American Survey

When & context. Roughly 1607–1776. Jamestown, Virginia (1607) was founded as a commercial venture; Plymouth (1620) by Separatist Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact aboard the Mayflower; Massachusetts Bay (1630) by Puritans under John Winthrop who saw their colony as a divinely covenanted "errand into the wilderness." Writing served practical and religious ends — promotion tracts, histories, sermons, journals, devotional verse — since Puritans distrusted fiction and banned theatre. The Salem witch trials (1692, 19 hanged) and the revivalist Great Awakening (1730s–40s) mark the late flare and transformation of Puritan culture.

What defines it. Plain style (clarity over ornament, modeled on the Geneva Bible) as the official Puritan aesthetic — though Edward Taylor privately wrote ornate metaphysical verse; providential interpretation of everyday events; typology; dominant genres: sermon, history, journal, spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, devotional poetry, almanac. Print culture arrived early: Harvard founded 1636 to train ministers, the first press at Cambridge, and the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in British North America. The New England Primer (c. 1690) taught the alphabet through doctrine. A secular, witty Southern strand (William Byrd II's History of the Dividing Line, written 1728ff., published 1841) contrasts with New England piety.

Authors & works

• John Smith (1580–1631) — A True Relation (1608), often counted the first American book in English; The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), source of the (much-embellished) Pocahontas rescue story. Promotional literature of Virginia.
• William Bradford (1590–1657) — Of Plymouth Plantation (written 1630–1651; first published in full only 1856). Pilgrim history; the model of plain style.
• John Winthrop (1588–1649) — "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630, associated with the Arbella crossing): "we shall be as a city upon a hill"; his Journal chronicles Massachusetts Bay.
• Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672) — The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (London, 1650): the first published book of poems by a resident of the American colonies (her brother-in-law John Woodbridge carried the manuscript to London). Later domestic poems: "To My Dear and Loving Husband," "Upon the Burning of Our House" (1666), published posthumously in Several Poems (1678).
• Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705) — The Day of Doom (1662), a ballad-meter versification of Judgment Day; often called the first American bestseller.
• Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729) — frontier pastor at Westfield; Preparatory Meditations, "Huswifery." Metaphysical conceits in the manner of Herbert/Donne; he left his poems unpublished, and they were not printed until the 1930s.
• Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637–1711) — A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), from King Philip's War; the prototype captivity narrative and a colonial bestseller.
• Cotton Mather (1663–1728) — Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), church history of New England; The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), defending the Salem verdicts; his Bonifacius ("Essays to Do Good," 1710) influenced Franklin.
• Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) — "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (preached at Enfield, Connecticut, 1741; the spider dangled over the fire); Freedom of the Will (1754). The Great Awakening's greatest theologian (with the English itinerant George Whitefield); died of a smallpox inoculation just after becoming president of Princeton.

Terms

• Plain style — clear, unadorned prose/verse subordinating art to truth; the Puritan ideal (Bradford).
• Typology — reading persons and events as fulfillments of biblical "types" (e.g., the Atlantic crossing as a new Exodus).
• Jeremiad — sermon lamenting communal decline and calling for return to the covenant; a durable American rhetorical form.
• Covenant theology — society as a contract with God; communal prosperity and disaster read as divine feedback.
• Election / predestination — Calvinist doctrine that God has already chosen the saved; drives Puritan self-scrutiny and diary-keeping.
• Captivity narrative — first-person account of abduction by Native Americans, framed as a trial of faith (Rowlandson); ancestor of the sentimental and gothic novel in America.
• Great Awakening — revivalist wave of the 1730s–40s (Edwards, Whitefield) emphasizing conversion experience.
• Conceit — elaborate extended metaphor (Taylor's spinning wheel in "Huswifery").

MC facts

• Jamestown 1607; Plymouth 1620 (Mayflower Compact); Massachusetts Bay 1630.
• Bay Psalm Book (1640) = first book printed in British North America (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
• Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650) = first published book of poetry by an American colonist — published in London.
• Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom (1662) = often called the first American bestseller; Rowlandson (1682) founded the captivity genre.
• Of Plymouth Plantation stayed in manuscript until 1856; Taylor's poems until the 1930s — two major "delayed" colonial texts.
• "City upon a hill" = Winthrop, 1630 (echoing Matthew 5:14).
• "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" = Edwards, Enfield, 1741 (Great Awakening).
• Salem witch trials 1692; the Mathers (Increase and Cotton) implicated in the surrounding debate; Hawthorne's ancestor John Hathorne was a Salem judge (→ topic 3).

Trap warning

• "City upon a hill" belongs to Winthrop's 1630 lay sermon — not to Bradford, and not to a Revolutionary document (its political afterlife came much later).
• Keep the three Puritan poets straight: Bradstreet (published 1650, domestic and devotional), Taylor (metaphysical, unpublished until the 20th century), Wigglesworth (doctrinal bestseller). And Edwards is an 18th-century revivalist — contemporary with Franklin but the opposite of an Enlightenment thinker.

Practice MC

When & context. The 18th century, peaking 1763–1800. After the French and Indian War, the taxation crisis (Stamp Act 1765) escalated into Revolution (1775–83), followed by the Constitution (1787) and ratification debate. Enlightenment rationalism — Locke's natural rights, Newtonian order, deism — displaced Calvinist theology among the educated. Literature was overwhelmingly public and persuasive: pamphlets, declarations, almanacs, newspapers, letters; the first American novels, plays, and professional authors appear only after independence.

What defines it. Reason, utility, self-improvement, civic virtue; the "self-made man" (Franklin) replaces the Puritan saint; genres: political pamphlet, autobiography, epistolary essay, satire, public document as literature. Post-war firsts establish a national literary infrastructure: first staged comedy, first novel, first bestselling novel, first professional novelist.

Authors & works

• Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) — Poor Richard's Almanack (1732–58; maxims collected as "The Way to Wealth," 1758); The Autobiography (written 1771–90, published posthumously — first in French, 1791): the classic self-made-man narrative with its 13-virtues "project of arriving at moral perfection." "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" (1784): an ironic "bagatelle" contrasting Native American courtesy with European rudeness — who exactly is the savage? "On the Slave Trade" (Federal Gazette, March 1790, signed "Historicus"): his last public essay, written weeks before his death — a hoax letter in which a fictional Algerian corsair defends enslaving Christians, exactly parodying Congressman James Jackson's pro-slavery arguments.
• Thomas Paine (1737–1809) — Common Sense (January 1776, published anonymously): the case for immediate independence in plain, biblical-cadenced prose; the Revolution's most widely read pamphlet (well over 100,000 copies within months). The American Crisis (1776–83): "These are the times that try men's souls" (Crisis No. 1, December 1776, read to Washington's troops). Later Rights of Man (1791–92) and the deist The Age of Reason (1794–95), which made him a pariah.
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) — principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence (adopted July 4, 1776; edited by Franklin, Adams, and Congress); Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).
• J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813) — Letters from an American Farmer (1782); Letter III, "What Is an American?", coins the image of the American as a "new man," individuals of all nations "melted into a new race" — the melting-pot idea.
• The Federalist (1787–88) — 85 essays by Hamilton (the majority), Madison, and Jay under the shared pseudonym "Publius," urging ratification of the Constitution.
• Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) — Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773): the first published book by an African American, prefaced by an attestation from Boston worthies (→ topic 15).
• Olaudah Equiano — The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (London, 1789), foundational slave narrative.
• Post-war firsts — Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1787): first American comedy professionally staged; William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy (1789): first American novel (epistolary seduction plot); Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (London 1791 / Philadelphia 1794): the best-selling American novel until Uncle Tom's Cabin; Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799): American Gothic, often called the first professional American novelist — bridge to Poe (→ topic 3).

Terms

• Enlightenment — confidence in reason, natural law, progress, and human perfectibility.
• Deism — God as rational clockmaker known through nature, not revelation or miracles (Franklin, Paine, Jefferson).
• Natural rights — Lockean life, liberty, property — recast by Jefferson as "the pursuit of happiness."
• Pamphlet — cheap topical print, the Revolution's key medium (Common Sense).
• Melting pot — Crèvecoeur's image of European nationalities fused into a "new man."
• Sentimental / seduction novel — Richardson-derived didactic plot of virtue endangered (Charlotte Temple).
• Almanac — yearly calendar-plus-miscellany; Franklin's vehicle for proverbial wisdom.

MC facts

• Common Sense: January 1776, anonymous, arguing for independence six months before the Declaration.
• Declaration of Independence adopted July 4, 1776; Jefferson principal drafter.
• Franklin's Autobiography was unfinished and published only after his death (French translation first, 1791).
• "On the Slave Trade" (1790) = Franklin's final public piece, an anti-slavery parody under the pseudonym "Historicus."
• Crèvecoeur's Letters (1782), Letter III = "What Is an American?" / melting pot.
• The Federalist = Hamilton + Madison + Jay = "Publius" (85 essays, 1787–88).
• Wheatley 1773 = first African American book; Equiano 1789 = model slave narrative.
• Firsts of the 1780s–90s: The Contrast 1787 (comedy), The Power of Sympathy 1789 (novel), Charlotte Temple 1791/94 (bestselling novel), Wieland 1798 (Gothic).

Trap warning

• "These are the times that try men's souls" opens The American Crisis — not Common Sense.
• Franklin's two required essays are ironic persona pieces, not earnest reportage: "Remarks" inverts the label "savage"; "On the Slave Trade" attacks slavery by ventriloquizing its defenders. Also: Paine's Age of Reason is deist, not atheist.

Practice MC

When & context. c. 1820–1865, the era F. O. Matthiessen later dubbed the "American Renaissance" (his 1941 book covers 1850–55, the astonishing cluster of masterpieces). After the War of 1812, critics demanded a national literature independent of Britain ("Who reads an American book?" sneered the Edinburgh Review, 1820). A booming magazine and gift-book market made the short tale a signature American form. Writers mined Dutch New York legend (Irving, the "Knickerbocker" circle), the frontier (Cooper), and the Puritan past (Hawthorne).

What defines it. Imagination, emotion, and the individual over neoclassical reason; legend, history, and the marvelous as material. Hawthorne's prefaces distinguish the romance (latitude for the "Marvellous," psychological and symbolic truth) from the realistic novel. Two moods: expansive adventure and myth-making (Irving's humor, Cooper's frontier epic) versus dark Romanticism (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville): sin, guilt, obsession, the limits of knowledge — an implicit rebuttal of Transcendentalist optimism (→ topic 4). Poe theorizes the short story as a form of calculated "unity of effect."

