CLEP

What are 8 typical elements of Gothic literature?

1. setting is usually in a family estate that has been passed down 2. atmosphere of mystery and suspense 3. elements of the supernatural 4. can include ghostly legends or a horrible death or murder 5. omens, foreshadowing, and dreams are common 6. emotional states like insanity, anger, doom, and obsessive love are common 7. damsels in distress or women dying due to a slow or unexplainable illness 8. man or woman experiencing great passion, the obsessive nature of a man or woman in love, or excessive grief one feels upon the loss of a loved one

Year Columbus arrived in the New World

1492

The Great Awakening

1740s a revival of Puritanism after it began to fade for a while

In what year did George Washington become the first president of the United States?

1789

In what year was the Louisiana Purchase negotiated?

1803

grotesques

This literary device describes the very real and horrible aspects of a human being.

William Faulkner

This male southern writer often wrote in stream of consciousness.

Gwendolyn Brooks

drew upon experience in the black ghettos of Chicago for her poetry

Modernism

e.e. cummings

Edward Taylor

early American poet known for using conceits

When did the focus shift from exploration to settlement?

end of the 16th century

Gertrude Stein

expatriate who spent most of her adult life in Paris

Ezra Pound

famous for The Cantos, which took him nearly 50 years to complete; this is a long poem made up of over 100 poems or "cantos."

Patrick Henry

famous for his Speech to the Second Virginia Convention

Benjamin Franklin

famous for his autobiography

Ezra Pound

father of Imagism

Jonathan Edwards

fire and brimstone preacher

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

give the author and title: 50 page revolutionary pamphlet

Edward Taylor; Huswifery

give the author and title: poem that compares the spinning of thread to the making of cloth to the making of clothing to receiving God's grace

Michael Wigglesworth; The Day of Doom

give the author and title: poem that proceeds from Judgment Day to Hell where shackled sinners burn eternally, unconsumed in the fiery lake, and finally to Paradise where the rejoicing saved will look eternally on "God's bright countenance."

Samuel Sewall; The Selling of Joseph

give the author and title: the first anti-slavery tract

Crevecoeur; Letters from an American Farmer

give the author and title: this book was published in France in 1782 and is a broad social and moral survey of the colonies that would become the United States

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay; The Federalist Papers

give the author and title: this document was signed "Publius"

Crevecoeur; Letters from an American Farmer

give the author and title: this work attempts to answer "What is an American, this new man?"

Transcendentalism

Because men were created in God's image, men all contain a spark of divinity, or God, within them. Not listening to one's intuition is like not listening to the voice of God speaking within.

Early American Literature/Puritan

Because of original sin, man is totally depraved from birth.

The Beat Generation

During the "tranquilized 1950s," there were a group of writers and artists in New York who wrote socially and politically subversive literature that rejected American mainstream values.

Modernism; Imagism

Ezra Pound

Modernism

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Contemporary Literature

Flannery O'Connor

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: . Later, another of Richard's uncles, Tom, comes to live with the family. One morning, Tom asks Richard what time it is and thinks Richard responds in a sassy manner. He tries to beat Richard for his supposed insolence, but the boy fends him off with razor blades. Meanwhile, Richard picks his way through school. He delights in his studies—particularly reading and writing—despite a home climate hostile to such pursuits. To the bafflement and scorn of everyone, he writes and publishes in a local black newspaper a story titled "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre." He graduates from the ninth grade as valedictorian, giving his own speech despite the insistence of his principal, friends, and family that he give a school-sanctioned speech to appease the white audience.

William Carlos Williams; "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Give the author and title: "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white/ chickens."

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: . George, fearing how the boss at the ranch will react to Lennie, insists that he'll do all the talking. He lies, explaining that they travel together because they are cousins and that a horse kicked Lennie in the head when he was a child. They are hired. They meet Candy, an old "swamper," or handyman, with a missing hand and an ancient dog, and Curley, the boss's mean-spirited son.

Romanticism

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Olaudah Equiano

Flannery O'Connor

She was a devoted Roman Catholic. Her stories and novels are laced with religious allusions, themes, and symbols.

Modernism

Sherwood Anderson

Modernism

Susan Glaspell

Contemporary Literature; confessional poet

Sylvia Plath

Modernism

T.S. Eliot

Realism

The writer's primary responsibility was to be an accurate observer and reporter of the life around him.

The Jazz Age

The years between World War I and the Great Depression; an era marked by an increase in youthful abandonment and characterized by flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, riotous parties, sexual infidelity, and racial and sexual tolerance

Confessional poets

These poets used poetry as a way to express battle with personal demons.

Regionalism/Local Color

These two movements are part of the overall literary movement entitled Realism.

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

They tended to write on science, ethics, or government, rather than on religion.

Early American Literature/Puritan

They valued plainness in literature, worship, and dress.

Cotton Mather; Maganlia Christi Americana or The Great Works of Christ in America

give the title and author: history of the New England colonies containing short biographies of the great founders and God's hand in the affairs of New England

Cotton Mather; Wonders of the Invisible World

give the title and author: written to justify the execution of 19 people during the Salem witchcraft trials

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

give the title: recounts his experiences traveling as an enslaved person on a ship from Africa to Barbados, revealing the horrors on the ship and the degradation he suffered

Samuel Sewall

judge in the Salem witchcraft trials

Carl Sanburg

known as the Chicago Poet

William Carlos Williams

known as the Doctor Poet; physician who often wrote poems on prescription pads known as the Doctor Poet

Anne Bradstreet

often called America's first poet

Eatonville, Florida; Zora Neale Hurston

one of the first intentional all-black communities and the author associated with it

Gwendolyn Brooks

one of the most celebrated African-American poets of the twentieth century

Anti-transcendentalism

saw a gap between human desires and human possibilities.

William Faulkner

his 15 novels tell the imagined saga of Yoknapatawpha Country in northwest Mississippi from the 1820s to the 1950s

Ezra Pound

his political and economic obsessions led him into anti-Semitism and treason and to hospitalization for the criminally insane

Pilgrims

immigrated to America in 1620-1630

aphorisms

short, witty statements that express wise or clever observations about life

Phillis Wheatley

slaved turned poet

Give up rights for law and order

social contract

Transcendentalism

the basic truths of the universe lie beyond the knowledge we obtain from our senses. Through the senses, we learn the facts and laws of the physical world, and through our capacity to reason we learn to use this information, creating, for instance, science and technology. But, there is another realm of knowledge that goes beyond or transcends what we hear or see or learn from books.

The Mayflower Compact

the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony

What were the consequences so severe if one spoke out against the Church of England?

the king was the head of the church so, going against the church meant going against the king, which is treason

Edward Taylor

the only American poet who is considered a metaphysical poet

Poor Richard's Almanac

this book is famous for aphorisms such as "A penny saved is a penny earned" and "Fish and visitors smell in three days"

The Federalist Papers

this document argued that the Constitution would ensure national defense, enforce unity among states, improve commerce and national wealth, and act as a voice for individual states

William Faulkner

well-known for his fictional Mississippi County Yoknapatawpha

Ernest Hemingway

won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954

The Federalist Papers

written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

John Winthrop

wrote A Modell of Christian Charity, a sermon

Benjamin Franklin

wrote A Printer's Epitaph

Samson Occom

wrote A Short Narrative of My Life

Anne Bradstreet

wrote Before the Birth of One of Her Children

Thomas Paine

wrote Common Sense "The Crisis"

Edward Taylor

wrote Huswifery

St. Jean de Crevecoeur

wrote Letters from an American Farmer

Cotton Mather

wrote Maganlia Christi Americana

William Bradford

wrote Of Plymouth Plantation

Phillis Wheatley

wrote On Being Brought from Africa to America

Benjamin Franklin

wrote Poor Richard's Almanac

Jonathan Edwards

wrote Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Anne Bradstreet

wrote The Author to Her Book

Michael Wigglesworth

wrote The Day of Doom

Samuel Sewall

wrote The Diary of Samuel Sewall; published in 3 volumes

Olaudah Equiano

wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Mary Rowlandson

wrote The Narrative and the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

Anne Bradstreet

wrote The Prologue

Toni Morrison

wrote The Song of Solomon and Beloved

Phillis Wheatley

wrote To His Excellency General Washinton

Anne Bradstreet

wrote To My Dear Children

Anne Bradstreet

wrote To My Dear and Loving Husband

Edward Taylor

wrote Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

Anne Bradstreet

wrote Upon the Burning of Our House

Phillis Wheatley

wrote a collection of poems titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, and Moral

Thomas Jefferson

wrote the Declaration of Independence

John Winthrop

wrote the famous journal The History of New England

Bernard Malamud

wrote the novel The Assistant and the short story "The First Seven Years"

Pilgrims

1. arrived in 1620 2. Plymouth, Massachusetts

Early American Literature

Edward Taylor

Anne Bradstreet; Before the Birth of One of Her Children

"All things within this fading world hath end, / Adversity doth still our joys attend; / No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet, / But with death's parting blow is sure to meet... / And if chance to thing eyes shall bring this verse, / With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse; / And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake, / Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take."

Anne Bradstreet; To My Dear Children

"This Book by Any yet vnread, / I leaue for yov when I am dead, / That, being gone, here yov my find / What was your liueing mother's mind. / Make vse of what I leaue in Loue / And God shall blesse yov from above."

Four factors that helped to create nationalism

1. the American Revolution 2. War of 1812 3. Industrialization 4. Centralized Economic and Political Systems

Deists

According to these men, God created the universe and the laws of the universe and then left the world to operate according to those laws

Contemporary Literature; confessional poet

Anne Sexton

Ralph Ellison

African-American contemporary writer

Toni Morrison

African-American novelist

Alice Walker

African-American novelist and short story writer

James Baldwin

African-American novelist who grew up in Harlem

What was the 1400s called?

Age of Exploration

Contemporary Literature; African-American novelist

Alice Walker

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

All men are created equal and are endowed with certain natural rights.

Contemporary Literature; beat poet

Allen Ginsberg

William Carlos Williams

Along with Ezra Pound, he is known as an Imagist poet.

Benjamin Franklin

Although he is not credited with writing it, this founding father helped to draft the Declaration of Independence

The Beat Generation

Although the terms "beatnik" was said to have been used by a journalist who criticized these poets for their "counterculture," the term "beat" is often associated with Jack Kerouac as a shortened form of "deadbeats," "beaten down," or "beatified."

Regionalism and Local Color

Ambrose Bierce

Contemporary Literature; Chinese-American writer

Amy Tan

Early American Literature

Anne Bradstreet

Contemporary Literature; playwright

Arthur Miller

Where did the first migrants to America come from?

Asia

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Benjamin Franklin

Contemporary Literature; Jewish writer

Bernard Malamud

African-American during Naturalism

Booker T. Washington

Regionalism and Local Color

Bret Harte

Early American Literature

Cabeza de Vaca

Modernism

Carl Sandburg

Naturalism

Characters are controlled by their environment, gender, race, socioeconomic standing, and ethnicity.

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

Claude McKay

Transcendentalism

Concord, Massachusetts, was the center of transcendentalist thinking.

Romanticism

Conveying emotions to readers was valued.

Early American Literature

Cotton Mather

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

Countee Cullen

Early American Literature

Creation and Origin Myths

Romanticism and Gothic Literature

Edgar Allan Poe

Who invented the cotton gin?

Eli Whitney

Contemporary Literature; poet

Elizabeth Bishop

Modernism

Eugene O'Neill

Modernism

Ernest Hemingway

Contemporary Literature

Eudroa Welty

From whom did the United States purchase the Louisiana Purchase?

France

Naturalism

Frank Norris

Abolitionists, Regionalism and Local Color

Frederick Douglass

Modernism

Gertrude Stein

Carl Sandburg; Chicago

Give the author and city: This poet gave his city and its growing industry, increased immigrant population, and blue-collar population a voice in American literature.

Robert Frost; "The Road Not Taken"

Give the author and title: " I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference."

Carl Sandburg; "Chicago"

Give the author and title: "Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; / Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders."

William Carlos Williams; "This Is Just to Say"

Give the author and title: "I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox.... / Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold." The speaker apologizes to an unidentified "you" for eating plums that the "you" was saving.

Wallace Stevens; "Anecdote of the Jar"

Give the author and title: "I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill. / It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill."

Allen Ginsberg; "Howl:

Give the author and title: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, / starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking / for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking / in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating / across the tops of cities contemplating jazz..."

Langston Hughes; "I, Too"

Give the author and title: "I, too, sing America." The poem asserts that people of African-American descent are part of America too. This poem is a direct response to Walt Whitman's "I hear America Singing."

Claude McKay; "If We Must Die"

Give the author and title: "If we must die, let it not be like hogs...." The poem is a defiant call to protest. The speaker warns against passive acceptance of hostility and urges people to fight back. He suggests that death is inevitable but can be noble if it serves a cause. The final couplet ("Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back") states the speaker's resolve to die fighting.

Anne Bradstreet; To My Dear and Loving Husband

Give the author and title: "If were two were one than surely we... / Then while we live live, in love let's so persevere / That when we live no more, we may live ever."

Langston Hughes; "Mother to Son"

Give the author and title: "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair / It's had tacks in it / And splinters, / And boards torn up, ... / Don't set you down on the steps / 'Cause you finds it's kinder hard... / For I'se still goin' honey,... / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." A mother tells her son not give up when life is difficult.

Robert Frost; "Fire and Ice"

Give the author and title: "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice."

Robert Frost; "Mending Wall"

Give the author and title: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and "Good neighbors make good fences." A stone wall separates the speaker's property from his neighbor's

Ezra Pound; "In a Station of the Metro"

Give the author and title: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." The poem compares the crowd at a subway station to petals on a bough.

Langston Hughes; "Theme for English B"

Give the author and title: "The instructor said, / Go home and write /a page tonight. /And let that page come out of you— / Then, it will be true." "The instructor said, / Go home and write /a page tonight. /And let that page come out of you— / Then, it will be true." The speaker's page discusses what it is like to be a African American man in Harlem and in white America.

Anne Bradstreet; Upon the Burning of Our House

Give the author and title: "The world no longer let me love, / My hope and treasure lies above."

Anne Bradstreet; The Author to Her Book

Give the author and title: "Thou till-form'd offspring of my feeble brain, / Who after birth didst by my side remain, / Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, / Who thee abroad, expos'd to publik view, / Made thee in raggs, halting to th' press to trudge, / Where errors were not lessened (all may judge)."

Anne Bradstreet; The Prologue

Give the author and title: "To sing of Wars, of Captain, and of Kings, / Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun, / For my mean Pen are too superior things; / Or how they all, or each their dates have run, / Let Poets and Historians set these forth, / My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth."

Langston Hughes; "Harlem"

Give the author and title: "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" The poem emphasizes the tension felt by African Americans unable to realize their dreams.

Robert Frost; "Birches"

Give the author and title: "When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them."

e.e. cummings; " anyone lived in an anyhow town"

Give the author and title: "anyone" is a man and "noone" is a woman who don't fit in to their small town community but nonetheless live, love, and eventually die together

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon

Give the author and title: . When it is time to go to Los Angeles, the newly awakened Schwartz says they should go on without him that he no longer wishes to return to Los Angeles. Wylie agrees to take a note to a fellow traveler and he and Cecilia leave. It is the next day before they learn that Mr. Schwartz committed suicide soon after their departure. Back on the plane, Cecilia discovers that the mystery passenger that Mr. Schwartz was concerned with earlier is Monroe Stahr, her father's partner.

Flannery O'Connor; "Good Country People"

Give the author and title: A Bible salesman, purportedly named Manley Pointer, visits the family and is invited for dinner despite the Hopewells' lack of interest in purchasing Bibles. Mrs. Hopewell believes Manley is "good country people." While leaving the home, Pointer invites Joy for a picnic date the next evening, and she ironically imagines seducing the innocent Bible salesman. During the date, he persuades her to go up into the barn loft where he persuades her to remove her prosthetic leg and takes her glasses. He then produces a hollowed-out Bible containing a bottle of whiskey, sex cards, and some condoms. He tries to get her to drink some liquor, but she rebuffs his advances. At that point he disappears with her leg after telling her that he collects prostheses from disabled people and is a nihilistic atheist.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: A consummate politician, Jody soon succeeds in becoming the mayor, postmaster, storekeeper, and the biggest landlord in town. But, Janie seeks something more than a man with a big voice. She soon becomes disenchanted with the monotonous, stifling life that she shares with Jody. She wishes that she could be a part of the rich social life in town, but Jody doesn't allow her to interact with "common" people. Jody sees Janie as the fitting ornament to his wealth and power, and he tries to shape her into his vision of what a mayor's wife should be. On the surface, Janie silently submits to Jody; inside, however, she remains passionate and full of dreams.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: A drunken Pablo insults Robert Jordan, who tries to provoke Pablo, hoping to find an excuse to kill him. Pablo refuses to be provoked, even when Agustín hits him in the face. When Pablo steps away for a few minutes, the others agree that he is dangerous and must be killed. Robert Jordan volunteers to do it. Suddenly, Pablo returns and announces that he has changed his mind and will help with the bridge. Later that night, Maria comes outside to sleep with Robert Jordan again. They talk about their feeling that they are one person, that they share the same body.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: A government-run camp proves much more hospitable to the Joads, and the family soon finds many friends and a bit of work. However, one day, while working at a pipe-laying job, Tom learns that the police are planning to stage a riot in the camp, which will allow them to shut down the facilities. By alerting and organizing the men in the camp, Tom helps to defuse the danger. Still, as pleasant as life in the government camp is, the Joads cannot survive without steady work, and they have to move on.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: A peasant named Anselmo guides Robert Jordan to the guerrilla camp, which is hidden in a cave. Along the way, they encounter Pablo, the leader of the camp, who greets Robert Jordan with hostility and opposes the bridge operation because he believes it endangers the guerrilleros' safety. Robert Jordan suspects that Pablo may betray or sabotage the mission.

Sylvia Plath; "Lady Lazarus"

Give the author and title: A sardonic statement of the poet's intention to attempt by incineration suicide for the third time, treating the matter as a performance where the vulgar crowd will applaud her as she rises from the ashes "with my red hair / And...eat men like air."

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: A terrible hurricane bursts into the Everglades two years after Janie and Tea Cake's marriage. As they desperately flee the rising waters, a rabid dog bites Tea Cake. At the time, Tea Cake doesn't realize the dog's condition; three weeks later, however, he falls ill. During a rabies-induced bout of madness, Tea Cake becomes convinced that Janie is cheating on him. He starts firing a pistol at her, and Janie is forced to kill him to save her life. She is immediately put on trial for murder, but the all-white, all-male jury finds her not guilty.

