We’re excited to share with you that Cornell University has revealed their Fall 2011 common reading selection and it’s… wait for it… Homer & Langley by author E.L. Doctorow!
The story tells of two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. Homer & Langley generates a range of engaging topics for discussion and exploration, including the major events of twentieth-century U.S. history from prohibition to flower children, the modern media phenomenon of “reality,” the significance of community, the creation of “trash,” and the claims of family, as well as sustainability, news, rebellion, the psychology of hoarding, and autarky.
E. L. Doctorow is a winner of the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal. He is one of the most visible and influential American novelists of the last forty years, and perhaps the leading figure, in the U.S. and internationally, in the development of the post-modernist historical novel.
We salute Cornell University for its bold choice of this unique fiction!
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