Authors & works

• Washington Irving (1783–1859) — A History of New York by "Diedrich Knickerbocker" (1809), comic mock-history; The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), containing "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (Ichabod Crane, Katrina Van Tassel, Brom Bones, the Headless Horseman; Dutch Hudson Valley folklore). First American writer to win international fame and live by his pen; pioneer of the short story.
• James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) — The Spy (1821); the Leatherstocking Tales, published The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), The Deerslayer (1841), all featuring the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (Hawkeye) with Chingachgook and Uncas; also sea fiction (The Pilot, 1824). Myth-maker of the frontier and its vanishing.
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) — born Boston, raised Richmond; magazine editor and ferocious critic; died in Baltimore under unexplained circumstances. Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827, "By a Bostonian"); The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838, his only novel); Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) incl. "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839); "The Black Cat" (Saturday Evening Post, 1843): alcoholic narrator, the "spirit of PERVERSENESS," Pluto and the gallows-marked second cat, wife murdered and walled up in the cellar, the cat's cry betraying him — companion piece to "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843); "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841): the first modern detective story, with C. Auguste Dupin (also "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," "The Purloined Letter"); "The Raven" (1845) made him famous; "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) rationalizes it: brevity, unity of effect, "the death of a beautiful woman" as "the most poetical topic."
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) — born in Salem on July 4; descendant of witch-trial judge John Hathorne (he added the "w"). Twice-Told Tales (1837); "Young Goodman Brown" (1835); Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) incl. "The Birth-Mark" (1843): the scientist Aylmer removes the tiny hand-shaped mark — the one flaw — from his wife Georgiana's cheek and kills her; allegory of fatal perfectionism and science overreaching nature (assistant Aminadab as earthiness). The Scarlet Letter (1850): Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, Pearl — sin, secrecy, and public punishment in Puritan Boston. The House of the Seven Gables (1851, with the romance-defining preface), The Blithedale Romance (1852, from his Brook Farm stint), The Marble Faun (1860).
• Herman Melville (1819–1891) — sailed on the whaler Acushnet (1841); early fame from South-Seas narratives Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851; London edition titled The Whale, expurgated and missing the epilogue) — Ishmael ("Call me Ishmael."), Ahab, the Pequod; written in the Berkshires near Hawthorne and dedicated to him; a commercial failure. Pierre (1852) flopped; "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (Putnam's Monthly, 1853; collected in The Piazza Tales, 1856): the lawyer-narrator and the copyist whose "I would prefer not to." escalates into total passive refusal — dead-letter office coda; proto-existential parable of Wall Street dehumanization. "Benito Cereno" (1855); The Confidence-Man (published April 1, 1857 — April Fools' Day, fittingly). Two decades as a New York customs inspector; Billy Budd left in manuscript, published 1924, fueling the 1920s "Melville Revival."

Terms

• Romance vs. novel — Hawthorne's distinction: romance claims latitude beyond ordinary probability for symbolic/psychological truth.
• Dark Romanticism — the pessimistic branch dwelling on sin, guilt, madness, and evil (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) against Transcendental optimism.
• Gothic — machinery of terror (haunted houses, doubles, live burial) adapted to psychological ends.
• Tale — the short prose form perfected in the American magazine market (Irving → Poe → Hawthorne).
• Unity (singleness) of effect — Poe's rule that every word of a tale should serve one preconceived emotional effect.
• Arabesque / grotesque — Poe's own labels (1840) for his tales of ornate psychological terror vs. dark comedy.
• Allegory & symbol — Hawthorne's characteristic method (the letter A, the birthmark).
• Knickerbocker school — Irving-era New York writers of urbane humor and local legend.

MC facts

• The Sketch Book (1819–20) contains both "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
• Leatherstocking = Natty Bumppo; The Last of the Mohicans = 1826; publication order ≠ chronological order of Natty's life (The Deerslayer, written last, is his youth).
• First detective story = "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841, Dupin, Paris setting).
• Landmark dates: The Scarlet Letter 1850; The House of the Seven Gables 1851; Moby-Dick 1851; "Bartleby" 1853.
• Moby-Dick is dedicated to Hawthorne; it failed commercially, and Melville died obscure (1891) — reputation restored by the 1920s revival and Billy Budd (1924).
• Poe: "The Raven" (1845) = fame; "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) = his poetics; died 1849 in Baltimore.
• Hawthorne: born July 4, 1804, Salem; Salem judge ancestor; worked in the Salem Custom House (the Scarlet Letter frame sketch "The Custom-House").
• "The Black Cat" (1843) and "The Birth-Mark" (1843) are exact contemporaries — same year, opposite gothic modes (see trap).

Trap warning

• Poe vs. Hawthorne gothic: Poe aims at psychological terror and aesthetic effect with no moral (perverseness, obsession, madness); Hawthorne writes moral allegory of sin, guilt, and Puritan history. If a question asks who attaches an explicit moral lesson to gothic material — Hawthorne, not Poe.
• Melville's contemporary fame rested on Typee, not Moby-Dick; and the first London edition of Moby-Dick appeared as The Whale.

Practice MC

When & context. 1830s–1850s New England, centered on Concord, Massachusetts. Transcendentalism grew out of (and against) Boston Unitarianism, fed by German Idealism via Coleridge and Carlyle. It coincided with an unprecedented reform ferment — abolition, women's rights, temperance, education reform, utopian communities — that intensified through the crisis decade of the 1850s (Fugitive Slave Act 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854, John Brown 1859) toward the Civil War (1861–65).

What defines it. Intuition over sense-data and inherited doctrine; divinity immanent in nature and in every self; self-reliant nonconformity; the essay and the lyceum lecture as genres; journal-keeping as spiritual practice. Its social wing runs from utopian experiment (Brook Farm, Fruitlands) to principled resistance (Thoreau) to abolitionism — where the slave narrative becomes the era's most consequential American genre, linking literacy and freedom.

Authors & works

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) — ex-Unitarian minister (resigned 1832). Nature (1836), the movement's manifesto ("transparent eye-ball" passage); "The American Scholar" (Phi Beta Kappa address, 1837) — Oliver Wendell Holmes called it "our intellectual Declaration of Independence"; "The Divinity School Address" (1838) got him barred from Harvard for decades; Essays: First Series (1841: "Self-Reliance" — "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"; "The Over-Soul"), Essays: Second Series (1844: "The Poet," "Experience"). Also "Concord Hymn" (1837): "the shot heard round the world."
• Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) — lived at Walden Pond (on Emerson's land) from July 4, 1845 to September 1847; Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854): "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"; deliberate living, economy, nature observation. Jailed overnight (1846) for refusing the poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican War → "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), posthumously retitled "Civil Disobedience" — direct influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Later radicalized: "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854), "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859).
• Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) — first editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial (1840–42); Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the first major American feminist book; literary critic for Greeley's New-York Tribune and America's first female foreign correspondent (Rome, 1848–49 revolution); drowned in the 1850 wreck of the Elizabeth off Fire Island.
• Institutions — Transcendental Club (from 1836); The Dial (1840–44); Brook Farm commune (1841–47; Hawthorne briefly a member → The Blithedale Romance); Alcott's Fruitlands (1843).
• Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) — escaped slavery in 1838; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), authenticated by prefaces from Garrison and Wendell Phillips: the literacy scenes (Mrs. Auld; "knowledge unfits a child to be a slave" is the logic he inverts), the fight with the slave-breaker Covey as the turning point, deliberate silence about his escape route. British supporters purchased his freedom (1846); founded The North Star in Rochester (1847); "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Life and Times (1881/1892). Supported the women's suffrage resolution at Seneca Falls.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) — Uncle Tom's Cabin (serialized in the National Era 1851–52; book 1852): Tom, Eliza's ice-crossing escape, Little Eva, Simon Legree; sentimental Christian anti-slavery melodrama; roughly 300,000 US copies in its first year — the century's best-selling American novel; answered doubters with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853).
• Harriet Jacobs (c. 1813–1897) — Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, as "Linda Brent," edited by Lydia Maria Child): the female slave narrative — sexual persecution, seven years hidden in a garret.
• William Lloyd Garrison — founded the abolitionist weekly The Liberator (1831). Seneca Falls Convention (1848): Stanton's "Declaration of Sentiments" rewrites Jefferson — "all men and women are created equal."

Terms

• Transcendentalism — New England idealism: truth grasped by intuition transcending the senses; nature as symbol of spirit.
• Oversoul — Emerson's universal spirit in which all individual souls and nature participate.
• Self-reliance — trust in one's own intuition against conformity and tradition.
• Civil disobedience — Thoreau's principled, nonviolent refusal to obey unjust law, accepting punishment.
• Lyceum — the public-lecture circuit that carried Emerson's essays to national audiences.
• Utopian community — reform by model settlement (Brook Farm, Fruitlands).
• Slave narrative — ex-slave autobiography with white-authored authenticating documents; literacy = the road to freedom.
• Sentimental novel — fiction mobilizing sympathy (especially women readers') for moral reform (Uncle Tom's Cabin).
• Abolitionism — the movement for immediate emancipation (Garrison, Douglass).

MC facts

• Nature 1836 = manifesto; "The American Scholar" 1837 = the call for intellectual independence (Holmes's "intellectual Declaration of Independence").
• Thoreau: two years at Walden 1845–47 (moved in on July 4); Walden published 1854; "Civil Disobedience" 1849 (original title "Resistance to Civil Government").
• The Dial founded 1840, Margaret Fuller first editor; Woman in the Nineteenth Century 1845.
• Douglass: escape 1838; Narrative 1845; The North Star 1847 (Rochester).
• Uncle Tom's Cabin: serial 1851–52, book 1852 — a decade before the war; the Lincoln "little woman who started this great war" greeting is an unverified anecdote.
• Brook Farm 1841–47; Hawthorne's participation → The Blithedale Romance (1852).
• Seneca Falls 1848; "Declaration of Sentiments."
• Emerson resigned his Unitarian pulpit (1832) before launching Transcendentalism.

Trap warning

• Oversoul = Emerson's universal shared spirit — not a Calvinist elect, not the subconscious. And Transcendentalism is the optimistic branch of American Romanticism; Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville form the skeptical "dark" counter-current (→ topic 3).
• Douglass's Narrative (1845) precedes Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): authentic Black autobiography vs. a white author's sentimental novel. Don't attribute UTC's plot to Douglass or vice versa.

Practice MC

When & context. Mid-19th century. The enormously popular Fireside (Schoolroom) Poets — Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell — dominated parlors and classrooms with memorizable, morally uplifting verse in European forms. Against this backdrop, 1855 brings Whitman's Leaves of Grass, answering Emerson's call in "The Poet" (1844) for a bard adequate to America; and from the early 1860s Emily Dickinson writes, almost entirely in private, the era's other radical body of poetry. The Civil War produces Whitman's Drum-Taps (1865) and Melville's Battle-Pieces (1866).

What defines it. Three registers: (1) Fireside gentility — regular meter and rhyme, domestic, historical, and moral subjects, addressed to the family circle; (2) Whitman — free verse, long anaphoric catalogues, the expansive democratic "I," the body and the en-masse, America itself as the greatest poem; (3) Dickinson — hymn-derived common meter compressed and estranged: slant rhyme, dashes, irregular capitalization, riddling definitions of death, immortality, nature, and consciousness.

