Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Apple, Max - Joe David Bellamy (essay date 1995)

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Joe David Bellamy (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: Bellamy, Joe David. “Max Apple.” In Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium, pp. 179–182. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Bellamy surveys the stories in The Oranging of America.]

The spirit that made America what it is today is still operative, according to Max Apple in his remarkable debut, The Oranging of America. That peculiar combination of resourcefulness, fanaticism, greed, and dumb luck is all around us, just waiting to launch another multibillion-dollar franchise. This spirit is embodied for Apple during a fill-up at the world's largest gas station, in a real-estate woman's yen to transform the Astrodome into a climate-controlled subdivision for middle-income bungalows, or in an elderly scientist's obsession with the health-giving properties of yogurt that leads him to hypothesize a yogurt-based theory of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Carole Cook (review date 1977)
   2. Celia Betsky (review date 1977)
   3. Dennis Vannatta (essay date 1980)
   4. Alan Wilde (essay date 1981)
   5. Wayne Glausser (essay date 1983)
   6. Max Apple with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory (interview date 1983)
   7. Tom LeClair (review date 1984)
   8. Max Apple with Allan Vorda (interview date 1987)
   9. Alan Wilde (essay date 1987)
   10. Jerome Klinkowitz (essay date 1992)
   11. Joe David Bellamy (essay date 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright