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    A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution"
    A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution"
    A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution"
    Ebook38 pages21 minutes

    A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution," 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 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535829977
    A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for John Updike's "Oliver's Evolution" - Gale

      13

      Oliver's Evolution

      John Updike

      1998

      Introduction

      Oliver's Evolution is a short story written by the American author John Updike. First published in Esquire's April 1998 issue, the story was the last of many that Updike published in that magazine. It is an example of a subgenre of fiction variously called snap fiction, flash fiction, micro fiction, or sudden fiction, referring to short stories that are very short. The term flash fiction was coined by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, who were inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 750-word A Very Short Story in compiling an anthology of very short stories. Later, James Thomas, along with Robert Shapard, compiled a collection of eighty short stories that are no more than two thousand words in length. Among the stories in their 2006 collection Flash Fiction Forward is Oliver's Evolution, a brief (647-word) tale about a boy with neglectful parents who evolves into a solid, if flawed, man. Oliver's Evolution is also included in Updike's Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, published in 2000. It is available online on the Esquire website at http://www.esquire.com/fiction/fiction/john-updike-final-story-0498.

      Author Biography

      Updike was one of America's preeminent men of letters for the half century and more preceding his death. He appeared twice on the cover of Time magazine, and his work was a fixture in the pages of the New Yorker, Esquire, and other prominent magazines. He published thirty novels, fourteen collections of short stories, ten collections of poetry, thirteen collections of nonfiction essays and criticism, and numerous book reviews and pieces of art criticism for such publications as the New York Review of Books. He also won virtually every prestigious award writers can win: the O. Henry Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (twice), the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and (twice) the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

      An only child, John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, though he grew up in the nearby town of Shillington, where his father was a high-school science teacher. In Updike's fiction, Reading and Shillington are often represented by the fictional towns of Brewer and Olinger, respectively. Updike would later say that his inspiration to

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