the Contemporary Period

housewife (anne sexton)

"Cinderella" may well have originated in the composition of the "Housewife" a decade before the publication of Transformations. Irony also drips with acid in this examination of the lexicon of domesticity. Every one of the 56 words that follow the poem's opening thesis that "Some women marry houses" builds upon that concept in a way that quickly transforms the figurative into the literal.

Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin

As the story opens, an unnamed narrator reads in a newspaper about the arrest of his brother Sonny for using and selling heroin. This unnerving revelation causes him to think back to their childhood, when Sonny was "wild, but he wasn't crazy" (4). The narrator is sort of shell-shocked the whole day as he tries to teach his classes. (He's a high school math teacher and he can't help but compare Sonny to the guys in his class.) He somehow makes it through the day and as he's getting ready to leave he runs into one of Sonny's old friends, who seems like he wants to get something off his chest. It turns out that he feels a little responsible for what's happened to Sonny, since he is a heroin user himself. He was honest about how good it feels to get high when Sonny asked him about it. He also tries to explain to the narrator what it's like to be on drugs and why Sonny may have gotten hooked, but the narrator just ends up more frustrated and angry. It's some time after this that the narrator finally tries to contact Sonny. He only does so because his (the narrator's) young daughter, Grace, has died. Sonny replies right away and tells the narrator that he really, really needed to hear from him but he never got in touch because he figured he had caused too much pain. Sonny returns to Harlem (where the two men grew up) and moves in with the narrator and his family once he gets out of jail. Things are a little tense and awkward at first, but the narrator's wife, Isabel, is able to break the ice with Sonny. Things are still a bit off, though. After a few weeks, the narrator is home alone and considers searching Sonny's room for signs that he's still doing drugs. But before he gets around to it, he notices a street-side religious revival taking place outside his apartment. He watches two women and a man sing and pray, and then he notices that Sonny has been standing on the street watching. Once the revival finishes, Sonny heads up to the apartment and he and the narrator get into what's probably an inevitable argument. Sonny starts to talk about suffering and about trying to escape it by using drugs. He talks about playing the piano and how sometimes he just has to play. He tries to explain to his brother why he turned to drugs in the first place, but the narrator doesn't want to hear it at first. He blames the music (and other musicians) for leading Sonny to heroin, and he tells Sonny how angry he is that Sonny seems determined to end his life by being an addict. Sonny gets just as angry - for his brother never reaching out to him after his arrest, for not accepting that people have different ways of dealing with things, and for not understanding that being a musician isn't what turned Sonny into a drug addict. The two eventually cool off and the narrator realizes that he's just worried about his little brother, so he promises himself that he'll always look out for Sonny from here on out. At the end of this conversation, Sonny invites the narrator to come hear him play at a club that night. When they get to the club, an old musician named Creole greets Sonny and tells him that he's been waiting for his return. Lots of people in the club know Sonny and have come to hear him play after his long absence. The narrator suddenly realizes that he's in Sonny's world now. Creole is the bandleader at the club. He gets the other musicians ready and then leads Sonny onto the stage. This is a big moment for Sonny, and he's nervous. His piano playing is shaky and unsure, but after he gets through the first set he suddenly becomes his old self again, and his playing mesmerizes the narrator. As the narrator sits at a table by himself, he finally gets what Sonny's been trying to tell him all along - about music, about being a musician, about trying to deal with suffering. He sends Sonny a drink (Scotch and milk - gross!) and as the waitress puts it on the piano above Sonny's head, the narrator doesn't think he sees it. But then Sonny takes a drink, nods to the narrator, and goes back to playing.

the beat generation

Group highlighted by writers and artist who stressed spontaneity and spirituality instead of apathy and conformity.

America Allen Ginsberg

In short, things ain't good. He feels let down. He's broke (mentally and financially), and he's tired of all the warring that the country does. Basically, the whole country (in his view) is going to the birds. He wants to know when America will straighten up and fly right. The speaker tells us that he knows what he's doing, that he misses the good old labor activists and the communists. Now, he just sits around all day and tries to go against the grain, which frankly sounds exhausting. Here's what going against the grain looks like for him: staring at flowers in the closet, smoking weed, and getting drunk while failing to hook up. To which we say, do not try this at home. Still, the speaker admits that he's just as much to blame as everyone else. After all, he reads Time for criminey's sakes. Talking to America, in some ways, is just like talking to himself. That's not enough to let America off the hook, though. The speaker makes a sarcastic plea for poetic originality, and then an impassioned plea to free jailed union activists and other downtrodden folk. He remembers all those wonderful communist meetings he attended as a boy, but then it's all gone wrong since then (much like how Family Matters went wrong after Urkel hit puberty). The speaker makes fun of the paranoid, ignorant folk who think that Russia is out to get them at every turn. Finally, he says enough is enough. If you want something done... call a professional. No wait! Do it yourself. In the end, our speaker resolves to go out there to help fix all these problems, personally.

a good man is hard to find (Flannery O'conner)

It's time for a family trip of some kind, and there's a disagreement in the family about where to go. Bailey wants to take his family, (i.e., his wife, baby, and two kids, John Wesley and June Star), to Florida. His mother, called simply "the grandmother," doesn't want to go there. To make her case, she mentions that there's a dangerous criminal named The Misfit on the loose, and that he's headed that way. No one seems to take her especially seriously—after all, she's just the grandma. The next morning, it's off to Florida they go. Everyone piles in the car, including the grandmother, who seems to have acquired some enthusiasm for the trip. (She's also secretly stowed away her cat, Pitty Sing.) They hit the road and begin the trip from Georgia to Florida. During the trip the grandmother plays games and tells stories to the kids. They stop at a restaurant to eat, and converse a bit with the owner, Red Sammy, and his wife. The grandmother talks with the couple about how hard it is to trust people and find "good men" these days. She also talks a bit about The Misfit. Back on the road, the grandmother gets the kids all excited by telling them about an old plantation she once visited that's located nearby. The kids convince the reluctant Bailey to take them all to see it. He turns onto a dirt road, which, the grandmother assures him, leads to the plantation. After following the road for a while they don't see anything. Suddenly, the grandmother remembers that the plantation isn't here at all—it's actually in Tennessee. She is so startled by this realization (which she doesn't tell anybody), that she jerks, letting her cat out of the basket where she's stowed it. The animal is propelled onto Bailey's shoulder. A dramatic accident follows, as the car veers off the road and flips over. As June Star laments, however, no one is killed. The family waits for a car to come along, and sure enough, one does. Only it's not quite the help they were expecting. It turns out that their "help" is none other than The Misfit and two of his buddies. The grandmother recognizes The Misfit, and tries to convince him he's a good man who couldn't possibly want to do anything to harm them. The Misfit orders Bailey and John Wesley into the woods, where his cronies shoot them. The mother, the baby, and June Star soon follow. All the while, the grandmother, increasingly dizzy and in shock, talks with The Misfit, still trying to convince him he's a good man, and telling him he should pray to Jesus. This gives The Misfit the opportunity to tell a bit of his personal history and offer some his ideas on Jesus, about whom he's actually done some thinking. The grandmother, detecting a moment of vulnerability in him is suddenly moved to call him her child and reaches out to touch him. The Misfit responds by promptly shooting her three times in the chest. The story ends with him telling his cronies, who've returned from shooting the others, to dump her body with the rest. "She would've been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," he says.

good country people (flannery O'connor)

Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Hopewell take care of "important business"(2) every morning over breakfast. Mrs. Hopewell gets up at 7:00 AM and lights the heaters—hers and her daughter Joy's—and then she gets to gossiping in the kitchen with Mrs. Freeman. Joy, who is thirty-two years old and extremely educated, takes her time coming in. Mrs. Freeman has two teenage daughters, one married and pregnant, and one not; the girls are a big topic of morning conversation. Mrs. Hopewell employs the Freemans, a tenant farming family—she's done so for the past four years—and they've worked out well because they are not "trash," but rather "good country people" (3). Ahem... did you notice that title reference? Because that totally just happened. Anyway, before the Freemans, a year was about the most a family stayed working for Mrs. Hopewell. Joy has a grumpy attitude, but Mrs. Hopewell lets her get by with it because she has a wooden leg. When she was ten, her leg was "shot off in a hunting accident" (13), which sounds like a major bummer to us. Joy legally changed her name to Hulga when she was twenty-one, but Mrs. Hopewell doesn't call her that. Moms, right? Hulga has a doctoral degree in philosophy but lives at home because she has a heart condition and needs to be cared for by her mother. She might only live another ten years or so. Today (Saturday) Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman are wondering what Hulga talked about with the Bible salesman who came by yesterday; apparently Hulga is an atheist. Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, wasn't able to sell Mrs. Hopewell a Bible, but he did get lunch, some conversation, and a date for today at 10:00 AM with Hulga out of his visit. Hulga and Manley meet up and begin walking in the woods. They kiss, and talk about God, damnation, nothingness, and Hulga's leg. Hulga thinks he's not nearly as smart as she is. When Manley suggests they find a place to "sit down" (104), Hulga leads him to the barn loft. Manley kisses her more and takes away her glasses. She doesn't notice. He tells her he loves her and wants her to tell him the same in return. He also wants to see where her false leg attaches to her real one. She succumbs, reluctantly at first, to both requests. After Manley removes her leg, he refuses to give it back to her. She panics. Manley open his Bible—and guess what? It's hollow inside. From the hollow, he removes whiskey, cards, and condoms. Hulga is not impressed. She demands her leg and loses all romantic spirit. Manley packs up his things... as well as Hulga's leg. He tells Hulga that he is just as smart as she is and suggests that he completely fooled her: He is an even bigger believer in nothing than she is. Through the loft opening, Hulga watches Manley leave. Her face is agitated. Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman watch him leave, too. Mrs. Hopewell thinks he was selling Bibles to the black people who live in the direction from which he came. It's not clear what Mrs. Freeman thinks, but she gets the last word in the story. You just know we've got something to say about this over in the "What's Up With the Ending?" section.

revelation (flannery O'connor)

