By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Dry September’ is a 1931 short story by the American writer William Faulkner. In the story, which takes place one hot and rainless September in the American South, a white woman accuses an African-American man of attacking her, and the white men of the town form a mob to go after the man. Despite the barber of the town urging caution, they ignore him and pursue the man with terrible consequences.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Old Man at the Bridge’ is one of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest stories: short enough to be considered as perhaps more of a ‘vignette’ than a ‘story’ as such. Set during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, ‘Old Man at the Bridge’ is about an encounter between the story’s narrator and an old man in his seventies who was the last person to leave his town behind during the war.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Strength of God’ is a short story by the American writer Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941). The story appeared in Anderson’s 1919 collection Winesburg, Ohio and concerns a minister who finds himself entertaining lustful thoughts about a woman he accidentally sees through a window one day.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Langston Hughes (1901-67) was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. Over the course of a varied career he was a novelist, playwright, social activist, and journalist, but it is for his poetry that Hughes is now best-remembered. But what are the best Langston Hughes poems? Below, we introduce ten of his finest.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle steps into the yellow wood of a famous American poem
Robert Frost’s two best-known poems both involve a speaker stopping in, or by, a wood: one takes place at the end of the day, in winter (his ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’), while the other, his most famous poem, takes place one morning during autumn. That poem is ‘The Road Not Taken’, which mentions a ‘yellow wood’ within its opening line. But what does that yellow wood symbolise?