Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Essays

  • Indian-American Identity

    819 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen” (Lahiri, My Two lives). Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer Prize winner, describes herself as Indian-American, where she feels she is neither an Indian nor an American. Lahiri feels alienated by struggling to live two lives by maintaining two distinct cultures. Lahiri’s most of the work is recognized in the USA rather than in India where she is descents

  • Literary Analysis of The Color Purple

    651 Words  | 2 Pages

    with her sister and her children, whom she had never met. After their remarkable journeys in life, Celie and Nettie finally reunite and live a happy and satisfactory life together with their family. Having won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, and also the National Book Award for Fiction, Alice Walker will forever be noted in history for breaking the literary barrier in African American literature. She not only conveyed the importance of blacks, but also distinguished the necessity of African American

  • History of Afrian Americans in Toni Morrison´s Beloved

    1164 Words  | 3 Pages

    Toni Morrison was the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The novel, Beloved, considered by many to be her best, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved, is a novel that reflects upon the History of African American slaves. This novel depicts images of the past, for former slaves in the novel; the past is a burden that they desperately try to forget. However for the protagonist Sethe, memories of slavery are inescapable. Beloved begins in 1873, Cincinnati

  • The Old Man and the Sea

    877 Words  | 2 Pages

    1951, and published in 1952, the novel was the last of Hemingway’s novels to be published during his lifetime. The book was praised by critics, and became an immediate success. The story was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was a factor in Hemingway winning a Nobel Prize. The story was published after Across the River and into the Trees, a Hemingway novel that was almost universally panned by critics. The Old Man and the Sea bolstered Hemingway’s somewhat tarnished reputation

  • The Color Purple

    1362 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Results of Celie’s Physical and Mental Abuse In 1982 Alice Walker titled her Pulitzer Prize Winning novel, The Color Purple, which is symbolically meant to reflect radiance and majesty (Columbia). It is a story, entirely conveyed through letters, of one young black girl’s struggle to escape the brutal and degrading treatment by men, which had become a constant part of her life. Instead of focusing on race throughout the novel Walker accords “greater importance to power, the power to be, to

  • Beloved Research Paper

    1430 Words  | 3 Pages

    nameless, already crawling baby was buried with a headstone that was engraved with the word “Beloved.” Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. She is known for telling the stories of African-Americans in her novels, her most notable being The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Beloved, Love, and A Mercy. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for

  • to killa mockaosdf

    613 Words  | 2 Pages

    To Kill a Mockingbird sold the largest number of copies (Book), at one million copies per year (O'Neill). More than thirty million copies were sold worldwide and has been translated into more than forty languages (Kill). The book has won the Pulitzer Prize (Murphy), and in 2011 Lee won the National Medal of Arts (Harper). Our National Novel (O'Neill), was also voted best novel of the twentieth century (Kill), and is considered the most influential book of all time beating the Bible (Mcelwaine).

  • Satire In Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces

    777 Words  | 2 Pages

    by publishers caused Toole to become depressed and commit suicide. The novel was a rare publishing phenomenon, which was submitted by Toole’s mother after his suicide. Eventually the novel would defeat the odds and even go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the year

  • Alice walker

    1099 Words  | 3 Pages

    Alice walker Alice Walker is a well known poet, novelist, essayist, educator, biographer, and editor and her quote “Black women can survive only by recovering the rich heritage of their ancestors,” best characterizes her works and life as a black women in this world. Alice Malsenior Walker born February 8, 1944 in Eatonton, Ga. The youngest of eight children, her parents Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah were sharecroppers and dairy farmers. From an early age she was introverted and quite shy,

  • A Temporary Matter By Jhumpa Lahiri

    654 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian American author who likes to write mainly about the experiences of other Indian Americans. She is a very successful author. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first novel and her fiction appears in The New Yorker often. One of those works from 1998 is a short story, “A Temporary Matter”, about a husband and a wife, Shukumar and Shoba, whose electricity will be temporarily cut off for one hour for five days. This seems simple enough, but as you read the story you find that

  • The Optimist's Daughter: A Look at Death and Dying

    1417 Words  | 3 Pages

    into the library, screaming, by Miss Tennyson Bullock, out of sight behind the blanket of greenery. Judge McKelva's smoking chair lay behind them, overturned" (86). This is a short excerpt from The Optimist's Daughter (1972) by the Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Eudora Welty. The story is centered around Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who left her home in the South to live in Chicago. While in Chicago she meets Philip Hand, and they are married. Philip, however, goes to war and never returns

