Login
Register
Home || Search || About us || Blog || Contact us || Other book sites

Name: The Centaur
Author: John Updike
Year: 1964
Rank:

Rating:

Original Rating:

Popularity: 1.9
Genres/categories: Classic, Award winners

Purchase/research links:
Amazon
GoodReads
OpenLibrary
eBooks.com
LibraryThing


ISBN:
9780140023404
9780233983059
9785553674991
0140023402
0233983058
5553674999
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1964.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER
 
The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell's fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author's remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron's agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is "a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son."
Similar books:

Of the Farm
by John Updike
The Orchard Keeper
by Cormac McCarthy
Bullet Park
by John Cheever
Dodsworth
by Sinclair Lewis
Lancelot
by Walker Percy
Point Omega
by Don DeLillo
The Arrangement
by Elia Kazan
A Frolic of His Own
by William Gaddis
The Dean's December
by Saul Bellow
A Naked Singularity
by Sergio de la Pava
In the Beauty of the Lilies
by John Updike
The Tidewater Tales
by John Barth
Angels on Toast
by Dawn Powell
The Thanatos Syndrome
by Walker Percy
Ten North Frederick
by John O'Hara
Answered Prayers
by Truman Capote
Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Room
by Emma Donoghue
Sophie's World
by Jostein Gaarder