 First edition cover | |
| Author | Anne Tyler |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Knopf |
Publication date | 1980 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 311 pp |
| ISBN | 9780804108812 |
| OCLC | 5353607 |
| 813/.5/4 | |
| LC Class | PZ4.T979 Mo 1980 PS3570.Y45 (79020272 ) [1] |
Morgan's Passing is a 1980 novel by Anne Tyler. It won the 1980 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award. [2]
Morgan Gower is a middle-aged husband and father who works at Cullen's Hardware Store. Morgan's life is boring: His house is dominated by his wife and daughters who generally ignore him, and his workplace is too slow for his active mind, his wit, and his imagination. In short, his life has fallen far short of his heroic aspirations, and he keeps a closet full of costumes—priest, riverboat gambler, Daniel Boone outfits—donning a different costume nearly every day, wandering the streets of Baltimore, a man in search of an identity in which he feels comfortable.
One day, he meets a young couple, Emily and Leon Meredith, performing their puppet show in public. Emily goes into labor right after the show, and Morgan (posing as Doctor Morgan) delivers the baby in the backseat of his car. Over the next couple of years, an increasingly bored Morgan frequently runs into the couple "accidentally on purpose." He stalks them and over a period of time becomes their friend. Leon and Emily are not the happy couple that they appeared to be; Leon is a frustrated actor who has been reduced to a puppeteer. Emily seems uncertain of what she wants but it isn't Leon. Morgan initially tries to befriend them both (and their daughter Gina) but over several years becomes entranced with Emily. He spends more and more time with his new companions, and his wife and daughters barely notice his absence. Eventually Emily and Morgan sneak around their spouses, she becomes pregnant by Morgan, and they run off together to a new life, Morgan finally content as he assumes Leon's identity.
John Leonard of The New York Times said, "Morgan, like a novelist, wants to be everybody else in order to look at himself through innocent eyes, to be charmed....Miss Tyler, witty, civilized, curious, with her radar ears and her quill pen dipped on one page in acid and on the next in orange liqueur, is asking whether art is adequate to the impersonations life insists on, death absolves. She is a wonderful writer." [3]
In The New York Review of Books , James Wolcott compared Tyler to a "sentry or a detective [who] seems to notice everything: the pale fluorescent gloom of laundromats, pockets filled with lint-covered jellybeans, the smell of crabcakes and coconut oil on a Delaware beach, grapy veins in the calves of middle-aged mothers. As a chronicler of domestic fuss, Tyler can be compared to John Updike." [4]
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the gender neutral pen name Currer Bell. Jane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.
Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.
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Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.
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