Authors & works

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) — the century's most famous American poet; Harvard professor; Bowdoin classmate of Hawthorne. "A Psalm of Life" (1838); Evangeline (1847, dactylic hexameters); The Song of Hiawatha (1855, trochaic tetrameter modeled on the Finnish Kalevala); The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858); "Paul Revere's Ride" (1861; in Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863); first complete American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1867); bust in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey (1884) — the first American so honored.
• Other Fireside Poets — William Cullen Bryant ("Thanatopsis," published 1817; nature's consolation in blank verse); John Greenleaf Whittier (Quaker abolitionist; the bestselling winter idyll Snow-Bound, 1866); Oliver Wendell Holmes ("Old Ironsides," 1830, which saved the USS Constitution; The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858; coined "Boston Brahmin"); James Russell Lowell (A Fable for Critics, 1848; first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, founded 1857).
• Walt Whitman (1819–1892) — Brooklyn printer-journalist. Leaves of Grass (July 1855): twelve untitled poems incl. the future "Song of Myself" ("I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world"); self-published, author unnamed on the title page (a shirtsleeves portrait instead); prose preface on the poet of democracy. Emerson wrote to him: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career" — Whitman stamped the sentence in gold on the spine of the 1856 second edition. Continuous revision through the "deathbed edition" (1891–92). "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856); "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (1859). Civil War volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals → Drum-Taps (1865), incl. "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer": the lecture hall's "charts and diagrams" versus looking up "in perfect silence at the stars" — intuition over tabulated science, Romanticism in eight free-verse lines. Lincoln elegies "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and the uncharacteristically rhymed, hugely popular "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865–66). Fired from his Interior Department clerkship (1865) over the "indecent" Leaves.
• Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) — Amherst; one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; from the early 1860s increasingly reclusive. Nearly 1,800 poems, only about ten printed (anonymously, editorially "corrected") in her lifetime — e.g., "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" as "The Snake" (1866). Wrote to critic T. W. Higginson in 1862 asking if her verse was "alive"; sewed poems into hand-bound fascicles. "I Never Saw a Moor" (c. 1865; published 1890, titled "Chartless" by her editors): certainty of heaven and of the unseen by inference — faith without empirical evidence, the exact inverse companion to Whitman's astronomer. "Because I could not stop for Death," "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died," "My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun." First posthumous Poems (1890, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd & Higginson, heavily regularized; further series 1891, 1896); the restored scholarly edition came only with Thomas H. Johnson (1955).
• Poe as poet — "The Raven" (1845), "Annabel Lee" (1849); incantatory sound-effects; "The Poetic Principle" (the long poem "a contradiction in terms") (→ topic 3).

Terms

• Free verse — verse without regular meter or rhyme (Whitman's line, biblical in cadence).
• Catalogue & anaphora — Whitman's long enumerations and initial repetitions building democratic inclusiveness.
• Common (hymn) meter — alternating 8/6-syllable quatrains (Watts's hymnal), Dickinson's base form.
• Slant (partial) rhyme — near-rhyme (soul/all), Dickinson's signature dissonance.
• Fascicle — Dickinson's hand-sewn manuscript booklets (~40).
• Elegy — mourning poem ("Lilacs," "O Captain!").
• Fireside / Schoolroom Poets — the genteel popular quintet: Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell.
• Persona / lyric "I" — Whitman's mythic self "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos."

MC facts

• Leaves of Grass: first edition July 1855, self-published, 12 poems, no author name on the title page; Emerson's famous letter followed within weeks.
• 1855 double event: Leaves of Grass and Longfellow's Hiawatha appeared the same year — free-verse future vs. genteel bestseller.
• "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" first appeared in Drum-Taps (1865).
• "O Captain! My Captain!" — rhymed and metrical, Whitman's most popular poem in his lifetime, and his least representative (a favorite "least typical" exam answer).
• Dickinson: ~10 poems published in her lifetime; first volume Poems 1890 (posthumous); major scholarly editions include Johnson (1955) and Franklin (1998); "I Never Saw a Moor" printed 1890 under the editorial title "Chartless."
• Longfellow: Hiawatha meter borrowed from the Kalevala; Evangeline in hexameters; first American Dante translation (1867); Westminster Abbey bust (1884).
• Bryant's "Thanatopsis" (1817) = earliest landmark of American Romantic poetry.
• Emerson's essay "The Poet" (1844) is the theoretical license Whitman answered; Emerson also wrote "Concord Hymn" ("the shot heard round the world"), not Longfellow.

Trap warning

• Pair the two required poems correctly: Whitman's astronomer poem = free verse, turning away from measurable proof toward silent wonder; Dickinson's moor poem = rhymed quatrains, certainty without seeing. Swapping authors or forms is the obvious trap.
• Editors gave Dickinson's poems titles ("Chartless") and smoothed her dashes — her poems are properly untitled and were restored only in 1955. Don't date her writing by the 1890 publication.

Practice MC

When & context. From the Civil War (1861–65) to about 1900 — the Gilded Age, named after Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 satirical novel: continental railroads, industrial fortunes, corruption, urbanization, immigration. Literary power sat in the quality magazines (Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Century, Scribner's; Chopin published in Vogue), with W. D. Howells as editor-champion of the movement. Realism defined itself against the romance and against sentimental idealization.

What defines it. Howells: realism is "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material" — probable events, ordinary middle-class people, recognizable settings, moral complexity without melodrama; American realism favored "the more smiling aspects of life." Vernacular speech enters serious literature (Twain). Regionalism / local color documents distinctive regional manners and dialects as the nation reunifies. Henry James turns realism inward — psychological realism, the "center of consciousness." Women writers press the "woman question" to realism's limits (Chopin, Gilman).

Authors & works

• William Dean Howells (1837–1920) — "Dean of American letters"; Atlantic editor-in-chief (1871–81), then Harper's columnist; championed Twain, James, and later Crane, Norris, and Paul Laurence Dunbar; risked his standing defending the Haymarket anarchists (1887). A Modern Instance (1882, divorce); The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885, a businessman's moral rise through financial fall); A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890); the credo Criticism and Fiction (1891).
• Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) — Hannibal, Missouri; printer, Mississippi river pilot (the pen name is the leadsman's call for two fathoms — safe water), Nevada miner, San Francisco journalist. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865); The Innocents Abroad (1869); Roughing It (1872); The Gilded Age (1873, with Warner); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Life on the Mississippi (1883); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London 1884 / New York 1885): Huck's vernacular first-person voice, the raft, Jim, the shore's "civilization" as fraud and violence; banned by the Concord Public Library within weeks; Hemingway (1935): "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894, babies switched across the color line); late-life bankruptcy, world lecture tour, and darkening pessimism ("The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," 1899). Howells's verdict: "the Lincoln of our literature."
• Henry James (1843–1916) — brother of philosopher William James; expatriate from 1875 (Paris, then England); naturalized British 1915; Order of Merit 1916. The international theme — American innocence meeting European experience: Daisy Miller (1878, his breakthrough), The Portrait of a Lady (1881, Isabel Archer), late "major phase" The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904). "The Art of Fiction" (1884): the novel as "a direct impression of life." What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898): restricted point of view; the governess's ghosts kept deliberately ambiguous.
• Regionalists / local colorists — Bret Harte ("The Luck of Roaring Camp," 1868, California camps); Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896; "A White Heron," 1886 — coastal Maine); Mary E. Wilkins Freeman ("A New England Nun," 1891; "The Revolt of 'Mother'"); Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus, 1880, Br'er Rabbit trickster tales from African American oral tradition); George Washington Cable (Creole New Orleans); Hamlin Garland (Main-Travelled Roads, 1891, bleak Midwestern farms — his "veritism" shades into naturalism).
• Kate Chopin (1850–1904) — St. Louis-born; married into Louisiana Creole society; began writing widowed, back in St. Louis; collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). "Désirée's Baby" (1893; the KAJL list titles it "The Father of Désirée's Baby"): Armand Aubigny casts out wife and part-Black baby — the closing letter reveals the Black ancestry is his own; race, Louisiana plantation society, surgical final-line irony. "The Story of an Hour" (1894): Louise Mallard's hour of widowed freedom — "free, free, free" — ended by her husband's return; doctors call her death "the joy that kills." "A Respectable Woman" (1894): Mrs. Baroda tempted by houseguest Gouvernail (who reappears in The Awakening); the famously open ending — "I have overcome everything! ... This time I shall be more sensible." The Awakening (1899): Edna Pontellier, Grand Isle, the sea; denounced as morbid and unwholesome, it sank her reputation — revived in 1969 by Per Seyersted's edition ("The Storm," written 1898, was first printed then).
• Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914) — Union veteran (Shiloh, Chickamauga), then San Francisco's most feared columnist ("Bitter Bierce"). "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890; in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891): Confederate sympathizer Peyton Farquhar hanged from the bridge; the "escape" is a dying man's stretched instant — time dilation, sensory hyperrealism, the snap of the twist ending. The Devil's Dictionary (1906 as The Cynic's Word Book; retitled 1911). Rode into revolutionary Mexico in 1913 and vanished.
• Edith Wharton (1862–1937) — James's friend; anatomist of Old New York's leisure class. The House of Mirth (1905, Lily Bart's determinist slide — realism shading into naturalism); Ethan Frome (1911, frame-narrated New England); The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer — the first woman to win the fiction Pulitzer.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) — "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892): first-person descent into madness under the "rest cure"; feminist psychological realism with gothic surface; later the utopia Herland (1915).

Terms

• Realism — truthful representation of probable, ordinary experience; character over plot; free moral agency.
• Verisimilitude — the texture of lifelikeness (speech, detail, motive).
• Local color / regionalism — fiction foregrounding one region's dialect, customs, and landscape.
• Vernacular — everyday spoken language as literary medium (Huck's voice).
• Novel of manners — social codes of a class under a microscope (James, Wharton).
• International theme — James's American-innocence-abroad plot.
• Center of consciousness — narration filtered through one finely aware mind (James).
• Gilded Age — Twain-Warner coinage: gold veneer over corruption.
• Dialect writing — phonetic rendering of regional speech (Harris, Twain).

MC facts

• "Gilded Age" comes from Twain & Warner's novel (1873).
• Huckleberry Finn: UK December 1884, US February 1885; sequel to Tom Sawyer (1876); narrated by Huck in dialect; banned in Concord, 1885.
• Twain born 1835 and died 1910 — with Halley's Comet in the sky both times (he predicted he'd "go out with it").
• Howells's definition of realism ("truthful treatment of material") and his editorial power made him the movement's gatekeeper.
• Daisy Miller (1878) made James famous; The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the peak of his middle period; he became a British subject in 1915.
• "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890/91) = the most anthologized Civil War story; twist = the escape was a dying hallucination.
• The Awakening (1899) was condemned, not celebrated, on publication; Chopin's revival dates from 1969.
• Wharton = first woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction (1921, The Age of Innocence).

Trap warning

• Realism vs. Naturalism (the exam's favorite): realism = ordinary middle-class life, free choice, "smiling aspects"; naturalism = humans determined by heredity, environment, and chance, typically in the lower depths (→ topic 7). A definition question answered with "instinct rather than free will" points to Naturalism, not Realism.
• Bierce ≠ Crane: Bierce is a war veteran writing ironic realist tales (1890s about the 1860s); Crane, born 1871, never saw the Civil War and imagined it naturalistically. And "mark twain" is a depth call, not a family name.

Practice MC

When & context. 1890s–1910s (with Dreiser's An American Tragedy as a late 1925 summit). Intellectual inputs: Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" Social Darwinism, Taine's race–milieu–moment, and Zola's "experimental novel," which treated fiction as a laboratory. Social inputs: the 1893 depression, strikes, immigrant slums, the closing frontier, the Klondike gold rush (1897). Adjacent: Progressive-Era muckraking journalism (McClure's; Theodore Roosevelt coined "muckraker," disparagingly, in 1906, from Bunyan's man with the muck-rake).