Ernest Hemingway; "In Another Country"

Give the author and title: A young wounded American solider tells of his treatment for a war wound in an Italian hospital. He recounts his interaction with an Italian major, who is struggling to recover from his wound and who teaches the narrator Italian grammar. When the major's wife dies unexpectedly, his grief adds to the hopelessness the narrator feels.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: Adam Trask settles in the valley with his pregnant wife Cathy where he eventually becomes friends with Samuel Hamilton. Before moving to California, Adam lives on a farm in Connecticut with his half-brother, Charles. The dark and moody Charles resents the fact that his and Adam's father, Cyrus, has always favored the good-natured Adam. Upon his death, Cyrus leaves his sons a large and unexpected fortune, probably stolen during his days as an administrator in the U.S. Army. Despite their new-found wealth, Adam and Charles remain unable to get along.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: Adam's housekeeper, Lee, who has extensively researched the biblical story of Cain and Abel, advises Cal that God intends each individual to choose his own moral destiny rather than be constrained by the legacy of his parents. This idea, encapsulated by the Hebrew word timshel (meaning "thou mayest"), counters Cal's fatalistic idea that he has inherited his mother's evil and sin. Aron gradually withdraws into religious fervor in order to shield himself from the corruption of the world—an approach that Abra and Lee consider cowardly. Adam, meanwhile, squanders the family fortune on a poorly executed business venture involving refrigerated shipping of vegetables.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: Addie Bundren, the wife of Anse Bundren and the matriarch of a poor southern family, is very ill and is expected to die soon. Her oldest son, Cash, puts all of his carpentry skills into preparing her coffin, which he builds right in front of Addie's bedroom window. Although Addie's health is failing rapidly, two of her other sons, Darl and Jewel, leave town to make a delivery for the Bundrens' neighbor, Vernon Tull, whose wife and two daughters have been tending to Addie. Shortly after Darl and Jewel leave, Addie dies.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: Addie has made Anse promise that she will be buried in the town of Jefferson, and though this request is a far more complicated proposition than burying her at home, Anse's sense of obligation, combined with his desire to buy a set of false teeth, compels him to fulfill Addie's dying wish. Cash, who has broken his leg on a job site, helps the family lift the unbalanced coffin, but it is Jewel who ends up manhandling it, almost single-handedly, into the wagon.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: After Jody's funeral, Janie feels free for the first time in years. She rebuffs various suitors who come to court her because she loves her new-found independence. But, when Tea Cake, a man twelve years her junior, enters her life, Janie immediately senses a spark of mutual attraction. She begins dating Tea Cake despite critical gossip within the town. To everyone's shock, Janie then marries Tea Cake nine months after Jody's death, sells Jody's store, and leaves town to go with Tea Cake to Jacksonville.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: After Sofia confronts her, Celie, who was already feeling guilty about what she had done, apologizes and confides in her about all the abuse she suffers at Mister's hands. She also begins to consider Sofia's advice about defending herself against further abuse from Mister. Shug Avery, a lounge singer and Mister's long-time mistress, falls ill, and Mister takes her into his house. Celie, who had been fascinated by the photos of Shug she found in Mister's belongings, is thrilled to have her there. Mister's father expresses disapproval of the arrangement, reminding Mister that Shug has three out-of-wedlock children. Mister proudly states that he knows for certain that all the children have the same father, indirectly admitting to being their father. Mister's father leaves in disgust after drinking a glass of water that Celie spit in.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: After a few more days of preparation, the fiesta begins. The highlight of the first day is the first bullfight, at which Pedro Romero, a nineteen-year-old prodigy, distinguishes himself above all the other bullfighters. Despite its violence, Brett cannot take her eyes off the bullfight, or Romero. A few days later, Jake and his friends are at the hotel dining room, and Brett notices Romero at a nearby table. She persuades Jake to introduce her to him. Later that night, Brett asks Jake to help her find Romero, with whom she says she has fallen in love. Jake agrees to help, and Brett and Romero spend the night together.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: After almost two decades of marriage, Janie finally asserts herself. When Jody insults her appearance, Janie rips him to shreds in front of the townspeople, telling them all how ugly and impotent he is. In retaliation, he savagely beats her. Their marriage breaks down, and Jody becomes quite ill. After months without interacting, Janie visits him on his deathbed. Refusing to be silenced, she once again chastises him for the way that he treated her. As she berates him, he dies.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: After his triumph over Cathy, Adam becomes a livelier and more committed father to his boys. Adam decides to move the family off the ranch and into the town of Salinas so that Aron and Cal can attend school. The twins are assigned to the seventh grade, and Aron begins a relationship with Abra, the goodhearted daughter of a corrupt county supervisor. Cal continues to struggle with his dark side, and when he finally happens to discover the truth about his mother, he believes that her evil has been passed down to him.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: After moving in with Logan, Janie is miserable. Logan is pragmatic and unromantic and, in general, treats her like a pack mule. One day, Joe (she calls him Jody) Starks, a smooth-tongued and ambitious man, ambles down the road in front of the farm. He and Janie flirt in secret for a couple weeks before she runs off and marries him. Janie and Jody, as she calls him, travel to all-black Eatonville, where Jody hopes to have a "big voice."

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: After the family returns to the road, the grandmother begins telling the children a story about a mysterious house nearby with secret passages, a house she remembers from her childhood. This catches the children's attention and they want to visit the house, so they harass their father until he reluctantly agrees to let them take a side trip. As he drives them down a remote dirt road, the grandmother suddenly realizes that the house she was thinking of was actually in Tennessee, not Georgia. That shocking realization makes her involuntarily kick her feet which frightens the cat, causing it to spring from its hidden basket, onto Bailey's neck. He then loses control of the car and flips it over to end up in a ditch below the road.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: After the good-natured fights that ritually accompanied a night of drinking, Danny was not finished. He picked up a table leg and challenged the entire world to a fight. When no one took the challenge, he charged outside, screaming that if no one would fight him then he would pit himself against an enemy worthy of his efforts. Danny plummeted to fatal wounds in the forty-foot drop to the bottom of the gulch behind his house. No one was sure what really happened, but everyone was sure that they had heard Danny fighting with some supernatural enemy before he let out his last scream of defiance.

Flannery O'Connor; "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Give the author and title: After the wedding Shiftlet and Lucynell go on their honeymoon. They stop in a restaurant and have dinner. There Lucynell falls asleep. Once she is sound asleep on the counter of the diner, Shiftlet gets up out of his seat and begins to leave. The boy behind the counter looks at the girl and then back at Shiftlet in a confused manner. Seeing how beautiful Lucynell is, the boy exclaims, "She looks like an angel of Gawd". Shiftlet then replies "Hitchhiker" and leaves her at the restaurant.

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: After they leave, the grandmother speaks to The Misfit who says he's been falsely imprisoned for killing his father, when his cause of death was actually a flu epidemic. The Misfit mentions talking to a psychiatrist while in prison about why he did not remember what crime he had committed. The men shoot Bailey and John in the forest, then come back to take the children's mother, the baby, and June Star for the same purpose. The grandmother begins pleading for her own life. When The Misfit talks to her about Jesus, he expresses his doubts about His raising Lazarus from the dead.

Flannery O'Connor; "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Give the author and title: Afterwards Shiftlet "was more depressed than ever" and he "kept his eye out for a hitchhiker." As a storm is breaking in the sky, Shiftlet sees a road sign that reads, "Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own." Shiftlet then offers a ride to a boy who did not even have his thumb out. Shiftlet tries to make conversation, telling stories about his sweet mother, who is — as the boy at the diner called Lucynell — "an angel of Gawd." But the boy does not buy Shiftlet's sentimentality. "My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking polecat," he snaps, before leaping from the car. Shocked, Shiftlet "felt the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him," exclaiming, "Oh Lord! Break forth and wash the slime from the earth!" The rain finally breaks, with a "guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's car." Shiftlet speeds off to Mobile, Alabama.

Tennessee Williams; The Glass Menagerie

Give the author and title: Amanda is a Southern lady living in poverty among delusions of a gentle past. She imposes her claim to gentility upon her children, Tom and Laura, driving Tom off to sea and with the best of intentions creating a situation that emotionally crushes Laura, fragile as her glass animals.

Flannery O'Connor; "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Give the author and title: An elderly woman and her daughter sit quietly on their porch at sunset when Shiftlet comes walking up the road to their farm. Through carefully selected details, the author reveals that the girl is deaf, that the old woman views Shiftlet as 'a tramp,' and that Shiftlet himself wears a "left coat sleeve that was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it." The two adults exchange curt pleasantries, then Mrs. Crater offers him shelter in exchange for work but warns, "I can't pay." Shiftlet says he has no interest in money, adding that he believes that most people are too concerned with money.

Robert Lowell; "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"

Give the author and title: An elegy for poet's war-drowned sailor cousin and a passionate denunciation in surreal imagery of war and man's fight with God, prophesying a distant peace when the world comes of its own will to "Calvary's Cross."

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: Andrés, who has been traveling through the night to deliver Robert Jordan's dispatch to General Golz. Crossing into Republican territory, Andrés is slowed when several suspicious but apathetic officers question him. When Andrés and his escort finally near Golz's headquarters, a politician named André Marty suspects that they are Fascist spies and orders them arrested. Robert Jordan's friend Karkov hears about the arrests and uses his influence to free the men. Robert Jordan's dispatch finally reaches Golz but arrives too late. The Republican offensive already has begun and can no longer be stopped.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Anger, fear, and frustration define Bigger's daily existence, as he is forced to hide behind a façade of toughness or risk succumbing to despair. While Bigger and his gang have robbed many black-owned businesses, they have never attempted to rob a white man. Bigger sees whites not as individuals, but as a natural, oppressive force—a great looming "whiteness" pressing down upon him. Bigger's fear of confronting this force overwhelms him, but rather than admit his fear, he violently attacks a member of his gang to sabotage the robbery.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Another of the mill workers, Byron Bunch, is intrigued and unsettled when Lena Grove suddenly appears at the mill one day. He tells the town's disgraced former minister, Reverend Gail Hightower, of his efforts to care for the girl. Soon, Lena comes to realize that the man she seeks—her baby's father, Lucas Burch—is really Joe Brown. Upon Lena's arrival in town, Brown is being held in the town jail after the murder of a local woman, Joanna Burden, and the burning of her home. Joe Christmas, Miss Burden's occasional lover, is the chief suspect.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: Aron graduates from high school early and leaves for Stanford University. Adam misses Aron terribly, thinking him smarter and more ambitious than Cal. However, Cal, in collaboration with Will Hamilton, one of Samuel's sons, works secretly to earn back the fortune his father lost on the failed refrigeration business. Cal also hopes to make enough money to pay for Aron's tuition at Stanford. In the strained economy of World War I, Will and Cal buy beans from local farmers at an unfairly low price and sell the beans, in turn, to desperate British buyers at an unfairly high price. The venture nets Cal thousands of dollars, which he plans to give to his father as a gift at Thanksgiving.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: Aron, who is miserable at Stanford, comes home for Thanksgiving. Adam is thrilled to see Aron but appalled by Cal's gift of money. Adam considers the money to be earned dishonestly and tells Cal to give it back to the farmers from whom he stole it. Enraged and jealous of Adam's obvious preference for Aron, Cal loses control of his anger and rashly tells Aron the truth about their mother, Cathy. When Cal takes Aron to the brothel to show him that Cathy is still alive, the revelation crushes the fragile Aron, who screams incoherently and runs away. The next day, the shattered Aron joins the Army, while Cathy, horrified by her son's reaction to her, commits suicide by overdosing on morphine. She leaves her entire fortune—part of it inherited from Charles, part of it earned through blackmail and prostitution—to Aron.

Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar

Give the author and title: As Esther improves, the hospital officials grant her permission to leave the hospital from time to time. During one of these excursions, she finally loses her virginity with a math professor named Irwin. She begins bleeding profusely and has to go to the emergency room. One morning, Joan, who seemed to be improving, hangs herself. Buddy comes to visit Esther, and both understand that their relationship is over. Esther will leave the mental hospital in time to start winter semester at college. She believes that she has regained a tenuous grasp on sanity, but knows that the bell jar of her madness could descend again at any time.

Ernest Hemingway; "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

Give the author and title: As Harry lies on his cot, he is aware that vultures are walking around his makeshift camp, and a hyena lurks in the shadows. Knowing that he will die before he wakes, Harry goes to sleep and dreams that the rescue plane is taking him to a snow covered summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Its Western summit is called the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God, where he sees the legendary leopard.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: As Richard enters the adult working world in Jackson, he suffers many frightening, often violent encounters with racism. In the most demoralizing of these encounters, two white Southerners, Pease and Reynolds, run Richard off his job at an optical shop, claiming that such skilled work is not meant for blacks. Richard is upset because the white Northerner who runs the company, Mr. Crane, has hired Richard specifically for the purpose of teaching a black man the optical trade, but then does little to actually help defend Richard against his racist employees.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: As a child, Joe Christmas is left on the steps of an orphanage. When the facility's dietician mistakenly believes that Joe has overheard her having sex with a young doctor in her room, she worries she will lose her job. To eliminate this risk, she threatens to expose young Joe's biracial background and thus have him transferred to an orphanage for black children. She discusses the plan with the orphanage's janitor, who kidnaps Joe and takes him to Little Rock, where he is found and returned, only to be adopted two weeks later by a sternly religious man, Mr. McEachern, and his wife.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: As a young minister, Gail Hightower secures a church in Jefferson to feed his obsession with his grandfather, a Confederate cavalryman who was killed in the town during the Civil War. Hightower's young wife is unfaithful and grapples with mental health problems. She eventually dies in a fall from the window of a Memphis hotel room where she is staying with another man. A scandal ensues, and the Jefferson parishioners turn on Hightower, who is forced to step down.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: As dawn breaks, Robert Jordan and Anselmo descend on the bridge, shoot the Fascist sentries, and plant the explosives. Pilar arrives and says that Eladio has been killed, while Fernando, fatally wounded, must be left behind. When Robert Jordan detonates the explosives, the bridge falls, but shrapnel from the blast strikes Anselmo and kills him. Pablo emerges from below, saying that all five of his men are dead. Agustín accuses Pablo of shooting the men for their horses, and Pablo does not deny it. As the group crosses the road in retreat, a Fascist bullet hits Robert Jordan's horse, which tramples on Robert Jordan's left leg, breaking it. Knowing that he must be left behind, Robert Jordan says goodbye to Maria, saying that he will be with her even if she goes.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: As he returns to the brush house, a group of hostile men confronts him and tries to take the pearl from him. He fights the men off, killing one and causing the rest to flee, but drops the pearl in the process. As Juana ascends from the shore to the brush house, she finds the pearl lying in the path. Just beyond, she sees Kino on the ground, next to the dead man. He bemoans the loss of the pearl, which she presents to him. Though Kino explains that he had no intention to kill, Juana insists that he will be labeled a murderer. They resolve to flee at once.

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: As he speaks, the Misfit becomes agitated and angry. He snarls into the grandmother's face and claims that life has "no pleasure but meanness". In her growing confusion, she thinks that The Misfit is going to cry, so she reaches out and touches his shoulder tenderly, saying "You're one of my own children!" His reaction is to jump away "as if a snake had bitten him" and he kills her with three shots. When they finish murdering the family, The Misfit takes a moment to clean his glasses, saying that the grandmother would have been a good woman if "it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." The story ends with the Misfit chastising one of his sidekicks for claiming that the family's murder was good fun. The Misfit tells him to shut up, that "it's no real pleasure in life."

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: As his despair grows, Richard resolves to leave for the North as soon as possible. He becomes willing to steal in order to raise the cash necessary for the trip. After swindling his boss at a movie theater, selling stolen fruit preserves, and pawning a stolen gun, Richard moves to Memphis, where the atmosphere is safer and where he can make his final preparations to move to Chicago. In Memphis, Richard has the seeming good fortune of finding a kind, generous landlady, Mrs. Moss, who determines that he must marry her daughter, Bess. Richard does not take to Bess, so his living situation is awkward until Mrs. Moss comes to terms with the fact that her daughter will never be Richard's wife.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: As the Great Depression forces him and millions of others out of work, Richard begins to find Communism appealing, especially its emphasis on protecting the oppressed. He becomes a Communist Party member because he thinks that he can help the Party cause with his writing, finding the language that can promote the Party's cause to common people. Meanwhile, Richard works various jobs through federal relief programs. When he begins writing for leftist publications, he takes positions with federal theater companies and with the Federal Writers' Project. To his mounting dismay, he finds that, like any other group, the Communist Party is beset with human fears and foibles that constantly frustrate its own ends. Richard's desire to write biographical sketches of Communists and his tendency to criticize Party pronouncements earn him distrust. After a great deal of political strife and slander that culminates in his being physically assaulted during a May Day parade, Richard leaves the Party. Unfazed by the failure of his high hopes, he remains determined to make writing his link to the world.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: As the Joads near California, they hear ominous rumors of a depleted job market. One migrant tells Pa that 20,000 people show up for every 800 jobs and that his own children have starved to death. Although the Joads press on, their first days in California prove tragic, as Granma Joad dies.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: At Granny's, Richard once again faces the familiar problem of hunger. He also faces a new problem: Granny's incredibly strict religious regimen. Granny, a Seventh-Day Adventist, sees her strong-willed, dreamy, and bookish grandson as terribly sinful, and she struggles mightily to reform him. Another of Richard's aunts, Addie, soon joins the struggle against Richard's defiance. Richard's obsession with reading and his lack of interest in religion make his home life an endless conflict. Granny forces him to attend the religious school where Aunt Addie teaches.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: At four-thirty, Danny gets up and goes for a walk in the direction of Monterey, and while he is gone, neighbors swarm on the house, decorating it. At five-thirty, the seven friends walk home with fourteen gallons of wine bought with their day's wages. They set out to find Danny and get the party started. Pilon and Pablo find him gloomily standing on a dark pier in Monterey. Pablo later swears that he saw an unearthly black bird hanging over Danny's head. When they give Danny word of the party, he is invigorated, and the three race back up the hill to get things started. The party became legendary for its greatness. Everyone in the whole town was there, and they danced so hard that the floor of the house caved in at points. Unfortunately, the night ended in tragedy.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: At nightfall, Kino, Juana, and Coyotito set out for the capital. Skirting the town, they travel north until sunrise and then take covert shelter by the roadside. They sleep for most of the day and are preparing to set out again when Kino discovers that three trackers are following them. After hesitating briefly, Kino decides that they must hurry up the mountain, in hopes of eluding the trackers. A breathless ascent brings them to a water source, where they rest and take shelter in a nearby cave. Kino attempts to mislead the trackers by creating a false trail up the mountain. Kino, Juana, and Coyotito then hide in the cave and wait for an opportunity to escape back down the mountain. The trackers are slow in their pursuit and finally arrive at the watering hole at dusk. They make camp nearby, and two of the trackers sleep while the third stands watch. Kino decides that he must attempt to attack them before the late moon rises. He strips naked to avoid being seen and sneaks up to striking distance.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: At the camp, Robert Jordan meets Pilar, Pablo's "woman." A large, sturdy part-gypsy, Pilar appears to be the real leader of the band of guerrilleros. A rapport quickly develops between Robert Jordan and Pilar. During the course of the evening, Robert Jordan meets the six other inhabitants of the camp: the unreliable Rafael, feisty and foul-mouthed Agustín, dignified Fernando, old Primitivo, and brothers Andrés and Eladio. The camp also shelters a young woman named Maria, whom a band of Fascists raped not long before. Robert Jordan and Maria are immediately drawn to each other.

William Faulkner; Absalom, Absalom!

Give the author and title: At the end of the Civil War, Sutpen (a colonel) finds his son and reveals to him that not only is Bon his and Judith's half-brother, he is also, in part, a black man. That knowledge makes Henry revolt against Bon in a way that even the idea of incest did not, and on the day Bon arrives to marry Judith, Henry murders him in front of the gates of the Sutpen plantation.

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: Bailey intends to take his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation, but his mother, (referred to as "the grandmother" in the story) wants him to drive to Tennessee. She argues that his children, June Star and John Wesley, have never been to Tennessee and shows him a news article about an escaped murderer called The Misfit last seen heading to Florida.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: Before going to bed, Kino reburies the pearl under his sleeping mat. That night, he is roused by an intruder digging around in the corner. A violent struggle ensues, and Kino's efforts to chase away the criminal leave him bloodied. Terribly upset by this turn of events, Juana proposes that they abandon the pearl, which she considers an agent of evil. The next morning, Kino and Juana make their way to town to sell the pearl. Juan Tomás, Kino's brother, advises Kino to be wary of cheats. Indeed, all of the dealers conspire to bid low on the pearl. Kino indignantly refuses to accept their offers, resolving instead to take his pearl to the capital.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Bigger Thomas, a poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old black man in 1930s Chicago, wakes up one morning in his family's cramped apartment on the South Side of the city. . Having grown up under the climate of harsh racial prejudice in 1930s America, Bigger is burdened with a powerful conviction that he has no control over his life and that he cannot aspire to anything other than menial, low-wage labor. His mother pesters him to take a job with a rich white man named Mr. Dalton, but Bigger instead chooses to meet up with his friends to plan the robbery of a white man's store.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Bigger eludes the massive manhunt for as long as he can, but he is eventually captured after a dramatic shoot-out. The press and the public determine his guilt and his punishment before his trial even begins. The furious populace assumes that he raped Mary before killing her and burned her body to hide the evidence of the rape. Moreover, the white authorities and the white mob use Bigger's crime as an excuse to terrorize the entire South Side. Jan visits Bigger in jail. He says that he understands how he terrified, angered, and shamed Bigger through his violation of the social taboos that govern tense race relations.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Bigger tries to conceal his crime by burning Mary's body in the Daltons' furnace. He decides to try to use the Daltons' prejudice against communists to frame Jan for Mary's disappearance. Bigger believes that the Daltons will assume Jan is dangerous and that he may have kidnapped their daughter for political purposes. Additionally, Bigger takes advantage of the Daltons' racial prejudices to avoid suspicion, continuing to play the role of a timid, ignorant black servant who would be unable to commit such an act. Mary's murder gives Bigger a sense of power and identity he has never known.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; Tender is the Night

