Maggot lives with his grandparents full-time because his mother is in prison for the attempted murder of her boyfriend. They have a grandson, nicknamed Maggot, who is Demon’s age. Demon’s father died before his birth, and due to his mother’s addictions, Demon spends most of his childhood with the Peggots. Peggot declares that he has good luck and will not die by drowning. Peggot, assists the birth, and when he is born in his amniotic sac, Mrs. A nominee for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Kingsolver is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the National Humanities Medal.Ĭontent warning: This study guide contains summary and analysis of drug addiction, death by overdose, physical and emotional abuse, sexual exploitation, and anti-gay slurs that are present in the source text.ĭemon is born in a small town in Virginia while his mother is passed out from drug and alcohol use. Kingsolver is an American novelist whose books regularly make the New York Times Best Seller list.

Kingsolver bases her novel on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) to connect the present to the past, to combine cultures, and to adapt Dickens’s mission of using literature to hold a mirror up to society. The story exposes the systemic failures of American institutions but celebrates the resiliency of the individual spirit. Set in Lee County, Virginia, Demon Copperhead uses the first-person point of view of its titular character to juxtapose the world’s beauty and ugliness.

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