Mrs. Turpin and her husband, Claud, enter the waiting room at a doctor's office, where they have come to treat the ulcer on Claud's leg. There is nowhere for Mrs. Turpin to sit because a dirty child is taking up too much space on the sofa. Mrs. Turpin immediately starts a mindless conversation with the only other woman in the room whom she deems worthy, judging by appearance. This woman, who is dressed stylishly and whom Mrs. Turpin considers to be pleasant, is the mother of an extremely unattractive, fat, teenage girl who is reading a book called Human Development and scowling. This girl is Mary Grace. Mrs. Turpin sizes up the other occupants of the waiting room, including a white-trash woman, who is the mother of the dirty boy. Mrs. Turpin thanks Jesus, as she often does at night before falling asleep, that she is not white-trashy or black. She considers the classes of people in the world to be distinguished by race and by whether or not they own a home and land. She begins to feel sorry for Mary Grace because she is so homely, though Mary Grace has been looking up from her book only to smirk at Mrs. Turpin. All of sudden, the girl seems to lose patience and slams her book shut to stare directly at Mrs. Turpin "as if she had some special reason for disliking her." The conversation between Mrs. Turnpin and Mary Grace's mother turns to farming, and Mrs. Turpin says that she and Claud own a home and land and have hogs which they keep in a pen so their feet don't get dirty; they keep them clean by hosing them down. The white-trash woman expresses her distaste at the idea of owning hogs. A black delivery boy enters with a delivery for the doctor's office, and Mrs. Turpin deliberately shows him kindness. Mary Grace continues to show signs of losing patience with the conversation as her mother, Mrs. Turpin, and the white-trash woman discuss the possibility of sending all black Americans back to Africa. Again, Mrs. Turpin feels thankful that Jesus has made her white and privileged, and all of a sudden Mary Grace's stare becomes more intense and violent, as if she can read Mrs. Turpin's mind. Mrs. Turpin reacts by trying to engage Mary Grace in conversation about college and the book she is reading, but Mary Grace refuses to participate. Instead, her mother talks about how ungrateful she is and what a shame it is that she has such a bad disposition. Mrs. Turpin responds that she is always grateful for making her life the way it is, and exclaims aloud, "Thank you, Jesus!" At that point, Mary Grace hurls her book at Mrs. Turpin's face and physically attacks her, strangling her neck. Almost immediately, she is pulled off and falls on the floor, where she lies with her eyes rolling in her head. Mrs. Turpin asks, "What you got to say to me?" and Mary Grace responds, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog." Soon, Mary Grace and her mother leave in an ambulance and Mrs. Turpin and Claud go home. They spend the afternoon lying in bed resting, and while Claud sleeps, Mrs. Turpin fixates on what the girl said to her. She cries at first, but then gets angry that she should be the target of this message, since there were so many other, lesser people in the room to whom it could have been directed. Before Claud takes the black farmhands home in the pick-up truck, Mrs. Turpin brings them ice cold water to drink. Mrs. Turpin confides in them what happened, but when they react with sympathy and compliments she only becomes annoyed since she knows they are insincere. Before they have finished drinking, she goes back into the kitchen and decides to go to the pig parlor. She tries to justify their existence in her mind, thinking about how smart they are and all that they can do. She sends Claud on his way to take the farm hands home in the pick-up truck, and grabs the hose to spray down the hogs. She asks God why he sent her such a message, and is unable to understand how she can be "saved and from hell too." She addresses God and Mary Grace at the same time, revealing her disdain for white-trash and black people. Then she challenges God, saying, "Go on, call me a hog again... Who do you think you are?" Immediately, she has a vision. A She sees a streak of light extending upward into the sky, surrounded by fire, like a bridge. A horde of people advances from the earth toward Heaven, but in the front are all those whom Mrs. Turpin considers below herself: white-trash, now clean, black people, and "freaks and lunatics" like Mary Grace seems to be. At the end of the procession are people like her and Claud, who have been stripped of their earthly virtues (like kindness to those they consider to be inferiors). The vision reveals to her that all people are equal in God's eyes, and she is successfully moved.

a native son (james baldwin)

The book begins with a preface with the author explaining how he felt unprepared to publish the collection of essays called Notes of a native son. Baldwin notes how the blacks were oppressed and how he wished to come into contact with the inheritance that was lost to him. Baldwin ends the preface by noting that he published the collection when he was just 31 and how, in more than 30 years, he noticed almost no change. In the next section, Baldwin presents some autobiographical details about himself. Baldwin was born in Harlem and he was interested in reading since an early age. His father wanted him to become a preacher but Baldwin felt no inclination towards spending his life as a mister. When he was 20, Baldwin left for Paris where he began writing his books. Unfortunately, none of them were published. Thus, Baldwin decided that he must write about his experience as a black man before being able to write properly about anything else. In the third part, Baldwin discusses a well-known novel, entitled Uncle Tom's Cabin. While many hailed the novel as being progressive, Baldwin criticizes it for treating the subject of slavery from a sentimentalist view. This is, in Baldwin's opinion, a bad way to look at the situation and does not analyze the reason why the slaves were treated the way they were. Baldwin also points out that in the novel, the black are still presented in a stereotypical way and that whiteness is still associated with goodness and beauty. Thus, Baldwin argues that because of this, blacks will still be perceived as inferior for a long time to come. The next essay is entitled Many Thousands Gone Baldwin argues that the reason why the blacks never told their story is because the whites were unwilling to listen to it. In time thus, the whites developed a certain way of looking at the black community and of criticizing it based on a number of stereotypes and facts considered universal. As a result, a line was drawn between whites and blacks, dividing them into two separate groups. This however, should not be the case since the modern American society is composed both by whites and black in equal parts. Baldwin also argues that even the most well-known black characters in literature are racist even though they try to portray blacks in a positive manner. In time, many black people ended up adopting the image constructed of them by the white people and through this, they forgot about their true identity and about their true heritage and became the people the whites wanted them to become. In this essay, Baldwin mentions the book written by Richard Wright and entitled Native Son. Baldwin praises the book because it presents the process through which the black protagonist was transformed by the society's perception of him. Next, the author continues with the essay entitled Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough in which Baldwin analyzes and criticizes the movie Carmen Jones. The movie was adapted after a French opera with the same name but only black people were cast as actors. Despite this, Baldwin notes that the movie depicts the black people in an unnatural way and removes certain aspects of the black culture such as their language to make the actors and their actions appear more suitable. Baldwin also notes that while the cast is all-black, the protagonists and the positive characters are played by lighter-skinned black people while the villains and other characters depicting negative aspects are played by darker-skinned actors. Baldwin also criticizes the movie for desexualizing black people and for making it seem as if their sexuality is a threat and something negative that must be avoided. In his next essay, Baldwin talks about Harlem, the place where he and his own parents grew up. Baldwin notes regrettably that Harlem changed little since his youth despite all the good intentions and despite the efforts made by some black leaders. Baldwin also criticizes the press and how it fails to distinguish itself from the publications written by white people. Baldwin notes that black people are extremely religious and that countless churches can be found in Harlem. At the same time, he notes that the black people seem to have problems in dealing with the Jews whom they considered as being oppressors despite them being oppressed in the past as well. Baldwin also disagrees with the idea that oppression makes people wiser and claims that oppression only makes the oppressed feel angry and makes them want revenge. In Journey to Atlanta, Baldwin talks about politicians and how blacks expect to be disappointed by the various politicians running the country. Blacks are also less inclined to believe in politicians who are black as well since they all end up just as the white politicians, caring only about themselves. Sometimes, black people are used by white politicians to further their agenda as it happened to one of Baldwin's brothers who traveled to Atlanta and who was then made by a white party member to go and gather votes instead of playing, the thing he went there for. Because of this, the quartet made almost no money. Despite this, Baldwin's brother refused to be sadden or affected by this. In the essay Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin talks about his father and about his death which took place in 1943. Baldwin talks about his father, a man who was born while his parents were still slaves. Baldwin also notes that his father had troubles connecting with his children who were scared of the man. Towards the end of the father's life, it was discovered that he was mentally ill and that contributed to his falling health. Baldwin remembers how his father would never trust white people and how he was always paranoid about them. Baldwin adopted some of his father's views and he began to be wary of white people whom he saw as being the enemy. When Baldwin was living in New Jersey, he witnessed racial bigotry when he was not allowed to eat in certain restaurants because he was a person of color. Because of this, Baldwin reacted sometimes violently, expressing his anger towards the people who refused to treat him in the same manner they would treat a white person. Baldwin returned to Harlem a few days before his father died and he notes that only days after, his youngest brother was also born. Baldwin's father was buried on the same day when Baldwin turned 18 and around the same time, the Harlem riots took place. Even though Baldwin admits that he was not close to his father, he agrees that he was right when he talked about how bad hate is for a person. In the next essay, Baldwin writes about the situation in France and how the blacks living in Europe had a different situation than the blacks living in America. In comparison with them, the Europeans had more chances of becoming successful but still, they tried to keep themselves distanced from the African Americans whom they looked at with suspicion. The next essay talks about Paris as well and how the American students in Paris were like a colony. Many of the American students were soldiers in the past who chose to remain behind after the war in Europe. The Americans harbored the belief that life will be better in Paris but then they are quickly disappointed by life in Paris and then they eventually decide to return home to America. Baldwin also criticizes the Americans who do get adapted to life in Paris but who, according to Baldwin, they lose their own sense of identity. In the following essay, Equal in Paris, Baldwin is arrested after he is discovered possessing some stolen goods from a hotel. The man who stole the sheets was a man from America who left his hotel after it became inhabitable and Baldwin arranged for him to live in the same hotel as him. Baldwin is arrested for the stolen sheets and then sent to prison, a few miles away from Paris. There, he waits his trial and he spends his Christmas Eve in the hospital. A day later, Baldwin is released from prison. When he is released, Baldwin looks at the judges who laugh at his situation and Baldwin thinks that they never think that they could end up in a similar situation. The last essay in the collection is entitled Stranger in the Village and takes place after Baldwin left Paris and went to Switzerland. Baldwin stays in a little village where he is the only black person. The people from the village never saw a black person before then and because of this, they treat Baldwin with great curiosity and yet with coldness. While in the village, Baldwin witnesses a festival during which a child is painted in black and then attempts to raise money for the community to buy black slaves so they could be converted to Christianity and saved from their savage way of life. Baldwin leaves the village but then he continues to return there, year after year. Some people get used to his presence while other people are suspicious and criticize Baldwin. The writer then ends his essay by talking about how in order to survive, the black community had to build some type of relationship with the rest of the world who looked at them from a privileged point of view.

the bluest eye (toni morrison)

