American Texts I

• What it is: A letter to the editor of Philadelphia's Federal Gazette, dated 23 March 1790 and signed "Historicus" — Franklin's last public writing (he died on 17 April 1790). It responds to Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who had defended slavery in the House of Representatives against Quaker abolitionist petitions. "Historicus" claims Jackson's speech resembles one delivered a century earlier (allegedly in 1687, cited to a nonexistent source, "Martin's Account of his Consulship") by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers, opposing a petition by a sect called the Erika, or Purists, to abolish piracy and the enslavement of Christians. The invented Algerian speech reproduces the standard pro-slavery arguments point for point — who will cultivate the land, the slaves are better off than at home, they cannot safely be freed, religion sanctions the practice — with white Christians as the slaves. The Divan rejects the petition, and Historicus dryly concludes that Congress, guided by similar reasoning, will probably do the same.
• Themes & motifs: Reductio ad absurdum of pro-slavery logic; self-interest masquerading as principle and piety; role reversal (enslaved Christians) as the engine of moral recognition; the universality of rationalization across cultures and religions.
• Form & devices: Literary hoax with a deadpan documentary frame (fake date, fake source, fake speaker — authenticating apparatus parodied); structural irony: the reader rejects the Algerian's logic and is trapped into rejecting Jackson's; verbal irony in the polite closing; the pseudonym "Historicus" mock-lends scholarly authority. Direct line from Swift's A Modest Proposal — satire by monstrous analogy rather than open argument.
• Context & significance: Enlightenment satire in the service of abolition: reason tests an argument by transposing it. Franklin was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (from 1787), and the 1790 petitions to the first Congress were its work; the essay turns his last weeks into a public political act. It also shows the 18th-century Barbary corsair context (Muslim states enslaving European captives), which made the reversal instantly legible.

• Remember:

  • Federal Gazette, 23 March 1790; signed "Historicus"; Franklin died 17 April 1790 — his final public writing.
  • Parodies the pro-slavery speech of James Jackson of Georgia in the House of Representatives.
  • Invented speaker: Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, of the Divan of Algiers, supposedly in 1687, against the petition of the Erika ("Purists").
  • The satire answers Quaker/abolitionist petitions debated in the first US Congress in 1790.

• Quotable: The Divan's resolution: "The Doctrine, that Plundering and Enslaving the Christians is unjust, is at best problematical; but that it is the Interest of this State to continue the Practice, is clear; therefore let the Petition be rejected."

Exam angles

• What it is: A short essay written during Franklin's diplomatic years in France and printed on his private press at Passy in 1784. It opens by rejecting the label of the title — "savage" merely names a difference of manners — and then strings together anecdotes contrasting Native American courtesy with white rudeness. The Iroquois politely decline the Virginians' offer (made after the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster) to educate six of their youths at the College of William and Mary, observing that college-bred young men return good for nothing as hunters, warriors, or counsellors — and counter-offer to educate a dozen Virginian sons and "make men of them." A Swedish minister preaches the fall of man; the Susquehanna elders courteously accept his "story" and reciprocate with their own maize-origin myth, at which the minister explodes — revealing who actually lacks manners. Finally the Iroquois orator Canasatego concludes from a Sunday visit to an Albany church (where a merchant afterwards lowers his beaver price) that whites meet weekly to learn how to cheat Indians, and contrasts Indian hospitality to strangers with the white demand for money.
• Themes & motifs: Cultural relativism — politeness, civility, and religion look different from each side of the frontier; hospitality as the true measure of civilization; European ethnocentrism and religious intolerance satirized; conversation and council manners (never interrupt) versus the noisy British House of Commons.
• Form & devices: Essay built of juxtaposed anecdotes posing as neutral ethnographic "remarks"; the irony is structural — Franklin rarely editorializes, letting the Indians' courteous speeches condemn the whites; ironic redefinition of key terms (savage, civility, politeness); the noble-savage convention (cf. Montaigne's "Of Cannibals") used as a mirror for Europe rather than as anthropology.
• Context & significance: A key Enlightenment statement of cultural relativism and one of the earliest sympathetic literary treatments of Native Americans by a major American writer — though its Indians are an idealized rhetorical device, not documentation. Written for a European audience while Franklin was American minister to France, it belongs with his Passy "bagatelles."

• Remember:

  • Written/printed 1784 at Passy (France), during Franklin's diplomatic mission.
  • Key anecdotes: the declined College of William and Mary offer (after the Treaty of Lancaster, 1744); the Swedish minister vs. the Susquehanna corn myth; Canasatego, the church visit, and the beaver-price trick.
  • Thesis sentence is the opening line (see Quotable).
  • Genre: satirical essay using the noble savage convention against European self-congratulation.

• Quotable: "Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs." Also: "…no people so rude, as to be without rules of politeness; nor any so polite, as not to have some remains of rudeness."

