, he will later insist, all he ever wanted. Writing directly to his unborn daughter, he tells her that Ellen Kelly’s new house is where she will eventually be conceived.

Parcel 3: His Life at 15 Years of Age At the wedding of his sister Annie to yet another troublemaker, Alex Gunn, Kelly sees his mother dancing with a ‘‘ferret faced fellow’’ named Bill Frost. He is disturbed by his mother’s gay and girlish behavior in Frost’s presence. During the reception, Power appears and lures Kelly away for what Kelly believes will be a brief excursion on horseback. In fact, it is the beginning of his apprenticeship to Power. Kelly and Power ride into the bush to Power’s hideout on Bullock Creek, in the Wombat Mountain Range. Soon, Kelly is Power’s accomplice in a stagecoach robbery, and though all they manage to get from the robbery is some lace, an English clock, and a bag full of marbles, his fate as an outlaw is sealed: ‘‘that was the moment . . . I made myself a bushranger as well.’’ Following a fight with one of Power’s friends, Kelly is sent home, where he finds that Frost has moved in. He also discovers that his mother has betrayed him and sold him into servitude to Power. The police come for Kelly, to arrest him for his part in the robbery of Chinese merchant Ah Fook, but Power arrives in time to pay Kelly’s bail.

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Parcel 4: His Life at 16 Years of Age Not long after Kelly learns his mother is carrying Frost’s child, Power arrives at Ellen Kelly’s home to claim the merchandise he has paid for: her son Ned Kelly. As soon as Kelly rides off into the bush with Power, Frost abandons Ellen Kelly. When Kelly finds out about it from Power, he vows to murder Frost. Kelly and Power pass through a hellish brushfire as they search for Frost, whom they find with a prostitute. Kelly shoots Frost in the stomach with his rifle and leaves him for dead on the steps of the whorehouse. Later, and despite knowledge to the contrary, Power assures Kelly that Frost did indeed die of his gunshot wounds. Following the robbery of R. R. McBean, a powerful landowner, Power and Kelly travel to Tambo Crossing, seeking the safety of anonymity. Frost makes a surprise reappearance and tells Kelly that Power has been, and continues to be, involved with his mother, too. In a blind rage, Kelly almost kills Power, steals his beloved horse Daylight, and embarks on a journey into the bush.

Parcel 5: His Early Contact with Senior Policemen Kelly returns home, meets his new baby sister Ellen, and learns that the town of Greta is crawling with police, who soon arrest him for his connections to Power and the McBean robbery. As he learns more about what he can expect from the police and the wealthy from increased interactions with them, Kelly’s growing awareness of English injustices against the Irish is made plain. Tricked into a fistfight for his freedom by police commissioners who want to capture Power, Kelly wins the fight but is returned to a jail cell when he refuses to betray Power. His opponent in the fight, Constable John Fitzpatrick, befriends Kelly and warns him that Kelly’s uncle Jack Lloyd is about to turn in Power for the reward money. When Kelly is released from prison as Power is taken into custody, everyone, including his mother, takes it as a sign that Kelly, and not Lloyd, turned in Power to secure his own release. Kelly becomes a pariah, or outcast, in the community, and two of his other uncles, Jimmy and Pat Quinn, are among the most upset.

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Parcel 6: Events Precipitated by the Arrest of Harry Power Another former prisoner of Van Dieman’s Land, Ben Gould, a traveling salesman of sorts, arrives with his cart of housewares at the Kelly place. He has a broken-down horse that he says belongs to the McCormicks, a husband and wife in the same line of work as Gould. What Gould does not say is that the horse is stolen, and that Gould harbors a passionate hatred of Mr. McCormick, who was a warden at Van Dieman’s Land. The McCormicks, following a humiliating confrontation with Gould, get their horse back and retreat to town, where Kelly delivers them a Mafia-like message from Gould: a pair of sheep testicles wrapped in cloth with a note telling McCormick he will need them in bed with Mrs. McCormick. Constable Hall feels himself betrayed by Kelly in an earlier public confrontation with his uncles Jimmy and Pat, an outgrowth of the Power arrest. Though he once promised to watch out for Kelly, he manufactures the false charge of horse theft that sends Kelly to prison for three years.

Parcel 7: His Life Following His Later Release from Pentridge Gaol When Kelly is released from prison, he returns to his mother’s house once again, and once again he is disappointed to find that Ellen Kelly has not only taken another unsuitable husband, George King, who is Kelly’s age, but that she has had King’s child. Kelly, who has come home to save the farm, laments, ‘‘All my life all I wanted were a home.’’ He finds that King, who wants to get into the horse-thieving business, is a bad influence. Kelly takes a job at a sawmill—the first real job he has ever had—but cannot forget about Wild Wright, whom he believes was instrumental in the betrayal that sent him to prison. Seeing an opportunity, a pub owner talks Kelly out of a street fight with Wright in favor of a boxing match. Kelly’s narration of the brawl is bloody and once again underscores English mistreatment of the Irish. By the end of this chapter, Kelly is living a quiet life, working at the sawmill, breeding horses with his cousin Tom Lloyd, and cultivating his literary side. His friend Joe Byrne has given him a Bible, some Shakespeare, and a

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copy of Lorna Doone, which Kelly reads three times in two years, and which he especially loves for the parallels in the story to his own life.

Parcel 8: 24 Years Kelly’s horse is impounded when it wanders onto former common ground now controlled by the wealthy landowner McBean, and Kelly simply walks into the impoundment lot and retrieves it. When he is accused of horse stealing, he quits his job at the sawmill and heads for Power’s old hideout at Bullock Creek. The poet and opium addict Byrne soon shows up, as do Kelly’s younger brother Dan and his friend Steve Hart. Hart loves old tales and songs of the Irish rebels, and like Kelly’s father, he sometimes wears a woman’s frock. The new constable, Alex Fitzpatrick, turns out to be the brother of John Fitzpatrick, whom Kelly had fought and then befriended in Melbourne. One night, Alex introduces Kelly to Mary Hearn, who will become Kelly’s lover and mother to the daughter he addresses in his letters. Alex Fitzpatrick betrays Kelly by courting his fourteen-year-old sister, Kate. Fitzpatrick has two other women—one of them pregnant— in other towns. In a confrontation on the Kelly porch, Ellen Kelly bashes Fitzpatrick over the head with a shovel and Kelly shoots him in the wrist. Kelly flees for Bullock Creek an outlaw.

Parcel 9: The Murders at Stringybark Creek In Kelly’s absence, the police arrest his mother and take away her baby. She is detained in Beechworth Prison as an accomplice to her son’s shooting of Alex Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick then tries to persuade Mary Hearn to turn Kelly in. Meanwhile, to Kelly’s unease, the Kelly Gang continues to grow; as Jimmy Quinn, Wild Wright, and Aaron Sherritt, Byrne’s lifelong friend and fellow opium addict, arrive.

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In retreat and crossing the flood-swollen Murray River on horseback, Kelly’s beloved copy of Lorna Doone is ruined. Byrne suggests that he, Kelly, and Mary Hearn flee to California, but Kelly is determined to return to his family’s home in Greta. He is also determined to free his mother from prison.

Parcel 10: The History Is Commenced When Kelly arrives in Greta, he discovers that a modified version of events has made the newspapers, and he stays up all night telling Hearn how it really happened. She encourages him to write it all down and tells him she is pregnant with his daughter. In the aftermath of the shootout on Stringybark Creek, Donald Cameron, a member of Parliament, wonders publicly if the police were not to blame. This provides further motivation for Kelly to write the true version of his story. Hearn, who was born and raised in Ireland, tells Kelly, Dan Kelly, and Hart the story of the Sons of Sieve, Irish rebels who wore women’s dresses and smeared their faces with ash to frighten unjust landowners—precisely the activity for which Red Kelly was sentenced to Van Dieman’s Land. Kelly reflects on the horror of transporting Irish prisoners to Van Dieman’s Land. He feels that those who were transported would rather forget the past, while Kelly and the others of his generation are ‘‘left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon.’’ Having written his story just as Hearn asked him to and hoping to influence the disposition of his case, Kelly sends his long narrative to the Melbourne newspaper for publication. He also comes to the realization that the sympathy of the poor can be bought—just as his uncle sold out Power—and hatches a plan to rob a bank at Euroa, an act that will enhance the Kelly Gang’s growing legend and ensure their status as folk heroes.

Parcel 11: His Life at 25 Years of Age

A manhunt begins, and there is ample evidence that the police intend to bring the Kelly Gang in dead. Kelly and the others get wind of this as they prepare to defend themselves at a hideout on Stringybark Creek. When the police arrive, Kelly and his gang are prepared to ambush them, and three policemen die in the ensuing violence. The gang’s reputation grows among the poor, even as they are hunted as outlaw killers by the law.

The authorities’ manhunt in Kelly’s home district widens and twenty-one men are arrested for simply knowing Kelly, including Jack McMonigle, who is well-known for having publicly denounced Kelly. Kelly and his men set out to do chores and help out on the farms of the twenty-one arrested men while they are in jail. Kelly determines that in addition to freeing his mother, he must liberate these newly imprisoned men as well.

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Just as Byrne did earlier, Hearn tries to talk Kelly into fleeing with her to California, but he will not leave as long as his mother and the twenty-one men still languish in jail. Hearn boards a ship for California without him. Kelly grows angry when he realizes the newspaper is not going to print his long letter, so he composes another; this one for government officials. Even without the newspapers to spread it, Kelly realizes his renown is growing: ‘‘I were the terror of the government being brung to life in the cauldron of the night.’’

Parcel 12: Conception and Construction of Armour With the police drawing nearer and Kelly feeling increasingly pressured, Hearne sends word that Kelly’s daughter has been born in San Francisco. Perhaps as a reaction to the birth, Kelly’s vision broadens—now he decides he will have to free not only his mother and the twenty-one men from prison, but all ‘‘the innocents’’ as well. With the authorities on his heels, Kelly heads to an abandoned shepherd’s cabin in the bush. The walls of the cabin are papered over with old newspapers, some of them from the time of the American Civil War, which ended fifteen years before. Alone and bored, Kelly begins reading the newspapers. One story captures his attention: the story of a titanic battle between two ironclad battleships, the Union’s USS Monitor and Southern States’ CSS Virginia. Kelly realizes almost at once that men could be ironclad too and become ‘‘Soldier[s] of Future Time,’’ or ‘‘our 1st Monitor.’’ He organizes and outfits a makeshift forge and foundry, where he and his men are soon banging iron into breastplates, leg-protectors, and the bucket-shaped helmets for which they will be best remembered. In the weeks that follow, they make a number of ironclad suits for local farmers, other men ‘‘perjured against and falsely gaoled.’’

Parcel 13: His Life at 26 Years of Age Bearing their iron suits, Kelly and his gang arrive in the town of Glenrowan, where Kelly has lured the police and where he will make his last stand on what he calls ‘‘[t]his historic night.’’ The ironclad men set up headquarters in a hotel and tavern. They take dozens of hostages, who end up having such a good time with the Kelly

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gang that when given a chance to escape, only one—a constable—flees. Outside, Kelly meets school teacher Thomas Curnow as he arrives into town by buggy and takes him hostage. Curnow—nervous, effeminate ‘‘prim & superior’’—is carrying a thick copy of the plays of William Shakespeare, and Kelly takes it from him. Curnow is surprised to discover that the outlaw knows the work of the Bard, as Shakespeare is called. Later, Curnow interrupts Kelly as he works on his personal history, and is even more surprised to discover that Kelly is an author. Curnow asks him if he knows Lorna Doone, which produces a flood of memories and feelings in Kelly. Lorna Doone, of course, is Kelly’s favorite book. Seeming to slip into character, Curnow recites the opening passage of Lorna Doone from memory, and then, after Kelly lets him read a page of his manuscript, he offers to help Kelly with his five-hundred-page ‘‘history.’’ That night, the Kelly Gang sings, dances, and drinks with their hostages. Kelly is clearly intrigued at the idea of Curnow helping with his manuscript, although Curnow insists he would have to take the manuscript home with him to do Kelly’s work justice. This is the end of Kelly’s narration, if not quite his story.

‘‘The Siege at Glenrowan’’ and ‘‘The Death of Edward Kelly’’ Because Curnow has talked Kelly into handing over his manuscript, Kelly’s narration comes to an end. These two brief chapters recount, in the third person, the gang’s last hours and Kelly’s execution. With Kelly’s five hundred handwritten pages under his arm, Curnow hurries home, deposits the manuscript, and then runs to the railroad tracks to stop the train carrying the group of policemen that Kelly has lured into Glenrowan. Curnow tells them that the Kelly Gang is waiting for them. The police, armed with this information as well as with Webley and Enfield rifles and buckets of deadly Martini-Henry bullets, surround the hotel. Once the shooting begins, the police fire indiscriminately, killing local men, women, and children. Byrne is killed when one of the bullets pierces his armor. Many bullets are deflected off Kelly’s armor, but he is eventually wounded and captured. Dan Kelly and Hart stay on and fight until they are burned alive inside the hotel.

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to Kelly’s own life, and it becomes his favorite book. Later Byrne and Kelly do strike up a friendship, and Byrne becomes the most indispensable member of Kelly’s gang. Byrne is an opium addict, however, and his habit brings him into regular contact with a childhood friend, Aaron Sherritt, whom Kelly mistrusts and who later betrays Byrne and Kelly to the police.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS The 2003 movie Ned Kelly portrays the legendary story of Kelly and his gang. The movie was adapted from a novel about Kelly by Australian writer Robert Drewe. It stars Heath Ledger as Ned Kelly and Orlando Bloom as fellow gang member Joe Byrne. It is available on DVD from Universal Home Entertainment. True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) was released in an unabridged version on audio cassette by Audiobooks. It is narrated by Gianfranco Negroponte.

Curnow is taken into protective custody in Melbourne and never quite becomes the Australian hero he believes he should be. He keeps the manuscript, despite his often-voiced low opinion of Kelly, and numerous pencil markings on the manuscript seem to prove that he continued to work obsessively on it for years. Kelly is taken to the Melbourne jail, where he will await his execution. As he mounts the hanging scaffold, his last words are, ‘‘Such is life.’’ His final requests are for the release of his mother from prison and that he be buried in consecrated ground. Neither is honored, and he is buried inside the walls of the prison.

CHARACTERS

Mr. Donald Cameron Cameron is a member of the Australian parliament. After the incident at Stringybark Creek, he raises questions about whether the police themselves were at fault and caused the massacre.

Thomas Curnow Curnow is a schoolteacher who becomes one of the Kelly Gang’s hostages in Glenrowan. His appearance in the novel is brief but crucial. After Curnow flatters Kelly and convinces him to turn over the ‘‘parcels’’ of his personal history on which he is hard at work—even as the hostages are being held at Mrs. Jones’s pub—Curnow is revealed to loathe Kelly and his gang and to hold Kelly’s writing in the lowest contempt. Nevertheless, evidence suggests it is Curnow who is responsible for the parcels’ survival, and that the schoolteacher even worked on organizing and editing them over the many years that Kelly’s work was in his possession.

Constable Alex Fitzpatrick Fitzpatrick befriends Kelly after hearing of him through his brother John, a constable in Melbourne. He introduces Kelly to Mary Hearn, who will give birth to the daughter to whom Kelly’s letters are addressed. Later, Fitzpatrick falls in love with Kelly’s fourteenyear-old sister Kate, for which Kelly shoots him in the wrist. Fitzpatrick then betrays Kelly to the police, setting off the novel’s final manhunt.

Sir Redmond Barry Barry is the judge to whom Kelly offers surrender in exchange for dropping the charges against Ellen Kelly. Barry refuses and sentences Ellen to three years in prison.

Joe Byrne At Kelly’s boxing match with Wild Wright, Joe Byrne approaches him and tries to strike up a friendship. He gives Kelly a copy of the novel Lorna Doone, a story that has striking parallels

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Constable John Fitzpatrick Constable Fitzpatrick fights Kelly in Melbourne Prison and then befriends him, bringing a whole leg of lamb to Kelly’s cell. Later, Fitzpatrick’s brother Alex will befriend—and then betray—Kelly as well.

Constable Flood Flood impregnates Kelly’s sister Annie Gunn while her husband Alex is in jail.

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Ah Fook Fook is a Chinese merchant. He is present for the first stagecoach robbery that Kelly and Power attempt together. Power slices open Fook’s carpetbag full of marbles, which Kelly takes with him. Fook comes to Kelly’s house and has him arrested for highway robbery.

has a child with George King, although Kelly does not know that King is the father. She becomes pregnant again, with the daughter who Kelly addresses in the book. Later she tries to convince Kelly to escape with her to California. He does not, but Hearn makes it to safety in San Francisco where she gives birth to their daughter.

Bill Frost Bill Frost becomes Ellen’s second husband, and he disappears when she becomes pregnant. With Harry Power’s help, the sixteen-year-old Kelly hunts Frost down, shoots him, and mistakenly believes he has killed him.

Mr. Irving Mr. Irving is Kelly’s cruel teacher, who makes Kelly dread school and feel shame at his ignorance.

Mrs. Jones

Ben Gould Gould is a hawker, a traveling salesman who does business from a wagon. Gould involves Kelly in an argument that leads to a jail sentence for Kelly.

Alex Gunn Gunn appears at the Kelly house, and although Kelly and Annie believe he is one of their mother’s suitors, he ends up marrying Annie. Later, he goes to prison for stealing sheep.

Mrs. Jones runs the tavern where the Kelly Gang holds their hostages during the final showdown at Glenrowan.

Annie Kelly Annie is Kelly’s older sister by one year. She marries Alex Gunn, who later goes to prison. Annie dies in childbirth.

Dan Kelly

Mr. Gill is the editor of the Jerilderie Gazette. After Kelly writes a long explanation of his actions, he gives it to Gill to print. Kelly hopes his fifty-eight-page letter will exonerate him, or at least force the authorities to release his mother. Gill does not print the letter but gives it to the police instead.

Dan Kelly is Ned Kelly’s younger brother, and he is the sibling who is most similar to Kelly in temperament. When Kelly sees Dan drunk with some rowdy young men, he tries to make Dan a partner in his legitimate horse business. Later, Dan joins Kelly in what becomes known as the Kelly Gang, and he dies in the hotel fire that occurs during the final standoff with police in Glenrowan.

Superintendent Hare

Edward Kelly

Mr. Gill

Hare interrogates Kelly in Melbourne, playing the bad cop to his partner Nicolson’s good cop.

See Ned Kelly

Ellen Quinn Kelly Steve Hart Hart is a member of the Kelly Gang and Dan Kelly’s best friend. He sometimes wears a dress, as Red Kelly is reported to have done, and he knows it has something to do with the Irish rebels he worships. He does not exactly understand what the dresses are about until Mary, who grew up in Ireland, tells him the story of the Sons of Sieve, who wore dresses and smeared their faces with ashes to frighten their opponents.

Mary Hearn Alex Fitzpatrick introduces Kelly to Hearn, and Kelly falls in love with her at first sight. She

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Throughout most of True History of the Kelly Gang, Kelly’s mother Ellen is at the center of her son’s world. His devotion to her provokes his jealousy of her many lovers, particularly George King, who is Kelly’s age. Kelly’s loyalty to his mother compels him to defer to her unreasonable—even outrageous—demands, and ultimately leads to his armored last stand at Glenrowan. Ellen is a Quinn—the Quinns are a family of petty thieves and brawlers—and in her own way she is as defiant and difficult as any of them. Nevertheless, Kelly is tireless in his efforts to help her and dies in a vain attempt to free her from prison.

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Ellen Quinn Ellen is also the name Kelly’s mother gives to the daughter she has with the scoundrel Bill Frost. Baby Ellen dies at fourteen months.

Gracie Kelly Gracie is Kelly’s sister.

Jem Kelly Jem is Kelly’s younger brother by a year. Jem is not the troublemaker that his male siblings, cousins, and uncles are, though he is willing to stand up for himself and his family.

John Kelly See Red Kelly

Kate Kelly Kate is Kelly’s little sister. Constable Alex Fitzpatrick falls in love with her, which sets off a series of events that end with a warrant for Kelly’s arrest and Ellen Kelly’s imprisonment.

Maggie Kelly Maggie is Kelly’s younger sister. She marries Bill Skilling.

Ned Kelly Ned Kelly is the leader and namesake of the Kelly Gang and the narrator of almost the entire novel, which is presented as a series of personally written ‘‘parcels’’ to his unborn daughter, and covers the period of Kelly’s life from age twelve to his execution at twenty-six. He is born into an Irish Australian family of hardscrabble dirt ranchers, brawlers, and petty thieves who are in near-perpetual conflict with the local landowners, or squatters, and the authorities; who are either English or otherwise represent English, as opposed to Irish, interests. After his father dies, his mother Ellen Kelly apprentices the fifteen-year-old Kelly, for a price, to the bushranger and outlaw Harry Power, who mentors the young man in the ways of banditry, evasion, and a scavenging life in the bush. This apprenticeship sets in motion the currents that will direct Kelly’s life thereafter. As an adult with several prison stints under his belt, Kelly is a natural leader of men. He is by turns tender and brutal, compassionate and ruthless, understanding and remorseless. He will never turn against an ally, and he is a compelling storyteller who is unusually sensitive to language. Kelly repeatedly tells his reader that

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his life could have been quite different; that all he ever wanted was a piece of land to work, security for his family, and to be left alone. Although there are times when he seems unable to understand himself or his mother, his insights into others—their motives, their innermost fears, and the desires that force them to action—are often piercingly exact. Kelly falls within the camp of folk heroes that includes both Jesse James and Robin Hood.

Red Kelly Red Kelly is Kelly’s father. An Irishman, he is arrested and transported to Van Dieman’s Land, an island prison, for crimes Kelly never heard him talk about. Early in the novel, Constable O’Neill tells Kelly the story of ‘‘A Certain Man’’ who was arrested in Ireland with several co-conspirators for murdering a landlord-farmer. While the others were executed, this Certain Man was spared his life—the implication, Kelly understands, being that the Certain Man is his father, and that he turned against his mates, the worst crime a Kelly can commit. O’Neill also tells Kelly about seeing Red Kelly crossing a field one night wearing a woman’s dress. Later in the novel, Kelly finds out more about this episode of apparent cross-dressing. Following a stint in prison for a crime his son commits—and attempts to confess to—Red dies, seemingly broken by his most recent incarceration.

George King King is Ellen Kelly’s third husband. He is Kelly’s age, and like Kelly he is a sometime horse thief. Ellen bears King’s son John at about the same time that Mary Hearn, who will later bear Kelly’s daughter, has a child by King as well. Kelly does not discover this connection until much later.

John King John King is the son of George King and Ellen Kelly.

Jack Lloyd Jack Lloyd is Ellen Kelly’s brother-in-law, married to her sister Kate. He turns Harry Power in to the police and allows people to think that Kelly did it.

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Tom Lloyd

Jimmy Quinn

Tom Lloyd is Jack’s son and Kelly’s cousin. For a period he and Kelly are best friends.

Kate Lloyd

Jimmy Quinn is Ellen Kelly’s brother and Kelly’s uncle. Jimmy is easily provoked, and he is partly responsible for several incidents that end in arrests.

Kate is Ellen Kelly’s sister and Jack Lloyd’s wife.

Margaret Quinn

Constable Tom Lonigan

Margaret is Pat Quinn’s wife and Ellen Kelly’s sister-in-law.

Tom Lonigan is the first policeman killed, by Kelly, in the incident at Stringybark Creek, which sets off the manhunt for Kelly and his gang.

Pat Quinn

R. R. McBean McBean is a magistrate and landowner who is very often Kelly’s tormentor and victim. Kelly frequently crosses McBean’s Kilfeera Station.

Jack McMonigle When twenty-one men are arrested following the incident at Stringybark Creek for simply knowing Kelly, McMonigle is among them despite being well-known for having publicly denounced Kelly.

Patchy Moran Patchy Moran is Kelly’s childhood bully. Moran overhears and spreads the tale that O’Neill tells Kelly about seeing Kelly’s father in a dress.

Pat Quinn is Ellen Kelly’s brother. He is known as Wild Pat the Dubliner and likes to drink to excess.

Edward Rogers Rogers is a pub owner who intervenes in the fist fight between Wild Wright and Kelly and arranges a public boxing match instead.

J. P. Rowe Rowe is a squatter, or landowner, from Mount Batten Station, who turns in sixteenyear-old Kelly after seeing him steal a horse.

Dicky Shelton Dicky Shelton is saved from drowning by the twelve-year-old Kelly. This is the first time the reader sees the pleasure Kelly takes in helping others.

Superintendent Nicolson Nicolson interrogates Kelly in Melbourne, playing the good cop to his partner Hare’s bad cop.

Aaron Sherritt Sherritt is Joe Byrne’s childhood friend and fellow opium addict. He betrays Byrne and Kelly to the police.

Constable O’Neill O’Neill is the policeman who hangs around the Kelly home early in the novel. He tells Kelly the story about ‘‘A Certain Man’’ and later about seeing Red Kelly in a dress.

Harry Power Harry Power is a notorious bushranger and outlaw who courts Ellen Kelly and then makes a deal with her to apprentice Kelly in banditry. He becomes both a father figure and nemesis, or adversary, to Kelly, lying to the boy and leading him into deeper and deeper trouble. It is with Power that Kelly commits his first robbery, setting him on the path that will take him finally to his death at Glenrowan.

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Bill Skilling Skilling is a miner hired by Ellen Quinn as farm help. He becomes Kelly’s brother-in-law when he marries Maggie Kelly.

Detective Michael Ward Ward is a sadistic detective who tries to intimidate Mary Hearn into telling him what she knows about Kelly’s whereabouts.

Dummy Wright Dummy Wright is Wild Wright’s deaf-mute brother. Kelly uses him to provoke a fight with Wild.

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Wild Wright Kelly believes Wright is responsible for charges against Kelly that lead to a jail sentence. The two men fight and later become friends.

Mr. Zinke Zinke is a lawyer hired by Power to get Kelly out of prison following the robbery incident with Ah Fook.

THEMES Post-Colonialism Colonialism is the use of economic, political, and social policies to maintain or extend control over jurisdictions and peoples that lie outside the nation exercising such power. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the era in which True History of the Kelly Gang is set, Australia was struggling to emerge from its colonial past with England and from its own history as a penal colony where English and Irish criminals were sent. In True History of the Kelly Gang, the tension this effort generates is made evident in the endless conflicts between the mostly Irish selection-holders, or homesteaders, and the English squatters, landlords who own the larger tracts of property. More particularly, the conflict is evident in the constant, almost daily disputes that pit the Kellys and the Quinns against the local police force, which is staffed by and represents the interests of the English. Ned Kelly is highly alert to the perceived English superiority, and he alludes to it often. While in custody at the Benalla Police Station, he observes that Superintendent Hare is ‘‘posh spoken[, sitting] grimly behind the cedar desk trying to frighten me with his blue English eyes. . . . When he stood up it were like seeing a tapeworm uncurl in your presence.’’ By the end of the novel, Kelly’s struggle has enlarged to include a recognizable political dimension. He says this of the relationship between his gang and the poor, Irish, and dispossessed of Australia: ‘‘[W]e was them and they was us and we had showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born.’’

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Across time and cultures, it is the poor with whom the outlaw’s adventures resonate; for example, Robin Hood in England, Jesse James in the United States, Pancho Villa and his peasant armies in Mexico, and Phoolan Devi, the ‘‘Bandit Queen’’ in India. All were cheered on by farmers, miners, and others working menial jobs, for whom the outlaw represented an opportunity to retell their own stories, reshape the myths they believed about themselves, and participate in heroism. Outlaws stand up for the oppressed and fight back against the oppressor. For many Australians in the late 1870s, particularly those of Irish descent, Ned Kelly was exactly such a figure—one on whom the aspirations of an entire class could be pinned. Because Australia was founded as a penal colony and many of its citizens carried the ‘‘taint’’ of convict blood, Kelly’s story is particularly potent. Peter Carey’s Kelly certainly recognizes the importance of stories people tell about themselves and their history, especially in the case of a people who have been denied a sense of history: ‘‘That is the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget what come before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon.’’ This understanding is the real impetus, or inspiration, for Kelly to commit his story to paper for his unborn daughter. In the first paragraph of the first ‘‘parcel’’ Kelly writes, I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter . . . this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

Home and Domesticity

Who cheers on the outlaw? Certainly not those who hold and wield power; by definition the outlaw is working against those interests.

Although Ned Kelly at times seem to enjoy the mythical aura developing around him—especially late in True History of the Kelly Gang, once his trajectory has been fully established—he never fully embraces it, either. Kelly believes he is the victim of fate, of circumstances completely beyond his control: he was born to Irish parents in Australia; he is falsely accused of crimes he did not commit; and he is apprenticed to the bushranger Harry Power. As Kelly repeatedly tells the reader in a number of different ways, all he ever really wanted was a place to settle down and make a quiet life. In fact, it is for love of his home and family, and out of desire for a quiet and trouble-free life, that Kelly commits his first

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY It has been remarked by critics that True History of the Kelly Gang seems to be at least partially indebted to novels and films about the American West. Watch Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1973 movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Write a one-page paper comparing Peckinpah’s Billy to Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly. Consider and compare these two characters’ motivation for their actions. Ned Kelly is so popular in Australia that muffler shops and burger stands are named after him. Though some Australians are ashamed of his legacy, many still see Kelly as a hero to the oppressed. What does Kelly do in the novel that might account for his ongoing status as a folk hero? Write a fiveparagraph essay explaining Kelly’s legacy to someone who has never heard of him. Use at least three specific examples from the book as evidence.

of view—that of the storyteller. First-person narrators can alter their stories to cover up mistakes and embarrassing incidents, or make themselves look better than they really are. Write a one-page paper explaining how the other side might view Kelly. How would a policeman’s or government official’s account of Kelly’s activities differ from Kelly’s parcels?