The novel opens in the fall of 1941, just after the Great Depression, in Lorain, Ohio. Nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister, Frieda, live with their parents in an "old, cold and green" house. What they lack in money they make up for in love. The MacTeers decide to take in a boarder named Mr. Henry. At the same time, they also take in young Pecola Breedlove, whose father recently hit her mother and tried to burn down the family home. Pecola is a quiet, awkward girl who loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is beautiful and that her own blackness is inherently ugly. Pecola's home life is difficult. Her father, Cholly, abuses alcohol and her parents fight constantly. Pecola begins to think that if she were prettier, her parents would be nicer to each other and to her. Since Pecola equates beauty with whiteness, she begins to pray for blue eyes in order to change the way she sees the world as well as the way she is seen by others. Above Pecola's house live three prostitutes - Miss Marie, Poland, and China. These women use men for money, curse, spit, and laugh. They are also genuinely kind to Pecola and tell her stories about love, sex, and money. Pecola gets teased at school by boys, and by the new, light-skinned girl, Maureen Peal. One winter day, Claudia tries to punch Maureen for making fun of Pecola, but she misses and punches Pecola dead in the face instead. Junior, a young black boy from the neighborhood, lures Pecola into his house and attacks her with a cat. Later, when he kills the cat, he blames it on Pecola, causing his mother to yell at her and kick her out of the house. In the spring of 1942, Mr. Henry gropes Frieda and gets kicked out of the MacTeers' house. Through flashback, the narrator reveals the histories of Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. Pauline has a deformed foot that has always made her feel like an outcast in her huge family. We see her as a young girl, losing herself in church songs and romantic fantasy, always imagining someone who would love her and save her. From Hollywood movies, she learns about beauty and begins to emulate white celebrities like Jean Harlow. We also learn about Cholly, who is abandoned by his mother near train tracks when he is four days old. He gets taken in by his great aunt, Jimmy, who raises him until her death. The day of Jimmy's funeral, Cholly has his first sexual experience with Darlene, a local girl. While they are having sex in a field, two white men approach them and shine a flashlight on them. They laugh at the pair and force them to continue having sex while they watch and laugh. Cholly and Darlene are humiliated, and Cholly, unable to direct his anger at the white men, turns it onto Darlene instead. He spends the next few years moving from city to city and from woman to woman. He meets and weds Pauline in Kentucky and the couple moves to Lorain, Ohio. Back in the present, Cholly comes home drunk one day to find Pecola washing dishes. Cholly rapes her in the kitchen. When it's over, he covers her with a quilt. Pauline finds Pecola unconscious on the floor. When Pecola tells her that Cholly raped her, she doesn't believe it and hits her. Cholly rapes Pecola again at some point after this, although it's unclear exactly when. Pecola becomes pregnant with her father's child. She visits Soaphead Church, a quack psychic and healer, and asks him to give her blue eyes. Soaphead tells Pecola to give his dog some meat, and if the dog acts strangely, she will get her wish. Pecola doesn't realize that Soaphead hates the dog and has given her poison to feed to it. When the dog begins to gag and limp around, Pecola believes she will receive her blue eyes. Claudia and Frieda learn of Pecola's pregnancy through neighborhood gossip. Although everyone else in Lorain wants the baby to die, Claudia and Frieda pray that it survives. They spend the summer of 1942 planting marigold seeds in the hopes that if the flowers blossom, Pecola's baby will survive. Pecola's baby dies. Pauline and Pecola move to the edge of town and Pecola begins to lose her mind. Pecola can be seen looking into a mirror, talking to herself about her blue eyes, and picking through trash.

A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

The play takes place right after World War II, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Kowalski apartment is in a poor but charming neighborhood in the French Quarter. Stella, twenty-five years old and pregnant, lives with her blue collar husband Stanley Kowalski. It is summertime, and the heat is oppressive. Blanche Dubois, Stella's older sister, arrives unexpectedly, carrying all that she owns. Blanche and Stella have a warm reunion, but Blanche has some bad news: Belle Reve, the family mansion, has been lost. Blanche stayed behind to care for their dying family while Stella left to make a new life for herself, and Blanche is clearly resentful by her sister's abandonment of the family. Blanche meets her sister's husband, Stanley, for the first time, and immediately she feels uncomfortable. We learn that Blanche was once married, when she was very young, but her husband died, leaving her widowed and alone. Stanley initially distrusts Blanche, thinking that she has cheated Stella out of her share of Belle Reve - but Stanley soon realizes that Blanche is not the swindling type. But the animosity between the two continues. Blanche takes long baths, criticizes the squalor of the apartment, and irritates Stanley. Stanley's roughness bothers Blanche as well, since he makes no effort to be gentle with her. One night, during a poker game, Stanley gets too drunk and beats Stella. The women go to their upstairs neighbors' apartment, but soon Stella returns to Stanley. Blanche is unable to understand Stella and Stanley's powerful (and destructive) physical relationship. That night, she also meets Mitch, prompting an immediate mutual attraction. The next day, Stanley overhears Blanche saying terrible things about him. From that time on, he devotes himself fully to her destruction. Blanche, herself, has a shady past that she keeps close to the vest. During the last days of Belle Reve, after the mansion was lost, she was exceptionally lonely and turned to strangers for comfort. Her numerous amorous encounters destroyed her reputation in Laurel, leading to the loss of her job as a high school English teacher and her near-expulsion from town. Tensions build in the apartment throughout the summer. Blanche and Stanley see each other as enemies, and Blanche turns increasingly to alcohol for comfort. Stanley, meanwhile, investigates Blanche's past, and he passes the information about her sexual dalliances on to Mitch. Although Blanche and Mitch had been on track to marry, after he learns the truth, he loses all interest in her. On Blanche's birthday, Mitch stands her up, abandoning her for good. Stanley, meanwhile, caustically presents Blanche with her birthday gift: bus tickets back to Laurel. Blanche is overcome by sickness; she cannot return to Laurel, and Stanley knows it. As Blanche is ill in the bathroom, Stella fights with Stanley over the cruelty of his act. Mid-fight, she tells him to take her to the hospital - the baby is coming. That night, Blanche packs and drinks. Mitch arrives unexpectedly. He confronts her with the stories of her past, and she tells him, in lurid detail, the truth about her escapades in Laurel. He approaches her, making advances, wanting what she has denied him all summer. She asks him to marry her, and when he refuses, she kicks him out of the apartment. Hours later, Stanley comes home to get some sleep while Stella's labor continues. Blanche further antagonizes Stanley, destroying his good humor, and he responds by mercilessly destroying Blanche's illusions, one by one, until finally he rapes her. Weeks later, another poker game is being held at the Kowalski apartment. Blanche has suffered a mental breakdown. She has told Stella about Stanley's assault, but Stella has convinced herself that it cannot be true. A doctor and nurse come and take Blanche away to the asylum. The other men continue their poker game as if nothing has happened.

the fish (elizabeth bishop)

The speaker catches a huge fish while fishing in a little rented boat. She studies her catch for a while as, holding it up half out of water beside the boat. The fish is pretty old and gnarly-looking, with barnacles and algae growing on it, and it also has five fishing hooks with the lines still partially attached hanging from its jaw. The speaker considered how tough this fish must be and how much he probably had to fight. She begins to respect the fish. The poem takes its final turn when the oil spillage in the boat makes a rainbow and the speaker, overcome with emotion by the fish and the scene, lets the fish go.

morning song (sylvia plath)

The speaker, "I," addresses a new baby, "you," throughout this poem. The baby is born and begins screaming. The speaker reflects on how the baby looks and sounds in its first moments of life. Soon the family watches the baby in its bed, a form of viewership that strikes the speaker as something similar to viewing a statue at an art museum. At home, the speaker stays awake most of the night, listening to the baby breathing. Once the baby starts to cry, the speaker (who we now know is the baby's mother, judging from the fact that she's wearing a Victorian nightgown), rushes out to take care of it. She watches as the morning starts to color the windowpanes, and then marvels at how the baby has begun to coo - a form of "singing" that the speaker likens to "vowels" flying up like "balloons."

Her Kind - Anne Sexton

Think of this poem as a walk down memory lane - a rather dark, twisted, and not-so-pleasant memory lane. The speaker of this poem is remembering all the things that she has been in the past: a lonely witch, a clutter-obsessed cave dweller, and the victim of persecution. See? We told you that her path wasn't all sunshine and roses. As she makes her way through all the things that she has been, however, we begin to figure out just why her life hasn't been as "normal" as it might have been. See, we only know a very few things about our speaker - but one of them is that she's a woman. And as we learn about her situation, we can only assume that her path has been determined, at least in part, by that fact. Our speaker's not angry about the fact that she's a woman, however. In fact, it becomes the basis of her solidarity with all those folks out there who are outside the fold. As she reminds us (many, many times), she's one of their kind.

Pigeon feathers (john updike)

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. 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" (126). 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" (130). 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." (132) 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. 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" (139) 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" (150).

Mirror (Sylvia Plath)

This poem is not a riddle, speaking with the voice of some mysterious "I" until the end, where the reader is shocked to find out that it's a mirror, and not a person speaking. Instead, the poem lets us know from the start that we're hearing from a mirror, with its title, "Mirror," and its first line, "I am silver and exact." The first stanza describes the mirror, which seems to be like one of those people who doesn't tell white lies - it's truthful and exact, but not cruel. As the first stanza personifies the mirror, showing us some of its human characteristics, we also find out a little about the mirror's life. Most of the time, it reflects a pink speckled wall, which could be found in any bathroom, but it also sees a lot of faces, and a lot of darkness. Jump into the second stanza, and the stakes have changed. The mirror is no longer a mirror, but a lake, which also shows reflections. And we get to see a whole new character: a woman. We saw faces in the first stanza, but now we focus on one face in particular. This woman, we find out, isn't very happy with her reflection in the lake, so she tries to find a kinder reflection under the light of a candle or the moon. When the lake reflects her faithfully anyway, she cries and gets upset. In the last two lines of this poem, we see why this woman is so upset: in her watery reflection, her past is drowning, and a horrible future is rising to meet her.

Rabbit, run (john updike)

Twenty-six-year-old Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom runs home one evening to find his wife, Janice, who is seven months pregnant, at home - without their son Nelson and without the family car - drinking, again. They argue, and he leaves to fetch the car and the boy, but along the way decides to permanently hightail it out of Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania and drive until he gets to the beach. He drives in circles and ends up back in Mt. Judge the next day. Instead of going home, he goes to see his high school basketball coach, Marty Tothero, who introduces him to Ruth Leonard, a sexually experienced woman about his age who has dabbled in prostitution. Rabbit and Ruth hit it off famously, and Rabbit decides to drop his car off for Janice, grab a few clothes, and shack up with Ruth in the city of Brewer, of which Mt. Judge is a suburb. While leaving his old pad he is pursued by Jack Eccles, the minister of Janice's family's church. Eccles and Rabbit develop a friendship of sorts, which mostly consists of Eccles trying to convince Rabbit to return to Janice while battling (and coaching) him on the golf course - and of Rabbit getting into some heavy flirting with Eccles' wife, Lucy. Two months pass. Rabbit and Ruth are for the most part happy. Rabbit has left his work as a MagiPeel Peeler salesman and found fulfillment in the widowed Mrs. Smith's fabulous fifty-acre garden. Yet, signs of trouble are emerging in the Rabbit and Ruth household. Ruth is about a month pregnant, but hasn't told Rabbit yet. Ruth and Rabbit go out for drinks one night and things get ugly. Rabbit feels that Ruth took the side of her old lover, Ronnie Harrison, when Ronnie was clearly giving Rabbit a hard time. Rabbit interrogates Ruth as to her sexual history with Ronnie, and then, upon finding out that she gave Ronnie a *******, requires Ruth to give him one to make up for her traitorous behavior. She does, and a little later that night Reverend Eccles calls to tell Rabbit that Janice is in labor. He leaves Ruth to go to Janice and soon becomes the proud father of one Rebecca June Angstrom. While Janice is recovering, Rabbit moves back into their old apartment with his son Nelson, and cleans the place up while spending quality time with the boy. Janice gets out of the hospital, and things are OK. Janice isn't drinking. Rabbit is working for her dad, selling used cars. But after nine days both Janice's body and mind are feeling postpartum strain. That Sunday, Rabbit goes to Eccles's church for the first time (leaving Janice and the kids at home to rest). He gets into some deep flirting with Lucy Eccles and comes home wanting to have sex NOW with Janice. The baby won't stop crying though, for like hours, and the whole time Rabbit is trying to get Janice to drink (to put her in the mood), chain smoking, and clinging to her in case she suddenly feels like having sex with him. Finally, the baby stops crying, Nelson goes to bed, and Rabbit gets Janice to take a drink. They get into bed and Rabbit tries to have sex with her. Still sore from giving birth, from her episiotomy, and from Rabbit living with "a *****," Janice rebuffs him. He gets mad and leaves. Meanwhile, Janice really does start drinking, and drinks all day Monday in fact. Frantic and depressed, she slaps Nelson. Her mother calls and upsets her, and then she finds that Rebecca June has somehow gotten baby poop all over herself and her crib. Drunk and full of anger, confusion, and fear, Janice tries to give Rebecca a bath and accidentally drowns her. Rabbit calls Eccles that night and finds out what happened. He'd spent the night in a motel and the day trying to catch a glimpse of Ruth, but with no luck. He busses back to Mt. Judge full of shame and remorse. Why is he so ashamed? Because he really thinks, most of the time, that he killed his daughter by not being in the apartment at the time of her death. He feels like he took out a hit on the kid when he walked out on Janice. He really convinces himself, and is disappointed that the law doesn't consider him a suspect. This guilt makes him more determined than ever to work things out with Janice. To stay with her forever to atone for his sins...but... At the end of Rebecca June's burial service he loudly accuses Janice of murdering their daughter and loudly proclaims his innocence. Humiliated, he runs. He runs to Brewer, finds Ruth, and guesses she is pregnant. She is really nasty to him and threatens to abort the baby if he doesn't divorce Janice so he can marry her. He agrees, but when he steps out to pick up food from the deli, as you've probably predicted, he runs...And the book ends.