What defines it. Pessimistic determinism: character and fate decided by heredity, environment, economics, and chance; humans as animals under thin varnish ("the brute within"); an indifferent universe (Crane's "The Open Boat"); plots of decline (McTeague, Hurstwood); documentary detail combined with extreme, even sensational situations — Norris insisted naturalism was closer to romance than to Howellsian realism of the "broken teacup." Settings: slum, battlefield, wilderness, market — laboratories of force.

Authors & works

• Stephen Crane (1871–1900) — minister's son, born six years after Appomattox. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893): Bowery slum determinism, self-published under the pseudonym "Johnston Smith." The Red Badge of Courage (1895): Henry Fleming's fear, flight, and accidental "red badge" (a rifle-butt blow from a fleeing Union soldier); battle rendered as impressionist sense-data and animal instinct; veterans praised its accuracy though Crane had seen no war. Shipwrecked en route to Cuba (the Commodore, January 1897) → "The Open Boat" (1897): four men, an indifferent sea, the oiler drowns; also "The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" (1898); proto-imagist free-verse volumes The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899). Died of tuberculosis at 28 in Badenweiler, Germany.
• Frank Norris (1870–1902) — studied at Berkeley and Harvard; Zola's loudest American disciple. McTeague (1899): the unlicensed Polk Street dentist, Trina's lottery gold and miser mania, murder, Death Valley handcuff finale (filmed by von Stroheim as Greed, 1924). The unfinished wheat trilogy "The Epic of the Wheat": The Octopus (1901, Southern Pacific railroad vs. San Joaquin ranchers), The Pit (1903, Chicago grain speculation); The Wolf never written — he died of appendicitis at 32. As a Doubleday reader he championed Sister Carrie. Essays: The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903).
• Jack London (1876–1916) — oyster pirate, sailor, tramp, Klondike prospector (1897–98); socialist lecturer and simultaneously a Spencer-and-Nietzsche enthusiast — the contradiction is the point. The Call of the Wild (1903): the dog Buck devolves/ascends to the wild (rights sold outright — a famously bad bargain); mirror novel White Fang (1906); The Sea-Wolf (1904, Wolf Larsen's superman brutality critiqued); "To Build a Fire" (definitive 1908 version: man freezes, dog survives — instinct beats reason; in the earlier 1902 boys'-magazine version the man lives); The Iron Heel (1908, dystopia); Martin Eden (1909, autobiographical writer-hero). The best-paid, most celebrity-branded American author of his day; died at 40.
• Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) — twelfth of thirteen children of poor German Catholic immigrants in Indiana; journalist. Sister Carrie (1900): Carrie Meeber drifts upward via Drouet and Hurstwood as Hurstwood sinks to suicide — desire and chance, no moral bookkeeping; Doubleday, Page honored the contract but buried the book (a few hundred copies sold; reissued 1907). Jennie Gerhardt (1911); the Cowperwood "Trilogy of Desire" (The Financier 1912, The Titan 1914, The Stoic posth. 1947), based on streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes. An American Tragedy (1925): Clyde Griffiths, the drowned Roberta, the electric chair — from the 1906 Chester Gillette–Grace Brown murder case; his greatest success. "Typhoon" (collected in Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories, 1927): a sheltered daughter of a rigid immigrant household, seduced and refused marriage, shoots her lover — upbringing, instinct, and tabloid "justice" as converging forces; late Dreiserian determinism in miniature. In 1930 the first American Nobel went to Sinclair Lewis, who in his acceptance speech named Dreiser as the writer who deserved it.
• Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) — The Jungle (serialized 1905 in the socialist Appeal to Reason; book 1906): Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus in Chicago's Packingtown; intended as a labor exposé, it ignited food-safety panic instead — the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act followed within months (1906). Sinclair: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Fellow muckrakers: Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company, 1904), Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the Cities, 1904). Sinclair's later career: Oil! (1927), Boston (1928, Sacco–Vanzetti), the EPIC campaign for California governor (1934), Pulitzer for Dragon's Teeth (1943) (→ topic 10).

Terms

• Determinism (biological / environmental / economic) — behavior and fate governed by instinct, heredity, milieu, and money rather than free will — the exam's sample definition: "people's behaviour is often driven by instinct rather than free will."
• Social Darwinism — Spencer's transfer of "survival of the fittest" to society.
• Atavism / "the brute within" — reversion to the animal under stress (McTeague, Wolf Larsen).
• Muckraker — Progressive-Era exposé journalist (TR's 1906 coinage via Bunyan).
• Plot of decline — naturalism's signature arc: Hurstwood, Maggie, McTeague.
• Literary impressionism — reality as flickering subjective sense-impressions (Crane).
• Experimental novel — Zola's program: novelist as scientist testing "temperaments" in controlled conditions.

MC facts

• The Jungle (1906) → workplace/food-safety legislation (Pure Food and Drug Act, Meat Inspection Act) — the official sample question's answer.
• The Red Badge of Courage 1895; Crane born 1871 — no war experience; died 1900 at 28.
• Maggie (1893) was self-published under a pseudonym; Sister Carrie (1900) was contract-published but unpromoted — two famous "suppressed" naturalist debuts.
• "To Build a Fire" exists in two versions: 1902 (man survives) and 1908 (man dies) — the 1908 one is canonical.
• Norris's wheat trilogy is incomplete: The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), The Wolf (never written; Norris died 1902).
• An American Tragedy (1925) is based on the 1906 Gillette–Brown case.
• Muckraker trio: Sinclair (meatpacking), Tarbell (Standard Oil), Steffens (city corruption).
• Frank Norris (as publisher's reader) championed Dreiser's Sister Carrie.

Trap warning

• For biological determinism, identify behaviour driven by instinct or inherited dispositions; for social determinism, identify pressure from upbringing, poverty or institutions. The sample's instinct-over-free-will option distinguishes the term from everyday determination. In a written explanation, specify the force shown by the passage instead of asserting that all Naturalist fiction abolishes choice.
• The Jungle's impact was legislative, not aesthetic — it did not shape Modernism, and it did not primarily change the English wordstock (official sample's distractors).

Practice MC

Official sample versus historical precision. The department’s sample offers “workplace safety legislation” as the relevant impact of The Jungle, against unrelated linguistic and Modernist alternatives. That is the intended choice within that set. For an open answer, be more precise: public reaction helped advance federal food and meat-inspection laws in 1906; do not rename those laws as worker-protection legislation. The FDA’s historical account explains this distinction.

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. WWI (US entry 1917) discredited the old certainties; the 1920s brought Prohibition (1920–33), the Jazz Age, and cheap-franc expatriate Paris around Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus and Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company; the 1929 Crash ended the party. Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins shepherded Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

What defines it. Formal experiment: stream of consciousness, multiple and unreliable narrators, fractured chronology, radical ellipsis; disillusionment with "big words" (glory, honor); critique of the American Dream; the epigraph Hemingway took from Stein — "You are all a lost generation." — named the cohort. Influences: James and Conrad's point-of-view technique, Joyce, Freud, Bergson.

Authors & works

• Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) — Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); mentor, collector, coiner of the label.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) — This Side of Paradise (1920); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922 — he popularized the term); The Great Gatsby (1925): Nick Carraway's framed narration, Gatsby's reinvented self, Daisy, the green light, the valley of ashes and Dr. T. J. Eckleburg's eyes — the American Dream perverted into money and nostalgia (the exam's sample open question); Tender Is the Night (1934); the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941). Died at 44, out of fashion.
• Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) — Red Cross ambulance driver wounded in Italy, 1918. In Our Time (1925, Nick Adams stories); The Sun Also Rises (1926, Jake Barnes, Brett, Pamplona); Men Without Women (1927) incl. "Hills Like White Elephants": a couple at a Spanish rail junction negotiating an "awfully simple operation" — abortion, never named; nearly all dialogue; the textbook of the iceberg theory (theory of omission — seven-eighths under water). A Farewell to Arms (1929); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940, Spanish Civil War); The Old Man and the Sea (1952; Pulitzer 1953); Nobel 1954. Style: short declarative sentences, concrete nouns, understatement.
• William Faulkner (1897–1962) — Oxford, Mississippi; invented Yoknapatawpha County. The Sound and the Fury (1929, four sections incl. Benjy's); As I Lay Dying (1930, 15 narrators); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936). "A Rose for Emily" (Forum, April 1930 — his first story in a national magazine): told by a communal "we," time deliberately scrambled, Miss Emily Grierson, Homer Barron, the arsenic, the gray hair on the pillow — Southern Gothic necrophilia as the town's own repressed history (→ topic 11). Nobel Prize for 1949 (presented 1950; "man will not merely endure: he will prevail"); Pulitzers for A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1963). Devices: stream of consciousness, multiple narration, dislocated chronology, symbolism.
• John Dos Passos (1896–1970) — Manhattan Transfer (1925); the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel 1930, 1919 1932, The Big Money 1936): Newsreel collages, Camera Eye stream of consciousness, capsule biographies — cinematic montage of a whole society.
• Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) — Winesburg, Ohio (1919): linked story cycle of small-town "grotesques"; mentored both Hemingway and Faulkner (who both later mocked him).
• Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) — Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922): satire of boosterish conformity ("Babbittry"); declined the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith; first American Nobel laureate in Literature (1930).

Terms — Lost Generation (Stein via Hemingway); Jazz Age (Fitzgerald); stream of consciousness (term from William James's psychology); iceberg theory / theory of omission; expatriate; story cycle; unreliable narrator; American Dream.

MC facts

• The Great Gatsby 1925; The Sun Also Rises 1926; "Hills Like White Elephants" in Men Without Women 1927; A Farewell to Arms 1929; The Sound and the Fury 1929.
• "You are all a lost generation" = Stein's remark, used by Hemingway as epigraph to The Sun Also Rises.
• American Nobel laureates in literature: Lewis 1930, O'Neill 1936, Pearl Buck 1938, Eliot 1948 (US-born, by then a British subject), Faulkner 1949, Hemingway 1954, Steinbeck 1962, Bellow 1976, I. B. Singer 1978, Brodsky 1987, Morrison 1993, Dylan 2016, Glück 2020.
• "A Rose for Emily" — Forum magazine, April 1930; Faulkner's first nationally published story.
• Hemingway: Pulitzer 1953 (The Old Man and the Sea), Nobel 1954; died by suicide 1961.
• Faulkner's county = Yoknapatawpha (seat: Jefferson), based on Lafayette County, Mississippi.

Trap warning

• The official sample: the device LEAST typical of Faulkner is linear chronology (multiple narration and symbolism are his stock in trade).
• Attribution chain: Stein said "lost generation," Hemingway printed it; Fitzgerald owns "Jazz Age." And Lost Generation (1920s Paris) ≠ Beat Generation (1950s America) (→ topic 10).

