CLT 1-5, cult lit #6, cult lit #7, Cult Lit #8, cult #9, cult lit #10
John Updike
A "new-realist" celebrated for the precision of his style and the painterly way he recreates his fictional worlds. His stories convey his vision of middle America and of the middle class holding onto its style of life while at the same time trying to adjust its mind to new ideas and new social realities. His best works include Rabbit Run and Couples.
"Casey Jones"
A ballad from the early 20th century about a railroad engineer who dies valiantly in a train wreck.
Walden
A book by Henry David Thoreau describing his two years of life alone at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He recounts his daily life in the woods, and celebrates nature and the individual's ability to live independently of society. A famous line from the book is Thoreau's statement that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Spoon River Anthology
A collection of interrelated poems by Edgar Lee Masters. Masters recreates the fictional town of Spoon River and writes in verse the epitaphs of the deceased. Master's villagers speak one after the other from their graves--their understanding of their lies illuminated by death. Masters pictured many vivid characters In the anthology and satirizes the relations and hypocrisy of a small town.
Poor Richard's Almanack
A collection of periodicals (each one was called Poor Richard or Poor Richard Improved) by Benjamin Franklin, issued from 1732 to 1757. They contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom, such as "Early to bed and early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
Leaves of Grass
A collection of poems by Watt Whitman, written mainly in free verse. Published with revisions every few years in the late 19th century, it conditions such well known poems as "I Hear America Singing", "Song of Myself", and, "Oh Captain, My Captain".
Flannery O'Connor
A devout Catholic in the rural Protestant South. Her intense devotion is present in the situations of her characters, who are frequently grotesque, often eccentric, eve dull and decent, or even genuinely satanic, Her fiction is charged with a violence both comical and terrifying. Her works include "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People."
Mourning Becomes Electra
A drama by Eugene O'Neill. The Mannon family is driven to their self-destructive behavior by inner needs, forbidden love, and compulsions they can neither understand nor control.
"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head"
A line from "Barbara Frietchie," a poem from the Civil War years by the poet John Greenleef Whitler, which describes a fictional incident in the war. Barbara Frietchie, aged over ninety, displays a Union flag, when confederate traps, march through her town. The soldiers shoot the flag off its staff, but Barbara Frietchie catches it leans out the window, and addresses the soldiers: " Shoot, if you must, this old gray head/ But spare your country's flag! she said."
Naturalism
A literary movement that shares with Realism its attention to the speech and behavior of the present, but considers people's behavior to be determined by social and economic forces beyond human control. Some of the best-known Naturalists are Frank Norris and Stephen Crane.
Transcendentalism
A movement in American literature and though in the nineteenth century. It called on people to view the objects in the world as small versions of the whole universe and trust their individual intuitions. The two most noted American transcendentalist were Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote "Self-Reliance," and Henry David Thoreau
Washington Irving
A nineteenth-century American author. His works include "the legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip van winkie."
The Color Purple
A novel (1982) by Alice Walker, Celie suffers the poverty, racism, sexual abuse, and ignorance of a sharecropper family. Through strength of character she endures it all rises in the end to a serene accommodation to her existence and restoration to those she loves.
The Sun Also Rises
A novel by Ernest Hemingway about a group of young Americans living in Europe in the 1920s It captures the disillusionment and cynicism of the Lost Generation
A Farewell to Arms
A novel by Ernest Hemingway set in World War I An American soldier and an English nurse fall in love He deserts to join her, and she dies giving birth to their child. Robert Jordan and Maria emerge as two of the most famous American literary characters.
The Great Gatsby
A novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, recounted the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, a millionaire who makes elaborate schemes to win back his former mistress. The novel shows the rise and fall of one man's American Dream
Uncle Tom's Cabin
A novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe; it paints a grim picture of life under slavery. The title character is pious, passive slave, who is eventually beaten to death by the overseer Simon Legree. Published shortly before the Civil War, "Uncle Tom's Cabin won support for the antislavery cause. Although Stowe presents Uncle Tom as a virtuous man, the expression "Uncle Tom" is often used today as a term of reproach for a subservient black person who tolerates discrimination.