the bean eaters (gwendolyn brooks)

Two old folks sit at their dinner table, eating a rather unappetizing (but oh-so-cheap) meal of...beans.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Willy Loman, an old salesman, returns early from a business trip. After nearly crashing multiple times, Willy has a moment of enlightenment and realizes he shouldn't be driving. Seeing that her husband is no longer able to do his job as a traveling salesman, Willy's wife, Linda, suggests that he ask his boss, Howard, to give him a local office job at the New York headquarters. Willy thinks that getting the new job is a sure thing since he (wrongly) sees himself as a valuable salesman. We begin to learn some family background and hear about Willy and Linda's grown sons, Biff and Happy. Biff has just returned home from working as a farmhand in the West. Willy thinks Biff could easily be rich and successful, but is wasting his talents and needs to get on track. Willy thinks Biff is being wish-washy to spite him. Later that night, Willy starts having flashbacks and talking to imagined images as if they were real people. You guessed it: something is wrong. He's ranting so loudly that Happy and Biff wake up. The brothers are legitimately worried, as they have never seen their father like this. Biff, feeling as though he should stay close to home and fix his relationship with his dad, decides to talk to a former employer, Bill Oliver, about getting a loan to start a business. In the middle of the night, Willy's talking to himself so loudly that everyone wakes up. Linda admits to her sons that she and Willy are struggling financially. Worse, Willy has been attempting suicide. She's worried and takes it out on her boys, accusing Biff of being the cause of Willy's unhappiness. Now Willy gets in on the family discussion and the situation goes downhill. He and Biff begin to argue, but Happy interjects that Biff plans to see Oliver the following morning. Willy is overjoyed. Everyone goes to sleep believing that tomorrow will fulfill their dreams: Willy expects to get a local job, and Biff expects to get a business loan. The next day, of course, everything goes wrong. Willy feels happy and confident as he meets with his boss, Howard. But instead of getting a transfer to the New York office, Willy gets fired. Destroyed by the news, he begins to hallucinate and, yes, once again speak with imaginary people as he heads out to meet his sons at a restaurant. Waiting for their dad at the restaurant, Biff explains to Happy that Oliver wouldn't see him and didn't have the slightest idea who he was. Distressed, spiteful, and something of a kleptomaniac, Biff stole Oliver's fountain pen. By now, Biff has realized that he was crazy to think he would ever get a loan, and that he and his family have been lying to themselves for basically their entire lives. When Willy comes into the restaurant demanding good news, Biff struggles to explain what happened without letting his father down. Willy, who can't handle the disappointment, tries to pretend it isn't true. He starts drifting into the dreamy past again, reliving the moment when Biff discovered his (Willy's) affair with a woman in Boston. While their dad is busy being detached from reality, Biff and Happy ditch him for two girls. Biff and Happy return home from their dates to find their mother waiting for them, fuming mad that they left their father at the restaurant. A massive argument erupts. No one wants to listen to Biff, but he manages to get the point across that he can't live up to his dad's unrealistic expectations and is basically just a failure. He's the only one who sees that they've been living a lie, and he tells them so. The night's fight ends with Willy realizing that Biff, although a "failure," seems to really love him. Unfortunately Willy can't get past the "failure" bit. He thinks the greatest contribution that he himself can make toward his son's success is to commit suicide. That way, Biff could use the life insurance money to start a business. Within a few minutes, there's a loud crash. Willy has killed himself. In the final scene, Linda, sobbing, still under the delusion that her husband was a well-liked salesman, wonders why no one came to his funeral. Biff continues to see through his family's lies and wants to be a better man who is honest with himself. Unfortunately, Happy wants to be just like his dad.

the first seven years (bernard malamud)

a short story that was written in 1950. It later appeared in Malamud's first collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, in 1958. The narrative tells the story of Feld, a Jewish shoemaker who is searching for a suitable husband for his daughter. The story itself is set in 1949. During this time, Jewish immigration to the United States was common, and the world was attempting to come to terms with the horrific results of the Holocaust and World War II.

John Updike

an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic.

theodore roethke

an American poet, Roethke is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation. Roethke's work is characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery

Allen Ginsberg

an American poet, philosopher, writer, and activist. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed.

Robert Lowell

an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry.

songs of solomon (toni morrison)

focuses on the African-American experience in the United States over four generations. The novel examines the legends and folklore that tell the story of slaves who flew off to Africa. It also deals with the Great Migration (the movement of Southern blacks into other parts of the country) that took place following the Civil War and the uber individualistic mindset that was beginning to characterize urban America in the 1960s (hello iPod nation). The novel has been popular for being able to zoom in telescopically on the black experience in America, but to also embrace and discuss universal themes, ideas, and concepts that affect every human. Themes like love, loss, friendship, and the search for identity. Toni Morrison has written that she wants her readers (that means us) to take part in the creation of the story, so she leaves some stones unturned in the hopes that we will kick our imaginations into turbo gear. It takes two to tango, says she. In fact, Morrison says, "I want [the reader] to respond on the same plane as an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination." Oh man, this book just keeps getting better and better. When was the last time you heard a Nobel Prize-winning author say to you, "Oh, don't mind me! Those are just words on a page - I'm much more interested in what you have to say in response to this little universe I've created." Um, never. Toni Morrison was used to writing from the female perspective, but decided to challenge herself by following and capturing the male voice. You could say she did a pretty good job, because she earned the National Book Critics Award for this novel. Song of Solomon was also monumental in garnering Morrison the Nobel Prize in literature, awarded in 1993, and she was the first black American to be presented with this honor.

Toni Morrison

American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Ralph Ellison

American novelist, literary critic, and scholar. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory.

Arthur miller

American playwright, essayist, and a major figure in the twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge. He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits.

Tennessee williams

American playwright. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. After years of obscurity, at age 33 he became suddenly famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie in New York City.

John Berryman

American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.

Gwendolyn Brooks

American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive the Pulitzer.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

Anne Sexton

American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die.

Sylvia Plath

American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer

Eudora Welty

American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

the mother (gwendolyn brooks)

An unnamed speaker ruminates about the abortions she's had. She thinks about the children and adults that her pregnancies could have grown up to be. She addresses the aborted fetuses directly, and tells them that she was not "deliberate" in her decision to have an abortion. She contemplates the idea of abortion itself, and asks if it's possible to kill something that was never alive. She ends the poem by announcing that she "loved [them] all."

power; Adrienne Rich

An unnamed speaker tells a brief anecdote about how a backhoe (basically, a big ol' excavating machine) unearthed an old bottle of liquid. This bottle is a relic of the past. It's one of those quack sciences, so-called magical bottles of tonic that was advertised back in the day as the solution to all humankind's problems. As in, Cure your malaise with sugar water! Then the speaker suddenly shifts gears. She tells us that she was reading about Marie Curie earlier in the day. (Perhaps drawing a contrast between Curie and the sellers of tonic). The speaker imagines that Curie understood her radiation sickness better than anyone else, though she denied it, which draws our attention to the tension between what Curie knew, and what Curie would admit to the world. In the final stanza, the speaker slowly and powerfully tells us that Curie died "a famous woman," all while denying that her ailments were caused by radium, the "source" of her power.

sestina Elizabeth Bishop

Because of the sestina form, this is kind of a wild, circular summary, but we'll take you for little ring around the rosy. It's September, late afternoon, and it's raining out. A grandmother and her granddaughter are inside making a snack and some tea. To kill some time while the water boils, they read the almanac and make jokes out of what they find. Even though the grandmother is laughing, it seems she is upset about something, because she's trying to hide her tears. At this point, both the grandmother and the grandchild seem to disappear into their own private thoughts. The grandmother thinks how her sadness might be connected to the time of year, and the child is distracted by the condensation forming on the teakettle. While the grandmother tidies up—hanging the almanac back on its string, putting more wood on the stove—the child draws a picture of a house and a man "with buttons like tears" to show to her grandma. The poem ends in a pretty imaginative way, with the almanac dropping imaginary moons from its pages into the flower bed of the kid's drawing, then saying "time to plant tears"; the grandmother singing to the stove; and the child drawing another scribble of a house with her crayons.

My Papa's Waltz - Theodore Roethke

Daddy's had a little too much whiskey, and now he's waltzing around the kitchen with his son. Their waltz is pretty clumsy - the pans are sliding from the shelf, and mom's not too happy about that. The father must be a guy who works with his hands, because his knuckles are rough, and he deals with a lot of dirt. This dance may not be all fun and games for the boy - he keeps scraping his ear on his dad's belt buckle, ouch! And his dad is keeping time, perhaps not so gently, on the boy's head. In the end, the father dances the boy off to bed.

