26 pages 52 minutes read

Junot Díaz

Wildwood

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2007

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Background

Authorial Context: Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and immigrated with his family to the US in 1974, settling in New Jersey. He earned a Bachelor’s in English from Rutgers University, an MFA at Cornell, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continues to write while teaching creative writing at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Culture and immigrant life are at the center of Diaz’s writing. As in “Wildwood,” his short story collections, essays, and a novel have a cultural thread running through them. Diaz won numerous awards for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (from which “Wildwood” is taken and published as a short story), including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Diaz joins such authors as James Joyce (Ulysses) and Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men) in taking liberties with punctuation and syntax, leaving the text somewhat unstructured and omitting quotation marks to convey dialogue. Diaz has said that he wants to blur the line between thought and speech, the way human memory works, and so doesn’t use quotation marks. Diaz also infuses a measure of Spanglish—a blend of Spanish and English—in his writing. “Wildwood” contains Spanish words and phrases that either have a commonality with English or can be translated through

blurred text

blurred text

Related Titles

By Junot Díaz

Study Guide

logo

How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)

Junot Díaz

How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)

Junot Díaz

STUDY + TEACHING GUIDE

logo

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz

Study Guide

logo

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Díaz

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Díaz