American literature Course Organizer
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1 Goals & Strategy
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1.1 Shoot for 90% on all work
1.2 Perfect attendance
1.3 Meet with professor if there are questions
1.4 Don't fall behind
1.4.1 Set aside study and reading time each day
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2 The Romantic Period
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2.1 Period: 1820-1860
2.2 Key Authors
2.2.1 Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts. His father, also Nathaniel,
was a sea captain and descendent of John Hawthorne, one of the judges in the Salem
witchcraft trials of 1692. He died when the young Nathaniel was four year old.
Hawthorne grew up in seclusion with his widowed mother Elizabeth - and for the rest
of her life they relied on each other for emotional solace. Later he wrote to his friend
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "I have locked myself in a dungeon and I can't find the
key to get out." Hawthorne was educated at the Bowdoin College in Maine (1821-
24). In the school among his friends were Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who
became the 14th president of the U.S.
2.2.2 Edgar Allan Poe
1809-49, American poet, short-story writer, and critic, b. Boston.
He is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original
writers in American literature. His skillfully wrought tales and
poems convey with passionate intensity the mysterious, dreamlike,
and often macabre forces that pervaded his sensibility. He is also
considered the father of the modern detective story.
2.2.3 Emily Dickinson
1830-86, American poet, b. Amherst, Mass. She is widely
considered one of the greatest poets in American literature. Her
unique, gemlike lyrics are distillations of profound feeling and
original intellect that stand outside the mainstream of 19th-century
American literature.
2.2.4 Herman Melville
2.3 Required Reading
2.3.1 Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
2.3.1.1 characters
2.3.1.2 Key Themes
2.3.1.3 Questions
2.3.2 Melville: Moby Dick
2.3.3 Poe: selected works
2.3.3.1 The Fall of the House of Usher
2.3.3.2 The Raven
2.3.4 Dickinson: selected works
2.4 Questions for Discussion
2.4.1 All Files
ein test 2.4.1.1 American Literature.docx
2.4.1.2 Rough Outline_Am. Lit.docx
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3 Rise of Realism
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3.1 Period: 1860-1914
3.2 Key Authors
3.2.1 Mark Twain
3.2.2 Kate Chopin
3.2.3 Henry James
1843-1916, American novelist and critic, b. New York City. A
master of the psychological novel, James was an innovator in
technique and one of the most distinctive prose stylists in English.
He was the son of Henry James , Sr., a Swedenborgian theologian,
and the brother of William James , the philosopher. Educated
privately by tutors in Europe and the United States, he entered
Harvard law school in 1862. Encouraged by William Dean
Howells and other members of the Cambridge literary circle in the
1860s, James wrote critical articles and reviews for the Atlantic
Monthly, a periodical in which several of his novels later appeared
in serial form. He made several trips to Europe, and while there he
became associated with such notable literary figures as Turgenev
and Flaubert . In 1876 he settled permanently in London and
became a British subject in 1915.
James devoted himself to literature and travel, gradually assuming
the role of detached spectator and analyst of life. In his early
novels, including Roderick Hudson (1876), The American
(1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881),
as well as some of his later work, James contrasts the
sophisticated, though somewhat staid, Europeans with the
innocent, eager, though often brash, Americans. In the novels of his
middle period, The Bostonians (1886), The Princess
Casamassima (1886), and The Tragic Muse (1890), he turned
his attention from the international theme to reformers,
revolutionaries, and political aspirants.
During and after an unsuccessful six-year attempt (1889-95) to win
recognition as a playwright, James wrote a series of short,
powerful novels, including The Aspern Papers (1888), What
Maisie Knew (1897), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), The Turn
of the Screw (1898), and The Sacred Fount (1901). In his last
and perhaps his greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902),
The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), all
marked by a return to the international theme, James reached his
highest development in the portrayal of the intricate subtleties of
character and in the use of a complex, convoluted style to express
delicate nuances of thought.
Perhaps more than any previous writer, James refined the
technique of narrating a novel from the point of view of a character,
thereby laying the foundations of modern stream of consciousness
fiction. The series of critical prefaces he wrote for the reissue of his
novels (beginning in 1907) won him a reputation as a superb
technician. He is also famous for his finely wrought short stories,
including “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Real Thing,” which
are masterpieces of the genre. In addition to fiction and literary
criticism, James wrote several books on travel and three
autobiographical works. He never married.
3.2.4 Edith Wharton
3.2.5 Willa Cather
1873-1947, American novelist and short-story writer, b.