Exam angles

• What it is: A roughly 47-page pamphlet published anonymously in Philadelphia on 10 January 1776, arguing that reconciliation with Britain is impossible and that America's only rational course is immediate independence under a republican government. Its four sections argue in sequence: (1) society is a blessing but government at best a necessary evil, and the "mixed" English constitution is a sham; (2) monarchy and especially hereditary succession are unnatural and unscriptural absurdities; (3) the present crisis makes separation both necessary and ripe ("'Tis time to part"); (4) America has the population, resources, and potential navy to succeed alone. It became the best-selling pamphlet of the Revolution — traditional estimates run to well over 100,000 copies in 1776 alone (modern scholars debate the figures) — and decisively shifted public opinion toward independence six months before the Declaration.
• Themes & motifs: Natural rights and republican self-government; the absurdity of monarchy and hereditary rule; America as the "asylum for mankind" — a refuge for liberty with a world-historical mission; independence as plain "common sense" available to every reader, not learned doctrine; commerce and geography (a continent cannot belong to an island).
• Form & devices: Popular pamphlet rhetoric: plain diction, short declarative sentences, direct address, and rhetorical questions aimed at artisans and farmers rather than lawyers; biblical argument (Israel's demand for a king in 1 Samuel used to prove monarchy offends God) for a Bible-reading audience; homely analogy (continent/island, parent/child) turned into political logic; aphorism as a memory-device — the pamphlet is built to be quoted aloud in taverns.
• Context & significance: Paine, an English ex-corset-maker and excise officer, had arrived in Philadelphia only in late 1774 with letters of introduction from Franklin. Published after Lexington and Concord (April 1775) but before independence was respectable, Common Sense moved the debate from "rights within the empire" to separation; the Declaration of Independence followed on 4 July 1776. Distinguish it from The American Crisis (first number, December 1776), which opens "These are the times that try men's souls" — a favorite exam trap. Paine's later works: Rights of Man (1791–92), The Age of Reason (1794–95).

• Remember:

  • Published 10 January 1776, Philadelphia, anonymously (early title pages said only "Written by an Englishman").
  • Four sections: origin of government / monarchy and hereditary succession / present state of American affairs / America's ability.
  • Best-selling Revolutionary pamphlet; "These are the times that try men's souls" is The American Crisis, not Common Sense.
  • Monarchy demolished partly through 1 Samuel 8 (Israel demanding a king); George III appears as "the Royal Brute of Britain."

• Quotable: "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one." — "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." — "'Tis time to part." — "O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."

Exam angles

• What it is: A tale from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (published in installments 1819–20), presented as "Found Among the Papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker." In the drowsy Dutch community of Sleepy Hollow near Tarry Town on the Hudson, the gangling Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane — singing-master, glutton, and devout believer in Cotton Mather's witchcraft lore — courts the heiress Katrina Van Tassel, with an eye on her father's overflowing farm. His rival is the burly local hero Brom Bones (Abraham Van Brunt). Riding home on the ancient horse Gunpowder from the Van Tassels' harvest party, where ghost stories included the Headless Horseman — the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head was carried away by a cannon-ball — Ichabod is chased by the Horseman, who hurls his "head" at him. Next morning only Ichabod's hat and a shattered pumpkin are found by the church bridge; Brom, who married Katrina soon after, always "looked exceedingly knowing" when the pumpkin was mentioned, though old Dutch wives insist Ichabod was spirited away; a postscript reports the storyteller himself doubting half of it.
• Themes & motifs: Imagination and superstition versus rational (and economic) reality; the mobile, acquisitive Yankee versus the settled Dutch community — a comic contest of American cultural types; abundance and appetite (food as courtship and as real estate); storytelling and legend-making in a young nation that lacks a deep past; the mock-Gothic thrill enjoyed and simultaneously debunked.
• Form & devices: Layered frame narration — Geoffrey Crayon presents a paper of the dead antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker, who himself heard the tale told at a corporation meeting (the postscript) — so the "legend" reaches us third-hand and pre-doubted; sustained mock-heroic style (epic diction for a schoolmaster's appetite and a courtship); rationalized Gothic: the pumpkin and Brom's knowing look supply a natural explanation while the tale keeps its ghost; rich pictorial description (the sketch tradition); irony of the "moral" postscript.
• Context & significance: The Sketch Book made Irving the first American author with a major international (especially British) reputation — effectively the first professional American man of letters. Irving imported German folk-legend material and naturalized it in the Hudson Valley, deliberately manufacturing local legends for the new republic ("Rip Van Winkle" is the companion piece, 1819). "Knickerbocker" was already famous from his burlesque A History of New York (1809); the persona gave New York its enduring nickname.

• Remember:

  • From The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20); this tale appeared in the 1820 installment; written while Irving lived in England.
  • Frame personas: Geoffrey Crayon (the book) and Diedrich Knickerbocker (this tale + postscript).
  • The Headless Horseman is the ghost of a Hessian trooper (German mercenary of the Revolution); Ichabod's horse is Gunpowder; Ichabod is steeped in Cotton Mather's witchcraft writings.
  • Ending: hat + shattered pumpkin; Brom Bones marries Katrina; Ichabod's fate left an open question (rumored later a lawyer, politician, and justice elsewhere).
  • Irving = first internationally famous American author; earlier burlesque A History of New York (1809).

• Quotable: Ichabod on horseback: "…one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield."

Exam angles

• What it is: First published 19 August 1843 in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post (then running as The United States Saturday Post). A condemned man writes on the eve of his execution — "But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul" — insisting he is not mad. Once gentle and animal-loving, he degenerates through alcohol ("the Fiend Intemperance"), cuts out the eye of his favorite black cat Pluto, and later hangs the cat — because he knew it had loved him and because he knew the act was sin. His house burns that night, leaving on the one surviving wall the image of a gigantic cat in a rope. A second one-eyed black cat, marked with a white splotch that gradually assumes the shape of the GALLOWS, attaches itself to him; when his wife stops him from axing it on the cellar stairs, he buries the axe in her brain and walls her corpse up in the cellar. The police find nothing until, in a fit of bravado, he raps on the wall: a cry answers, and the wall is torn down to reveal the corpse with the living cat — walled in with the body — sitting on its head.
• Themes & motifs: "Perverseness" — the unmotivated urge to do wrong for wrong's sake and to destroy what one loves; alcoholism and domestic violence; guilt that externalizes itself and demands exposure; superstition (the witch-cat, the wife's remark) held ambiguously against psychological explanation; doubling (Pluto / the second cat; the loving husband / the murderer).
• Form & devices: Retrospective first-person confession by an unreliable narrator whose calm, reasoning tone contradicts the horror of his acts; explicit thematic essay embedded in the tale (the paragraph on "the spirit of PERVERSENESS"); Gothic apparatus turned inward — every apparently supernatural event (the fire-image, the second cat, the scream) also admits a natural or psychological reading; foreshadowing through the gallows-shaped mark; Poe's "unity of effect" — every detail bent toward a single terror.
• Context & significance: Dark Romanticism's psychology of sin and self-destruction; companion piece to "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) and theorized in "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845). Poe is the great theorist of the short story — his 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales and "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) demand brevity and a single preconceived effect. The temperance movement of the 1840s gives the drunkard's confession contemporary resonance.

