A Time Out of Joint: Essays on International Literature

A TIME OUT OF JOINT collects Wolcott Wheeler’s provocative, impassioned, erudite literary essays on major writers ranging from colonial Puritan divines John Winthrop and Michael Wigglesworth to recognized Western giants such as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, and William Burroughs to such equally fascinating talents as American Nisei novelists John Okada and Milton Murayama and noted Japanese authors Yukio Mishima and Seicho Matsumoto. The author is noted for his lucid, readable, entertaining writing style; his essay on Yukio Mishima alone attracted 17,000 page views online.He takes an arresting, fresh look at such classics as Huck Finn, Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, The Confidence-Man, Bartleby the Scrivener, Naked Lunch, The Naked and the Dead, The Sun Also Rises, The Blithedale Romance, Self-Reliance, and Dog Soldiers, as well as focusing on lesser-known but equally important literary works.Several themes stand out: the dark shadow Puritanism has cast over America; the atomization of the individual in modern society; the (accompanying) rise of charismatic, destructive male authority figures; the evils of racism and imperialism; and the terrifying lack of compassion in our world. But above all else, the author’s critical writing is marked by a compelling moral vision that focuses on the terrible destructive power of evil, underscoring that something is dreadfully wrong with our society—our time is out of joint—and it’s our responsibility to set it right.Wolcott Wheeler is a writer who lives in New York. Shortly after graduating from Princeton University, he became a screenwriter for Columbia Pictures in Hollywood and later lived in Japan. A fiction writer, he is also a historian, journalist, literary and political essayist, comic book creator, and published haiku poet. He is fascinated by Asia and by how history, politics, and culture intersect and interact with each other. Read more