Give the author and title: Dick is accused of infidelity by a former patient, and Nicole, in anger, runs their car off the road. Dick learns his father has passed away and heads to America for the funeral. Upon his return, Dick meets Rosemary in a hotel, and the two consummate the aborted romance they had begun several years earlier. In the aftermath, Dick realizes his world is falling apart.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Bigger's girlfriend, Bessie, makes an offhand comment that inspires him to try to collect ransom money from the Daltons. They know only that Mary has vanished, not that she is dead. Bigger writes a ransom letter, playing upon the Daltons' hatred of communists by signing his name "Red." He then bullies Bessie to take part in the ransom scheme. However, Mary's bones are found in the furnace, and Bigger flees with Bessie to an empty building. Bigger rapes Bessie and, frightened that she will give him away, bludgeons her to death with a brick after she falls asleep.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: Bill, Jake, and Cohn travel together into Spain, to Pamplona. They plan on meeting Brett and Mike there. Jake and Bill leave on a bus that afternoon to meet the couple. After arriving in Pamplona, Jake and Bill check into a hotel owned by Montoya, a Spanish bullfighting expert who likes Jake for his earnest interest in the sport. Jake and Bill meet up with Brett, Mike, and Cohn, and the whole group goes to watch the bulls being unloaded in preparation for the bullfights during the fiesta.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: But after the tragic death of his friend Tod Clifton, a charismatic young black "Brother" who is shot by a white policeman, the narrator becomes disillusioned with the disparity between what the organization preaches and what its leaders practice. As a result, he decides to leave the Brotherhood, headquartered in an affluent section of Manhattan, and returns to Harlem where he is confronted by Ras the Exhorter (now Ras the Destroyer) who accuses him of betraying the black community. To escape the wrath of Ras and his men, the narrator disguises himself by donning a hat and dark glasses. In disguise, he is repeatedly mistaken for someone named Rinehart, a con man who uses his invisibility to his own advantage.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Byron and the Hineses arrive at Hightower's house and reveal that Joe Christmas's father was a circus worker who tried to run off with the Hineses' daughter before Uncle Doc shot and killed him. Eventually, Uncle Doc placed the baby in the orphanage in Memphis where he worked as a janitor. Byron wants Hightower to lie and claim that Joe Christmas was with him at his house on the night of Joanna Burden's murder. Hightower becomes angry and asks them to leave.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon

Give the author and title: Cecilia has had a crush on Monroe Stahr since childhood and hopes that this summer break from school will lend them an opportunity to explore those feelings. A few days after returning to California, Cecilia goes to the studio. While trying to convince him to leave his work, an earthquake strikes. Cecilia, her father, and his business companions go into Stahr's office. Here, they learn that the earthquake has caused a water main to burst and the back lot is flooded. Stahr calls a fix-it man, and they all rush out to see the damage for themselves. After a few moments, two women come floating down the flood on the head of a prop statue. Stahr is instantly infatuated with one of the women because of her resemblance to his deceased wife.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Celie visits Alphonso, who confirms Nettie's story. Celie begins to lose some of her faith in God. She confides in Shug who explains her own unique religious philosophy to Celie. Celie, having had enough of her husband's abuse, decides to leave Mister along with Shug and Squeak, who is considering a singing career of her own. Celie puts a curse on Mister before getting in the car and leaving him for good. Celie settles in Tennessee and supports herself as a tailor. Celie learns that Mister, suffering from a considerable decline in fortune after Celie left him, has changed dramatically. He gives Celie permission to call him by his first name, Albert. Albert proposes that they marry "in the spirit as well as in the flesh," but Celie declines. Alphonso dies unexpectedly, and Celie inherits the land and moves back into her childhood home. Around this time, Shug falls in love with Germaine, a member of her band, and the news of this crushes Celie. Shug travels with Germaine, all the while writing postcards to Celie. Celie pledges to love Shug, even if Shug does not love her back.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Celie, the protagonist and narrator, is a poor, uneducated, fourteen-year-old black girl living in the American South. She writes letters to God because the man she believes to be her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once, a pregnancy that resulted in the birth of a girl. Alphonso takes the girl away shortly after her birth. Celie has a second child, a boy, whom Alphonso also abducts. Celie's ailing mother dies after cursing Celie on her deathbed. Celie and her younger sister, Nettie, learn that a man identified only as Mister wants to marry Nettie. Alphonso refuses to let Nettie marry, instead arranging for Mister to marry Celie.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: Charles is disgusted at his brother's marriage to Cathy, who, unbeknownst to Adam or Charles, is a former prostitute who murdered her parents and stole their money. Although Charles despises Cathy, he takes her into his bed after she drugs Adam on their wedding night. Adam and Cathy move to California, as Adam proves unable to live peacefully with Charles in Connecticut. In Salinas, Cathy learns she is pregnant and attempts to abort her baby in order to prevent any furtherance of ties to her husband. She is desperate to escape Adam despite the fact that he loves her and provides for her. The abortion is unsuccessful, and Cathy eventually gives birth to twins, Aron and Caleb (Cal). It is clear from the start, however, that Cathy does not care about the infants and wants to leave the household as soon as possible.

Toni Morrison; The Bluest Eye

Give the author and title: Cholly returns home one day and finds Pecola washing dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and hatred that are fueled by guilt, he rapes her. When Pecola's mother finds her unconscious on the floor, she disbelieves Pecola's story and beats her. Pecola goes to Soaphead Church, a sham mystic, and asks him for blue eyes. Instead of helping her, he uses her to kill a dog he dislikes.

Toni Morrison; The Bluest Eye

Give the author and title: Claudia and Frieda find out that Pecola has been impregnated by her father, and unlike the rest of the neighborhood, they want the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they have been saving for a bicycle and plant marigold seeds. They believe that if the flowers live, so will Pecola's baby. The flowers refuse to bloom, and Pecola's baby dies when it is born prematurely. Cholly, who rapes Pecola a second time and then runs away, dies in a workhouse. Pecola goes mad, believing that her cherished wish has been fulfilled and that she has the bluest eyes.

William Faulkner; Absalom, Absalom!

Give the author and title: Clytie, Thomas's daughter with a slave woman and a withered old woman herself, sets fire to the manor house, killing herself and Henry, and bringing the Sutpen dynasty to a fiery end.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: Cohn has become restless of late, and he comes to Jake's office one afternoon to try to convince Jake to go with him to South America. Jake refuses, and he takes pains to get rid of Cohn. That night at a dance club, Jake runs into Lady Brett Ashley, a divorced socialite and the love of Jake's life. Brett is a free-spirited and independent woman, but she can be very selfish at times. She and Jake met in England during World War I, when Brett treated Jake for a war wound. During Jake and Brett's conversation, it is subtly implied that Jake's injury rendered him impotent. Although Brett loves Jake, she hints that she is unwilling to give up sex, and that for this reason, she will not commit to a relationship with him.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: Cora, Tull's wife, remembers Addie's unchristian inclination to respect her son Jewel more than God. Addie herself, speaking either from her coffin or in a leap back in time to her deathbed, recalls events from her life: her loveless marriage to Anse; her affair with the local minister, Whitfield, which led to Jewel's conception; and the birth of her various children. Whitfield recalls traveling to the Bundrens' house to confess the affair to Anse and his eventual decision not to say anything after all. A horse doctor sets Cash's broken leg, while Cash faints from the pain without ever complaining. Anse is able to purchase a new team of mules by mortgaging his farm equipment, using money that he was saving for his false teeth and money that Cash was saving for a new gramophone, and trading in Jewel's horse.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: Curley is newly-married, possessive of his flirtatious wife, and full of jealous suspicion. Once George and Lennie are alone in the bunkhouse, Curley's wife appears and flirts with them. Lennie thinks she is "purty," but George, sensing the trouble that could come from tangling with this woman and her husband, warns Lennie to stay away from her.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: Daisy and Tom introduce the narrator to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom the narrator begins a romantic relationship. The narrator also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom Buchanan's marriage: t Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: Danny steals from everyone, including the members of his own household. Husbands all over town call for vengeance for what he has done to their wives, and the police swear that he will be arrested on sight for his vandalism and fighting. Mr. Torrelli, the wine merchant, even produces a note that Danny has signed authorizing the sale of the house for $25 dollars. Luckily, the merchant did not think to make a backup copy, and the paisanos quickly dispose of the original.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: Danny's funeral is a public debacle of fine clothes, stolen flowers, and military splendor. The paisanos cannot attend, however, for if they enter the proceedings in their poor clothes it would be a disgrace to Danny's memory. Instead, they watch from afar until they cannot stand the sorrow any longer and burst into tears. That night, they drink more wine and talk fondly of Danny's memory. They sing songs that he liked and smoke cigars provided by Tito Ralph. As Pilon attempts to relight one of the cigars, the match flutters out of his hand and ignites a newspaper in the corner. At first, they all get up to stamp the fire out, but they change their minds. The house dies, as Danny did, in one last blaze of glory. When there is nothing but ashes left, the friends depart, each going his separate way.

Jack Kerouac; On the Road

Give the author and title: Dean comes east to Sal again, foiling Sal's stable life once more, and they drive west together, with more crazy adventures on the way at Bull Lee's in New Orleans, ending in San Francisco this time. The winter after that, Sal goes to Dean, and they blaze across the country together in friendly fashion, and Dean settles in New York for a while. In the spring, Sal goes to Denver alone, but Dean soon joins him and they go south all the way to Mexico City this time. Through all of this constant movement, there is an array of colorful characters, shifting landscapes, dramas, and personal development.

Jack Kerouac; On the Road

Give the author and title: Dean, a big womanizer, will have three wives and four children in the course of these three years. Perceptive Sal, who at the beginning is weakened and depressed, gains in joy and confidence and finds love at the end. At first Sal is intrigued by Dean because Dean seems to have the active, impulsive passion that Sal lacks, but they turn out to have a lot more in common. The story is in the details.

Alice Walker; "Everyday Use"

Give the author and title: Dee ransacks the trunk at the foot of Mama's bed, reappearing with two quilts made by her mother, aunt, and grandmother. The quilts contain small pieces of garments worn by relatives all the way back to the Civil War. Dee asks her mother for the quilts. Mama hears Maggie drop something in the kitchen and then slam the door. Mama suggests that Dee take other quilts, but Dee insists, wanting the ones hand-stitched by her grandmother. Mama gets up and tries to tell Dee more about the garments used to make the quilts, but Dee steps out of reach. Mama reveals that she had promised Maggie the quilts. Dee gasps, arguing that Maggie won't appreciate the quilts and isn't smart enough to preserve them. But Mama hopes that Maggie does, indeed, designate the quilts for everyday use.

Alice Walker; "Everyday Use"

Give the author and title: Dee says that the priceless quilts will be destroyed. Mama says that Maggie knows how to quilt and can make more. Maggie shuffles in and, trying to make peace, offers Dee the quilts. When Mama looks at Maggie, she is struck by a strange feeling, similar to the spirit she feels sometimes in church. Impulsively, she hugs Maggie, pulls her into the room, snatches the quilts out of Dee's hands, and places them in Maggie's lap. She tells Dee to take one or two of the other quilts. As Dee and Hakim-a-barber leave, Dee informs Mama that Mama does not understand her own heritage. Kissing Maggie, Dee tells her to try and improve herself and that it's a new day for black Americans. Mama and Maggie watch the car drive off, then sit in the quiet of the yard until bedtime.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: During the first week of their marriage, Tea Cake and Janie encounter difficulties. He steals her money and leaves her alone one night, making her think that he married her only for her money. But, he returns, explaining that he never meant to leave her and that his theft occurred in a moment of weakness. Afterward, they promise to share all their experiences and opinions with each other. They move to the Everglades, where they work during the harvest season and socialize during the summer off-season. Tea Cake's quick wit and friendliness make their shack the center of entertainment and social life.

Arthur Miller; A View from the Bridge

Give the author and title: Eddie Carbone violates the code of ethnic loyalty in his Brooklyn neighborhood and provokes his own death when he is unable to accept the label of informer

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Ella and Maggie flee with the two boys to West Helena, Arkansas. There, the two sisters' combined wages make life easier than it had been in Memphis. After only a short time, however, Maggie flees to Detroit with her lover, Professor Matthews, leaving Ella the sole support of the family. Hard economic times return. Times become even harder when a paralytic stroke severely incapacitates Ella. Richard's grandmother brings Ella, Richard, and Alan to her home in Jackson, Mississippi. Ella's numerous siblings convene in Jackson to decide how to care for their ailing sister and her two boys.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Ella's worsening health prevents her from raising two children by herself and often leaves her unable to work. During these times, Richard does whatever odd jobs a child can do to bring in some money for the family. School is hardly an option for him. At one point, the family's troubles are so severe that Ella must place her children in an orphanage for a few weeks.

Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar

Give the author and title: Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, travels to New York to work on a magazine for a month as a guest editor. Esther attempts to lose her virginity with a UN interpreter, but he seems uninterested. She questions her abilities and worries about what she will do after college. On her last night in the city, she goes on a disastrous blind date with a man named Marco, who tries to rape her.

Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar

Give the author and title: Esther awakens to find herself in the hospital. She has survived her suicide attempt with no permanent physical injuries. Once her body heals, she is sent to the psychological ward in the city hospital, where she is uncooperative, paranoid, and determined to end her life. Eventually, Philomena Guinea, a famous novelist who sponsors Esther's college scholarship, pays to move her to a private hospital. In this more enlightened environment, Esther comes to trust her new psychiatrist, a woman named Dr. Nolan. She slowly begins to improve with a combination of talk therapy, insulin injections, and properly administered electric shock therapy. She becomes friends with Joan, a woman from her hometown and college who has had experiences similar to Esther's. She is repulsed, however, when Joan makes a sexual advance toward her.

Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar

Give the author and title: Esther returns to the Boston suburbs and discovers that she has not been accepted to a writing class she had planned to take. She will spend the summer with her mother instead. She makes vague plans to write a novel, learn shorthand, and start her senior thesis. Soon she finds the feelings of unreality she experienced in New York taking over her life. She is unable to read, write, or sleep, and she stops bathing. Her mother takes her to Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist who prescribes electric shock therapy for Esther. Esther becomes more unstable than ever after this terrifying treatment, and decides to kill herself. She tries to slit her wrists, but can only bring herself to slash her calf. She tries to hang herself, but cannot find a place to tie the rope in her low‑ceilinged house. At the beach with friends, she attempts to drown herself, but she keeps floating to the surface of the water. Finally, she hides in a basement crawl space and takes a large quantity of sleeping pills.

Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar

Give the author and title: Esther wonders if she should marry and live a conventional domestic life, or attempt to satisfy her ambition. Buddy Willard, her college boyfriend, is recovering from tuberculosis in a sanitarium, and wants to marry Esther when he regains his health. To an outside observer, Buddy appears to be the ideal mate: he is handsome, gentle, intelligent, and ambitious. But he does not understand Esther's desire to write poetry, and when he confesses that he slept with a waitress while dating Esther, Esther thinks him a hypocrite and decides she cannot marry him. She sets out to lose her virginity as though in pursuit of the answer to an important mystery.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: Eventually, the Pirate reaches his goal of one thousand quarters and buys a golden candlestick for Saint Francisco. The monotony of the paisano way of life and the weight of property ownership begins to wear on Danny, however. For a month, he sits on the porch with his friends brooding over memories of nights sleeping in the forest and the infinitely better taste of stolen food. In the end, the weight is too much, and Danny gives into to his desires to re-experience his youth. He disappears into the woods and goes on a month long crime spree.

Ezra Pound; "A Pact"

Give the author and title: I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman - / I have detested you long enough..... / It was you that broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving. / We have one sap and one root - / Let there be commerce between us."

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: Focusing on the events of one fateful day, the narrator then recalls his college days. Assigned to chauffeur Mr. Norton, a prominent white visiting trustee, around the campus, the narrator follows Mr. Norton's orders and takes him to visit two sites in the nearby black neighborhood — the cabin of Jim Trueblood, a local sharecropper, and the Golden Day, a disreputable bar/half-way house for shell-shocked World War I veterans. The narrator, however, is expelled from his beloved college for taking Mr. Norton to these places and sent to New York, armed with seven letters from his dean (Dr. Bledsoe). The letters, he believed, are letters of recommendation, but are in reality letters confirming his expulsion. Arriving in New York City, the narrator is amazed by what he perceives to be unlimited freedom for blacks. He is especially intrigued by a black West Indian man (later identified as Ras the Exhorter) whom he first encounters addressing a group of men and women on the streets of Harlem, urging them to work together to unite their black community. But the narrator's excitement soon turns to disillusionment as he discovers that the North presents the same barriers to black achievement as the South.

Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea

Give the author and title: For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: George and Lennie meet Slim, the skilled mule driver who wields great authority on the ranch. Slim comments on the rarity of friendship like that between George and Lennie. Carlson, another ranch-hand, suggests that since Slim's dog has just given birth, they should offer a puppy to Candy and shoot Candy's old, good-for-nothing dog.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: George and Lennie share a dream of buying their own piece of land, farming it, and much to Lennie's delight, keeping rabbits. George ends the night by treating Lennie to the story he often tells him about what life will be like in such an idyllic place.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: George begins to tell Lennie the story of the farm they will have together. As he describes the rabbits that Lennie will tend, the sound of the approaching lynch party grows louder. George shoots his friend in the back of the head. When the other men arrive, George lets them believe that Lennie had the gun, and George wrestled it away from him and shot him. Only Slim understands what has really happened, that George has killed his friend out of mercy. Slim consolingly leads him away, and the other men, completely puzzled, watch them leave.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: George confides in Slim that he and Lennie are not cousins, but have been friends since childhood. He tells how Lennie has often gotten them into trouble. For instance, they were forced to flee their last job because Lennie tried to touch a woman's dress and was accused of rape. Slim agrees to give Lennie one of his puppies, and Carlson continues to badger Candy to kill his old dog. When Slim agrees with Carlson, saying that death would be a welcome relief to the suffering animal, Candy gives in. Carlson, before leading the dog outside, promises to do the job painlessly.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: Grieving the recent death of her fiancé, Catherine longs for love so deeply that she will settle for the illusion of it. Her passion, even though pretended, wakens a desire for emotional interaction in Henry, whom the war has left coolly detached and numb.

Ernest Hemingway; "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

Give the author and title: Harry, a writer, and his wife, Helen, are stranded while on safari in Africa. A bearing burned out on their truck, and Harry is talking about the gangrene that has infected his leg when he did not apply iodine after he scratched it. As they wait for a rescue plane from Nairobi that he knows won't arrive on time, Harry spends his time drinking and insulting Helen. Harry reviews his life, realizing that he wasted his talent through procrastination and luxury from a marriage to a wealthy woman that he doesn't love.

Ernest Hemingway; "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

Give the author and title: Helen wakes, and taking a flashlight, walks toward Harry's cot. Seeing that his leg is dangling alongside the cot and that the dressings are pulled down, she calls his name repeatedly. She listens for his breathing and can hear nothing. Outside the tent, the hyena whines — a cry that is strangely human.

William Faulkner; Absalom, Absalom!

Give the author and title: Henry goes to college at the University of Mississippi in 1859 and meets a sophisticated fellow student named Charles Bon, whom he befriends and brings home for Christmas. Charles meets Judith, and over time, an engagement between them is assumed. But, Sutpen realizes that Bon is actually his own son—Henry and Judith's half-brother—from a previous marriage, which he abandoned when he discovered that his wife had negro blood. He tells Henry that the engagement cannot be and that Bon is Henry's own brother; Henry reacts with outrage, refusing to believe that Bon knew all along and willingly became engaged to his own sister. Henry repudiates his birthright, and he and Bon flee to New Orleans.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: Henry is diagnosed with jaundice, and Miss Van Campen, the superintendent of the hospital, accuses him of bringing the disease on himself through excessive drinking. Believing Henry's illness to be an attempt to avoid his duty as a serviceman, Miss Van Campen has Henry's leave revoked, and he is sent to the front once the jaundice has cleared. As they part, Catherine and Henry pledge their mutual devotion.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: Henry reunites with Catherine in the town of Stresa. From there, the two escape to safety in Switzerland, rowing all night in a tiny borrowed boat. Although Henry is sometimes plagued by guilt for abandoning the men on the front, the two succeed in living a beautiful, peaceful life. When spring arrives, the couple moves to Lausanne so that they can be closer to the hospital. Early one morning, Catherine goes into labor. The delivery is exceptionally painful and complicated. Catherine delivers a stillborn baby boy and, later that night, dies of a hemorrhage. Henry stays at her side until she is gone. He attempts to say goodbye but cannot. He walks back to his hotel in the rain.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: Henry travels to the front, where Italian forces are losing ground and manpower daily. Henry leads his team of ambulance drivers into the great column of evacuating troops. The men pick up two engineering sergeants and two frightened young girls on their way. Henry and his drivers then decide to leave the column and take secondary roads, which they assume will be faster. When one of their vehicles bogs down in the mud, Henry orders the two engineers to help in the effort to free the vehicle. When they refuse, he shoots one of them. The drivers continue in the other trucks until they get stuck again. They send off the young girls and continue on foot toward Udine. As they march, one of the drivers is shot dead by the easily frightened rear guard of the Italian army. Another driver marches off to surrender himself, while Henry and the remaining driver seek refuge at a farmhouse.

Allen Ginsberg; "Howl"

Give the author and title: If the key word of the first section was "who," the second section asks "What?" As in, what destroyed the best minds of his generation? The poet provides the answer immediately: Moloch. In the Hebrew Bible, Moloch was an idolatrous god to whom children were sacrificed by placing them in fire. In other words, not a friendly god. The religious context and history of Moloch is extremely complicated, so it's better to stick to the poem's own definition. For the poet, Moloch is associated with war, government, capitalism, and mainstream culture, all of which might be summed up by one of the poem's most important concepts: the "machine" or "machinery." Moloch is an inhuman monster that kills youth and love.

William Faulkner; Absalom, Absalom!