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. c. 1910–1945. Little magazines were the engine: Harriet Monroe's Poetry (Chicago, 1912) printed "In a Station of the Metro" (1913) and "Prufrock" (1915); also The Dial, The Little Review. Two poles: London/Paris expatriates (Pound, Eliot, H.D., Stein) versus poets of the American ground (Frost, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Sandburg). Pound's slogan: "Make it new."

What defines it. Imagism (c. 1912–17): direct treatment of the "thing," no superfluous word, musical phrase over metronome — the movement that broke Victorian rhetoric. Then divergence: Eliot's allusive, impersonal high modernism (objective correlative; "Tradition and the Individual Talent," 1919) vs. Williams's American-idiom concreteness ("No ideas but in things") vs. Frost's traditional forms hiding modern darkness; Stevens's philosophical fictions of imagination.

Authors & works

• Ezra Pound (1885–1972) — Idaho-born; London impresario of Imagism (christened "H.D., Imagiste"; anthology Des Imagistes, 1914; "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," 1913); "In a Station of the Metro" (1913, two lines, petals on a wet black bough); Cathay (1915); Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920); edited The Waste Land down by half — Eliot's dedication: "il miglior fabbro." Life project The Cantos (1917–69), incl. Canto XLV, "With Usura" (in The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 1937): liturgical anaphora ("with usura...") indicting usury as sin against nature and craft — no house of good stone, no painting made to endure, "CONTRA NATURAM"; economics (Social Credit) fused with aesthetics — the doctrine that led him to Mussolini's Italy. Wartime Rome Radio broadcasts → arrested for treason 1945, caged at Pisa (The Pisan Cantos, 1948), ruled unfit for trial, confined at St. Elizabeths 1946–58; the 1949 Bollingen Prize to The Pisan Cantos caused a national scandal.
• T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) — born St. Louis; London banker-critic; "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Poetry, 1915); The Waste Land (1922, dedicated to Pound); "The Hollow Men" (1925 — note: it sits on the British required list); Ash-Wednesday (1930); Four Quartets (1943). British subject and Anglo-Catholic from 1927; Nobel 1948. Critical coinages: objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, impersonal poetry.
• Robert Frost (1874–1963) — first books published in England: A Boy's Will (1913), North of Boston (1914), which opens with "Mending Wall": spring wall-repair ritual; the neighbor's inherited saw "Good fences make good neighbours" vs. the speaker's "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" — the poem weighs both, endorses neither. "The Road Not Taken" (1915; in Mountain Interval, 1916): the roads were worn "really about the same" — a wry self-portrait of retrospective myth-making, habitually misread as a hymn to individualism (Frost: "a tricky poem"). "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923). Four Pulitzers (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943 — still the record); recited "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. Blank verse, rhyme, New England speech; on free verse: like "playing tennis with the net down."
• William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) — lifelong pediatrician in Rutherford, NJ; Spring and All (1923, incl. "The Red Wheelbarrow"); "This Is Just to Say"; epic Paterson (1946–58); "No ideas but in things"; the American idiom, the variable foot; posthumous Pulitzer (1963, Pictures from Brueghel). Anti-Waste Land: Eliot's poem, he said, set American poetry back by handing it to the academics.
• Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) — Hartford insurance executive; Harmonium (1923: "Sunday Morning," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"); "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1934); Collected Poems (1954, Pulitzer 1955). Imagination vs. reality; poetry as the "supreme fiction" after the gods.
• E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) — Tulips and Chimneys (1923); typographic play, lowercase "i," syntax rearranged; satire ("next to of course god america i") beside lyric tenderness; WWI memoir The Enormous Room (1922) (→ topic 12).
• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) — Imagism's purest instrument ("Oread"); Sea Garden (1916); wartime Trilogy (1944–46).
• Marianne Moore (1887–1972) — Observations (1924); "Poetry" ("imaginary gardens with real toads in them"); syllabic stanzas, embedded quotations; Collected Poems (1951) took the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Bollingen; edited The Dial.
• Also — Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916: "Hog Butcher for the World"); Hart Crane (The Bridge, 1930 — an affirmative answer to The Waste Land); Edwin Arlington Robinson; Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915); Amy Lowell, who took over Imagism ("Amygism," Pound sneered). Harlem Renaissance poetry → topic 15.

Terms — Imagism; vorticism (Pound's next -ism, with BLAST); free verse; objective correlative (external facts that formula-trigger the intended emotion); impersonality; variable foot; syllabic verse; little magazine; high modernism.

MC facts

• Poetry magazine: Chicago, 1912, Harriet Monroe — launchpad of Imagism, "Prufrock," "Metro."
• 1922 = The Waste Land (and Joyce's Ulysses) — modernism's annus mirabilis.
• Frost's first two books came out in England; he holds four poetry Pulitzers; Kennedy inauguration 1961.
• "Mending Wall" opens North of Boston (1914); "The Road Not Taken" opens Mountain Interval (1916).
• "With Usura" = Canto XLV of Pound's Cantos (1937).
• Bollingen Prize 1949 to Pound (then held for treason) = the era's biggest literary controversy.
• Day jobs: Stevens (insurance lawyer/executive), Williams (physician) — a favorite trivia pairing.
• Eliot: born American, died British (naturalized 1927); Nobel 1948; claimed by both survey lists.

Trap warning

• Frost is modern but not experimental: "least typical of Frost" = free verse / fragmented collage; his tools are blank verse, rhyme, dialogue, dramatic monologue.
• Misreading traps: "Good fences make good neighbours" is the neighbor's proverb, questioned by the speaker; "The Road Not Taken" is ironic about the "difference." Also don't confuse William Carlos Williams with Tennessee Williams (→ topic 14).

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. The 1929 Crash → Great Depression, Dust Bowl migration, New Deal (WPA Federal Writers' Project employed writers); WWII; then postwar affluence, suburbia, the Cold War, and McCarthyism — answered in the 1950s–60s by youth alienation, the Beats, the counterculture, and the civil rights movement.

What defines it. Three successive registers: (1) 1930s social-protest and proletarian fiction — documentary realism on behalf of the dispossessed (Steinbeck, Wright, Farrell, Caldwell); (2) 1950s fiction of alienation inside prosperity (Salinger's phonies, Cheever's suburbs); (3) open revolt — the Beat Generation's spontaneity, Buddhism, jazz, and obscenity-trial battles, and confessional poetry's breach of decorum (madness, sex, family wounds, suicide).

Authors & works

• John Steinbeck (1902–1968) — Salinas, California; Of Mice and Men (1937, George and Lennie); The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Pulitzer 1940): the Joads from Oklahoma dust to California camps along Route 66; alternating "interchapters"; Tom Joad's farewell; the Rose of Sharon tableau ending; publicly burned and banned in Kern County. Cannery Row (1945); East of Eden (1952); Nobel 1962.
• Richard Wright — Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945): Depression-era protest at full force (→ topic 15 for details).
• J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) — The Catcher in the Rye (1951): Holden Caulfield's weekend flight from Pencey Prep through New York; "phonies," the red hunting hat, the catcher fantasy; a perennial target of school bans. Nine Stories (1953) opens with "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (The New Yorker, 1948): Muriel on the hotel phone; war-damaged Seymour Glass with little Sybil and the bananafish fable on the beach; the final sentence's pistol shot — postwar trauma sealed under resort small talk; first of the Glass family stories (Franny and Zooey, 1961). Withdrew to Cornish, New Hampshire; published nothing after 1965.
• The Beat Generation (Kerouac's term, c. 1948 — "beat" = beaten-down + beatific; John Clellon Holmes's article "This Is the Beat Generation," 1952) — Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets No. 4, 1956): "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"; the 1957 San Francisco obscenity trial (publisher Ferlinghetti acquitted — Judge Horn found redeeming social importance); Kaddish (1961). Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957, drafted on a 120-foot scroll in three weeks, 1951): Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady); "spontaneous prose"; The Dharma Bums (1958). William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (Paris 1959 / US 1962; cleared of obscenity in Massachusetts, 1966). Launch event: the Six Gallery reading, San Francisco, October 1955. Bridge to the counterculture: Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962).
• Confessional poetry (label coined by M. L. Rosenthal reviewing Lowell's Life Studies, 1959) — Robert Lowell (Life Studies, 1959; For the Union Dead, 1964); Sylvia Plath (1932–1963): The Colossus (1960); The Bell Jar (January 1963, under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"; Esther Greenwood's breakdown); died by suicide in February 1963; Ariel (1965, edited by Ted Hughes) incl. "The Applicant" (written October 1962): marriage as a sales pitch — the suited applicant, the wind-up wife ("A living doll"), the chorus "Will you marry it, marry it, marry it"; consumer idiom weaponized; also "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus"; Collected Poems (1981) won a posthumous Pulitzer (1982). Anne Sexton (Live or Die, Pulitzer 1967); John Berryman (77 Dream Songs, Pulitzer 1965).
• Also — Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933; The Day of the Locust, 1939 — Hollywood's grotesque underside); Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960; Pulitzer 1961): Scout, Atticus Finch, the Tom Robinson trial, Boo Radley — race and childhood in Depression Alabama (the Guterson connection → topic 13); Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) → topic 15.

Terms — proletarian novel; Dust Bowl / Okies; Beat Generation; spontaneous prose; obscenity trial; confessional poetry; counterculture; interchapter.

MC facts

• The Grapes of Wrath 1939, Pulitzer 1940; Steinbeck Nobel 1962.
• The Catcher in the Rye 1951; "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" = The New Yorker, 1948, first Glass story, ends in Seymour's suicide.
• Howl 1956; obscenity trial won 1957. On the Road published 1957 but drafted 1951.
• "Confessional" coined by Rosenthal about Lowell's Life Studies (1959).
• The Bell Jar appeared under a pseudonym weeks before Plath's death (Feb 1963); Ariel is posthumous (1965); "The Applicant" was written in her October 1962 burst.
• To Kill a Mockingbird: 1960, Pulitzer 1961, Lee's only novel until Go Set a Watchman (2015).

Trap warning

• Keep the three "generations" apart: Lost (1920s Paris expatriates), Beat (1950s San Francisco/New York), confessional poets (a school, not a "generation" — Lowell/Plath/Sexton/Berryman). MC options love to shuffle these.
• "The Applicant" is Plath, from Ariel — satirizing marriage as a transaction; don't misfile it as a Depression-era job poem (the title is bait) or attribute it to Sexton.

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. Mainly 1930s–1960s. The label "Southern Gothic" crystallized in the 1930s (Ellen Glasgow used it disparagingly of Faulkner and company); the mode descends from Poe and Hawthorne via Sherwood Anderson's "grotesques" (Winesburg, Ohio, 1919). Its ground: the defeated, decaying South — ruined plantation houses, rigid race and class codes, evangelical religion — but a New England branch (Jackson) proves the gothic is not region-locked.

What defines it. The grotesque: physically or spiritually deformed characters used as moral X-rays; decayed houses and towns as memory made architecture; violence erupting inside the everyday; race, gender, and class as haunting forces; religious extremity — O'Connor's South "Christ-haunted" rather than Christ-centered; dark comedy fused with horror; secrets kept by whole communities (the "we" of "A Rose for Emily").