• Remember:

  • Published 19 August 1843, Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post (United States Saturday Post).
  • First cat: Pluto (named for the Roman god of the underworld); second cat: one-eyed, with a gallows-shaped white mark.
  • Narrator writes on the eve of his execution; the wife-murder is committed with an axe, the corpse walled up in the cellar.
  • Key concept: the spirit of PERVERSENESS; cf. "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845); "The Tell-Tale Heart" is the same year (1843).
  • Poe's story theory: unity of effect ("The Philosophy of Composition," 1846; Hawthorne review, 1842).

• Quotable: "But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul." — "…hung it because I knew that it had loved me… hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin."

Exam angles

• What it is: First published in The Pioneer (March 1843) and collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The brilliant scientist Aylmer marries the beautiful Georgiana, then becomes obsessed with the one flaw on her otherwise perfect face: a tiny crimson birthmark shaped like a hand. To him it is "the fatal flaw of humanity," the visible grip of earthly imperfection; a dream shows him cutting it away until the knife reaches her heart. Georgiana, made to loathe the mark by his horror, submits to its removal in his laboratory, attended by the shaggy, earthy assistant Aminadab, who mutters that if she were his wife he would never part with it. Reading Aylmer's journal, she discovers his career is a record of glorious failures, yet drinks his elixir anyway. The mark fades — and as its last crimson tint disappears, Georgiana dies, the mark having been "the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame"; Aminadab's hoarse chuckle closes the experiment.
• Themes & motifs: The fatal pursuit of perfection — mortality and imperfection as the very condition of being human; science as Faustian overreach against Nature; spirit versus matter (Aylmer/Aminadab); the male idealization and control of the female body — Georgiana is perfected out of existence; the complicity of the victim who internalizes the ideal.
• Form & devices: Third-person narration with an intrusive moralizing narrator (Hawthorne's tales openly interpret themselves); allegory and symbol: the hand-shaped mark condenses mortality, earthliness, sexuality, and Nature's grip; character allegory in the Aylmer (intellect/spirit) — Aminadab (body/earth) pairing; proleptic dream; irony of the ending — total success is total loss; the "romance" mode: psychological truth in frankly symbolic settings.
• Context & significance: Central dark-Romantic rejoinder to both Transcendental perfectibility and the era's scientific utopianism: human beings cannot be purified of earth without being destroyed. Companion piece: "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), another laboratory-destroyed woman. Hawthorne's Puritan inheritance (an ancestor, John Hathorne, judged the Salem witch trials) underlies his lifelong subject of secret sin and moral pride; The Scarlet Letter follows in 1850.

• Remember:

  • The Pioneer, March 1843; collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).
  • Characters: Aylmer (scientist), Georgiana (wife), Aminadab (earthy laboratory assistant).
  • The mark: a tiny crimson hand on Georgiana's left cheek; visible when she pales, fading when she blushes.
  • Ending: the elixir works, the mark fades, Georgiana dies; Aminadab laughs.
  • Movement label: dark Romanticism; anti-perfectibility, anti-scientific-hubris allegory.

• Quotable: Aminadab: "If she were my wife, I'd never part with that birthmark." — "It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions." — "The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame."

Exam angles

• What it is: Autobiography "Written by Himself," published in Boston by the Anti-Slavery Office in 1845, with a preface by William Lloyd Garrison and a letter by Wendell Phillips authenticating the author. Douglass records his birth in Talbot County, Maryland (c. 1818; enslaved people were kept ignorant of their birthdays), his scarcely known mother and unknown white father, and the whipping of his Aunt Hester — the "blood-stained gate" through which he entered slavery's hell. Sent to Baltimore, he begins learning letters from Sophia Auld until her husband Hugh forbids it, unwittingly teaching Douglass that literacy is "the pathway from slavery to freedom"; he continues secretly (white street boys, The Columbian Orator, shipyard letters). Hired out to the "slave-breaker" Edward Covey, he is whipped weekly until, at sixteen, he physically resists Covey in a two-hour fight — the turning point "how a slave was made a man" — and is never whipped again. After a betrayed escape plot (1836) and caulker's work in Baltimore, he escapes on 3 September 1838 (method deliberately withheld), marries Anna Murray, settles in New Bedford as "Frederick Douglass" (renamed after a hero of Scott's The Lady of the Lake), and is discovered by the abolitionist movement; an appendix distinguishes the "Christianity of Christ" from the slaveholding "Christianity of this land."
• Themes & motifs: Literacy and knowledge as the road to freedom; slavery as a system that dehumanizes slaveholders too (Sophia Auld's corruption from kindness to cruelty); manhood and selfhood won through resistance before legal emancipation; religious hypocrisy of the slaveholding South; the destruction of family; songs of the enslaved as testimony of sorrow, not contentment; naming and self-authorship.
• Form & devices: First-person retrospective narrative combining documentary precision (names, places, dates — a public indictment) with rhetorical set-pieces: the chiasmus ("man made a slave / slave made a man"), the apostrophe to the white-sailed ships on Chesapeake Bay, biblical cadence and irony. It codified the slave-narrative genre conventions: white-authored authenticating documents; the "I was born" opening with unknown birthdate; the literacy scene; the violent turning point; the escape whose method is concealed to protect others; the new name; the anti-slaveholding-religion appendix.
• Context & significance: The most famous and rhetorically accomplished American slave narrative and a foundational text of African American literature. Publishing it exposed the fugitive author — Douglass lectured in Britain (1845–47) until English friends purchased his legal freedom (1846); he founded The North Star (1847) and rewrote his life twice (My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855; Life and Times, 1881/1892). The book's very existence, "Written by Himself," refuted the propaganda that Africans could not master letters.

