Literary Criticism: Junior Annotated Bibliography Research Paper: Of Mice and Men

Each volume in the American Profiles series provides middle and high school students with concise information on eight to thirteen important and influential figures in a particular field of endeavor. Profiles are organized around a movement, event, or profession that has had a significant, lasting impact on American history and contemporary life. Essential biographical information is included for each figure, but the heart of each profile describes the critical achievements and contributions of the individual under consideration and assesses the subject's significance, not only in the context of the person's own lifetime, but in the broader sweep of American history. Placing each figure's achievements and contributions in a historical context makes each profile the ideal source for preparing reports. Students can use this framework as a basis for comparisons and contrasts, which will give them a better understanding of how individuals shape, and are shaped by, the times in which they live. -- Jack London -- Sherwood Anderson -- Willa Cather -- F. Scott Fitzgerald -- William Faulkner -- Ernest Hemingway -- John Steinbeck -- Richard Wright.

Presents an overview of the literary movement known as American realism, and features fifteen critical articles that offer a definition of realism, and discuss the rise of naturalism, class, race, and gender in American realism; national character in American realism; and realism after 1914.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest." Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

The American Dream' is a phrase that has become an essential component of the American experience, a phrase that, once entered into the national lexicon, has come to define our nation's identity, underlying nearly every aspect of our lives. And since the

An illustrated overview of the life and works of a selected number of important writers in the English language from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.