Moby Dick
A novel by Herman Melville. Its central character, Captain Ahab, engages in a mad, obsessive quest for Moby Dick, a great white whale. The novel opens with the famous sentence "Call me Ishmael."
The Last of the Mohicans
A novel by James Fenimore Cooper; part of the Leatherstocking Tales. The main character is Natty Bumppo.
Little Women
A novel by Louisa May Alcott, about four sisters growing up in New England in the 19th century
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A novel by Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn, a boy running away from his father, and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, take to the Mississippi River on a raft. Eventually Jim is captured, and Huck helps him escape. The lessons Huck learns about life are a prevailing theme of the book.
The Scarlet Letter
A novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne about Hester Prynne, a woman in the 17th century New England who is convicted of adultery. At the beginning of the story, she is forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her dress as a sign of her guilt. Hester will not reveal the identify of her partner in adultery. Her husband comes to realize who us her lover is and takes revenge on him. Eventually, her dying lover publicly admits his part in the adultery.
Invisible Man
A novel by Ralph Ellison, set in the United States in the 1930s; it depicts a black man's struggle for identity. In the end, the unnamed narrator runs for his life and falls into a cellar. He decides to remain underground and write a novel about the absurdities of his life.
Babbit
A novel by Sinclair Lewis. The title character, an American real estate agent in a small city, is portrayed as crass, loud, over optimistic boor who thinks only about money speaks in cliches such as "You've gotta have pep, by golly!" By extension, a "Babbit" is narrow, materialistic businessman.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
A novel by Zora Neal Hurston. The novel is the story of the search by a young black woman for self knowledge and self fulfillment. An excellent novel of the black experience that is sincere and authentic.
Roots
A novel by the twentieth-century American author Alex Haley, later made into a popular television drama. It traces a black American man's heritage to Africa, where his ancestors had been captured and sold as slaves.
Gone with the Wind
A novel from the 1930's by Margaret Mitchell. Set in Georgia in the period of the Civil War, it tells of three marriages of the central characters, Scarlett O'Hara, and of the devastation caused by the war. The film version of Gone with the Wind, also from the 1930s, is one the most successful films ever made.
Tobacco Road
A novel from the 1930s by Erskine Caldwell, about a family of sharecroppers from Georgia and their many tragedies. Tobacco Road was made into a play that ran for several years on Broadway. A "Tobacco Road" is a poor shantytown, usually in the rural South, and usually populated by whites.
The Catcher in the Rye
A novel from the 1950's by J.D. Salinger. It relates the experiences of Holden Caulfield, a sensitive by rebellious youth who runs away from his boarding school
A Streetcar Named Desire
A play by Tennessee Williams about the decline and tragic end of Blanche DuBois, a southern belle who, as she puts it, has "always depended on the kindness of strangers" Set in New Orleans, Dubois is an alcoholic nymphomaniac with a lurid past. She disturbs the balanced relationship between Stanley and Stella.
Our Town
A play by Thornton Wilder, dealing with everyday life in a small town in New England.
Death of a Salesman
A play from the 1940s by Arthur Miller. In the play, Willie Loman, a salesman who finds himself regarded as useless in the occupation because of his age, kills himself. A speech made by friend of Willy's after his suicide os well known, and it ends with the lines: "Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman has dot dream, boy. It comes with the territory."
The Raven
A poem by Edgar Allan Poe. A man mourning for his lost lover is visited by a raven that tells him he will see her "nevermore." The poem begins with these famous lines: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"Casey at the Bat"
A poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, from the late 19th-century about Casey, an arrogant, overconfident baseball player who brings his team down to defeat by refusing to swing the first two balls pitched to him, and then missing on the third. The poem's final line is, "There is no joy in Mudville- The mighty Casey has struck out."
"The Village Blacksmith"
A poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about a village blacksmith in New England. It begins: Under the spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands.
Catch 22
A war novel from the 1960s by Joseph Heller. In the novel Catch 22 is a provision in army regulations; it situates that a soldiers request to be relieved from active duty can be accepted only if he is mentally unfit to fight. Any soldier, however, who has the sense to ask ti be spared the horrors of war is obviously mentally sounds, ad therefore must stay to fit. Figuratively, a "catch-22" is any absurd arrangement that puts a person in a double bind: for example, a person can't get a job without experience, but cant get experience without a job.
