The Blood of the Lamb (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Peter De Vries
- First Published: 1962
- Type of Plot: Comic realism
- Time of Work: 1920’s-1950’s
- Setting: Chicago and New York City
- Principal Characters: Don Wanderhope, Ben Wanderhope, Louie Wanderhope, Greta Wigbaldy, Carol, Rena Baker
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, Family or family life, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Parents and children, New York City, 1940’s, Religion, 1920’s, 1930’s, Chicago, Immigration or emigration, Fathers, Calvinism, Hospices, Leukemia, Rocky Mountains, Tuberculosis
- Locales: New York, NY, Chicago, IL, Rocky Mountains
The Novel
Peter De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb is a deeply religious novel, although the religious sensibility is often expressed in unconventional ways: through the comic, the grotesque, the mundane, and the tragic. The novel’s protagonist, Don Wanderhope, whose name suggests a religious quest, grows up in a strict Dutch Calvinist immigrant family in Chicago and later tries to escape from the confines of his immigrant background and become more fully Americanized. Yet he finds his aspirations to the good life thwarted by a series of unhappy circumstances as...
[The entire page is 2557 words long]
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