Recitatif (toni morrison)

First Encounter- Meeting in a state home for children, Twyla and Roberta become friends because of their similar circumstances. Both are currently residing at St. Bonny's because their mothers could not provide adequate care for them. Neither of the children knows the reality of what is happening with their parents, Roberta being told her mother is sick and Twyla being told her mother "dances all night". Rolling into a major theme of the novel, both of the girls are different races (black and white), but who is who is not told just yet. Despite these differences, what they have both been through is what makes them such good pals. They have an "alliance" with each other against the girls on the second floor, and against the orphans at the home who lost their parents, probably just so that they could have something to do. Maggie becomes friends with both of them - although she cannot talk, she makes food in the kitchen for all of the children. Every Sunday, the girls' mothers come to see them at a church. Both of the youth become embarrassed when, after Mary (Twyla's mother) offers her hand to Roberta's mother, Roberta's mother refuses to touch it. Second Encounter- Eight years later in the 1960's, the good friends Twlya and Roberta coincidentally meet again. Twyla is working at a restaurant that Roberta comes into with two men that are too rambunctious and annoying. The short encounter resembles themes of how both of the girls don't like how the other is living, but are too cowardly to change anything. Third Encounter - Twelve years after the second encounter, or twenty years after the first, the women meet again. Both are married, and they bump shopping carts at a new supermarket. The meeting seems a lot more optimistic than it was last time, since memories of their wedding day's love for their husbands, and just little things that they've done over the years are shared. Both don't have any money problems, since Roberta is married to an IBM executive and Twyla a firefighter. Fourth Encounter- At an unknown date, the women meet once again. Racial matters, now that the two are adults, get in the way of their friendship. Twyla sees Roberta picketing forced integration, an she feels scared. Roberta doesn't have any sympathy for her, and continues to protest. Roberta tells Twyla that when Twyla was little, she had kicked Maggie, who Roberta says was black, while she was on the ground. Twyla never thought of Maggie as black before, instead having "sandy skin". Joining an anti-picket picket across the street, Twyla holds up signs that seem to have a conversation with Roberta. Fifth Encounter- On Christmas Eve some time far after the previous encounter, the two meet for the final time in a quiet coffee shop. The two discuss racism once again, and sympathy is spread. Ending without a resolution, the conclusion shows much resemblance to our world today.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

He lives off the grid, in a warm hole in the ground where he is hibernating in anticipation of future direct, visible action. But before all this direct, visible action happens, he needs to detail his road to recognizing his invisibility. We get context when we learn that the narrator's grandparents were former slaves freed after the Civil War. On his deathbed, the narrator's grandfather, who had been considered a meek man, confesses anger towards the white-controlled system and advocates using the system against them. The narrator dismisses his grandfather's words and goes on to live a meek and obedient life as a model black student. After writing a successful speech on the importance of humility to black progress (i.e., the idea that blacks can progress as long as they recognize whites as superior), he is invited to give the speech to leaders of his town. The narrator is super-excited to give this speech. Fast forward to speech day: the narrator is forced to strip off his clothes and fight a blindfolded "battle royal" with other young black men in front of white town leaders. Definitely not a speech. Only after the young men fight, egged on by drunken town leaders, is the narrator allowed to give his speech. His big moment has arrived, but the town leaders barely listen. They reward him well, however. At the close of his speech, the narrator is presented with a fine briefcase and a scholarship to a black college. The narrator recalls that the college grounds were beautiful (remember this whole story is being told by a guy currently living in a manhole). He remains a model student and aspires one day to work with Dr. Bledsoe, who heads the school. When he is selected to drive Mr. Norton, one of the school's founders and a rich white millionaire, around the grounds, the narrator is excited. And then things go horribly wrong. The two visit old slave quarters and hear the story of a man named Trueblood, who apparently impregnated his daughter. In need of some fortifying liquids, Mr. Norton orders the narrator to take him to the nearest bar. This happens to be an insane-asylum-and-bar hybrid. (What?!) Well, so much for the narrator someday working with Dr. Bledsoe—the guy kicks him out of school and tells him to go look for work in Harlem, New York. He hands the narrator some letters of recommendation and wishes him luck. The narrator is excited about his prospects in Harlem, but Dr. Bledsoe's letters of recommendation aren't doing any magical employment tricks. Turns out the letters of recommendation are actually the opposite—letters asking the recipient to not help the narrator. Ouch. Crushed and dismayed, the narrator ends up taking a job at Liberty Paints. While there, he makes white paint, is mistaken for a fink (a hired strike-breaker), then mistaken for a unionist, and then is accidentally blown up and used as a lab rat in the company hospital. All-around great first day on the job. It's also the narrator's last day. We don't blame him. A friendly, motherly woman named Mary Rambo takes the narrator into her house and, for lack of a less clichéd phrase, believes in him. This belief is borne out when the narrator witnesses an old black couple getting evicted on the streets and feels compelled to give an awesome impromptu speech (to a listening audience, no less). One of those listening is a white man named Brother Jack, who initiates the narrator into the Brotherhood, a multiracial organization with communist undercurrents. The narrator moves out of Mary's house, makes some good money, and learns the ways of the Brotherhood. He makes some excellent speeches (to people that listen), and gains increasing prestige within the Harlem community. Big mistake, apparently. The Brotherhood re-assigns the narrator to attend to women's issues downtown, which is equivalent to your swimsuit company transferring you to Juneau, Alaska. After a couple weeks, the narrator returns to Harlem to learn that Tod Clifton, a fellow young black Brother, has been missing for a number of weeks. Harlem itself has undergone a lot of change—much of the work the narrator put into the community has disappeared. The narrator is further thrown for a loop when he finds Clifton selling Sambo dolls on the street. He witnesses a police officer shoot Clifton. With Clifton dead, the narrator urgently tries to contact senior members of the Brotherhood to organize a funeral service, but ends up taking matters into his own hands and organizes a public funeral. Mistake! The Brotherhood summons the narrator to a meeting during which they chastise him for taking matters into his own hands. They call Clifton a traitor for selling the racist Sambo dolls, and they reprimand the narrator for organizing a public funeral. Apparently, public demonstrations are no longer part of the Brotherhood agenda. Brother Jack instructs the narrator to visit Brother Hambro, who will outline the new program. The narrator decides to visit Brother Hambro that night, but on the way, he bumps into Ras the Exhorter, a black nationalist who conveniently uses the situation to stir up anti-Brotherhood sentiment. It's a bit of a dangerous situation for the narrator, who sees two men ready to follow him into a who-knows-what kind of dark alley. Deciding that a disguise would be the best course of action, the narrator purchases a prop or two and promptly starts being mistaken for a man called Rinehart. This Rinehart character is a reverend, a gambler, a fighter, and a pimp, among other identities. The narrator realizes that he can have multiple identities—that's the benefit of being invisible. Deciding to discuss the idea with Hambro, the narrator meets up with Hambro and learns that the Brotherhood is planning to sacrifice the people of Harlem in service of a greater, unnamed cause. The narrator decides to spy on the Brotherhood and figure out their true intentions, but is unsuccessful. Harlem erupts into a race riot, and the narrator speculates that this was the Brotherhood's plan all along. Extremely upset, he continues running down the streets of Harlem as Ras the Exhorter (now Ras the Destroyer) urges further destruction. Ras calls for the narrator to be apprehended, but the narrator eludes capture after a brief confrontation. He tries to go to Mary's house, but ends up falling down a manhole. When he awakens, he realizes the full extent of the Brotherhood manipulation and gets angry. He realizes he needs a plan of action and decides to hibernate until then. He tells us that writing his story was helpful, and that he's ready to come out of hibernation. He wonders if his story is speaking for us as well as himself.

Petrified man (Eudora Welty)

In Petrified Man, most of the drama takes place in the dialogue between Mrs Fletcher and her beautician Leota; there is little external action. During a shampoo and set, Leota tells her customer about her new tenant and friend, Mrs Pike. At first, the two gossip politely, but as soon as Leota notices that Mrs Fletcher's hair is falling out, probably due to her pregnancy rather than the perm she got the week before, the atmosphere changes from friendly to hostile. Suddenly, Mrs Fletcher becomes annoyed by the fact that she has become the talk of the town, and is furious when she gets to know that it was the observant Mrs Pike who noticed her belly. She also dismisses any subject that Leota brings up to distract her, such as Mr Pike, a fortuneteller, and the petrified man at a freak show next door. Moreover, she is extremely annoyed by Mrs Pike's son Billy, who roams the beauty parlor when his mother is at work. In fact, she now despises the idea of having a child of her own. However, she brightens up a little when Leota tells her about the good luck that Mrs Pike had: Due to her excellent observation skills, she identified the man in a wanted ad in one of Leota's magazines as the petrified man at the freak show, who has raped four women. Mrs Pike getting a $500 reward infuriates Leota because she feels the money should have been hers--after all, the ad was in a magazine in her house, and the wanted man was right next door. This time, when Billy misbehaves, it is Leota who spanks him with a brush. In the end, Billy mischievously runs out of the beauty parlor, revealing in a sarcastic comment that the women's lives are a disappointment.

the man moth (elizabeth bishop)

In the first stanza, we're looking down on a man in the street as the moon shines down on him. Where's the Man-Moth? Oh, there he is in the second stanza, coming out from under the streets. He's kind of twitchy about being up here. He believes the moon is a hole in the sky, and he's trying to get up to see what's on the other side. He's still nervous and afraid, but he paints a dramatic picture as he scales up the buildings. He's like if Spiderman and Batman adopted a giant moth. Turns out he's no Spiderman or Batman (he was adopted after all), though, because he falls, and this seems to be the usual course of events when he tries this. We follow the Man-Moth underground in the second part of the poem and hop on a subway train with him. He does odd things like insisting on sitting backward and never taking his hands out of his pockets, seeming very alien even though this is his home. In the end, we're encouraged to take a closer look. The good news is that he doesn't seem to mind if you shine a flashlight in his eyes. In fact, if you do it, he'll give you something precious—a single tear—if you pay close enough attention. The meaning of all of these things depends on how we interpret what's going on.

why i live at the P.O. (eudora welty)

It is the 4th of July and, man, is it STIFLING! The arrival of Stella-Rondo is about to push the emotional temperature well past the boiling point. Not only has she come home to announce that she has left her husband, Mr. Whitaker—whom she stole right out from under Sister—but she's also got a two year old daughter named Shirley T. Stella-Rondo explains that the girl is adopted, but Sister alone is suspicious about that because, after all, little Shirley seems to take after Papa-Daddy, their grandfather on their mother's side. In fact, if Papa Daddy cut his beard off, he would look very much like Shirley T. The suggested to Papa Daddy that Sister thinks he should cut off his beard only serves to turn up the heat as he gets angry at Sister and repeats his believe that she's been made at him ever since he helped to get her the job down at the post office. The appearance of a drunk Uncle Rondo later in the evening wearing kimono that Mr. Whitaker had given to Stella-Rondo initiates a heated argument between the two sisters over the jealousy Sister feels toward Stella-Rondo. Later Sister accuses her mother of playing favorites with Stella-Rondo before making more accusations about both the lineage and the mental capacity of Shirley T. By now, Sister is convinced that everyone has turned against her at the reappearance of Stella-Rondo except for Uncle Rondo. This situation is upset when Stella-Rondo insinuates that Sister was making fun of his wearing the kimono and the next morning kicks off with his setting off firecrackers in Sister's bedroom. Having made the decision to start living at the post office now that the entire house has been turned against her by Stella-Rondo, she goes around the house and started collecting items that she considers hers. Mama steps in to debate these considerations and Sister brings up the issue of Shirley's parentage again before refusing to sit down to a game of cards with everyone. Finally, Sister tells everyone if they ever want to see her, they can feel free to come down to the post office. Papa Daddy says he won't bother. Sister points out that if none of them ever come to the post office, there will be no way for Stella-Rondo to stay in touch with Mr. Whitaker. At the suggestion that Mr. Whitaker was the one to initiate the separation, Stella-Rondo runs from the room in tears. It has been five days now since Sister started living at the post office and in that time no one from the family has come to visit. Some of the other people in town sided with her family against her, but she claims to be happy and wouldn't even bother listening at this point even if Stella-Rondo finally came clean about what really happened between her and Mr. Whitaker.