The New Yorker
A weekly magazine known for nonfiction and short stories, and for its cartoons. Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber are notable author whose work appeared regularly in the magazine
"Civil Disobedience"
An essay by Henry David Thoreau. It contains his famous statement "That government is best which governs least," and asserts that people's obligations to their own conscience take precedence over their obligations to their government. Thoreau also argues that if in following their conscience, people find it necessary to break the laws of the state, they should be prepared to pay penalties, including imprisonment. Thoreau himself went to jail for refusing to pay a tax to support the Mexican War.
"Self-Reliance"
An essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that advices the reader "Trust thyself" and argues that "whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." It is the source of several well-known epigrams, such as " To be great is to be misunderstood" and " A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Zora Neal Hurston
An important Harlem Renaissance writer whose masterpiece was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her writing was very regional and closely followed the speech patterns of central Florida.
Herman Melville
Nineteenth-century author known for Moby Dick. In his writing. Melville drew on several adventurous years spent at sea.
Horatio Alger, Jr.
Nineteenth-century author known for his many books in which poor boys become rich through their earnest attitudes and hard work. A true story of spectacular worldly success achieved by someone who started near the bottom is often called a "Horatio Alger story."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nineteenth-century author known for his novel and short stories that explore themes of sin and guilt. His works include The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
Emily Dickinson
Nineteenth-century poet famous for her short, untitled, evocative poems. Some of her famous poems begin, "There is no frigate like a book," "Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me," "I never saw a moor," and "I'm nobody, who are you?" Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems, only seven of which (and these over her protest) were published in her lifetime.
Walt Whitman
Nineteenth-century poet; His principal work is Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems that celebrates nature, democracy, and individualism. The earthiness of Whitman's poetry shocked many readers of the time. Walt Whitman's rugged appearance is memorable, especially in his old age, when he wore a flowing white beard.
Scarlett O'Hara
The heroine of the book "Gone with the Wind." Scarlett is a shrewd, manipulative southern belle who survives two husbands and finally is matched with by a third Rhett Butler.
Mark Twain
The nom de plume of Samuel L Clemens, an author, and humorist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He is famous for his stories with settings along the Mississippi River, his books include The adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and The Prince and the Pauper. Ernest Hemingway, America's most noted author, said that all American literature can be traced back to Mark Twain.
O. Henry
The pen name for William Sydney Porter. Twentieth century author known for "The Gift of the Magi" and other short stories. He specialized in surprise ending and tales full of irony
Gertrude Stein
Twentieth-century author who lived most of her life in France. She wrote her life story as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Toklas was her companion), and she is said to Europe after World War I. Her work also include poems and the story collection Three Lives; and the most famous line from her poetry is "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Eudora Welty
Twentieth-century author who was a Southern regional realist. Her pictures of twentieth-century life in rural and small town Mississippi accurately reflect both its surfaces and its deeper psychological currents. Her most famous stories are "Why I Live at the P.O." and "The Petrified Man."
William Faulkner
Twentieth-century author whose works, set mostly in the South include The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. A major writer of his time, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949. All of his stories are set in the fictional "Yoknapatawpha Country" is Mississippi.
Gloria Steinem
Twentieth-century author, journalist, and advocate of women's rights; one of the leaders of the women's liberation movement. Steinem was a founder of Ms. magazine.
Carl Sandburg
Twentieth-century author. His widely varied works include poems about the countryside and industrial heartland of United States, especially Chicago, using the rhythms of their speech, the structure of the way they said things.
Richard Wright
Twentieth-century writer best known for his novels dealing with the black experience in the United States. Two of his best known works are Black Boy and Native Son. Wright was the first African American writer to win a broad response from the reading public.
Thronton Wilder
Twentieth-century writer best known for his play Our Town.
Tennessee Williams
Twentieth-century writer famous for his plays, which portray violent passions in ordinary people; these plays include A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie. From World War 2 until his accidental death in 1983, Williams shared with Arthur Miller the distinction of being the foremost American dramatist.
