Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thirty years ago, in an essay titled "Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday," novelist Ralph Ellison posed these questions: "How many generations of Americans, white and black, wooed their wives and had the ceremonial moments of their high school and college days memorialized by Ellington's tunes? And to how many thousands has he defined what it should mean to be young and alive and American?" Today, at a time when neo-swing and the Big Band sound have become trendy, even bursting forth from commercials for the Gap and Burger King, it's worth pondering how much...
...Novelist Thomas Berger responds to continuing fascination with the American West by distilling its sprawling, general history into the essence of this well-knit chronicle, Berger should be commended for his painstaking research, which allows him, through our personal tour-guide Jack, to make a complicated and convoluted history seem both very straightforward and very real; distant and lionized legends like Wild Bill Hickok become poignantly human through Jack's unique perspective and experience. In his novel The Return of little Big Man, Thomas Berger proves himself to be a master of the storytelling craft through an engaging narrative that...
...their responses to his work, a patternbecame evident, and I think it would not be unfairto say that if Hemingway's legacy is determined inlarge part by which of his works are read andvalued and thought beautiful or useful--aneffective definition of the canon expressed at theConference by the novelist Francine Prose--thenHemingway as a writer has been dramaticallyreduced...
...most politicians, are not likely to stand the test of time. Would an economist have been selected 10 years ago, shortly after Black Monday and on the eve of a major recession? I doubt it. By contrast, Ralph Ellison (Commencement speaker in 1974) will always be a great novelist, Oscar Arias (speaker in 1988) will always be a crusader for peace and Colin Powell (speaker in 1993) will always be a military hero...
Parini, himself a novelist and a poet, is something of a partisan--"Robert Frost has been my favorite poet ever since the ninth grade"--but his readings of the poems and of the man are shrewd. Frost had what might be called a limited greatness. Parini's dust jacket calls him "the only truly 'national poet' America has yet produced." No. That would still be Whitman...