Authors & works

• William Faulkner — the fountainhead: "A Rose for Emily" (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) — plantation dynasties as haunted houses (→ topic 8).
• Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) — Georgia; devout Roman Catholic; lupus killed her at 39. Wise Blood (1952, Hazel Motes and the "Church Without Christ"); A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955): the title story's Grandmother and The Misfit — grace arriving through violence; "Good Country People" (the stolen wooden leg); Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965, posthumous); The Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972, posthumously. The grotesque, she argued, is how you make the blind see: "to the hard of hearing you shout."
• Carson McCullers (1917–1967) — The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940, published at 23; the deaf-mute John Singer and his satellite lonely-hearts); Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941); The Member of the Wedding (1946, Frankie Addams); The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951, Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon) — loneliness, unrequitable love, androgyny, freaks.
• Truman Capote (1924–1984) — Alabama childhood beside Harper Lee (he is her Dill; she researched with him in Kansas). Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948); Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958, Holly Golightly); In Cold Blood (1966; serialized in The New Yorker 1965): the 1959 Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas — his self-proclaimed "nonfiction novel," fusing reportage with novelistic technique.
• Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) — "The Lottery" (The New Yorker, June 26, 1948): a sunny village's annual stoning, ritual scapegoating under bland civic procedure ("It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed) — it drew the most mail in the magazine's history to that date, much of it cancellations; The Haunting of Hill House (1959); We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Vermont settings — New England, not Southern, gothic.
• Kin & heirs — Eudora Welty ("A Worn Path"; Pulitzer 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter) — local color at the gothic's edge; Tennessee Williams's Blanche DuBois as gothic heroine (→ topic 14); later: Cormac McCarthy (Child of God, 1973; Blood Meridian, 1985) carries the mode forward.

Terms — Southern Gothic; grotesque (deformity as revelation — via Anderson's "The Book of the Grotesque"); the uncanny; nonfiction novel (Capote's term); scapegoat ritual ("The Lottery"); "Christ-haunted" South (O'Connor); memory-laden house (Usher → Emily's house → Hill House).

MC facts

• "The Lottery": The New Yorker, June 26, 1948 — record reader outrage; the ending withheld until the first stone.
• In Cold Blood (1966) = "nonfiction novel"; Kansas, 1959 Clutter murders.
• O'Connor: two novels, two story collections; Catholic; died 1964; posthumous NBA 1972.
• McCullers published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at 23 (1940).
• "A Rose for Emily" (1930) supplies the genre's checklist: decaying mansion, communal narrator, corpse behind a locked door.
• Capote and Harper Lee: childhood friends and research partners (Dill ↔ In Cold Blood fieldwork).

Trap warning

• Shirley Jackson is NOT Southern Gothic — her horrors are New England village and haunted-house gothic; a question filing "The Lottery" under the South is a trap.
• O'Connor's grotesque is theological (grace through violence), not gratuitous horror and not Poe's aesthetic terror; and In Cold Blood is fact-based reportage-as-novel, not fiction.

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. WWI: US entry 1917; the key witnesses served as volunteer ambulance or Red Cross men — Hemingway (wounded at Fossalta, Italy, 1918), Dos Passos, Cummings — and wrote the disillusion of the 1920s (→ topic 8). WWII: 1941–45 produced two waves — late-1940s/50s panoramic realism by veterans (Mailer, Jones, Wouk), then 1960s absurdist retrospection (Heller, Vonnegut) filtered through Cold War and Vietnam-era distrust; plus the reportage landmark of Hersey's Hiroshima and the postwar flowering of Jewish-American fiction (Malamud, Roth, Bellow).

What defines it. WWI: anti-heroic realism; the "separate peace" (Frederic Henry's desertion); abstract words — glory, honor, sacred — declared obscene beside concrete names of villages and rivers. WWII wave one: naturalist panorama of the citizen army as machine. Wave two: black humor and the absurd — war as self-perpetuating bureaucratic logic (the catch), trauma told through time-fracture and science fiction (Vonnegut), metafiction admitting the telling's impossibility.

Authors & works

• WWI — Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929): Lieutenant Frederic Henry and nurse Catherine Barkley, the Caporetto retreat, the rain-soaked ending; The Sun Also Rises (1926) as aftermath (Jake's wound). Dos Passos, Three Soldiers (1921); E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room (1922, French detention-camp memoir); Willa Cather, One of Ours (Pulitzer 1923); Faulkner, Soldiers' Pay (1926).
• Norman Mailer (1923–2007) — The Naked and the Dead (1948, at 25): a Pacific-island platoon, General Cummings and Sergeant Croft, Dos Passos-style "Time Machine" flashbacks; instant classic of the realist wave.
• James Jones (1921–1977) — From Here to Eternity (1951; National Book Award 1952): Private Prewitt at Schofield Barracks before Pearl Harbor; The Thin Red Line (1962, Guadalcanal).
• Herman Wouk — The Caine Mutiny (1951; Pulitzer 1952): Captain Queeg and the strawberries.
• Joseph Heller (1923–1999) — Catch-22 (1961; he flew 60 missions as a B-25 bombardier): Captain Yossarian on "Pianosa"; ever-rising mission counts; Milo Minderbinder's syndicate; Snowden's secret spilled at last; the title rule — asking to be grounded for insanity proves you sane (retitled from Catch-18 to avoid Leon Uris's Mila 18); "catch-22" entered the dictionary; chronology looped and scrambled.
• Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) — POW survivor of the Dresden firebombing (February 1945) in an underground meat locker; Slaughterhouse-Five (1969): Billy Pilgrim "unstuck in time," Tralfamadorian fatalism, "So it goes." after every death; a metafictional first chapter on the impossibility of writing an anti-war book (the alternative title: The Children's Crusade).
• John Hersey — Hiroshima (1946): six survivors' hours; it filled the entire August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker; A Bell for Adano (Pulitzer 1945).
• Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) — "Armistice" (written c. 1940, when he was 26; unpublished for half a century, it appeared posthumously in The People and Uncollected Stories, 1989): Brooklyn Jewish grocer Morris Lieberman follows radio news of the fall of France (the June 1940 armistice); boyhood pogrom memory; the gloating pro-German delivery driver Gus — anti-Semitism on the American home front. Malamud's canon: The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), The Magic Barrel (NBA 1959), The Fixer (1966; Pulitzer + NBA).
• Philip Roth (1933–2018) — "Defender of the Faith" (The New Yorker, 1959; in Goodbye, Columbus, which won the 1960 National Book Award): Sergeant Nathan Marx, decorated combat veteran back at a Missouri training camp in 1945, versus trainee Sheldon Grossbart, who works their shared Jewishness for exemptions — conscience versus tribal loyalty; the story angered parts of the Jewish community, foreshadowing Roth's career-long quarrel (→ topic 13).
• War poetry — Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1945): five lines from womb to state to "loosed from its dream of life"; "they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

Terms — separate peace; black humor; the absurd; catch-22 (self-sealing rule); metafiction (Vonnegut's chapter one); nonlinear time / "unstuck in time"; home-front story; Jewish-American fiction.

MC facts

• The WWI novelists were ambulance/Red Cross men: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings.
• A Farewell to Arms = WWI Italian front; For Whom the Bell Tolls = Spanish Civil War — different wars.
• The Naked and the Dead 1948; From Here to Eternity 1951 (NBA 1952); The Caine Mutiny Pulitzer 1952.
• Catch-22 1961 — was almost Catch-18 (Uris's Mila 18 forced the change).
• Slaughterhouse-Five 1969 — Dresden, February 1945, witnessed by POW Vonnegut; refrain "So it goes."
• Hersey's Hiroshima took over an entire New Yorker issue (Aug 31, 1946).
• "Armistice": written c. 1940, published posthumously 1989 — Malamud's earliest surviving war reflection.
• "Defender of the Faith": 1959, in Goodbye, Columbus (NBA 1960).

Trap warning

• Match war to book: Heller = WWII air war Italy (1961); Vonnegut = Dresden (1969); Mailer = Pacific (1948); Jones = Pearl Harbor-era Hawaii (1951); Hemingway's Farewell = WWI Italy (1929). Questions love swapping Heller/Vonnegut and the two Hemingway wars.
• The realist wave (Mailer, Jones, Wouk — late 40s/early 50s) precedes the absurdist wave (Heller, Vonnegut — 1960s); reversing the order is a classic error.

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. c. 1960–2000s: Cold War paranoia, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, television and consumer saturation; French theory and Lyotard's "incredulity toward metanarratives"; the 1965 Immigration Act, civil rights, and the campus "canon wars" opened American literature to voices the old canon excluded.

What defines it. Postmodernism: metafiction and self-reflexivity; irony, parody, pastiche; high and low culture blended; paranoia and conspiracy as plot engines; encyclopedic maximalism (Pynchon) against minimalism ("dirty realism" — Carver); history rewritten as historiographic metafiction. The multicultural canon: memory, hyphenated identity, oral tradition, and magical realism (via García Márquez) entering the mainstream — Native American Renaissance, Chicano/a, Asian American, and African American flowerings (→ topic 15).

Authors & works — postmodernists

• Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) — Russian-born; Lolita (Paris 1955, US 1958): Humbert Humbert's seductive unreliable confession; Pnin (1957); Pale Fire (1962): a 999-line poem plus a madman's commentary — the pattern-book of metafictional form.
• John Barth (1930–2024) — The Sot-Weed Factor (1960); Lost in the Funhouse (1968); the essays "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) and "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980) — postmodernism's in-house theory.
• Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) — total recluse; V. (1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): Oedipa Maas and the Trystero postal conspiracy — paranoia or pattern?; Gravity's Rainbow (1973): V-2 rockets, Tyrone Slothrop, entropy — shared the 1974 National Book Award, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's unanimous choice (no fiction prize given); Mason & Dixon (1997).
• Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) — Snow White (1967); collage-fragment short stories ("The Balloon").
• Don DeLillo (b. 1936) — White Noise (1985, NBA): Hitler Studies, the Airborne Toxic Event, the fear-of-death drug; Libra (1988, Oswald); Underworld (1997).
• Others — William Gaddis (J R, NBA 1976); Robert Coover; Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, 1985–86); Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller (→ topic 12); David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996) marking the post-postmodern turn.
• Counter-current: realists & minimalists — Raymond Carver (1938–1988): pared-down working-class stories (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 1981; Cathedral, 1983) — "dirty realism"; Saul Bellow (Nobel 1976; The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Herzog, 1964; Humboldt's Gift, Pulitzer 1976); John Updike (Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy — Pulitzers 1982 and 1991); John Cheever; Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint, 1969; American Pastoral, Pulitzer 1998).

