The Fourth Age (Chaotic) of Harold Blooms Canon (Part 16)
Explore Harold Bloom's Chaotic Fourth Age of the literary canon with this essential list of books. Discover key works that define this transformative period in Bloom's celebrated critique.
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
by Eudora Welty
Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. These stories are honest, and vastly entertaining.
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Up in the Old Hotel
by Joseph Mitchell
Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style. These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.
Book
Appointment in Samarra
by John O'Hara
A 20th century classic, "Appointment in Samarra" is the masterpiece by the writer Fran Leibowitz called "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald." With trademark verisimilitude, O'Hara captures the personal politics and easy bitterness of small-town life in this first and most widely read of his books.
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Call It Sleep
by Henry Roth
When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves—--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide, Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.
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All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Character study of a Southern demagogue whose career follows in some respects as that of Huey Long.
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee
Words and photographs describe the daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the American South.