Ned Kelly says his history will ‘‘contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.’’ But is Kelly an entirely reliable, truthful narrator? In True History of the Kelly Gang the reader is presented with only one point

crime, killing a neighbor’s calf so that the family has something to eat. The most obvious and consistent pattern in the novel is that of Kelly’s forced removals from and attempts to return to his home. Upon one such return and finding that the farm and his family are both in disarray, Kelly says, ‘‘All my life all I wanted were a home.’’ Similar thoughts occur to him often, whenever he feels most estranged from his family and from society. On the other hand, he is able to make a home of sorts in the natural world, in the bush around Power’s old cabin at Bullock Creek. His language when he describes moving across the plains or through the Wombat and Warby

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Ned’s writing is largely unpunctuated and frequently ungrammatical, but it has an urgency and vibrancy that demand the reader’s attention. Write a two-page short story or a fourteen-line poem in the voice of someone you know well who does not speak the same way you do. Be respectful, and try to really listen to the person as you write. What does his or her speech tell you about that person? What does listening tell you about yourself?

The epigraph to the novel is from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: ‘‘The past is not dead. It is not even past.’’ Why does Carey use this for his epigraph? What does this quote mean, and what are its implications? Write a one-page essay explaining how the quote is relevant to the story of Ned Kelly.

mountain ranges is so evocative that it is difficult to believe he does not quite feel at home there: ‘‘I never seen this country before it were like a fairy story landscape the clear and windy skies was filled with diamonds the jagged black outlines of the ranges were a panorama.’’

STYLE Epistolary Novel True History of the Kelly Gang is an epistolary novel, one in which the story is carried forward by letters written by one or more of the characters. Although, strictly speaking, what

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Ned Kelly writes are not letters but bound parcels, the novel is in effect one long letter to his unborn daughter. The effect of an epistolary novel is to impart a sense of immediacy and verisimilitude, or the appearance of truth and realism in fiction or drama. It accomplishes this because Kelly’s letters are written in the thick of the action, with no time to even punctuate sentences. Contributing to this sense are the librarian’s careful notes at the beginning of each parcel, such as note at the beginning of Parcel 13: ‘‘On page 7 the manuscript is abruptly terminated.’’ Carey has placed a note at the beginning of the novel suggesting that the manuscript can be found at the Melbourne Public Library under a particular call number, but there is no actual library of that name. In addition, the use of the epistolary form places the action of the novel even more convincingly in the nineteenth century, as epistolary novels were a common form of literature at that time. Most importantly, what True History of the Kelly Gang gains in its use of the epistolary form is the uninterrupted and unfiltered voice of Ned Kelly. The text is rendered as he himself spoke, in the language and with the word choices of a perceptive and sensitive, if not formally educated, Irish Australian man of the nineteenth century. It is largely unpunctuated and at times poetic. Carey based Kelly’s voice in the novel on an existing document, the ‘‘Jerilderie Letter,’’ an 8300-word document by the real, historical Ned Kelly, in which he tells of his exploits and the reasons for his actions.

Picaresque Novel In addition to being an epistolary novel, True History of the Kelly Gang is also a picaresque novel. The picaresque novel is usually structured in episodes, not unlike a television or radio show, and tells the story of a rogue, or rascal, who makes his living by his wits rather than through ordinary employment. Often times, these novels are autobiographical. The picaresque form dates to ancient Rome. One of its most best-known examples is Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Folktale True History of the Kelly Gang is a kind of folktale, a narrative that develops over the course of many years through repeated retellings. Although the story of Ned Kelly is not

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properly a folktale—because folktales usually deal with myths, legends, fables and tall-tales— it nevertheless incorporates some elements of the folktale. Kelly’s story has been passed along orally as much as in written form, leaving open the probability of cumulative authorship, where each teller contributes something to the story. Also like a folktale, it tells the story of a largerthan-life character who accomplishes tremendous deeds, though in this case the character was a real person and not fictional.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Great Transportation Britain began sending its convicted criminals to Australia and surrounding islands in 1788 and continued to do so until 1868, when the last prisoners arrived. By that time, over 150,000 convicts had been ‘‘transported.’’ More than a third of them were Irish, like Ned Kelly’s parents, and almost all of them came from the lower classes. Very early on, as the convicts completed their sentences and were released, they came into conflict with squatters, freemen who were granted rights to almost limitless tracts of land to raise grazing livestock. Because the convicts were mostly unskilled and uneducated— only half could read and write—there were few opportunities open to them, and the task of building a new society proved difficult. Like any free people, they wanted land, opportunities, and rights. The squatters opposed this, and so hostilities developed between the two groups. The squatters hoarded the land as much as possible, claiming more and more from what had been the ‘‘commons,’’ or public lands for the use of all. They impounded stray farm animals that wandered from the former convicts’ farms, heightening the existing tensions between the two groups. This situation pitting the ex-convicts and their descendants, especially the Irish convicts, against the English squatters is the source of nearly all Kelly’s problems in True History of the Kelly Gang. For instance, R. R. McBean’s vast landholdings seem to lie between Kelly and wherever he wants to go, surrounding and nearly engulfing Kelly and his family.

Australian Lore Carey begins True History of the Kelly Gang with an epigraph—an inscription on the title

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Reward poster for the Kelly Gang Mitchell Library, Sydney page—from American author William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom!: ‘‘The past is not dead. It is not even past.’’ With that, Carey appears to be making a case for Ned Kelly’s story having some ongoing relevance for modern readers. Although Carey has lived in New York for a number of years, he experienced two formative events, both of which occurred in the 1960s in Australia, that led him to fictionalize the true story of Kelly, a story Carey has called a ‘‘powerful foundation myth.’’ First, he saw a series of paintings by artist Sydney Nolan with Ned Kelly as their subject. Later, he read Kelly’s fifty-six-page ‘‘Jerilderie Letter,’’ the document in which the historical Kelly tries to explain his actions, what drove him, and what he wished for the future even on the eve of his capture and execution. Carey says that

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Australians still respond to this story so powerfully because Kelly was neither debased nor broken by his experiences, and that he was in a sense triumphant—qualities Australians value even today and which continue to influence the way they think about themselves and their countrymen.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang was published simultaneously by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom and by Knopf in the United States in January 2001. The novel received almost universally favorable reviews in Australia, the United States, and the United

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Kingdom, from reviewers writing for mainstream publications as well as those writing for a more academic audience. Almost all of those reviewers remarked upon what Anthony Quinn, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Carey’s ‘‘fully imagined act of historical impersonation.’’ Quinn is here referring to Carey’s deft channeling of the voice he first encountered in the historical Ned Kelly’s ‘‘Jerilderie Letter,’’ the bushranger’s own handwritten and wildly poetic account of his exploits, which Carey adopts and adapts to suit his own purposes in True History of the Kelly Gang. While the last section of the novel is certainly driven by plot, most of the first part of the book seems episodic, with events only loosely linked one to another. Many critics have felt that this does not matter. As Thomas Jones put it in the London Review of Books, ‘‘The first two thirds of the novel is driven not by the shape of the narrative—it is too fragmented and disconnected for that—but by the blood pressure of the prose. The language is rich but never cloying; the unpunctuated syntax virtuoso.’’ Some reviewers have registered mild complaints. Besides calling True History of the Kelly Gang ‘‘an undeniably impressive novel . . . a stylistic tour de force,’’ Douglas Ivison in the Journal of Australian Studies also addresses what he considers a flaw: that Carey never addresses the larger social and political implications of Kelly’s status as a folk hero. Ivison points out that the ‘‘contradictions in Kelly’s character . . . go largely unexamined,’’ and that Kelly, despite the gritty realism evinced in Carey’s prose, ‘‘remains in the world of romantic myth.’’ Complaints such as those have been few, and True History of the Kelly Gang has succeeded both critically and commercially—it won the 2001 Booker Prize and has so far been Carey’s best selling book. ‘‘Even if Australian critics are ashamed of Ned Kelly,’’ John Banville writes in the New York Review of Books, ‘‘they can still take nothing but pride in Peter Carey.’’

THERE ARE THOSE AUSTRALIANS—OFTEN THOSE WHO ARE MORE EDUCATED, MORE AFFLUENT, AND WELL-TRAVELED—WHO ARE DISCOMFITED BY THEIR COUNTRYMEN WHO CELEBRATE THE LIFE AND EXPLOITS OF A BUSHRANGER AND OUTLAW, AND WHO INSIST ON HIS STATUS AS A NATIONAL HERO.’’

In 1786, the English government was exhausted by an increase in crime that was the inevitable by-product of industrialization. Technical and mechanical innovation had resulted in urbanization, the mass movement of people from rural farming areas into cities. Some members of Parliament and other spokesmen for the government began to discuss the possibility of ‘‘transporting’’ convicted criminals to faraway penal colonies in England’s newly acquired South Pacific lands—New South Wales, in present-day Australia, and Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania. Two years later, with a load of human cargo, eleven convict ships set sail for lands that were at that time almost entirely unknown by Englishmen. This practice continued unabated for the next eighty years, and by the 1860s and 1870s—the time in which Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang is set—a great number of Australian freemen carried the ‘‘taint’’ of convict blood but were nevertheless angling for advantage in this strange new world.

Kelsay is a novelist and instructor of English composition. In this essay, Kelsay considers Ned Kelly’s place in the Australian imagination.

The situation was ripe for conflict. After the imprisoned had served their sentences and been released as free men and women, they expected, quite understandably, nothing less than the full rights and responsibilities extended to every other non-convict who had landed on the island-continent’s shores. Approximately onethird of the newly free were of Irish descent and harbored deep resentments toward the English, their former jailers and tormentors, who now governed and enforced the laws of Australia. And many grown men and women who had never been convicted of any crime were the sons and daughters of those who had. It was into this situation that Ned Kelly, himself the son of Irish convicts, was born in 1855.

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CRITICISM Michael Kelsay

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From the contempt that is heaped upon him by his English schoolmaster to the abuse he suffers at the hands of a local police officer, Carey’s Ned Kelly is shaped by forces over which he has little or no control. Yet, as Carey himself has pointed out in interviews, Kelly is never brutalized or diminished by oppression and injustice Because of this, many Australians identify Kelly as exhibiting quintessentially Australian characteristics: independence, pride, resilience, selfdetermination. Kelly is repeatedly arrested unjustly and tossed into jail, but those experiences only serve to shape his understanding of class divisions and clarify his sense of himself and his place in the world, such as when an arresting constable expresses his scorn and loathing for the sixteen year old Kelly and his kind: He answered he would gaol my mother if he so chose and all my brothers & uncles & cousins and he did not care if we should breed like rabbits for he would lockup the mothers & babies too.

It is sentiments like these, delivered with frank and casual contempt, that finally cause Kelly to rebel; to take his fate into his own hands and become, finally and quite self-consciously, an outlaw attacking the established order, or as Kelly himself puts it, ‘‘the terror of the government being brung to life in the cauldron of the night.’’ Kelly’s growing self-awareness and class consciousness lead him to a new understanding of himself—as Graham Huggan says in Australian Literary Studies, Kelly begins to ‘‘envision himself as an actor in a violent history of his own making.’’ Even as a boy of fifteen, Kelly has a sense that he is participating in his own creation. In the dispiriting aftermath of a botched stagecoach robbery, he stoops to pick marbles from the dust, which amount to his and his mentor Harry Power’s entire haul. Much later, reflecting back on that day, Kelly writes, ‘‘That was the moment by the law I made myself a bushranger as well.’’ Toward the end of his story, as the forces of the state that are arrayed against him grow in strength, Kelly’s sense that he is engaged in a creative act intensifies. Having withdrawn to the bush for safety with his gang, where they busy themselves making a shelter, gathering food and cooking, he says, ‘‘We was building a world.’’ Later, as the climax of the novel

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approaches and after Kelly sets a trap for the authorities, he observes that ‘‘the police was actors in a drama writ by me.’’ Of course, by then he’s also read the novel Lorna Doone and studied the plays of William Shakespeare—so it is not much of a wonder that Kelly has such a well-developed sense of the dramatic. And it is even less of a wonder that he would find support among men forced to plant wheat then ruined by the rust men mangled upon the triangle of Van Diemen’s Land men with sons in gaol men who witnessed their hard won land taken up by squatters men perjured against and falsely gaoled men weary of constant impounding on & on each day without relent.

To this day, it is among those harder types— the farmers and truck drivers and other working people of contemporary Australia—that the strongest sympathy for Kelly’s long-ago-lost cause is found, at least in part. In an interview with The Observer, Peter Carey said that ‘‘you rarely lose marks in Australia for outwitting the police.’’ Americans are not unfamiliar with this type of anti-hero, one who embodies admirable qualities, sometimes a great deal, as well as qualities that are almost always condemned, sometimes quite forcefully. Kelly’s place in the Australian consciousness is similar to that of Jesse James, the nineteenth-century bank- and train-robber whose exploits were closely covered by the newspapers of the day, and who was adored and even cheered on by many ordinary Americans. James, like Kelly, always claimed he had been forced into the outlaw’s life by corrupt authorities. But Carey cautions against carrying the comparison between James and Kelly too far. In his interview with The Observer, he says he tells his American friends that a better comparison is to Thomas Jefferson, because ‘‘that is the sort of space Kelly occupies in the national imagination,’’ that of a founding father dear to the history of a nation. Moreover, while Jesse James’s legend and legacy seem to be fading somewhat in the American imagination—books and movies chronicling the outlaw’s life have slowed to a trickle—the figure of Ned Kelly continues to interest Australians. Robert Drewe’s novel Our Sunshine was published in 1991, and less than ten years later Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning True History appeared. In addition, there have been numerous biographies published just in the past decade, and even some graphic

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Laurence Kinlan as Dan Kelly, Philip Barantini as Steve Hart, Heath Ledger as Ned Kelly, and Orlando Bloom as Joe Byrne in the 2003 film Ned Kelly Australian Film Commission/Working Title/The Kobal Collection/Johns, Carolyn

autobiographies (in which the story is told in pictures or drawings rather than text) aimed at readers as young as eight or nine. Cinema, too, has embraced Kelly—Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones starred as the outlaw in a 1970 film about Kelly, and another version starring Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom and Naomi Watts appeared in theaters in 2003. And although they are not films about Ned Kelly specifically, it is impossible to imagine the three Mad Max films if Kelly had never lived. Max, after all, is forced against his will into the brutal life he leads, wears makeshift, rigged-up body armor, and never hurts anyone who does not clearly deserve it—all essential elements of the Kelly legend. In their daily lives, Australians are surrounded by reminders of Kelly: historical displays, museum exhibits, and even businesses like souvenir stands and dry cleaners that have been named after the outlaw. New South Wales, which was Kelly’s home state, where his name and image are most common, and where his presence most keenly felt even today.

their countrymen who celebrate the life and exploits of a bushranger and outlaw, and who insist on his status as a national hero. Thomas Curnow, the schoolmaster in True History of the Kelly Gang who betrays Kelly and winds up in possession of Kelly’s manuscript, says, What is it about we Australians, eh? he demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might not we find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?

If pride in Kelly is indeed an embarrassment, then the answer is yes. But Carey has called the story of the historical Ned Kelly a ‘‘powerful foundation myth,’’ by which he may mean that it is a story that Australians have been telling themselves for more than a century and which they may need to keep telling. As Carey and his Ned Kelly character both know, the loss of a cultural memory amounts, in essence, to the loss of oneself: ‘‘Our parents would rather forget what come before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon.’’

But there are those Australians—often those who are more educated, more affluent and well-traveled—who are discomfited by

Source: Michael Kelsay, Critical Essay on True History of the Kelly Gang, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

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IN PASSAGES SUCH AS THIS CAN BE HEARD THE


ANGER OF A PEOPLE WHOSE PAST IS TOO RECENT AND PAINFUL TO SUPPORT ANY FIRM SENSE OF THEMSELVES, AND WHAT THEY ARE, AND WHAT THEY

Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) is similar to True History of the Kelly Gang in that Ondaatje writes, at times, from the outlaw’s point of view. In form, it intersperses journalism with poetry and autobiography, using a number of different narrators. Jack Maggs (1997), by Peter Carey, is also a historical novel. It is not set in Australia but one of its central characters is transported as a convict before returning to England. Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983) tells the fictionalized story of the American outlaw who, like Ned Kelly, was a hero to some and a criminal to others.

CAME FROM.’’

Wainewright the Poisoner (2000), a novel by Andrew Morton, tells the story of a famous nineteenth-century prisoner who was transported to Tasmania. Like True History of the Kelly Gang, it is written in the form of an apologia, or an explanation for why Wainewright did what he did. Winner of the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award, Annie Proulx’s Postcards (1993) is the story of Loyal Blood and his family in the mid1900s. After Loyal accidentally kills his girlfriend, he is forced to roam about the United States, separated from his family and never truly finding a place to call home. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1993) follows the journey of John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins as they cross the Mexican border in search of adventure. They find love, death, fear, joy, capture, and redemption in this coming of age novel.

John Banville In the following excerpt from his critical essay, Banville looks at Carey’s use of voice to capture the character of the narrator.

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Source: John Banville, ‘‘The Wild Colonial Boy,’’ in New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, No. 5, March 29, 2001, pp. 15–16.

Andreas Gaile In the following excerpt, Gaile examines Carey’s mixture of truth and fiction about one of Australia’s most infamous outlaws ‘Such is life,’ said Ned Kelly on 11 November 1880, before the hangman put the noose around his neck. ‘Such is life,’ wrote Joseph Furphy in his classic Australian novel

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roughly two decades later, paying homage to Kelly’s famous last words. Over the past 120 years, Kelly’s life has intrigued more creative writers, artists, journalists, historians and filmmakers than any other historical figure since European settlement. Each publication and recreation of the life of Kelly adds a new layer to the historical mist. The ‘true history’ becomes more and more inaccessible—with Ned receding into his ironclad armour. In True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey reinvents the life of the man who can always provoke a passionate public debate, even in the third millennium. Scorned by some as a horsethief and murderer, and admired by others as an icon of Australianness, Kelly is one of Australia’s most controversial historical figures. The public reveres him for embodying a number of Australian virtues: he was loyal to his mates, displayed a healthy disrespect for the establishment, and was forever rising from the fight against the authorities, in the fashion of a true Aussie battler. He has certainly found great sympathy with his latest fictional re-creator, Peter Carey. Carey has already tested the boundaries between fact and fiction. In Illywhacker, his notoriously unreliable, 139-year-old narrator Herbert Badgery dismantles official (‘factual’) Australian history as nothing but fictions, or even lies. True History of the Kelly Gang has the same kind of postmodern playfulness: real life merges with the fictional reality of the novel. Carey creates a near-perfect illusion of reality, and almost manages to dupe the reader. ‘The undated, unsigned, handwritten account’ opening the novel, he wants us to believe, is collected in ‘Melbourne Public Library’; Carey even gives the accession number ‘V.L. 10453.’ What may be obvious to the Australian reader causes the nonAustralian reader to pause and at least think twice here: there is, of course, no such document in ‘Melbourne Public Library’. There is not even a library of that name in Melbourne—Carey has been spinning a yarn once again. Despite all its flurry about fiction and historical facts, Carey’s novel is, generally, true to life: Carey retells the history of the Kelly outbreak, mostly as we find it in the history books. But he adds something that academic studies of Ned Kelly lack: the human perspective. The outlaw’s flawed grammar, his imperfect punctuation and his rambling style create a natural

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immediacy between reader and fictional character, and often reveals an unexpected imagistic beauty: ‘In a settler’s hut the smallest flutter of a mother’s eyelids are like a thin sheet rattling in the wind.’ Carey’s Australia has not overcome the social injustices of the ‘system’ yet. After the end of convictism and transportation, the colony of Victoria, in Ned’s words, is still ‘ruled like Beechworth Gaol.’ The oppositions between convict and jailer have only been replaced by new—and no less harsh—ones. In True History of the Kelly Gang, colonial small-town life lacks any air of romanticism. It is marked by the constant struggle between the haves and the havenots, between poor selectors and insatiable squatters. We encounter Ned’s family engaged in a struggle for survival, fighting against an unrelenting nature as much as against the authorities. It is the ‘historic moment of UNFAIRNESS’, in Kelly’s words, that unites all Australians and gives True History of the Kelly Gang a larger, political dimension. Carey’s protagonists are ‘burnt and hardened by the fates.’ There is a sad inevitability in Ned’s fall, earning him a good deal of sympathy with the reader, and yet Ned Kelly, in fiction and reality, was undoubtedly responsible for the death of three troopers. What makes Kelly so controversial even today is his social-revolutionary appeal. As the British historian Eric J. Hobsbawm tells us in his 1969 classic Bandits, Kelly classifies as a social bandit, an avenger of the lowest and poorest, and can be compared to such fabled outlaws as the American Jesse James, the Mexican bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa, the Indian ‘Bandit Queen’ Phoolan Devi, the above-mentioned Robin Hood, as well as the German Schinderhannes. In the hands of Carey, the Kelly Gang—‘[t]hem boys was noble of true Australian coin’—has clearly discernible political ambitions. Although purporting to be solely a ‘true history’, Carey’s re-enactment of the Kelly outbreak is also a huge imaginative accomplishment. Carey has reinvented parts of his nation’s history before, dismantling historical myths and lies in Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda. Never before, however, has Carey engaged so closely with real historical figures. As he depicts the historical reality of life in colonial Victoria, Carey inscribes into his nation’s history what

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the patchwork of Australia’s transported cultures has always seemed to lack: a mythology. Carey has said in a recent interview that True History of the Kelly Gang is ‘the book I’ve waited my whole life to write’. Carey stages the life of Ned Kelly, has him make his own history. To Ned, it seems, the police are nothing but ‘actors in a drama writ by me.’ With all its veracity, we must remind ourselves that Carey presents to us a postmodern innuendo: after all, the stage manager is Peter Carey, and Ned is nothing but an actor in a drama writ by the real-life author. Source: Andreas Gaile, ‘‘Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang,’’ in Meanjin, Vol. 60, No. 3, September 1, 2001, pp. 214–219.

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Jones, Thomas, ‘‘Full Tilt,’’ in London Review of Books, February 8, 2001, pp. 24–25. McCrum, Robert, ‘‘Reawakening Ned,’’ The Observer, www.books.guardian.co.uk/ (January 7, 2001). Quinn, Anthony, ‘‘Robin Hood of the Outback,’’ in New York Times Book Review, January 7, 2001, p. 8.

FURTHER READING Drewe, Robert, Ned Kelly, Penguin Books, 2004. Drewe’s novel about Ned Kelly is considered the first on the subject of this legendary Australian. His account of Kelly’s life was adapted into the 2003 movie Ned Kelly. Hugh, Robert, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Vintage, 1988. First published in 1986, The Fatal Shore tells the story of Australia’s founding and history as a penal colony for English and Irish convicts.

SOURCES Banville, John, ‘‘The Wild Colonial Boy,’’ in New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, No. 5, March 29, 2001, pp. 15–16. Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang, Vintage International, January 2002. Gaile, Andreas, ‘‘Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang,’’ in Meanjin, Vol. 60, No. 3, Sept 1, 2001, pp. 214–19. Huggan, Graham, ‘‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly,’’ in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, May 2002, pp. 142–56.

Flannery, Tim F., The Explorers: Stories of Discovery and Adventure from the Australian Frontier, Grove Press, 2000. The Explorers is a collection of first-person accounts about the discovery and exploration of Australia, from early accounts in the 1600s to recent stories of adventures still to be had in the continent’s outback.

Ivison, Douglas, Review of True History of the Kelly Gang, in Journal of Australian Studies, Issue 71, December 15, 2001, pp. 144–45.

Kelly, Ned, ‘‘Jerilderie Letter,’’ Alex McDermott, ed., Faber and Faber Ltd., 2001. Peter Carey was inspired to write True History of the Kelly Gang after reading Kelly’s original letter stating the motives, purpose, and hopes behind his actions.

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The Wedding The Wedding (2003) is Nicholas Sparks’s sequel to his bestselling novel The Notebook (1996). The Wedding is narrated by Wilson Lewis, the sonin-law of Noah and Allie Calhoun (the primary characters in The Notebook). Wilson’s absentminded neglect of his relationship with his wife, Jane, comes to a head when he forgets their twenty-ninth anniversary. Her response brings Wilson to the realization that Jane may no longer be in love with him. With some encouragement and inspiration from Noah, Wilson decides to re-court Jane in the hopes of rekindling some of the magic from early in their relationship. In his ninth novel, Sparks returns to the character of Noah Calhoun from The Notebook as Wilson’s confidant and counselor in matters of the heart. When Jane and Wilson’s oldest daughter, Anna, announces that she and longtime boyfriend, Keith, want to get married in one week—on Jane and Wilson’s thirtieth anniversary—Wilson finds the perfect opportunity to display his year-long romantic efforts to win Jane back. While both Jane and Wilson support the immediacy of the wedding given Noah’s unstable health, Jane is not pleased with Anna’s request for a no-frills wedding. Jane wants Anna to have a formal ceremony and reception—the kind of wedding she never had. Wilson helps Anna and Jane reach a compromise, and he plays an integral part in pulling the wedding together. He draws on his memories

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of how he first courted Jane as a guide to planning a wedding-to-remember for his daughter, and in the process shows Jane the man he wants to become.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Nicholas Sparks was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 31, 1965. While he was growing up, his family lived in Nebraska and Michigan before settling in California, where he graduated high school as valedictorian in 1984. In 1985, as a freshman at Notre Dame, he broke the school record for the 4 800 relay in track. After suffering from a track-related injury, and at his mother’s suggestion, he tried his hand at writing. He wrote a novel, but it was never published. He married his wife Catherine in July of 1989 and they lived in Sacramento, California, while he worked at a number of jobs. He wrote another novel, which, like the first, was never published. In 1992, his job as a pharmaceutical salesman required a relocation to North Carolina, where he later wrote The Notebook. While it was not his first published novel—that was Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding, written with Billy Mills (1990)—The Notebook (1996) was the first novel that garnered widespread recognition for Sparks. Sparks drew inspiration for his writing from his family hardships. His next novel, Message in a Bottle (1998) was inspired by the untimely death of his mother from a horseback riding accident in 1989. His father also died prematurely in a car accident in 1996 at age fifty-four. A Walk to Remember (1999), was inspired by Sparks’s younger sister, Danielle, who had brain cancer. In 2000, shortly after its publication, she died at age thirty-three.

Nicholas Sparks Ó by Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission

Sparks is the author of eleven novels, with the publication of At First Sight (2005). Sparks is a major donor to the creative writing department at the University of Notre Dame, where his contributions support scholarships, fellowships, and internships. As of 2005, Sparks lives with his wife and five children in North Carolina.

PLOT SUMMARY Prologue

Following A Walk to Remember, The Rescue (2000), was inspired by Sparks’s struggle to help his son, who was incorrectly diagnosed with autism. Novels that followed include A Bend in the Road (2001), Nights in Rodanthe (2002), and The Guardian (2003). The Wedding, also published in 2003, was written as a sequel to The Notebook. Three Weeks with My Brother (2004) is a nonfiction chronicle written with his brother, Micah Sparks, about their around-the-world trip that helped them process the emotional strain of their recent family tragedies.

The prologue begins with Wilson asking the question, ‘‘Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?’’ Wilson identifies the catalyst to his renewed efforts to energize his relationship with his wife: he forgot their twenty-ninth anniversary. He sees this incident as the culmination of the many years he has taken his marriage for granted. While he loves Jane just as much as when they first married, he also recognizes that Jane may not feel the same way. Wilson presents the reader his story, relating the events and emotions of the previous fourteen months, beginning with the missed anniversary.

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Chapter 1 Chapter 1 explores the current state of Wilson and Jane’s relationship. Wilson considers the personality differences of Jane, himself, and their three children, Anna, Joseph, and Leslie. He acknowledges that most of the childrearing responsibilities have always fallen on Jane’s shoulders and now that the children are grown, he feels that Jane knows them much better than he does. Anna, the oldest, works for her local newspaper and has dreams of becoming a fiction writer. Joseph is a social worker at a battered women’s shelter. Leslie, the youngest and still in college, is studying biology and physiology with the hopes of becoming a veterinarian. Shortly after the missed anniversary, Jane announces to Wilson that she wants to visit Joseph in New York for a couple of weeks, alone. Wilson realizes that his marriage is in a state of crisis, and he visits his father-in-law Noah Calhoun to chat and get some relationship advice. To Wilson, Noah is the authority on how to make a marriage work. The romance between Noah and his late wife, Allie, has taken on almost mythic proportions in the family consciousness. After talking with Noah, Wilson ‘‘knew what [he] had to do.’’

Chapter 2 Wilson resolves to court Jane as if they were first starting to date. However, he is not sure why she fell in love with him to begin with. He is not a very romantic guy; he’s too practical. He recalls some of his attempts to re-court Jane in the months after the forgotten anniversary, such as cooking fancy meals for her and working off some extra weight. He then explains an important event that occurs just as the thirtieth anniversary nears. Anna bursts through the front door and announces that she and longtime boyfriend, Keith, want to get married in one week, on Jane and Wilson’s thirtieth anniversary.