• Remember:

  • Published 1845, Boston, Anti-Slavery Office; preface by Garrison, letter by Wendell Phillips; subtitle "Written by Himself."
  • Born c. 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; escaped 3 September 1838; renamed from Scott's Lady of the Lake.
  • Key episodes: Aunt Hester's whipping; Sophia/Hugh Auld literacy scene; The Columbian Orator; the fight with Edward Covey; the appendix on religion.
  • Later: The North Star (1847); two expanded autobiographies (1855, 1881/92).

• Quotable: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." — "It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass." — "From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." — Appendix: "…between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference…"

Exam angles

• What it is: An eight-line free-verse poem first published in Drum-Taps (1865), Whitman's Civil War volume, and later absorbed into Leaves of Grass, where it stands in the "By the Roadside" cluster. Four anaphoric "When…" lines pile up the astronomer's lecture — proofs, figures, charts and diagrams, applause in the lecture-room — until the speaker becomes "tired and sick," rises, glides out alone into "the mystical moist night-air," and looks up "in perfect silence at the stars." The entire poem is a single sentence whose grammar delays release until the escape it describes. (The exam list spells "Learned"; Whitman's text has the elided "Learn'd.")
• Themes & motifs: Direct, unmediated experience versus secondhand analytic knowledge; Romantic/Transcendentalist intuition set against Enlightenment measurement; the individual versus the applauding crowd; nature as the true lecture hall; silence versus noise, night versus lamplit room.
• Form & devices: Whitman's free verse — no regular metrical scheme or end-rhyme, lines swelling and contracting organically (the longest lines belong to the lecture, the calm final line is short); anaphora and parallelism ("When… When… When… When…") that mimic the additive tedium of data; a single periodic sentence with the turn at "Till rising and gliding out"; sensory contrast (dry figures / "mystical moist night-air"); the pun in "unaccountable" — the speaker's sickness cannot be counted or charted; "perfect silence" answering "much applause."
• Context & significance: Leaves of Grass (first edition 1855, twelve untitled poems, self-published; endlessly revised until the 1891–92 "deathbed" edition) answered Emerson's call for an American poet with a democratic, all-including free verse. This poem is the classic set text for that formal revolution and for the Romantic hierarchy of experience over instruction — though it dramatizes the limits of mediated knowledge rather than attacking science as such. Drum-Taps grew from Whitman's volunteer service in Washington's war hospitals.

• Remember:

  • First published in Drum-Taps (1865); later placed in the "By the Roadside" cluster of Leaves of Grass.
  • 8 lines, one sentence, free verse; four-fold anaphora "When…"; turn at "Till rising and gliding out."
  • Leaves of Grass: first edition 1855; revised through the 1891–92 deathbed edition.
  • Do not confuse: the poem is not in the 1855 first edition — it is a Civil War–era poem.

• Quotable: "When I heard the learn'd astronomer," … "Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

Exam angles

• What it is: A two-quatrain poem (Johnson no. 1052 / Franklin no. 800; the manuscript, Amherst 237, is a pencil draft of c. 1865) first published posthumously in Poems (1890), the debut selection edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, in its "Time and Eternity" section. The argument is an analogy of faith: the speaker has never seen a moor or the sea, yet knows what heather and a billow look like; likewise she has never spoken with God nor visited Heaven, yet is as certain of the spot "As if the Checks were given." The first editors smoothed her text — "Billow" became "wave must," "Checks" became "chart," dashes became commas — a textbook case of how the 1890s editions domesticated Dickinson.
• Themes & motifs: Faith as inference and analogy rather than empirical proof; the reach of imagination beyond experience (the speaker claims knowledge without direct observation; do not turn that statement into an unverified claim about the author’s reading or travel); certainty shadowed by the conditional "As if"; the domestication of the transcendent in a homely travel metaphor (a ticketed journey to a guaranteed destination).
• Form & devices: Hymn-derived short metre: the opening quatrain scans approximately 6-6-8-6 syllables (three, three, four, three iambic feet), not common metre’s 8-6-8-6; the second quatrain follows that pattern with a possible extra syllable in “Heaven.” The rhyme is ABCB; two exactly parallel stanzas moving from nature (moor/sea) to the supernatural (God/Heaven) — analogy as structure; Dickinson's signature dashes, capitalized nouns, and compression; the "Checks" metaphor: the railway checks or tickets handed to a passenger, tokens that guarantee arrival — faith holds the ticket though the destination is unseen (some read bank checks; the travel reading is standard); the "As if" that both asserts and quietly suspends certainty.
• Context & significance: Dickinson (1830–1886, Amherst, Massachusetts) wrote nearly 1,800 poems (1,789 in R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition), of which fewer than a dozen were published during her lifetime; her poems also circulated privately in letters. Publication history and permission are more complicated than a blanket claim that every appearance was unauthorized. After her death her sister Lavinia found the manuscripts, many sewn into the little booklets called fascicles; Todd and Higginson's Poems (1890) began her fame, and Thomas H. Johnson’s 1955 edition and R. W. Franklin’s later editions are major stages in their scholarly editing. This poem is the anthology piece for her hymn-meter faith poems — and, with its altered lines, for the whole editorial history.