Authors & works — multicultural canon

• Native American Renaissance — N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), House Made of Dawn (1968; Pulitzer 1969 — the breakthrough); Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Ceremony (1977); Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Love Medicine (1984, NBCC; later The Round House, NBA 2012; The Night Watchman, Pulitzer 2021); Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (NBA for Young People's Literature, 2007).
• Asian American — Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976, NBCC): memoir crossed with Chinese "talk-story"; Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989): four mother-daughter pairs around the mahjong table; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (Pulitzer 2000).
• Chicana — Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984): Esperanza's vignettes, Chicago barrio.
• African American — Morrison, Walker, and the whole line → topic 15 (Morrison's Beloved is also the era's key magical-realist and historiographic-metafiction landmark).
• Required contemporary texts — David Guterson (b. 1956): Snow Falling on Cedars (1994; PEN/Faulkner Award 1995): San Piedro Island, Puget Sound, 1954 — Japanese American fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto tried for Carl Heine's death; reporter Ishmael Chambers and his lost first love Hatsue; wartime internment (Manzanar) in flashback; courtroom drama against communal prejudice — Guterson wrote it while teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to high-schoolers, and the kinship shows (the exam's sample open question). Michael Cunningham (b. 1952): The Hours (1998; Pulitzer + PEN/Faulkner 1999): one day each for three women — Virginia Woolf drafting Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 Richmond, reader Laura Brown in 1949 Los Angeles, and "Mrs. Dalloway" Clarissa Vaughan in 1990s New York tending the AIDS-stricken poet Richard; The Hours was Woolf's own working title for Mrs. Dalloway — postmodern intertextual homage (2002 film).

Terms — postmodernism; metafiction; historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon); pastiche; paranoid plot; maximalism vs. minimalism; dirty realism; magical realism (supernatural narrated matter-of-factly within realism); intertextuality; canon wars; unreliable narrator (Humbert).

MC facts

• Lolita: Paris 1955 (Olympia Press), US 1958; Nabokov wrote it in English.
• Gravity's Rainbow: NBA 1974; Pulitzer vetoed by the advisory board — no 1974 fiction award.
• "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) = Barth's postmodern manifesto.
• House Made of Dawn Pulitzer 1969 = first Pulitzer novel by a Native American; opened the Native American Renaissance.
• Kingston's The Woman Warrior 1976; Tan's The Joy Luck Club 1989; Cisneros's Mango Street 1984.
• Snow Falling on Cedars: PEN/Faulkner 1995; internment + murder trial; The Hours: Pulitzer 1999; rewrites Mrs. Dalloway.
• Bellow: Nobel 1976, three NBAs, Pulitzer for Humboldt's Gift (1976).

Trap warning

• Metafiction (fiction about its own fictionality — Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut's chapter one) ≠ magical realism (impossible events told deadpan inside realism — Beloved, García Márquez). Definitional MC loves to swap them.
• The Hours reworks Mrs. Dalloway — not To the Lighthouse or Orlando; and Snow Falling on Cedars concerns Japanese American internment in Washington State — not Chinese immigration, not the South.

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. The 19th-century stage was melodrama; serious American drama begins with the Little Theatre movement — above all the Provincetown Players (founded 1915), who staged O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff in 1916 and Susan Glaspell's Trifles the same year. Broadway's golden age (1920s–50s) runs through the Group Theatre (1931; Method acting; Odets's Waiting for Lefty, 1935) to the postwar Williams–Miller peak; Off-Broadway (1950s) and Off-Off-Broadway open space for Albee and the avant-garde; the 1970s–90s bring Shepard, Mamet, August Wilson, and Kushner.

What defines it. O'Neill imports tragedy and European expressionism; Williams's lyrical "plastic theatre" and memory play; Miller's tragedy of the common man and social conscience; Albee's American absurdism savaging family myths; Shepard's mythic broken West; Mamet's percussive con-man vernacular ("Mamet-speak"); Wilson's decade-by-decade African American history cycle; Kushner's political epic fantasia.

Authors & works

• Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) — actor's son, born in a Times Square hotel. Sea plays for the Provincetown Players (1916); Beyond the Horizon (1920, Pulitzer — his first of four: 1920, 1922 Anna Christie, 1928 Strange Interlude, 1957 Long Day's Journey into Night, posthumous); expressionist The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922); Desire Under the Elms (1924); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931, the Oresteia in post-Civil-War New England); lone comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933); The Iceman Cometh (1946, Harry Hope's saloon of pipe dreams); Long Day's Journey into Night (written c. 1941, released to the stage 1956): the four haunted Tyrones = the O'Neills. Nobel Prize 1936 — still the only American playwright so honored.
• Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) — Our Town (1938, Pulitzer): Grover's Corners, the Stage Manager, bare stage, Emily's return; The Skin of Our Teeth (1942, Pulitzer 1943); also the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Pulitzer 1928) — the only writer with Pulitzers in both fiction and drama.
• Tennessee Williams (1911–1983; born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi; family moved to St. Louis in 1918) — The Glass Menagerie (1944 Chicago / 1945 Broadway): the "memory play," Amanda, fragile Laura's glass animals, Tom, the Gentleman Caller. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; Pulitzer 1948; Kazan's production with Brando): faded Belle Rêve schoolteacher Blanche DuBois arrives at Stella and Stanley Kowalski's Elysian Fields flat in New Orleans; the paper lantern over the bare bulb, the poker night, Mitch, the birthday truth-telling, the rape, and the exit line "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"; desire vs. brute reality, the Old South's ghost expiring in the New. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer): Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy, "mendacity"; The Night of the Iguana (1961).
• Arthur Miller (1915–2005) — All My Sons (1947); Death of a Salesman (1949; Pulitzer + Tony): Willy Loman, Biff, Linda's "attention must be paid," the Requiem — tragedy of the common man (his essay of the same year); The Crucible (1953): Salem 1692 as allegory of McCarthyism (John Proctor's name); Miller himself defied HUAC (1956; contempt conviction 1957, reversed 1958); A View from the Bridge (1955); married Marilyn Monroe (1956–61; The Misfits screenplay).
• Edward Albee (1928–2016) — The Zoo Story (1959, premiered in West Berlin); The American Dream (1961); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962): George and Martha's all-night "fun and games," the imaginary son killed at dawn — Tony 1963, but the Pulitzer trustees overrode the drama jury and gave no 1963 award; Pulitzers later for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), Three Tall Women (1994).
• Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) — A Raisin in the Sun (1959): the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway; the Younger family, a Chicago kitchenette, Mama's plant, Walter Lee's liquor-store dream, the move to Clybourne Park; title from Hughes's "Harlem" ("What happens to a dream deferred?"); New York Drama Critics' Circle Award (its youngest and first Black winner); died at 34.
• Sam Shepard (1943–2017) — family trilogy Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978; Pulitzer 1979), True West (1980, the two brothers swap selves) — the American West as broken myth.
• David Mamet (b. 1947) — American Buffalo (1975); Glengarry Glen Ross (1983 London / 1984 US; Pulitzer 1984): real-estate salesmen, the leads, "Always be closing"; Oleanna (1992).
• August Wilson (1945–2005) — the Pittsburgh (Century) Cycle: ten plays, one per decade of Black 20th-century life, incl. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987; Pulitzer + Tony — ex-Negro-Leagues slugger Troy Maxson), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990; Pulitzer) (→ topic 15).
• Tony Kushner (b. 1956) — Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Millennium Approaches, Pulitzer 1993; Perestroika): AIDS-era America, Prior Walter's angel, Roy Cohn.
• Also — Susan Glaspell (Trifles, 1916); Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty, 1935); Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles, Pulitzer + Tony 1989); Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, Pulitzer 2002 — first African American woman to win the drama Pulitzer).

Terms — expressionism (distorted subjective staging — The Hairy Ape); memory play (Glass Menagerie); plastic theatre (Williams: set, sound, light as poetic language); tragedy of the common man (Miller); theatre of the absurd, American branch (Albee); Method acting / Group Theatre; Off-Broadway; play cycle (Wilson).

MC facts

• O'Neill: Nobel 1936 (the only American playwright); four Pulitzers; Long Day's Journey staged and Pulitzered posthumously (1956/57).
• Pulitzer pairs: Streetcar 1948 (Williams) and Death of a Salesman 1949 (Miller) in consecutive years; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1955.
• The Crucible (1953) = Salem 1692 standing for McCarthyism; Miller faced HUAC himself in 1956.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was denied the 1963 Pulitzer (no drama award that year).
• A Raisin in the Sun (1959) = first Broadway play by a Black woman; title from Langston Hughes.
• Wilson's cycle: ten plays / ten decades; two Pulitzers (Fences, The Piano Lesson).
• Angels in America Pulitzer 1993; Wilder = Pulitzers in two genres.

Trap warning

• Who-wrote-what is the exam's bread and butter: Streetcar/Menagerie/Cat = Tennessee Williams; Salesman/Crucible = Miller; Virginia Woolf/Zoo Story = Albee; Our Town = Wilder; Raisin = Hansberry; Fences = August Wilson.
• Distinguish the Williamses and Wilsons: Tennessee Williams (playwright) ≠ William Carlos Williams (poet-doctor); August Wilson (Pittsburgh Cycle) ≠ Lanford Wilson (another playwright) ≠ Thornton Wilder.

Practice MC

Required-text practice: American Texts II — form, themes, context and model answers.

When & context. A continuous line from colonial verse through antebellum slave narratives, the post-Reconstruction Washington–Du Bois debate, the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance (1920s), mid-century protest and modernism, the Black Arts Movement (1965–75), the canonical flowering of Morrison and Walker, to today's Whitehead, Ward, and Coates. The tradition theorizes itself: double consciousness, the color line, signifying.

What defines it. Literacy as liberation (the slave narrative's core); the vernacular resources of spirituals, blues, jazz, sermon, and folktale versus mastery of "high" forms (the Hughes–Cullen debate); double consciousness (Du Bois: "two-ness... two souls, two thoughts... in one dark body"); passing and the color line; memory and the neo-slave narrative; community as chorus (Hurston's porch, Morrison's towns, Wilson's cycle → topic 14).

Authors & works (the line, chronologically)

• Firsts — Lucy Terry, "Bars Fight" (composed 1746, printed 1855): earliest known poem by an African American; Jupiter Hammon: first published African American poet (broadside "An Evening Thought," 1761); Phillis Wheatley: first book by an African American (Poems on Various Subjects, London 1773; "On Being Brought from Africa to America").
• Slave narratives — Equiano (1789) → Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) (details → topic 4) → Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Fiction firsts: William Wells Brown, Clotel (London, 1853): first African American novel; Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig (1859): first novel by a Black woman published in the US.
• Turn of the century — Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Compromise address (1895), Up from Slavery (1901) — vocational accommodationism; vs. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk (1903) — "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," double consciousness, the "Talented Tenth"; co-founded the NAACP (1909) and edited The Crisis; died in Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington. Paul Laurence Dunbar ("We Wear the Mask"; dialect and standard verse; championed by Howells; his "Sympathy" — "I know why the caged bird sings" — gave Angelou her title); Charles W. Chesnutt (The Conjure Woman, 1899; first African American fiction in the Atlantic, 1887); James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912, published anonymously; God's Trombones, 1927; "Lift Every Voice and Sing").

