the virgin suicides jeffrey eugenides book review

What’s more, many factory workers were leaving Detroit to live in the suburbs, which further diminished the city’s economic stability. By the 1970s, however, foreign car companies had caught up, and this majorly hurt Detroit’s auto industry. This ultimately established Detroit’s booming auto industry, which prospered for decades. Ford was able to make the Model-T affordable because he was able to cut costs on production, using conveyor belts to create an assembly line and thus streamline the process. The car was wildly popular because it was the first automobile that was actually affordable-there had been other cars before the Model-T, but they were exorbitantly priced. At the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford produced the first Ford Model-T in Detroit. What’s more, the novel is set in a wealthy suburb outside of Detroit, which was the primary hub of the nation’s-and even the world’s-automobile industry. He is on the board of directors for The Paris Review and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Princeton University.Īlthough it’s never explicitly stated, it’s generally understood that The Virgin Suicides takes place in the 1970s, a time when there were many cultural shifts taking place. He also published a collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, in 2017. His third novel, The Marriage Plot, was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His second novel, Middlesex, was published in 2002 and won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He published his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, in 1993 to wide acclaim, going on to publish short stories in a number of prestigious magazines in the ensuing years. He spent the next few years in Brooklyn, where he worked as secretary for the Academy of American Poets. Equipped with a foundational literary education, he went on to attend Stanford University’s English and Creative Writing program.

After graduating high school, he attended Brown University, where he studied English.

When he was a junior in high school, he decided he wanted to be a writer after reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for class. He was raised in Grosse Pointe, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960.

The virgin suicides jeffrey eugenides book review