UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Mildred Walker
Most acclaimed
The orange tree
In the five novellas that comprise The Orange Tree, Carlos Fuentes continues the passionate and imaginative reconstruction of past and present history that has distinguished Terra Nostra and The Campaign. From the story of Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean, to the fate of Hernan Cortes's two sons, to the destruction of the Spanish city of Numantia by the Romans and the annihilation of Hollywood by Acapulco, Fuentes couples the epic grandeur of the spiritual and the historical with the many pleasures of the flesh. "In The Orange Tree," he remarks, "I gather together not only all my most immediate sensual pleasures - I see, touch, peel, bite, swallow - but also the most primordial sensations: my mother, wet nurses, breasts, the sphere, the world, the egg." The result is a sensitive exploration of cultural conflict that is also a feast for the senses.
The quarry
1947
Bringing to life the culture of Harlem in the 1920s, Charles Chestnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and aesthetic milieu of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters, The Quarry is peopled with so many figures of the time - including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey - that it constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American history. Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man, whose adoptive black parents are determined that he become a leader in the black community. Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.
A piece of the world
1972
To Christina Olson, the entire world is her family farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. The only daughter in a family of sons, Christina is tied to her home by health and circumstance, and seems destined for a small life. Instead, she becomes Andrew Wyeth’s first great inspiration, and the subject of one of the best-known paintings of the twentieth century, Christina’s World.