#baldwin_james

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Battling with Life

(people at odds with the society around them)

James Baldwin, Go, Tell It on the Mountain

T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Tortilla Curtain

Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Maxim Gorky, Foma Gordeev

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Emile Zola, Nana

See also: EMOTIONALLY ILL-AT-EASE    PERPLEXED BY LIFE    REVISITING ONE'S PAST   

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The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

(seventeen-year-old escapes stifling upbringing, on the run in New York at Christmas)

Families (relationships between the generations)

Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Roddy Doyle, The Commitments

John Updike, The Centaur

John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle

François Mauriac, The Nest of Vipers

Growing Up (young adults coming to terms with their own needs and desires - and with the world at large)

William Golding, The Pyramid

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop  (adolescent orphan goes to live with deranged puppeteer-uncle)

Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career  (young Australian, 1910s, preys on follies of European bourgeoisie)

Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse

Philip Roth, Portnoy"s Complaint

Antonia White, Frost in May

New York (the city as a vast, all-engulfing landscape)

Jerome Weidman, Fourth Street East

Martin Amis, Money

James Baldwin, Another Country

USA (seen - by adults as well as the young - as a kind of theme-park on the borderland between reality and fantasy)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1860s Mississippi: boy"s adolescence on river and in riverside communities)

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Patricia Highsmith, The People Who Knock on the Door

John Irving, The Cider House Rules

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Garrison Keiller, Lake Wobegon Days

Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?  (Sammy claws his way to the top; scum always floats)

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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

(dark childhood, miserable growing-up and eventual happiness in 19th-century London)

"Dickensian" Novels: Bleak Side of Life (the battle for existence fought - and lost)

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables  (1820s France: honest man convicted to gallets escapes and rebuilds his life)

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset  (1860s England: honest man wrongly accused of theft; student making his way in London)

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth  (1880s New York heiress rejects ways of society to "be herself")

James Baldwin, Go, Tell It on the Mountain  (1950s Harlem: son of slum family learns about sex, racism and born-again Christian love)

John O"Hara, The Lockwood Concern  (1930s Pennsylvania family becomes wealthy by violence, destroys itself)

J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement  (1920s London firm taken over, developed and ruined by confidence-trickster)

"Dickensian" Novels: Cheerful Side of Life (life maybe a struggle, but it can still be fun)

David Cook, Sunrising  (1830s England: three children rescued from degradation in rural and urban slums)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1860s Mississippi: boy"s adolescence on river and in riverside communities)

H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly  (1890s England: middle-aged "drop-out" has many adventures, finds happiness)

Thomas Mann, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man  (1900s Europe: confidence-man"s cheerful, amoral adventures among the bourgeoisie)

Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot  (1950s widow travels world I search of happiness)

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March  (1930s Chicago: zestful account of slum boy using his wits to make his way)

Learning How to Be Grown-up (adolescence as a quest, with adulthood as the glittering prize)

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage  (1890s London school days, Paris student life and eventual happiness of lonely young man)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister  (1790s Europe: young man runs away to be an actor, esperiences real life, "finds" himself)

André Gide, The Counterfeiters  (1920s Paris: young people growing up, initiated into life and love)

Lisa Alther, Kinflicks  (1960s USA: young woman learns about sex, love, feminism, protest-politics and "dropping out")

Mordechai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz  (1930s Montreal: young man moves from rags to riches, loses his soul)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis  (1840s London: after many escapades, young man finds literary success)