homage to mistress bradstreet (John Berryman)

It was irrelevant to Berryman whether on not the historical figure represented in his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet ever actually experienced the discontent described in the poem. The Bradstreet it describes is a montage of frustrations, temptations, and feelings of guilt, very much like those of the poet who created hen. Though Berryman had written the poem's first stanza and several lines of the second in March, 1948, he set them aside for nearly five years until the tone of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953) gave him inspiration for the idiom he sought. Using notes he had made on the historical Bradstreet during this hiatus, Berryman wrote fifty new stanzas during the first two months of 1953, completing the entire poem on March 22 of that year. He was fond of saying that he finished the poem five years to the day after he had started it. Berryman had been fascinated with Bradstreet as early as 1937. He read her poems and letters to her husband, and examined as much historical detail as he could find about daily life in Puritan Massachusetts. Bradstreet's mediocrity as a poet, coupled with the severe moral code of the society in which she lived, predisposed him to see an affinity with his own circumstances. To a degree, then, she is a mask for Berryman, whose guilt for his marital infidelity was strong following the affair he described in his sonnets; however, Bradstreet is also "Lise" herself and at least one other lover. By 1953, these distinctions had become relatively unimportant: Bradstreet had become every person who doubts or feels guilt, frustration, and estrangement. Berryman considered both himself and Bradstreet to be poets in societies hostile to their art. He portrays her as rejecting both her husband and father and the Puritan deity that sanctions their view of life. Even so, Berryman knew that this was taking great liberties with the historical evidence available. The historical Bradstreet's letters portray her as a model of devotion to her husband; members of her family encouraged her writing of poetry and (without her knowledge) saw to the first publication of her poems.

a supermarket in California (allen ginsberg)

It was originally included as one of the "other poems" in Ginsberg's 1956 publication of "Howl and Other Poems" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books. Ginsberg also wrote one of his other famous poem, "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley" on the same day that he wrote "A Supermarket." Both were some of his first experiments with the long line form that would be epitomized by his poem, "Howl," and which would be Ginsberg's trademark style. "A Supermarket in California" is both an ode to Ginsberg's poetic hero and major influence, Walt Whitman, as well as an early experimentation with many of the themes that would dominate his work throughout his career. Whitman, who is considered to be America's first original poet, was an early influence on Ginsberg's writing. Whitman, a nineteenth century poet, experimented with meter and rhythm and eschewed the structured line and stanza which was the standard form for poetry of his time. Whitman became known as an eccentric, both for his style of writing as well as his lifestyle. Whitman himself was greatly influenced by the Romantic poets and much of his poetry deals with nature and the encroachment of industrialized society on all that is natural and, in Whitman's thought, good about America. Additionally, Whitman's poems often glorified a sexually expressive mode of being, using veiled references to promote both a spiritual and sexual freedom. Like "Howl," Whitman's early poetry, including his most famous work, Leaves of Grass was considered pornographic and obscene by nineteenth century standards. Whitman himself is believed to have been homosexual or bisexual, though those assertions are sometimes challenged by modern Whitman scholarship. Ginsberg sought to continue Whitman's legacy stylistically and thematically. Ginsberg's long line was inspired by Whitman's use of varying lengths of line and breath. Thematically, Ginsberg sought to continue Whitman's poetic assault upon industrialized society by writing about the consequences of corporate and industrial growth that Whitman could only foresee in his own work. "A Supermarket in California," with its depictions of domesticated life symbolized by food placed out of its natural context, deals with such themes. Additionally, "A Supermarket" also alludes to a hidden sexualized world, veiled in the language of commonplace things. Ginsberg also pays homage to another influence in "A Supermarket," Garcia Lorca. Lorca was an influential Spanish poet in the early 20th century. Lorca was killed at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War by the right wing Spanish Nationalists for his own leftist political views. Ginsberg, who remained sympathetic to leftist politics for his entire life, wrote a line about the Spanish Loyalists in his poem, "America." Lorca was an influence on Ginsberg mainly for his own homage to Whitman in his own poetry. Like Ginsberg, Lorca saw as an influence Whitman's disregard for poetic rules and structure and for his controversial subject matter that prized free thought and expression over cultural conformity.

a worn path (eudora welty)

On a cold December day, an elderly woman named Phoenix Jackson makes her way along a remote path, narrating the journey to herself as she goes. She traverses different kinds of terrain—hills, forests, swamps, and fields—that test the strength and endurance of her old body. She encounters animals and people along her way, too. Some of these are real; others are daydreams, memories, or tricks of the eye. One of these animals, a black dog, bowls her over, leaving her lying in a ditch for a while until a hunter, a young white man with a dog of his own chained by his side, stops to help her up. The hunter and Phoenix chat, mostly about her age and where she is going, which makes him seem nice enough, but he's really pretty much a jerk. He sets his own dog off to attack the black dog, and he points his gun directly at Phoenix, which he thinks is really funny. As the two part ways, the hunter advises Phoenix to go home, but she insists on continuing her journey. The path gives way to town, which is decorated for Christmas and filled with people bustling by Phoenix as they go about their business. Phoenix asks one of these people to tie her shoes, and then Phoenix climbs the steps to a big building and enters a doctor's office where she is greeted by a less-than-friendly attendant. Luckily, a nurse recognizes Phoenix right away as a grandmother who makes the long trip into the city frequently in order to get medicine for her grandson who is sick with lye poisoning. Even though she doesn't think it will help, the nurse gives Phoenix medicine for her grandson's throat, and the attendant gives Phoenix a nickel in the spirit of Christmas. Phoenix decides that she will buy her grandson a paper windmill to bring home to him along with the medicine.

beloved (toni morrison)

Sethe, a former slave, lives in Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver, and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. She's been ostracized from her community because, about 15 years before our story begins, she did the unthinkable: she killed one of her own children. There was a good reason for it, of course—if child-killing can ever be justified. See, Sethe was trying to keep her children from slave catchers. Time passes. Baby Suggs dies. That leaves Denver all alone (she's got two brothers, Howard and Bugler, but they ran off years ago). Oh: there is one creature still around the house. It's a ghost. That's right, folks—124 Bluestone is haunted. Furniture gets thrown around the house; people get moved. Sethe doesn't seem to mind too much though. She's got a good job as a cook, and she's got her daughter. Things are about as good (or as bad) as they're ever going to be. That's when Paul D Garner shows up. Paul D lived with Sethe at Sweet Home, the plantation where they both were enslaved. He remembers just about everything in Sethe's past—her husband Halle, their former masters, all the bad stuff that went on at the plantation. When Paul D comes around, Sethe feels like she can finally open up. As you might expect, Paul D and Sethe end up in bed together. It's not just a fling either; they become a couple. Denver's not that wild about the new man in their life. That's why, when a strange woman shows up on the doorstep of 124 Bluestone Road, Denver's excited. The woman says that her name is Beloved, which is totally freaky since "Beloved" is what Sethe had carved on the tombstone of her dead baby. That's not the only coincidence either. Beloved seems to know things about Sethe that no one should know. Sethe lets Beloved stay because she thinks Denver needs a friend; plus, Sethe can't shake the idea that this Beloved might actually be her little Beloved, back from the dead and grown. Denver wants Beloved to stay because she's always wanted an older sister. Paul D's the only one who's not so sure about Beloved, but it's not like he can do anything about it; he doesn't own the house. Once Beloved is part of the household, things start to change. Denver will do anything to please her. Beloved, however, only wants what Sethe has. You can guess what happens next right? Cue: "Bizarre Love Triangle." Beloved ends up seducing Paul D. We told you she was trouble. But that's not what splits up Paul D and Sethe. Stamp Paid, an old friend of the family, tells Paul D about how Sethe killed her daughter and went to jail. Paul D can't believe it. When he confronts Sethe, they get in a huge fight. Paul D leaves. Sethe couldn't care less—all she cares about is Beloved. Here's when things get even uglier. Now that Paul D is out of the picture, Beloved's got the girls all to herself. Sethe and Denver give her everything they have—but Beloved wants more. Pretty soon Denver realizes that Beloved only wants Sethe. Sethe, in turn, gets fired from her job and, thus, spends all of her time with Beloved. Pretty soon there's no food in the house. Denver suddenly realizes that they're all going to die unless she steps up and does something. She hasn't left 124 Bluestone in years—not since when she used to go to school—but she finally screws up the courage to leave the house and ask for help. Surprisingly, all of the townspeople who once scorned Sethe and Denver now pour out their help. They give Denver food and hook her up with a new job. She's able to buy food for her mother and Beloved, who is now pregnant (we told you things get uglier!). When the neighbors ask about Sethe, Denver gets evasive, but eventually the neighbors figure out that Beloved is "haunting" Sethe. So they decide to do something about it. The women of the town perform an exorcism. While that's going on, the white man who happens to be Denver's employer drives by the house to pick up Denver. Sethe snaps: she sees the slave catchers coming to take her children again and runs at the man with an ice pick. That's where things get blurry. No one can say exactly what happens, but Sethe is safe, the white man is safe—and Beloved is gone. Eventually Paul D returns to 124 and makes up with Sethe. Denver's happy in her new life out in the community. And Beloved? That's still a mystery.

the dream songs (john berryman)