Give the author and title: In 1833, a wild, imposing man named Thomas Sutpen comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, with a group of slaves and a French architect in tow. He buys a hundred square miles of land from an Indian tribe, raises a manor house, plants cotton, and marries the daughter of a local merchant, and within a few years is entrenched among the local aristocracy. Sutpen has a son and a daughter, Henry and Judith, who grow up in a life of uncultivated ease in the northern Mississippi countryside.

Susan Glaspell; Trifles

Give the author and title: In 1901, Margaret Hossack was accused, tried, and convicted of killing her sleeping husband with an axe. The plot revolves around Minnie Wright who has been arrested for the murder of her distant and abusive husband; however, the audience never meets Minnie. The play takes place in Wright's kitchen. The men are investigating the crime scene while their wives discuss the horrible act and Minnie's depressive life with the deceased man. The play is a wonderful depiction of irony as the audience is led to believe that the women have a much better idea about who actually killed the husband.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: In Madrid, Robert Jordan's friend, a Russian journalist named Karkov, learns that the Fascists know about the offensive the Republicans have planned for the next day. Karkov worries about Robert Jordan. At two in the morning, Pilar wakes Robert Jordan and reports that Pablo has fled the camp with some of the explosives that were meant to blow the bridge. Though furious at first, Robert Jordan controls his anger and plans to carry out the operation anyway, with fewer explosives.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: In a above beautiful Monterey lived a group of men called the paisanos. They were drunkards, thieves, ruffians, and vagabonds, but they were also surprisingly good at heart, requiring little more from life than friendship and a little wine. Among these paisanos were Danny, Pilon, Pablo, Jesus Maria, and Big Joe Portagee.

T.S. Eliot; "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Give the author and title: In a popular passage, the speaker intimates on the dismal punishment of old age as he states, "I shall grow old... I shall grow old.... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

Ernest Hemingway; "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

Give the author and title: In a series of flashbacks, Harry recalls the mountains of Bulgaria and Constantinople, as well as the suddenly hollow, sick feeling of being alone in Paris. Uneasily, he recalls a boy who'd been frozen, his body half-eaten by dogs, and a wounded officer so entangled in a wire fence that his bowels spilled over it.

John Updike; "Pigeon Feathers"

Give the author and title: In catechetical class, David asks Reverend Dobson what happens to consciousness between death and Judgment Day. Both the reverend's and the other students' uneasy reaction to the question make David feel stupid for asking. After many follow-up questions, Dobson tells David he may think of Heaven "as the way in which the goodness Abraham Lincoln did lives after him." The Reverend concedes that people do not remain conscious after they die. Later, David's mother confronts him when she sees him reading the Bible. He angrily explains that Reverend Dobson effectively told him there is no Heaven. Mother tries to explain that one lifetime is enough and that God is a human construct though the evidence of divinity is all around them, but David angrily writes off her explanation as the illogical workings of the feminine mind.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: In order to jolt Adam out of his despondency, Samuel finally tells him the truth about Cathy. Samuel dies soon afterward. After Samuel's funeral, Adam visits Cathy at the brothel. Her deteriorating body and cynical, vulgar talk make Adam realize that he can now move on and forget her, as she is a repugnant creature who has become irrelevant to his life. Cathy, however, is desperate to retain power over Adam. She even offers to have sex with him to keep him in the brothel and prove that he is no better than she. Adam refuses and leaves with a serene smile.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: In the afternoon, the whole neighborhood gathers at Kino's brush house to celebrate his find. Kino names a list of things that he will secure for his family with his new-found wealth, including a church wedding and an education for his son. The neighbors marvel at Kino's boldness and wonder if he is foolish or wise to harbor such ambitions.

Elizabeth Bishop; "The Armadillo"

Give the author and title: In the beginning, Bishop simply describes the St. John's Day carnival in Rio-in which fire balloons are a tradition. After watching that very carnival she shifts her attention to the effects when the flames release on the forest and on the innocent creatures like an armadillo. She shows how the poor animal armadillo dies when the fire catches it. The final image of the dead armadillo is heart touching. Its fist is actually very strong, but not before the fires that savage human beings throws over it. It means the means of survival and defense is utterly helpless in front of massive and monstrous violence that devilish human beings can make and use over living beings. The animals in the poem driven from their nests by a fallen balloon emerge, frightened and mystified. All of the ancient owls to the baby rabbits become vulnerable in the face of this disaster. All of the animals; panic and misery can be found in these final lines of the poem, their plights extends subtly to become our own. We human beings also cannot protect ourselves from the equally mysterious and terrible events that shake us. Mainly, the poem points directly to these fire bombings which wrecked the same kind of horrifying destruction on a part of our universe that the fire balloons wreak on the animals.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: In the late nineteenth century, a man named Samuel Hamilton settles in the Salinas Valley in northern California. He brings his strict but loving wife, Liza, with him from Ireland. Although Samuel is well-respected in the community, he never becomes a wealthy man. The Hamiltons go on to have nine children and become a prominent family in the valley.

Jack Kerouac; On the Road

Give the author and title: In the winter of 1947, the reckless and joyous Dean Moriarty, fresh out of another stint in jail and newly married, comes to New York City and meets Sal Paradise, a young writer with an intellectual group of friends, among them the poet Carlo Marx. Dean fascinates Sal, and their friendship begins three years of restless journeys back and forth across the country. With a combination of bus rides and adventurous hitchhiking escapades, Sal goes to his much-dreamed-of west to join Dean and more friends in Denver, and then continues west by himself, working as a fieldworker in California for a while, among other things.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: In this novel, one of the main characters spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, across the bay from his mansion. The main character's extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. He wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that the main character will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, the main character and Daisy reestablish their connection. Their love rekindled, they begin an affair.

James Baldwin; Go Tell It on the Mountain

Give the author and title: In this novel, the author describes the course of the fourteenth birthday of John Grimes in Harlem, 1935. He also uses extended flashback episodes to recount the lives of John's parents and aunt and to link this urban boy in the North to his slave grandmother in an earlier South. The first section follows John's thoughts, the second mostly his aunt's, the third his father's, the fourth his mother's, and the fifth again mostly John's.

Arthur Miller; All My Sons

Give the author and title: In this play, the business practices of manufacturer Joe Keller conflict with the ethics of his fiercely loved son, Chris, a conflict that ends in Joe's suicide.

Sylvia Plath; "Ariel"

Give the author and title: In this poem, the poet recounts a ride into the dawn, the rider becoming one with the horse, sweeping through briars that tear away old restrictions, old traditions.

Langston Hughes; "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

Give the author and title: In this poem, the speaker is the voice of African-American culture with its ancient connection to the earth and all of humanity.

Eudora Welty; "A Worn Path"

Give the author and title: In this story, an old woman named Phoenix Jackson is walking through the woods into town. On her way she encounters many obstacles, including thorny bushes, barbed wire, and a large dog, among others. She meets a hunter, pocketing a nickel that he drops, and a lady who ties her shoes. Her reason for going to Natchez is to pick up a supply of medicine for her grandson, who accidentally swallowed lye a few years before. She tells the nurse in the hospital that the damage to his throat never fully heals, and every so often his throat will begin to swell shut. It is Old Phoenix's love for her grandson that causes her to face the trial of the journey to town, every time it is necessary, with no questions asked.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: Jake meets up with Mike and Bill, who are both extremely drunk. Cohn soon arrives, demanding to know where Brett is. After an exchange of insults, Cohn attacks Mike and Jake, knocking them both out. When Jake returns to the hotel, he finds Cohn lying face down on his bed and crying. Cohn begs Jake's forgiveness, and Jake reluctantly grants it. The next day, Jake learns from Bill and Mike that the night before Cohn also beat up Romero when he discovered the bullfighter with Brett; Cohn later begged Romero to shake hands with him, but Romero refused.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Jan enlists his friend, Boris A. Max, to defend Bigger free of charge. Jan and Max speak with Bigger as a human being, and Bigger begins to see whites as individuals and himself as their equal. Max tries to save Bigger from the death penalty, arguing that while his client is responsible for his crime, it is vital to recognize that he is a product of his environment. Part of the blame for Bigger's crimes belongs to the fearful, hopeless existence that he has experienced in a racist society since birth. Max warns that there will be more men like Bigger if America does not put an end to the vicious cycle of hatred and vengeance.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: Janie Crawford, an attractive, confident, middle-aged black woman, returns to Eatonville, Florida, after a long absence. The black townspeople gossip about her and speculate about where she has been and what has happened to her young husband, Tea Cake. They take her confidence as aloofness, but Janie's friend Pheoby Watson sticks up for her.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: Jewel rescues the animals in the barn, then risks his life to drag out Addie's coffin. Darl lies on his mother's coffin and cries. The next day, the Bundrens arrive in Jefferson and bury Addie. Rather than face a lawsuit for Darl's criminal barn burning, the Bundrens claim that Darl is insane and give him to a pair of men who commit him to a Jackson mental institution. Dewey Dell tries again to buy an abortion drug at the local pharmacy, where a boy working behind the counter claims to be a doctor and tricks her into exchanging sexual services for what she soon realizes is not an actual abortion drug. The following morning, the children are greeted by their father, who sports a new set of false teeth and, with a mixture of shame and pride, introduces them to his new bride, a local woman he meets while borrowing shovels with which to bury Addie.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Joe Christmas stays in the cabin on Joanna Burden's property, and the two quickly become lovers. Their relationship is marked by passion, violence, and long periods in which they ignore each other. Miss Burden wants a child and claims to be pregnant, but Joe is strongly opposed to the idea. After a time, Joe Brown comes to live with Joe Christmas in his cabin. Miss Burden tries to help Joe Christmas financially, but her meddling only provokes his ire. One night, he savagely attacks and kills her with a razor after she tries to fire a pistol at him in an apparent attempt at a murder-suicide. Miss Burden's nephew in New Hampshire offers a $1,000 reward for the capture of his aunt's killer. Search parties with bloodhounds comb the countryside for the fugitive Joe Christmas, who eludes capture for days, running to the point of hunger and exhaustion.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Joe Christmas, escapes from his captors as well, while he is being led across the town square. Before long, he is tracked down, shot, killed, and castrated in Hightower's kitchen by a bounty hunter named Percy Grimm. Afterward, the aging Hightower muses on his past and prepares for his own death.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Joe's new foster father subjects him to regular beatings. As Joe grows and enters puberty, he eventually crosses paths with Bobbie, a prostitute who works as a waitress in the nearby town. When Mr. McEachern catches his son at a dance with Bobbie, a fight erupts, and Joe kills his foster father by smashing a chair over his head. Abandoned by Bobbie and her cohorts, Joe embraces a life on the run and wanders for more than fifteen years, eventually making his way to Jefferson.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: Just as Kino prepares to attack, Coyotito lets out a cry, waking the sleepers. When one of them fires his rifle in the direction of the cry, Kino makes his move, killing the trackers in a violent fury. In the aftermath, Kino slowly realizes that the rifle shot struck and killed his son in the cave. The next day, Kino and Juana make their way back through town and the outlying brush houses. Juana carries her dead son slung over her shoulder. They walk all the way to the sea, as onlookers watch in silent fascination. At the shore, Kino pulls the pearl out of his clothing and takes one last, hard look at it. Then, with all his might, under a setting sun, he flings the pearl back into the sea.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: Kino and Juana take their family canoe, an heirloom, out to the estuary to go diving for pearls. Juana makes a poultice for Coyotito's wound, while Kino searches the sea bottom. Juana's prayers for a large pearl are answered when Kino surfaces with the largest pearl either of them has ever seen. Kino lets out a triumphant yell at his good fortune, prompting the surrounding boats to circle in and examine the treasure.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: Kino rushes back to the shore to prepare the canoe, while Juana returns home to gather Coyotito and their belongings. Kino arrives at the shore and finds his canoe destroyed by vandals. When he climbs the hill, he sees a fire blazing and realizes that his house has burned down. Desperate to find refuge, Kino, Juana and Coyotito duck into Juan Tomás's house, where they hide out for the day. Relieved that the three did not perish in the blaze, as the rest of the neighborhood believes, Juan Tomás and his wife, Apolonia, reluctantly agree to keep Kino and Juana's secret and provide shelter for them while pretending to be ignorant of their whereabouts.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Left with no other options, Bigger takes a job as a chauffeur for the Daltons. Coincidentally, Mr. Dalton is also Bigger's landlord. Mr. Dalton and other wealthy real estate barons are effectively robbing the poor, black tenants on Chicago's South Side—they refuse to allow blacks to rent apartments in predominantly white neighborhoods, thus leading to overpopulation and artificially high rents in the predominantly black South Side. Mr. Dalton sees himself as a benevolent philanthropist, however, as he donates money to black schools and offers jobs to "poor, timid black boys" like Bigger. However, Mr. Dalton practices this token philanthropy mainly to alleviate his guilty conscience for exploiting poor blacks.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Lena Grove, a pregnant teenager, has made her way to Mississippi in search of her baby's father. She hitches a ride into the small town of Jefferson, which is home to a planing mill. One of the workers at the mill, Joe Christmas, is a brooding, racially ambiguous man who appeared suddenly at the mill one day in search of a job. After gaining employment, he was soon joined at the mill by another man named Joe Brown. The two formed a partnership, making and selling liquor illegally and eventually quit their jobs.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Lena goes into labor, but by the time Byron arrives with the doctor, Hightower has already delivered the baby. Assisting in the delivery is Mrs. Hines, who mistakenly believes that Lena is her long-dead daughter, Milly, and that the newborn is her grandson, Joe Christmas. Byron arranges to have Joe Brown sent to Lena's cabin; upon arriving, Brown is shocked to see Lena holding his newborn son, slips out a back window, and runs away. Byron sees Brown escape and tries to stop him, but the much larger man beats Byron soundly and escapes on a passing train.

William Faulkner; A Light in August

Give the author and title: Lena moves into the cabin that the two Joes had shared in order to prepare for the birth of her baby; Byron Bunch stays in a tent nearby. Joe Christmas is apprehended on the streets of nearby Mottstown. His biological maternal grandfather, Uncle Doc Hines, makes his way through the crowd to curse Joe and call for his death. When the officials from Jefferson arrive to take charge of the prisoner, Mrs. Hines breaks through the crowd as well, hoping to see the face of the grandson whom her husband told her died as a child.

John Updike; "A & P"

Give the author and title: Lengel, the old and prudish manager, feels the girls are not clothed appropriately for a grocery store, and admonishes them, telling them they must have their shoulders covered next time, which Sammy believes embarrasses them. Offended by the manager's disregard for the three customers' dignity, Sammy ceremoniously removes his store apron and bow tie and resigns on the spot, despite the mention by the manager of the pain this would cause his parents. Sammy then leaves the store, seemingly in expectation of some display of affection or appreciation from the young women involved, only to find that they've already left, apparently oblivious to his presence. .

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: Lennie accidentally kills his puppy in the barn. Curley's wife enters and consoles him. She admits that life with Curley is a disappointment and wishes that she had followed her dream of becoming a movie star. Lennie tells her that he loves petting soft things, and she offers to let him feel her hair. When he grabs too tightly, she cries out. In his attempt to silence her, he accidentally breaks her neck.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: Lennie flees to a pool of the Salinas River that George had designated as a meeting place should either of them get into trouble. As the men back at the ranch discover what has happened and gather together a lynch party, George joins Lennie. Much to Lennie's surprise, George is not mad at him for doing "a bad thing."

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: Lennie has a mild mental disability and is deeply devoted to George and dependent upon him for protection and guidance. George finds that Lennie, who loves petting soft things but often accidentally kills them, has been carrying and stroking a dead mouse. George angrily throws it away, fearing that Lennie might catch a disease from the dead animal. George complains loudly that his life would be easier without having to care for Lennie, but the reader senses that their friendship and devotion is mutual.

Eudora Welty; "Petrified Man"

Give the author and title: Leota questioned her about why didn't she recognize the man while they were at the freak show. Mrs. Pike replied, "I didn't recognize him with that white powder all over his face. He just looked familiar." During her visit to the beauty parlor, Mrs. Fletcher and Leota discussed this and came to the conclusion if they had shared a place with him, that they had both felt something was peculiar about him. The story concludes with Billy Boy, Mrs. Pike's son, receiving a spanking from the women in the beauty parlor.

Robert Lowell; "Epilogue"

Give the author and title: Offers poet's rationale for the realism and unflinching candor of the poems of self-revelation that comprise his work beginning with Life Studies. Its final lines: "We are poor passing facts, / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph his living name."

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during World War I. At the beginning of the novel, the war is winding down with the onset of winter, and Henry arranges to tour Italy. The following spring, upon his return to the front, Henry meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse's aide at the nearby British hospital and the love interest of his friend Rinaldi. Rinaldi, however, quickly fades from the picture as Catherine and Henry become involved in an elaborate game of seduction.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Life improves when Ella moves to Elaine, Arkansas, to live with her sister, Maggie, and her sister's husband, Hoskins. Hoskins runs a successful saloon, so there is always plenty of food to eat, a condition that Richard greatly appreciates but to which he cannot accustom himself. Soon, however, white jealousy of Hoskins's business success reaches a peak, as local white men kill Hoskins and threaten the rest of his family.

Alice Walker; "Everyday Use"

Give the author and title: Mama decides that she will wait in the yard for her daughter Dee's arrival. Mama knows that her other daughter, Maggie, will be nervous throughout Dee's stay, self-conscious of her scars and burn marks and jealous of Dee's much easier life. Mama fantasizes about reunion scenes on television programs in which a successful daughter embraces the parents who have made her success possible. Sometimes, Mama imagines reuniting with Dee in a similar scenario, in a television studio where an amiable host brings out a tearful Dee, who pins orchids on Mama's dress.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: Mama reminds Sister that she was spurned by Mr. Whitaker and that if she had been the one returning home, her welcome would have been no less warm. Sister disagrees and attempts to convince her mother that Shirley-T. is not adopted. Mama refuses to recognize the truth. Sister then wonders out loud whether Shirley-T. is even able to talk, and she hints that the child might have a developmental disability. Mama shouts up the stairs to relay Sister's concerns. Angered at the accusation, Stella-Rondo has Shirley-T. sing the theme song to Popeye the Sailor Man, a performance that is followed by the child tap-dancing loudly. Satisfied, Mama insists that Sister apologize for her accusation, but Sister refuses. Mama furiously stalks upstairs to embrace her adopted granddaughter.

Alice Walker; "Everyday Use"

Give the author and title: Mama says that he must be related to the Muslims who live down the road and tend beef cattle and also greet people by saying "Asalamalakim." Hakim-a-barber says he accepts some of their doctrines but is not into farming or herding. Mama wonders whether Hakim-a-barber and Dee are married. Sitting down to eat, Hakim-a-barber states that he does not eat collard greens or pork. Dee, however, eats heartily, delighted by the fact that the family still uses the benches her father made. Hopping up, she approaches the butter churn in the corner and asks Mama if she can have its top, which had been carved by Uncle Buddy. Dee wants the dasher too, a device with blades used to make butter. Hakim-a-barber asks if Uncle Buddy whittled the "dash" as well, to which Maggie replies that it was Aunt Dee's first husband, Stash, who made it. Dee praises Maggie's memory and wraps the items. Mama grips the handle of the dasher, examining the ruts and worn areas made by her relative's hands.

T.S. Eliot; "The Waste Land"

Give the author and title: Many scholars also note how important Ezra Pound was to the editing and completion of this poem; he cut out many superfluous passages and helped the poet rename the text, which was originally titled "How do the Police in different voices."

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Mary is too drunk to make it to her bedroom on her own, so Bigger helps her up the stairs. Drunk and aroused by his unprecedented proximity to a young white woman, Bigger begins to kiss Mary. Just as Bigger places Mary on her bed, Mary's blind mother, Mrs. Dalton, enters the bedroom. Though Mrs. Dalton cannot see him, her ghostlike presence terrifies him. Bigger worries that Mary, in her drunken condition, will reveal his presence. He covers her face with a pillow and accidentally smothers her to death. Unaware that Mary has been killed, Mrs. Dalton prays over her daughter and returns to bed.

Richard Wright; Native Son

Give the author and title: Mary, Mr. Dalton's daughter, frightens and angers Bigger by ignoring the social taboos that govern the relations between white women and black men. On his first day of work, Bigger drives Mary to meet her communist boyfriend, Jan. Eager to prove their progressive ideals and racial tolerance, Mary and Jan force Bigger to take them to a restaurant in the South Side. Despite Bigger's embarrassment, they order drinks, and as the evening passes, all three of them get drunk. Bigger then drives around the city while Mary and Jan make out in the back seat.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Meanwhile, Nettie and Samuel marry and prepare to return to America. Before they leave, Adam marries Tashi, an African girl. Following African tradition, Tashi undergoes the painful rituals of female circumcision and facial scarring. In solidarity, Adam undergoes the same facial scarring ritual. Just after Celie realizes that she is content in her life without Shug, Shug returns, having ended things with Germaine. The end of the novel has Nettie, Samuel, Olivia, Adam, and Tashi arriving at Celie's house. Nettie and Celie embrace, having not seen each other for over thirty years. They introduce one another to their respective families as the novel ends.

