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    A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies"
    A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies"
    A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies"
    Ebook35 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535827102
    A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ella Leffland's "Last Courtesies" - Gale

      1

      Last Courtesies

      Ella Leffland

      1978

      Introduction

      Ella Leffland's short story Last Courtesies is surprisingly violent. But the violence is, at least at the beginning, more suggested than explicit. In the foreground, the protagonist Lillian suppresses violent urges, while she is described as too polite. Throughout most of this story, Lillian is filled with fear and remorse, but she is determined to keep her emotions in check. She does go out of her way to not return rudeness expressed toward her. There are, however, moments when doing so is impossible, just as there are moments when the background violence of this story leaks through. This story is a psychological study of eccentrics. The violence erupts in ever mounting stages as the eccentricities of the characters collide, culminating in the brutality at the end.

      Last Courtesies was first published in 1976 in Harper's Magazine. It was then chosen for the O. Henry Award for best short story the following year. Four years later, the story was selected as the title piece for Leffland's collection Last Courtesies. In a New York Times review of this collection, John Romano referred to Leffland as one of the poets of alienation but distinguished her from others in being essentially moral as well as psychological. Romano also praised Leffland for the sympathy that she arouses for her characters without judging them.

      Author Biography

      Ella Leffland was born on November 25, 1931, in Martinez, California. She attended San Jose State College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1953. Leffland has stated that she began writing around the age of ten, but she was twenty-eight before she had her first short story published. After that, she wrote five novels and a collection of short stories.

      Leffland worked as a city hall reporter for a few years upon obtaining her college degree. Then for three years she was a copyeditor for San Francisco's Sun Reporter. She also worked variously as a typist, a

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