  • Life Struggles and Themes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple

    2038 Words  | 5 Pages

    an author named Zora Neale Hurston, who made a great influence on Walkers later life. Later in her life she edited one of her fiction called “ I love myself when I am laughing”(Janet Witalec). Further on in her career, she wrote“ The Color Purple” which was brought to audience in 1982, as she became a famous named author. She then, received an award called Pulitzer Prize and the movie by Steven Spielberg, which brought her both fame and controversy (Jone Lewis). Much of her work known to have the

  • The Semiotics of Covers

    2335 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Semiotics of Covers I'm going to buy a book today - but not a school book, a real book - a bestseller. I walk past the harmonica man standing outside of the Brown Office Building, clamping my ears shut against the discordant melodies he's spewing out at me. I enter the Brown Bookstore - my Mecca, my Graceland. I strut past the tables near the door and walk toward the bestseller wall, my being allthewhile bombarded by hardcovers seeking my wandering eyes. Howard Stern in drag screams out

  • The Ghost of Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1501 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Ghost of Beloved One of the most engaging arguments about Toni Morrison’s book Beloved is centered around the nature of the girl Beloved. The argument is whether Beloved is simply a young woman who herself had suffered the horrors of slavery, or the ghost of Sethe’s crawling already? baby girl. The evidence shows that Morrison intended Beloved to be the ghost of the crawling already? girl. It has been said that there are basically two reasons why ghosts walk: they have either unfinished

  • A Writers Style

    1223 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Pulitzer Prize winning writer N. Scott Momaday has become known as a very distinctive writer who depicts the stories of the Native American life in almost poetic ways. He does an excellent job of transporting the reader from the black and white pages of a book, to a world where every detail is pointed out and every emotion felt when reading one of Momaday’s books or other writings. This style of writing that Momaday uses is very evident in his work “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” and made even more

  • To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

    842 Words  | 2 Pages

    Harper Lee grew up in Alabama in a time when racism was rampant and the people were merely sustaining an adequate life due to the Great Depression. The story is set in the rural town of Maycomb, which is a place where, “there was no hurry, for there was no place to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with...” Maycomb is a slow paced, hot, poverty-stricken Alabaman town with outdated infrastructures where people had old-fashioned values and traditional views. These factors then spread an outbreak

  • A & P by John Updike

    1259 Words  | 3 Pages

    A & P John Updike, one of the most forward-thinking and socially provocative writers of the 50s and 60s, is known for his “incisive presentation of the quandaries of contemporary personal and social life.” (Lawn 529) Updike graduated from Harvard University and wrote for one of the more cutting edge publications like The New Yorker- both are notoriously ahead of their time and harbor controversial ideas. In his short story “A&P”, Updike reveals a young man named Sammy in a society on the brink

  • Misunderstanding in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

    531 Words  | 2 Pages

    Misunderstanding in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Walter Cunningham arriving and presenting himself at the finch household poses some questions for Jem. Firstly she cannot understand the agricultural terms as Atticus and Walter discuss crops. “…but there’s another’n at the house now that’s field size.” Jem takes this as Walter saying that he has employed someone to help with the cutting and thus asks him if he paid with a bushel of potatoes. Jem’s mindset of the Cunningham’s not paying money

  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

    2585 Words  | 6 Pages

    Each character’s personality in the book To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee is intricately described, therefore giving the reader an image or idea of the kind of person he or she is. A picture of the character is formed in the mind with maybe rough edges but a soft heart on the inside. A character’s personality may be oversimplified by drawing shapes in symbolism, but the shapes may be helpful in perceiving the general extent of the characteristics. With a little help from Lee’s descriptions, I

  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

    1264 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, through a child's eyes Haper Lee develops a character named Arthur Radley. Arthur is know to the children simply as Boo . The name they have given him, depicts the way the children views him. Throughout the town of Maycomb, people twisted Boo’s personality and character into a terrible person. As the novel unfolds, the children finally discover the true character of Boo. But, because Arthur Radley lived in the shadows of society, the creation of the myth of the