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The Swimmer (short Story)
"The Swimmer" is a short story by American author John Cheever, originally published in ''The New Yorker'' on July 18, 1964, and then in the 1964 short fiction collection ''The Brigadier and the Golf Widow''. The story was collected in ''The Stories of John Cheever'' (1978), published by Alfred A. Knopf. Considered one of Cheever's most outstanding works, "The Swimmer" has received exhaustive analysis from critics and biographers. In 1968, "The Swimmer" was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Burt Lancaster. This is the only literary work by Cheever that has appeared on screen. Plot The story is told from a third-person omniscient point-of-view, in which the focal character is Neddy Merrill, a suburban resident of the New York State County of Westchester, spanning two of Cheever's fictional communities of Shady Hill and Bullet Park. Neddy Merrill is lounging poolside at the residence of his well-to-do neighbors, the Westerhazy's. By all appearances, he is ente ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Cheever
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included " The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", " The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and " The Swimmer", and he also wrote five novels: ''The Wapshot Chronicle'' (National Book Award, 1958),from the Awards 50-year anniversary publications and from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) '' The Wapshot Scandal'' (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), '' Bullet Park'' (1969), '' Falconer'' (1977) and a novella '' Oh What a Paradise It Seems'' (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous soc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
King Arthur
King Arthur ( cy, Brenin Arthur, kw, Arthur Gernow, br, Roue Arzhur) is a legendary king of Britain, and a central figure in the medieval literary tradition known as the Matter of Britain. In the earliest traditions, Arthur appears as a leader of the post-Roman Britons in battles against Saxon invaders of Britain in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. He appears in two early medieval historical sources, the ''Annales Cambriae'' and the ''Historia Brittonum'', but these date to 300 years after he is supposed to have lived, and most historians who study the period do not consider him a historical figure.Tom Shippey, "So Much Smoke", ''review'' of , ''London Review of Books'', 40:24:23 (20 December 2018) His name also occurs in early Welsh poetic sources such as ''Y Gododdin''. The character developed through Welsh mythology, appearing either as a great warrior defending Britain from human and supernatural enemies or as a magical figure of folklore, sometimes associated wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. History Random House was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint from publisher Horace Liveright, which reprints classic works of literature. Cerf is quoted as saying, "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random," which suggested the name Random House. In 1934 they published the first authorized edition of James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'' in the Anglophone world. ''Ulysses'' transformed Random House into a formidable publisher over the next two decades. In 1936, it absorbed the firm of Smith and Haas—Robert Haas became the third partner until retiring and selling his share back to Cerf and Klopfer in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Ungar Publishing Company
Frederick Ungar Publishing Company was a New York publishing firm which was founded in 1940. History The Frederick Ungar Publishing Company published over 2,000 titles, including reference books such as the ''Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century'' and many works on literature and cinema. The more than 200 translations published by the firm of works by such authors as Thomas Mann, including his '' Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen'' (1918) (translated as ''Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man''), Erich Fromm and Goethe helped make those works more popular in the United States.(19 November 1988)Frederick Ungar; World Literature Publisher ''Los Angeles Times'' The company was acquired by Continuum Publishing Company in 1985.McDowell, Edwin (14 September 1985)UNGAR PUBLISHING IS BOUGHT BY CONTINUUM ''The New York Times'' Frederick "Fritz" Ungar Frederick "Fritz" Ungar (born Friedrich Ungar) worked as a publisher from 1922 and co-founded the publishing houses Phaidon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Library Of America
The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 300 volumes by authors ranging from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, including selected writing of several U.S. presidents. Overview and history The ''Bibliothèque de la Pléiade'' ("La Pléiade") series published in France provided the model for the LOA, which was long a dream of critic and author Edmund Wilson. The initial organizers included American academic Daniel Aaron,Cromie, William J., Ken Gewertz, Corydon Ireland, and Alvin Powell"Honorary degrees awarded at Commencement's Morning Exercises", ''Harvard Gazette''. June 7, 2007. Lawrence Hughes, Helen Honig Meyer, and Roger W. Straus Jr. The initial board of advisers included Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, and Eudora Wel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blake Bailey
