John Cheever, America’s foremost documentarian on the lifeless routines and endless yard maintenance of suburbia, made his permanent move out of Manhattan and into a Dutch Colonial farmhouse in Ossining in 1961. In 1964, “The Swimmer” was published in The New Yorker, a short story which follows a socially well-regarded and youthful man as he traverses […]
Tag Archives: Jona Whipple
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Jan
Jan
In 1922, Willa Cather’s foray into the subject of World War I, One of Ours, was published by Knopf. The novel follows Claude Wheeler, a young Nebraskan who has become disappointed with the monotonous direction of his life. Wheeler yearns to dedicate himself to something besides the years of farming and marriage which stretch out […]
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Oct
Oct
We often think of a well-received, award-winning, widely-read piece of published writing as a triumph not only for its writer, but for those who enjoyed reading it and appreciated its perspective. It is easy for us to overlook the possibility that there are, sometimes, regrets involved in writing. Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain” appeared in […]
In November of 2010, Katy Perry’s dance-pop anthem to confidence, “Firework,” debuted on the American charts. It peaked at number one on the Billboard Top 100, topped charts around the world, and was nominated for a Grammy. At the time, few would have guessed that the club song and its music video, which featured Perry […]
In his 1936 essay for Esquire, “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote loosely, as if looking sideways at something he didn’t wish to see again, on the fuzzy details of his struggles with alcoholism and resulting depression. He writes of a time when he began to question the surroundings of his own life, and seemed […]
Of all the American writers influenced by a sense of place, there were perhaps few who wove pieces of home into their writing as deftly, and as frequently, as John Steinbeck. Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, about 30 miles away from Cannery Row on the beautiful Monterey Bay, which would one day […]
Shortly before Rona Jaffe’s death in 2005, she wrote the foreword for a reissue of her first novel, the bestselling The Best of Everything. In the foreword, Jaffe described a different time, a time when sex and relationships were not discussed in straightforward terms, the Mad Men-era of married cads and the career girls at […]