As the 2020s dawn and as The Great Gatsby — the novel that also serves as a chronicle of the American “roaring ‘20s” — enters the public domain, it seems fair to look around and see if the American landscape has produced any parallels to the eponymous character from F…

John William De Forest coined the term “the Great American novel” in an 1868 article in The Nation, while claiming that as of yet, no one had written one. According to De Forest, such a work of literature would provide “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American…

What exactly is “The Great American Novel” anyway? The answer to that question lies at the heart of a kind of game we’ve been playing in literary circles (full disclosure: I spent sixteen years as a college English professor) for almost two hundred years. To some extent, that game might…

It was cold, raining, and dark, as Pittsburgh mornings often are, when a dude with long blond hair and a red trucker hat approached me on Forbes Avenue and asked me a question. He was the fifth person who had recently asked me about the same thing, so I immediately…

Writing Teacher: Never use the second-person narrative, even in essays. Never. Never ever. Me: Why not? Writing Teacher: Just don’t. Trust me. I said never ever! Me: (Side-eyed, sotto voce) Hold my beer. Writing Teacher: Wut? Me: Nothing. When you’re a fan of J.D. Salinger, you eventually get to David…

We’re on the verge of the 2020’s and that got me thinking back to 1999, when everyone was talking about the millennium and being on the verge of something totally new, something out of a science fiction story or a danceable Prince song. It was a cool year in the…

Virginia Woolf is simultaneously one of the most influential and misunderstood writers of all time. Her most famous works include the novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), as well as her book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). A Room of One’s Own contributed…

All right, let’s do some analysis of “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. First, let’s establish a rule, though. We need to have one rule in place about author intention. We’re throwing author intention right out the window. For the purposes of these analyses I do not care about…

On the Future (and Radical Potential) of Audiobooks — We now live in the Earbud Society. You see them dangling from ears in cars, all over college campuses, in Starbucks, and even the workplace (especially on elevators.) Social avoidance has never been easier, and yet research is showing that this audio-revolution is a great boon to society. And audiobooks…