Chapter 3 Wilson thinks back on how he and Jane first met, the first time he told Jane he loved her, their first home, and how their relationship developed. Wilson mentions compromises that they both made early in their relationship: Jane settled for a simple civil ceremony instead of a wedding in a church followed by a big reception; Wilson moved to New Bern. Wilson sees the importance that Jane puts on Anna’s wedding

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as a reflection of the regrets she has about their wedding.

Chapter 4 Wilson visits Noah at Creekside, the nursing home where he now resides. His wife, Allie, has passed away, and now Noah spends most of his time by the pond. Wilson finds Noah sitting on a bench feeding a particular swan, his copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass lying beside him. Noah loves Whitman’s poems, and he has a strong attachment to this particular copy of Leaves of Grass; the book itself had comforted him during his military service and had even taken a bullet for him during World War II. Noah has a strong attachment toward the swan, but the narrative does not yet reveal the reason for this attachment, other than to say that it causes the doctors to think Noah is delusional. Noah recalls a special moment when he and Allie had first reunited after being apart for fourteen years; they took a canoe out onto a lake filled with swans. Noah explains how Allie was always fascinated by swans because of their lifelong devotion to their mates. Wilson has heard this and other stories of Noah and Allie’s relationship many times before, told by both Jane and Noah. He understands their importance. When Wilson returns home, he reflects on the ways he has failed Jane in their marriage, with what he terms ‘‘innocent neglect.’’

Chapter 5 The wedding plans now underway allow Wilson an opportunity to express his love for Jane in a tangible way. During the week of planning, Wilson makes an elaborate dinner for Jane to help her relax. She comes home very excited that one of her favorite photographers happens to be available for Anna’s wedding. When Jane expresses concern about the cost of the wedding, Wilson, a characteristically frugal man, assures her not to worry. She cannot believe her ears. As they are giggling and joking, Wilson thinks back to their first date. He had made reservations at an expensive restaurant, but they lost their reservation because they were delayed helping a stray dog find its owner. As Wilson’s mind returns to the present, the easy mood between him and Jane breaks down into awkwardness. He then brings up when he asked Noah for Jane’s hand in marriage. This is the segue to Wilson’s proposal that they should have Anna’s wedding at Noah’s house. Jane agrees.

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Chapter 6 As Wilson takes care of more wedding plans, he thinks back to the first time Jane told him about her parents’ legendary relationship. Wilson continues to run errands for the wedding, stops by to see Noah, and then meets up with the landscapers at Noah’s house. Later, Jane tells Wilson how exasperated she is with Anna because Anna can’t seem to make up her mind about anything—she seems to be just going along with whatever Jane likes. On top of that, Jane is fretting about the caterer. Wilson assures her that he will take care of everything. He feels some of the old magic of their relationship returning.

Chapter 7 Wilson is making dinner for Jane when she returns home. As they chat about their respective days, Wilson remembers how worried he was returning to law school at Duke for his last year, being concerned that Jane would meet someone else while they were in separate cities. Wilson mentions to Jane that he wishes there had been time for Keith to ask him for Anna’s hand in marriage, as he found the experience of asking Noah for Jane’s hand quite character building. Wilson thinks back on how he proposed to Jane, and the two of them go for an evening walk. There is a brief and tense discussion of Noah’s attachment to the swan, but the details are withheld from the narrative.

Chapter 8 Wilson arranges for the Chelsea, Jane’s favorite restaurant, to cater the wedding. Jane is extremely pleased. Wilson thinks back to five days after he and Jane were married, when Jane requested that Wilson go to church with her and later pray with her, even though he was an atheist. He remembers her saying that she made compromises for him, like having a secular civil ceremony, and now she needed him to do this for her. This memory fuels Wilson’s determination to make Anna’s wedding great. Jane’s sister calls and informs Wilson that Noah is in the hospital.

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swan is Allie reincarnated, and Noah wants him to feed her while he is in the hospital. While Wilson is not convinced that the swan is Noah’s reincarnated wife, it doesn’t bother him to indulge Noah. Later that evening, Wilson apologizes to Jane for how absent he’s been from their marriage. Jane tells Wilson why she married him and why she loves him; his willingness and ability to provide so well for the family has always meant a lot to her.

Chapter 10 Wilson comes back from a morning walk to find that Jane has made breakfast. Anna comes to the house and whispers to Wilson that she cannot wait until the wedding. It seems as though there might be more to the wedding than meets the eye. Anna and Jane leave for Raleigh and Greensboro to shop for a wedding dress. As the girls prepare to leave, Wilson and Jane share a romantic kiss in the driveway.

Chapter 11 When Wilson goes by the nursing home to feed the swan, she isn’t interested in food. Reluctantly, Wilson talks to the swan, explaining that Noah is going to be fine. He is surprised to see the swan suddenly begin eating. Wilson later visits Noah in the hospital and brings him his treasured copy of Leaves of Grass. Wilson leaves to check on the wedding preparations and reminisces about the kiss he and Jane shared earlier in the day.

Chapter 12

Noah has tripped on a root near the pond and hit his head. Jane and Wilson rush to the hospital and meet up with Jane’s siblings. When Noah is finally allowed visitors, he first asks for Wilson, alone. Wilson knows why; he is the only one who is sympathetic to Noah’s belief that the

Wilson is re-courting Jane in the same fashion that he courted her in their first year of marriage. He remembers how building their first house had taken a toll on her, and in order to speed up the process, he secretly hired a crew to work on the house and kept Jane away from it during the last week of building. He then surprised her with the finished house, much sooner than she thought it would be ready. In the same way, he keeps Jane away from Noah’s house while it is undergoing the wedding renovations so he can surprise her with its transformation. Jane calls to tell Wilson that she is going to stay overnight in Greensboro because Anna cannot make up her mind about a wedding dress. Wilson day dreams about the kiss they shared earlier and thinks that perhaps things are changing for the better between them.

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Chapter 13 Wilson is overseeing the sweeping landscaping renovations at Noah’s house. The neighbor, Harvey Wellington, a pastor and longtime friend, makes the remark that he is glad that the house is being tended to. He says, ‘‘the more special something is, the more people seem to take it for granted.’’ Wilson knows that he has taken Jane and their love for each other, like the house, for granted too long. He later visits Noah at Creekside now that he is back from the hospital. They discuss the landscaping work being done at the house and the almost mythic rose garden Noah constructed for Allie early in their marriage, in the shape of five concentric hearts. The family believes that the rose garden was one big gift of love for Allie. Noah tells Wilson the real story. He made the first heart when their first child was born, and kept adding to it with each child. When one of their children died at age four, the garden made Allie too sad to look at; she even asked Noah to mow it down. He didn’t act on the onetime request— he was not sure she really meant what she said. The rose garden lived on as a gift both beautiful and sad for Allie. Later that night, Wilson and Jane share a pizza just as they used to in their youth. Jane startles Wilson by asking him if he is having an affair. She is a bit bewildered by his recent expressions of love and wonders what his motive is. Wilson assures her that he is not having an affair. He adds that he wants to prepare a little anniversary surprise for her the next night because the day of their anniversary will be too busy with the wedding.

Chapters 14–15 Wilson continues to oversee the renovation at Noah’s house and anticipates the secret he has in store for Jane. The next night, Wilson posts a note on their front door telling Jane that a surprise awaits her inside. Jane enters their house, and Wilson has left candles, music, and little notes everywhere, leading her upstairs where he has left special bath oils and a new dress. The notes instruct her that after she gets ready for the evening, she will be blindfolded in a limousine that will pick her up and drive her to a destination where he will be waiting.

Chapter 16 The limo takes Jane to Noah’s house, where Wilson has prepared more surprises. Wilson lets her remove the blindfold for her to see, for the

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first time, the magnificence of Noah’s renovated house and grounds. Jane is speechless. Wilson instructs Jane to go upstairs to her old room where another surprise awaits her. Wilson has put together an album consisting of pictures of the two of them; beneath each picture Wilson has written what he was thinking when each photo was taken. Jane comes downstairs, visibly moved. Jane tells Wilson how she remembers her parents always dancing in the kitchen. Wilson and Jane dance for awhile, then, moved by the romantic evening, go upstairs and make love.

Chapter 17 The next day, Wilson and Jane are in town having lunch when they get a call from Jane’s sister Kate that something has happened, and Noah is extremely upset. They go to Creekside to find out that the swan is gone. It is not clear whether Noah questions his belief that the swan is Allie in the first place, or if he thinks that the swan and therefore, Allie, has left him. After things settle down a bit and Kate leaves, Noah gives Jane and Wilson his copy of Leaves of Grass as an anniversary gift. Later that evening, Jane gives Wilson an anniversary gift of cooking lessons in Charleston. They agree to take them together.

Chapter 18 The wedding day has finally arrived. The hired help and the family start arriving. Joseph pulls Wilson aside and tells him how surprised and delighted he is about Wilson’s efforts to win back Jane’s love in the past year. Joseph confesses to Wilson how upset Jane had been when she visited him in New York alone after the forgotten anniversary a year earlier. Consequently, Joseph only reluctantly helped Wilson with his anniversary gift to Jane. The wedding ceremony is about to begin. Anna comes down the stairs, not in her bridal gown, but in a bridesmaid dress, holding a veil behind her back. Now the real surprise is revealed—the wedding had been a surprise for Jane all along. Jane is the bride, not Anna, and this is the wedding Jane always wanted but never had. Wilson had been preparing the wedding for a year so that it would be a surprise. The amazing coincidences that a first-class caterer, musician, and photographer had all been available on such short notice were actually planned well in advance. After the wedding, Wilson finds Noah down at the river. The swan has found her way to

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Noah Calhoun

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

The Wedding was adapted to an audio book, read by Tom Wopat, in September 2003. It is available from Time Warner Audio Books on audio cassette and audio CD.

The Wedding was adapted as an e-book in September 2003. It is available from Warner books in Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader formats.

the river right by the house, presumably to be with the family for the wedding. Wilson now believes that the swan is Allie.

Noah Calhoun is Jane’s father. His love story with his wife, Allie, is chronicled in Sparks’s novel The Notebook and is referenced throughout The Wedding. In The Wedding, Noah’s romantic reputation is held up as an ideal that Jane and her siblings aspire to in their own relationships. Wilson, Jane’s husband, sees him as an authority on the subject of marriage and seeks advice from Noah, who acts as Wilson’s confidant in matters of the heart. Noah relates many stories of his relationship with Allie to Wilson to help him put his own troubles in perspective. Noah misses Allie terribly; though she died five years before the novel’s action begins, he does not feel that she is gone completely. He believes she has come back in the form of a swan at a nearby pond. Indeed, the swan seems to express human emotions such as concern, love, and devotion, and never leaves the pond regardless of the weather. Noah carries a battered copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a reminder of his love for Allie. He maintains a good sense of humor despite his age and precarious health.

Epilogue Wilson concludes that a man can truly change if he really wants to. He is going to keep up his romantic gestures to show Jane how much he loves her every day, not just once a year.

Kate Kate is Jane’s sister. She calls Jane and Wilson when Noah is taken to the hospital after he trips on a root and hits his head. The sisters fuss and fawn over their father and disapprove of his belief that Allie has been reincarnated as a swan.

CHARACTERS Harold Larson

Dr. Barnwell Dr. Barnwell is Noah’s doctor. He is like a member of the family, as he has been taking care of Noah for years; however, he is concerned about Noah’s mental health. He thinks Noah is delusional because Noah believes a swan is his dead wife, Allie.

Allie Calhoun Allie Calhoun is Noah’s wife and Jane’s mother. Allie is not an actual living character in The Wedding, but she is referred to throughout the novel. Her love story with Noah is legendary within the Calhoun family, and serves as an inspiration for Wilson to win back the affections of his wife. Noah believes that Allie has been reincarnated as a swan at the pond near his nursing home, since she had been fascinated by swans.

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Harold Larson was a law school student at Duke University with Wilson. Harold and his girlfriend, Gail, serve as a foil to Wilson and Jane. Wilson remembers how Harold’s breakup with Gail had made him worry about his own relationship with Jane. He was worried that, like Gail, Jane might meet someone else while he was away in law school and she was teaching in New Bern.

Anna Lewis Anna Lewis is Jane and Wilson’s oldest child. She is twenty-seven years old and works at the local paper with the hopes of someday becoming a novelist. She announces in Chapter 2 that she and boyfriend, Keith, want to get married in one week, on Jane and Wilson’s thirtieth anniversary. Jane is surprised, but Wilson has come to expect that Anna will do things her

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own way and according to her own timing. Anna is a freethinker; she dresses all in black and is very opinionated. While she usually likes to have her own way, when it comes to the wedding, she does not seem to make up her mind about anything. She merely agrees with everything Jane suggests, which exasperates and confuses Jane. At the end of the novel, it becomes clear why she has taken such an uncharacteristically indecisive attitude to the wedding. Anna plays a significant role in helping Wilson pull together his surprise for his and Jane’s thirtieth anniversary.

Jane Lewis Jane Lewis is the wife of Wilson Lewis and the daughter of Noah and Allie Calhoun. Wilson describes the young Jane as being beautiful with a long ponytail, and even when she is middle-aged, he finds her extremely attractive. According to Wilson, Jane is gregarious, organized, warm, and expressive. She was responsible for most of the child rearing as the kids were growing up, and by the time the children left home, she and Wilson were leading separate lives and they found it difficult to relate to each other. When Wilson forgets their twenty-ninth anniversary, she becomes extremely upset. It is apparent to Wilson that Jane feels that this is yet another moment when Wilson has disappointed her. Her perfunctory response to Wilson’s afterthe-fact anniversary gift of perfume indicates the despair she feels about the state of her marriage. Consequently, she visits their son, Joseph, for a couple of weeks, her first trip without Wilson. During this trip, Jane confides to Joseph about how upset she is with the state of her marriage. For the most part, she hides these feelings from Wilson, although Wilson understands that he must do something drastic to save the marriage. While Jane is initially suspicious of Wilson’s motives—she accuses him of having an affair— she comes to appreciate the measures he takes to save their marriage.

Joseph Lewis Joseph Lewis is Jane and Wilson’s only son, who works in New York City as a social worker in a women’s shelter. Early in the novel, Wilson describes his relationship with Joseph as being somewhat distant, although they have good conversations. Joseph becomes angry with Wilson when he learns of how Wilson had forgotten his and Jane’s twenty-ninth anniversary. Jane visits Joseph after the forgotten anniversary, and

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Joseph becomes her confidant about her marital problems. Because Joseph is quite displeased with Wilson, he is reluctant to be part of his thirtieth anniversary gift to Jane. Nonetheless, by the end of the novel, Joseph is proud of his father for rekindling the romance and working hard to improve his relationship with Jane.

Leslie Lewis Leslie Lewis is Jane and Wilson’s youngest child. She is in college at Wake Forest, studying biology and physiology with the hopes of becoming a veterinarian. She is a romantic, and Wilson turns to her for help while planning his anniversary surprise for Jane. Leslie meets up with Anna and Jane in Greensboro to look for wedding dresses.

Wilson Lewis Wilson is the main character and narrator of the novel. He has forgotten his and Jane’s twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. Now, fourteen months later, he explains how he rekindled the love in their marriage during the year that followed the forgotten anniversary. Wilson is a practical and unromantic man, an estate lawyer who is a creature of habit. He blames himself for his ‘‘innocent neglect’’ of the marriage which, over time, has left a huge chasm in his relationship with Jane. He is not sure how to relate to her anymore. When he forgets their twenty-ninth anniversary, it suddenly occurs to him that perhaps Jane doesn’t love him anymore. Consequently, he resolves to try to win back her love. His journey takes a year, culminating on his and Jane’s thirtieth anniversary. Over the course of this year, he remembers how he and Jane initially fell in love, and uses these memories as a guide to figure out what he needs to do to reignite Jane’s interest in him. He often consults Jane’s father, Noah, as a kind of spiritual guide in his quest to make Jane fall in love with him all over again.

Nathan Little Nathan Little is a landscaper who has helped Wilson over the years with various landscaping projects. He enlists Nathan’s help to ready Noah’s house for the wedding. With a team of landscapers, Nathan manages to make the grounds of Noah’s house breathtakingly beautiful.

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John Peterson John Peterson is the pianist at the Chelsea restaurant. He is also Anna’s former piano teacher and plays the music for the wedding. Peterson has a soft spot for the Lewis family because Jane had taken a chance on him to give Anna piano lessons when he was relatively unknown in the town. Now that he is very well known and well regarded, Jane cannot believe that he is available on such short notice.

Harvey Wellington Harvey Wellington is a minister who lives next door to Noah and Allie, and has been a good friend of the family for a long time. He officiates at the wedding. When Harvey sees Noah’s house being readied for the wedding he makes a comment about special things, like the house, often being taken for granted.

THEMES Love The Official Nicholas Sparks Web Site identifies the theme of The Wedding as being ‘‘love and renewal,’’ and it is addressed in several ways in the novel. Jane and Wilson’s love is renewed through the year-long process of courting Jane all over again as he had done when they had first met. He loves his wife, but realizes his ‘‘innocent neglect’’ of their marriage may have made his wife fall out of love with him. When Wilson forgets his and Jane’s twenty-ninth anniversary, this is the final straw that causes him to realize that he has not tended to his marriage for many years. He sees a sadness in Jane that indicates she has been unhappy in the marriage for some time. His challenge is to win back his wife’s love by showing her how much he loves her. Ultimately, his memories of how he and Jane came to be in love in the first place serve as his guide to knowing how to court her all over again. Wilson discovers that like anything else, love requires constant attention and upkeep in order to keep it alive. Additionally, the love between Wilson’s father-in-law, Noah, and Noah’s late wife, Allie, serves as a backdrop for the novel. Wilson sees Noah and Allie’s marriage as the model that he should follow. When he expresses this sentiment to Noah, Noah reveals that he and Allie had their difficult times as well. Nonetheless, Noah’s

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relationship with Allie, a love that is referenced throughout the novel, is seen as something that can overcome obstacles, even death. Noah’s love for Allie is renewed after her death in his daily care of the swan. While it is not clear if the swan is indeed a reincarnated Allie, Noah’s conviction reveals how his love for Allie is eternal, even after she is gone.

Appearance and Reality Noah and Allie’s almost mythic relationship highlights the discrepancy between appearance and reality. While Noah believes ardently that the swan is Allie reincarnated, the doctors—and his children—believe this is evidence that Noah is losing his mind. The reader is never certain one way or the other, but Noah’s reality brings him peace and comfort. Another example of appearance versus reality is the rose garden. For the family, Noah’s present to Allie of a rose garden in the shape of five concentric hearts is an expression of ideal and true love, the work of a true romantic. The reality, Noah reveals later, is that the rose garden was five separate gifts, one heart for each child that was born. Consequently, the rose garden always held a certain sadness for Allie because one of their young children died. When she looked at the garden, she not only thought of Noah’s love, but also of her dead child. What the family views as a monument to love was also, in reality, a reminder of a tragic loss. The most dramatic example of appearance versus reality is revealed at the end of the novel when Jane, as well as the reader, learns that the wedding is not really Anna’s wedding but Jane’s—a surprise that Wilson has been planning for a year. What appeared to be Anna’s indecisiveness over wedding details was, in reality, her way of allowing Jane to pick her own favorites. During the preparation, Jane had believed that top-notch photographers, musicians, and caterers serendipitously had made cancellations the very weekend of the wedding. At the end of the novel, the truth is revealed that it was all Wilson’s plan so Jane would be surprised, getting her dream wedding after all.

Family and Family Life The importance of familial relationships is central to The Wedding. Planning the wedding brings the family together and helps to mend not only Jane and Wilson’s relationship, but also Wilson’s relationship with his children. Joseph

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and Wilson’s relationship becomes strained when Jane despairs after Wilson forgets their twenty-ninth anniversary. Joseph is skeptical of Wilson’s efforts to enlist the family in planning Jane’s thirtieth anniversary surprise. By the end of the novel, however, Joseph and Wilson’s relationship is repaired as Joseph understands the efforts Wilson has made to win back Jane’s love. As the patriarch of the family, Noah is the person that the family seems to revolve around. Anxious that he will not live long, Anna requests a quick wedding. When Noah is rushed to the hospital, all his children gather in the waiting room for him, as well as for each other. As they huddle together, Wilson mentions that he understands that in such moments Jane needs the company of her siblings perhaps even more than she needs him. Likewise, when Noah regains his health, the family comes together as well. At the end of the novel, Wilson reveals how he could not have pulled off the wedding without his family helping him keep the surprise a secret.

Change Wilson opens the novel with this question: ‘‘Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change?’’ This question generates Wilson’s quest in the novel, as he is determined, whatever the answer, to change. It is not a desire for him, but a necessity. After the oversight of his anniversary, Wilson is afraid that he might have lost his wife forever as a result of the man that he has been: preoccupied, absent, and focused on work. The only way to repair his relationship with Jane and save his marriage is to change. He muses several times that he does not think he is the man that Jane wanted to marry, nor did he become the man he wanted to be. Because of this, Wilson must stretch himself beyond his comfort zone. He takes several weeks off from work, cooks dinner, suggests evening walks, and plans a romantic pre-anniversary evening for Jane. Once he begins to make Jane a priority, he finds it becomes easier to be the man she wants. The man who begins the novel is trapped by his feelings and fearful of losing his wife, but the man at the end of the novel has found something new in himself, and has emerged with a new outlook on life and his marriage. Indeed, he answers his own question: ‘‘Yes, I decided, a man can truly change.’’

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STYLE Anthropomorphism The novel explores the concept of anthropomorphism through the swan that Noah believes to be Allie reincarnated. Anthropomorphism refers to animals resembling humans, either physically or emotionally. In a sense, the swan becomes a character in the novel, just as real as Wilson or Noah. For Noah, quite literally, the swan is Allie’s way of being with him beyond the grave. The swan is attentive to Noah’s voice and conversation, lies at his feet, looks after him after he hits his head, and even joins him for the wedding. By the end of the novel, even Wilson has also come to think that the swan is Allie. When he feeds the swan in Noah’s absence, he is shocked to find that the swan will not eat until he actually tells her that Noah is okay. It appears that the swan is more than merely an animal presence, but Nicholas Sparks does not state definitively either way. Near the end of the novel, the swan disappears and Noah is extremely upset. It is not clear whether Noah doubts his conviction that the swan is Allie, or if he is just depressed that she is gone. When the swan shows up in the river near Noah’s house, where the wedding is being held, Noah is immensely relieved. He believes the swan left the pond at Creekside to be with the family for the wedding. When Wilson sees the swan in the river after the wedding, he too believes the swan is Allie.

Didacticism A didactic literary work refers to a story whose purpose is to teach a lesson. Though the term is often applied to fairytales and fables, there is an instructive quality to The Wedding that suggests that there is a lesson to be learned. Wilson is telling this story from a distance of two months after the surprise wedding. Though he states in the prologue ‘‘a man can learn nothing by asking my advice’’ about marriage, it is clear that he thinks his experiences over the past fourteen months are worth telling—and learning from—otherwise, he would not be telling the story at all. Sparks’s use of the first-person narrator suggests a ‘‘learn from my mistakes’’ point of view. But the lesson to be learned is not exclusive to men or husbands. The reader of The Wedding can learn many lessons: the power of love, the need to cherish what we love, and the ability to change if it is really desired.

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Read the novel or watch the film version of The Notebook and consider the development of the character of Noah Calhoun. Do the accounts of him in both books seem to be the same character? Why or why not? What differences are there? In what ways has Allie’s death affected Noah’s outlook on life? Write a paper that compares and contrasts the depiction of Noah in both works.

Nicholas Sparks’s novels represent North Carolina in great detail. Find two of the following: a tourist guide, a tourist website, or a photography book that depicts smalltown North Carolina. What aspects of North Carolina does Sparks focus on? Compare the ways that New Bern is represented in The Wedding with how it is portrayed in the tourist guides and the photography books. Which representation is more attractive or interesting to you? Why? Report your findings on a chart in which you identify and explain the similarities and differences in the representations.

Review some of the poems contained in Leaves of Grass and choose three poems

Flashback A flashback in literature describes events that occur before the narrative beginning of the story. This entire novel is a flashback, framed by the prologue and epilogue that take place in October 2003. The core of The Wedding is written as Wilson’s flashbacks to the early stages of his relationship with Jane, to the missed twenty-ninth anniversary, and to his attempts in the following year to become a more romantic person. Flashbacks in The Wedding provide the background of how Jane and Wilson’s relationship first developed so that the reader can understand how the relationship has atrophied over time. When readers see Wilson and Jane in their early dating and early marriage years in

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that you imagine might be especially meaningful to Noah, and explain why. Find passages in The Wedding to support your points. With your findings, write a letter to Wilson and Jane from Noah’s perspective in which he explains how the poems affected his life and why he loves them so much.

Sparks has openly discussed the autobiographical nature of his novels. His family has experienced several tragedies that he has woven into his fiction. Read Three Weeks with My Brother, a nonfiction account about a trip with his brother, Micah, and compare the ways that he discusses tragedy and grief in that book and in The Wedding. What aspects of loss and grief are depicted in the novel? What aspects are depicted in the nonfiction work? Which is more powerful to you and why? Write an essay in which you compare passages from The Wedding with passages from Three Weeks with My Brother, concluding the paper with your opinion about which genre more effectively depicts loss and grief.

flashbacks, they are able to compare how the characters interacted then to how they interact now. Flashbacks often show the characters’ motivations, and are used extensively in The Wedding to illustrate what Wilson misses about his marriage. They show the reader what he thinks about when he looks at Jane and how he knows what he must do to win back her love.

Metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that links the characteristics of one object to something seemingly unrelated. Noah’s house is a metaphor for the state of Jane and Wilson’s relationship. The home was once well loved and beautiful, but the garden and the house have

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been neglected for some time, resulting in its diminished beauty. A thick coat of dust covers everything inside and the pieces of furniture are covered with sheets so that they look like ghosts haunting the house. The roses in the garden have ‘‘grown wild’’ from neglect. When Wilson looks at them, he thinks there is ‘‘no way it could be salvaged except by pruning everything back and waiting another year for the blooms to return.’’ This is similar to what he did with his relationship with Jane: after the debacle of the forgotten anniversary, Wilson pruned himself, cutting away the dead and withering things, and waited a year for the fruits of his labor—the wedding. With a little tending and care, the house resumes its former beauty. Likewise, Wilson’s ‘‘innocent neglect’’ of his relationship to Jane caused them to drift apart, leaving their love not nearly as visible. With some care, Wilson is able to rekindle the romance with Jane, resulting in an energized marriage and a strengthened relationship.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Early Twenty-First Century America Nicholas Sparks began writing The Wedding in 2002. He wanted to write a sequel of sorts to The Notebook and also explore the idea of love being renewed. The Wedding is both written and set in North Carolina, the setting more specifically being the town of New Bern. The reader gets a sense of what New Bern is like in 2003 with the novel’s vivid descriptions and inclusion of the famous restaurant, the Chelsea, and pianist John Peterson. Instead of fast-paced, big-city life, filled with modern technology, the pace of the novel is leisurely, much like the pace of the small town where the novel is set. Sparks embraces what are considered to be traditional values: marriage, family, and spirituality. His values concerning marriage are reflected in this novel. Excerpted on the Official Nicholas Sparks Web Site, Sparks discusses how he expressed his views on marriage in The Wedding in a speech given in Lisbon in 2003: I wanted to create a love story between a married couple, one in which the husband decides to court his wife all over again. . . . Marriage is both the most wonderful and frustrating experiences of most people’s lives. No one’s marriage is perfect, and no one’s marriage is always easy. For these reasons, I find great nobility in

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people who work to improve their marriage and do their best to keep the romance in their marriage. Set in twenty-first century America, where one in two marriages end in divorce, Sparks is espousing what is an almost radical idea: working on a marriage rather than giving up on it. Instead of a breakdown of the family unit, which has become common in contemporary America, in the novel, there are close relationships among family members; the family comes together both in times of joy and in times of crisis. Sparks’s religious values are also evident in the novel. Jane opens Wilson up to becoming a Christian, even though he was raised an atheist. Wilson thinks fondly of how Jane asked him to go to church with her and how he and Jane prayed together for their first child. Despite the traditional values of its main characters, The Wedding expresses a mixture of traditional gender roles and the changing concepts of gender. For example, Jane, a stayat-home mom, typical for women in previous decades, had been the primary caregiver for their three children. Even after the children grow up and move out, Jane does not seek a full-time job. While Jane maintains a more traditional role in the family, Wilson breaks out of masculine gender roles of decades past. He learns how to cook sumptuous meals for Jane, becomes more romantic, and takes responsibility for solving their marital problems, roles that have previously been considered feminine.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Wedding instantly became a bestseller upon its release in 2003. Fans of The Notebook flocked to bookstores for Sparks’s long awaited sequel to the love story of Noah and Allie Calhoun. Readers who love his novels have expressed satisfaction with this installment of Sparks’s view of love and life. However, those who find his novels too sugary-sweet and his characters unconvincing have expressed similar criticism about The Wedding. Nonetheless, even those who are nonplussed by Sparks’s works in general do agree that The Wedding fulfills readers’ expectations. For the most part, critics who do not like the themes of Sparks’s other novels, likewise do not like The Wedding. Critics such as Carmela

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‘‘for every woman and every man who is married or who contemplates being married in the future.’’ A Publishers Weekly review makes the point that The Wedding clearly delivers what female readers want, a good love story that will make them hope their own partners could be a little more like Wilson. Ben Steelman, staff writer for Wilmington, North Carolina’s Star News, notes that even though Sparks’s novels have been criticized for being too simplistic and superficial, these kind of feel-good stories fulfill the expectations of Sparks’s readers. Even Lythgoe, who criticizes the novel, goes on to call The Wedding ‘‘actually quite a good story’’ and concludes that ‘‘even with my criticisms, this seems like Sparks’s best work.’’ Sparks’s novels clearly appeal to a large audience; several of his novels have been adapted to film with much success, perhaps due to this same formula.

