Though it’s February and light snow is on the ground, Rose Burbank stops for a picnic. She’s romancing George Burbank, a good-hearted undemonstrative rancher. He’s thinking about his automobile and what it would be to have a more luxurious model, a...
On June 16, 1906, unknown to each other, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom remember the picnic on the Hill of Howth when they agreed to marry sixteen years earlier. a popular park outside of Dublin. As part of her soliloquy in which Molly recalls the day, she remembers...
Miller’s picnic captures an awkward, passionless-first-time-sexual encounter between Mick and Harry in Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. According to McCullers, Mick and Harry hardly speak, and the narrative breaks off before they have sex....
Wolfe’s tale of murder unfolds when Rex Stout’s three-hundred-and-fifty-pound detective is to give a short speech at the United Restaurant Workers of America Fourth of July celebration at Culp’s Meadows, somewhere on Long Island. As narrated by...
Angelou fondly recalls the “summer picnic fish-fry” with characteristic high spirits. As narrated in her fictionalized memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou explains this was the biggest outdoor event of the year” in the African American Stamps, Arkansas....
Hazelton prefers picnics that are not spontaneous.. She contends a picnic begins when you “invite the people and then figure out the food.” “My idea of a good picnic, she writes, “is one that I can fix up at home and need only carry and unpack at the chosen spot. I...
Welber’s The Winter Picnic is about a willful boy who wants a picnic, even in the snow. Adam is a city boy who wants to picnic even in the snow despite his mother’s protestations. Adam bundles up and plays picnic: he makes plates, cups, and a bowl out of snow but...
The picnic in McCarry’s The Secret Lovers, a Cold War spy-versus-spy novel, is a sly allusion to Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. When Paul Christopher’s boss David Patchen complains that Impressionists bore him and “Picnics explain nothing,”...
Goldman’s The Princess Bride takes a satiric jab at a traditional lovers’s picnic. “Indeed,” he writes in the novel, Vizzini, “had set out a little picnic spread. From the knapsack that he always carried, he had taken a small handkerchief, and on it, he has...
Casual readers usually neglect Christie’s poems, but her inner life is there and not in Marple’s or Poirot’s. “Picnic 1960” suggests Christie never lost her sense of her good life. In the final poem of the volume, Christie makes the case...
