AMERICAN LITERATURE RESEARCH PAPER

Topics:

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1. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn is (or not) a racist book.

2. In Kate Chopin’s stories, characters search for female spiritual emancipation.

3. O’Henry (William Sydney Porter) masters surprise endings using New York City as the setting for his short stories.

4. Jack London combines realism with humanitarianism in The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

5. Robert Frost wrote many poems from his own life, recurrent losses, and everyday tasks.

6. Robert Frost’s, “The Road Not Taken,” has universal appeal because it deals with contemplation of life’s decisions in retrospect.

7. In Carl Sandburg’s famous poem, “Chicago”, he uses free verse to reveal, explore, and celebrate the lives of common people.

8. E. E. Cummings is an inventive, imaginative modern American poet.

9. “In Just” by E. E. Cummings is (or is not) written from a child’s viewpoint.

10. Harlem Renaissance Poets set the tone use imagery through their language choice to represent realism and idealism in their poetry.

11. James Weldon Johnson humanizes God in his poem ”The Creation.”

12. F. Scott Fitzgerald personifies “The Jazz Age” in The Great Gatsby.

13. Obsession with wealth (or lack of it) is seen in most of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings.

14. In Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway portrays the unconquerable spirit of man.

15. Rich in Christian symbols and metaphors, Old Man and the Sea can be considered a parable of moral value.

16. Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is an autobiographical play.

17. Eugene O’Neil’s plays are tragically realistic.

18. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath portrays struggles during the Great Depression.

19. Grapes of Wrath evokes both pity and anger.

20. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a modern tragedy.

21. Of Mice and Men shows the inhumanity of the human condition.

22. John Steinbeck uses California for settings and migrant workers for characters in many of his novels.

23. Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie is a drama of pathetic characters with lives of desperation artfully set in the 1930’s.

24. By dramatically portraying everyday life in a small town, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town conveys the gift of life itself.

25. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the 1930’s, portrays prejudice and tolerance, knowledge and ignorance, and courage and cowardice.

26. Pearl S. Buck’s short story, “The Enemy,” raises high level moral, medical, wartime, and family ethical questions.

27. Flannery O’Connor’s thematic element of facing death recurs in many of her short stories.

28. Arthur’s Miller’s The Crucible, written during McCarthyism with a backdrop of the Salem Witch Trials, is really a play about the human condition.

29. The Crucible shows how hysteria tears apart a community.

30. Arthur Miller puts human integrity to the test in The Crucible.

31. Sylvia Plath reveals the social pressure of American women in the 1960’s in The Bell Jar.

32. Maya Angelou’s strong belief in the power of education is present in her autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

33. John Knowles shows how war impacts everyone despite mere indirect involvement in A Separate Peace.