• Remember:

  • Written c. 1865; published posthumously in Poems (1890), ed. Todd & Higginson; Johnson 1052 / Franklin 800.
  • Short-metre pattern (6-6-8-6 in the first quatrain), ABCB; two parallel quatrains: nature → God. Scan the given text before applying a general description of Dickinson’s style.
  • Editors changed "Billow" → "wave must" and "Checks" → "chart" in 1890.
  • ~1,800 poems (1,789 in Franklin's 1998 edition); only about ten published in her lifetime, all anonymously; fascicles; Johnson's scholarly edition 1955.

• Quotable: "I never saw a Moor — / I never saw the Sea — / Yet know I how the Heather looks / And what a Billow be." (manuscript/Johnson text; the 1890 editors printed "wave must be" and, later in the poem, "chart" for "Checks")

Exam angles

Interpretation: A conditional phrase can support a reading of tension within faith, but does not prove that Dickinson personally disbelieved.

• What it is: Published anonymously in two installments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (November and December 1853) and collected in The Piazza Tales (1856). An elderly, "eminently safe" Wall Street lawyer — a Master in Chancery — narrates his experience with the copyist he once employed alongside the comic clerks Turkey, Nippers, and the boy Ginger Nut. The pale scrivener Bartleby at first copies mechanically day and night, then answers a request to proofread with "I would prefer not to," and by degrees prefers not to do anything — including copying, leaving the office (he lives there, as a Sunday visit reveals), or quitting. Unable to force or bribe him out, the lawyer finally moves his own offices; the new tenants have Bartleby removed to the Tombs prison as a vagrant, where, preferring not to dine, he is found dead, curled at the base of the prison wall ("With kings and counselors," murmurs the narrator — an allusion to Job). An epilogue reports the one rumor of his past: he had been a clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington. The story ends: "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
• Themes & motifs: Alienated clerical labor in the world of Wall Street — the office as enclosure (walls, screens, dead walls, the Tombs); passive resistance and radical negation — the power and cost of "preferring not to"; the limits of prudent Christian charity (the narrator's benevolence is real but self-regarding and finally helpless); failed communication (dead letters); the inscrutability of the other person.
• Form & devices: First-person retrospective narration by the lawyer, who is as much the story's subject as Bartleby: genial, self-justifying, quietly self-interested, and never granted access to Bartleby's interior; the unvarying formula "I would prefer not to" with its polite conditional — repetition as both comedy and horror (the word "prefer" even infects the other clerks' speech); the humor-character pairing of Turkey and Nippers (useful only half the day each); pervasive wall symbolism down to the subtitle "A Story of Wall-Street"; the withheld backstory delivered only as rumor, keeping the tale a parable open to existentialist, Marxist, Christian, and biographical readings.
• Context & significance: Written after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) had wrecked Melville's career, when he turned to anonymous magazine fiction (this and "Benito Cereno" are the masterpieces of that period, both in The Piazza Tales, 1856). The story is now read as a proto-modernist parable of the office and of absurd resistance — an American anticipation of Kafka — and its refuser has been claimed as a cousin of Thoreau's civil disobedience.

• Remember:

  • Putnam's Monthly Magazine, November–December 1853, anonymous; collected in The Piazza Tales (1856).
  • Narrator: unnamed Wall Street lawyer, a Master in Chancery; office staff: Turkey, Nippers, Ginger Nut.
  • Bartleby dies in the Tombs (New York prison), refusing food; the narrator's Job allusion: "With kings and counselors."
  • Epilogue rumor: Bartleby had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington.
  • Melville's career context: post–Moby-Dick (1851) failure; magazine period 1853–56.

• Quotable: "I would prefer not to." — "On errands of life, these letters speed to death." — "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

Exam angles

• What it is: Published in Vogue (February 1894) and collected in A Night in Acadie (1897). Mrs. Baroda is mildly annoyed that her husband Gaston has invited his college friend Gouvernail, a New Orleans journalist, for a week or two at their sugar plantation. The guest confounds her expectations by being quiet, unglamorous, and indifferent to her charms, and her puzzlement shades into obsessive attention. One night on a dark bench he sits beside her and murmurs a fragment of Whitman — "'Night of south winds — night of the large few stars! / Still nodding night —'" — and talks freely of his youth; she is seized by physical desire, longs to touch him, and, being a respectable woman, flees to the city until he leaves. She then opposes his ever returning — until, near the year's end, she herself proposes a new visit, laughing over her husband's delight and pressing a kiss on his lips: "I have overcome everything! you will see. This time I shall be very nice to him." The famous ambiguity: has she overcome the desire — or the scruples?
• Themes & motifs: Female sexual desire inside a contented marriage; "respectability" as social mask and self-description; repression, self-command, and their possible collapse; the unknowability of a wife's inner life to a cheerfully oblivious husband; night, cigar smoke, and murmured poetry as the sensory language of temptation.
• Form & devices: Third-person narration limited to Mrs. Baroda with free indirect discourse rendering what she will not say aloud; radical economy (a few pages) with the crisis displaced into atmosphere rather than event; the Whitman allusion (from "Song of Myself," section 21) as erotic code — the poem says what neither character may; the open ending built on one polysemous sentence, an irony Chopin refuses to resolve; the title as a question the story asks rather than a fact it states.
• Context & significance: Vogue published Chopin's boldest work in the 1890s. The story shows local color (Louisiana plantation setting) shading into psychological realism, and it is a compact example of Chopin's proto-feminist theme: the respectable woman discovers her desire as a fact requiring management, not a sin requiring confession. Gouvernail reappears in "Athénaïse" and briefly in The Awakening — a favorite identification question.