William Faulkner; "A Rose for Emily"

Give the author and title: Miss Grierson, a symbol of the Old South and old Southern aristocracy, is jilted by Homer Barron, the man whom she loves. In order to "have" him, she poisons him with arsenic and keeps his corpse in what would have been their bedroom. This is not discovered until after her when death, when townspeople breakdown the door and find the corpse and a long gray hair lying on the pillow next to it.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Mister and his children, whose mother was murdered by a jealous lover, all treat Celie badly. However, she eventually gets Mister's squalid living conditions and incorrigible children under control. Shortly thereafter, Nettie runs away from Alphonso and takes refuge at Celie's house. Mister makes sexual advances toward her. Celie then advises Nettie to seek assistance from a well-dressed black woman that she had seen in the general store a while back; the woman had unknowingly adopted Celie's daughter and was the only black woman whom Celie had ever seen with money of her own. Nettie is forced to leave after promising to write. Celie, however, never receives any letters and concludes that her sister is dead.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: Muley Graves, an old neighbor, wanders by and tells the men that everyone has been "tractored" off the land. Most families, he says, including his own, have headed to California to look for work. The next morning, Tom and Jim set out for Tom's Uncle John's, where Muley assures them they will find the Joad clan. Upon arrival, Tom finds Ma and Pa Joad packing up the family's few possessions. Having seen handbills advertising fruit-picking jobs in California, they envision the trip to California as their only hope of getting their lives back on track.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon

Give the author and title: Monroe Stahr and Kathleen, a girl whom he saw floating down the flood on the head of a prop statue, drive to Santa Monica and find their way to a house Stahr is building out there. Kathleen seems reluctant to be with Stahr, though when he takes her home she insists he take her back to the house, and there they become intimate. It is not until later that Stahr learns from a letter Kathleen wrote at the beginning of the date that she is engaged to marry another man. Kathleen calls Stahr and asks to see him. Kathleen explains about a difficult relationship she recently left thanks to the help of her fiancé. Kathleen gives Stahr a chance to tell her not to marry her fiancé, but he does not take it. The next day, Stahr receives a telegram to let him know Kathleen has been married.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon

Give the author and title: Monroe Stahr asks Cecilia to arrange a meeting between him and a Communist whom Stahr blames for organizing a union at the studio. Stahr takes Cecilia and this man to dinner and drinks too much, getting into a physical altercation with the Communist afterward. It is after this that Cecilia finally gets her wish, and she and Stahr begin seeing each other. Brady begins plotting against Stahr in order to force him out of the company, going as far as blackmailing Stahr over his affair with Kathleen, which has continued despite her marriage, and hiring a man to kill Stahr. In retaliation, Stahr hires a man to kill Brady. However, Stahr has second thoughts, though he cannot cancel the order because the plane he is flying to New York on crashes. Brady dies soon after Stahr, leaving Cecilia without both the most important men in her life.

John Updike; "Pigeon Feathers"

Give the author and title: Mother suggests that David read Plato's Parable of the Cave, and confides in him that the fear of death lessens as one gets older. She calls in David's father, who says that life is nothing but "garbage" and therefore David needn't worry about death. Over the next few months, David continues to obsess about death, but he finds superficial comfort in school and at church. For his fourteenth birthday, David's parents give him a rifle. One day, Granmom asks David to shoot the family of pigeons that have nested in the barn. He derives a kind of joy from killing the impudent birds. When he shoots one but it does not fall from the rafters, he shoots it again and again hoping to make it fall like the others. Mother comes into the barn and reprimands him for making noise, shooting excessively and spooking their dog Copper. She orders him to bury the birds. As he does so, David admires their beautiful feathers. He is overcome by the beauty of the world around him, and ponders that "the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever."

Flannery O'Connor; "Good Country People"

Give the author and title: Mrs. Hopewell owns a farm in rural Georgia which she runs with the assistance of her tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Freeman. Mrs. Hopewell's daughter, Joy, is thirty-two years old and lost her leg in a childhood accident. Joy is an atheist and has a Ph.D. in philosophy but seems non-sensible to her mother, and in an act of rebellion against her mother, Joy changed her name to "Hulga," the ugliest name Mrs. Hopewell can imagine.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: Next, Stella-Rondo sees to it that Uncle Rondo, too, turns against Sister. Stella-Rondo claims that Sister has been sneering at Uncle Rondo's ridiculous appearance. Angered, Uncle Rondo strips off the kimono, throws it on the ground, and stomps on it, grinding it into the dirty floor. His anger continues to simmer that night, as he plays cards with Mama and Stella-Rondo.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: Nick's next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Toni Morrison; The Bluest Eye

Give the author and title: Nine-year-old Claudia and ten-year-old Frieda MacTeer live in Lorain, Ohio, with their parents. It is the end of the Great Depression, and the girls' parents are more concerned with making ends meet than with lavishing attention upon their daughters, but there is an undercurrent of love and stability in their home. The MacTeers take in a boarder, Henry Washington, and also a young girl named Pecola. Pecola's father has tried to burn down his family's house, and Claudia and Frieda feel sorry for her.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: No longer simply a game in which they exchange empty promises and playful kisses, Henry and Catherine's love becomes powerful and real. Once Henry's damaged leg has healed, the army grants him three weeks convalescence leave, after which he is scheduled to return to the front. He tries to plan a trip with Catherine, who reveals to him that she is pregnant.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: Now in his 40s, he recalls a time when he was a naïve young man, eager to become a renowned educator and orator. The narrator begins his story by recalling his high school graduation speech, which attracted the attention of the white school superintendent who invites him to give the same speech at a local hotel to the town's leading white citizens. But when he arrives at the hotel, the narrator is forced to participate in a brutal blindfolded boxing match (the "battle royal") with nine of his classmates, an event, which, he discovers, is part of the evening's entertainment for the "smoker" (a kind of stag party). The entertainment also includes a sensuous dance by a naked blonde woman, and the boys are forced to watch. The boxing match is followed by a humiliating event: The boys must scramble for what appear to be gold coins on an electrified rug (but, which turn out to be only worthless brass tokens). Then the narrator — now bruised and bleeding — is finally allowed to give his speech in front of the drunken white men who largely ignore him until he accidentally uses the phrase "social equality" instead of "social responsibility" to describe the role of blacks in America. At the end of his speech — despite his degrading and humiliating ordeal — the narrator proudly accepts his prize: a calfskin briefcase containing a scholarship to the state college for Negroes.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: On St. Andrew's Eve, Pilon and Big Joe think they have found treasure, but it turns out to be a signpost for a geological survey. There are affairs with women, but the companionship within the group is much stronger than the affections any of them have for women. In many cases, the paisanos provide a service to a needy party. One time, they house and feed a distraught caporal from the Mexican Army with his baby when the two have nowhere else to go. Another time, they save the large family of Senora Teresina Cortez from starvation when the local bean crop fails. Sometimes there is wine, and sometimes there is food, but there is always the pleasure that each of them receives from the company of the others.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: On the Fourth of July, Sister's uneventful life in China Grove is interrupted by the arrival of her sister, Stella-Rondo, who has just left her husband, Mr. Whitaker, and returned to the family home in Mississippi. Sister had briefly dated Mr. Whitaker before Stella-Rondo became engaged to him. Stella-Rondo arrives from Illinois, accompanied by Shirley-T., a little girl she claims is her legally adopted daughter. The rest of the family, overjoyed at Stella-Rondo's return, does not share Sister's suspicion that Shirley-T. is actually Stella-Rondo's biological daughter.

Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea

Give the author and title: On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far beyond the island's shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat. The old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: On the first night of their journey, the Bundrens stay at the home of a generous local family. Due to severe flooding, the main bridges leading over the local river have been flooded or washed away, and the Bundrens are forced to turn around and attempt a river-crossing over a makeshift ford. When a stray log upsets the wagon, the coffin is knocked out, Cash's broken leg is reinjured, and the team of mules drowns. Vernon Tull sees the wreck and helps Jewel rescue the coffin and the wagon from the river.

Flannery O'Connor; "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Give the author and title: Once Shiftlet moves into the Crater's farm, he fixes a broken fence and hog pen, teaches Lucynell how to speak her first word ("bird" — a recurring symbol in O'Connor's fiction), and, most importantly, repairs the automobile. At this time Mrs. Crater gives her daughter's hand in marriage over to Mr. Shiftlet, but he declines saying, "I can't get married right now, everything you want to do takes money and I ain't got any." Mrs. Crater, in her desperation to marry off her daughter, offers him a sum of money to marry Lucynell. He then accepts and agrees to marry her. Soon after, the three take the car into town and Lucynell and Shiftlet are married.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: One day in class, Aunt Addie beats Richard for eating walnuts, though it was actually the student sitting in front of Richard who had been eating the nuts, not Richard. When Addie tries to beat Richard again after school that day, he fends her off with a knife. Similar scenes recur with frustrating frequency over the following months and years. One time, Richard dodges one of Granny's backhand slaps, causing her to lose her balance and injure herself in a fall off the porch. Addie tries to beat Richard for this incident, but he again fends her off with a knife.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: One day, Cathy shoots Adam, flees the house, and moves to Salinas proper to resume her life as a prostitute. Adam decides to cover for Cathy by lying to the local sheriff and saying that his gunshot wound was an accident. Cathy wins the trust of Faye, the madam of a local brothel, then poisons her and fools the doctors and other prostitutes into thinking that Faye died naturally. Cathy assumes control of the brothel and starts to blackmail powerful men in Salinas with photographs of them performing sadomasochistic sex acts with her and her prostitutes.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: One day, Ruthie, the youngest daughter, reveals to a girl in the camp that her brother has killed two men and is hiding nearby. Fearing for his safety, Ma finds Tom and sends him away. Tom heads off to fulfill Jim's task of organizing the migrant workers. The end of the cotton season means the end of work, and word sweeps across the land that there are no jobs to be had for three months. Rains set in and flood the land.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: One night, after a good amount of wine, the house burns down, and though Danny is angry at first, he allows the friends to move in with him. At Danny's house, they form a group, which is often compared to the Knights of the Round Table. Indeed, they engage in many quests, some noble, and some downright sinful, enjoying companionship and the comfort of a roof to the fullest. Most of the group's quests revolve around the acquisition of money, but in one case, they find a new friend instead.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: One night, most of the men go to the local brothel. Lennie is left with Crooks, the lonely, black stable-hand, and Candy. Curley's wife flirts with them, refusing to leave until the other men come home. She notices the cuts on Lennie's face and suspects that he, and not a piece of machinery as Curley claimed, is responsible for hurting her husband. This thought amuses her.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: One night, the narrator's dead grandfather — a former slave — appears in a dream, ordering him to open the briefcase and look inside. Instead of the scholarship, the briefcase contains a note that reads, "Keep This ****** Boy Running." The dream sets the stage. For the next 20 years of his life, the narrator stumbles blindly through life, never stopping to question why he is always kept running by people — both black and white — who profess to guide and direct him, but who ultimately exploit him and betray his trust.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: One the morning, Robert Jordan wakes up, sees a Fascist cavalryman, and shoots him, awakening the camp. After breakfast, the group hears sounds of a fight in the distance, and Robert Jordan believes that the Fascists are attacking El Sordo's camp. Agustín and Primitivo want to aid El Sordo, but Robert Jordan and Pilar know that it likely would be useless. The scene shifts to El Sordo's hill, which a group of Fascists is assaulting. El Sordo's men play dead and manage to shoot the Fascist captain, but several minutes later, Fascist planes bomb the hilltop and kill everyone in El Sordo's band. The ranking Fascist officer orders the beheading of all the corpses of El Sordo's men. The guerrilleros at Pablo's camp, having heard the planes bomb El Sordo's hill, feel glum as they eat lunch.

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: Only the children's mother is injured, the children are frantic with excitement, and the grandmother's main concern is dealing with Bailey's anger. The family waits for help. When she notices a car coming down the road, the grandmother flags it down until it stops. Three men come out and begin to talk to her. All three have guns. The grandmother says that she recognizes the leader, the man in glasses, as The Misfit. The Misfit confirms this, saying it would have been better for them all if she hadn't recognized him, and Bailey curses his mother. The Misfit has his two men take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods, claiming that "the boys want to ask you something."

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: Pablo returns, claiming that he left in a moment of weakness. He says that he threw the explosives into the river but felt great loneliness after doing so. He has brought back five men with their horses from neighboring guerrilla bands to help. The fighters take their positions.

Toni Morrison; The Bluest Eye

Give the author and title: Pecola loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is beautiful and that she is ugly. Pecola moves back in with her family, and her life is difficult. Her father drinks, her mother is distant, and the two of them often beat one another. Her brother, Sammy, frequently runs away. Pecola believes that if she had blue eyes that she would be loved, and her life would be transformed. Meanwhile, she continually receives confirmation of her own sense of ugliness—the grocer looks right through her when she buys candy, boys make fun of her, and a light-skinned girl, Maureen, who temporarily befriends her makes fun of her too. She is wrongly blamed for killing a boy's cat and is called a "nasty little black bitch" by his mother.

John Steinbeck; "Flight"

Give the author and title: Pepe', a foolish young man, commits murder and must flee his home. He heads into the California desert where he tries to evade capture and becomes the prey of those who are hunting him. He is wounded and dies of blood poisoning.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: Pheoby visits Janie Crawford to find out what has happened. Their conversation frames the story that Janie relates. Janie explains that her grandmother raised her after her mother ran off. Nanny loves her granddaughter and is dedicated to her, but her life as a slave and experience with her own daughter, Janie's mother, has warped her worldview. Her primary desire is to marry Janie as soon as possible to a husband who can provide security and social status for her. She finds a much older farmer named Logan Killicks and insists that Janie marry him.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: Pilar and Pablo lead Maria away. Alone, Robert Jordan contemplates suicide but resolves to stay alive to hold off the Fascists. He is grateful for having lived, in his final few days, a full lifetime. For the first time, he feels "integrated," in harmony with the world. As the Fascist lieutenant approaches, Robert Jordan takes aim, feeling his heart beating against the floor of the forest.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: Pilar leads Robert Jordan through the forest to consult with El Sordo, the leader of another band of guerrilleros, about the bridge operation. They take Maria along. El Sordo agrees to help with the mission, but both he and Robert Jordan are troubled by the fact that the bridge must be blown in daylight, which will make their retreat more difficult. On the way back to Pablo's camp, Robert Jordan and Maria make love in the forest. When they catch up with Pilar, Maria confesses to Pilar that the earth moved as they made love. Pilar, impressed, says that such a thing happens no more than three times in a person's lifetime.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: Realizing that he cannot return to college, the narrator accepts a job at a paint factory famous for its optic white paint, unaware that he is one of several blacks hired to replace white workers out on strike. Nearly killed in a factory explosion, the narrator subsequently undergoes a grueling ordeal at the paint factory hospital, where he finds himself the object of a strange experiment by the hospital's white doctors. Following his release from the hospital, the narrator finds refuge in the home of Mary Rambo, a kind and generous black woman, who feeds him and nurses him back to health. Although grateful to Mary, whom he acknowledges as his only friend, the narrator — anxious to earn a living and do something with his life — eventually leaves Mary to join the Brotherhood, a political organization that professes to be dedicated to achieving equality for all people. Under the guidance of the Brotherhood and its leader, Brother Jack, the narrator becomes an accomplished speaker and leader of the Harlem District. He also has an abortive liaison with Sybil, a sexually frustrated white woman who sees him as the embodiment of the stereotypical black man endowed with extraordinary sexual prowess.

Arthur Miller; The Crucible

Give the author and title: Refusing to make a false confession or to save himself by implicating others, John Proctor dies a hero in a play set during the Salem Witchcraft Trials, an allegory of the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Required to remain quiet while his grandmother lies ill in bed, four-year-old Richard Wright becomes bored and begins playing with fire near the curtains, leading to his accidentally burning down the family home in Natchez, Mississippi. In fear, Richard hides under the burning house. His father, Nathan, retrieves him from his hiding place. Then, his mother, Ella, beats him so severely that he loses consciousness and falls ill. Nathan abandons the family to live with another woman while Richard and his brother, Alan, are still very young.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Richard begins reading obsessively and grows more determined to write. His mother, brother, and Maggie soon join him in Memphis. They all decide that Richard and Maggie will go to Chicago immediately and that the other two will follow in a few months. In Chicago, Richard continues to struggle with racism, segregation, poverty, and with his own need to cut corners and lie to protect himself and get ahead. He suppresses his own morals, forcing himself to work at a corrupt insurance agency that takes advantage of poor blacks. He also works in a café and for a couple of well-meaning Jewish storeowners, the Hoffmans, in a whites-only neighborhood. Irresponsibly, Richard soon quits to try to get a job in the post office.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Richard takes a job at another optical shop, where Olin, a seemingly benevolent white coworker, plays mind games with Richard and Harrison, another young black worker, in an attempt to get them to kill each other. These strategies culminate in a grotesque boxing match between Richard and Harrison. Another white coworker in the optical shop, Falk, is genuinely benevolent and lets Richard use his library card to check out books that otherwise would be unavailable to him.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: Robert Jordan and Anselmo leave the camp to scout out the bridge. When they return, Pablo publicly announces that neither he nor his guerrilleros will help blow up the bridge. Pilar and the others disagree, however, so Pablo sullenly gives in. Privately, Rafael urges Robert Jordan to kill Pablo, but Pilar insists that Pablo is not dangerous. That night, Maria comes out to join Robert Jordan as he sleeps outside. They profess love for each other and make love.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: Robert Jordan writes a dispatch to the Republican command recommending that both the bridge operation and the larger offensive be canceled, for the Fascists are aware of the plan and the operation will not succeed. He sends Andrés to deliver the dispatch to the headquarters of General Golz, a Republican leader.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: Romero fights brilliantly, dazzling the crowd by killing a bull that had gored a man to death in the streets. Afterward, he cuts the bull's ear off and gives it to Brett. After this final bullfight, Romero and Brett leave for Madrid together. Cohn left that morning, so only Bill, Mike, and Jake remain as the fiesta draws to a close.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: Rose of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn child, and Ma, desperate to get her family to safety from the floods, leads them to a dry barn not far away. Here, they find a young boy kneeling over his father, who is slowly starving to death. He has not eaten for days, giving whatever food he had to his son. Realizing that Rose of Sharon is now producing milk, Ma sends the others outside, so that her daughter can nurse the dying man.

T.S. Eliot; "The Waste Land"

Give the author and title: The core allusion of the poem is to the Grail Legend of the Fisher King (himself an allusion to Christ) and the infertile land over which he reigns.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; Tender is the Night

Give the author and title: Rosemary Hoyt, a beautiful eighteen-year-old movie starlet, on vacation with her mother, arrives at a rather deserted portion of the French Riviera. There, Rosemary meets Dick Diver, a handsome American psychologist in his thirties with whom she instantly falls in love. Dick and his wife, Nicole, are exemplars of grace and sophistication and move among a social set of similarly extraordinary people.

John Updike; "A & P"

Give the author and title: Sammy, a teenage clerk in a grocery store, is working the cash register on a hot summer day when three young women about his age enter barefoot and clad only in swimsuits, to purchase herring snacks. Although they are dressed for the beach, Sammy allows the girls to continue shopping while he appraises them sexually. He imagines details about the girls based on their appearance alone, impressions that, to his surprise, are shaken when the leader of the trio, a stunning girl he has dubbed "Queenie", speaks in a voice unlike that which he had created in his mind.

Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea

Give the author and title: Santiago chastises himself for going "out too far," and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply. The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man's struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man's absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more.

Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea

Give the author and title: Santiago feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve. On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home.

Flannery O'Connor; "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Give the author and title: Sensing not only a handyman but a suitor for her daughter, Mrs. Crater asks if Shiftlet is married, to which he responds, "Lady, where would you find you an innocent woman today?" Mrs. Crater then makes known her love for her daughter, Lucynell, adding, "She can sweep the floors, cook, wash, feed the chickens, and hoe." Mrs. Crater is clearly offering her daughter's hand to Shiftlet. For the moment, however, he simply decides to stay on the farm and to sleep in the broken-down car.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: Set during the colonial era in Mexico, this novel takes place in a small rural town called La Paz on the Baja Peninsula. Kino, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito, live in a modest brush house by the sea. One morning, calamity strikes when a scorpion stings Coyotito. Hoping to protect their son, Kino and Juana rush him to the doctor in town. When they arrive at the doctor's gate, they are turned away because they are poor natives who cannot pay enough.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: Set in the U.S. during the pre-Civil Rights era when segregation laws barred black Americans from enjoying the same basic human rights as their white counterparts, the novel opens in the South (Greenwood, South Carolina), although the majority of the action takes place in the North (Harlem, New York). In the Prologue, the narrator — speaking to us from his underground hideout in the basement (coal cellar) of a whites-only apartment building — reminisces about his life as an invisible man.