First Presbyterian Church in New Bern, NC

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Ó Lee Snider/Corbis

Laura Issen

Ciuraru of The Washington Post and Yvonne Crittenden from the Ontario Windsor Star, brand The Wedding as a sappy, unrealistic love story. Crittenden refers to the novel as a ‘‘saccharin novel about marriage [that] is the kind that gives ‘chicklit’ a bad name.’’ Ciuraru concurs, saying that The Wedding ‘‘may test the patience of even the most ardent sentimentalists’’ and sees the character of Jane as one-dimensional. Other criticisms of Sparks’s work, and The Wedding in particular, make the claim that his lackluster writing style makes the love story unconvincing. Reviewers like Dennis Lythgoe of Salt Lake City’s Deseret Morning News as well as Ciuraru claim that flat characters and ‘‘pedestrian’’ prose make the conflict-resolution rather shallow. Those who do not like The Wedding seem to tire of its simplicity and predictability. Interestingly, those who enjoy The Wedding seem to enjoy its predictability. Overall, The Wedding’s reception has been quite positive. Sparks openly admits that he has a formula, and this formula is clearly what his readers are looking for. Patricia Jones of the Tulsa World calls The Wedding ‘‘a slice of life readers will take to their hearts.’’ She concludes that the novel is

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Issen is a high school English teacher as well as a college instructor of rhetoric and composition. In this essay, Issen considers the ways in which The Wedding articulates a new kind of masculinity that is in touch with traits previously considered feminine. Critic Ben Steelman of Star News terms The Wedding a didactic novel, teaching men how to treat their wives, ‘‘like one of those epistolary novels of the 1700s, which were supposed to teach the rising middle class in England and the colonies how to behave.’’ However, neither the themes nor the writing style targets a male audience. Indeed most critics, and even Nicholas Sparks himself, acknowledge that his readership is largely female. Sparks is a novelist who openly acknowledges that he writes what he thinks his readers—mainly female—want to read. He expresses this view in an interview on The Early Show shortly after the publication of The Wedding. When Sparks is asked why he chose a male character rather than a female character to fix the relationship, he answers that he is giving his readers what they want: First off, I think it’s more realistic that the man would be the one who is less focused on the relationship in the long term. And that’s a general statement. It’s certainly not true for all marriages. . . . But I thought . . . [it] would

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IN FACT, THE WAY THAT THE NOVEL APPEALS TO WOMEN REFLECTS A CHANGING CONCEPT OF MANHOOD—NOW IN TOUCH WITH BOTH TRAITS THOUGHT TO BE FEMININE AS WELL AS TRAITS CONSIDERED TO BE MASCULINE.’’

seem more believable because if I wrote it—and I have a lot of women readers—and they say, ‘Well, I’m already doing all of this stuff. We need to work on the husband.’

Sparks is appealing to the emotions of his female audience by addressing their relationship concerns, not necessarily the concerns of men. In fact, the way that the novel appeals to women reflects a changing concept of manhood—now in touch with both traits thought to be feminine as well as traits considered to be masculine. A reviewer from Britain’s Mirror remarks that the novel appeals to women and not socalled real men when he says ‘‘[s]elf-respecting blokes will balk at this unbelievably sentimental story. Make no mistake, it’s strictly one for the ladies and, even then, only those who believe in fairytales.’’ While this reviewer likely intended his comments to be negative, perhaps he is correct in inferring that The Wedding is a fairytale of sorts, one that appeals to a particular female audience. This female audience can clearly be characterized as belonging to the twenty-first century, when definitions of what is desirable in a man have shifted to embrace characteristics that were formerly considered to be feminine. The development of Wilson’s romantic IQ in The Wedding highlights this new definition of masculinity. Consequently, the novel derives its appeal from its mixture of male perspective and female sensibility. Traditional masculinity and femininity in much of the twentieth century were rigidly separated spheres. The man of the house worked to support his family, came home to supper already on the table, drank a cocktail or two, and then read the paper or watched television until it was time for bed. He took care of maintenance needs, made sure the family was provided for, and was discreet with his emotions.

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The feminine sphere of the home often included housework, cooking, and raising the children. Women, wives, and mothers did not work outside of the home largely until the 1970s and 1980s. Their jobs, instead, were to keep a clean home, do the cooking, and manage the children and their activities. The woman was seen as the emotional core of the marriage and the family, the person everyone turned to for support and nurturing. The division of duties— both in the home and outside of it—along gender lines were traditional social institutions. In the early twenty-first century, however, the sharp lines separating the traditionally masculine from the traditionally feminine began to blur. Women are now as strong a presence in the workplace as men, and it is not uncommon to hear of stay-at-home fathers who take on the duties of child-rearing and housework while their wives work. There has been a rise in men who participate in traditionally feminine rituals such as manicures, pedicures, and other grooming regimens, and a rise of households headed by single mothers and women who take on all the responsibilities of managing a family. Household duties between married couples are now commonly shared, and are not exclusively divided by the role of ‘‘husband’’ or ‘‘wife.’’ It is within this atmosphere of broadening cultural definitions of masculine and feminine that Wilson finds himself needing to make a change. And perhaps unlike generations before him, he is willing to consider both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine sensibilities in order to achieve this change. Wilson describes the problems in his relationship with Jane as stemming from his own ‘‘innocent neglect’’ of the marriage; quite simply, he has taken Jane for granted. Wilson’s problem is often considered to be a stereotypically masculine response to relationships. In the first part of the novel, he explains how it has taken years of this ‘‘innocent neglect’’ to bring him and Jane to such a crisis in their relationship. As Wilson tries to remedy the situation in the months following the forgotten anniversary, he expresses an awkward, rather scientific way of addressing matters of the heart: In January, for instance, I bought a cookbook and took to preparing meals on Saturday evenings for the two of us; some of them, I might add, were quite original and delicious. In addition to my regular golf game, I began walking through our neighborhood three mornings a

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week, hoping to lose a bit of weight. I even spent a few afternoons in the bookstore, browsing the self-help section, hoping to learn what else I could do. The experts’ advice on improving a marriage? To focus on the four As— attention, appreciation, affection, and attraction. Yes, I remember thinking, that makes perfect sense, so I turned my efforts in those directions.

Sparks takes care to depict Wilson as a somewhat stiff, albeit open-minded middleaged man. The methodical quality of Wilson’s initial attempts to rekindle the romance between him and Jane shows Wilson to be a thoughtful and practical man, if perhaps a bit out of touch with his emotions. While he is open to seeking advice to help his marriage, it is not easy for him to express passion or romance. Sparks gives his reader some insight into what an emotionally awkward middle-aged man might be thinking in such a circumstance—wanting to do something to improve his marriage, but not knowing where to start. While Wilson seems incapable of fully expressing himself in the early part of the novel, when he later focuses on the relationship, he notices details about Jane that reveal a more sensitive man, perhaps one in touch with his feminine sensibilities. For instance, he notices the ‘‘painted toenails [that] peeked out beneath the hems,’’ and ‘‘the way her hair caught the light; I smelled the faintest trace of the jasmine gel she’d used earlier.’’ These observations contrast sharply with the awkward man represented earlier. Critic Yvonne Crittenden has noted that Wilson’s solution is to become a ‘‘‘metrosexual’— a man who’s not gay but acts gay—i.e., gets in touch with his feminine side, believing that’s what women want.’’ While Crittenden does not think that many female readers would actually find this solution believable, it is clear that these passages are meant to appeal to an audience of women who would find this newfound sensibility attractive. Furthermore, after a year of working to improve his marriage, Wilson surprises Jane with an evening that she has always wanted, a couple of nights before the wedding. As the evening unfolds, Wilson’s newfound romantic side is revealed as he taps into his feminine sensibilities to come up with a suitable anniversary celebration. The way Wilson describes how he imagines Jane reading the little notes he has left her, taking in the candles, bath oils, lotion, new

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robe, new dress, wine, all leading up to a limousine taking her to meet him at Noah’s newly spruced-up house, emphasizes why the novel appeals so much to a female audience. As one of the notes reads: Is there anything better than a long hot bath after a busy day? Pick the bath oil you want, add plenty of bubbles, and fill the tub with hot water. Next to the tub you’ll find a bottle of your favorite wine, still chilled, and already uncorked. Pour yourself a glass. Then slip out of your clothes, get in the tub, lean your head back, and relax. When you’re ready to get out, towel off and use one of the new lotions I bought you. Do not dress; instead, put on the new robe and sit on the bed as you open the other gift.

This kind of evening appeals to the senses and to many women’s idea of romance. It might seem unlikely, however, that most men would be able to identify with a woman enough to dream up such a celebration. Wilson, now a far cry from his early awkward days, is able to do just that; he draws on memories of what Jane had wished for on previous anniversaries—wishes that he did not then fulfill—and imagines how she must be feeling after a day of wedding planning. The novel’s climax emphasizes the fairytale quality of the plot. It occurs when Anna is walking down the stairs of Noah’s house right before the wedding is to begin. In this moment, the secret is revealed: the wedding, Jane’s wedding, is Wilson’s thirtieth anniversary gift to her. As in a typical fairytale, the lovers get married, and everyone lives happily ever after. While readers may not be able to predict that the wedding is really for Jane, readers most certainly know that everything is going to work out for Jane and Wilson. And that is indeed what Sparks aims to do—give his readers a story that will make them happy because it has fulfilled their expectations. While it may not be believable to many that a middle-aged man would transform into a sensitive guy to save a thirty-year marriage, such a story has strong appeal to women who wish such fairytales could come true. Source: Laura Issen, Critical Essay on The Wedding, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

David Haffenreffer In the following interview with Haffenreffer, Sparks discusses the success of his books and their subsequent adaptations to film.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? The Notebook (1996) is the book to which The Wedding is the sequel. The Notebook is the story of Allie and Noah Calhoun’s relationship, which opens with Noah reading to an ailing Allie with flashbacks to 1932 when they first meet and 1946, when they reunite. Three Weeks with My Brother (2004) is a nonfiction account of the worldwide trip that Sparks and his brother, Micah, took to reconnect after suffering several family tragedies. In The Rescue (2001), Sparks tells the story of Denise Holden, a single mother who falls in love with Taylor McAdden, a fireman who helps rescue her son when her car crashes during a storm. Taylor must deal with his past before he can fully give his love to Denise. Sparks mentions that this novel was inspired by his struggles to help his son deal with what they thought was autism but was later found to be a misdiagnosis.

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Sparks’s A Walk to Remember (1999) tells the story of Jamie, a teenager who is not very popular but knows herself very well. She and

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Landon, an unlikely pair, fall in love, despite Jamie’s cancer. Jamie’s faith and inner strength change Landon forever. Sparks mentions that his sister, who died of cancer at age thirty-three in 2000, was the inspiration for this novel. Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas (2003), by James Patterson, is the story of how a woman comes to understand her boyfriend who abruptly leaves her by reading the diary of his belated first wife. Wedding Season (2004), by Darcy Cosper, presents a character on the opposite end of the marriage spectrum from Wilson and Jane. Joy must endure a summer full of her friends’ weddings while defending her decision not to get married herself to her longtime boyfriend, Gabe.

Jan Karon’s A Common Life: The Wedding Story (2002), part of her ‘‘Beloved Mitford’’ series, also takes place in a small North Carolina community. It is the story of how Father Timothy Kavanagh and Cynthia Coppersmith fell in love and planned a memorable wedding.

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Swan in water Field Mark Publications. Reproduced by permission

Source: David Haffenreffer, ‘‘Author Nicholas Sparks On The Wedding,’’ in CNN’s The Biz, September 15, 2003, p. 1.

Harry Smith In the following interview with Smith, the author offers an analysis of his two main characters. Since 1996, author Nicholas Sparks has written seven best-sellers. He’s had two of his novels turned into movies and has been named sexiest author—yeah—by People magazine. His latest book, The Wedding, is a love story that renews an affair from his first novel The Notebook. Nicholas Sparks is with us this morning. Good morning. Mr. NICHOLAS SPARKS (Author, The Wedding): Good morning. Thanks for having me back.

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SMITH: Would you be anything other than a storyteller? MR. SPARKS: These days, no. I don’t think so. Simply because it’s—it’s what I do now, and I really like the process of—of creating stories. The writing is always a challenge, but actually coming up with stories, that parts— that—that’s great. SMITH: Yeah. Mr. SPARKS: I mean, that—that’s what I do. SMITH: This story is—is—is melancholy in a way because it starts with the story of a man who forgets his wife’s—their—his wife’s . . . Mr. SPARKS: Yeah. SMITH: . . . their anniversary. Mr. SPARKS: Right. Very sad. SMITH: I mean, completely—this guy has not a clue. Mr. SPARKS: Right.

Mr. SPARKS: You know, its—I think he— he learns that he’s taken his wife for granted. You know? He—he talks about this and this is really what the book is about, what gets him to this point. And he calls it a case of innocent neglect, you know. He wasn’t a bad guy, he wasn’t abusive. He wasn’t addicted to drugs or anything. He just kind of took it for granted, and as he realizes that while he still loves his wife, because it was working well for him . . . SMITH: Right. Mr. SPARKS: . . . you know, maybe he hasn’t been enough for—there enough for his wife. SMITH: Yeah. He’s a professional guy, he’s a lawyer . . . Mr. SPARKS: Right. SMITH: . . . things are—you know . . . Mr. SPARKS: Right. SMITH: . . . from his perspective, all is well with the world. How does she see it? Mr. SPARKS: Well, you know, it was OK for a while because she understood that, you know, because . . . SMITH: Busy raising the kids. Mr. SPARKS: . . . she’s busy raising the kids and, of course, you have to have an income and he was doing that, so everything was great. And

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then once the kids are gone, it’s—they realize how much they’ve drifted apart. But it’s not necessarily that empty-nest syndrome. He talks that this has been a long time in the making. SMITH: Yeah. Mr. SPARKS: It’s just the—he hasn’t been the kind she’s—he should have been the whole time in this marriage and he seats out to change that. SMITH: Right. Now as an author . . . Mr. SPARKS: Yeah. SMITH: . . . do you write from personal experience? Mr. SPARKS: Of course. Everything— everything I write is personal experience. You know, and I haven’t been married forever. I’ve been married for 14 years but—and I don’t know all the answers about marriage . . . SMITH: Right.

SMITH: And what does he—what does he learn from that?

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Mr. SPARKS: . . . but—so I’ll speak about mine. It goes through ups and downs. And it doesn’t mean that when you’re down you’re thinking about divorce, it just means that you’re not concentrating on each other way you should. You know—and there are times in life where that’s important. SMITH: Yeah. Mr. SPARKS: If you have a sick child in the hospital, you know, that . . . SMITH: That’s the priority. Mr. SPARKS: . . . that’s the priority. You know, if you’re moving, you know, you’re doing that, that’s the priority. SMITH: Yeah. Mr. SPARKS: And some couples are—if it’s in one of these down phases, they’re just good at going up, and others aren’t. SMITH: As you were writing this book, why did you choose—because you can make a choice. You could have said the man—the man can save the marriage, the woman can save the marriage. Mr. SPARKS: Right. SMITH: Why did you have the man save the marriage? Mr. SPARKS: Well, that goes down to a number of different things about the type of books that I write . . . SMITH: Right.

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Mr. SPARKS: . . . and I think that—that it’s more realistic, actually. First off, I think it’s more realistic that the man would be the one who is less focused on the relationship the long term. And that’s a general statement. It’s certainly not true of all marriages. SMITH: Right. Mr. SPARKS: But I though that, you know, it would seem more believable because if I wrote it—and I have a lot of women readers—and they say, ‘Well, I’m already doing all of this stuff. We need to work on the husband.’ So . . . SMITH: Yeah. Yeah. It’s—I—it’s—I think your style of writing is so interesting, because life in these books is pr—is kind of close to perfect, but it’s not perfect. You know? The people who have the jobs are a little bit better than the jobs that you wish you had . . . Mr. SPARKS: Right. SMITH: . . . you know, and their lives are a little bit better than most of us really have. And it’s—it’s a kind of an interesting fantasy life, but it’s just fraught with all these kind of real-life problems. Mr. SPARKS: Right. Yeah. I—I, of course, draw on—you know, whenever I do these things, you know, I live a certain kind of life, you know? I live in a small Southern town and—and all of our friends are kind of like my wife, and I. You know, we all have little kids and we all have the same—we go to the soccer games on weekends. You know, we do all these things and you learn that, you know, as great as things appear on the outside, there’s all—everybody has . . . SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mr. SPARKS: . . . everybody has—has stuff going on, and just every couple is different. SMITH: And real quick, who are their in-laws? Mr. SPARKS: Noah and Allie Calhoun. SMITH: Bada-bing. Mr. SPARKS: You know, bada-bing. SMITH: There you go. If you want to know what’s going on there—good to see you. Thanks for coming back. Mr. SPARKS: Thanks, Harry. Source: Harry Smith, ‘‘Nicholas Sparks discusses his new book The Wedding,’’ in CBS’s The Early Show, September 15, 2003, p. 1.

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SOURCES Ciuraru, Carmela, Review of The Wedding, in the Washington Post, September 14, 2003, Section T, p. 13. Crittendon, Yvonne, Review of The Wedding, in the Windsor Star, December 27, 2003, Section F, p. 7. Jones, Patricia A., Review of The Wedding, in the Tulsa World , September 7, 2003, Section H, p. 10. Lythgoe, Dennis, Review of The Wedding, in the Deseret Morning News, August 22, 2003, Section C, p. 02. ———, Review of The Wedding, in the Deseret Morning News, September 21, 2003, Section E, p. 02. The Mirror, Review of The Wedding, in the Mirror, October 24, 2003, Features, p. 22. The Official Nicholas Sparks Web Site at www. nicholassparks.com/Novels/The Wedding/BackInfo.html (June 27, 2005). Publishers Weekly, Review of The Wedding, in Publishers Weekly Reviews, August 11, 2003, PW Forecasts, p. 255. Smith, Harry, Interview with Nicholas Sparks, on The Early Show, September 15, 2003. Sparks, Nicholas, The Wedding, Warner Books, 2003. Steelman, Ben, Review of The Wedding in Star News, October 12, 2003, Section D, pp. 1, 4.

FURTHER READING Chung, Winnie, Interview with Nicholas Sparks, in South China Morning Post, April 10, 1999, p. 4. Winnie Chung interviews Nicholas Sparks about his opinion of the film adaptations of his novels as well as the autobiographical nature of his stories. Lacy, Bridgette A, ‘‘Tour the N.C. of Authors’ Imaginations,’’ in The News and Observer (Raleigh), May 22, 2005, p. 100. This article discusses how North Carolina has been an inspiration for Nicholas Sparks’s novels as well as the novels of mystery writer Margaret Maron. Lisovicz, Susan, Interview with Nicholas Sparks, on The Biz, September 24, 2002. In this interview with Nicholas Sparks, he discusses how Hollywood has adapted several of his novels to film. He discusses how his love stories, like his experiences in life, are mixed with sadness. Rozenfeld, Monica, ‘‘Famous Author Tells of Life, Love That Influenced Works at Rutgers,’’ in the Daily Targrum, November 15, 2004. Monica Rozenfeld, a reporter for the Rutgers newspaper, reports on a speech that Nicholas Sparks gave at the school about his life as a writer. Gibson, Charles, Interview with Nicholas Sparks, on Good Morning America, June 28, 2004. In Charles Gibson’s interview with Nicholas Sparks, Gibson discusses the film adaptation of The Notebook.

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Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) is a biography of William Shakespeare. In it, Greenblatt proposes to answer the question of how a man with only a secondary school education, the son of a small town glove maker, became the most renowned playwright of all time. As with other persons in Elizabethan England—England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, 1558–1603— there are records of Shakespeare’s life. Some of these correspond to the usual signposts: birth, marriage, and death. Scattered records of other moments, especially of transactions in which he was involved, also exist. In all, however, they form only a sketchy trail with considerable gaps. Greenblatt builds entire scenarios around the limited evidence. He connects what is known about key moments in Shakespeare’s life to what historians have learned about what was going on at those moments in England. He then relates both the personal history and the larger social history to Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.

STEPHEN GREENBLATT 2004

Will in the World is only one of several books by major scholars of Shakespeare to come out at around the same time. These books, the fruits of a generation of scholarship, sum up insights and appreciation that have developed over decades of teaching and research. Some, like Shakespeare (2002), by David Bevington, and The Age of Shakespeare (2004), by Frank Kermode, are similar to Will in the World in that they draw connections between

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Shakespeare’s art and his life and times. But no scholar has been more influential in promoting this approach to the study of literature in general and Shakespeare in particular than Greenblatt. His Will in the World has attracted more readers than any other contemporary book on Shakespeare. It is therefore having a major impact on our understanding of Shakespeare today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Stephen Greenblatt is widely recognized as a leading academic scholar and public intellectual. That is, he has risen to the top of academia, or the professional world of university teaching and research. He has also reached beyond academia to address his writings and lectures to less specialized audiences. In 2002, he was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, one of the most prestigious faculty appointments at one of the world’s leading universities. Greenblatt was born on November 7, 1943, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the son of Harry J. Greenblatt, a lawyer, and Mollie Greenblatt. As a youth, he attended Newtown High School, where a favorite English teacher, John Harris, helped to influence him in his choice of career. He went on to study at Yale University, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964 and a doctorate in 1969, and at Cambridge University in England, from which he earned a master of philosophy degree in 1966. His principal mentor at Yale was Alvin Kernan, the author of The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1959). Greenblatt began his distinguished teaching career in the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley in 1969; he remained on the faculty there until 1997, when he moved to Harvard. The National Endowment for the Humanities recognized him with their young humanist award in 1971–1972. At Berkeley, Greenblatt’s work was influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who began teaching there in 1975. This influence was an important factor in Greenblatt’s development of New Historicism. New Historicism, sometimes known as Cultural Studies, is a practice of interpreting texts in their historical context, or in relation to the time and place in which they were written. It

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Stephen Greenblatt Ó Rick Friedman/Corbis is also a set of theories about how texts are shaped by large social and historical forces— not simply the individual creativity of their authors. In ‘‘Pretending to Be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism,’’ Paul Stevens writes that Greenblatt’s first major New Historicist book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980), ‘‘marked a major change in the direction of English studies.’’ Greenblatt went on to publish many other influential books on the literature and culture of the Renaissance, or early modern period. These include Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988), Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990), Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), and Hamlet in Purgatory (2001). He is also the editor of the Norton Shakespeare, and of several collections of essays by other scholars. All of these publications are published by academic presses, and they have been read mainly by university students and faculty. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), is the first of his major books to be addressed to a broader audience of interested readers, both inside and outside of academia. It was nominated for numerous awards, including the

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National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. As of 2005, Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University in Boston. He is married to Ramie Targoff and has three sons.

PLOT SUMMARY Chapter 1: Primal Scenes Greenblatt borrows the title of the first chapter of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare from psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. However, unlike the deeply intimate ‘‘primal scenes’’ of early childhood described in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the scenes that Greenblatt considers are the very public spectacles that Shakespeare would have been exposed to in his rural hometown of Stratford-uponAvon. As a student, Shakespeare would have read and participated in performances of Latin comedies. Perhaps, Greenblatt speculates, he starred in a performance of a play called The Two Menaechmuses, which became a source for Shakespeare’s own Comedy of Errors. Traveling troupes of actors came through town, and Shakespeare might have attended their exciting performances in the company of his father, who served a term as bailiff, or mayor. They staged morality plays, which delivered lessons about vices and virtues through simple plots and characters that stood for abstract principles, such as Youth or Chaos. Shakespeare later emulated these works by writing for a broad audience, but he also improved upon them by making his characters resemble real people. His plays also show the influence of the folk festivals that he would have seen as a youth. Greenblatt concludes the chapter with a description of the likely impact of a visit by Queen Elizabeth to the region; she stayed at the nearby castle of Earl of Leicester, who staged elaborate entertainments for her. Such ‘‘primal scenes’’ would have influenced Shakespeare’s development as a playwright.


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only for prosperity, but also for promotion in rank—to become a gentleman. Greenblatt deduces that during the time between the end of Shakespeare’s formal schooling—around 1580—and his professional emergence in London in the 1590s, Shakespeare was involved in his father’s work. The figurative language of his plays is rife with knowledgeable references to gloves and leather. The plays also refer frequently to drinking; Greenblatt speculates that alcoholism might have been a cause of a collapse of John’s fortunes. After reaching a height of prosperity and status during Shakespeare’s early adolescence, John fell into debt and lost his social standing. Greenblatt suggests that the family’s hardships may be the reason for Shakespeare’s artistic preoccupation with what Greenblatt calls ‘‘the dream of restoration’’: many of Shakespeare’s characters, such as the exiled Prospero and Miranda of The Tempest, suffer such reversals, only to be restored to their proper station by the end of the play. Perhaps, the opportunity to act and dress like a gentleman was what attracted Shakespeare to the theatre in the first place. Greenblatt suggests that, as a successful playwright and businessman, Shakespeare was behind a successful application to have John recognized as a gentleman through the gaining of a family coat of arms—a status that Shakespeare would inherit.

Chapter 3: The Great Fear

Shakespeare grew up in a society in which occupations and lifestyles were tightly regulated. His father, John, was a glove maker who also drew income by illegally trading in wool and dealing in loans and property. John aspired not

The England of Shakespeare’s youth had suffered through decades of vicious religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants under the Tudor dynasty. Upon her ascension to the throne in 1558, the Anglican Protestant Queen Elizabeth reversed the policies of her halfsister Mary (who had reigned from 1553) and made Protestantism the state religion—practicing Catholicism became a crime. The persecution of Catholics created a climate of fear that drove many people to carry on their religious practice in secret; they were Protestants in public but Catholics in private. Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare’s mother was probably a devoted Catholic and that his father might have played both roles. Shakespeare may have experienced a deeply conflicted household. Drawing on evidence that he acknowledges to be controversial, Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare might have spent part of his young adulthood working as a schoolmaster for wealthy Catholic families in Lancashire, in

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Chapter 2: The Dream of Restoration

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Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film version of Hamlet The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by


interprets Shakespeare’s plays and poetry in light of this likelihood; his works show mixed feelings, at best, about marriage. The chapter title comes from words spoken by Beatrice, a heroine of Much Ado About Nothing. They suggest a pessimistic view in which couples meet, fall in love, marry, and fall out of love. Beatrice and her lover, Benedick, are perhaps the only couple in Shakespeare’s principal comedies that actually seem to have a good prospect for the future; other couples seem ill-matched. In the plays considered as ‘‘problem comedies,’’ such as Measure for Measure, characters are forced to marry against their will—as Greenblatt suspects was the case with Shakespeare. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare stresses the importance of avoiding premarital sex in plays like Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. Those mature married couples in his plays who do maintain intimacy, such as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, have disturbingly warped relationships. However, Shakespeare’s sonnets show that he did experience love—but only outside of marriage.

Chapter 5: Crossing the Bridge

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the north of England, which was a stronghold of recusancy, or the refusal to accept Protestantism. There, Shakespeare may have gotten his start as an actor with regional troupes, but he would also have been exposed to the dangers associated with the secret practice of Catholicism. He may have met Edmund Campion, a notorious Catholic missionary who was publicly executed. Shakespeare’s plays indicate a temperament that would not have been attracted to religious extremism, but they also show how such experiences captured his imagination.

Chapter 4: Wooing, Wedding and Repenting In 1582, back in Stratford, eighteen-year-old Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older, independent, and already pregnant with Shakespeare’s first daughter, Susanna. He then spent most of his adult life living away from his family, in London. When he died in 1616, he left Anne out of his will, bequeathing her only, as an apparent afterthought, his ‘‘second best bed.’’ These circumstances suggest that Will did not have a happy marriage. Greenblatt

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What brought Shakespeare, in the mid– 1580s, to leave Anne and their three small children to go make his fortune in London? Greenblatt explores a story that emerged in the late seventeenth century that Shakespeare was seeking to escape punishment after having been caught illegally hunting, or poaching, for deer on the property of his powerful neighbor, Sir Thomas Lucy. He suggests that this story might have been a front for a more serious clash with Lucy, who was a devoted Protestant and a persecutor of secret Catholics. Lucy was involved in the arrests and investigations that led to the deaths of Shakespeare’s distant relations, John Somerville and Edward Arden, both condemned as Catholic traitors. It is possible that Shakespeare, too, had something to fear. It is also possible that he had the opportunity to join up with a prestigious troupe of players, the Queen’s Men, who were in Stratford in 1587 and possibly had an opening for a young actor. His arrival in London would have been exciting. It was a teeming city, dangerous, rapidly changing, with impressive architecture and sights. It would become the model for the urban settings in Shakespeare’s plays. It is likely that Shakespeare’s point of entry into the city was London Bridge, where he would have seen the heads of Somerville and Arden still on

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spikes. The fate of these relatives might give a clue to the lack of information now available for Shakespeare’s biographers—in that dangerous political climate, Shakespeare learned to be secretive and private.

