American Literature – Page 6 – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Great Gatsby is the quintessential Jazz Age novel, capturing a mood and a moment in American history in the 1920s, after the end of the First World War. Rather surprisingly, The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies.

If Fitzgerald had stuck with one of the numerous working titles he considered for the novel, it might have been published as Trimalchio in West Egg (a nod to a comic novel from ancient Rome about a wealthy man who throws lavish parties), Under the Red, White and Blue, or even The High-Bouncing Lover (yes, really).

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1841. A maelstrom is a whirlpool: the word dates from at least the sixteenth century and was formed from Dutch words malen (meaning ‘grind’) and stroom (meaning ‘stream’). The story Poe weaves out of this natural phenomenon is highly suggestive, leaving itself open to numerous interpretations.

A Summary and Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories written by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Subtitled ‘A Parable’, the story originally appeared in a gift book titled The Token and Atlantic Souvenir in 1836, before being collected in Hawthorne’s short-story collection Twice-Told Tales, the following year.

The Forgotten Author Who Predicted the Sinking of the Titanic

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Morgan Robertson’s prophetic novel The Wreck of the Titan

What connects the invention of the periscope to the sinking of the Titanic? Nothing specifically technical or naval: it’s a literary link, of sorts. The man who claimed to have invented the periscope also wrote a short novel which uncannily predicted the sinking of the Titanic some fourteen years before that ship’s ill-fated voyage.

A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘Acquainted with the Night’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Acquainted with the Night’ is a poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963), published in 1928. One of Frost’s most popular short poems, it is slightly unusual in his oeuvre in focusing on the urban rather than rural world of many of his other famous poems.