Elizabeth Bishop; "In the Waiting Room"

Give the author and title: Set precisely on February 5, 1918, while her Aunt Consuelo keeps a dental appointment in Worcester, Massachusetts, the young speaker must entertain herself with a copy of National Geographic. A precocious reader, she examines articles in a revealing order — the inside of a volcano, the explorations of Osa and Martin Johnson, and photos of bare-breasted native women. In line 36, the poem's high point, an unsolicited burst of emotion, like a volcanic eruption, surprises the speaker, who at first believes the sound bursts from her "foolish, timid" aunt, who quails at dental treatment.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: Several weeks later, while Brett and Cohn are both traveling outside of Paris, one of Jake's friends, a fellow American war veteran named Bill Gorton, arrives in Paris. Bill and Jake make plans to leave for Spain to do some fishing and later attend the fiesta at Pamplona. Jake makes plans to meet Cohn on the way to Pamplona. Jake runs into Brett, who has returned from San Sebastian; her fiancé, Mike, is with her. They ask if they may join Jake in Spain, and he politely responds that they may. When Mike leaves for a moment, Brett reveals to Jake that she and Cohn were in San Sebastian together.

Zora Neale Hurston; Their Eyes Were Watching God

Give the author and title: She returns to Eatonville where her former neighbors are ready to spin malicious gossip about her circumstances, assuming that Tea Cake has left her and taken her money. Janie wraps up her recounting to Pheoby, who is greatly impressed by Janie's experiences. Back in her room that night, Janie feels at one with Tea Cake and at peace with herself.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Shug is initially rude to Celie, who has taken charge of nursing her, but the two women become friends. Celie soon finds herself infatuated with Shug. Frustrated by Harpo's domineering behavior, Sofia moves out, taking her children with her. Several months later, Harpo opens a juke joint where Shug, who has fully recovered from her illness, sings nightly. Shug decides to stay when she learns that Mister beats Celie when she is away. Shug and Celie's relationship grows more intimate. Sofia returns for a visit and promptly gets into a fight with Harpo's new girlfriend, Squeak, knocking the other woman's teeth out. In town one day, the mayor's wife, Miss Millie, asks one of Sofia's children to work as her maid. Sofia rudely refuses. When the mayor slaps Sofia for "insubordination", Sofia returns the blow. Sofia is subsequently sentenced to twelve years in jail.

John Updike; Rabbit, Run

Give the author and title: Since his glory days of high school basketball, Rabbit Angstrom's life had gone gently down hill; he reacts to his growing despair by abandoning his mistress and his wife and child and running away into aimless drifting.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: Slim goes to the barn to do some work, and Curley, who is maniacally searching for his wife, heads to the barn to accost Slim. Candy overhears George and Lennie discussing their plans to buy land and offers his life's savings if they will let him live there too. The three make a pact to let no one else know of their plan. Slim returns to the bunkhouse, berating Curley for his suspicions. Curley, searching for an easy target for his anger, finds Lennie and picks a fight with him. Lennie crushes Curley's hand in the altercation. Slim warns Curley that if he tries to get George and Lennie fired that he will be the laughingstock of the farm.

Robert Lowell; Life Studies

Give the author and title: Some scholar's point to this work as the beginning of the confessional movement in American poetry.

T.S. Eliot; "The Waste Land"

Give the author and title: Some scholars argue that this poem is a treatise against modernity and a tale of detachment, isolation, and fragmentation that leads only to demise.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Squeak, a mixed-race woman, is Sheriff Hodges' illegitimate niece. Her attempt to blackmail the sheriff into releasing Sofia results in her being raped by the sheriff. Squeak cares for Sofia's children while she is incarcerated, and the two women develop a friendship. Sofia is eventually released six months early and begins working for Miss Millie, a job that she detests. Despite being newly married, Shug instigates a sexual relationship with Celie upon her next visit. One night Shug asks Celie about her sister. Shug helps Celie recover letters from Nettie that Mister has been hiding from her for decades. The letters indicate that Nettie befriended a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine, the well-dressed woman whom Celie saw in the store. Nettie eventually accompanied the two to Africa to do missionary work. Samuel and Corrine have unwittingly adopted Celie's son and daughter, Adam and Olivia. Corrine, noticing that her adopted children resemble Nettie, wonders if Samuel fathered the children with her. Increasingly suspicious, Corrine tries to limit Nettie's role within her family.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: Stella-Rondo reminds Sister that she vowed never to speak of Shirley-T. again. Miffed, Sister goes to the kitchen to make green-tomato pickles, as the servants had been given the day off for the holiday. Mama comes in and expresses her disapproval at Sister making a food that will not agree with Uncle Rondo and Shirley-T. Sister points out that she would have been given a much different reception if she had been the one to return home from Illinois under such questionable circumstances.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: Still crying, Stella-Rondo shuts herself in her bedroom. Sister hires a girl with a cart to haul her belongings to the post office. Five days later, Sister has yet to hear from her family, but she convinces herself that she is happy to be alone. There is little mail to attend to, and the people in town are divided in their support of her actions. Sister asserts that if Stella-Rondo appeared at the post office and was forthcoming about the details of her life with Mr. Whitaker, Sister would plug both of her ears with her fingers and refuse to l

Langston Hughes; "The Weary Blues"

Give the author and title: The poem expresses the speaker's admiration for the blues and its musicians. Hughes's rhythm recalls the syncopation common in blues music. Hughes uses words to mimic music.

William Faulkner; Absalom, Absalom!

Give the author and title: Sutpen becomes a broken—though still forceful—man; he slides slowly into alcoholism, begins an affair with a fifteen-year-old white girl named Milly, and continues in that vein until, following the birth of his and Milly's daughter, he is murdered by Milly's grandfather Wash Jones in 1869.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: That evening, as Kino and Juana prepare to leave, Juan Tomás cautions Kino against being overly proud, and Juana repeats her wish to be rid of the pearl. Kino silences her, explaining that he is a man and will take care of things. In the middle of the night, Juana steals away with the pearl. Kino wakes as she leaves and pursues her, apprehending her just as she is poised to throw the pearl into the sea. He tackles her, takes the pearl back, and beats her violently, leaving her in a crumpled heap on the beach.

Robert Lowell; "The Union of the Dead"

Give the author and title: The Boston aquarium is a memory of time past, now boarded up and empty of those symbols of eternal life—water and fish. Beside it, where corrupt politicians excavate for a civic garage, the adjacent Statehouse trembles for its lost virtue, and a monument to men dead in the cause of human brotherhood must be propped to survive "the garage's earthquake."

John Steinbeck; The Red Pony

Give the author and title: The Great Mountains--Jody is bored. He looks with longing at the great mountains, wishing he could explore them. Suddenly, an old Mexican man named Gitano appears, claiming he was born on the ranch. Gitano requests to stay on the farm until he dies. Carl Tiflin refuses, although he does allow him to stay the night. That night, Jody secretly visits Gitano. He is polishing an old sword. Jody asks if he has ever been to the great mountains, and Gitano says he has but remembers little. The next morning Gitano is gone. A neighbor reports seeing him riding into the mountains with something in hand—the rapier, Jody assumes. Jody is filled with longing at the thought.

John Steinbeck; The Red Pony

Give the author and title: The Leader of the People--The Tiflins' receive a letter from Jody's maternal grandfather, saying that he is coming to visit. Jody's father is upset and argues with his wife, complaining that the grandfather simply repeats his stories about crossing the Great Plains as the head of a wagon train. Jody goes down the road to meet his grandfather. That night, his grandfather begins his usual stories, but everyone is polite. The next morning, the grandfather is late coming down to breakfast, and Carl begins to openly complain about him. Suddenly, the grandfather walks in, having heard everything. For once in his life, Carl has to eat his words. After breakfast, Jody sits with his grandfather on the porch. Eventually, the grandfather begins talking about how he really feels, about how he wonders if it was really worth it to cross the plains. He says that what was important was not crossing the plains, but the act of leading people across it. Jody says that someday he will be a leader of the people, but his grandfather replies that the days of exploration are over.

John Steinbeck; The Red Pony

Give the author and title: The Promise--Billy Buck and Carl Tiflin decide Jody should raise a colt from birth. Jody is sent with Nellie, a mare, to have her bred. The breeding is expensive; Jody works extra hard at his chores to repay his father, but eventually he grows tired of waiting. Also, he is wary that Billy will let something go wrong, as happened with Gabilan. This hurts Billy's feelings. Finally, it comes time for the colt to be born, but the birthing is complicated. Nellie becomes very ill. Billy discovers that something is wrong with the birth, and he has to kill Nellie and cut the colt out of her stomach with his pocketknife.

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: The aunts and uncles decide that Alan, Richard's brother, will live with Maggie in Detroit. Ella will remain at home in Jackson. Richard, given the freedom to choose which aunt or uncle to live with, decides to take up residence with Uncle Clark, as Clark lives in Greenwood, Mississippi, not far from Jackson. Soon after he arrives at Clark's house, Richard learns from a neighbor that a young boy had died years ago in the same bedroom Richard now occupies. Too terrified to sleep, Richard successfully pleads to be returned to his grandmother's home.

James Baldwin; Go Tell It on the Mountain

Give the author and title: The author deals with issues of race and racism more elliptically in this novel than in his other works, but these issues inform all three of the text's central problems—indeed, according to some critics, these issues take center stage in the book, though subtly. John doesn't understand why his father hates him, reserving his love for John's younger brother Roy instead. He is torn between his desire to win his father's love and his hatred for his father (and the strict religious world this man represents). The boy believes himself to have committed the first major sin of his life—a belief that helps precipitate a religious crisis. Before the night is over, John will undergo a religious transformation, experiencing salvation on the "threshing-floor" of his family's storefront Harlem church. Yet, this will not earn him his father's love. What John does not know, but the reader does, is that the man he thinks is his father—Gabriel—is, in fact, his stepfather; unbeknownst to John, Gabriel's resentment of him has nothing to do with himself and everything to do with Gabriel's own concealed past.

Zora Neale Hurston; "How It Feels to Be Colored"

Give the author and title: The author describes herself as a little girl growing up in the all-African-American community of Eatonville, Florida, where she boldly interacts with white tourists, much to her family's chagrin. At the age of 13, the author goes to Jacksonville to attend school, where she discovers that she is a colored girl. The author discusses the impact of this lesson on her adult personality and her world view, explaining that she finds race both important and irrelevant to her identity

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: The camps are overcrowded and full of starving migrants, who are often nasty to each other. The locals are fearful and angry at the flood of newcomers, whom they derisively label "Okies." Work is almost impossible to find or pays such a meager wage that a family's full day's work cannot buy a decent meal. Fearing an uprising, the large landowners do everything in their power to keep the migrants poor and dependent.

Arthur Miller; A Memory of Two Mondays

Give the author and title: The characters in this play speak in a variety of dialects as they perform their dehumanizing tasks in an auto-parts warehouse and thus can be seen as representative of humanity at large.

Eugene O'Neill; Long Day's Journey into Night

Give the author and title: The drama follows the turmoil of one Connecticut family in the time span of one day. All of the men are addicted to alcohol, and the mother is addicted to morphine. The play is filled with deceit, love, hate, confusion, and emotional abandonment.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: The family continues on its way. In the town of Mottson, residents react with horror to the stench coming from the Bundren wagon. While the family is in town, Dewey Dell tries to buy a drug that will abort her unwanted pregnancy, but the pharmacist refuses to sell it to her and advises marriage instead. With cement the family has purchased in town, Darl creates a makeshift cast for Cash's broken leg, which fits poorly and only increases Cash's pain. The Bundrens then spend the night at a local farm owned by a man named Gillespie. Darl, who has been skeptical of their mission for some time, burns down the Gillespie barn with the intention of incinerating the coffin and Addie's rotting corpse.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: The family finds employment picking fruit but soon learn that they are earning a decent wage only because they have been hired to break a workers' strike. Tom runs into Jim Casy who, after being released from jail, has begun organizing workers; in the process, Casy has made many enemies among the landowners. When the police hunt him down and kill him in Tom's presence, Tom retaliates and kills a police officer. Tom goes into hiding, while the family moves into a boxcar on a cotton farm.

Allen Ginsberg; "Howl"

Give the author and title: The first section is by far the longest. In the first line of the first section, the speaker tells us that he has been a witness to the destruction of "the best minds" of his generation. The rest of the section is a detailed description of these people - specifically, who they were and what they did. He doesn't tell us what destroyed them quite yet, though we get plenty of hints. Most lines begin with the word "who" followed by a verb. These are people "who did this, who did that," etc. We quickly learn that these "best minds" were not doctors, lawyers, and scientists. They were not people whom most middle-class folks in the 1950s would have identified with the best America had to offer. And that's exactly the poet's point. According to the speaker, they are drug users, drop outs, world travelers, bums, musicians, political dissidents, and, yes, poets.

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: The grandmother recalls her youth in the Old South. She reminisces about how much better everything was in her time, when children were respectful and people "did right then." When the family stops at an old diner for lunch, she talks to the owner, Red Sammy, about The Misfit. He and the grandmother agree that things were much better in the past, that the world at present is degenerate, and she agrees with Sammy's remark that "a good man is hard to find."

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: The journey to California in a rickety used truck is long and arduous. Grampa Joad, a feisty old man who complains bitterly that he does not want to leave his land, dies on the road shortly after the family's departure. Dilapidated cars and trucks, loaded down with scrappy possessions, clog Highway 66; it seems the entire country is in flight to the Promised Land of California.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; This Side of Paradise

Give the author and title: The main character is handsome, quite intelligent though lazy in his schoolwork, and he earns admission to Princeton. Though initially concerned with being a success on campus, after failing a class he gives himself over to idleness; he prefers to learn through reading and discussions with friends than through his classes. Toward the end of his college career, America enters World War I, and the main character dutifully enlists, forgoing his degree.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: The main character's car strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson. The reader later learns that Daisy Buchanan was driving the car, and she is one who killed Myrtle.

William Faulkner; The Sound and the Fury

Give the author and title: The main characters are as follows: Benjy, a severely mentally handicapped thirty-three-year-old man, speaking in April 1928; Quentin, a young Harvard student, speaking in June 1910, and Jason, a bitter farm-supply store worker, speaking again in April 1928. The fourth chapter in in this novel is told using the author's own narrative voice but focuses on Dilsey, the Compson family's devoted "Negro" cook who has played a great part in raising the children.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: The narrator discovers that the Harlem community has erupted in violence. Eager to demonstrate that he is no longer part of the Brotherhood, the narrator allows himself to be drawn into the violence and chaos of the Harlem riot and participates in the burning of a Harlem tenement. Later, as he flees the scene of the burning building and tries to find his way back to Mary's, two white men with baseball bats pursue him. To escape his assailants, he leaps into a manhole, which lands him in his underground hideout. For the next several days the sick and delusional narrator suffers horrific nightmares in which he is captured and castrated by a group of men led by Brother Jack. Finally able to let go of his painful past — symbolized by the various items in his briefcase — the narrator discovers that writing down his experiences enables him to release his hatred and rediscover his love of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: The narrator reflects that just as main character's dream of his love was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though main character's power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him "great," the narrator reflects that the era of dreaming—both the main character's dream and the American dream—is over.

T.S. Eliot; "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Give the author and title: The poem opens with this famous image : "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table."

Flannery O'Connor; "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Give the author and title: The next day, Bailey takes his family to Florida anyway. The grandmother wakes up early to hide her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket on the floor in the back of the car. (She is worried that the cat would die while they were gone.) Bailey finds her sitting in the car, dressed in her best clothes and an ostentatious hat; she says that if she should die in an accident along the road, she wants people to see her corpse and know she was refined and "a lady." The Grandmother talks continuously during the trip, trying to engage her two grandchildren in games and telling them jokes and a story, all of which they ignore with disdain.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: The next morning, Jake and Cohn have lunch. Cohn is quite taken with Brett, and he gets angry when Jake tells him that Brett plans to marry Mike Campbell, a heavy-drinking Scottish war veteran. That afternoon, Brett stands Jake up. That night, however, she arrives unexpectedly at his apartment with Count Mippipopolous, a rich Greek expatriate. After sending the count out for champagne, Brett tells Jake that she is leaving for San Sebastian, in Spain, saying it will be easier on both of them to be apart.

Eudora Welty; "Petrified Man"

Give the author and title: The next time Mrs. Fletcher makes her visit to the parlor, it is more evident that she is still distraught about her pregnancy and Leota, the beautician, has plenty on her mind too. It is revealed since Mrs. Fletcher's last visit that a lot has went on between Leota and Mrs. Pike. While at home, Mrs. Pike noticed a man from the freak show in a magazine as a wanted man for the rape of four women. The reward was for a total of five hundred dollars. Leota was livid about this issue because Mrs. Pike and saw it in the magazine Leota owned. Mrs. Pike said that they had shared a house with Mr. Petrie, the man from the freak show, in New Orleans..

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: The novel begins during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Released from an Oklahoma state prison after serving four years for a manslaughter conviction, Tom Joad makes his way back to his family's farm in Oklahoma. He meets Jim Casy, a former preacher. Jim accompanies Tom to his home, only to find it—and all the surrounding farms—deserted.

William Faulkner; The Sound and the Fury

Give the author and title: The novel is about the three Compson brothers' obsessions with the their sister Caddy. This novel is a story told in four chapters, by four different voices, and out of chronological order.

Ernest Hemingway; For Whom the Bell Tolls

Give the author and title: The novel opens in May 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War. An American man named Robert Jordan, who has left the United States to enlist on the Republican side in the war, travels behind enemy lines to work with Spanish guerrilla fighters, or guerrilleros, hiding in the mountains. The Republican command has assigned Robert Jordan the dangerous and difficult task of blowing up a Fascist-controlled bridge as part of a larger Republican offensive.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon

Give the author and title: The novel opens with Cecilia, daughter of a Hollywood producer, flying home from her college in New York. Wylie White is a screenwriter and his friend is a failed producer, Mr. Schwartz. When the plane is grounded in Nashville, the three companions decide to ride out to Andrew Jackson's historic home, Hermitage.

T.S. Eliot; "The Waste Land"

Give the author and title: The poet began working on the poem after a short stay in a mental hospital. In its first edition, he did not include the many footnotes that accompanied the poem when it was published in book form. These notes, which aid the reader in interpretation, have now become a very integral part of understanding and interpreting the poem itself

Anne Sexton; "Her Kind"

Give the author and title: The poet casts herself as a witch, presenting her in three aspects: first, the night rider, abnormal, alienated, mad, dreaming evil for the community, touchingly aware that consequently she "is not a woman, quite"; second, a power humanizing rude nature and with eccentric insistence making the odd all even, her intentions misunderstood and probably feared; third, a witch convicted by the community carried to torture and the stake, still defiant and morally unvanquished.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; This Side of Paradise

Give the author and title: The protagonist expounds his new socialist principles and then continues to walk to Princeton. He arrives late at night, pining for Rosalind. He reaches his hands to the sky and says "I know myself, but that is all--".

Katherine Anne Porter; "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"

Give the author and title: The protagonist lies upon her deathbed reminiscing about her life, especially being jilted on her wedding day. She is jilted again in death because there is no afterlife.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: The remaining family members move from one squalid camp to the next, looking in vain for work, struggling to find food, and trying desperately to hold their family together. Noah, the oldest of the children, soon abandons the family, as does Connie, a young dreamer who is married to Tom's pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon. The Joads meet with much hostility in California.

Eudora Welty; "Petrified Man"

Give the author and title: The setting of the story is centered around a beauty parlor. Leota is the beautician and Mrs. Fletcher is her customer. Mrs. Fletcher is with child and she is not very happy about it. She is very shocked that anyone has found out. Leota let it be known that it was Mrs. Pike who informed her about Mrs. Fletcher's situation. Mrs. Fletcher doesn't know who Mrs. Pike is nor has she been introduced to her. Leota begins to mention the "travellin' freak show" that she had attended with Mrs. Pike.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: The structure of this novel is unconventional. The narrative chapters are interspersed with intercalary chapters, chapters that do not focus on the family, but relay a scene typical of what was occurring during the Great Depression.

Allen Ginsberg; "Howl"

Give the author and title: The third section is addressed to Carl Solomon, the poet's close friend from the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. The speaker refers to this psychiatric hospital by the shorter and more evocative fictional name of "Rockland." He reaffirms his solidarity with Solomon over and over again by repeating the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland." The central question of this section is "Where?" The speaker uses this question to explore Solomon's existence within the walls of the institute. The poem ends with the image from the speaker's dreams, in which Solomon is walking from New York to the speaker's "cottage" (in Berkeley, California), where they will reunite.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: The three remaining men rent a car and drive out of Spain to Bayonne and then go their separate ways. Jake heads back into Spain to San Sebastian, where he plans to spend several quiet days relaxing. He receives a telegram from Brett, however, asking him to come meet her in Madrid. He complies and boards an overnight train that same day. Jake finds Brett alone in a Madrid hotel room. She has broken with Romero, fearing that she would ruin him and his career. She announces that she now wants to return to Mike. Jake books tickets for them to leave Madrid. As they ride in a taxi through the Spanish capital, Brett laments that she and Jake could have had a wonderful time together. Jake responds, "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?"