The Dream Songs circles around the dreams, fears and hopes of the main character Henry. The poems are told from his perspective and through his lens mirror the change of life, the mood swings Henry has. Every poem has three stanzas of six lines each. The following summary focuses on three poems out of the anthology, serving as an example of the writing style and general content of Berryman's most famous work. Dream Song 1 deals with Henry's falling off luck. The first stanza tells of a sulking Henry that refuses to deal with the world. The second stanza starts out from the past, explaining about his good luck in the past, which suddenly stopped. Everything abruptly went wrong and the third-person narrator of the poem wonders how Henry is still alive after all that misfortune. None of the actual misfortune that befalls the character is mentioned, however the vocabulary used hints at dismaying forces. The last stanza has memories of the past and expectations of the future. It deals with lost childhood memories and the inevitability of death. All in all, the first dream song paints a gloomy picture of Henry's life. Dream Song 14 deals with Henry's boredom with life. The first and second stanza are connected through an enjambment. The first stanza focuses on the fact that boredom is something that one shouldn't have. Nature around Henry is full and nice, and in his childhood his mother warned him not to be bored. This warning goes on into the next stanza, where Henry realizes that he has no power to resist boredom (no inner resources). He starts counting things that bore him, including himself. The stanza ends with slight description of Henry's plights that also bore him, which leads into the third stanza. The counting of boring things continues, climaxing into the description of a dog that runs away and leaves the narrator behind. The poem paints another grim picture of life that even though it is quite good has nothing but boredom to offer. Dream Song 76 is a simulated conversation between Henry and death (Mr. Bones). The first stanza deals again with the narrator complaining about his life. Nothing ever happens to him, in sobriety and no bodily pleasures life has become shallow. The second stanza deals with thoughts of suicide. The narrator remembers his father's death, disapproving that his father left him. Then suicide by gun next to the sea, seems to be the obvious solution. Linking the third to the first stanza through the same metaphor (handkerchief for life), the narrator offers himself to death. He invites death to come and sit with him, explaining that nothing was in store for him so he rather left earth. This penultimate poem of the first collection deals with the main characters thoughts (or dreams) of death.

the glass menagerie (tennessee williams)

The action of The Glass Menagerie takes place in the Wingfield family's apartment in St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory - Tom Wingfield is the play's narrator, and usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues. The narrator addresses us from the undated and eternal present, although at the play's first production (1944-5), Tom's constant indirect references to the violence of the Second World War would have been powerfully current. The action of the play centers on Tom, his mother Amanda, and his sister Laura. In 1937 they live together in a small apartment in St. Louis. Their father abandoned them years earlier, and Tom is now the family's breadwinner. He works at the Continental Shoemakers warehouse during the day, but he disappears nightly "to the movies." Amanda is a loving mother, but her meddling and nagging are hard to live with for Tom, who is a grown man and who earns the wages that support the entire family. Laura is a frightened and terribly shy girl, with unbelievably weak nerves. She is also slightly lame in one leg, and she seldom leaves the apartment of her own volition. She busies herself caring for her "glass menagerie," a collection of delicate little glass animals. Amanda dreams constantly of the long-ago days when she was a young Southern belle and the darling of her small town's social scene. She enrolled Laura in classes at Rubicam's Business College, hoping that a career in business would make Laura self-sufficient. She discovers that Laura stopped attending class a long time ago, because the speed tests on the typewriter terrified her. After the fiasco at Rubicam's Amanda gives up on a business career for Laura and puts all her hopes into finding a husband for her. Amanda's relationship with Tom is difficult. Tom longs to be free - like his father - to abandon Amanda and Laura and set off into the world. He has stayed because of his responsibility for them, but his mother's nagging and his frail sister's idiosyncrasies make the apartment a depressing and oppressive place. Tom also hates his job. His only escape comes from his frequent visits to the movies, but his nightly disappearances anger and baffle Amanda. He fights with Amanda all the time, and the situation at home grows more unbearable. Amanda, sensing that Tom wants to leave, tries to make a deal with him. If Tom and Amanda can find a husband for Laura, a man who can take care of her, then Tom will be free of his responsibility to them. Amanda asks Tom to bring home gentlemen callers to meet Laura. Tom brings home Jim O'Connor, a fellow employee at the warehouse. He is an outgoing and enthusiastic man on whom Laura had a terrible crush in high school. Jim chats with Laura, growing increasingly flirtatious, until he finally kisses her. Then he admits that he has a fiancé and cannot call again. For fragile Laura, the news is devastating. Amanda is furious, and after Jim leaves she accuses Tom of playing a cruel joke on them. Amanda and Tom have one final fight, and not long afterward Tom leaves for good. In his closing monologue, he admits that he cannot escape the memory of his sister. Though he abandoned her years ago, Laura still haunts him.

Separating (john updike)

The affluent Maples are getting a divorce, but they cannot decide on the right time to tell their four children. They finally decide to break the news after their eldest, Judith, 19, returns from studying abroad in England. Richard Maple hopes to make an announcement at the dinner table, while Joan prefers to tell the children individually. After bickering, they finally agree that Joan's way is better. As one of his final tasks while he still lives in the house, Richard replaces a lock on the porch door. Unaware that anything is wrong, his children happily mill around the house as usual. Judith regales him with stories of her time in England. He sadly reflects that Judith is the only child that he and Joan "endured together" (37) long enough to raise into adulthood. That night, the Maples serve a dinner of lobster and champagne to welcome Judith back from her travels. Richard begins to cry at the table, something his children attempt to ignore. Eventually John, the second-youngest at 15, asks his mother why Richard is crying. Joan tells the boy the truth, and talk of the separation ripples through the dinner table. It becomes clear that Margaret, 13, the youngest child, somehow figured out that her parents were separating and her fears are now named. John demands to know why Richard and Joan failed to tell their children that they were having problems getting along. Richard tries to explain that they do get along but they don't love each other, but trails off. John is drunk from the champagne, and begins playing with matches, holding them close to his mother's face. He stuffs a cigarette into his mouth ands shows it to Margaret. Judith warns him to act mature. After dinner, Richard and John go on a walk, over which John confides that he is frustrated with his new school as well as the separation. Richard assures John that they will transfer him to a new school, as "life's too short to be miserable" (39). Later, Joan reprimands Richard for crying at the table, because it made Joan look like the separation was all her idea. Both parties agree, though, that they are lucky the children didn't think to ask whether the separation was caused by "a third person." They realize that they still need to inform their second-oldest child, Dickie, 17, who has been away at a rock concert. Richard will confront him alone, as the boy is most like him. After sleeping badly, Richard goes to the train station to pick Dickie up after the concert. He dreads telling Dickie about the separation, and happily procrastinates by driving Dickie's friends home. When he finally reveals the news, Dickie is stunned but takes it stoically. Richard confides that he hates being the bearer of such bad news. On their way home, Richard acknowledges a home on their block that contains a woman he hopes to marry. When they get home, Dickie goes to his room without another word. Joan and Richard go up to say good night to Dickie. They offer to call him in sick to work, but he declines. As Richard goes to kiss his son good night, Dickie turns and kisses him on the lips as "passionate as a woman" (41). With agony, he asks "Why?" Richard realizes that after living with the decision for such a long time, he has forgotten why he is separating from his wife.

A & P (John Updike)

The narrator is checking groceries when he realizes that three barefoot girls in bathing suits have walked into the store. The leader of the trio, who has her bathing suit straps down, catches his eye. She walks like a queen through the store, never turning to look at the narrator or his coworker, Stokesie. Queenie (as the narrator thinks of her) leads the other two around the store. The narrator has fun watching the shock of the other customers, who aren't used to seeing bathing suits at the A&P. Queenie is buying a jar of "Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream" (11). She gets in the narrator's checkout lane and prepares to pay him with a dollar bill that she takes from her bathing suit top. (Bow chicka wow wow.) Then Lengel, the manager of the A&P, comes in from outside, sees the girls, and tell them off for wearing nothing but skimpy swimsuits in the store. They argue with him, but he tells them they better dress right next time or not come again. Lengel tells the narrator, whose name is Sammy, to ring the girls up. Sammy does what he's told, but then he tells Lengel he's quitting. The girls probably hear him, but they don't turn around. Lengel warns Sammy that quitting will ruin his life, but Sammy turns in his apron and bow tie and saunters out into the parking lot. If he was hoping to find the girls, he's out of luck - they're long gone. Sammy watches Lengel checking groceries in Sammy's lane. Lengel looks hard and stiff, and Sammy "[feels] how hard the world [is] going to be to [him] hereafter"

One art (elizabeth bishop)

The poem begins rather boldly with the curious claim that "the art of losing isn't hard to master" (1.1). The speaker suggests that some things are basically made to be lost, and that losing them therefore isn't a big deal. She suggests that we get used to loss by practicing with little things, like house keys or a little bit of wasted time here and there; the idea is that if you're comfortable with the insignificant losses, you'll be ready to cope when the big ones come along. The losses mentioned in the poem grow more and more significant. First it's the things we try to remember, like names and places, then more specific items, such as a mother's watch or homes one has loved in the past. As these things begin to pile up, we wonder how much the speaker has actually mastered this so-called "art of losing." Is she really as glib (that is to say, smart-alecky) as she sounds, or does she still have deep feelings about all of these things? We're not so sure. However, the last stanza reveals a whole lot to us. We discover that the loss that really bothers her is that of a beloved person (friend, family, or lover, we don't know). She attempts rather feebly to claim that even this loss isn't a "disaster," though it appears to be one; at this point, though, we see that she really is still sad about the loss, and hasn't truly gotten over it.

Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath

The poem is spoken by Lady Lazarus, a speaker who shares a lot of similarities with the poet herself. Lady Lazarus begins by telling us that she has done "it" again. What is this "it"? We don't know at first. She compares herself to a Holocaust victim, and tell us that's she's only thirty years old, and that she has nine lives, like a cat. We soon figure out that "it" is dying; but, like the cat, she keeps returning to life. She tells us about the first two times that she almost died, and tells us that dying "is an art." She says that dying is a theatrical event, and imagines that people come and see her do it. In fact, it starts to seem as if she's performing a third death in front of a crowd at a circus or carnival. She compares herself again to Holocaust victims, and imagines that she's been burned to death in a concentration camp crematorium. At the end of the poem, she resurrects (or returns to life from death) once again, and she "eat[s] men like air."

Skunk Hour - Robert Lowell

The poem starts with the speaker reflecting on a coastal town in Maine. His observations track an elderly, wealthy woman who seems to have a ton of property, but who is quite alone in her older years. Then he starts to describe the things that have begun to go wrong with the place - the millionaire who lived there for the summer is gone, the town decorator seems depressed and poor, and now the whole place is looking pretty sad for fall. Then the speaker shifts the focus to himself. He remembers a drive he took through the town one night and what he saw as well as how he felt. It all seems pretty gloomy, and he admits to being depressed and feeling kind of crazy. What he observes after he lets us in on his mental state seems to be affected by how he's feeling, and as the poem progresses it gets pretty bleak.

daddy (sylvia plath)

The speaker creates a figurative image of her father, using many different metaphors to describe her relationship with him. He's like a black shoe that she's had to live in; like a statue that stretches across the United States; like God; like a Nazi; like a Swastika; and, finally, like a vampire. The speaker, faced with her father as a giant and evil Nazi, takes the part of a Jew and a victim. Yet, with this poem, the speaker gets her revenge, claiming that she's killed both her father and the man she made as a model of her father - her husband. This poem shows her struggle to declare that, no matter how terrible her father was and how much he remains in her mind, she is now through with him.

diving into the wreck - Adrienne Rich

The title, "Diving into the Wreck," lays out the basic idea here. To put it simply, the speaker is a diver, looking for the wreck of a ship beneath the ocean. She puts on scuba gear, and describes the process of descending to the wreck. First we hear about the trip down the ladder into the water, and then the big, scary, amazing feeling of entering the ocean. The sea and its life are all around, and then the speaker arrives at the wreck. The speaker first flashes a light on the wreck, and then begins to explore, searching through the body of a ship. We go on a tour of the space, seeing the abandoned, waterlogged objects that fill the wreck. It's important to notice that the speaker has many more mysterious things to say about who she (or he?) is, and what this experience means. For one thing, she addresses books and words, and how they relate to the experience of the dive. This forces us to think about what it means to be reading a poem. All the same, the images of the undersea dive are laid out pretty clearly for us.

