Additional Reading on describing people from the literary prose

HI guys, you may want to read more of liteary prose while describing or illustrating how physical and spiritual characteristics can be linked in a description, consider having a look at some character descriptions from literary prose:

1. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, the descritpion of the old man: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

   Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: the description of Tom Buchanan in Chapter 1: He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

   (Here’s talking about himself) “Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

3. Tony Parsons, Man and Boy: the description of Syd as Harry first sees her in the cafe. A witty, often eye-dabbing, always heartwarming love story between a father and his four-year-old son. Set in London, this is the not-to-be-forgotten saga of Harry Silver, who has it all: a beautiful wife, a wonderful son and a great job in the media. But in one night of infidelity, he throws it all away. His wife leaves to take a chance on a new life, leaving Harry at home with the daunting and exhilarating task of raising his son by himself. How Harry Silver learns to love his own father, find a new love and make the hardest decision of his thirty-plus years provides the magic and tension of this novel. https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/775/man-and-boy#reading_guide
4. Where to see the example of humanity more generally, the poem Human Beings by Adrian Mitchell is quite relevant: your beautiful useful hands you’re not an ape you’re not a parrot you’re not a slow loris or a smart missile you’re humannot british not american not israeli not palestinian you’re human

   not catholic not protestant not muslim not hindu you’re human

   we all start human we end up human human first human last we’re human or we’re nothing

   nothing but bombs and poison gas nothing but guns and torturers nothing but slaves of Greed and War if we’re not human

   look at your body with its amazing systems of nerve-wires and blood canals think about your mind which can think about itself and the whole universe look at your face which can freeze into horror or melt into love look at all that life all that beauty you’re human they are human we are human let’s try to be human

   dance!

Hope you will enjoy these readings!