Opening at the graveside funeral of an unnamed former advertising art director, the novel moves back through his childhood hernia surgery, three marriages, his estranged sons and devoted daughter Nancy, art classes at the Starfish Beach retirement community, and a string of worsening cardiac operations that finally kill him on the table.
Books mentioned in Everyman (5)
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats: epigraph: 'Here, where men sit and hear each other groan...' —JOHN KEATS, "Ode to a Nightingale"
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer: “reciting from memory for him, unostentatiously and in flawless Middle English, the prologue to The Canterbury Tales”
Books that mention Everyman (3)
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw: “Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly.”
Stoner by John Williams: “"It's difficult to—There's Everyman ..." "Can you name any more?" "No, sir," Walker said.”
The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck: “The novel's epigraph is drawn from the late-fifteenth-century English morality play Everyman; per the endnotes, Steinbeck himself referred to it as "the lead" to the book.”