Chapter 6: Life in the Suburbs Londoners looked outside city limits for entertainment, to the less regulated ‘‘liberties,’’ or suburbs. Some of the suburban pastimes were violent and gory, such as the popular spectator sport of bull- or bear-baiting (the animals were tied to stakes and attacked by dogs). The suburbs were also home to whorehouses. Shakespeare assuredly also witnessed the severe physical punishments and executions of criminals that were a routine spectacle on London streets. That these sights drew Shakespeare’s interest is evident in his plays. Among the spectacles that he would have seen were the theaters themselves, which were just emerging during the late sixteenth century. Religious and civic authorities felt the theaters, like other entertainments, were immoral and dangerous, and they tried to close them down. To make enough money, theaters had to draw repeat customers with a large repertory of plays; thus, there was considerable demand for a productive playwright. Shakespeare was inspired by his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who was the same age and of similar background. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine would have been one of the first plays that Shakespeare saw in London.


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drink, and a tendency for reckless, even criminal behavior. The group included the brilliant Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Greene, whom Greenblatt describes as ‘‘larger than life, a hugely talented, learned, narcissistic, selfdramatizing, self-promoting, shameless, and undisciplined scoundrel.’’ Perhaps, initially, the University Wits would have been intrigued by and appreciative of the author of the Henry VI trilogy, despite his provincial upbringing and grammar school education. But whether by their choice or his, he did not join the group and did not adopt their lifestyle. He was an outsider and a rival. As his career was soaring in the early 1590s, the University Wits were meeting premature deaths from disease, violence, and dissipation. In a posthumous book attributed to Greene, the author insulted Shakespeare, calling him ‘‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.’’ Shakespeare responded by parodying their works in his own plays, and by creating his great comic character, Falstaff. Falstaff, the carousing, witty, ‘‘fat knight’’ featured in Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, Henry V, and the Merry Wives of Windsor, was unmistakably modeled after Robert Greene.

Chapter 8: Master-Mistress

As he began to make his reputation in London, Shakespeare would have come in contact with the University Wits, the social circle of poets who wrote for the stage. The members of this group came from a variety of class backgrounds, but they had in common their degrees from Cambridge or Oxford, a fondness for

This chapter focuses on the poetry that Shakespeare wrote apart from his plays—especially his 154 sonnets. These were circulated in manuscript form well before they were printed as Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609. While the speaker of each sonnet (‘‘I’’) is unambiguously Shakespeare, the addressee (‘‘you’’) and other persons referred to are cunningly cloaked, so that scholars have been guessing at their identities for centuries. This effect was intentional. Shakespeare wrote the sonnets with the intention that only a very limited audience would understand them in their specific meanings. Greenblatt speculates that the first seventeen sonnets were commissioned for Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southhampton, a beautiful young aristocrat who was resisting considerable pressure to marry. These sonnets take the unconventional approach of encouraging the addressee to marry not out of love for a woman, but out of self-love: to replicate himself by having a child in his own image. In the process of making this argument, and in many of the 154 sonnets, the poet evinces his own love for this ‘‘master-mistress.’’ Shakespeare explicitly dedicated his poems ‘‘Venus and Adonis’’ and ‘‘The Rape of Lucrece’’

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Tamburlaine, with its exotic setting, its ambitious scope, its disregard for conventional morality, and its high poetic language, was utterly different from the plays he had seen in his youth. Shakespeare’s first plays, especially the Henry VI trilogy, were clearly influenced by Marlowe. While Shakespeare lacked Marlowe’s formal education and scholarly reading, his friend Richard Field, a printer, would have given him access to source material. Shakespeare’s early history plays are inferior to his later work, but they were quite popular, and announced the arrival of a new major playwright.

Chapter 7: Shakescene

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to Southhampton. The highly sensual former poem, one of the few works Shakespeare purposively had printed, was a popular success. Greenblatt suggests that in seeking an aristocratic patron, Shakespeare might have been trying to offset his loss of income from the temporary closings of the theatres because of civil unrest and the bubonic plague.

Chapter 9: Laughter at the Scaffold Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice was a response to his rival Christopher Marlowe’s own play about a Jewish villain, The Jew of Malta. Even though Jews were the sources of Judeo-Christian tradition, the evil figure of the Jew filled a crucial ‘‘symbolic role’’ as the ultimate outsider: anti-Christian and even inhuman. Barabas in The Jew of Malta, with his boundless hatred of Christianity, fulfills this role precisely: he has no redeeming characteristics. In that play and in his other work, Marlowe seemed to speak to his audience’s fear and hatred of foreigners. The Jews had long since been expelled from England, but xenophobic mobs, or people who are fearful of foreign people and places, periodically attacked existing communities of immigrants. Shakespeare, in his contribution to the composition of an unperformed play, Sir Thomas More, actually had More oppose such mob violence. More importantly, Shylock, the Jew in The Merchant of Venice, demanded the audience’s sympathy even as he excited their hatred. Greenblatt attributes this difference from Marlowe to Shakespeare’s reaction to the case of Rodrigo Lopez, a physician to the Queen who was accused of plotting to poison her. Lopez, a professed Christian, was of Jewish origin, and his accusers claimed he still adhered to Judaism. The spectators at his execution laughed when he insisted on his innocence and his faith. The audience may have laughed at Shylock as well, but they would have been discomfited by their recognition of his common humanity.

Chapter 10: Speaking with the Dead By 1600, it would seem that no accomplishment was lacking from Shakespeare’s career— yet he entered into a brilliant new phase with the creation of a masterpiece, Hamlet. Shakespeare’s great innovation was his display of inwardness—the state of his characters’ troubled minds. Through his earlier work, Shakespeare had been steadily improving on

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the form of the soliloquy, or the speeches in which characters, alone on the stage, speak their thoughts aloud. Shakespeare adapted an old story about the Danish prince that had been produced as a play before and was available in published sources. In the earlier versions, the prince feigns madness as a child in order to stall for time, so that he can grow up and avenge his father’s death. Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, already a young adult, pretends to be crazy for no clear reason. This uncertainty makes his psychological state the focus of the play. Greenblatt suggests that the tragedy’s emotional power might derive from Shakespeare’s reaction to the death of his son, Hamnet, in 1596 (his name echoes ‘‘Hamlet’’) and the impending death of his father, in the context of the religious conflicts discussed in Chapter 3. Protestants banned Catholic funeral practices such as paying for masses to speed the passage of the deceased through Purgatory, the holding area between Heaven and Hell where the dead suffer while atoning their sins. But for people who believed in Purgatory, such as, perhaps, Shakespeare’s parents, and possibly the playwright himself, their inability to help their dead loved ones would have been anguishing.

Chapter 11: Bewitching the King By omitting the rationale for Hamlet’s feigned madness, Shakespeare created opacity: a lack of transparency, a dark uncertainty that engages the spectator or reader in a limitless exploration into the depths of character. In his subsequent great tragedies, Othello and King Lear, Shakespeare similarly adapted his sources through the process Greenblatt calls the ‘‘excision of motive,’’ by which he stripped away the obvious pretexts for the characters’ behavior. It is unclear what induces Iago, the villain of Othello, to act with such hate, or what insecurity prompts Lear, fatally, to ask his daughters to demonstrate their love for him. His next great tragedy, Macbeth, was specifically written for Queen Elizabeth’s successor, James I. James had become an enthusiastic patron of Shakespeare’s company, now known as the King’s Men. Shakespeare wrote this play involving the assassination of a king, following a failed attempt on James’s life, the so-called Gunpowder Plot. At the beginning of the play, the three witches prophesy that the lineage of Banquo, James’s historical ancestor, will be established on the Scottish throne forever. If

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the prophesy reassured James, he would have had a more complicated response to the witches themselves. James was both fascinated and terrified by witches, whom he considered as agents of the devil. According to Greenblatt, the witches embody the principle of opacity, because their role in creating the terrible events of the play is unclear. Should one then look outward for the source of evil—to the witches—or inward, to oneself?

Chapter 12: The Triumph of the Everyday Beginning with the composition of King Lear, in 1604, Shakespeare apparently had retirement on his mind. That play, in which Lear’s retirement precipitates disaster, shows anxieties about the loss of status and dependency on one’s children. Shakespeare seemed to have hedged against such an outcome with careful retirement planning, including substantial real-estate investments in and around Stratford. While he lived modestly in London, he would retire to a life as a country gentleman. In the last phase of his career—through which he and the King’s

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Will in the World was released as an audio CD by Recorded Books in 2004. It is narrated by Peter J. Fernandez.

In Search of Shakespeare (2004) is a fourpart documentary, directed by David Wallace II and hosted by Michael Wood. The DVD is available from PBS.

Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 film by John Madden, starring Joseph Fiennes as the young playwright, Gwyneth Paltrow as his love-object, and Geoffrey Rush as the theatre owner. It was written by Marc Norman and the playwright Tom Stoppard, and Stephen Greenblatt served as a consultant. The DVD is available from Miramax Home Entertainment.

Men continued to prosper—Shakespeare, repeatedly meditated on aging in his plays. The Tempest, which he probably wrote in 1611, can be considered as a summation of his career. The lead character, Prospero, has the magical power of a playwright to control and decide the fate of the other characters on his Island. In the end, he is lenient toward those who wronged him. Restored to his Dukedom, he chooses to relinquish his magic and to return home. Similarly, Shakespeare gave up scripting the fates of kings and lovers and returned to Stratford, to petty property disputes, a wife for whom he bore little love, a daughter who made an unfortunate marriage, and to a relationship he cherished, with his eldest daughter Susanna and her young family.

CHARACTERS Edmund Campion Campion was a Jesuit who illegally entered England and was sojourning in the northern province of Lancashire at the same time that Shakespeare may have been there. He was the

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most famous Catholic martyr of the era. He beat his Protestant counterparts in a debate just before his grisly execution in 1581.

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character of Hamlet, Shakespeare accomplished the portrayal of a character’s ‘‘inner life.’’

Anne Hathaway See Anne Shakespeare

Earl of Southhampton Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of South-hampton, was an attractive, effeminate young aristocrat. He was under pressure from his family to marry but for years he refused to do so. He was the likely addressee of many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and may have had a secret relationship with the playwright.

Queen Elizabeth I Shakespeare lived most of his life during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, who ruled from 1558 to 1603. Like her father Henry VIII, she was a Protestant, who reversed the policies of the brief reign of her Catholic half-sister, (‘‘Bloody’’) Mary I. She supported the theater, although she was cautious about public gatherings because she feared social and political unrest.

Falstaff Falstaff, whom Greenblatt describes as ‘‘the greatest comic character in English literature,’’ is a character featured in the history plays 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. Falstaff was overweight, irresponsible, and devoted to merry-making. Shakespeare modeled Falstaff after rival poet Robert Greene.

Robert Greene The central figure in the University Wits—a group of university-educated poets and playwrights who met in pubs—the flamboyant, reckless Robert Greene insulted Shakespeare in a posthumous book, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, calling him ‘‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.’’ Greene was the inspiration for the character of Falstaff.

Hamlet The title character of Shakespeare’s most famous masterpiece, Prince Hamlet of Denmark was challenged by the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, to avenge his murder by his brother, Claudius, who married Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude. Hamlet is famous for his indecision about how to proceed. Greenblatt points out that his famous soliloquy, ‘‘To be, or not to be,’’ is actually a meditation on suicide. With the

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King James I James Stuart, who was king from 1603– 1625, was a more enthusiastic supporter of the theatre than his predecessor, Elizabeth. He took over the patronage of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, renaming them the King’s Men. Like Elizabeth, he feared assassination; the infamous Gunpowder Plot was a failed attempt on his life. He was the special intended audience for Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. Shakespeare used witches in its opening scene because he knew that James was both fascinated and horrified by witches.

Ben Jonson The playwright Ben Jonson was a late contemporary and friend of Shakespeare, and a great playwright who created such satirical plays as Volpone and The Alchemist. There is a story that Shakespeare died from overdrinking at a ‘‘merry meeting’’ with Jonson.

King Lear The aged title character of the tragedy King Lear chooses to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. His foolish request that they demonstrate their love for him sets in motion the disastrous chain of events that results in the death of his one faithful daughter, Cordelia, Lear himself, and several others. For Greenblatt, the character of Lear evokes Shakespeare’s anxieties about aging.

Roderigo Lopez The Portuguese Lopez was Queen Elizabeth’s doctor. Although he was of Jewish origin, he was a professed Christian. In 1594, he was arrested on suspicion of plotting to poison Elizabeth. His conviction and execution may have inspired Shakespeare’s somewhat sympathetic portrait of Shylock, the Jewish villain of his comedy The Merchant of Venice.

Christopher Marlowe Marlowe was the most talented playwright in London when Shakespeare arrived on the scene in the 1580s. He was a major influence on Shakespeare and became his primary rival.

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Although they had similar backgrounds, Marlowe had a university degree and was part of the group of poets called the University Wits. His great plays include Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. He led a fast, daring, and dangerous life. He died in 1593, at age twenty-nine, in what was long thought to be a fight over a bill at an inn but may have been an assassination.

Prospero The exiled Duke of Milan in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s magical powers make him the absolute ruler over the island where he lives with his daughter, Miranda. His control over the other characters on the island makes him like a playwright within the play. Greenblatt suggests that his relinquishing of his magic represents Shakespeare’s own retirement from the theatre.


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Judith Shakespeare Judith was Shakespeare’s younger daughter and the twin of his son, Hamnet. He was unhappy with her marriage to Thomas Quiney.

Mary Shakespeare Shakespeare’s mother was born Mary Arden, a member of a prominent Catholic family with higher status than her husband John’s family. She likely adhered to Catholicism despite the Protestant attempts to eliminate Catholic practice.

Susanna Shakespeare Susanna was Shakespeare’s favorite daughter. He probably retired to Stratford largely to be with her, her husband John Hall, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s father, a glove maker by trade, also engaged illegally in other businesses such as wool trading and money lending. For a period, he was a prominent citizen of Stratford-upon-Avon, holding a variety of local governance positions including bailiff, the equivalent of mayor. He may have been an alcoholic, and he may also have been a secret Catholic—he possibly signed a document attesting to his private faith. During Shakespeare’s adolescence, his father suffered a reversal in his fortunes—a circumstance that may have influenced Shakespeare’s own drive for success and prominence.

William Shakespeare, the Bard himself, was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. In Greenblatt’s account, young Shakespeare absorbed all the information and experiences that his provincial life had to offer, including the local festivals, performances by traveling players, and the pageantry of a visit to the area by the Queen in 1575. He had a grammar school education, including study in Latin, as well as a vocational education through his exposure to his father’s trades in glove making and wool. He was affected by John Shakespeare’s fall towards bankruptcy and by the family tensions and political dangers caused by the Protestant persecutions of Catholics. As a teenager, he may have worked as a schoolteacher for Catholic families in Lancashire. Back in Stratford, he married Anne Hathaway, though he apparently was not happy in the marriage. In the mid-1580s, he came to London, where he met John Marlowe, Robert Greene, and the rest of the group of playwrights called University Wits. Although he was influenced by their art and developed a professional rivalry with them, he was not attracted to their fast-paced, adventurous lifestyle. Shakespeare may also have had a romantic attachment to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southhampton, but he was discreet about his personal relationships. He was bereaved by the death of his son, Hamnet, in 1596, and transformed the pain of this loss into the power of his tragedy, Hamlet. Similarly, he displayed a wondrous gift for transforming his experiences and personal relationships, as well as his imagination

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Anne Shakespeare At age eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne, whose maiden name was Hathaway. She was twenty-six, financially independent, and about three months pregnant with their first daughter, Susanna. The legal records, including Shakespeare’s will, suggests that their marriage was an unhappy one.

Hamnet Shakespeare Shakespeare’s only son died at age eleven. A variant of the name ‘‘Hamnet’’ was ‘‘Hamlet.’’ The loss of his son may have been a source of inspiration for his great tragedy of that name.

John Shakespeare

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and source materials, into literature. He created at least thirty-seven plays, one-hundred-andfifty-four sonnets, and two longer poems. His industriousness earned him not only everlasting artistic fame, but also the achievement of his worldly goals—the financial prosperity and social standing of a gentleman. He retired to Stratford around 1611, to New Place, the second largest house in town. He died in 1616.

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inspired Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet. Later plays, such as King Lear and The Tempest show his interest in father-daughter relationships. He had two daughters, Susannah and Judith, and he clearly favored Susannah, the first born. Greenblatt concludes that Shakespeare retired to Stratford to live with Susannah and her family.

Religion Shylock The villain of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Shylock was not a one-dimensional character like his counterpart, Barabas, the Jew in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. He insisted on his humanity: ‘‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’’

John Somerville A distant relative of Shakespeare, John Somerville was arrested in 1583 and executed as a Catholic traitor.

Will See William Shakespeare

Henry Wriothesley See Earl of Southhampton

THEMES Family and Family Life Family relationships are a major theme in Shakespeare’s plays and a major theme in Will in the World. Especially important are marriage and fatherhood. According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was an unhappy one. He chose to live apart from her for most of their married life, and on dying he left her only his ‘‘second best bed.’’ In the plays, although the comedies end in marriages and some of the tragedies involve married couples, Shakespeare expresses a sour view of the prospects for happiness in marriage. Shakespeare may have had complicated emotions about his father, John, who was prominent and prosperous during Will’s early childhood but lost status and money during his young adulthood. One of the recurring themes in the plays is the ‘‘dream of restoration,’’ in which characters are restored to their former happiness. Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet, died at age eleven, a loss that possibly

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Shakespeare’s England was troubled by extreme religious conflict, with the Protestant Queen Elizabeth attempting to root out Catholicism from the land. As a youth, Shakespeare might have experienced a household that was divided by this conflict; his mother came from a prominent Catholic family, and his father, as a town official, had to enforce the anti-Catholic policies. Before he began his career as an actor and playwright, Shakespeare may have worked as a school teacher in Lancashire, a northern province that was a stronghold of recusants, or people who refused to adopt Protestantism. Greenblatt argues that the play that many consider to be Shakespeare’s greatest, Hamlet, is shaped by this conflict. He contends that the play grew out of the anxiety created by the abolition of Catholic rituals and beliefs concerning the dead, especially the belief that the deceased were held up to suffer in purgatory before they could move on to Heaven. The Protestants pronounced Purgatory to be a falsehood. Just as Hamlet is troubled by the unsettled state of his father, who returns as a ghost, Shakespeare may have been troubled about the soul of his dead son, Hamnet, and the approaching death of his father.

Success and Social Status In Shakespeare’s youth, his father, John, was successful in a number of business enterprises and enjoyed considerable status as a local government official. However, whether because of alcoholism, religious conflict, or a combination of factors, he fell on hard times financially and lost his status. Greenblatt depicts Shakespeare as quite industrious and concerned with status. As a playwright, he worked diligently, turning out an average of two plays a year; he also had a major financial stake in his theater company. Although, unlike his rivals, the University Wits, he only had a grammar school education, he became London’s leading

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How did you become you? Greenblatt introduces his study of Shakespeare’s life by asking: ‘‘How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?’’ This is a more complicated question than it appears to be. It is not a question of how Shakespeare became the person that he did, but rather how he came to express himself through such an amazing body of literature. Similarly, one can wonder about the influences that add up to any creative expression. How about yours? Whether you are a poet, an actor, a future doctor, or someone who prefers to keep quiet, write a two-page essay explaining how you became you, as you express yourself to the outside world. Write a Shakespearean Sonnet. It should be in iambic pentameter, with Shakespeare’s signature rhyme scheme: a b a b c d c d e f e f g g. That is, each of the fourteen lines should have ten syllables, with the accent on the even syllables. The first and third lines rhyme; the second and fourth lines rhyme, and so on through the twelfth line. The thirteenth and fourteenth lines rhyme, forming what is called a heroic couplet. Use one of his sonnets as a model. As important as the

playwright. He renewed his father’s application to be officially recognized as a gentleman with a coat of arms, and he retired to the second largest house in Stratford having fulfilled his ‘‘dream of restoration.’’

form is the content. Greenblatt suggests that any conclusions one might draw about Shakespeare from his sonnets must be the result of inference. With this in mind, you should write your sonnet in such a way that some of the references can only be fully understood by your close friends or family.

Watch a film version of a Shakespeare play, either a direct adaptation, such as Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 Much Ado About Nothing, a modernization, such as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), directed by Baz Luhrmann, or a ‘‘based on’’ adaptation such as Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), based on The Tempest. Write a one-page essay in which you discuss how the movie interprets the play for a modern audience.

Greenblatt only discusses a handful of Shakespeare’s plays at length. Choose one that is not listed on many pages, if at all, in the index for Will in the World, and write a two-page book report about some aspect of the play in relation to what you can learn about the period in which it was written.

Types of Shakespearean Plays

Mystery cycles were part of folk festivals and belonged to the Catholic culture that the Protestant government was trying to eliminate. They involved re-enactments of Bible stories, such as the Crucifixion. This folk culture was a clear influence on Shakespeare’s adult work as a playwright.

A number of literary genres are important to Will in the World. As a child, Shakespeare would have been exposed to late medieval forms, such as morality plays and mystery cycles. Morality plays were allegories performed by traveling players, in which the characters stood for abstract principles, such as Virtue or Pride, and the plays taught clear lessons.

Shakespeare excelled and innovated in the three forms of plays he worked in: histories, comedies, and tragedies. His history plays, such as the Henry VI trilogy that helped to establish him as a leading playwright in London, are based on chronicles of earlier times in England or on classical materials, as with Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra.

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These feature some of his most memorable characters, such as the evil hunchback Richard III, in the play of that name, and Falstaff, the lighthearted, irresponsible companion to young Henry V in 1 Henry IV. Shakespeare’s comedies have conventional plots through which the lovers overcome adversity and misunderstanding in order to be joined in marriage. At the same time, Shakespeare manages to have complex explorations of theme. The comedies that Greenblatt discusses most are The Merchant of Venice, in which the villain, the Jew Shylock, becomes the focal point of the play, and The Tempest, the last play Shakespeare wrote as the sole playwright, in which the character Prospero acts as a playwright within the play, controlling the circumstances and deciding the fates of the other characters. At perhaps the zenith of his career, Shakespeare wrote four tragedies that are among his most studied and performed works: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Like all tragedies, these end with the downfall of the title characters. According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s great innovation is the ‘‘excision of motive.’’ That is, rather than making it clear why his characters behave as they do, essentially dooming themselves and others through their behavior, Shakespeare leaves out this information, making their motives into fascinating mysteries. Like other Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare did not write in ordinary language but, principally, in blank verse. Blank verse is a poetic form that employs non-rhyming lines of iambic pentameter: ten syllables per line, with the accent on the even syllables. In addition to his plays, he was an accomplished poet. His poetic works include 154 sonnets. He was an innovator of the sonnet form, which consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. His version, known as the Shakespearean Sonnet, includes three quatrains, or stanzas of four lines with alternating rhymes, and ends with a rhyming couplet. His sonnets deal principally with themes of love, addressed to still unidentified persons, especially an aristocratic young man and a ‘‘dark lady.’’ Shakespeare’s longer neoclassical poems, which re-tell the classical myths of ‘‘Venus and Adonis’’ and the ‘‘Rape of Lucrece,’’ were enormously popular in his day.

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STYLE Speculative Biography Will in the World is a biography of William Shakespeare. Biography is a word derived from Greek, meaning life (bio) writing (graphy). Traditional biographies rely on source materials to reconstruct the life of their subject, or the person the biography is about. These can include legal records, letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts by people who knew the subject. Unfortunately, there is not enough source material to provide a detailed picture of the man who wrote such masterpieces as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. What Greenblatt does, then, is to reach beyond the traditional bounds of the genre of biography by speculating, or making educated guesses about how Shakespeare might have lived. He combines an understanding of the historical time and place in which Shakespeare lived with the available information about Shakespeare’s life and interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. For example, in Chapter 1, he knows that Shakespeare was in Stratford in 1575, when Queen Elizabeth visited nearby Kenilworth; he speculates that Shakespeare might have attended the Queen’s entertainments, or at least read about them, and he traces a connection between these entertainments and the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Greenblatt’s speculations stray from the known into the realm of the supposed, and have caused controversy and even dismissal by several critics and academics.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages Shakespeare was born near the beginning of the Elizabethan Age, during which the ruler of Britain was Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and he worked and lived into the Jacobean Age, under James I (1603–1625). Despite the long reigns of these monarchs, the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries was one of great social change within England, accompanied by political unrest. The religious conflicts that were set in motion when Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, left the Roman Catholic Church were a constant source of fear and violence. Both Elizabeth and James were in constant fear of assassination. Greenblatt

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describes a time that was heavily legalistic, with constant petty lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. ‘‘London was a nonstop theater of punishments’’ where offenders were tortured and sometimes executed in public. Daily life was strictly regulated, but this was also a time when someone like Shakespeare could leave his hometown and his father’s profession, and rise up in the world. Finally, this period was a heyday for literature and especially drama: Shakespeare was the foremost of many playwrights and poets to flourish during the Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages.

Contemporary Culture The context for Will in the World is our own—a world in which William Shakespeare is very much alive as the most influential and popular literary artist in the English language, and maybe all languages. His influence goes well beyond literature: he permeates our culture. His plays Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth are among the most commonly taught works in high school English. Students of those plays might recognize such lines as: ‘‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet’’ (Romeo and Juliet act 1, scene 2) ‘‘Et tu, Brute!’’ (Julius Caesar act 3, scene 1) ‘‘To be or not to be, that is the question’’ (Hamlet act 3, scene 1) ‘‘Out, damned spot! out, I say!’’ (Macbeth act 5, scene 1)

More significantly, those lines would be familiar to many people who have not read the plays. They have been absorbed into our popular culture. Similarly, Shakespeare’s plays are regularly performed; many have been adapted as films, and many have been reinterpreted in modern forms. For example, the adaptations of Romeo and Juliet include an opera by Charles Gounod, a ballet with music by Sergei Prokofiev, the musical West Side Story by Stephen Sondheim, and several films, including one directed by Baz Luhrmann with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the lead roles. Similarly, the comedy The Taming of the Shrew has been adapted as a musical, Kiss Me Kate, and a movie, Ten Things I Hate About You, set in a modern high school. Shakespeare is such a lasting and pervasive presence in our culture that it is difficult to imagine what it would be like if he had never existed.

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Accordingly, there is a great deal of interest in the man as well as the works, such that a biography of Shakespeare—nearly four hundred years after his death—could well be a popular and commercial success. In his review of Will in the World for the London Review of Books, Colin Burrow complains that Greenblatt’s biography is selling much more briskly than, for example, King Lear: ‘‘People are a lot more likely to buy books about Shakespeare’s life than they are to buy books by Shakespeare.’’ Yet it is natural to be curious about the Elizabethan man whose imagination has had such a role in shaping today’s world. In his ‘‘Preface,’’ Greenblatt himself asks, ‘‘How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?’’

Academia There is another relevant context to Will in the World: academia, or the professional world of higher education. This is the context that Greenblatt emerges from, as an English professor at Harvard University. Most academics write books and articles that are read only by other academics. A few, like the historian Simon Schama, Greenblatt’s Harvard colleague Louis Menand, the literary critic Harold Bloom, and Greenblatt himself, achieve such pre-eminence within their fields that they are able to cross over and write for a general educated audience. Greenblatt has achieved so much influence and stature within academia that, even before Will in the World, he has become known outside of it. He is perhaps the best-known scholarly literary critic of the early twenty-first century. As Christina Nehring writes in her review of Will in the World for the Atlantic Monthly, the project represents a meeting of ‘‘the biggest literary genius of all time and the biggest literary scholar of our own time.’’ Some scholarly readers, however, are suspicious of books like Will in the World that are written for non-specialized audiences. They consider them simplistic, watered-down, and insufficiently documented. It is not coincidental that some of the book’s harshest critics, like Colin Burrow in the London Review, are also professors of English who specialize in Shakespeare. At the same time, it may be useful for general readers to recognize the traces of more specialized writing in Will in the World. Instead of

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closely documenting his sources with footnotes, Greenblatt provides ‘‘Bibliographical Notes’’ for each chapter near the end of the book. At moments, such as when Greenblatt writes, ‘‘London was a nonstop theater of punishments,’’ the reader can hear an echo of the French social philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault. Foucault, the author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is very influential in academia, and particularly in Greenblatt’s critical method, New Historicism. Finally, near the end of the book, one finds a version of an argument that Greenblatt presented in an earlier, more scholarly book, Hamlet in Purgatory.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW One of the noteworthy aspects to the criticism of Will in the World is that there is so much of it. The book has drawn an enormous amount of notice for a book by a literary critic and about a literary topic. Within months of its publication, it had been featured in most book review sections of newspapers and magazines in the United States and England. Overall, this criticism has been favorable. That is, it has received far more positive reviews than negative ones. For some critics, Greenblatt has written the best of the Shakespeare biographies, surpassing his predecessors through his insightful connections between Shakespeare’s life and his works. Typical of these is Adam Gopnik, who reviewed Will in the World for the New Yorker: Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read. Greenblatt knows the life and period deeply, has no hobbyhorses to ride, and makes, one after another, exquisitely sensitive and persuasive connections between what the eloquent poetry says and what the fragmentary life suggests. Other reviewers agree in praising Greenblatt’s insightfulness, and they also commend his literary style as elegant and eloquent, without calling attention to itself. Yet they are less persuaded than Gopnik by Greenblatt’s articles. Colm Toibin, writing for the New York Times, sums up the view of several critics that Greenblatt is too willing to engage in guesswork, or to base claims on insufficient evidence: ‘‘Almost every step forward in reconstructing

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William Shakespeare The Library of Congress

his life involves a step backward into conjecture and a further step sometimes into pure foolishness.’’ Christina Nehring, in the Atlantic Monthly, is less concerned with Greenblatt’s conclusions than with his critical method. She deems Greenblatt’s New Historicism, the practice of placing literature in its historical context to show how texts are shaped by cultural forces, to be inadequate as a way of explaining Shakespeare. The power of Hamlet, she argues, cannot be explained through reference to Elizabethan religious conflicts. Shakespeare’s art is timeless—it evokes themes and emotions that transcend any particular historical period. Nehring’s response, however, is somewhat unusual. Most of the critics address their comments to Greenblatt’s speculations about Shakespeare’s life and its connection to his works. Many, like Gopnik, consider these speculations to be convincing. They praise Will in the World as a spectacular achievement. Others, like Toibin, are less persuaded, and their reviews are mixed or negative.

