Terms of Endearment (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Larry McMurtry
- First Published: 1975
- Type of Plot: Domestic/seriocomic realism
- Time of Work: The 1960’s and the 1970’s
- Setting: Houston, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Kearney and Omaha, Nebraska
- Principal Characters: Aurora Greenway, Emma Horton, Rosie Dunlup, Vernon Dalhart, General Hector Scott, Thomas “Flap” Horton
- Genres: Long fiction, Domestic realism
- Subjects: 1960’s, 1970’s, North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, Midwest, West, U.S., Cancer, Adultery, Servants, Terminal illness or terminally ill, Texas, Nebraska
- Locales: Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Des Moines, IA, Houston, TX, Kearney, NE, Omaha, NE
The Novel
Aurora Greenway, a selfish, fanciful widow, spends much of her rather empty life talking on the telephone to her daughter, Emma. They talk nearly every morning at seven-thirty (often to Emma’s chagrin—unlike her mother, she is not an early riser), and it is around their problematic relationship that the novel is built. Terms of Endearment is divided into two books of unequal length: The first, longer book covers a single year (1962) in the life of Aurora Greenway; the second book, a fraction the length of the first, is devoted to the last five years...
[The entire page is 2827 words long]
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