• Harlem Renaissance (c. 1919–mid-1930s; fueled by the Great Migration; program: Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, 1925, grown from the March 1925 Harlem number of Survey Graphic) —

  • Langston Hughes (1902–1967): "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (The Crisis, 1921); "I, Too" — first published in Survey Graphic, March 1925, then collected in The Weary Blues (1926): "I, too, sing America" — the darker brother sent to eat in the kitchen answers Whitman's "I Hear America Singing"; manifesto "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926); blues and jazz poetics; Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951, incl. "Harlem": "What happens to a dream deferred?").
  • Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960): Eatonville, Florida; Boas-trained anthropologist (Mules and Men, 1935); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Janie Crawford's three marriages, the pear tree, the hurricane; frame-tale porch talk and free indirect vernacular; panned by Richard Wright, she died poor and unmarked — Alice Walker placed her gravestone (1973) and relaunched her with "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (Ms., 1975).
  • Claude McKay (Jamaican-born): "If We Must Die" (1919, sonnet answering the Red Summer riots); Harlem Shadows (1922); Home to Harlem (1928).
  • Countee Cullen: Color (1925), "Yet Do I Marvel" — Keatsian formalist ("a poet, not a Negro poet"), Hughes's implicit opposite.
  • Also: Jean Toomer's genre-hybrid Cane (1923); Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929).

• Mid-century — Richard Wright (1908–1960): Uncle Tom's Children (1938); Native Son (1940): Bigger Thomas, Chicago's South Side — a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, unprecedented for a Black author; Black Boy (1945); "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937). Ralph Ellison (1913–1994): Invisible Man (1952): "I am an invisible man."; the battle royal, the Brotherhood, the light-filled basement — National Book Award 1953, the first to a Black novelist; his only novel in his lifetime (Juneteenth, posth. 1999). James Baldwin (1924–1987): Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Notes of a Native Son (1955; the essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," 1949, dismantled both Stowe and Wright); Giovanni's Room (1956); The Fire Next Time (1963). Gwendolyn Brooks: Annie Allen (1949) won the 1950 Pulitzer — the first Pulitzer awarded to an African American in any category; "We Real Cool" (1960).

• Black Arts Movement (c. 1965–75; the aesthetic wing of Black Power) — Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones, 1934–2014): the Obie-winning play Dutchman (1964, Lula and Clay on the subway); founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem (1965, after Malcolm X's assassination); Larry Neal's manifesto "The Black Arts Movement" (1968); Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti; community theatre, Black journals, a "Black Aesthetic."
• The canonical generation — Toni Morrison (1931–2019): editor at Random House while writing The Bluest Eye (1970): Lorain, Ohio, 1941; Pecola Breedlove's prayer for blue eyes; narrated largely by Claudia MacTeer against a disintegrating Dick-and-Jane primer text — internalized racism anatomized; Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977, NBCC); Beloved (1987; Pulitzer 1988): Sethe, the ghost-daughter, 124 Bluestone Road — from the Margaret Garner case; Nobel 1993 — the first Black woman awarded the literature Nobel. Alice Walker (b. 1944): The Color Purple (1982; Pulitzer + NBA 1983 — the first Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer): Celie's letters to God and to Nettie, Shug Avery; coined "womanist." Maya Angelou (1928–2014): I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Clinton's 1993 inauguration — the first inaugural poet since Frost (1961). Also: Audre Lorde; Ntozake Shange (for colored girls..., 1976); Rita Dove (Thomas and Beulah, Pulitzer 1987; US Poet Laureate 1993–95, the first African American in the retitled post); August Wilson (→ topic 14).
• Contemporary — Colson Whitehead (b. 1969): The Underground Railroad (2016; NBA 2016 + Pulitzer 2017 — the railroad literalized, alternate-history states) and The Nickel Boys (2019; Pulitzer 2020 — the Dozier reform school): one of only four novelists with two fiction Pulitzers (with Tarkington, Faulkner, Updike). Jesmyn Ward (b. 1977): Salvage the Bones (NBA 2011, Katrina) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (NBA 2017, ghost-ridden Mississippi road novel) — the first woman with two fiction National Book Awards. Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975): Between the World and Me (2015; NBA nonfiction) — a letter to his son, consciously after Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).

Terms — double consciousness; the color line; Talented Tenth; New Negro; Harlem Renaissance; passing; signifying (coded, revisionary Black rhetoric — Gates's The Signifying Monkey, 1988); Black Arts Movement / Black Aesthetic; womanist; neo-slave narrative (Beloved, The Underground Railroad).

MC facts

• Firsts ladder: Hammon first published poem (1761) → Wheatley first book (1773) → Clotel first novel (1853) → Our Nig first novel by a Black woman in the US (1859).
• Up from Slavery 1901 (Washington) vs. The Souls of Black Folk 1903 (Du Bois) — accommodation vs. agitation; Du Bois co-founded the NAACP (1909).
• "I, Too": Survey Graphic, March 1925 → The Weary Blues, 1926; it answers Whitman.
• Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937; Native Son 1940; Invisible Man 1952 (NBA 1953); Go Tell It on the Mountain 1953.
• Brooks: first African American Pulitzer (1950, poetry); Walker: first Black woman fiction Pulitzer (1983); Morrison: first Black woman Nobel (1993); Parks: first Black woman drama Pulitzer (2002).
• The Bluest Eye = Morrison's debut, 1970; Beloved Pulitzer 1988; Nobel 1993.
• Black Arts checklist: Baraka's Dutchman 1964; BARTS founded 1965; Neal's manifesto 1968.
• Contemporary doubles: Whitehead — two Pulitzers (2017, 2020); Ward — two NBAs (2011, 2017); Coates — NBA nonfiction (2015).

Trap warning

• Harlem Renaissance (1920s: Hughes, Hurston, McKay, Cullen — "New Negro" flowering within integration-era hopes) ≠ Black Arts Movement (1965–75: Baraka, Sanchez, Neal — separatist, revolutionary, tied to Black Power). Swapping names or decades between them is the classic question.
• Keep the "firsts" precise: Hammon = first published poet (1761); Wheatley = first book (1773). And Hughes's "I, Too" replies to Whitman — not to Emerson or Frost; The Weary Blues (1926) is where it was collected, not first printed (Survey Graphic, March 1925).

Practice MC

Foundational dates (topics 1–2)

• 1607 Jamestown; 1620 Plymouth & Mayflower Compact; 1630 Massachusetts Bay ("city upon a hill")
• 1640 Bay Psalm Book — first book printed in British North America
• 1650 Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse — first published colonial poet
• 1662 The Day of Doom — the "first American bestseller"
• 1682 Rowlandson — the captivity narrative
• 1741 "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (Great Awakening)
• 1776 Common Sense (January) → Declaration of Independence (July 4)
• 1782 Crèvecoeur's Letters ("What Is an American?")
• 1787 The Contrast (first staged comedy); 1789 The Power of Sympathy (first novel); 1798 Wieland (Gothic)

19th-century core dates (topics 3–7)

• 1819–20 The Sketch Book ("Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow")
• 1826 The Last of the Mohicans
• 1836 Nature; 1837 "The American Scholar"
• 1841 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (first detective story); Essays: First Series
• 1843 "The Black Cat" & "The Birth-Mark" (same year, rival gothic modes)
• 1845 Douglass's Narrative; "The Raven"; Woman in the Nineteenth Century
• 1850 The Scarlet Letter → 1851 Moby-Dick → 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin → 1853 "Bartleby" → 1854 Walden → 1855 Leaves of Grass + Hiawatha (the "American Renaissance" run)
• 1865 Drum-Taps ("When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer")
• 1876 Tom Sawyer; 1884/85 Huckleberry Finn (UK/US)
• 1890 Dickinson's Poems (posthumous; "I Never Saw a Moor" as "Chartless"); "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
• 1893 Maggie + "Désirée's Baby"; 1894 "The Story of an Hour" + "A Respectable Woman"
• 1895 The Red Badge of Courage; 1899 McTeague + The Awakening; 1900 Sister Carrie

20th-century core dates (topics 8–15)

• 1906 The Jungle → Pure Food and Drug Act + Meat Inspection Act
• 1912 Poetry founded (Chicago); 1913 "In a Station of the Metro"
• 1914 North of Boston ("Mending Wall"); 1915 "Prufrock" + "The Road Not Taken" (collected 1916)
• 1919 Winesburg, Ohio; 1922 The Waste Land; 1923 Harmonium + Spring and All + Cane
• 1925 The Great Gatsby; The New Negro; "I, Too" (Survey Graphic, March); An American Tragedy; Manhattan Transfer
• 1926 The Sun Also Rises + The Weary Blues; 1927 "Hills Like White Elephants" (Men Without Women) + "Typhoon" (Chains)
• 1929 The Sound and the Fury + A Farewell to Arms + the Crash
• 1930 "A Rose for Emily" (Forum, April)
• 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God + Of Mice and Men + "With Usura" (Canto XLV)
• 1939 The Grapes of Wrath; 1940 Native Son; c. 1940 "Armistice" written (published 1989)
• 1945 Black Boy; "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
• 1948 "The Lottery" + "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" + The Naked and the Dead
• 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire (Pulitzer 1948); 1949 Death of a Salesman
• 1951 The Catcher in the Rye; 1952 Invisible Man; 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
• 1955/1958 Lolita (Paris/US); 1956 Howl; 1957 On the Road
• 1959 A Raisin in the Sun + "Defender of the Faith" + Life Studies
• 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird; 1961 Catch-22; 1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• 1963 The Bell Jar (February: Plath's death); 1965 Ariel ("The Applicant", written Oct 1962)
• 1966 In Cold Blood + The Crying of Lot 49; 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five + I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• 1970 The Bluest Eye; 1973 Gravity's Rainbow; 1976 The Woman Warrior
• 1982 The Color Purple; 1987 Beloved; 1993 Angels in America Pulitzer & Morrison's Nobel
• 1994 Snow Falling on Cedars (PEN/Faulkner 1995); 1998 The Hours (Pulitzer 1999)

American Nobel laureates in Literature

• 1930 Sinclair Lewis (first American) · 1936 Eugene O'Neill (only playwright) · 1938 Pearl S. Buck · 1948 T. S. Eliot (US-born, British subject) · 1949 William Faulkner (presented 1950) · 1954 Ernest Hemingway · 1962 John Steinbeck · 1976 Saul Bellow · 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer · 1987 Joseph Brodsky · 1993 Toni Morrison (first Black woman) · 2016 Bob Dylan · 2020 Louise Glück

Firsts checklist

• First book printed in the colonies: Bay Psalm Book (1640) · first colonial poetry book: Bradstreet (1650)
• "First American bestseller": The Day of Doom (1662) · first bestselling American novel: Charlotte Temple (1791/94)
• First American novel: The Power of Sympathy (1789) · first staged American comedy: The Contrast (1787)
• African American firsts: published poet — Hammon (1761); book — Wheatley (1773); novel — Clotel (1853); novel by a Black woman in the US — Our Nig (1859)
• First detective story: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
• First international American literary celebrity: Irving · first American in Poets' Corner: Longfellow (1884)
• Pulitzer firsts: first woman (fiction) — Wharton (1921); first African American — Brooks (1950, poetry); first Black woman (fiction) — Walker (1983); first Black woman (drama) — Parks (2002); first Native American novelist — Momaday (1969)
• First Black National Book Award winner (fiction): Ellison (1953) · first Broadway play by a Black woman: A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• Two-time record holders: Whitehead — two fiction Pulitzers (2017, 2020); Ward — first woman with two fiction NBAs (2011, 2017); Frost — four poetry Pulitzers; O'Neill — four drama Pulitzers

Continue with the British Survey, American Texts I, or American Texts II. Use Drill to practise recall of the dates and works above.