Tento autor skúma hlbiny americkej literatúry 20. storočia, jeho diela sa zameriavajú na témy ako sú identita, história a ľudská povaha. Jeho štylistická obratnosť sa prejavuje v bohatom jazyku a komplexnej štruktúre jeho diel. S vášňou pre objavovanie nekonvenčných príbehov a postáv, často čerpá z histórie a folklóru, aby vytvoril diela, ktoré sú literárne prepracované a zároveň pôsobivé.
The stories of Dead Dog Lying shine a hard light on society's misfits: the misshapen in mind and body, children mystified by the adult world, and grownups trying--but never quite managing--to get it right. A man receives a message from a cell phone swallowed by a fish he's caught. A boy grows antlers that give him athletic prowess. A fiction writer learns about reality by walking into an improv play. Long after these allegorical stories are ingested, they will haunt the reader's troubled sleep.
Anthony Hecht, a critical study, uses a variety of approaches in detailed analyses of the major poems of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winner in poetry. The book traces influence, illuminates individual poems via historical and biographical information, and identifies motifs such as «man's painful doubleness» and «extravagance» which define the world Hecht lives in. The poems are viewed as emblematic of the poet's struggle for equilibrium on the plank between the rocks of determinism and the swamp of mysticism.