John Blake Bailey (born July 1, 1963) is an American writer and educator. Bailey is known for his literary biographies of Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels. In April 2021, his agency dropped him after several of his former eighth grade students came forward with accounts of rape and sexual abuse committed when they were adults. Background Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City and attended high school at Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School, where he was friends with another future author, Dan Fagin. He was a student at Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1985. Bailey and his family lost their house and most of their possessions in Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about in a series of articles for '' Slate''. In 2009–2010, Bailey was Writer in Residence at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. From 2010 to 2016, he was the Mina ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (; 29 January 1860 Old Style date 17 January. – 15 July 1904 Old Style date 2 July.) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics."Stories ... which are among the supreme achievements in prose narrative.Vodka miniatures, belching and angry cats George Steiner's review of ''The Undiscovered Chekhov'', in ''The Observer'', 13 May 2001. Retrieved 16 February 2007. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of ''The Seagull'' in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 189 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level. Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses the classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs, and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities. When used as a count ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants
In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs is a sociological term which is often used to describe white Protestant Americans who are part of the white upper-class, historically mostly Mainline Protestant elite. Typically WASPs are of British descent. WASPs have dominated American society, culture, and politics for most of the history of the United States. Critics have disparaged them as part of "The Establishment". Although the social influence of wealthy WASPs has declined since the 1960s, the group continues to play a central role in American finance, politics and philanthropy. ''Anglo-Saxon'' refers to people of English ancestry; however, some sociologists and commentators use ''WASP'' more broadly to include all White Protestant Americans of Western European and Northern European ancestry. ''WASP'' is also used for similar elites in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The 1998 ''Random House Unabridged Dictionary'' says the term is "sometimes disparaging ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Underworld
The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld. The concept of an underworld is found in almost every civilization and "may be as old as humanity itself". Common features of underworld myths are accounts of living people making journeys to the underworld, often for some heroic purpose. Other myths reinforce traditions that entrance of souls to the underworld requires a proper observation of ceremony, such as the ancient Greek story of the recently dead Patroclus haunting Achilles until his body could be properly buried for this purpose. Persons having social status were dressed and equipped in order to better navigate the underworld. A number of mythologies incorporate the concept of the soul of the deceased making its own journey to the underworld, with the dead needing to be taken a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inferno (Dante)
''Inferno'' (; Italian language, Italian for "Hell") is the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri's 14th-century Epic poetry, epic poem ''Divine Comedy''. It is followed by ''Purgatorio'' and ''Paradiso (Dante), Paradiso''. The ''Inferno'' describes Dante's journey through Christian views on Hell, Hell, guided by the Ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the "realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen". As an allegory, the ''Divine Comedy'' represents the journey of the soul toward God, with the ''Inferno'' describing the recognition and rejection of sin. Prelude to Hell Canto I The poem begins on the night of Maundy Thursday on March 24 (or April 7), 1300, shortly before the dawn of Good Friday. The narrator, Dante himself, is t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Odysseus
Odysseus ( ; grc-gre, Ὀδυσσεύς, Ὀδυσεύς, OdysseúsOdyseús, ), also known by the Latin variant Ulysses ( , ; lat, UlyssesUlixes), is a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the ''Odyssey''. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's ''Iliad'' and other works in that same epic cycle. Son of Laërtes and Anticlea, husband of Penelope, and father of Telemachus and Acusilaus, Odysseus is renowned for his intellectual brilliance, guile, and versatility (''polytropos''), and is thus known by the epithet Odysseus the Cunning ( grc-gre, μῆτις, mêtis, cunning intelligence). He is most famous for his ''nostos'', or "homecoming", which took him ten eventful years after the decade-long Trojan War. Name, etymology, and epithets The form ''Odys(s)eus'' is used starting in the epic period and through the classical period, but various other forms are also found. In vase inscriptions, we find the variants ''Oliseus'' (), ''Olyseus'' (), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