H.L. Mencken
Twentieth-century writer knows for his works of satire, mainly essays. Mencken mocked American society for its Puritanism, its anti-intellectualism, and its emphasis on conformity
Maya Angelou
Twentieth-century writer whose best-known work is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an autobiographical account of growing up as a black girl in the rural South.
Louisa May Alcott
nineteenth-century author known for Little Women and Little Men, along with other books for and about children.
"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass"
The autobiography of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Published in 1845 when Douglas was only 27, the book tells the story from childhood until his escape to freedom at the age of 20.
Captain Ahab
The captain of the ship the Pequod in Moby Dick by hermanMelville. Ahab is obsessed with capturing the great white whale, Moby Dick.
Natty Bumppo
The central character in The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. Natty, a settler, is taught by the native Americans and adopts their way of life
Simon Legree
The cruel overseer of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Though the book describes conditions in the slave-holding states of the South, Legree, the most vicious character in it, is from New England.
"The land was our before we were the land's..."
The first line of the poem "The Gift Outright" by Robert Frost
The Beat Poets
A group flourishing in the 1950's that emphasized mysticism and rejection of social taboos. Within the "beat" counterculture, the poet is a central figure, a guru of sorts, whose style of living, as much as his poetry, challenges social values and offers moral and spiritual instruction. Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were leaders in the Beat movement.
Lost generation
A group of writers and artists who lived and wandered in Europe during and after World War I. They were called "lost" because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into settled life. Gertrude Stein is usually credited with popularizing the expression. The characters in the book The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, are often mentioned as examples of the Lost Generation.
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
A horror story by Edgar Allan Poe At the end of the story, two of the family fall dead, and the ancestral mansion of the Ushers splits in two and sinks into a lake
"Good Country People"
A short story by Flannery O'Connor. Satan appears in the form of a suave young bible salesman who comes to the well-to-do farm of the divorced Mrs. Hopewell and her crippled Ph.D. daughter, Hulga.
"The Gift of the Magi"
A short story by O. Henry. An extremely poor young couple is determined to Christmas gifts to each other. He sells his watch to buy a set of combs for her long hair, and she cuts off her hair and sells it to buy him a wristwatch.
"Rip Van Winkle"
A story by Washington Irving. The title character goes to sleep after a game of bowling and much drinking in the mountains with a band of dwarfs. He awakes twenty years later and old man. Back home, Rip finds that all has changed; his wife is dead, his daughter is married, and the American Revolution has taken place.
poet laureate
America's national poet. The position was created in 1985, and Robert Penn Warren was approved in 1986. Robert Pinsky is the poet laureate in 2000
Deism
An 18th-century Enlightenment religion emphasizing reason, not miracles: partly a reaction against Calvinism and religious superstition.
Enlightenment
An 18th-century movement that focused on the ideals of good sense benevolence, and a belief in liberty, justice, and equality as the natural rights of man
Black Boy
An autobiographical ovel by Richard Wright, portraying racial conflicts in the rural south.
Puritanism
Emerged in England around the middle 1500s. Its aim was to "purify" the Church of England. The term is frequently used to refer to strictly; even rigidly moral attitude.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Twentieth-century author known for his short stories and for his novels including: The Great Gatsby and This side of Paradise. He led a tempestuous life with his wife, Zelda, and was one of several talented Americans, including Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Paris in the 1920s.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck's novel is made up of three stories: a history of the Salinas Valley, the chronicle of two families in the valley, and a re-creation of the Cain and Abel story. In each story the theme is the same: good and evil are always in conflict.
Realism
Movement in literature in the second half of the nineteenth century that sought to record accurately the speech and behavior of ordinary people and to depict life honestly, without Crane. Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Henry James.
Modernism
Literary movement from the beginning of the twentieth-century to around 1950. In general, Modernism rejects tradition and has a hostile attitude toward the immediate past. There was much experimentation in literature as authors tried to express the irrational working of the unconscious mind. Leading authors in the movement included T.S.Eliot, Gerstrude Stein, and Ezra Pound.
