Cultural References
Given Broyard's stature in the literary world and discussions about his life after his death, numerous literary critics, such as Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, Touré, and Brent Staples, have made comparisons between the character Coleman Silk in Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Broyard. Some speculated that Roth had been inspired by Broyard's life, and commented on the larger issues of race and identity in American society. However, Roth stated in a 2008 interview that Broyard was not his source of inspiration. He explained that he had only learned about Broyard's black ancestry and choices from Gates' New Yorker article, published months after he had already started writing the novel.
Read more about this topic: Anatole Broyard
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)