Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Bernice Murphy (Trinity College Dublin)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2000

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Michael Chabon’s novel

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

, is an exuberant, poignant, and above all, humane celebration of the human will to survive and the thrilling escape which the limitless avenues of the imagination can provide. It is also an immensely readable and at times gloriously old-fashioned homage to the first golden age of the art form which perhaps more than any other can claim to be truly an American innovation – the comic book – and of the redemptive, inspirational possibilities inherent in the very concept of the super hero.

It is perhaps not so surprising that an author to whom success and critical attention came rather earlier than usual should have written a novel about two boy geniuses who end up creating

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1904 words

Citation: Murphy, Bernice. "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16834, accessed 19 April 2024.]

Save this article