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CRITICISM Andrew Newman Newman teaches in the English Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In this essay, Newman examines Greenblatt’s process of inference, or educated guesswork, in Will in the World. At the beginning of his ‘‘Preface’’ to Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt summarizes William Shakespeare’s rise from obscurity to become a playwright of almost supernatural range and ability, whose work has the power to transport all kinds of audiences, not only of his generation but of every generation that followed. ‘‘How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?’’ The first Shakespeare in Greenblatt’s question is the man born into anonymity, the son of a glove maker in a provincial town. The second Shakespeare is less a person than a larger-than-life entity, whose mention automatically brings to mind the idea of great literature. How does Greenblatt connect the two? ‘‘How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?’’ is a variant of the usual question underlying literary biographies. One looks at the artistic achievement and wonder: how did he, or she, accomplish that? How can the art be explained by the life? Generally, in answering this question, the biographer puts three types of information into relationship with one another: information about the writer’s life, information about the time in which the writer lived (the historical context), and the literary works themselves. These works—their composition, publication, and reception—represent not only significant events in the life of the author, but also sources of information about the mind that created them. Such is the basic recipe for literary biography, but the proportions of the ingredients will vary according to the perspective of the biographer and, more significantly, according to the availability of those ingredients. This essay will examine how Greenblatt uses these ingredients to fashion his biography of Shakespeare.

THE FIRST ‘SHAKESPEARE’ IN GREENBLATT’S QUESTION IS THE MAN BORN INTO ANONYMITY, THE SON OF A GLOVE MAKER IN A PROVINCIAL TOWN. THE SECOND ‘SHAKESPEARE’ IS LESS A PERSON THAN A LARGER-THAN-LIFE ENTITY, ONE WHOSE MENTION AUTOMATICALLY BRINGS TO MIND THE IDEA OF GREAT LITERATURE. HOW DOES GREENBLATT CONNECT THE TWO?’’

Hawthorne’s biographers have been able to draw upon a wealth of material that was unpublished during his lifetime. They have been able to trace passages in his novels to passages in his journals, to get glimpses of his actual creative process at work. Much is known not only about him, but also about the people whom he knew and the times in which he lived. By contrast, almost nothing is known about the author of the epic poems The Odyssey and Iliad. ‘‘How did Homer become Homer?’’ is an unanswerable question. Homer is a name that rivals Shakespeare for its eminence in literary history, but there can be no biography. If there were, it would be almost pure guesswork. Scholars know a good deal about the general historical context, and an author might be able to construct a believable portrait of a Greek man who lived around 700 b.c., but there would be no basis upon which to persuade the reader of a connection between that man and The Odyssey.

In evaluating Greenblatt’s literary biography, one might look at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850) and ask the same question: How did Hawthorne become Hawthorne? In answering this question,

On the spectrum between Hawthorne, about whom scholars know a great deal, and Homer, about whom scholars know next to nothing, Shakespeare lies somewhere in between. Elizabethan England was a record-keeping society, but the records of Shakespeare’s life do little more than to locate him at certain places and times, with varying degrees of precision and reliability. For example, it is known that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-uponAvon. In combination with knowledge of Elizabethan custom, this baptismal record has helped biographers to infer a birth date of April 23. But there are no recorded reflections about his craft, except those that are found within the

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plays. There is little evidence, outside his art, of his personality: any conclusions that biographers draw must be the result of inference, or the logical process of shaping conclusions on the basis of limited information. From the records of his business transactions, Greenblatt infers that Shakespeare was actively concerned about making and saving money. From the provision in his will that his wife should receive his ‘‘second best bed’’—a meager bequest from a wealthy man to his spouse—and from his choice to spend most of his adult life living apart from her, Greenblatt infers that William held little love for Anne Hathaway Shakespeare. However, there is no parallel to Hawthorne’s written declarations about his feelings about his wife, which biographers and literary critics have then related to his characterizations of the heroines in his novels. In other words, to get from what is known about Hawthorne to what one reads in the The Scarlet Letter requires only a small step. To get from what is known about Shakespeare to what one reads in his plays and poetry requires more of a leap. Greenblatt is as likely to make this leap in one direction as in the other—that is, he jumps back and forth between the works and the biographical facts, developing his inferences in the process. For instance, he devotes a large part of the chapter on marriage to a discussion of the plays. He notes that the many couples in the comedies do not seem to enjoy the prospect of happy marriages. Shakespeare’s portrayals of intimate marriages, as between Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet or Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, are frightening. Greenblatt writes: Shakespeare’s plays then combine, on the one hand, an overall diffidence in depicting marriages and, on the other hand, the image of a kind of nightmare in the two marriages they do depict with some care. It is difficult not to read his works in the context of his decision to live for most of a long marriage away from his wife.

Here, Greenblatt’s description of his practice is in line with the conventions of literary biography—the works are read in the context of the author’s life. But the proportions are different— he has much more information about the works than about the life. In effect, the sources on Shakespeare’s life are read as much in the context of his plays as vice-versa. The two readings are mutually affirming. That is, from the will and Shakespeare’s living arrangements, Greenblatt

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infers that Shakespeare bore little love for his wife; Shakespeare’s negative attitude about marriage in his plays, supports this inference. From the plays, Greenblatt infers that Shakespeare was sour on marriage in general; this inference is supported by the known facts about Shakespeare’s marriage. The great leap, however, is in the connection between the two sources, the idea that Shakespeare’s negativity about marriage in his plays was the result of his disappointment in his own. The idea of this connection is open to critique. As Colm Toibin points out, ‘‘unhappy marriages are by their very nature more dramatic, so the creation of exciting drama may have impelled [Shakespeare] more than the obvious display of his conscious experience.’’ That is, Shakespeare may have simply been trying to tell a compelling story. Toibin’s critique illustrates the difficulty of using literary art as biographical sources, but with Shakespeare there is often little else to turn to. Except, that is, for history. Greenblatt compensates for the thinness of the information about Shakespeare’s life with the thickness of the information about Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The records that mention Shakespeare by name put him in a certain time and place; Greenblatt then creates a detailed description of what was going on there and then in order to construct an inference about Shakespeare’s experiences. In at least one important instance, the first step in this process is itself a matter of inference: the understanding that William Shakeshafte, the man mentioned in the will of the Lancashire gentleman Alexander Hoghton, is actually William Shakespeare is a matter of controversy among Shakespeare scholars. However, Greenblatt builds a large part of the argument of Chapter 3: ‘‘The Great Fear’’ on the possibility that Shakespeare and Shakeshafte are one and the same, which would place Shakespeare in the midst of the dangerous Catholic intrigues that were afoot in Lancashire in the early 1580s. If Shakespeare were there, then, Greenblatt infers that he might have met the famous Catholic missionary and martyr Edmund Campion. Greenblatt then makes further inferences about how Shakespeare would have responded to this meeting based on the evidence of Shakespeare’s plays and of the life he went on to lead. Colin Burrow, in his negative review of Greenblatt’s book in the London Review of Books, criticizes what he sees as Greenblatt’s process:

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Globe Theater in England Ó The Folger Shakespeare Library. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library In a will there is found a name, which is not Shakespeare’s but is close enough possibly to be his. From this it is assumed that Shakespeare was a member of a Catholic household. From this in turn it is inferred that he was committed, and perhaps passionately committed, to Catholicism. From this it is a small step to suppose that he met and had a deep affinity with a Catholic martyr.

that Greenblatt builds his arguments through an unstable structure of inferences is accurate.

Nevertheless, and although he focuses on the most extreme example, Burrow’s criticism

Yet what his critics consider, in Toibin’s phrase, to be ‘‘pure foolishness,’’ more sympathetic readers may consider to be daring. As Laura Miller writes in Salon.com, Greenblatt’s book ‘‘is such a graceful effort to spin a life out of a few scraps of paper that only a churl would be unpersuaded by it.’’ In other words, to appreciate Will in the World the reader needs to be willing to follow Greenblatt as he leaps from the known to the unknown to the plausible to the merely possible. If one stays behind with the known, then one is left with only a very limited picture of Shakespeare. The portrait that Greenblatt constructs, through his weaving of biographical, historical, and literary sources, is much richer. The accuracy of this portrait is not verifiable. Certainly, some of Greenblatt’s conjectures might be off base, but others might be right on target, and unless Shakespeare rises up to speak from the dead, the reader can never know which is which. The premise of Will in the World is that a hazy and incomplete view of who Shakespeare actually was is less rewarding

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Greenblatt’s inferences are actually a good deal more nuanced, or distinctive, than Burrow gives him credit for. According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare would have had a complicated relationship to Catholicism; he was too practical and ambitious to be devoted to the cause of an outlawed religion. His response to Campion would have been one of fascination, but also of repulsion: if he actually saw Campion in 1581 Shakespeare would even then probably have shuddered and recoiled inwardly, pulling away from the invitation, whether implicit in the saint’s presence or directly and passionately urged, to shoulder the cross and join in a pious struggle for the Catholic faith.

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than a relatively full understanding of who Shakespeare might well have been. Source: Andrew Newman, Critical Essay on Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.


Renee Montage In the following interview for National Public Radio, Greenblatt discusses his effort to create a plausible view of Shakespeare’s life from the few facts that exist regarding the author.

Shakespeare’s plays and poetry are available in many editions, both print and online. Some of the plays that Stephen Greenblatt discusses at length are Hamlet, Henry IV Part One, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and the sonnets. Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) is a more extended discussion of the themes in ‘‘Speaking with the Dead,’’ Chapter 10 of Will in the World. The Greenblatt Reader (2005), edited by Michael Paine, collects scholarly and journalistic essays by Greenblatt, the founder of the school of literary criticism known as New Historicism or cultural studies.

In her essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister that was as gifted as he was. Would she have become a great playwright, too? The essay is available in various editions, including one by Harvest Books, 1989. Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life (1964) is a historical fiction novel by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange.

In his short story ‘‘Shakespeare’s Memory,’’ the celebrated Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges imagines the consequences when an aging Shakespearean scholar inherits Shakespeare’s memory. The story is available in English in his collection The Book of Sand (1977). The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1995), by Charles Nicholl, is a lively historical novel about the life and violent death of Shakespeare’s most famous rival. Marlowe’s plays, including Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta, are available in many editions, both print and online.

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Literary biographies almost always disappoint. Instinctively, we want to learn all we can about individuals whose creations have moved us, and with and through which we have lived. Time and again a writer’s own behaviour proves not only to have been not only much less admirable than that of his persona or characters but also much less interesting. In this sense, Greenblatt’s decision to conclude his study with the statement that Shakespeare was ‘determined to end his days . . . within the boundaries of the everyday’ serves as a preemptive strike. If the records show a Shakespeare who was somewhat commonplace, even a bit of a bore, let him at least have desired strongly to become such a man. Earlier in the book Greenblatt attributes some inner musings to his hero of staggering banality: ‘He must have said to himself something like ‘‘You are not in Stratford anymore’’ or ‘‘Whatever else I am . . . I am not Marlowe.’’’ Despite Shakespeare’s exceptional brilliance in articulating emotions of great complexity—or, as Greenblatt has it, ‘opacity’—his biographers have to face a deficit of extra-literary expressions of tender feeling.

Source: Renee Montage, ‘‘Interview with Stephen Greenblatt,’’ in National Public Radio (NPR), November 17, 2004, p. 1.

Katherine Duncan-Jones In the following essay, Shakespeare scholar and biographer Duncan-Jones separates fact from theory in Greenblatt’s biography.

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The last major document, the will, is notable both for negative emotions, such as bequests to old friends struck out, and a lack of endearments. Even his elder daughter fails to rate a ‘dear’ or a ‘loving’. Famously, his wife nearly got left out altogether. Yet we do know from Thomas Heywood in 1612 that Shakespeare was very angry with a printer who had pirated some of his poems, and from his ‘cousin’ Thomas Greene in 1613 that he refused to worry about the plight of the Stratford poor should more common land be enclosed for pasture. As all biographers must to some extent do, Greenblatt copes with the absence of personal documents by means of quasi-novelistic speculation. For instance, we know nothing whatsoever about Shakespeare’s reaction to the death of his 11-year-old son Hamnet in August 1596. On p. 289 Greenblatt remarks that ‘the father presumably saw his son buried’. Actually, he may not have done, for it could have taken three or four days for the news to reach him in London, and a further three or four days to travel to Stratford, by which time the burial had probably taken place. However, on p. 312 Greenblatt tells us that ‘Shakespeare undoubtedly returned to Stratford . . . for his son’s funeral’. An extended

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meditation ensues on the father’s complexly opaque emotions as he ‘stood in the churchyard watching the dirt fall on the body of his son’. Though Greenblatt’s Shakespeare decides to end his days among the ‘everday’, his early years are crowded with incident. Rather than choosing between different theories about the early years Greenblatt generously embraces many of them. Will is recruited as a pious Catholic youth to work for Alexander Hoghton in Lancashire; back in the Midlands, he has a brief but life-changing encounter with Edmund Campion, S.J. Immediately afterwards he woos the daughter of a ‘staunchly Protestant farmer, and early on in his theatrical career includes a ‘coarsely explicit piece of Protestant pope-bashing’ in King John, (Why, incidentally, does ‘Protestant’ rate a big P and the pontiff not?). There are passages of dizzying confusion in the early chapters as Greenblatt attempts to steer Will into the stream of his well-documented literary career after dallying too long on the wilder shores of speculation. Trying valiantly to make meaningful connexions, he suggests that Will made love to Anne ‘as if to mark his decisive distance from Campion’. They don’t work. The evidence for his wooing is sound—marriage license, baptismal record. The evidence that he met Campion is non-existent.


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versions of Shakespeare summoned up in recent biographies, including, no doubt, my own. Source: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘‘Will-’o-the-wisp for ever,’’ in Spectator, October 9, 2004, p. 54.

SOURCES Burrow, Colin, ‘‘Who Wouldn’t Buy It?’’ in London Review of Books, www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/burr01_.html (January 20, 2005) Gopnik, Adam, ‘‘Will Power: Why Shakespeare Remains the Necessary Poet,’’ in the New Yorker, September 13, 2004, p. 90. Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, W.W. Norton, 2004. Miller, Laura, ‘‘The Genius Next Door,’’ in Salon.com, www.salon.com (September 27, 2004). Nehring, Christina ‘‘Shakespeare in Love, Or in Context,’’ in Atlantic Monthly, December 2004, pp. 129–34. Stevens, Paul, ‘‘Pretending to be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism,’’ in New Literary History Vol. 33, Issue 3, 2002, pp. 491, 501, 505. Toibin, Colm, ‘‘Reinventing Shakespeare,’’ in the New York Times, October 3, 2004, Sec. 7, Col. 1, p. 22.

FURTHER READING

Like much of Greenblatt’s recent work, Will in the World combines a good deal of insight and sensitivity with a strangely uncritical mish-mash of idee´s fixes and nonsense. His obsession with the pervasive sadism of Shakespeare’s England (but really the Continent was no better) often leads him astray, and impels him to lead readers astray. For instance, he describes Queen Elizabeth’s special pleasure in the spectacle of ‘the ancient massacre’ of Danes by Englishmen, performed for her by Coventry artisans at Kenilworth in 1575. Yet, whatever the historical battle may have been in 1012, the artisans’ play was certainly no ‘massacre’. The Danes were powerfully armed landsknechts, and ‘twice had the better’; finally, however, they were defeated, and many ‘Danes’ were ‘led captive for triumph by our English women’. This rumbustious mockbattle was well calculated to please Elizabeth as a spectacle of an English victory succeeded by mercy and brought to completion by women. No such scenario suits Greenblatt’s Will, a decent, everyday man in a cruelly complex world. He is no more believable than any of the

Bevington, David, Shakespeare, Blackwell, 2002. Bevington is a major Shakespeare scholar and editor of his plays. Shakespeare examines major themes that Shakespeare uses throughout his plays, such as love, jealously, hate, and family ties, and how these universal themes allow twenty-first century readers to enjoy and understand these plays written over four hundred years ago. Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Trade, 1999. Bloom, one of the most renowned literary critics of contemporary times, makes the controversial assertion that Shakespeare taught humanity how to be human. Garber, Marjorie, B., Shakespeare After All, Pantheon, 2004. Shakespeare After All is a readable and comprehensive critical study of Shakespeare’s plays. Kermode, Frank, The Age of Shakespeare, Modern Library, 2004. Kermode provides an authoritative account of the history and culture of Elizabethan England in relation to the plays.

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Schoenbaum, Samuel S., Shakespeare’s Lives, Oxford University Press, 1991. Shakespeare’s Lives is the definitive history of the biographies of William Shakespeare. ———, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, Oxford University Press, 1971.

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In this volume, Schoenbaum collects the primary documents related to Shakespeare’s life. Wood, Michael, Shakespeare, Basic Books, 2003. Shakespeare is the companion volume to In Search of Shakespeare, a 2003 documentary hosted by Michael Wood for the BBC.

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Glossary A abstract: as an adjective applied to writing or literary works, abstract refers to words or phrases that name things not knowable through the five senses. Examples of abstracts include the Cliffs Notes summaries of major literary works. Examples of abstract terms or concepts include ‘‘idea,’’ ‘‘guilt,’’ ‘‘honesty,’’ and ‘‘loyalty.’’ aestheticism: a literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ is a good summary of aestheticism. The movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature. Age of Johnson: the period in English literature between 1750 and 1798, named after the most prominent literary figure of the age, Samuel Johnson. Works written during this time are noted for their emphasis on ‘‘sensibility,’’ or emotional quality. These works formed a transition between the rational works of the Age of Reason, or Neoclassical period, and the emphasis on individual feelings and responses of the Romantic period. Significant writers during

the Age of Johnson included the novelists Ann Radcliffe and Henry Mackenzie, dramatists Richard Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, and poets William Collins and Thomas Gray. Age of Reason: see neoclassicism Age of Sensibility: see Age of Johnson agrarians: a group of Southern American writers of the 1930s and 1940s who fostered an economic and cultural program for the South based on agriculture, in opposition to the industrial society of the North. The term can refer to any group that promotes the value of farm life and agricultural society. Members of the original Agrarians included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. allegory: a narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes. Examples of allegorical works include Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. allusion: a reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. For example, describing someone as a ‘‘Romeo’’ makes an

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allusion to William Shakespeare’s famous young lover in Romeo and Juliet. amerind literature: the writing and oral traditions of Native Americans. Native American literature was originally passed on by word of mouth, so it consisted largely of stories and events that were easily memorized. Amerind prose is often rhythmic like poetry because it was recited to the beat of a ceremonial drum. Examples of Amerind literature include the autobiographical Black Elk Speaks, the works of N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Craig Lee Strete, and the poetry of Luci Tapahonso. analogy: a comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptedness of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies. Analogies often take the form of an extended simile, as in William Blake’s aphorism: ‘‘As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.’’ angry young men: a group of British writers of the 1950s whose work expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Common to their work is an anti-hero who rebels against a corrupt social order and strives for personal integrity. The term has been used to describe Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Wain, and others. antagonist: the major character in a narrative or drama who works against the hero or protagonist. An example of an evil antagonist is Richard Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, while a virtuous antagonist is Macduff in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. anthropomorphism: the presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for ‘‘human form.’’ The fables of Aesop, the animated films of Walt Disney, and Richard Adams’s Watership Down feature anthropomorphic characters. anti-hero: a central character in a work of literature who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heros typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals. They generally

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feel helpless in a world over which they have no control. Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts. A well-known anti-hero is Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. anti-novel: a term coined by French critic JeanPaul Sartre. It refers to any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The anti-novel usually fragments and distorts the experience of its characters, forcing the reader to construct the reality of the story from a disordered narrative. The best-known antinovelist is Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of Le voyeur. antithesis: the antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion of the statement that is defined as the ‘‘antithesis’’; the first portion is the ‘‘thesis.’’ An example of antithesis is found in the following portion of Abraham Lincoln’s ‘‘Gettysburg Address’’; notice the opposition between the verbs ‘‘remember’’ and ‘‘forget’’ and the phrases ‘‘what we say’’ and ‘‘what they did’’: ‘‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’’ apocrypha: writings tentatively attributed to an author but not proven or universally accepted to be their works. The term was originally applied to certain books of the Bible that were not considered inspired and so were not included in the ‘‘sacred canon.’’ Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston all have apocrypha. Apocryphal books of the Bible include the Old Testament’s Book of Enoch and New Testament’s Gospel of Peter. apprenticeship novel: see bildungsroman archetype: the word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. This term was introduced to literary criticism from the psychology of Carl Jung. It expresses Jung’s theory that behind every person’s ‘‘unconscious,’’ or repressed memories of the past, lies the ‘‘collective unconscious’’ of the human race:

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memories of the countless typical experiences of our ancestors. These memories are said to prompt illogical associations that trigger powerful emotions in the reader. Often, the emotional process is primitive, even primordial. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the ‘‘collective unconscious.’’ They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. Examples of literary archetypes include themes such as birth and death and characters such as the Earth Mother. argument: the argument of a work is the author’s subject matter or principal idea. Examples of defined ‘‘argument’’ portions of works include John Milton’s Arguments to each of the books of Paradise Lost and the ‘‘ A r g u m e n t ’’ t o R o b e r t H e r r i c k ’ s Hesperides. art for art’s sake: see Aestheticism audience: the people for whom a piece of literature is written. Authors usually write with a certain audience in mind, for example, children, members of a religious or ethnic group, or colleagues in a professional field. The term ‘‘audience’’ also applies to the people who gather to see or hear any performance, including plays, poetry readings, speeches, and concerts. Jane Austen’s parody of the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey, was originally intended for (and also pokes fun at) an audience of young and avid female gothic novel readers. autobiography: a connected narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story. Examples include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams. automatic writing: writing carried out without a preconceived plan in an effort to capture every random thought. Authors who engage in automatic writing typically do not revise their work, preferring instead to preserve the revealed truth and beauty of spontaneous expression. Automatic writing was employed by many of the Surrealist writers, notably the French poet Robert Desnos.

to literature in favor of innovations in style or content. Twentieth-century examples of the literary avant-garde include the Black Mountain School of poets, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Beat Movement.

B baroque: a term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style or diction. Baroque works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. The term ‘‘Baroque Age’’ designates a period in Western European literature beginning in the late sixteenth century and ending about one hundred years later. Works of this period often mirror the qualities of works more generally associated with the label ‘‘baroque’’ and sometimes feature elaborate conceits. Examples of Baroque works include John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Luis de Gongora’s Soledads, and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. baroque age: see baroque baroque period: see baroque beat generation: see beat movement beat movement: a period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s—including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti— who rejected established social and literary values. Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-influenced free verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind—generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs—the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter. Kerouac’s On the Road is perhaps the bestknown example of a Beat Generation novel, and Ginsberg’s Howl is a famous collection of Beat poetry. beats, the: see Beat Movement

avant-garde: French term meaning ‘‘vanguard.’’ It is used in literary criticism to describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches

belles- lettres: a French term meaning ‘‘fine letters’’ or ‘‘beautiful writing.’’ It is often used as a synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature. Lewis Carroll’s Alice

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in Wonderland epitomizes the realm of belles-lettres. bildungsroman: a German word meaning ‘‘novel of development.’’ The bildungsroman is a study of the maturation of a youthful character, typically brought about through a series of social or sexual encounters that lead to self-awareness. Bildungsroman is used interchangeably with erziehungsroman, a novel of initiation and education. When a bildungsroman is concerned with the development of an artist (as in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), it is often termed a kunstlerroman. Well-known bildungsromane include J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Robert Newton Peck’s A Day No Pigs Would Die, and S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. biography: a connected narrative that tells a person’s life story. Biographies typically aim to be objective and closely detailed. James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D is a famous example of the form. black aesthetic movement: a period of artistic and literary development among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the first major African-American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the black masses. Key figures in black aesthetics included one of its founders, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones; poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and dramatist Ed Bullins. Works representative of the Black Aesthetic Movement include Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, a 1964 Obie award-winner; Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Baraka and playwright Larry Neal and published in 1968; and Sonia Sanchez’s poetry collection We a BaddDDD People, published in 1970. black arts movement: see black aesthetic movement black comedy: see black humor

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black humor: writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch- 22 is considered a superb example of the use of black humor. Other wellknown authors who use black humor include Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter. bloomsbury group: a group of English writers, artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic and philosophical discussions in Bloomsbury, a district of London, from around 1907 to the early 1930s. The Bloomsbury Group held no uniform philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater social tolerance. At various times the circle included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. bon mot: a French term meaning ‘‘good word.’’ A bon mot is a witty remark or clever observation. Charles Lamb and Oscar Wilde are celebrated for their witty bon mots. Two examples by Oscar Wilde stand out: (1) ‘‘All women become their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’’ (2) ‘‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’’ burlesque: any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by treating a trivial subject with profound seriousness or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. The word ‘‘burlesque’’ may also be used as an adjective, as in ‘‘burlesque show,’’ to mean ‘‘striptease act.’’ Examples of literary burlesque include the comedies of Aristophanes, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote,, Samuel Butler’s poem ‘‘Hudibras,’’ and John Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera.

C Celtic renaissance: a period of Irish literary and cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement aimed to create a romantic vision of Celtic myth and legend. The most significant works of the Celtic Renaissance typically present a dreamy, unreal world, usually in reaction against the reality of contemporary

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problems. William Butler Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin is among the most significant works of the Celtic Renaissance. Celtic twilight: see Celtic Renaissance character: broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones. In the techniques of anthropomorphism and personification, animals—and even places or things—can assume aspects of character. ‘‘Characterization’’ is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The term ‘‘character’’ also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a specific attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition. Notable characters in literature include Oedipus Rex, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Macbeth, Candide, Hester Prynne, Ebenezer Scrooge, Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Scarlett O’Hara, James Bond, and Kunta Kinte. characterization: see Character chronicle: a record of events presented in chronological order. Although the scope and level of detail provided varies greatly among the chronicles surviving from ancient times, some, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, feature vivid descriptions and a lively recounting of events. During the Elizabethan Age, many dramas—appropriately called ‘‘chronicle plays’’—were based on material from chronicles. Many of William Shakespeare’s dramas of English history as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II are based in part on Raphael Holinshead’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a ‘‘classic’’) from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism. Classical authors from ancient Greek and Roman times include Juvenal and Homer. Examples of later works and authors now described as classical include French literature of the seventeenth century, Western novels of the nineteenth century, and American fiction of the mid-nineteenth century such as that written by James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. classicism: a term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. Works associated with classicism typically exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical organization, and respect for tradition. Examples of literary classicism include Cicero’s prose, the dramas of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the writings of J. W. von Goethe, G. E. Lessing, and T. S. Eliot. climax: the turning point in a narrative, the moment when the conflict is at its most intense. Typically, the structure of stories, novels, and plays is one of rising action, in which tension builds to the climax, followed by falling action, in which tension lessens as the story moves to its conclusion. The climax in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans occurs when Magua and his captive Cora are pursued to the edge of a cliff by Uncas. Magua kills Uncas but is subsequently killed by Hawkeye. colloquialism: a word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang. An example of colloquialism can be found in Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-room Ballads: ‘‘When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre He’d ’eard men sing by land and sea; An’ what he thought ’e might require ’E went an’ took.’’

classical: in its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may

concrete: concrete is the opposite of abstract, and refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object or concept with the

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senses. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden contains much concrete description of nature and wildlife. connotation: the impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning. Connotations may be universally understood or may be significant only to a certain group. Both ‘‘horse’’ and ‘‘steed’’ denote the same animal, but ‘‘steed’’ has a different connotation, deriving from the chivalrous or romantic narratives in which the word was once often used. convention: any widely accepted literary device, style, or form. A soliloquy, in which a character reveals to the audience his or her private thoughts, is an example of a dramatic convention. crime literature: a genre of fiction that focuses on the environment, behavior, and psychology of criminals. Prominent writers of crime novels include John Wainwright, Colin Watson, Nicolas Freeling, Ruth Rendell, Jessica Mann, Mickey Spillane, and Patricia Highsmith.