Post-modernism
Media-influenced literary movement of the late 20th century characterized by open-endedness and collage. Post-modernism questions the foundations of cultural and artistic forms through irony and the opposites. Popular culture and electronic technology are the focus of the movement.
Arther Miller
Miller shares with Tennessee Williams the distinction of being the best American dramatist from World War II to the present. Williams' plays are based on emotion, often looking at the struggle between right and wrong the American myth of success generation gaps, and siblings with contrasting values. HIs most famous lays are Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.
Harlem renaissance
Name given to the period from the end of World War 1 and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African American writers produced a sizeable body of literature in the four prominent genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and essay. Common themes included alienation and the use of the blues tradition. Major writers included Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Anna Bontemps.
For whom the bell tolls
Novel by Ernest Hemingway set in the Spanish Civil War. The title is taken from a line in sermon by English essayist and poet John Donne.
Ogdon Nash
Twentieth-century author known for his witty poems, many of them published in The New Yorker. They are married by outrageous rhymes such as those in "The Baby" (A bit of talcum/Is all walcum) or in "Reflections on Ice-Breaking" ("Candy is dandy/ But liquor is quicker")
Sinclair Lewis
Twentieth-century author known for using his novels to criticize aspects of American life such as small-town narrowness, insincere, preachers, and the discouragement of scientific curiosity. His books include Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and Street. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his contributions to literature.
Saul Bellow
Perhaps the foremost among the American novelists who came into prominence after WWII, 1976 Nobel Prize winner Bellow is a part of the novelistic mainstream. His books have the rich flavor of his urban Jewish upbringing. Henderson the Rain King and Herzog are his two most famous works.
Nobel Prize
Prizes given annually for achievement in eight fields, including literature. The awards are considered a mark of world-wide leadership in which they are given. A cash prize of up to one million dollars is given to each winner.
Langston Hughes
Twentieth-century author known for his poems about the black experience in the United States. Hughes was the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. A well-known line from his poem "Dream Deferred" is "What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry like a raisin in the sun?"
Pulitzer Prize
The prestigious awards given annually for excellence in American journalism, literature, and music.
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"
The text of a cable sent by Mark Twain from London to the press in the United States after his obituary had been mistakenly published. Twain died at the age of seventy-five on his birthday. His birth and death were both marked by the Haley's Comet.
E.E. Cummings
Twentieth century author who spurned the use of many conventions of standard written English in his poetry. He often avoided using capital letters, even in his name and experimented freely with typographic conventions, grammar, and syntax. He wrote poetry on love, the fallings of public institutions, and many other subjects.
Toni Marrison
Twentieth-century American author awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. Morrison's literacy stem to William Faulker and American writers from further south. Her lasting impression literature is of sympathy and humanity, both based on profound humor. Her works include Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Tar Baby.
James Thurber
Twentieth-century author and cartoonist; author of The Secret Life Walter Mitty. His humorous drawings, short stories, and essays poke gentle fun at the lives and folly of men and women.
Ralph Ellison
Twentieth-century author best known for the book The Invisible Man. The novel won the National Book Award and is regarded as a classic of modern literature. Ellison resists being categorized as a black writer, aiming his fiction to address the universal human conditions.
John Dos Passos
Twentieth-century author best known for the three novels that make up the U.S.A. trilogy. Passos relied heavily on the stream-of-consciousness effect in his novels.
T.S. Eliot
Twentieth-century author born and raised in America. Eliot immigrated to England where he wrote poems, plays, and essays, and urged the use of ordinary language in poetry. He was much concerned with the general emptiness of modern life and with the revitalization of religion. Among Elliot's best known works are the poems "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock" and "the waste land," and the play Murder in the cathedral.
Dorothy Parker
Twentieth-century author known for her often sarcastic wit. Parker write poems, short stories, film, scripts, and reviews of plays and books. Her poetry contains some often quoted lines, such as "Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses."
"Ships that pass in the night"
Words from the poem "Elizabeth," by Henry Wadsworth longfellow. The full passage reads: Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing. Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence
"miles to go before I sleep"
Words from the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost
Existenialism
a philosophical movement embracing the view that the suffering individual must create meaning in an unknowable, chaotic, and seemingly empty universe
