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    A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens"
    A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens"
    A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens"
    Ebook35 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535840255
    A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens" - Gale

      1

      The Underground Gardens

      T. Coraghessan Boyle

      1998

      Introduction

      T. Coraghessan Boyle's story, The Underground Gardens, was first published in the New Yorker in the May 25, 1998, issue, and was collected in 2001 in the author's short-story collection After the Plague. The story is loosely based on the life of an Italian American immigrant who began digging a huge underground complex on his land in Fresno, California, in the arid San Joaquin Valley, in the early 1900s. Using this historical person and elements of his life as a start, Boyle crafts an optimistic story about an Italian American immigrant whose hopes—including marrying the woman of his dreams—are repeatedly dashed, but who nevertheless perseveres and continues to dream. This story is unlike many of Boyle's works, which poke fun at the human condition or contain large doses of cynicism, sarcasm or other forms of negativity. Instead, Boyle examines positive ideas such as the power of faith and the importance of self-sufficiency. The story is, however, similar to many of Boyle's other works, in that it uses an actual historical event—in this case, Baldasare's digging of his gardens—as a starting point for the narrative. A copy of the story can be found in the Penguin paperback edition of After the Plague, which was published in 2003.

      Author Biography

      Boyle was born on December 2, 1948, in Peekskill, New York. He has noted that he never read a book until he was eighteen. In fact, Boyle never aspired to be a writer. In the 1960s, Boyle enrolled at the State University of New York at Potsdam as a music student. While in school, he took an influential creative writing course, and began reading literature. After graduating in 1968, Boyle taught English in a public high school, which, he has admitted, was mainly to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.

      During this same period, Boyle began writing his own short stories and became a habitual user of drugs and alcohol. These two activities culminated

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