Who wrote 'Earthly Powers', a long and ambitious first- person novel, narrated by an octogenarian homosexual?
Earthly Powers Earthly Powers Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. It begins with the "outrageously provocative" first sentence: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey (allegedly loosely based on British author W. Somerset Maugham), telling the story of his life in 82 chapters. It "summed up the literary, social and moral history of the
Earthly Possessions (novel) Earthly Possessions (novel) Earthly Possessions is a 1977 novel by Anne Tyler. This, Tyler's seventh novel, followed "Celestial Navigation" and "Searching for Caleb" and preceded her award-winning novels "Morgan's Passing", "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant", "The Accidental Tourist", and "Breathing Lessons". Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte Emory has felt trapped her whole life in Clarion, Maryland—first by her embarrassingly eccentric parents, then by her preacher-husband whom she married too young, and eventually by "his variously afflicted brothers, a daughter who won't answer to her own name, a house full of refugees, an impossible clutter." She finally decides to run away from it all,