• Remember:

  • Vogue, February 1894; collected in A Night in Acadie (1897).
  • The guest Gouvernail quotes Whitman, "Song of Myself" (section 21): "Night of south winds — night of the large few stars!"
  • Ending line: "I have overcome everything! … This time I shall be very nice to him." — deliberately double-edged.
  • Gouvernail recurs in "Athénaïse" and in The Awakening.

• Quotable: "'Night of south winds — night of the large few stars! / Still nodding night —'" (Gouvernail's Whitman); "I have overcome everything! you will see. This time I shall be very nice to him."

Exam angles

• What it is: Published in Vogue on 14 January 1893 under the title "The Father of Désirée's Baby" (the form on the exam list) and collected in Bayou Folk (1894). In antebellum Creole Louisiana, Désirée — a foundling discovered as a toddler by the pillar of the Valmondé gate and raised as the Valmondés' daughter — is passionately married by Armand Aubigny, master of the gloomy plantation L'Abri and bearer of one of the oldest names in Louisiana. After the birth of their son Armand is transformed by pride and love — until, at three months, the baby's appearance, set beside the quadroon nurse's boy, reveals African ancestry. Armand coldly tells Désirée "It means… that the child is not white; it means that you are not white," and, when her mother writes "Come home to Valmondé," sends wife and child away; Désirée walks with the baby into the bayou and does not come back. Weeks later, burning her corbeille, layette, and letters in a great bonfire, Armand finds a fragment of an old letter from his mother to his father: she thanks God that "our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery."
• Themes & motifs: Race as a social construction enforced by the one-drop logic of slavery — status that a single suspicion can revoke overnight; the fusion of racial and patriarchal power (Armand's name decides what his wife is); unknown origins versus hidden origins; pride destroying love; slavery's everyday cruelty (Armand's "strict" rule; the presence of La Blanche); providence and its ironies (the foundling "sent by a beneficent Providence").
• Form & devices: Third-person narration with shifting focalization (notably Madame Valmondé's early shudder at L'Abri and at the baby — the reader is given clues before Désirée sees them); the Maupassant-style twist ending through a withheld document, which converts the story's dramatic irony into a verdict on Armand and on racial essentialism itself; symbolism: L'Abri ("the shelter") that shelters no one, its black-pall roof and shadowing oaks; the stone pillar (origin, foundling, fixity); the October bonfire as auto-da-fé of a marriage; the bayou as erasure; names (Désirée = "the desired one"). Chopin translated Maupassant and learned the conte's economy from him.
• Context & significance: The most anthologized American treatment of racial "passing" avant la lettre and a peak of local color used for tragedy: the Creole hierarchy of white, quadroon, and enslaved supplies the machinery of destruction. Setting the story in the antebellum past gave Chopin's 1890s readers a safe distance from a critique that lands squarely on racial categories as such. Note the ambiguity often set as a question: the text implies but never states Désirée's death, and Armand's own knowledge remains debatable (did he know of his ancestry? the letter's placement "in the drawer" leaves a sliver of doubt).

• Remember:

  • Vogue, 14 January 1893, as "The Father of Désirée's Baby"; collected in Bayou Folk (1894).
  • Names: Désirée (foundling of the Valmondés), Armand Aubigny, plantation L'Abri ("the shelter"), the quadroon nurse boy.
  • Twist: the final letter from Armand's mother establishes African ancestry on his side. Désirée's parentage remains unknown; the letter exposes his unjustified blame without resolving her ancestry.
  • Set before the Civil War (antebellum), written 1892; Maupassant-style twist ending.

• Quotable: "It means," he answered lightly, "that the child is not white; it means that you are not white." — "…our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery."

Exam angles

• What it is: Published in Vogue on 6 December 1894 as "The Dream of an Hour"; about a thousand words covering a single hour. Because Louise Mallard is "afflicted with a heart trouble," her sister Josephine and her husband's friend Richards break gently the news that Brently Mallard has died in a railroad disaster. Louise weeps at once, then withdraws alone to her room, where, facing the open window full of spring life — treetops, rain-smell, sparrows, patches of blue sky — something approaches her and she yields to it, whispering "free, free, free!" She exults in the years ahead that will belong to herself alone, acknowledging that she had loved him — sometimes — but that love counts for little beside self-possession ("Free! Body and soul free!"). Descending the stairs "like a goddess of Victory," she sees the front door open: Brently walks in, unharmed and ignorant of any accident. Louise drops dead, and the doctors conclude she died "of heart disease — of the joy that kills."
• Themes & motifs: Marriage as benevolent repression — even kind intentions impose "a powerful will bending hers"; selfhood and freedom as the deepest female desire; the heart as literal organ and symbol of a constrained life; spring vitality versus the closed house; time compressed into a single revelatory hour; the world's inability to read a woman's inner truth.
• Form & devices: Third-person limited narration with free indirect discourse tracking Louise's transformation; extreme compression and a double reversal (death news → liberation; resurrection → death); layered irony — situational (the "dead" man lives, the living woman dies) and dramatic (the doctors’ explanation is undermined by the reader’s access to Louise’s earlier response; loss of anticipated freedom is a strong interpretation, not a clinically established cause); symbolism of the open window (future, spring, freedom) versus the closed door and the stairs down into the social world; the withheld name (she is "Mrs. Mallard" until her hour of selfhood makes her "Louise").
• Context & significance: Now Chopin's most anthologized story and a foundational text of American feminist literary study, though its cold-eyed view of even a kind marriage disturbed contemporary editors. Its rediscovery came with the Chopin revival around Per Seyersted's Complete Works (1969). The one-hour frame makes it the standard classroom example of compression and irony in the American short story.

