Literature Help: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

By Students' Academy

It is a coming-of-age epistolary novel that is basically focused on an introverted teenage boy named Charlie.

Charlie is the protagonist and narrator of the novel; he is quite introvert. The story describes Charlie’s experiences in a series of letters which are written to a person who is a stranger. Charlie doesn’t even know the stranger’s name.

The story is set in the early 1990s. As the story opens, Charlie happens to be a freshman at high school in Pittsburgh suburb. The story follows his freshman year.

Literature Help: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Copyright
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: History and Background
Chapter Three: Plot Overview
Chapter Four: Characters
Chapter Five: Complete Summary
Chapter Six: Critical Analysis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Oct 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310925580

Students' Academy

Easy study guides for the students of English literature.

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Literature Help: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Students' Academy

Copyright

Literature Help: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Students' Academy

Copyright@2014 Students' Academy

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Chapter One: Introduction

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky was first published on 1st of February in 1999.

It is a coming-of-age epistolary novel that is basically focused on an introverted teenage boy named Charlie.

Charlie is the narrator of the novel; he is quite introvert. The story describes Charlie’s experiences in a series of letters which are written to a person who is a stranger. Charlie doesn’t even know the stranger’s name.

The story is set in the early 1990s. As the story opens, Charlie happens to be a freshman at high school in Pittsburgh suburb. The story follows his freshman year.

Charlie is a very intelligent boy, mature than his years. He is a deep thinker but his thoughts are mostly unconventional.

At the very beginning of the novel, it is disclosed that Charlie is very shy and he is also not popular.

It is said that the author took about five years to create and develop the characters. Chbosky is said to have collected all other aspects of the story from his own memories.

Introversion, adolescence, sexuality, and drug addiction are some of the important themes of the novel.

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower the author makes several references to other literary works. He also alludes to films and pop culture.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a great commercial success, but the book was banned in some of the American schools. They banned the book because of its content. After the first publication of the book, the story received mixed reviews from literary reviewers and critics.

The novel was adapted into a movie in the year 2012. Owing to the success of the movie, the novel’s sales also increased immensely.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower made it The New York Times Best Seller List in the year 2012. Even today, its sales are going up.

Nowadays, the book is very popular in the academic circles in the United States and other English speaking countries.

Chapter Two: History and Background

Chbosky has based the novel on the real life experiences. He created the characters and events through his memory. It is said that the author had faced a very difficult period in his life.

Once, he had a bad breakup, and after the breakup he asked himself whey such good people let themselves get treated so badly.

In his school, Chbosky was working on another story when this story began. He started writing the novel in the summer of 1996 when he was still in college. He finished two drafts later in the summer after two years in 1998.

There are anonymous letters in the novel, but according to the author the idea of those anonymous letters came to him from a real experience. He reveals that during his senior year in his high school, he had written an anonymous letter to Stewart Stern describing how much he had been influenced by Rebel Without a Cause.

After about a year and a half, Stewart Stern found Chbosky and became Chbosky’s mentor.

The character of Charlie in the novel is loosely based on Chbosky. In the novel, he has included numerous details form the time which he had spent in Pittsburg.

The other characters in the novel were also based on certain real