Winchester, Va., considered one of the great American writers of
the 20th cent. When she was nine her family moved to the
Nebraska prairie frontier. She graduated from the Univ. of
Nebraska in 1895 and worked as a journalist and as a teacher in
Pittsburgh. In 1904 she went to New York City. The publication
of The Troll Garden (1905), her first collection of short stories,
led to her appointment to the editorial staff of McClure's
Magazine. She eventually became managing editor and saved the
magazine from financial disaster. After the publication of
Alexander's Bridge in 1912, she left McClure's and devoted
herself to creative writing. For many years she lived quietly in New
York City's Greenwich Village. The first of her novels to deal with
her major theme is O Pioneers! (1913), a celebration of the
strength and courage of the frontier settlers. Other novels with this
theme are My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922; Pulitzer
Prize), and A Lost Lady (1923). The Song of the Lark (1915)
focuses on another of Cather's major preoccupations—the need of
artists to free themselves from inhibiting influences, particularly that
of a rural or small-town background; the tales collected in Youth
and the Bright Medusa (1920) and the novel Lucy Gayheart
(1935) also treat this theme. With success and increasing age
Cather became convinced that the beliefs and way of life she
valued were disappearing. This disillusionment is poignantly evident
in her novel The Professor's House (1925). She subsequently
turned to North America's far past for her material: to colonial
New Mexico in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), widely
regarded as her masterpiece, and to 17th-century Quebec for
Shadows on the Rock (1931), in both novels blending history with
religious reverence and loving characterizations. The volumes My
Mortal Enemy (1926) and The Old Beauty and Others (1948)
present her highly skilled shorter fiction. Her intense interest in the
craft of fiction is shown in the essays in Not Under Forty (1936)
and On Writing (1949). Cather herself was a master of that craft,
her novels and stories written in a pellucid style of great charm and
stateliness.
3.3 Required Reading
3.3.1 Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3.3.2 Chopin: The Awakening
3.3.3 James: The Wings of the Dove
3.3.4 Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
3.3.5 Cather: My Antonia
3.4 Questions for Discussion
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4 Suggested Materials for Course
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4.1 Pen/pencil and paper
4.2 three ring binder: for organizing handouts, note taking, and class work
4.3 notebook
4.4 laptop
4.5 computer disk or drive on which to store work
4.6 required reading books
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5 20th century/Modernism
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5.1 Period: 1914-1945
5.2 Key Authors
5.2.1 F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald), 1896-1940, American novelist and
short-story writer, b. St. Paul, Minn. He is ranked among the great
American writers of the 20th cent. Fitzgerald is widely considered
the literary spokesman of the “jazz age” —the decade of the
1920s. Part of the interest of his work derives from the fact that the
mad, gin-drinking, morally and spiritually bankrupt men and
women he wrote about led lives that closely resembled his own.
Born of middle-class parents, Fitzgerald attended private schools,
entering Princeton in 1913. He was placed on academic probation
in his junior year, and in 1917 he left Princeton to join the army.
While stationed in Montgomery, Ala., he met and fell in love with
Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a local judge. During this time, he also
began working on his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which
describes life at Princeton among the glittering, bored, and
disillusioned, postwar generation. Published in 1920, the novel was
an instant success and brought Fitzgerald enough money to marry
Zelda that same year.
The young couple moved to New York City, where they became
notorious for their madcap lifestyle. Fitzgerald made money by
writing stories for various magazines. In 1922 he published his
second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, about an artist and his
wife who are ruined by their dissipated way of life. After the birth
of their daughter, Frances Scott, in 1921 the Fitzgeralds spent
much time in Paris and the French Riviera, becoming part of a
celebrated circle of American expatriates.
Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, appeared in 1925. It
is the story of a bootlegger, Jay Gatsby, whose obsessive dream of
wealth and lost love is destroyed by a corrupt reality. Cynical yet
poignant, the novel is a devastating portrait of the so-called
American Dream, which measures success and love in terms of
money. The author's long-awaited novel Tender is the Night
(1934), a complex study of the spiritual depletion of a psychiatrist
who marries a wealthy former patient, although later regarded
highly, was initially coolly received.
Fitzgerald's later years were plagued by financial worries and his
wife's progressive insanity. The author spent his last years as a
scriptwriter in Hollywood, Calif. He died of a heart attack in 1940
at the age of 44. The Last Tycoon, a promising unfinished novel
about the motion picture industry, was published in 1941.
Fitzgerald also published four excellent short story collections:
Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille
(1935).
5.2.2 Ernest Hemingway
The son of a country doctor, Hemingway worked as a reporter for
the Kansas City Star after graduating from high school in 1917.
During World War I he served as an ambulance driver in France and
in the Italian infantry and was wounded just before his 19th birthday.
Later, while working in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto
Star, he became involved with the expatriate literary and artistic circle
surrounding Gertrude Stein. During the Spanish Civil War,
Hemingway served as a correspondent on the loyalist side. He fought
in World War II and then settled in Cuba in 1945. In 1954,
Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After his
expulsion from Cuba by the Castro regime, he moved to Idaho. He
was increasingly plagued by ill health and mental problems, and in
July, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself.
5.2.3 John Steinbeck
5.2.4 Gertrude Stein
5.2.5 T.S. Eliot
5.2.6 Robert Frost
5.2.7 E.E. Cummings
5.2.8 Langston Hughes
5.3 Required Reading
5.3.1 Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
5.3.2 Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
5.3.3 Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
5.3.4 Stein: Tender Buttons
5.3.5 Eliot: selected works
5.3.6 Frost: selected works
5.3.7 Cummings: selected works
5.3.8 Hughes: selected works
5.4 Questions for Discussion
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6 Exam Topics
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6.1 To be determined...
6.1.1 List of topics will be handed out the Friday before the exam!
6.2 Review Resources
6.2.1 outline of American Literature
6.2.2 American Lit web resources listing
6.2.3 American Lit reference guide
6.3 Review all Discussion Questions
6.4 Presentation
6.4.1 Select book
6.4.2 10 minute presentation
6.4.2.1 Include visuals
6.4.3 Develop thesis
6.4.4 Use map for presentation
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