• Remember:

  • Vogue, 6 December 1894, original title "The Dream of an Hour."
  • Characters: Louise Mallard (heart trouble), Brently Mallard, sister Josephine, friend Richards.
  • Final line: died "of heart disease — of the joy that kills."
  • Story time ≈ one hour; the twist depends on a false casualty report from a railroad disaster.

• Quotable: "free, free, free!" — "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of the joy that kills."

Exam angles

• What it is: Published in the San Francisco Examiner on 13 July 1890 and collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891; later reissued as In the Midst of Life). Part I: on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, Union soldiers prepare with ritual precision to hang a civilian; time dilates around him — the ticking of his watch tolls like an anvil — and he thinks of escape. Part II: a flashback identifies him as Peyton Farquhar, a wealthy Alabama planter and ardent secessionist kept from the army, who was lured into attempting to burn the bridge by a gray-clad soldier who asked for water at his gate — "He was a Federal scout." Part III: the rope breaks; Farquhar falls into the stream, frees his hands with superhuman clarity, dodges volleys and cannon, swims to shore, and walks all night through an ever-stranger forest until he reaches his plantation, where his wife steps down to meet him — then a blinding blow, and darkness. The last sentence withdraws the whole escape: "Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."
• Themes & motifs: The dying man's fantasy — desire outrunning reality in the second before death; war stripped of chivalry: an execution, not a battle, and a would-be hero who is really a dupe; subjective versus mechanical time (the watch); deception on every level — the disguised scout deceives Farquhar, Farquhar's brain deceives him, the narrative deceives the reader; the romantic civilian imagination of war punished by war's procedures.
• Form & devices: Tripartite structure — objective execution scene / explanatory flashback / subjective escape — with the analepsis suspending the drop across the whole story; manipulation of duration: seconds stretched into pages as dying perception dilates; deep focalization whose sensory exaggerations (seeing the individual veining of leaves, the gray eye of the marksman through the rifle sights, hearing insects) signal unreality even as they persuade; the deadpan final sentence as structural twist; a clinical narrator whose military exactness ironizes the event (the title's neutral "occurrence"). The device of the extended death-instant made the story a model for later fiction and film — famously adapted as a French short film (1962) aired on The Twilight Zone.
• Context & significance: Bierce fought through the Civil War in the 9th Indiana Infantry (Shiloh, Chickamauga; severely wounded at Kennesaw Mountain, 1864) — almost alone among major American authors in writing the war from combat experience. "Bitter Bierce," journalist and author of The Devil's Dictionary (1906/1911), disappeared into revolutionary Mexico in 1913–14 — a famous unsolved vanishing. His war fiction's cold irony bridges realism and naturalism and anticipates the anti-romantic war writing of Crane and Hemingway.

• Remember:

  • San Francisco Examiner, 13 July 1890; collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) (= In the Midst of Life).
  • Three numbered parts; Part II ends "He was a Federal scout."
  • Peyton Farquhar: Alabama planter and civilian secessionist, hanged for attempting to sabotage the repaired bridge.
  • Bierce: Union veteran (Shiloh, Chickamauga, wounded 1864); vanished in Mexico, 1913/14; The Devil's Dictionary.

• Quotable: "He was a Federal scout." — "Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."

Exam angles

Reading focus: the assigned short extract shows Henry's self-congratulation after one attack, the renewed attack and his flight. Practise its animal and machine imagery closely. The ironic head wound and Jim Conklin's death belong to the wider novel and help explain its title and context.

• What it is: Novel subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War, syndicated in a drastically abridged newspaper version in December 1894 and published in book form by D. Appleton in 1895. Henry Fleming, "the youth," enlists in the (fictional) 304th New York with Homeric visions of glory against his mother's plain advice. In his first engagement he holds; when the enemy unexpectedly returns, he panics and runs, then wanders the rear rationalizing his flight (the squirrel he startles seems to prove flight is nature's law), watches his friend Jim Conklin, "the tall soldier," die grotesquely after Chancellorsville-like fighting — "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer" — and abandons the persistent "tattered soldier" whose questions shame him. Wishing he too had "a red badge of courage," he receives his wound ironically: a fleeing Union soldier clubs him with a rifle. Taken for a grazed combatant, he returns to his regiment, fights next day in a fury, carries the flag, and the novel closes on his quiet self-congratulation — "He was a man."
• Themes & motifs: Courage and cowardice demythologized — heroism as accident, instinct, vanity, and luck; the indifference of nature (the tranquil forest "chapel" with its ant-covered corpse; the serene sky over slaughter); the individual dissolved in the crowd and the machine of the regiment; the gap between war as imagined (Greek-like struggles) and war as process; maturation left deliberately ambiguous.
• Form & devices: Third-person narration locked to Henry's perceptions and saturated with irony at his expense; literary impressionism — battle rendered as color, noise, and fragment ("the red sickness of battle"; the wafer sun) rather than strategy; naturalist imagery of men as animals and machines; characters identified by epithet ("the youth," "the loud soldier," "the tall soldier"), universalizing the episode; the battle never named in the text (scholarship, classically Harold Hungerford's 1963 article, identifies it from internal evidence as Chancellorsville, May 1863); religious-sounding images (the wafer) that critics still dispute.
• Context & significance: Crane, born 1871, wrote the most convincing American combat novel without having seen war, working from veterans' accounts and the Century magazine's "Battles and Leaders" series; veterans nonetheless vouched for its accuracy, and his later war reporting (Greece, Cuba) confirmed for him that he had guessed right. The novel made "war without romance" canonical and leads directly to Hemingway. Crane's Maggie (1893) had already introduced naturalist determinism; "The Open Boat" (1897) perfects the indifferent universe; he died of tuberculosis in 1900, aged 28.