D dadaism: a protest movement in art and literature founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by World War I by revolting against numerous forms of social convention. The Dadaists presented works marked by calculated madness and flamboyant nonsense. They stressed total freedom of expression, commonly through primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often senseless, poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism. Proponents of Dadaism include Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Eluard. decadent: see decadents decadents: the followers of a nineteenth-century literary movement that had its beginnings in French aestheticism. Decadent literature displays a fascination with perverse and morbid states; a search for novelty and sensation—the ‘‘new thrill’’; a preoccupation with mysticism; and a belief in the senselessness of human existence. The movement is closely associated with the doctrine Art for Art’s Sake. The term ‘‘decadence’’ is

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sometimes used to denote a decline in the quality of art or literature following a period of greatness. Major French decadents are Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. English decadents include Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Frank Harris. deduction: the process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise. An example of deduction is present in the following syllogism: Premise: All mammals are animals. Premise: All whales are mammals. Conclusion: Therefore, all whales are animals. denotation: the definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. The word ‘‘apartheid’’ denotes a political and economic policy of segregation by race, but its connotations—oppression, slavery, inequality—are numerous. denouement: a French word meaning ‘‘the unknotting.’’ In literary criticism, it denotes the resolution of conflict in fiction or drama. The denouement follows the climax and provides an outcome to the primary plot situation as well as an explanation of secondary plot complications. The denouement often involves a character’s recognition of his or her state of mind or moral condition. A wellknown example of denouement is the last scene of the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, in which couples are married, an evildoer repents, the identities of two disguised characters are revealed, and a ruler is restored to power. description: descriptive writing is intended to allow a reader to picture the scene or setting in which the action of a story takes place. The form this description takes often evokes an intended emotional response—a dark, spooky graveyard will evoke fear, and a peaceful, sunny meadow will evoke calmness. An example of a descriptive story is Edgar Allan Poe’s Landor’s Cottage, which offers a detailed depiction of a New York country estate. detective story: a narrative about the solution of a mystery or the identification of a criminal. The conventions of the detective story include the detective’s scrupulous use of logic in solving the mystery; incompetent or ineffectual police; a suspect who appears guilty at first but is later proved innocent;

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and the detective’s friend or confidant— often the narrator—whose slowness in interpreting clues emphasizes by contrast the detective’s brilliance. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ is commonly regarded as the earliest example of this type of story. With this work, Poe established many of the conventions of the detective story genre, which are still in practice. Other practitioners of this vast and extremely popular genre include Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie. dialogue: in its widest sense, dialogue is simply conversation between people in a literary work; in its most restricted sense, it refers specifically to the speech of characters in a drama. As a specific literary genre, a ‘‘dialogue’’ is a composition in which characters debate an issue or idea. The Greek philosopher Plato frequently expounded his theories in the form of dialogues. diary: a personal written record of daily events and thoughts. As private documents, diaries are supposedly not intended for an audience, but some, such as those of Samuel Pepys and Anais Nin, are known for their high literary quality. The Diary of Anne Frank is an example of a well-known diary discovered and published after the author’s death. Many writers have used the diary form as a deliberate literary device, as in N i k o l a i G o g o l ’ s s t o r y ‘‘ D i a r y o f a Madman.’’ diction: the selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. Either or both may vary depending on the desired effect. There are four general types of diction: ‘‘formal,’’ used in scholarly or lofty writing; ‘‘informal,’’ used in relaxed but educated conversation; ‘‘colloquial,’’ used in everyday speech; and ‘‘slang,’’ containing newly coined words and other terms not accepted in formal usage.

Examples of didactic literature include John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, JeanJacques Rousseau’s Emile, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Simple Story. documentary novel: see Documentary doppelganger: a literary technique by which a character is duplicated (usually in the form of an alter ego, though sometimes as a ghostly counterpart) or divided into two distinct, usually opposite personalities. The use of this character device is widespread in nineteenth- and twentieth- century literature, and indicates a growing awareness among authors that the ‘‘self’’ is really a composite of many ‘‘selves.’’ A well-known story containing a doppelganger character is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which dramatizes an internal struggle between good and evil. double entendre: a corruption of a French phrase meaning ‘‘double meaning.’’ The term is used to indicate a word or phrase that is deliberately ambiguous, especially when one of the meanings is risque or improper. An example of a double entendre is the Elizabethan usage of the verb ‘‘die,’’ which refers both to death and to orgasm. double, the: see Doppelganger draft: any preliminary version of a written work. An author may write dozens of drafts which are revised to form the final work, or he or she may write only one, with few or no revisions. Dorothy Parker’s observation that ‘‘I can’t write five words but that I change seven’’ humorously indicates the purpose of the draft.

didactic: a term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found in artistically pleasing works, the term ‘‘didactic’’ usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds ‘‘overly didactic,’’ that is, heavy-handed in its delivery of a lesson.

dramatic irony: occurs when the audience of a play or the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know. The irony is in the contrast between the intended meaning of the statements or actions of a character and the additional information understood by the audience. A celebrated example of dramatic irony is in Act V of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where two young lovers meet their end as a result of a tragic misunderstanding. Here, the audience has full knowledge that Juliet’s apparent ‘‘death’’ is merely temporary; she will regain her senses when the mysterious

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‘‘sleeping potion’’ she has taken wears off. But Romeo, mistaking Juliet’s drug-induced trance for true death, kills himself in grief. Upon awakening, Juliet discovers Romeo’s corpse and, in despair, slays herself. dramatis personae: the characters in a work of literature, particularly a drama. The list of characters printed before the main text of a play or in the program is the dramatis personae. dream allegory: see Dream Vision dream vision: a literary convention, chiefly of the Middle Ages. In a dream vision a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and religious lessons. Important works of this type are The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Piers Plowman by William Langland, and The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. dystopia: an imaginary place in a work of fiction where the characters lead dehumanized, fearful lives. Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale portray versions of dystopia.

E Edwardian: describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901–1910). Writers of the Edwardian Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Writers of this era include George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Edwardian age: see Edwardian electra complex: a daughter’s amorous obsession with her father. The term Electra complex comes from the plays of Euripides and Sophocles entitled Electra, in which the character Electra drives her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her lover in revenge for the murder of their father. Elizabethan age: a period of great economic growth, religious controversy, and nationalism closely associated with the reign of

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Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603). The Elizabethan Age is considered a part of the general renaissance—that is, the flowering of arts and literature—that took place in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The era is considered the golden age of English literature. The most important dramas in English and a great deal of lyric poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time. The notable authors of the period—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and John Donne—are among the best in all of English literature. empathy: a sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character. An example of an empathic passage is William Shakespeare’s description in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis of: the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain. Readers of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Windhover may experience some of the physical sensations evoked in the description of the movement of the falcon. enlightenment, the: an eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of the Enlightenment valued reason and believed that both the individual and society could achieve a state of perfection. Corresponding to this essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority. Important figures of the Enlightenment were Denis Diderot and Voltaire in France, Edward Gibbon and David Hume in England, and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in the United States. epigram: a saying that makes the speaker’s point quickly and concisely. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote an epigram that neatly sums up the form: ‘‘What is an Epigram? A Dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul.’’ epilogue: a concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

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the epilogue is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience. A famous epilogue is Puck’s speech at the end of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

exemplum: a tale with a moral message. This form of literary sermonizing flourished during the Middle Ages, when exempla appeared in collections known as ‘‘example-books.’’ The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are full of exempla.

epiphany: a sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. The term was widely used by James Joyce in his critical writings, and the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners are commonly called ‘‘epiphanies.’’

existentialism: a predominantly twentiethcentury philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because there are no fixed values, individuals can create their own characters— indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people find freedom from life’s anguish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters. Existentialist thought figures prominently in the works of such authors as Eugene Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus.

episode: an incident that forms part of a story and is significantly related to it. Episodes may be either self- contained narratives or events that depend on a larger context for their sense and importance. Examples of episodes include the founding of Wilmington, Delaware in Charles Reade’s The Disinherited Heir and the individual events comprising the picaresque novels and medieval romances. episodic plot: see plot epistolary novel: a novel in the form of letters. The form was particularly popular in the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is considered the first fully developed English epistolary novel. epitaph: an inscription on a tomb or tombstone, or a verse written on the occasion of a person’s death. Epitaphs may be serious or humorous. Dorothy Parker’s epitaph reads, ‘‘I told you I was sick.’’ epithet: a word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. ‘‘The Napoleon of crime’’ is an epithet applied to Professor Moriarty, arch-rival of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s series of detective stories. erziehungsroman: see bildungsroman essay: a prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. The term was coined by Michel de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of brief, informal reflections on himself and on various topics relating to human nature. An essay can also be a long, systematic discourse. An example of a longer essay is John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. exempla: see exemplum

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expatriates: see expatriatism expatriatism: the practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another country. Literary expatriates include English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats in Italy, Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in England, American writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway in France, and Trinidadian author Neil Bissondath in Canada. exposition: writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. In dramatic writing, the exposition is the introductory material which presents the characters, setting, and

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tone of the play. An example of dramatic exposition occurs in many nineteenthcentury drawing-room comedies in which the butler and the maid open the play with relevant talk about their master and mistress; in composition, exposition relays factual information, as in encyclopedia entries. expressionism: an indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentiethcentury school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Advocates of Expressionism include dramatists George Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Luigi Pirandello, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O’Neill, and Elmer Rice; poets George Heym, Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, and Georg Trakl; and novelists Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

F Fable: a prose or verse narrative intended to convey a moral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in fables. A famous fable is Aesop’s ‘‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’’ fairy tales: short narratives featuring mythical beings such as fairies, elves, and sprites. These tales originally belonged to the folklore of a particular nation or region, such as those collected in Germany by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Two other celebrated writers of fairy tales are Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling. falling action: see denouement fantasy: a literary form related to mythology and folklore. Fantasy literature is typically set in non-existent realms and features supernatural beings. Notable examples of fantasy literature are The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. farce: a type of comedy characterized by broad humor, outlandish incidents, and often vulgar subject matter. Much of the ‘‘comedy’’ in film and television could more accurately be described as farce. femme fatale: a French phrase with the literal translation ‘‘fatal woman.’’ A femme fatale is a sensuous, alluring woman who often leads men into danger or trouble. A classic

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example of the femme fatale is the nameless character in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, portrayed by Marilyn Monroe in the film adaptation. festschrift: a collection of essays written in honor of a distinguished scholar and presented to him or her to mark some special occasion. Examples of festschriften are Worlds of Jewish Prayer: A Festschrift in Honour of Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi and The Organist as Scholar: Essays in Memory of Russell Saunders. fiction: any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and configuration is a creation of the author. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind are examples of fiction. figurative language: a technique in writing in which the author temporarily interrupts the order, construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of one or more figures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, or simile. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Examples of figurative language are tropes such as metaphor and rhetorical figures such as apostrophe. figures of speech: writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types of figures of speech: rhetorical figures, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words, and tropes, which do. Types of figures of speech include simile, hyperbole, alliteration, and pun, among many others. Fin de siecle: a French term meaning ‘‘end of the century.’’ The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century, a transition period when writers and other artists abandoned old conventions and looked for new techniques and objectives. Two writers commonly associated with the fin de siecle mindset are Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

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First Person: see point of view flashback: a device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. Flashbacks are often introduced as the dreams or recollections of one or more characters. Flashback techniques are often used in films, where they are typically set off by a gradual changing of one picture to another. foil: a character in a work of literature whose physical or psychological qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed Dr. Watson as a man of normal habits and intelligence, making him a foil for the eccentric and wonderfully perceptive Sherlock Holmes. folklore: traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms—such as legends, songs, and proverbs—or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was first used by W. J. Thoms in 1846. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is the record of English folklore; myths about the frontier and the Old South exemplify American folklore. folktale: a story originating in oral tradition. Folktales fall into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events. Examples of folktales include Giambattista Basile’s The Pentamerone, which contains the tales of Puss in Boots, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, which represent transplanted African folktales and American tales about the characters Mike Fink, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and Pecos Bill. foreshadowing: a device used in literature to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the graveyard encounter at the beginning of the novel between Pip and the escaped convict Magwitch foreshadows the baleful atmosphere and events that comprise much of the narrative.

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form: the pattern or construction of a work which identifies its genre and distinguishes it from other genres. Examples of forms include the different genres, such as the lyric form or the short story form, and various patterns for poetry, such as the verse form or the stanza form. futurism: a flamboyant literary and artistic movement that developed in France, Italy, and Russia from 1908 through the 1920s. Futurist theater and poetry abandoned traditional literary forms. In their place, followers of the movement attempted to achieve total freedom of expression through bizarre imagery and deformed or newly invented words. The Futurists were self-consciously modern artists who attempted to incorporate the appearances and sounds of modern life into their work. Futurist writers include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

G genre: a category of literary work. In critical theory, genre may refer to both the content of a given work—tragedy, comedy, pastoral—and to its form, such as poetry, novel, or drama. This term also refers to types of popular literature, as in the genres of science fiction or the detective story. genteel tradition: a term coined by critic George Santayana to describe the literary practice of certain late nineteenth- century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of the Genteel Tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards. Some of the best-known writers of the Genteel Tradition are R. H. Stoddard and Bayard Taylor. gilded age: a period in American history during the 1870s characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Examples of Gilded Age literature include Henry Adams’s Democracy and F. Marion Crawford’s An American Politician. gothic: see gothicism gothicism: in literary criticism, works characterized by a taste for the medieval or morbidly attractive. A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural,

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gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, charnel houses, ghosts, medieval castles, and mysteriously slamming doors. The term ‘‘gothic novel’’ is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is perhaps the best-known English work of this kind. gothic novel: see gothicism great chain of being: the belief that all things and creatures in nature are organized in a hierarchy from inanimate objects at the bottom to God at the top. This system of belief was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A summary of the concept of the great chain of being can be found in the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, and more recently in Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. grotesque: in literary criticism, the subject matter of a work or a style of expression characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity. Early examples of literary grotesque include Francois Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, while more recent examples can be found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene Ionesco, Gunter Grass, Thomas Mann, Mervyn Peake, and Joseph Heller, among many others.

H hamartia: in tragedy, the event or act that leads to the hero’s or heroine’s downfall. This term is often incorrectly used as a synonym for tragic flaw. In Richard Wright’s Native Son, the act that seals Bigger Thomas’s fate is his first impulsive murder. Harlem renaissance: the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is generally considered the first significant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread

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recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Works representative of the Harlem Renaissance include Arna Bontemps’s poems ‘‘The Return’’ and ‘‘Golgotha Is a Mountain,’’ Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem, Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, Langston Hughes’s poem ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’’ and the journals Crisis and Opportunity, both founded during this period. Hellenism: imitation of ancient Greek thought or styles. Also, an approach to life that focuses on the growth and development of the intellect. ‘‘Hellenism’’ is sometimes used to refer to the belief that reason can be applied to examine all human experience. A cogent discussion of Hellenism can be found in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. hero/heroine: the principal sympathetic character (male or female) in a literary work. Heroes and heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: idealism, courage, and integrity, for example. Famous heroes and heroines include Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. heroine: see hero/heroine historical criticism: the study of a work based on its impact on the world of the time period in which it was written. Examples of postmodern historical criticism can be found in the work of Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jonathan Goldberg. holocaust: see holocaust literature holocaust literature: literature influenced by or written about the Holocaust of World War II. Such literature includes true stories of survival in concentration camps, escape, and life after the war, as well as fictional works and poetry. Representative works of Holocaust literature include Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, Czeslaw Milosz’s Collected Poems,

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William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. horatian satire: see Satire humanism: a philosophy that places faith in the dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature. ‘‘Humanists’’ typically believe in the perfectibility of human nature and view reason and education as the means to that end. Humanist thought is represented in the works of Marsilio Ficino, Ludovico Castelvetro, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Dean John Colet, Desiderius Erasmus, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Matthew Arnold, and Irving Babbitt. humors: mentions of the humors refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person’s health and personality were determined by the balance of four basic fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A dominance of any fluid would cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive, and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience, anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness, gluttony, and lack of motivation. Literary treatment of the humors is exemplified by several characters in Ben Jonson’s plays Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour. humours: see humors hyperbole: in literary criticism, deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect. In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth hyperbolizes when she says, ‘‘All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand.’’

representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the object or experience itself. Images are either ‘‘literal’’ or ‘‘figurative.’’ Literal images are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are usually visual, but the term ‘‘image’’ can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience. In his poem ‘‘The Shepherd’s Hour,’’ Paul Verlaine presents the following image: ‘‘The Moon is red through horizon’s fog;/ In a dancing mist the hazy meadow sleeps.’’ The first line is broadly literal, while the second line involves turns of meaning associated with dancing and sleeping. Imagery: the array of images in a literary work. Also, figurative language. William Butler Yeats’s ‘‘The Second Coming’’ offers a powerful image of encroaching anarchy: Turning and turning in the widening gyre ‘‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart. . . .’’ in medias res: a Latin term meaning ‘‘in the middle of things.’’ It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various flashback devices to reveal previous action. This technique originated in such epics as Virgil’s Aeneid. induction: the process of reaching a conclusion by reasoning from specific premises to form a general premise. Also, an introductory portion of a work of literature, especially a play. Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘‘Prologue’’ to the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Sackville’s ‘‘Induction’’ to The Mirror of Magistrates, and the opening scene in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew are examples of inductions to literary works.

image: a concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a

intentional fallacy: the belief that judgments of a literary work based solely on an author’s stated or implied intentions are false and misleading. Critics who believe in the concept of the intentional fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufficient matter for interpretation, even though they may concede that an author’s statement of purpose c a n b e us e f u l . A n a l y s i s o f W i l l i a m Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads based on the observations about poetry he makes in his

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I idiom: a word construction or verbal expression closely associated with a given language. For example, in colloquial English the construction ‘‘how come’’ can be used instead of ‘‘why’’ to introduce a question. Similarly, ‘‘a piece of cake’’ is sometimes used to describe a task that is easily done.

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‘‘Preface’’ to the second edition of that work is an example of the intentional fallacy.

the fictional characters’ language of ‘‘Nadsat.’’

interior monologue: a narrative technique in which characters’ thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. images are often used to represent sensations or emotions. One of the bestknown interior monologues in English is the Molly Bloom section at the close of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The interior monologue is also common in the works of Virginia Woolf.

journalism: writing intended for publication in a newspaper or magazine, or for broadcast on a radio or television program featuring news, sports, entertainment, or other timely material. The essays and reviews written by H. L. Mencken for the Baltimore Morning Herald and collected in his Prejudices are an example of journalism.

Irish literary renaissance: a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement in Irish literature. Members of the movement aimed to reduce the influence of British culture in Ireland and create an Irish national literature. William Butler Yeats, George Moore, and Sean O’Casey are three of the best-known figures of the movement. irony: in literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. The title of Jonathan Swift’s ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ is ironic because what Swift proposes in this essay is cannibalism—hardly ‘‘modest.’’

J Jacobean age: the period of the reign of James I of England (1603-1625). The early literature of this period reflected the worldview of the Elizabethan Age, but a darker, more cynical attitude steadily grew in the art and literature of the Jacobean Age. This was an important time for English drama and poetry. Milestones include W illiam Shakespeare’s tragedies, tragi-comedies, and sonnets; Ben Jonson’s various dramas; and John Donne’s metaphysical poetry. jargon: language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people. Literary examples of jargon are Francois Villon’s Ballades en jargon, which is composed in the secret language of the coquillards, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, narrated in

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juvenalian satire: see satire

K knickerbocker group: a somewhat indistinct group of New York writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme: New York life. Two famous members of the Knickerbocker Group were Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. The group’s name derives from Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York. kunstlerroman: see bildungsroman

L lais: see lay leitmotiv: see motif literal language: an author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of figurative language. To say ‘‘He ran very quickly down the street’’ is to use literal language, whereas to say ‘‘He ran like a hare down the street’’ would be using figurative language. literature: literature is broadly defined as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works. Literature includes poetry, drama, fiction, and many kinds of nonfiction writing, as well as oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions not necessarily preserved in a written format, such as films and television programs. lost generation: a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly

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applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

M mannerism: exaggerated, artificial adherence to a literary manner or style. Also, a popular style of the visual arts of late sixteenth-century Europe that was marked by elongation of the human form and by intentional spatial distortion. Literary works that are selfconsciously high-toned and artistic are often said to be ‘‘mannered.’’ Authors of such works include Henry James and Gertrude Stein. memoirs: an autobiographical form of writing in which the author gives his or her personal impressions of significant figures or events. This form is different from the autobiography because it does not center around the author’s own life and experiences. Early examples of memoirs include the Viscount de Chateaubriand’s The Memoirs of Chateaubriand and Giacomo Casanova’s History of My Life, while modern memoirs include reminiscences of World War II by Dwight Eisenhower, Viscount Montgomery, and Charles de Gaulle. metaphor: a figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object. An example is ‘‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’’ in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Here, Juliet, the first object, is identified with qualities of the second object, the sun.

mood: the prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter. The poem ‘‘Dover Beach’’ by Matthew Arnold offers examples of two different moods originating from the same experience: watching the ocean at night. The mood of the first three lines—‘‘The sea is calm tonight The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straights. . . .’’ is in sharp contrast to the mood of the last three lines— ‘‘And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.’’ Motif: a theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. For example, the various manifestations of the color white in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a ‘‘specific’’ motif, while the trials of star-crossed lovers is a ‘‘conventional’’ motif from the literature of all periods. Motiv: see Motif muckrakers: an early twentieth-century group of American writers. Typically, their works exposed the wrongdoings of big business and government in the United States. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exemplifies the muckraking novel.

modernism: modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. Many writers are associated with the concepts of Modernism, including Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and James Joyce.

muses: nine Greek mythological goddesses, the da ug ht ers o f Z e us a nd M n emo sy ne (Memory). Each muse patronized a specific area of the liberal arts and sciences. Calliope presided over epic poetry, Clio over history, Erato over love poetry, Euterpe over music or lyric poetry, Melpomene over tragedy, Polyhymnia over hymns to the gods, Terpsichore over dance, Thalia over comedy, and Urania over astronomy. Poets and writers traditionally made appeals to the Muses for inspiration in their work. John Milton invokes the aid of a muse at the beginning of the first book of his Paradise Lost: ‘‘Of Man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit of the Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That

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Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos. . . .’’ mystery: see Suspense myth: an anonymous tale emerging from the traditional beliefs of a culture or social unit. Myths use supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They may also explain cosmic issues like creation and death. Collections of myths, known as mythologies, are common to all cultures and nations, but the best-known myths belong to the Norse, Roman, and Greek mythologies. A famous myth is the story of Arachne, an arrogant young girl who challenged a goddess, Athena, to a weaving contest; when the girl won, Athena was enraged and turned Arachne into a spider, thus explaining the existence of spiders.

N narration: the telling of a series of events, real or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reflecting the author’s artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘‘storyline.’’ The recounting of scary stories around a campfire is a form of narration. narrative: a verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense ‘‘method of narration.’’ For example, in literary criticism, the expression ‘‘narrative technique’’ usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Narratives range from the shortest accounts of events, as in Julius Caesar’s remark, ‘‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’’ to the longest historical or biographical works, as in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as diaries, travelogues, novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. narrator: the teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Huckleberry Finn is the narrator of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. naturalism: a literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The

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movement’s major theorist, French novelist Emile Zola, envisioned a type of fiction that would examine human life with the objectivity of scientific inquiry. The Naturalists typically viewed human beings as either the products of ‘‘biological determinism,’’ ruled by hereditary instincts and engaged in an endless struggle for survival, or as the products of ‘‘socioeconomic determinism,’’ ruled by social and economic forces beyond their control. In their works, the Naturalists generally ignored the highest levels of society and focused on degradation: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, insanity, and disease. Naturalism influenced authors throughout the world, including Henrik Ibsen and Thomas Hardy. In the United States, in particular, Naturalism had a profound impact. Among the authors who embraced its principles are Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Frank Norris. negritude: a literary movement based on the concept of a shared cultural bond on the part of black Africans, wherever they may be in the world. It traces its origins to the former French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Negritude poets, novelists, and essayists generally stress four points in their writings: One, black alienation from traditional African culture can lead to feelings of inferiority. Two, European colonialism and Western education should be resisted. Three, black Africans should seek to affirm and define their own identity. Four, African culture can and should be reclaimed. Many Negritude writers also claim that blacks can make unique contributions to the world, based on a heightened appreciation of nature, rhythm, and human emotions—aspects of life they say are not so highly valued in the materialistic and rationalistic West. Examples of Negritude literature include the poetry of both Senegalese Leopold Senghor in Hosties noires and Martiniquais Aime-Fernand Cesaire in Return to My Native Land. negro renaissance: see Harlem renaissance neoclassical period: see neoclassicism neoclassicism: in literary criticism, this term refers to the revival of the attitudes and styles of expression of classical literature. It is generally used to describe a period in

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European history beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting until about 1800. In its purest form, Neoclassicism marked a return to order, proportion, restraint, logic, accuracy, and decorum. In England, where Neoclassicism perhaps was most popular, it reflected the influence of seventeenth- century French writers, especially dramatists. Neoclassical writers typically reacted against the intensity and enthusiasm of the Renaissance period. They wrote works that appealed to the intellect, using elevated language and classical literary forms such as satire and the ode. Neoclassical works were often governed by the classical goal of instruction. English neoclassicists included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, John Gay, and Matthew Prior; French neoclassicists included Pierre Corneille and Jean-Baptiste Moliere. neoclassicists: see Neoclassicism new criticism: a movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of literature. The New Critics saw little merit in historical and biographical analysis. Rather, they aimed to examine the text alone, free from the question of how external events—biographical or otherwise—may have helped shape it. This predominantly American school was named ‘‘New Criticism’’ by one of its practitioners, John Crowe Ransom. Other important New Critics included Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. new journalism: a type of writing in which the journalist presents factual information in a form usually used in fiction. New journalism emphasizes description, narration, and character development to bring readers closer to the human element of the story, and is often used in personality profiles and in-depth feature articles. It is not compatible with ‘‘straight’’ or ‘‘hard’’ newswriting, which is generally composed in a brief, fact-based style. Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, Thomas Wolfe, Joan Didion, and John McPhee are well-known New Journalists.

noble savage: the idea that primitive man is noble and good but becomes evil and corrupted as he becomes civilized. The concept of the noble savage originated in the Renaissance period but is more closely identified with such later writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Aphra Behn. First described in John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada, the noble savage is portrayed by the various Native Americans in James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘‘Leatherstocking Tales,’’ by Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and by John the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. novel: a long fictional narrative written in prose, which developed from the novella and other early forms of narrative. A novel is usually organized under a plot or theme with a focus on character development and action. The novel emerged as a fully evolved literary form in the mid-eighteenth century in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. novella: an Italian term meaning ‘‘story.’’ This term has been especially used to describe fourteenth-century Italian tales, but it also refers to modern short novels. The tales comprising Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron are examples of the novella. Modern novellas include Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Henry James’s ‘‘The Aspern Papers.’’ novel of ideas: a novel in which the examination of intellectual issues and concepts takes precedence over characterization or a traditional storyline. Examples of novels of ideas include Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Point Counter Point, and After Many a Summer. novel of manners: a novel that examines the customs and mores of a cultural group. The novels of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton are widely considered novels of manners.

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new negro movement: see Harlem renaissance

Objective Correlative: an outward set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events corresponding to an inward experience and evoking this experience in the reader. The term frequently appears in modern criticism in

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discussions of authors’ intended effects on the emotional responses of readers. This term was originally used by T. S. Eliot in his 1919 essay ‘‘Hamlet.’’ objectivity: a quality in writing characterized by the absence of the author’s opinion or feeling about the subject matter. Objectivity is an important factor in criticism. The novels of Henry James and, to a certain extent, the poems of John Larkin demonstrate objectivity, and it is central to John Keats’s concept of ‘‘negative capability.’’ Critical and journalistic writing usually are or attempt to be objective. Oedipus complex: a son’s amorous obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Literary occurrences of the Oedipus complex include Andre Gide’s Oedipe and Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale, as well as the most famous, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. omniscience: see point of view onomatopoeia: the use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as ‘‘hiss’’ or ‘‘meow.’’ At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic. A celebrated example of onomatopoeia is the repetition of the word ‘‘bells’’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘‘The Bells.’’ oxymoron: a phrase combining two contradictory terms. Oxymorons may be intentional or unintentional. The following speech from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet uses several oxymorons: ‘‘Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of wellseeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.’’

