Novelist Nathan Zuckerman, crippled by unexplained chronic neck and shoulder pain and unable to write since publishing his notorious novel Carnovsky, is cared for by four women while feuding bitterly with his brother Henry and obsessing over a scathing critical essay by Milton Appel. Unable to work and convinced he wants a different life, he flies to Chicago posing as a pornography publisher to enroll in medical school, gets into a drunken graveside brawl that shatters his jaw, and ends up hospitalized, trailing interns on their rounds as a patient fascinated by real physical suffering.
Books mentioned in The Anatomy Lesson (23)
The Collar by George Herbert: “He'd got the book down to read "The Collar," hoping to find something there to help him wear his own — quotes the poem at length”
Poetics by Aristotle: “He taught them The Poetics, The Oresieia, Passage to India, The Alchemist, Portrait of the Artist, King Lear, The Autobiography of Benvenuio Cellini—taught them all like holy books”
The Oresteia by Aeschylus: “He taught them The Poetics, The Oresieia, Passage to India... taught them all like holy books”
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster: “He taught them The Poetics, The Oresieia, Passage to India, The Alchemist, Portrait of the Artist, King Lear...”
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson: “Listed among classic works his college humanities teacher taught 'like holy books' alongside The Poetics, King Lear, and The Oresteia — the Jacobean comedy, not the later Coelho novel (chronologically impossible for a 1949 college course)”
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce: “He taught them...Portrait of the Artist, King Lear, The Autobiography of Benvenuio Cellini—taught them all like holy books”
King Lear by William Shakespeare: “He taught them...King Lear, The Autobiography of Benvenuio Cellini—taught them all like holy books”
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: “The worst days of the Cold War and they were studying The Communist Manifesto in the social-science course”
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann: “She made the round of the galleries and museums in the morning, then after lunch came to the hospital and read to him for two hours from The Magic Mountain”
Das Kapital by Karl Marx: “He remembered the Modern Library Giant: Das Kapital”
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: “a paperback copy of David Copperfield open on the sheet that covered her chest”
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: “He carried The Waste Land with him on the El, reading away until Clark Street”
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett: “When, some years later, he went to see a production of Waiting for Godot, he said afterwards to the woman who was then his lonely wife...”
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: “For the tongue it was like the journey up the river in "Heart of Darkness." The mysterious stillness, the miles of silence, the tongue creeping Conradianly on toward Kurtz”
Abou Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt: “embedded as indelibly...as "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Annabel Lee," the first two poems he'd had to memorize for a high-school English class”
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe: “embedded as indelibly...as "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Annabel Lee," the first two poems he'd had to memorize for a high-school English class”
The Darling by Anton Chekhov: “Chekhov, drawing on material resembling Henry's, had written a story one-third that length called "The Darling"”
Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer: “a father who'd read William Shirer's Berlin Diary and Wendell Willkie's One World and took pride in keeping up”
One World by Wendell Willkie: “a father who'd read William Shirer's Berlin Diary and Wendell Willkie's One World and took pride in keeping up”
Table Talk by Martin Luther: “the wallowing in ass-wiping throughout Rabelais and all the ripened turds dotting Luther's Table Talk”
Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe: “the Gantian goat cry he'd read about in Of Time and the River”
Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein: “Appel's disgust for the happy millions who worship at the shrine of the delicatessen and cherish Fiddler on the Roof”