• Remember:

  • Book 1895 (D. Appleton); abridged newspaper syndication December 1894; subtitle An Episode of the American Civil War.
  • Battle never named; identified by scholars as Chancellorsville (May 1863); regiment: the fictional 304th New York.
  • The "red badge" is ironic: Henry's head wound comes from a fleeing Union soldier's rifle butt.
  • Jim Conklin = "the tall soldier" (his death precedes the wafer sentence); Wilson = "the loud soldier."
  • Crane: b. 1871 (after the war), Maggie 1893, "The Open Boat" 1897, died 1900 at 28.

• Passage practice: Follow the shift from Henry's pleased self-image to the second attack. His body is compared to an exhausted horse, the enemy to steel machines and dragons, another fleeing soldier to a rabbit, and Henry himself to a chicken. These comparisons make fear physical and contagious: he follows others and mistakes a few fugitives for the whole regiment. Explain the conflict between his ideal of heroic self-command and his urgent wish to survive; do not call the animal imagery a literal biological diagnosis.

• Quotable: "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer." — "He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage." — "He was a man."

Exam angles

• What it is: A long short story first published in magazine form in 1926 and collected in Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories (Boni & Liveright, 1927). Ida Zobel grows up motherless in a "singularly restricted" German-immigrant household: her father William Zobel, a rigid paint-store owner contemptuous of jazz-age America ("brash gayety and looseness"), rations her life between home, his store, and a private German school, while her stepmother polices her friendships. At sixteen the swaggering Edward Hauptwanger appears; secret walks and boat evenings in King Lake Park end in seduction and pregnancy. When Edward refuses marriage and prepares to run, Ida takes her father's eight-shot revolver from the store desk — intending only to threaten him — and in the confrontation ("You will marry me, Ed, you will! You will! You see this? You will marry me!") shoots him dead in the street, confessing on the spot: "Yes, I shot him… He wouldn't marry me. He should have but he wouldn't — and so —". A press sensation makes her a popular heroine; sheltered by a wealthy patroness, she bears a son, Eric, and is promptly acquitted "with loud public acclaim," the public being "all for romance and drastic drama." But back in the gray parental world she cannot re-enter life; one evening she returns to the couple's old nook at King Lake Park and wades deliberately into the water — "Ida Zobel — Girl Slayer of Hauptwanger a Suicide," and then, as the story ends, "forgotten."
• Themes & motifs: Naturalist determinism: temperament, repressive upbringing, sexual desire and circumstance constrain the choices available to the characters; sexual desire as an impersonal force (the "typhoon" of the title) tearing through an over-ordered world; the double standard and the ruined-girl plot inverted — here the girl shoots the seducer; Old-World immigrant rigidity versus 1920s American youth culture (movies, cars, flappers, "petting parties"); the press and public as a sentimental chorus that consumes and forgets; water as the medium of romance and of death.
• Form & devices: Omniscient naturalist narration with documentary sociological texture (the household's rules quoted like exhibits); Dreiser's late impressionistic, telegraphic style — fragments and exclamations mimicking the buffeting of forces ("And these young scamps… The loose, indifferent parents. The loose, free ways…"); the recurring authorial refrain "The world does not understand such things," framing events as process, not sin; symbolic set pieces: the Lorelei fountain statue of a German maiden and kneeling lover (the myth of fatal desire literally installed in the patroness's garden), King Lake and the boats, the closing newspaper headline as the world's last shallow word.
• Context & significance: A late document of American Naturalism — written immediately after An American Tragedy (1925), whose seduction-pregnancy-death material it reworks with the genders reversed (Clyde Griffiths drowns pregnant Roberta; Ida shoots Edward and then drowns herself). Dreiser's determinism — instinct and circumstance overriding will, desire as body chemistry (his recurring notion of "chemisms") — is exactly the "biological determinism" the exam's sample question defines as instinct-driven behavior rather than free will. Dreiser: Sister Carrie (1900), An American Tragedy (1925); died 1945.

• Remember:

  • Magazine publication 1926; collected in Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories (1927, Boni & Liveright).
  • Names: Ida Zobel; father William Zobel (paint store); seducer Edward Hauptwanger; the child Eric; setting anchored by King Lake Park.
  • Sequence: seduction → pregnancy → refused marriage → shooting with her father's revolver → sensational trial → acquittal → suicide by drowning.
  • Movement tag: late Naturalism; gender-inverted companion to An American Tragedy (1925).

• Quotable: "The world does not understand such things." — the final headline: "Ida Zobel — Girl Slayer of Hauptwanger a Suicide."

Exam angles

Twist and final-line endings (exam favorites)

Narration and technique at a glance

Common traps

• "These are the times that try men's souls" = The American Crisis (Dec. 1776), not Common Sense (Jan. 1776).
• Whitman's astronomer poem is from Drum-Taps (1865) — not the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass; spelling "Learn'd."
• Dickinson published about ten poems in her lifetime (not zero, not "a few dozen"); total ≈ 1,800 (1,789 in Franklin's edition).
• Red Badge: the battle is never named in the novel — Chancellorsville is a scholarly identification; Crane was born 1871 and never saw the war; Bierce, by contrast, fought in it.
• Chopin titles: exam list's "The Father of Désirée's Baby" = "Désirée's Baby" (original Vogue title); "The Story of an Hour" first appeared as "The Dream of an Hour."
• Franklin's "On the Slave Trade" is a hoax: no real Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, no real "Martin's Account" — that is the joke, not an error.
• "Bartleby" and the Putnam's publication were anonymous; the full title includes "A Story of Wall-Street."
• Hawthorne's "The Birth-Mark" (also printed "The Birthmark") is collected in Mosses from an Old Manse — not Twice-Told Tales.