P pantheism: the idea that all things are both a manifestation or revelation of God and a part of God at the same time. Pantheism was a common attitude in the early societies of Egypt, India, and Greece—the term derives from the Greek pan meaning ‘‘all’’

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and theos meaning ‘‘deity.’’ It later became a significant part of the Christian faith. William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among the many writers who have expressed the pantheistic attitude in their works. parable: a story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question. In the West, the best examples of parables are those of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, notably ‘‘The Prodigal Son,’’ but parables also are used in Sufism, rabbinic literature, Hasidism, and Zen Buddhism. paradox: a statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth. ‘‘Less is more’’ is an example of a paradox. Literary examples include Francis Bacon’s statement, ‘‘The most corrected copies are commonly the least correct,’’ and ‘‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’’ from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. parallelism: a method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘‘Civilization’’ contains this example of parallelism: ‘‘Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.’’ parnassianism: a mid nineteenth-century movement in French literature. Followers of the movement stressed adherence to welldefined artistic forms as a reaction against the often chaotic expression of the artist’s ego that dominated the work of the Romantics. The Parnassians also rejected the moral, ethical, and social themes exhibited in the works of French Romantics such as Victor Hugo. The aesthetic doctrines of the Parnassians strongly influenced the later symbolist and decadent movements. Members of the Parnassian school include Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Albert Glatigny, Francois Coppee, and Theodore de Banville. parody: in literary criticism, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. A typical parody adopts

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the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon. Henry Fielding’s Shamela is a parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. pastoral: a term derived from the Latin word ‘‘pastor,’’ meaning shepherd. A pastoral is a literary composition on a rural theme. The conventions of the pastoral were originated by the third-century Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the experiences, love affairs, and pastimes of Sicilian shepherds. In a pastoral, characters and language of a courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting. The term pastoral is also used to classify dramas, elegies, and lyrics that exhibit the use of country settings and shepherd characters. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘Adonais’’ and John Milton’s ‘‘Lycidas’’ are two famous examples of pastorals. pelado: literally the ‘‘skinned one’’ or shirtless one, he was the stock underdog, sharpwitted picaresque character of Mexican vaudeville and tent shows. The pelado is found in such works as Don Catarino’s Los effectos de la crisis and Regreso a mi tierra. pen name: see pseudonym persona: a Latin term meaning ‘‘mask.’’ Personae are the characters in a fictional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an ‘‘implied author,’’ a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself. Personae include the narrator of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

envious, sick, and pale with grief—all markedly human qualities. phenomenology: a method of literary criticism based on the belief that things have no existence outside of human consciousness or awareness. Proponents of this theory believe that art is a process that takes place in the mind of the observer as he or she contemplates an object rather than a quality of the object itself. Among phenomenological critics are Edmund Husserl, George Poulet, Marcel Raymond, and Roman Ingarden. picaresque novel: episodic fiction depicting the adventures of a roguish central character (‘‘picaro’’ is Spanish for ‘‘rogue’’). The picaresque hero is commonly a low-born but clever individual who wanders into and out of various affairs of love, danger, and farcical intrigue. These involvements may take place at all social levels and typically present a humorous and wide-ranging satire of a given society. Prominent examples of the picaresque novel are Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, and Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. plagiarism: claiming another person’s written material as one’s own. Plagiarism can take the form of direct, word-for- word copying or the theft of the substance or idea of the work. A student who copies an encyclopedia entry and turns it in as a report for school is guilty of plagiarism. Platonic criticism: a form of criticism that stresses an artistic work’s usefulness as an agent of social engineering rather than any quality or value of the work itself. Platonic criticism takes as its starting point the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s comments on art in his Republic.

personification: a figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. William Shakespeare used personification in Romeo and Juliet in the lines ‘‘Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, / Who is already sick and pale with grief.’’ Here, the moon is portrayed as being

Platonism: the embracing of the doctrines of the philosopher Plato, popular among the poets of the Renaissance and the Romantic period. Platonism is more flexible than Aristotelian Criticism and places more emphasis on the supernatural and unknown aspects of life. Platonism is expressed in the love poetry of the Renaissance, the fourth book of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, and the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe

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Shelley, Friedrich Holderlin, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. plot: in literary criticism, this term refers to the pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an ‘‘episodic plot.’’ In his Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster distinguishes between a story, defined as a ‘‘narrative of events arranged in their time- sequence,’’ and plot, which organizes the events to a ‘‘sense of causality.’’ This definition closely mirrors Aristotle’s discussion of plot in his Poetics. poetic justice: an outcome in a literary work, not necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, especially in ways that particularly fit their virtues or crimes. For example, a murderer may himself be murdered, or a thief will find himself penniless. poetic license: distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet—for the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is closely related to the concept of ‘‘artistic freedom.’’ An author exercises poetic license by saying that a pile of money ‘‘reaches as high as a mountain’’ when the pile is actually only a foot or two high. poetics: this term has two closely related meanings. It denotes (1) an aesthetic theory in literary criticism about the essence of poetry or (2) rules prescribing the proper methods, content, style, or diction of poetry. The term poetics may also refer to theories about literature in general, not just poetry. point of view: the narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. There are four traditional points of view. The ‘‘third person omniscient’’ gives the reader a ‘‘godlike’’ perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The ‘‘third person’’ point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character’s perception, much like

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the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters’ minds or motivations. The ‘‘first person’’ or ‘‘personal’’ point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character ‘‘tells’’ the story and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and first person is the ‘‘second person’’ point of view, wherein the author tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. James Thurber employs the omniscient point of view in his short story ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’’ Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’’ is a short story told from the third person point of view. Mark Twain’s novel Huck Finn is presented from the first person viewpoint. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City is an example of a novel which uses the second person point of view. polemic: a work in which the author takes a stand on a controversial subject, such as abortion or religion. Such works are often extremely argumentative or provocative. Classic examples of polemics include John Milton’s Aeropagitica and Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis. pornography: writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which can be shown to have literary value are viewed less harshly. Literary works that have been described as pornographic include Ovid’s The Art of Love, Margaret of Angouleme’s Heptameron, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; or, the Life of Fanny Hill, the anonymous My Secret Life, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. post-aesthetic movement: an artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter,

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African Americans are portrayed as looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Two well-known examples of works produced as part of the post-aesthetic movement are the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison. postmodernism: writing from the 1960s forward characterized by experimentation and continuing to apply some of the fundamentals of modernism, which included existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the anti-novel over the novel and the anti-hero over the hero. Postmodern writers include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, Adolfo Bioy-Casares, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. pre-Raphaelites: a circle of writers and artists in mid nineteenth-century England. Valuing the pre-Renaissance artistic qualities of religious symbolism, lavish pictorialism, and natural sensuousness, the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a sense of mystery and melancholy that influenced later writers associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. The major members of the group include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and Walter Pater. primitivism: the belief that primitive peoples were nobler and less flawed than civilized peoples because they had not been subjected to the tainting influence of society. Examples of literature espousing primitivism include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave, JeanJacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, the poems of Robert Burns, Herman Melville’s stories Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, many poems of William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, and William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. prologue: an introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the

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principal characters. In the ‘‘General Prologue’’ of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer describes the main characters and establishes the setting and purpose of the work. prose: a literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. Recognized masters of English prose writing include Sir Thomas Malory, William Caxton, Raphael Holinshed, Joseph Addison, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway. prosopopoeia: see personification protagonist: the central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. The protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions of modern literature as the hero or anti-hero. Well-known protagonists are Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. protest fiction: protest fiction has as its primary purpose the protesting of some social injustice, such as racism or discrimination. One example of protest fiction is a series of five novels by Chester Himes, beginning in 1945 with If He Hollers Let Him Go and ending in 1955 with The Primitive. These works depict the destructive effects of race and gender stereotyping in the context of interracial relationships. Another African American author whose works often revolve around themes of social protest is John Oliver Killens. James Baldwin’s essay ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’’ generated controversy by attacking the authors of protest fiction. proverb: a brief, sage saying that expresses a truth about life in a striking manner. ‘‘They are not all cooks who carry long knives’’ is an example of a proverb. pseudonym: a name assumed by a writer, most often intended to prevent his or her identification as the author of a work. Two or more authors may work together under one pseudonym, or an author may use a different

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name for each genre he or she publishes in. Some publishing companies maintain ‘‘house pseudonyms,’’ under which any number of authors may write installations in a series. Some authors also choose a pseudonym over their real names the way an actor may use a stage name. Examples of pseudonyms (with the author’s real name in parentheses) include Voltaire (FrancoisMarie Arouet), Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), Ellis Bell (Emily Bronte), George Eliot (Maryann Evans), Honorio Bustos Donmecq (Adolfo Bioy-Casares and Jorge Luis Borges), and Richard Bachman (Stephen King). pun: a play on words that have similar sounds but different meanings. A serious example of the pun is from John Donne’s ‘‘A Hymne to God the Father’’: ‘‘Sweare by thyself, that at my death thy sonne Shall shine as he shines now, and hereto fore; And, having done that, Thou haste done; I fear no more.’’

R realism: a nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjective experience. Seminal authors in the tradition of Realism include Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James. renaissance: the period in European history that marked the end of the Middle Ages. It began in Italy in the late fourteenth century. In broad terms, it is usually seen as spanning the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, although it did not reach Great Britain, for example, until the 1480s or so. The Renaissance saw an awakening in almost every sphere of human activity, especially science, philosophy, and the arts. The period is best defined by the emergence of a general philosophy that emphasized the importance of the intellect, the individual,

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and world affairs. It contrasts strongly with the medieval worldview, characterized by the dominant concerns of faith, the social collective, and spiritual salvation. Prominent writers during the Renaissance include Niccolo Machiavelli and Baldassare Castiglione in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega in Spain, Jean Froissart and Francois Rabelais in France, Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney in England, and Desiderius Erasmus in Holland. repartee: conversation featuring snappy retorts and witticisms. Masters of repartee include Sydney Smith, Charles Lamb, and Oscar Wilde. An example is recorded in the meeting of ‘‘Beau’’ Nash and John Wesley: Nash said, ‘‘I never make way for a fool,’’ to which Wesley responded, ‘‘Don’t you? I always do,’’ and stepped aside. resolution: the portion of a story following the climax, in which the conflict is resolved. The resolution of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is neatly summed up in the following sentence: ‘‘Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and every body smiled.’’ restoration: see restoration age restoration age: a period in English literature beginning with the crowning of Charles II in 1660 and running to about 1700. The era, which was characterized by a reaction against Puritanism, was the first great age of the comedy of manners. The finest literature of the era is typically witty and urbane, and often lewd. Prominent Restoration Age writers include William Congreve, Samuel Pepys, John Dryden, and John Milton. rhetoric: in literary criticism, this term denotes the art of ethical persuasion. In its strictest sense, rhetoric adheres to various principles developed since classical times for arranging facts and ideas in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. The term is also used to refer to effective prose in general and theories of or methods for composing effective prose. Classical examples of rhetorics include The Rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, and Cicero’s Ad Herennium. rhetorical question: a question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly used in

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believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientific examination. Both the natural world and the state of childhood were important sources for revelations of ‘‘eternal truths.’’ ‘‘Romanticism’’ is also used as a general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason. Prominent Romantics include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

oratory and other persuasive genres. The following lines from Thomas Gray’s ‘‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’’ ask rhetorical questions: ‘‘Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?’’ rising action: the part of a drama where the plot becomes increasingly complicated. Rising action leads up to the climax, or turning point, of a drama. The final ‘‘chase scene’’ of an action film is generally the rising action which culminates in the film’s climax. rococo: a style of European architecture that flourished in the eighteenth century, especially in France. The most notable features of rococo are its extensive use of ornamentation and its themes of lightness, gaiety, and intimacy. In literary criticism, the term is often used disparagingly to refer to a decadent or over-ornamental style. Alexander Pope’s ‘‘The Rape of the Lock’’ is an example of literary rococo. Roman a clef: a French phrase meaning ‘‘novel with a key.’’ It refers to a narrative in which real persons are portrayed under fictitious names. Jack Kerouac, for example, portrayed various real-life beat generation figures under fictitious names in his On the Road. romance: a broad term, usually denoting a narrative with exotic, exaggerated, often idealized characters, scenes, and themes. Nathaniel Hawthorne called his The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun romances in order to distinguish them from clearly realistic works.

romantics: see romanticism Russian symbolism: a Russian poetic movement, derived from French symbolism, that flourished between 1894 and 1910. While some Russian Symbolists continued in the French tradition, stressing aestheticism and the importance of suggestion above didactic intent, others saw their craft as a form of mystical worship, and themselves as mediators between the supernatural and the mundane. Russian symbolists include Aleksandr Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Fyodor Sologub, Andrey Bely, Nikolay Gumilyov, and Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov.

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romanticism: this term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics

satire: a work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. There are two major types of satire: ‘‘formal’’ or ‘‘direct’’ satire speaks directly to the reader or to a character in the work; ‘‘indirect’’ satire relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point. Formal satire is further divided into two manners: the ‘‘Horatian,’’ which ridicules gently, and the ‘‘Juvenalian,’’ which derides its subjects harshly and bitterly. Voltaire’s novella Candide is an indirect satire. Jonathan Swift’s essay ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ is a Juvenalian satire.

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science fiction: a type of narrative about or based upon real or imagined scientific theories and technology. Science fiction is often peopled with alien creatures and set on other planets or in different dimensions. Karel Capek’s R.U.R. is a major work of science fiction.

simile: a comparison, usually using ‘‘like’’ or ‘‘as’’, of two essentially dissimilar things, as in ‘‘coffee as cold as ice’’ or ‘‘He sounded like a broken record.’’ The title of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants’’ contains a simile.

second person: see point of view

slang: a type of informal verbal communication that is generally unacceptable for formal writing. Slang words and phrases are often colorful exaggerations used to emphasize the speaker’s point; they may also be shortened versions of an often-used word or phrase. Examples of American slang from the 1990s include ‘‘yuppie’’ (an acronym for Young Urban Professional), ‘‘awesome’’ (for ‘‘excellent’’), wired (for ‘‘nervous’’ or ‘‘excited’’), and ‘‘chill out’’ (for relax).

semiotics: the study of how literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language. Semioticians include Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva. setting: the time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of setting may include geographic location, characters’ physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. Examples of settings include the romanticized Scotland in Sir Walter Scott’s ‘‘Waverley’’ novels, the French provincial setting in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the fictional Wessex country of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and the small towns of southern Ontario in Alice Munro’s short stories. short story: a fictional prose narrative shorter and more focused than a novella. The short story usually deals with a single episode and often a single character. The ‘‘tone,’’ the author’s attitude toward his or her subject and audience, is uniform throughout. The short story frequently also lacks denouement, ending instead at its climax. Wellk nown short stories in clu de E rnest H e m i n g w a y ’ s ‘‘ H i l l s L i k e W h i t e Elephants,’’ Katherine Mansfield’s ‘‘The Fly,’’ Jorge Luis Borge’s ‘‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’’ Eudora Welty’s ‘‘Death of a Travelling Salesman,’’ Yukio Mishima’s ‘‘ T h r e e M i l l i o n M e n , ’’ a n d M i l a n Kundera’s ‘‘The Hitchhiking Game.’’ signifying monkey: a popular trickster figure in black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the 19th century. Henry Louis Gates Jr. examines the history of the signifying monkey in The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, published in 1988.

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slave narrative: autobiographical accounts of American slave life as told by escaped slaves. These works first appeared during the abolition movement of the 1830s through the 1850s. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African and Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are examples of the slave narrative. social realism: see socialist realism socialist realism: the Socialist Realism school of literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and established as a dogma by the first Soviet Congress of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to the working classes and themes of social struggle featuring strong proletarian heroes. A successful work of socialist realism is Nikolay Ostrovsky’s Kak zakalyalas stal (How the Steel Was Tempered ). stereotype: a stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type. Common stereotypical characters include the absentminded professor, the nagging wife, the troublemaking teenager, and the kindhearted grandmother. stream of consciousness: a narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing

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series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life. The textbook example of stream of consciousness is the last section of James Joyce’s Ulysses. structuralism: a twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that examines how literary texts arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings themselves. There are two major types of structuralist analysis: one examines the way patterns of linguistic structures unify a specific text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other interprets the way literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language itself. Prominent structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roman Jakobson, and Roland Barthes. structure: the form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or seemingly ‘‘unstructured’’ prose. Examples of common literary structures include the plot of a narrative, the acts and scenes of a drama, and such poetic forms as the Shakespearean sonnet and the Pindaric ode. sturm und drang: a German term meaning ‘‘storm and stress.’’ It refers to a German literary movement of the 1770s and 1780s that reacted against the order and rationalism of the enlightenment, focusing instead on the intense experience of extraordinary individuals. Highly romantic, works of this movement, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen, are typified by realism, rebelliousness, and intense emotionalism. style: a writer’s distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author’s personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author’s way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition. Styles may be classified according to period (Metaphysical, Augustan, Georgian), individual authors (Chaucerian, Miltonic, Jamesian), level

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(grand, middle, low, plain), or language (scientific, expository, poetic, journalistic). subject: the person, event, or theme at the center of a work of literature. A work may have one or more subjects of each type, with shorter works tending to have fewer and longer works tending to have more. The subjects of James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain include the themes of father-son relationships, religious conversion, black life, and sexuality. The subjects of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl include Anne and her family members as well as World War II, the Holocaust, and the themes of war, isolation, injustice, and racism. subjectivity: writing that expresses the author’s personal feelings about his subject, and which may or may not include factual information about the subject. Subjectivity is demonstrated in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. subplot: a secondary story in a narrative. A subplot may serve as a motivating or complicating force for the main plot of the work, or it may provide emphasis for, or relief from, the main plot. The conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is an example of a subplot. surrealism: a term introduced to criticism by Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted by Andre Breton. It refers to a French literary and artistic movement founded in the 1920s. The Surrealists sought to express unconscious thoughts and feelings in their works. The best-known technique used for achieving this aim was automatic writing— transcriptions of spontaneous outpourings from the unconscious. The Surrealists proposed to unify the contrary levels of conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into a new level of ‘‘super-realism.’’ Surrealism can be found in the poetry of Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, and Louis Aragon, among others. suspense: a literary device in which the author maintains the audience’s attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon be revealed. Suspense in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is sustained

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throughout by the question of whether or not the Prince will achieve what he has been instructed to do and of what he intends to do. syllogism: a method of presenting a logical argument. In its most basic form, the syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. An example of a syllogism is: Major premise: When it snows, the streets get wet. Minor premise: It is snowing. Conclusion: The streets are wet. symbol: something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works. Examples of symbols are sunshine suggesting happiness, rain suggesting sorrow, and storm clouds suggesting despair. symbolism: this term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identifiable with the individual poet. The principal aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term ‘‘symbolism’’ refers to the use of one object to represent another. Early members of the Symbolist movement included the French authors Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot were influenced as the movement moved to Ireland, England, and the United States. Examples of the concept of symbolism include a flag that stands for a nation or movement, or an empty cupboard used to suggest hopelessness, poverty, and despair.

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symbolist: see symbolism symbolist movement: see symbolism

T tale: a story told by a narrator with a simple plot and little character development. Tales are usually relatively short and often carry a simple message. Examples of tales can be found in the work of Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Saki, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and Armistead Maupin. tall tale: a humorous tale told in a straightforward, credible tone but relating absolutely impossible events or feats of the characters. Such tales were commonly told of frontier adventures during the settlement of the west in the United States. Tall tales have been spun around such legendary heroes as Mike Fink, Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, and Captain Stormalong as well as the real-life William F. Cody and Annie Oakley. Literary use of tall tales can be found in Washington Irving’s History of New York, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and in the German R. F. Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narratives of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. textual criticism: a branch of literary criticism that seeks to establish the authoritative text of a literary work. Textual critics typically compare all known manuscripts or printings of a single work in order to assess the meanings of differences and revisions. This procedure allows them to arrive at a definitive version that (supposedly) corresponds to the author’s original intention. Textual criticism was applied during the Renaissance to salvage the classical texts of Greece and Rome, and modern works have been studied, for instance, to undo deliberate correction or censorship, as in the case of novels by Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. theme: the main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. The theme of William Shakespeare’s Othello—jealousy—is a common one. thesis: a thesis is both an essay and the point argued in the essay. Thesis novels and thesis plays share the quality of containing a thesis which is supported through the action of the story. A master’s thesis and a doctoral

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dissertation are two theses required of graduate students.

harsh facts of modern urban existence. Some works by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emile Zola, Abraham Cahan, and Henry Fuller feature urban realism. Modern examples include Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Ron Milner’s What the Wine Sellers Buy.

thesis novel: see thesis third person: see point of view tone: the author’s attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author’s attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it. The tone of John F. Kennedy’s speech which included the appeal to ‘‘ask not what your country can do for you’’ was intended to instill feelings of camaraderie and national pride in listeners. transcendentalism: an American philosophical and religious movement, based in New England from around 1835 until the Civil War. Transcendentalism was a form of American romanticism that had its roots abroad in the works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of intuition and subjective experience in communication with God. They rejected religious dogma and texts in favor of mysticism and scientific naturalism. They pursued truths that lie beyond the ‘‘colorless’’ realms perceived by reason and the senses and were active social reformers in public education, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Prominent members of the group include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. trickster: a character or figure common in Native American and African literature who uses his ingenuity to defeat enemies and escape difficult situations. Tricksters are most often animals, such as the spider, hare, or coyote, although they may take the form of humans as well. Examples of trickster tales include Thomas King’s A Coyote Columbus Story, Ashley F. Bryan’s The Dancing Granny and Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red.

U understatement: see irony urban realism: a branch of realist writing that attempts to accurately reflect the often

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utopia: a fictional perfect place, such as ‘‘paradise’’ or ‘‘heaven.’’ Early literary utopias were included in Plato’s Republic and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, while more modern utopias can be found in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Theodor Herzka’s A Visit to Freeland, and H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia. utopian: see utopia utopianism: see utopia

V verisimilitude: literally, the appearance of truth. In literary criticism, the term refers to aspects of a work of literature that seem true to the reader. Verisimilitude is achieved in the work of Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, among other late nineteenth-century realist writers. Victorian: refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Victorian. This stereotype is contradicted by such dramatic intellectual developments as the theories of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (which stirred strong debates in England) and the critical attitudes of serious Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism. Works of Victorian literature include the poetry of Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the criticism of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, and the novels of Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy. Victorian age: see Victorian Victorian period: see Victorian

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and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in France by Viscount de Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset, in Russia by Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, in Poland by Juliusz Slowacki, and in America by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

W weltanschauung: a German term referring to a person’s worldview or philosophy. Examples of weltanschauung include Thomas Hardy’s view of the human being as the victim of fate, destiny, or impersonal forces and circumstances, and the disillusioned and laconic cynicism expressed by such poets of the 1930s as W. H. Auden, Sir Stephen Spender, and Sir William Empson. weltschmerz: a German term meaning ‘‘world pain.’’ It describes a sense of anguish about the nature of existence, usually associated with a melancholy, pessimistic attitude. Weltschmerz was expressed in England by George Gordon, Lord Byron in his Manfred

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Z zeitgeist: a German term meaning ‘‘spirit of the time.’’ It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era. Examples of zeitgeist include the preoccupation with the more morbid aspects of dying and death in some Jacobean literature, especially in the works of dramatists Cyril Tourneur and John Webster, and the decadence of the French Symbolists.

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Subject/Theme Index A Adolescence Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 33–35, 38–39 Afghan life The Kite Runner: 100–103 African-American life and thought Here in Harlem: 53–54, 59–65 Allusions The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 263 American dream Kira-Kira: 73–74 Seabiscuit: 221 Anthropomorphism Seabiscuit: 223 The Wedding: 338 Appearance v. reality A Northern Light: 200 The Wedding: 337 Assimilation and acculturation The Kite Runner: 95 Australian lore True History of the Kelly Gang: 321–322, 323–325

B Biography Seabiscuit: 223 Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 360

C Catharsis Seabiscuit: 221

Change The Wedding: 338 Character development Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 38–41 Christianity The Da Vinci Code: 9–12 Coming of age The Lovely Bones: 137 A Northern Light: 199 The Secret Life of Bees: 242 Community and neighborhood Here in Harlem: 53–54, 59–63 Mystic River: 159, 163, 165–166 Community of women The Secret Life of Bees: 240 Conspiracy theories The Da Vinci Code: 17–21 Culture clash Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 178

D Diction Here in Harlem: 56, 59 The Kite Runner: 96 Didacticism The Wedding: 338 Divine feminine The Da Vinci Code: 4, 10, 14 The Secret Life of Bees: 240, 245, 247–249 Doppelga¨nger motif Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 43

Double narratives The Last Juror: 117 A Northern Light: 201 Doubt State of Fear: 280, 287–289 Duty and responsibility A Northern Light: 199

E Empathy Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 178 Employment and economics Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 177–178 Environmentalism State of Fear: 282–283, 285–289 Epic The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 262 Episodic form The Last Juror: 117 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 179–180 State of Fear: 280 Epistolary novels True History of the Kelly Gang: 320–321 Espionage fiction State of Fear: 283–285 Ethnic conflict Trickster’s Choice: 298, 303–305 See also Racism and race relations Evil The Lovely Bones: 146

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F Fact in fiction The Da Vinci Code: 10, 12–15, 18–21 True History of the Kelly Gang: 327–329 Family Kira-Kira: 73, 80–81 Mystic River: 159 The Wedding: 337–338 Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 358 Family, fathers, and fatherhood The Kite Runner: 93, 103 Fantasy The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 261–262 Trickster’s Choice: 301, 305–307, 307–308 Fear, function of State of Fear: 278–279 Flashback and foreshadowing The Lovely Bones: 139 The Kite Runner: 95–96 The Wedding: 339 Folk tales True History of the Kelly Gang: 321 Foreign language Kira-Kira: 75 Foreshadowing The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 262–263 Friendship The Kite Runner: 99, 101

True History of the Kelly Gang: 319, 323–325, 326–327 Historic nonfiction Seabiscuit: 223, 227 Home and domesticity True History of the Kelly Gang: 319–320 Hope Kira-Kira: 74–75 Humor State of Fear: 280 Humor as criticism Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 180–181

I Identity and self Kira-Kira: 73 The Kite Runner: 93 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 178–179 Imagery and symbolism The Kite Runner: 96 Seabiscuit: 223–224 The Secret Life of Bees: 241 Inner monologue The Kite Runner: 96 Mystic River: 160–161 Innocence Seabiscuit: 226 Insiders v. outsiders Mystic River: 162–165 Investigative journalism Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 180, 182–183

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Gender roles Kira-Kira: 73 Trickster’s Choice: 298–299, 302 The Wedding: 341–343 See also Women’s role Good and evil The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 260 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 33 Grief and loss The Lovely Bones: 136–137, 145–148, 147

Journey and quest The Da Vinci Code: 9 The Kite Runner: 93 The Secret Life of Bees: 244–245, 246–247

H Heritage and ancestry Kira-Kira: 73, 78–79, 79 The Kite Runner: 93–95 Heroes and heroines Seabiscuit: 230 Trickster’s Choice: 305–307

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Literary genres The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 265–268 Literary merit Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 36–37, 38–41, 41–44 Love, romantic The Wedding: 337, 340–341, 346–348 Love and kinship Kira-Kira: 73

M Machines The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 260–261 Magic The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 265–268 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 36, 37 Marriage and courtship A Northern Light: 200–201 Masculinity The Wedding: 341–343 Memoir Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 180 Metafiction The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 262, 264, 267 Metaphor The Wedding: 339–340 Mothers and daughters The Lovely Bones: 141–145 Trickster’s Choice: 299–300 Multiculturalism Kira-Kira: 78–79 Multiple voices Here in Harlem: 55–56 Music The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 262 Mystery The Da Vinci Code: 11 The Secret Life of Bees: 244–246

K Knowledge, limits of State of Fear: 279

L Life and death The Lovely Bones: 137 Limitations and opportunities Here in Harlem: 54–55 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 179 Literary biography Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 363–369

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N Natural World The Secret Life of Bees: 240 Naturalism A Northern Light: 205 Nature symbolism The Secret Life of Bees: 241 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 183–186

O Orphans Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 43

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Outlaw as hero True History of the Kelly Gang: 319, 323–325, 326–327

Pain and suffering Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 178 Perseverance Seabiscuit: 228–229 Picaresque novels True History of the Kelly Gang: 321 Plot frame Trickster’s Choice: 301 Point of view The Lovely Bones: 138–139, 141–142, 146 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 35 Kira-Kira: 75 Mystic River: 160 Trickster’s Choice: 300 Political power/abuse of power The Kite Runner: 89, 95, 100–101 Popular culture Seabiscuit: 221–222 Post-colonialism True History of the Kelly Gang: 319 Power of the past Mystic River: 158–159

Q Quest The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 260 The Secret Life of Bees: 244–245 See also Journey and quest

R Racism and race relations Kira-Kira: 73, 79 The Last Juror: 115, 120–123 The Secret Life of Bees: 234, 239–240 See also Ethnic conflict Realism Kira-Kira: 75 Religion and religious faith The Da Vinci Code: 18–21 The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: 260

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S Sacrifice The Da Vinci Code: 9 Scientific experiments Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 180 Search for knowledge Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 32 Search for the Mother The Secret Life of Bees: 240 Sense of place Seabiscuit: 223 Series Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 35 Setting The Lovely Bones: 139 Shakespearean plays, types of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 359 Sickness and death Kira-Kira: 80 Social class The Last Juror: 115–116 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 178, 183–189 Social order Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 33 Southern life The Last Juror: 115 Speculative biography Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 360, 362–369 Spiritual quest The Secret Life of Bees: 244–245, 246–247 Sport literature Seabiscuit: 227–228, 229–230

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Sporting life Seabiscuit: 222 Storytelling A Northern Light: 208 The Secret Life of Bees: 242 Strength and weakness Mystic River: 160 Success and social status Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 358–359 Suspense The Da Vinci Code: 11 State of Fear: 280–281 Symbols Kira-Kira: 75–76 See also Imagery and symbolism

T Third-person point of view Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 35 Mystic River: 160 Trickster’s Choice: 300 Triple protagonist Mystic River: 161

V Violence and crime The Last Juror: 000 The Lovely Bones: 000 Mystic River: 159–160 A Northern Light: 207–208 Voice A Northern Light: 201 True History of the Kelly Gang: 326–327

W Womanhood, motherhood, and family Trickster’s Choice: 299–300 Women’s role The Da Vinci Code: 14–16 Kira-Kira: 79–80 A Northern Light: 204–205 See also Gender roles Working class Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: 188–189 Wounded hero Seabiscuit: 223

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The Last Juror: 116 Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: 358 Religious symbolism The Secret Life of Bees: 241 Ritual, importance of The Secret Life of Bees: 240–241 Romance Trickster’s Choice: 300

I n d e x

Literary Newsmakers for Students Volume 1

Drama for Students Volume 1

Novels for Students Volume 1