We Real Cool, Gwendolyn Brooks

This poem is only eight lines long, so you probably don't need a summary. What isn't included in the text of the poem, however, is a bit of background framing the lines we read. The poem lists off the thoughts of some young guys playing pool at a pool house called "The Golden Shovel," that seems pretty straightforward. But it's actually more complicated than that. In fact, the lines we read are what an outside observer thinks these boys might be feeling. So this observer, our speaker, thinks the boys might have dropped out of school, be drinking gin, staying out late at night, enjoying jazz, and will have short lives. How do we know all of this background information? From Gwendolyn Brooks, of course

the quaker graveyard in nantucket (robert lowell)

We begin our journey aboard a warship facing violent waves in the night. The sailors discover a body clinging to their net, so they weigh it down and throw it back in the sea. As he watches the drowned sailor sink, the speaker is reminded of Ahab, captain of the Pequod in Moby Dick, whose body would also be somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Later, guns are fired to commemorate the sailor's death, and the deaths of others lost at sea. The speaker wanders the Quaker graveyard in Nantucket, contemplating the sailor's fate and the fate of the Quaker sailors who died whaling. He imagines the Pequod trying to return home and failing, just as the sailors did. Meanwhile, the sea birds seem to be mourning all these deaths, and he hears both their cries and the cries of the Quaker sailors, whom he imagines still thought God was on their side even as they drowned. Even though the whaling industry may be over, he imagines that humans still believe that God is on their side, even as they defy him and die aboard great warships. Briefly, he visits a religious shrine in England, where everything is peaceful but where it is impossible to see or understand what God is thinking. When he returns, the graveyard is dark and spooky and the sea is facing another violent storm. He imagines the whale, whom Ahab stabbed, spilling its guts into the sea, and that those guts are like man's corruption, slowly destroying everything. But he also imagines God creating man from the sea slime, starting life the same place that the sailors lost their lives. In the end, he supposes it is God's will who lives or dies, and that His will is beyond human understanding.

kitchenette building (Gwendolyn Brooks)

We can't be sure of an exact sequence of events in this poem. Think of it as more of a domestic scene that could represent any day and any time. Brooks colors the scene with the vivid smells of cooking—so maybe it takes place around breakfast, lunch, or dinner—and closes the poem with a race to the bathtub—so maybe it takes place in the morning, or just before bed. In any case, our speaker wonders about the power of a dream to transcend all of this humdrum, daily (and kind of unpleasant) reality. She doesn't wonder long, though. Once the bathroom's free, the speaker drops this line of thought and rushes off to be the fifth person to enjoy the communal, lukewarm bathwater

for the union dead (robert lowell)

We get to do some time-traveling in this poem. Lowell jumps around frequently and without warning. We begin in South Boston at the aquarium that's been closed and boarded up for what seems like a long time. Then we move back in time with the speaker to when he used to visit the aquarium and gawk at the fish. When he snaps out of that daydream, he recalls a more recent past ("last March" specifically) when he witnessed the construction of what would become an underground parking garage. Included in that same scene is the Civil War memorial for Colonel Shaw (we'll get to him in detail later), and his all-black infantry. Then Lowell sneakily segues into a little info about the Civil War, and later, the dedication at the memorial. He stays more or less on the track for a handful of stanzas: he talks about how New England continues to remember the Civil War in graveyards and tattered flags, but how that memory is diminishing. Then he sort of pops back into the present, with a somewhat critical eye. He talks about World War II and how there are no commemorative statues for that war. To wrap up, he winds the image of Colonel Shaw and the old aquarium's fish together, and sort of superimposes them over slow-moving traffic in present-day Boston.

Jack Kerouac

an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian descent. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose.

James Baldwin

an American novelist and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America.

Flannery O'Connor

an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

Elizabeth Bishop

an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

elegy for jane (theodore roethke)

an elegy (a poem reflecting on someone's death). In short, the poem's title and subtitle let us know that things ended badly for Jane and that her demise was due, in no small part, to her inability to stay on a horse. The speaker begins by remembering Jane—connecting her physical characteristics and personality traits to a variety of natural imagery. He goes right on remembering throughout the poem's first three stanzas. In the poem's fourth and final stanza, the speaker wishes he could bring Jane back, to wake her from the eternal sleep of death. Spoiler Alert: He can't. The poem ends with the speaker's declaration of platonic love for his fallen student and we are left to consider the impact of one human life on another outside the context of romantic or familial love.

"I Knew A Woman" Theodore Roethke

appeared in a section of Words for the Wind entitled "Love Poems." This poem was apparently written about the time of Theodore Roethke's marriage to Beatrice O'Connell (a former student of his), and its speaker is a man very much in love and awed by the beauty of the woman he admires so profoundly. The poem concentrates on the erotic and physical but deals also with larger philosophical issues. Its tone is a subtle mix of the comic and the serious. The poem's metrical pattern is consistently iambic pentameter, but its stanza form is somewhat unusual. Each of the four stanzas consists of seven lines, and the typical rhyme scheme is ababccc. Actually the first four lines contain no rhyme at all, but later lines (except for line 21) follow this scheme precisely. This movement from complete lack of rhyme to a very regular rhyme scheme parallels the growing harmony between the two lovers. Since the poem's first line uses a past-tense verb and refers to bones, some readers have assumed that the central female character is now dead. Such a conclusion is questionable. In this case the verb "knew" surely alludes (in the biblical sense) to specific episodes of sexual intimacy and not necessarily to a relationship that has ended completely.

Howl- Allen Ginsberg

appears to be a sprawling, disorganized poem. But it's not. It 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. 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 Ginsberg's point. According to the speaker, they are drug users, drop outs, world travelers, bums, musicians, political dissidents, and, yes, poets. 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? Ginsberg 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 Ginsberg, 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. The third section is addressed to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg'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.

In the waiting room (elizabeth bishop)

begins with the speaker, Elizabeth, sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office on a dark winter afternoon in Massachusetts. While she waits for her aunt, who is seeing the dentist, Elizabeth looks around and sees that the room is filled with adults. To keep herself occupied, she reads a copy of National Geographic magazine. She looks at pictures of volcanoes, famous explorers, and people very different from herself (including naked black women), and is scared by what she reads and sees. Suddenly, she hears a cry of pain from her aunt in the dentist's office, and says that she realizes that "it was me" - that the cry was coming from her aunt, but also from herself. She imagines that she and her aunt are the same person, and that they are falling. In an attempt to calm down, Elizabeth says to herself that she is just about to turn seven years old. She compares herself to the adults in the waiting room, and wonders if she is one of "them." She seems to realize that she is, and looking around, says that "nothing / stranger could ever happen." Elizabeth then questions her basic humanity, and asks about the similarities between herself and others. What are the similarities between herself and her aunt? Between herself and the naked women in the magazine? How did she get where she is? What kind of connections does she have with the rest of the world? Elizabeth is overwhelmed. The waiting room is bright and hot, and she feels like she's sliding beneath a black wave. Finally, she snaps out of it. She remembers that World War I is still going on, that she's still in Massachusetts, and that it's still a cold and slushy night in February, 1918.

the bell jar (sylvia plath)

opens in the summer of 1953. Esther Greenwood is a bright nineteen-year-old working as an editorial intern at a popular women's magazine in New York City. Despite her academic promise and ambition, Esther feels isolated from society and discouraged about her future. These early symptoms of depression are aggravated by the pressure she feels to conform to social expectations of what a young woman should be - a virgin until marriage, and after marriage, a wife and a mother. Chided by her boss for not having a clear career focus, Esther goes on a series of dates, the last of which ends with her date attempting to assault her. Esther escapes, and returns home the next morning to her mother's house in the suburbs outside Boston. As the events of the summer unfold, Esther frequently flashes back to her problematic relationship with her on-and-off boyfriend Buddy Willard, a medical student. Through these flashbacks, we learn that while Esther idolized Buddy at first, she became disillusioned when he revealed that he had a sexual affair. Later, Esther visited Buddy while he was confined to a sanitarium for tuberculosis. After rejecting his proposal of marriage, Esther followed Buddy to the ski slopes, where she had an accident and broke her leg. Back with her mother, Esther finds out that she did not get accepted into a summer creative writing program, after which she quickly spirals down into a suicidal depression. Esther consults Dr. Gordon, but he botches her electroshock therapy, after which Esther's behavior grows increasingly erratic. Finally, Esther decides to end her life. She hides away in a crawlspace under her home and swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. Fortunately, she is rescued a few days later. After staying at a couple of hospitals, Esther is taken to a private psychiatric institution, where she meets Dr. Nolan, a compassionate female doctor. While there, Esther undergoes a series of successful electroshock and insulin therapy sessions. At the institution, she encounters Joan, a high school friend who also dated Buddy. However, Esther's life is again threatened when, after a sexual encounter with a professor she meets in Cambridge during a visit out of the institution, she hemorrhages. Joan, who is now living in Cambridge, helps Esther to the emergency room, and Esther returns to the institution the next day. Joan also returns to stay at the institution, and commits suicide near the institution's grounds soon after. Esther's condition, on the other hand, improves. The novel ends in the winter of 1954 as Esther enters her exit interview, which will determine if she's ready to leave the institution.

looking for mister green (saul Bellow)

recounts the efforts of George Grebe to deliver relief checks to handicapped residents of the South Side of Chicago. Grebe, thirty-five and an instructor of classical languages, has been reduced by the hard times of the Depression to taking a series of trivial, part-time jobs until an old schoolmate secures for him a position at the relief office. Grebe's desire to do well at his new job is hampered by its peculiar difficulty: "He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be." Grebe is particularly frustrated by his inability to find Mr. Tulliver Green but persists in his search long after quitting time. As the story develops, Grebe's quest to find Mr. Green becomes a symbolic quest to find his own identity. Grebe systematically questions a local grocer, the janitor, and several tenants of Mr. Green's building. Their responses are hostile and evasive. Grebe is viewed "as an emissary from hostile appearances" because he is not yet a familiar face in the territory and because he is white. Although Grebe himself has known hardship, he is out of place in this rundown district of the city, where he is shocked by the distrust of the people and the blighted physical setting.