I'm fascinated by how a fiction writer empathizes with characters whose experience is beyond his or her own. I was raised mostly in California. My high school had a slim white majority, followed by Mexican-Americans, then by Samoans. My father was a Congregational minister. After Sunday services he gave over his church to Samoans, who had no church of their own. Treating people of differing cultures is indispensable, but as I have aged I've seen that in no way should I appropriate nonwhite experience. It's a contradiction: One cannot not appropriate the lives of others in fiction. Yet one must define oneself by empathy for them. The hard-fought solution to the contradiction is compassion.
A remarkable book by the classic American writer. It is a novel, yet presents itself as a collection of stories. Faulkner explores the white history of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, but also extends himself to explore the Black characters that figure into the history whose true experience he can only have imagined. There are Lucas and Molly Beauchamp of "The Fire and the Hearth," the "Nigger" in "Pantaloon in Black," the part-Indian in "The Old People," Boon Hogganbeck in "The Bear,'" Molly again, and the doomed Samuel Beautchamp in ""Go Down Moses." The book is dedicated to a real person, Mammy, Caroline Barr, of whom Faulkner writes, "Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calcuation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love."
âI believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.â âWilliam Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulknerâs mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.
As was the fashion of the time, George Eliot took on a male pseudonym, replacing her true name, Mary Ann Evans. Typically she extended her subterfuge by writing about male characters whose names figured into the titles of her novels, e.g. Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Felix Holt the Radical, and Daniel Deronda. She had strong female characters, too, but it wasn't until her penultimate novel, Middlemarch, that she granted a female character, Dorothea, the center stage. There are male characters in this book, too: Dorothea's husband, the pedantic scholar, Casaubon, the physician, Lydgate, and of course the man whom Dorothea marries once Casaubon has died, Will Ladislaw. This is a historical novel, some forty years removed from its publication date. In it, Eliot regularly crosses the boundaries between female and male characters.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' Virginia Woolf
George Eliot's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from hisâŚ
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted reparteeâŚ
This could be any one of a number of books by Black authorsâCharles Wright, Ralph Ellison, James McPherson, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin.... Through such writers the experience of Black people is made available to those of us who are not Black. I've chosen Hurston's book because of the directness and rawness of her language and her use of scenes which bespeak the ability of a writer to transcend herself. Most memorable perhaps is the scene in which the abused and thrice married Janie is attempting to port her latest husband, Tea Cake, across a lake driven by wind. A bridge is fully occupied and of necessity they swim. Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog. He contracts rabies and dies.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling pieceâŚ
This is the story of the character in the title, Huckleberry Finn. He is escaping home, his cruel father, and his old friendships. Part way along his journey he is joined by the Black character Jim, who is escaping his enslavement. They travel along the Mississippi. While the book has as its protagonist Huckleberry, it seems that Jim is equally if not more important. He occupies the boundary Twain crosses as the book ultimately comes to revolve around Jim. In the end, it turns out that the woman thought to be his former owner has freed him of slavery.
Itâs 1969. Women are fighting for equality. Rosalee, an insecure sculptor, and Fran, a best-selling novelist, have their issues. Will their bitter envy of each other and long-held secrets destroy their tenuous friendship? Or will Jill, Rosaleeâs granddaughter, and the story behind her emerald necklace bind them together?
Perhaps Winter In The Blood is Welch's finest novel, though I hesitate to overlook Fools Crow. Like Hurston's work, the language in Winter In The Blood is raw, simple, and to the point. In this book, Welch offers a caveat to whites when he says, "I have seen works written about Indians by whites... but only an Indian knows who he is. If he has grown up on a reservation he will naturally write about what he knows. And hopefully he will have the toughness and fairness to present his material in a way that is not manufactured by a conventional stance. Whites have to adopt a stance; Indians already have one."
I love this book for its honesty generally and its gentle admonition regarding cross-cultural adventurism.
A contemporary classic from a major writer of the Native American renaissance â "Brilliant, brutal and, in my opinion, Welch's best work." âTommy Orange, The Washington Post
During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter in the Blood, is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted byâŚ
The action of the novel takes place in the American West, but it is not a "Western." Though its central focus is the life of Adaline Carson, the half-Arapaho daughter of the frontiersman Kit Carson, it is also not a biography. It is set in the time of the California gold rush, and is a graphic elegy for America's wide open plains, rivers, and mountains, and the people who lived in them, both for the good and ill. It is a vision of how greed, love, frontier mastery, and the doomed Native Tribes contended for control of this immensity, and how one young woman and her father were taken up in the resulting maelstrom that has become the American heritage.
Forty-six-year-old Madeline Fairbanks has no use for ideas like âseparation of the racesâ or âmen as the superior sex.â There are many in her dying Southern Appalachian town who are upset by her socially progressive views, but for yearsâpartly due to her late husbandâs still-powerful influence, and partly due toâŚ
When sixteen-year-old Ashlee Sutton's home life falls apart, she is beset by a rare mental illness that makes her believe she's clairvoyant. While most people scoff at her, she begins demonstrating an uncanny knack for sometimes predicting the future, using what could either be pure luck or something more remarkable.âŚ