James Baldwin; Go Tell It on the Mountain

Give the author and title: The title comes from a Negro spiritual. The novel is steeped in the language of the King James Bible, and the Bible is a constant presence in the characters' lives; thus, a familiarity with Biblical stories can enhance the reader's understanding of the text. At the heart of the story three main conflicts intertwine: a clash between father and son, a coming-of-age struggle, and a religious crisis.

William Faulkner; As I Lay Dying

Give the author and title: The youngest Bundren child, Vardaman, associates his mother's death with that of a fish he caught and cleaned earlier that day. With some help, Cash completes the coffin just before dawn. Vardaman is troubled by the fact that his mother is nailed shut inside a box, and while the others sleep, he bores holes in the lid, two of which go through his mother's face.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: Then, unexpectedly, at 6:30 the next morning, he throws an entire package of lit firecrackers onto the floor of Sister's bedroom. The ensuing racket unsettles Sister's already delicate nervous condition. Sister immediately decides that it is time for her to move to the post office. Making her intentions obvious, she goes through the house collecting her belongings, including a prized possession—a radio. Mama objects to the removal of a pair of vases. Sister fires back that if Mama wishes to see them, she can always come down to the post office. The family then uniformly asserts that they will never set foot in the post office or send or receive mail. Sister responds that, without the post office, Stella-Rondo won't be able to be in touch with Mr. Whitaker. This possibility prompts a flood of tears from Stella-Rondo. Mama expresses dismay that the joyous return of Stella-Rondo on a major holiday could turn so sour. Sister declares that it was Mr. Whitaker who left Stella-Rondo, not the other way around, and that she, Sister, had predicted exactly how things would turn out.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: There was a paisano in town named the Pirate, who was somewhat slow witted. He could be seen walking the streets and perusing the restaurants for scraps with his five dogs (his best friends and protectors). He chopped wood every day and sold it for a quarter in town. Pilon noticed that the Pirate never spent any money and deduced that he must be hiding it somewhere. Pilon follows the bum all over, trying to locate the stash, going so far as to invite him to stay in Danny's house so that they can keep a better watch over him. In living with the Pirate, the friends grow compassionate for him, and one day the Pirate simply turns over the money to the friends so that it will be safe. The large bag of coins becomes the symbolic center of the friendship.

John Updike; "Pigeon Feathers"

Give the author and title: Thirteen-year-old David moves with his family to Firetown. He has trouble adjusting to his new house, despite the fact that his family moves frequently. In his second week there, he decides to reorganize the books and picks up a copy of H.G. Wells's The Outline of History. He is appalled and impressed by Wells's secular account of the life of Jesus. Intrigued despite himself, David rereads the passage and tries to come up with objections to Wells but cannot.

Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea

Give the author and title: This first line of one his is novel's is "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish." Not, there are no adjectives or colorful descriptors. The author simply reports what he sees; that his is brilliance.

Tennessee Williams; A Streetcar Named Desire

Give the author and title: This is another dramatization of Southern decay. Blanche DuBois comes for an extended visit to her sister Stella, happily married to the boorish and violent Stanley Kowalski and living in a shabby corner of New Orleans. An alcoholic nymphomaniac with a lurid past, an aristocrat in sharp decline, Blanche disturbs the equilibrium of Stanly and Stella and their poker-playing , beer-drinking friends. Deeply neurotic on her arrival and persecuted by a hostile Stanley as a threat to his marriage, Blanch declines into psychosis and, in the final scene, is taken away in a straightjacket.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; This Side of Paradise

Give the author and title: This novel chronicles the life of Amory Blaine from his childhood up through his early twenties. Born the son of a wealthy and sophisticated woman, Beatrice, Amory travels the country with his mother until he attends the fictitious St. Regis prep school in New England.

John Steinbeck; Travels with Charley

Give the author and title: This novel depicts a 1960 road trip around the United States made by the author, in the company of his standard poodle. The author tells of traveling throughout the United States in a specially made camper he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse. His travels start in Long Island, New York, and roughly follow the outer border of the United States, from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in California, across to Texas, up through the Deep South, and then back to New York. Such a trip encompasses nearly 10,000 miles. According to the author's oldest son, the real reason for the trip was that the author knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time.

William Faulkner; The Sound and the Fury

Give the author and title: This novel follows the decline of the once prominent Compson family and examines the deterioration of the Southern aristocratic class since the Civil War. The Compsons are one of several prominent names in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Their ancestors helped settle the area and subsequently defended it during the Civil War.

John Steinbeck; The Red Pony

Give the author and title: This novel is divided into four stories. Each story centers on a boy named Jody; the four together show him in a critical time of his childhood. In the first story, Jody is ten years old. The Gift--This story describes Carl Tiflin's family and ranch, which will be the setting of all four stories. Jody is Carl's son. Another central character is Billy Buck, the ranch's single employed hand. While Carl is a stern, unemotional man, Billy is warmer and spends a lot of time teaching Jody how to take care of horses. The ranch includes several horses, along with cows and pigs. In this first story, Carl gives Jody a red pony, which Jody names Gabilan. Every morning Jody brushes the horse and after school works on training it. Just as he is about to teach Gabilan to let him ride him, the horse catches a bad cold in the rain. Billy had promised Jody that the horse would not get sick. Eventually, Billy has to resort to drastic measures to try to save Gabilan, cutting open a sack of puss then carving a breathing hold in the horse's throat. Unfortunately, the horse escapes one night, and Jody finds vultures preying on the corpse the next morning. Jody kills one of the vultures and is reprimanded by his father, but Billy defends him.

Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man

Give the author and title: This novel is the story of a young, college-educated black man struggling to survive and succeed in a racially divided society that refuses to see him as a human being. Told in the form of a first-person narrative, the novel traces the nameless narrator's physical and psychological journey from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness — or, according to the author, "from Purpose to Passion to Perception" — through a series of flashbacks in the forms of dreams and memories.

Ernest Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises

Give the author and title: This novel opens with the narrator, Jake Barnes, delivering a brief biographical sketch of his friend, Robert Cohn. Jake is a veteran of World War I who now works as a journalist in Paris. Cohn is also an American expatriate, although not a war veteran. He is a rich Jewish writer who lives in Paris with his forceful and controlling girlfriend, Frances Clyne.

Arthur Miller; Death of a Salesman

Give the author and title: This play details the tragedy of Willy Loman who dies from the dehumanizing effect of his unwavering pursuit of business success and his never-extinguished faith in the power of appearance and personality.

Allen Ginsberg; "Howl"

Give the author and title: This poem consists of three sections. Each of these sections is a prolonged "riff" on a single subject. You could even think of the poem as three enormous run-on sentences.

Elizabeth Bishop; "The Fish"

Give the author and title: This poem displays the poet's ecological awareness that leads her to accept a relationship of coexistence between human beings and nonhuman beings. This ecological awareness in the poem is reflected when she leaves the fish free. The awareness of the speaker is the awareness of the transistorizes of human glory, human domination over animals or even of commercial benefit. When the poet or speaker decides to set the fish free in terms of ecology, she not only saves of life of that fish but also saves many lives. In that sense the poet gains big things by losing some small thing.

T.S. Eliot; "The Waste Land"

Give the author and title: This poem draws on many different religions and ancient cultures in an attempt to comment on the current state of the world. Some scholars argue that the poem is a treatise against modernity and a tale of detachment, isolation, and fragmentation that leads only to demise. The core allusion of the poem is to the Grail Legend of the Fisher King (himself an allusion to Christ) and the infertile land over which he reigns.

Sylvia Plath; "Daddy"

Give the author and title: This poem is a frantic denunciation of a father who is given as a jack-booted brute, a Nazi torturer, and a devil. Desperate love is beneath the shrieking, spitting hatred, her attempted suicide at 10 and again at 20 expressing her heartbreak at being rejected. An imagined stake through the heart of this vampire kills with one gesture both him and his surrogate, the poet's husband.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Through her letters, Nettie reveals that she has become disillusioned with her missionary work. Corrine becomes ill with a fever. Nettie asks Samuel to tell her how he adopted Olivia and Adam. Realizing that Adam and Olivia are Celie's children, Nettie then learns that Alphonso is her and Celie's stepfather. Their biological father was a store owner whom white men lynched because they resented his success. She also learns that their mother suffered a mental collapse after the death of her husband and that Alphonso exploited the situation in order to control their mother's considerable wealth. Nettie confesses to Samuel and Corrine that she is in fact their children's biological aunt. The gravely-ill Corrine refuses to believe her until Nettie reminds her of her previous encounter with Celie in the store. Later, Corrine dies, finally having accepted Nettie's story.

Alice Walker; The Color Purple

Give the author and title: Time passes and Mister's children begin to grow up and leave home. Harpo, the only child of Mister who becomes a major character, falls in love with an assertive girl named Sofia. Sofia becomes pregnant with Harpo's baby and, despite initial resistance from Mister, marries Harpo. Harpo and Sofia have five other children in short order. Celie is amazed by Sofia's defiant refusal to submit to Harpo's attempts to control her. Harpo, kinder and gentler than his father, feels emasculated due to his inability to get Sofia to "mind." Celie advises Harpo not to try to dominate Sofia; she also tells Harpo that Sofia loves him, admitting that she only obeys Mister out of fear. Harpo temporarily follows Celie's advice but falls back under Mister's sway. A momentarily jealous Celie then advises Harpo to beat Sofia. Sofia fights back, however, inflicting serious injuries on Harpo.

John Steinbeck; East of Eden

Give the author and title: To protect the dazed Adam and his twin boys, neither Samuel Hamilton nor Lee, Adam's housekeeper, tells Adam or the boys that Cathy works at a brothel. As the twins grow older, Aron manifests his father's good heart, whereas Cal exhibits his mother's ruthlessness and tendency to manipulate. By the time they reach early adolescence, however, Cal actively struggles against his dark side and prays to God to make him more like Aron. Adam, meanwhile, remains melancholy and listless for years after Cathy's departure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: Tom realizes the main character is in love with his wife, Daisy. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. He forces the group of lunch guests to drive into New York City, where he confronts the main character. Tom announces to his wife that the main character is a criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby

Give the author and title: Tom tells Myrtle's husband, George, that main character was the driver of the car that killed his wife.. George, who has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds the main character in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

John Steinbeck; The Pearl

Give the author and title: Toward evening, the local priest visits Kino to bless him in his good fortune and to remind him of his place within the church. Shortly thereafter, the doctor arrives, explaining that he was out in the morning but has come now to cure Coyotito. He administers a powdered capsule and promises to return in an hour. In the intervening period, Coyotito grows violently ill, and Kino decides to bury the pearl under the floor in a corner of the brush house. The doctor returns and feeds Coyotito a potion to quiet his spasms. When the doctor inquires about payment, Kino explains that soon he will sell his large pearl and inadvertently glances toward the corner where he has hidden the pearl. This mention of the pearl greatly intrigues the doctor, and Kino is left with an uneasy feeling.

John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men

Give the author and title: Two migrant workers, George and Lennie, have been let off of a bus miles away from the California farm where they are due to start work. George is a small, dark man with "sharp, strong features." Lennie, his companion, is his opposite, a giant of a man with a "shapeless" face.

John Updike; "Pigeon Feathers"

Give the author and title: When he goes to bed, David holds his hands in the air and prays that Christ will touch them to prove that God exists. David feels nothing, but is unsure whether or not Jesus has simply touched him gently. On Sunday, David's father goes to church while David and his mother stay home to work. Mother recognizes that something is troubling David and she asks him about it, but David remains taciturn and won't discuss his fears of mortality. When he gets home, David's father remarks that the pastor is too intelligent for the farmers, and people who stay on the farm instead of moving to the city are "the lame, the halt, the blind ... human garbage."

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: Uncle Rondo soon appears in the hall, dressed in Stella-Rondo's kimono. Woozy from excessive doses of a prescription medication, he heads to the yard, where Papa-Daddy relays what he believes the ungrateful Sister has said about his beard. Sister then hears Stella-Rondo open one of the upstairs windows and goes to join her. Stella-Rondo asks Sister to look out into the yard and tell her what she sees, upset and embarrassed that Uncle Rondo has taken the kimono in which Mr. Whitaker had once photographed her. Sister defends Uncle Rondo and chastises Stella-Rondo for being overly critical, especially after suddenly appearing with an adopted daughter and imminent divorce.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; This Side of Paradise

Give the author and title: Upon his return to America, Amory meets the young debutante Rosalind Connage, the sister of his college friend Alec. The two fall deeply in love, but because of his family's poor investments, Amory has little money, and Rosalind does not wish to marry into poverty. Despite Amory's best efforts to earn money at an advertising agency, Rosalind breaks off their engagement in order to marry a wealthier man, devastating Amory.

John Updike; "Pigeon Feathers"

Give the author and title: We learn that David's family moved to a farm in Firetown on the insistence of his mother, who grew up on the farm and wanted to return to it. His father, a schoolteacher, is uncomfortable with the open spaces and makes excuses to spend time in town. David's parents argue frequently about organic farming. On one such night, David goes to the outhouse to get away from his parents' fighting. Suddenly, an insect alights on his flashlight, inspiring in David a deep sense of existential dread. When David returns, his parents are still arguing over organic farming. His mother believes that pesticides kill the land's soul, while his father insists that organic farming is a remnant of "the Dark Ages."

Toni Morrison; The Bluest Eye

Give the author and title: We learn that Pecola's parents have both had difficult lives. Pauline, her mother, has a lame foot and has always felt isolated. She loses herself in movies, which reaffirm her belief that she is ugly and that romantic love is reserved for the beautiful. She encourages her husband's violent behavior in order to reinforce her own role as a martyr. She feels most alive when she is at work, cleaning a white woman's home. She loves this home and despises her own. Cholly, Pecola's father, was abandoned by his parents and raised by his great aunt, who died when he was a young teenager. He was humiliated by two white men who found him having sex for the first time and made him continue while they watched. He ran away to find his father but was rebuffed by him. By the time he met Pauline, he was a wild and rootless man. He feels trapped in his marriage and has lost interest in life.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: When Danny finally returns, he is tired and pleased with the fun he has had, but the growing sense of age is still with him. Seeing their friend and their host in such a state, the friends of the house decide to cure him with a party. For the first time in their lives, the five, along with Tito Ralph, the jailer, and Johnny Pom-Pom go to work in the squid yards. Word of this earth-shattering event quickly spreads, and soon, it is leaked that they are trying to make money to have a party. The whole town gets behind their effort, preparing food, digging up long saved booze, and buying wine and decorations.

Alice Walker; "Everyday Use"

Give the author and title: When Dee arrives, Mama grips Maggie to prevent her from running back into the house. Dee emerges from the car with her boyfriend, Hakim-a-barber. Mama disapproves of the strange man's presence and is equally disapproving of Dee's dress and appearance. Hakim-a-barber greets and tries to hug Maggie, who recoils. Dee gets a camera from the car and takes a few pictures of Mama and Maggie in front of their house. She then puts the camera on the backseat and kisses Mama on the forehead, as Hakim-a-barber awkwardly tries to shake Maggie's hand. Dee tells her mother that she has changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo to protest being named after the people who have oppressed her. Mama tells Dee that she was in fact named after her Aunt Dicie, who was named after Grandma Dee, who bore the name of her mother as well. Mama struggles with the pronunciation of Dee's new African name. Dee says she doesn't have to use the new name, but Mama learns to say it, although she is unable to master Hakim's name.

F. Scott Fitzgerald; "Winter Dreams"

Give the author and title: When Dexter Green is young, he quits his job as a golf caddy because he is asked to carry the clubs of a spoiled 11-year-old girl by the name of Judy Jones. Years later after gaining success, Dexter meets Judy again and pursues her romantically, even though she treats him badly and interferes with his engagement to another woman. Years late, Dexter feels lost when he learns that Judy, who was his idealized figure of an alluring woman, has lost her looks.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: When Henry is wounded on the battlefield, he is brought to a hospital in Milan to recover. Several doctors recommend that he stay in bed for six months and then undergo a necessary operation on his knee. Unable to accept such a long period of recovery, Henry finds a bold, garrulous surgeon named Dr. Valentini who agrees to operate immediately. Henry learns happily that Catherine has been transferred to Milan and begins his recuperation under her care.

Eudora Welty; "Why I Live at the P.O."

Give the author and title: When Sister questions Shirley-T.'s dubious parentage, Stella-Rondo angrily orders Sister to never mention the matter again. In an attempt to turn Papa-Daddy against Sister, Stella-Rondo claims that Sister suggested that Papa-Daddy should trim his long, grizzled beard. Papa-Daddy believes Stella-Rondo's false claims and angrily reminds Sister that he was the one who secured her the job as the town's postmistress. Sister promptly leaves the table, while Papa-Daddy skulks outside to lie in the hammock.

John Steinbeck; Tortilla Flat

Give the author and title: When World War I broke out, these paisanos decided to enlist in a fit of drunken patriotism. None of them actually made it anywhere near combat and soon returned to Monterey to find it more or less as they had left it. One thing was different however, Danny's grandfather had died and left Danny two houses. Pilon is the first to find Danny after the war, and Danny allows his friend to rent the other house from him. Gradually, the rest of the group turns up, and Pilon convinces them to rent rooms in the second house.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

Give the author and title: When they rejoin the retreat, the battle police seize Henry, who, at a crucial moment, breaks away and dives into the river. After swimming a safe distance downstream, Henry boards a train bound for Milan. He hides beneath a tarp that covers stockpiled artillery, thinking that his obligations to the war effort are over and dreaming of his return to Catherine.

Alice Walker; "Everyday Use"

Give the author and title: Whereas Mama is sheepish about the thought of looking a white man in the eye, Dee is more assertive. Mama's musing is interrupted by Maggie's shuffling arrival in the yard. Mama remembers the house fire that happened more than a decade ago, when she carried Maggie, badly burned, out of the house. Dee watched the flames engulf the house she despised. Back then, Mama believed that Dee hated Maggie, until Mama and the community raised enough money to send Dee to school in Augusta. Mama resented the intimidating world of ideas and education that Dee forced on her family on her trips home. Mama never went to school beyond second grade. Maggie can read only in a limited capacity. Mama looks forward to Maggie's marriage to John Thomas, after which Mama can peacefully relax and sing hymns at home.

Ernest Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea

Give the author and title: While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness. As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin's blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago's continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin's precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail.

John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath

Give the author and title: While staying in a ramshackle camp known as a "Hooverville," Tom and several men get into a heated argument with a deputy sheriff over whether workers should organize into a union. When the argument turns violent, Jim Casy knocks the sheriff unconscious and is arrested. Police officers arrive and announce their intention to burn the Hooverville to the ground.

Robert Frost; "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Give the author and title: Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village though; / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow..... / The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep."

Richard Wright; Black Boy

Give the author and title: Without Nathan's financial support, the Wrights fall into poverty and perpetual hunger. Richard closely associates his family's hardship—and particularly their hunger—with his father and therefore grows bitter toward him. For the next few years, Ella struggles to raise her children in Memphis, Tennessee. Her long hours of work leave her little time to supervise Richard and his brother. Not surprisingly, Richard gets into all sorts of trouble, spying on people in outhouses and becoming a regular at the local saloon—and an alcoholic—by the age of six.

Sherwood Anderson; Winnesburg, Ohio

Give the author and title: a novel that is a collection of short stories or sketches that are loosely tied together by recurring characters, especially the young, small-town journalist George Willard.

Theodore Roethke; "Cuttings"

Give the author and title: a poem in which the author combines the theme of fertility in nature with the theme of physical and psychological regression; he becomes the cutting of a plant struggling to put down roots and through pure empathy re-experiences his own birth and its psychological trauma

Bernard Malamud; The Natural

Give the author and title: about baseball

Tim O'Brien; The Things They Carried

Give the author and title: about the Vietnam War

Lorraine Hansberry; A Raisin in the Sun

Give the author and title: drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class black family living in the South Side of Chicago

John Updike; The Centaur

Give the author and title: interweaves the story of a rural high school teacher and his student-son Peter with the myth of Chiron and his student Prometheus

Amy Tan; The Joy Luck Club

Give the author and title: the story of Chinese women and their Chinese-American children

Theodore Roethke; "I Knew a Woman"

Give the author and title: the themes of love and the joy of sex are set against the themes of aging and death in this poem; the aging poet delightfully follows the lead of a young woman who makes him feel both immortal and keenly aware of his own mortality

John Updike; Rabbit, Redux

Give the author and title: tries to give a coherent account of the political violence of the 1960s through the eyes of Rabbit Angstrom

Theodore Roethke; "My Papa's Waltz"

Give the author and title:The four quatrains of this poem are logically woven up to state the of compulsive drunkenness in a modern society. The speaker's father is a habitual drunkard. He comes home in a drunken state. Though the whiskey smell is unbearable to the child, he sticks to his father as a matter of protest which is never pronounced but endured. The speaker's mother seems not so much impatient. It seems that she is habituated to her husband's drunken nature. The mother does her usual household work without taking notice of her husband. But she becomes quite angry when he enters into the kitchen and dashes the shelf. By clinging to his father, the child might have been resisting his father from fighting with the mother. He might have been trying to protect his drunken father from her mother's angry blow.

