Description
From the early masters, Hawthorne and Melville, through Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to the postmodern minimalists of today, love stories have been an enduring part of the American literary tradition.
Lucy Rosenthal has gathered the great American love stories in a wonderfully enjoyable collection. These stories reflect America's diversity-economic, regional, racial, ethnic as well as the common themes that love inspires: the longing of first love; married love; clandestine love; breakups and partings.
As Lucy Rosenthal says in her introduction, many of the stories suggest that love in our culture is at odds with various other codes, such as fidelity or the work ethic.
The last scene in Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon explains that while there are many things a man in love can do, he can never cover up for the woman who killed his partner.
In John Cheever's story "The Pot of Gold," the fact that the lover's initial meeting is in the workplace does them no good at all. Harold Brodkey's "Innocence" can be read in part as a salute to love as work.
ISBN:9780883659182
