Books by Peter Wolfe

In 1973 the Australian novelist Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the year that his great novel of family ties and change, The Eye of the Storm, was published and became a bestseller in America and Europe.

Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald characterizes her work as having unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, he explains how shet brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to her writing.

James Ellroy's prose, in many ways as complex as any in the Western literary canon, strung together sensational stories of crime and catastrophe. The significance of his writing to Western culture has yet to be fully explored. Author Peter Wolfe offers us the first book-length study of Ellroy in English.

Havoc in the Hub examines the long-neglected work of George V. Higgins, bringing to light the wealth of intellectual, social, literary, and religious thought that underlie his 25 novels and numerous other writings.

Raymond Chandler''s eminence as a mystery writer is unchallenged. Somerset Maugham and George Grella both rate him above Dashiell Hammett; Eric Partridge deems him "a serious artist and a very considerable novelist," while praising him as "one of the finest novelists of his time." Peter Wolfe examines the many sides of Chandler and his work-his apparent will to self-destruct, his obsession with beautiful women, and his apparent brush with homosexuality-and casts much new and needed light on this major American author.