James Weldon Johnson; "My City"

Give the author and work: "But, ah! Manhattan's sights and sounds, her smells, / Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes / From being of her a part, her subtle spells, / Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums-- / O God! the stark, unutterable pity, / To be dead, and never again behold my city!"

James Weldon Johnson; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Give the author and work: The semiautobiographical novel is about the life of a young interracial man passing for "white" in New York. The narrator is born in a white, cultured world; however, he "learns" that he is black and chooses the cowardly track of becoming white in order to resist prejudice and scorn. Scholars now consider the novel a bridge between the slave narrative and the black novel.

Contemporary Literature; African-American poet

Gwendolyn Brooks

Modernism

H.D.

Regionalism and Local Color

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Jay Gatsby

He calls people "old sport."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

He coined the term "The Jazz Age" coined in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age.

Theodore Roethke

He is a transcendentalist poet, even though he is a contemporary author.

Eugene O'Neill

He is referred to as the father of modern American drama.

Eugene O'Neill

He mentored Susan Glaspell and the Provincetown Players

William Bradford

He signed the Mayflower Compact.

e.e. cummings

He was an Imagist poet, along with Pound and Williams.

Sherwood Anderson

He was an expatriate who spent time in Paris.

Transcendentalism

Henry David Thoreau

Realism

Henry James

Romanticism

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Eudora Welty

Her stories often take place in rural Mississippi.

Anti-Transcendentalism

Herman Melville

F. Scott Fitzgerald

His wife, Zelda, was plagued by mental and emotional instabilities.

John Steinbeck

Identify the author: literary naturalist whose poor and unschooled men and women contend with forces too strong for them--forces rooted in prejudice, custom, tradition, long-established social attitudes, and injustice; inability of his characters to rise above their social standing; his characters have dreams, aspirations, and desires, but they are trapped in a universe that cares nothing for them

Regionalism/Local Color

In its close attention to dialect, customs, and character types of a particular region, this writing showed the kind of objective observation of social facts that is typical of realism.

"The Sky Tree"

In this piece of literature, people live in Sky Land. When the wife of the chief cuts down the tree that supplies all of the land's food, the earth is created on the turtle's back.

Of Plymouth Planation

In this piece of literature, the Pilgrims are assisted by the Wampanoag Indians, especially by Squanto.

The General History of Virginia

In this piece of literature, the narrator is captured by Powhatan and saved by his daughter Pocahontas.

The Narrative and the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

In this piece of literature, the narrator is captured by the Wampanoag Indian's during King Phillip's War; the incident is relayed to the reader in removes

"Mending Wall"

In this poem, in spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: "Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality.

"A Pact"

In this poem, the poet's forthright confrontation with Walt Whitman, allows him to come to terms with a debt to his American forebear, the father of free verse. The poet depicts himself as the petulant child of an obstinate father. By reining himself in in the fifth line, he gives over peevish vengeance to acknowledge the development of modernism from its foundations. From this "new wood" that Whitman exposed, the poet intends to carve the future of poetry, thus achieving a "commerce" between himself and his predecessor.

"Fire and Ice"

In this poem, the speaker considers the age-old question of whether the world will end in fire or in ice. This is similar to another age-old question: whether it would be preferable to freeze to death or burn to death. The speaker determines that either option would achieve its purpose sufficiently well.

"The Road Not Taken"

In this poem, the speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the path. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet, he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so.

"Birches"

In this poem, when the speaker sees bent trees, he likes to think that they are bent because boys have been "swinging" them. He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging at the tree's crest to the ground. He used to do this himself and dreams of going back to those days. He likens tree swinging to getting "away from the earth awhile" and then coming back.

Romanticism

Intuition is more trustworthy than reason.

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

It is said that religion ruled the first half of the eighteenth century, and politics ruled the second half.

Transcendentalism

It is through intuition that we transcend what we learn from our senses and arrive at a spiritual level of knowledge.

Contemporary Literature; beat writer

Jack Kerouac

Naturalism

Jack London

Contemporary Literature; African-American novelist

James Baldwin

Romanticism

James Fenimore Cooper

Romanticism

James Russell Lowell

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

James Weldon Johnson

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jazz Age writer who battled alcoholism.

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

Jean Toomer

Romanticism

John Greenlief WHittier

Abolitionists, Regionalism and Local Color

John P. Parker

Early American Literature

John Smith

the South

John Smith is considered a writer from what region?

Modernism

John Steinbeck

Contemporary Literature

John Updike

Early American Literature

John Winthrop

Early American Literature

Jonathan Edwards

Regionalism and Local Color

Kate Chopin

Modernism

Katherine Anne Porter

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes

Transcendentalism

Launched by Ralph Waldo Emerson's publication of Nature in 1836.

Free as possible

Liberty

Realism

Literature in this period turned from human potentialities and aspirations to the actualities of existence in America.

Contemporary Literature; African-American playwright

Lorraine Hansberry

Transcendentalism

Margaret Fuller

Regionalism and Local Color

Mark Twain

Early American Literature

Mary Rowlandson

Early American Literature

Michael Wigglesworth

Anti-Transcendentalism

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Who was the first national literary hero in the United States? From what work of literature did he come?

Natty Bumppo; The Leatherstocking Tale

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

On the surface, this poem is simplicity itself. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening. He or she takes in the lovely scene in near-silence, is tempted to stay longer, but acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he or she can rest for the night.

The Jazz Age

One of themes of this era is the conflict between the traditions of the American past and the nontraditional sensibilities of the youthful future.

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Samson Occom

Early American Literature

Samuel Sewall

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Patrick Henry

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

People could discover the truth about the meaning of life by reason alone.

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Phillis Wheatley

Modernism

Robert Frost

Contemporary Literature; confessional poet

Robert Lowell

Contemporary Literature; African-American novelist

Ralph Ellison

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Realism

Rebecca Harding Davis

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

Richard Wright

Regionalism and Local Color

Sarah Orne Jewett

Anne Sexton; confessional poet

She made her poems out of the literal anguish of her life; the madness that overtook her from time to time seems to have been a refuge from the forces that made her life intolerable; her ultimate revenge was suicide.

A single ruler

Sovereign

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

St. Jean de Crevecoeur

No laws

State of nature

Naturalism

Stephen Crane

Contemporary Literature; playwright

Tennessee Williams

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

The 18th century period termed The Enlightenment or The Age of Reason was noted for belief in the ability of reason to discover truth, shape society, and shed "light" onto the darkness of ignorance, superstition, injustice, and tyranny.

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

The Federalist Papers

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

The leading writers of the period concerned themselves with the state of life on earth.

Sylvia Plath

The most famous poet of the confessional movement.

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

The natural world, human nature, and social institutions are governed by universal laws.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

The poem is an internal monologue about the state of love, his doubts and moments of inferiority, and ultimately, his isolation as an individual from society.

Transcendentalism

The same ideas of the Romantics, but multiplied

Early American Literature/Puritan

Their duty in this world was to see that God's will was carried out.

Contemporary Literature; poet

Theodore Roethke

Hilda Doolittle

There was a poet who went by "H.D." What do the "H" and "D" stand for?

Jean Toomer

This Harlem Renaissance writier is famous for writing Cane, a collection of stories, sketches, essays, and poems.

Ernest Hemingway

This author committed suicide in 1961 in the same manner as his father had more than thirty years prior, a self-inflicted shotgun wound; suicide ran in the author's family--his father, his sister, his brother, and his granddaughter all committed suicide.

John Steinbeck

This author is associated with the Great Depression and Monterey County, California, and the Salinas Valley.

Susan Glaspell

This author is known for founding a theater group with her husband in New York called the Provincetown Players.

Gertrude Stein

This author is known for the sketch. Unlike the short story that is preoccupied with plot, character setting, and conflict, the sketch is heavily influenced by the visual arts in that it is preoccupied with a single scene, moment, character, or image.

Ernest Hemingway

This author said, "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

Eudora Welty

This author was a well-accomplished photographer.

Ernest Hemingway

This author was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy during World War I.

Ernest Hemingway

This author was an expatriate who lived in Paris and Cuba.

John Steinbeck

This author won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Gwendolyn Brooks

This author wrote "Kitchenette Building," "The Bean Eaters," "We Real Cool," and "The Mother"."

Ernest Hemingway

This author wrote 10 novels and nearly 70 short stories.

Ernest Hemingway

This author's sentences are short and crisp, his paragraphs contained and tight, and adjectives are used sparingly.

Bernard Malamud

This author's writing conveys the Jewish experience in America.

Winnesburg, Ohio

This book begins with a sketch called "The Book of the Grotesque," in which the author writes, "You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques."

The History of New England

This famous journal was written aboard the Arbella by a man who was leading 2,000 English emigrants to Massachusetts Bay

"Chicago"

This free verse poem describes the city as the poet knew it in the early 1900s. The speaker personifies the city and praises its hard-working energy, while also noticing its crime, corruption, and poverty.

Of Plymouth Planation

This piece of literature details the hardships that the colonists faced, the Starving Time, and the First Thanksgiving.

The General History of Virginia

This piece of literature is about the founding of Jamestown.

A Model of Christian Charity

This piece of literature refers to "a city upon a hill"

"The Red Wheelbarrow"

This poem is just about how simple, everyday things are important. It is about how our happiness depends on appreciating dull things like chickens and wheelbarrows that are out in the rain. In other words, we need to find the joy in our everyday life.

"Anecdote of the Jar"

This poem is the story of a jar placed in the wilderness and the effects that jar has on the wilderness. The jar becomes a symbol of civilization, all that is man-made, which stands up against the natural world. At the end, we see that, though the jar may overpower the wilderness in the speaker's point of view, the wilderness still has the power of growth and procreation, which the jar does not, and can never have.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

This poem reveals the nightmare of modernism: getting old.

Sylvia Plath; confessional poet

This poet committed suicide by gassing herself in the kitchen oven in February 1963; she prevented the fumes from seeping into her children's room by sealing the door with towels.

Ezra Pound

This poet urged other poets to "make it new,"

T.S. Eliot

This poet was expatriate, and before he turned 40, he became a British citizen. We still consider him an American poet. He was friends with other expatriates, especially Ezra Pound.

e.e. cummings

This poet's poems are easily recognizable because of the poet's aversion to capitalization, punctuation, and traditional poetic lines and forms, and because of his use of spaces between words.

grotesque

This term originally referred to art and sculpture that was bizarre, fantastic, abnormal, and that symbolized the horror of being human in a very inhumane and distrustful world.

stream of consciousness

This writing technique presents the flow of a character's seemingly unconnected thoughts, responses, and sensations; presents the unbroken flow of thought that occurs in the waking mind.

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Thomas Jefferson

What president negotiated the Louisiana Purchase?

Thomas Jefferson

The Age of Enlightenment / The Age of Reason / Classicism / Revolutionary Literature

Thomas Paine

Anti-transcendentalism

Those who opposed transcendentalist thinking realized its revolutionary ideas and used their opposition to stimulate their own imaginations.

Romanticism

Through careful and close observation of nature, man can learn about himself. Man and nature are intimately connected.

Transcendentalism

Through close observation of nature, man can learn lessons about himself.

Regionalism/Local Color

Through the years, every region of the country had developed distinctive speech patterns and dialects, local customs and folkways, and recognizable character types.

Contemporary Literature

Tim O'Brien

Contemporary Literature; African-American novelist

Toni Morrison

The Beat Generation

Topics included drug experimentation, homosexuality, promiscuity, socialism, radical politics, and included a new generation of "hippies" and antiestablishment thinkers, artists, and writers.

Cabeza de Vaca

author associated with the exploration of Florida

Anne Bradstreet; The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

author and title of the first book of American published poetry

Gertrude Stein

Who coined the term "Lost Generation"?

Romanticism

Writers focused on conveying their inner worlds/their souls to the reader.

Romanticism

Writers focused on individual experiences rather than universal truths.

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

Unlike the Puritans, they had little interest in the hereafter or the supernatural.

Anti-transcendentalism

Unlike the transcendentalists' optimism, they found a mixture of good and evil in all people.

African-American during Naturalism

W.E.B. DuBois

Modernism

Wallace Stevens

Romanticism

Washington Irving

Romanticism

We should aspire to the ideal, to changing what is to what ought to be. Highly idealistic/optimistic.

Regionalism and Local Color

Willa Cather

Early American Literature

William Bradford

Early American Literature

William Byrd

Modernism; Imagism

William Carlos Williams

Romanticism

William Cullen Bryant

Who was the first major American novelist? What series of books did he write?

William Cullen Bryant; The Leatherstocking Tales

Realism

William Dean Howells

Modernism

William Faulkner

How did the Church of England come into existence?

You must explain thoroughly and include the following key words/phrases in your explanation: 1. England 2. King Henry VIII 3. son 4. Catholic 5. divorce 6. Church of England

The Beat Generation

You will recognize a poem from this era because of its open-verse form, its oftentimes objectionable or controversial subject matter, and its use of the confessional first-person voice.

Modernism; Harlem Renaissance

Zora Neale Hurston

Samson Occom

a Mohegan Indian turned Christian

Harlem Renaissance

a boom of art, social commentary, and even politics centered in Negro community in New York

Jeremaid

a loud lament against society's moral ills; Puritan sermons were often called by this term

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

another title for The Narrative and the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

Zora Neale Hurston

arguably the most important literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance

John Updike

a traditional realistic naturalist writer

Gustavus Vasa

alias for Olaudah Equiano

The Great Works of Christ in America

alternate title for Maganlia Christi Americana

conceit

an elaborate extended metaphor that dominates a passage or an entire poem

Allen Ginsberg

beat poet

Jack Kerouac

beat writier

Naturalism

characters are controlled by their environments.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

considered the most important novel of the Harlem Renaissance

The Federalist Papers

contain 85 essays aimed at persuading New York to ratify the new Constitution

Romanticism

defended the potential of the individual and his claim for individual freedom.

Phillis Wheatly; On Being Brought from Africa to America

give the author and title: " " 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too; / Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. / Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / 'Their colour is a diabolic die. ' Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be rein'd, and join th' angelic train."

Jonathan Edwards; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

give the author and title: ""O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in; it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit; full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell...."

Phillis Wheatley; To His Excellency General Washington

give the author and title: "Celestial choir! entron'd in realms of light. / Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write. / While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms, / She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms."

Patrick Henry; Speech to the Second Virginia Convention

give the author and title: "Give me liberty or give me death!"

Phillis Wheatley; To His Excellency General Washington

give the author and title: "Proceed, great chief, with virture on thy side, / Thy ev're action let the Goddess guide. / A crown, a mansion, and a thorne that shine..."

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

give the author and title: "The summer solider and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

give the author and title: "These are the times that try men's souls."

Thomas Jefferson; the Declaration of Independence

give the author and title: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable right; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

give the author and title: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

give the author and title: argues that there is no cause for fear; God is on their side and that three million people united in the holy cause of liberty cannot fail

Edward Taylor; Preparatory Meditations

give the author and title: collection of poems written to prepare for his sermons

Benjamin Franklin; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

give the author and title: details an approach to reach moral perfection; the author creates a list of 13 virtues that he decides he must possess in order to attain perfection

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

give the author and title: divided into 4 sections; urges the colonists to fight of independence

Edward Taylor; Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

give the author and title: poem comparing a spider to the devil, a fly to a man out of Christ, and a wasp to a man armed in Christ

Gertrude Stein

no other author in the twentieth century was as influenced by painting; friends with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso for whom she posed

Phillis Wheatley

people doubted whether this person actually work poetry because the works are of such high quality; required to defend doing so by writing poems in front of an official court in Boston

Transcendentalism

placed great value on individualism and being nonconformists.

Realism

placed less emphasis on the imagination and more on observed fact.

Countee Cullen

poet of the Harlem Renaissance

Imagism

poetry that is objective, adjective-free, and lean, in which the focus is to present a picture to the reader

Jonathan Edwards

preacher during the Great Awakening 1740

Thomas Paine; Common Sense "The Crisis"

published shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord

Realism

purpose was to reflect reality without softening or idealizing it features.

Langston Hughes

recognized as the most influential writer during the Harlem Renaissance

Regionalism/Local Color

refers to a work that connects itself to a particular geography: its history, culture, ways of speech, leisure activities, occupations, folklore, food, and clothing

the Lost Generation

refers to that group of men and women who came of age during World War I and who felt disillusioned in this unfamiliar post-war world.

Realism

reflected the general shift of concern of this period from human potentialities to human actualities, from ideas to facts, from personal vision to observed social behavior.

Blank slate

tabula rasa

expatriates

term for the Lost Generation American writers who emigrated to Europe and worked there from the end of World War I until the Great Depression

"How the World Was Made"

In this piece of literature, water beetle creates the earth from mud when there is no more room in Galunlati..

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason/Classicism/Revolutionary Literature

Governments exist only by the consent of the governed, who are justified in rebelling if their natural rights are violated.

Renaissance

1. 1000-1492 2. happened in Europe 3. a boom in culture (art, literature, philosophy) 4. means "rebirth"

First permanent English settlement in North America

1. 1607 2. Jamestown, Virginia

Grace

1. An experience granted by God 2. When God gave them grace, they would love him wholeheartedly. 3. Knew that no amount of prayer, going to church, and reading the Bible would make people love God 4. That only happened when He granted them grace.

Original sin

1. Because of Adam and Eve's sin, people are born sinful. 2. In order to be forgiven for one's sins (granted redemption), people have to be aware of their sinful nature.

How did the first migrants get to America?

1. Crossed a land bridge called the Bering Strait 2. Linked Asia and Alaska

First Europeans to visit the what is now the United States

1. Dutch Sailors 2. Commander: Henry Hudson

Bay Psalm Book

1. First book published in America--1640 2. Wanted a simple translation of the original Hebrew version of the Bible because they believed that man had added a lot of fancy stuff to it that was a distraction from God's original word 3. Classic example of Puritan plain writing style

Types of Literature

1. Fliers and Pamphlets 2. Religious Books 3. Newspapers 4. Journals and Diaries 5. Spiritual Autobiographies 6. Letters 7. Poetry

Concept of the Elect

1. God elected a few people to go to heaven. 2. Because God knows everything, He already knew if a person was destined for heaven or hell. 3. Believed all person deserved to go to hell because of their sinful nature 4. Nothing a person could do could change his status. 5. Once one of the elect, always one of the elect.

Divine Mission

1. God had given them a job. 2. Come to the New World and spread true Christianity (their religion/Puritanism) 3. Were to be the perfect example of a Christian society 4. "a city upon a hill"--biblical allusion

What are 3 major topics of Romantic writers?

1. Nature 2. the Past 3. the Inner World of Human Nature

King James Bible

1. Published in 1611 2. Most widely read book in English

Where did people settle first?

1. South first 2. North afterward

4 Core Beliefs of Native Americans

1. The land is scared, must be respected and no one can own it. 2. Lives revolve around cycles of nature 3. Stories/traditions pass verbally from generation to generation 4. Speech making and storytelling are important

Plainness

1. Valued plainness, especially in religion 2. Wanted to take return religion to the simple forms of worship described in the New Testament 3. Thought fancy stuff in churches distracted people from the word of God 4. Dressed plainly 5. Wrote plainly

What are 5 characteristics of Romanticism?

1. placed importance on emotions 2. placed importance on the individual 3. emphasized following one's intuition--gut instinct 4. often imaginative 5. believed that through close observation of nature that man would learn lessons about himself

What are 5 characteristics of Classicism/the Age of Reason?

1. reason is the dominating characteristics of both nature and human nature 2. nature is a self-contained machine, like a watch, whose laws of operation could be rationally understood 3. valued clarity, order, and balance. 4. imagination had to be restrained by reason and common sense 5. upheld tradition often to the point of resisting change

Early American Literature/Puritan

God had given them a divine mission. They were to come to the New World and spread true Christianity, to be an example of the perfect Christian society.

Early American Literature/Puritan

God is a God of authority, a ruler, a king.

Transcendentalism

God, humanity, and nature share a universal soul—called the Over-Soul.

Calvinism

Puritanism was derived from what religion?

Naturalism

The environment is often the antagonist.

Early American Literature/Puritan

They believed in the Concept of the Elect/Predestination.

Early American Literature/Puritan

They believed that God granted some people grace.

Early American Literature/Puritan

They discovered what God wanted them to do by reading the Bible.

Pilgrims

also called Separatists

Pilgrims

wanted a complete break from the Church of England

Puritans

wanted to purify the Church of England from any resemblance to Roman Catholicism

Christopher Columbus

wrote Journal of the First Voyage to America, a collection of letters

Cabeza de Vaca

wrote La Relacion

John Smith

wrote The General History of Virginia