Dec 27, 2009
“In the Autumn of the Year” received an O. Henry Award in 1979, a year after its first publication in The Bennington Review. Like many of Oates's stories, it tells of a single but important encounter between a man and a woman from different backgrounds and with different attitudes.
The protaonist, Eleanor Gerhardt, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, an articulate spinster suggestive of the nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson, who has come to a small New England college to accept an award. Her host for the visit is Benjamin Höller, a man she knew as a boy...
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