American Post-Modernism

Question 1

Truman Capote

Answer 1

Am PoMo

Born in New Orleans, moved to New York, dropped out of school and started writing for The New Yorker. Known for living the highlife, but did so supposedly in an effort to “research” his novels.

Question 2

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Answer 2

Truman Capote

in which Holly Golightly, a young woman, comes to New York seeking for happiness. He has a nameless cat and a brother named Fred. The nameless narrator is an aspiring writer who has the same birthday as Capote (September 30) and who follows Holly’s life, filled with colorful characters. “What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there…” The novel is constructed as a memory of events, that happened about 15 years earlier. Holly has left the country before the end of the war, and the narrator has not seen her since.

Question 3

In Cold Blood

Answer 3

Truman Capote

a pioneering work of documentary novel or “nonfiction novel”. The work started from an article in The New York Times about the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas. Sponsored by the magazine Capote interviewed with Harper Lee local people to recreate the lives of both the murderers and their victims. The research and writing took six years to finish.

Question 4

J.D. Salinger

Answer 4

Am PoMo

After he wrote Catcher in the Rye, Salinger presumably got sick of being lionized and went into seclusion.

Question 5

Franny and Zooey

Answer 5

J.D. Salinger
Am PoMo

This book, along with much of Salinger’s 1960s fiction, tells the story of the Glass family. Glass, that’s a name to remember. concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger’s short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the “Jesus prayer” as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the “Jesus prayer” is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.

Question 6

Catcher in the Rye

Answer 6

J.D. Salinger
Am PoMo

Tells the story of Holden Caulfeild, who is a young man that gets in trouble at his elite college. The story chronicles Holden’s going berserk and hating most people and most things about society. In the end, it turns out that Holden has a brain tumor—“a tumor on the brain,” he says—which presumably explains his berserk behavior. Somehow someone has begun pimping Holden as an archetypal figure in American literature—like James Finnimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo in his Leather Stockings Tales. Title is allusion to Robert Burns.

Question 7

Saul Bellows

Answer 7

Am Pomo

Jewish author

The Adventures of Augie March
Herzog

Question 8

The Adventures of Augie March

Answer 8

Saul Bellow
Am PoMo

The rich picaresque novel recounts the seemingly unconnected experiences of its hero in his quest for self-understanding. Augie March, the protagonist, is born into an immigrant Jewish family in Chicago before the Depression. His mother is poor and nearly blind. George, his younger brother, is retarded, and his elder brother, Simon, wants to become rich as soon as possible. Each of them is ‘drafted untimely into hardships’. Augie proceeds through a variety of dubious jobs and adventures. His employers include the real estate dealer named Einhorn and Mrs. Renling, owner of a smart men’s store, and other colorful, energetic characters, obsessed with sex, making money or both. Augie loves women and observes each portion of the female anatomy closely. On his mystical quest to discover ‘the lesson and theory of power,’ Augie finds everywhere lies, and asks why he always have to fall among theoreticians. The novel is a hymn to city life, it avoids sentimentality, and ends in Augie’s healthy laugh.

Question 9

Herzog

Answer 9

Saul Bellow
Am PoMo

centers on a middle-aged Jewish intellectual, Moses E. Herzog, whose life had some to a standstill. He is on the brink of suicide, he writes long letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, ex-wife Madeleine, Adlai Stevenson, and God. As Augie March, Moses Herzog is introspective and troubled, but he finally also finds that he has much reasons to content with his life. After pouring all Herzog’s thoughts into letters Bellow notes in the last words of the book: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”

Question 10

Christopher Isherwood

Answer 10

Am PoMo

Associated with WWII and Berlin. Friend of Auden, who appears by other names in his fiction.

Berlin Stories

Question 11

Berlin Stories

Answer 11

Christopher Isherwood

main character Sally Bowles

Question 12

William Faulkner

Answer 12

Am PoMo

Southern writer. Tell tale last names to look for: Snopes, Compson, and Satorise, and Sutpen. Particularly “Quentin Compson.” Most pieces are set in a fictionalized La Fayette County, Yoknapatawpha County. Makes long sentences. He went by “Count No ‘count.”

Question 13

The Sound and the Fury

Answer 13

William Faulkner
Am PoMo

The Compson farm is in decline. The novel is set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss., in the early 20th century. It describes the decay and fall of the aristocratic Compson family, and, implicitly, of an entire social order, from four different points of view. The first three sections are presented from the perspectives of the three Compson sons: Benjy, an “idiot”; Quentin, a suicidal Harvard freshman; and Jason, the eldest. Each section is focused primarily on a sister who has married and left home. The fourth section comments on the other three as the Compsons’ black servants, whose chief virtue is their endurance, reveal the family’s moral decline.

Question 14

Absalom, Absalom

Answer 14

William Faulkner
Am PoMo

Mysterious Thomas Sutpen builds an estate, imports black slaves, fights with them. concentrated on Thomas Sutpen’s attempts to found a Southern dynasty in the 19th-century Mississippi. “You see, I had design in mind. I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally, of course, a wife. I set out to acquire these things, asking no favor of any man.”

Question 15

As I Lay Dying

Answer 15

William Faulkner
Am PoMo

The book consists of interior monologues, most of them spoken by members of the Bundren family. Faulkner follows the illness, death, and burial of Addie Bundren. Her dying wish is to be buried in her home town. The family struggles through flood and fire to carry her coffin to the graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. The journey becomes Addie’s curse. “Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.” Cash, Addie’s son, breaks his leg, Darl, another son, attempts to cremate his mother’s body by setting fire to the barn, and Dewey Dell is raped in the cellar of a pharmacy. Addie is buried next to her father in the family plot. Darl’s sanity dies with her mother and he is taken finally to an asylum. Anse, the father, appears with a woman, introducing her as the new ‘Mrs Bundren’.

Question 16

Light in August

Answer 16

William Faulkner
Am PoMo

Light in August is the story of Lena Grove’s search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

Question 17

Go Down Moses

Answer 17

William Faulkner
Am PoMo

Series of short stories, contains “The Bear,” one of his most celebrated short works.

Question 18

“A Rose for Emily”

Answer 18

William Faulkner

Am PoMo

Question 19

“The Bear”

Answer 19

William Faulkner

Am PoMo

Question 20

Richard Wright

Answer 20

Am PoMo

He busted open the market for black fiction. He was involved in the Communist Party, and mentored Ralph Ellison in both authorial persuits and socioeconomic issues.

Question 21

Black Boy

Answer 21

Richard Wright
Am PoMo

A black boy named Richard, living in Mississippi, endures a violent home life and excels in school, becoming his highschool’s Valedictorian. He gives his own speech, rather than one to appease the white audience. He moves to Chicago and works some jobs that exploit poor blacks. When the Great Depression hits, he joins the Communist Party but eventually loses their trust because of his controversial writing. He leaves the party and believes his writing is the way to connect to the world. This is autobiographical.

Question 22

Native Son

Answer 22

Richard Wright
Am PoMo

Story of black Bigger Thomas, who works for the white Daltons. The daughter, Mary Dalton, and her communist boyfriend, Jan, break taboos of black white interaction. Bigger accidentally smothers Mary and burns her in the family furnace to cover up the manslaughter. He frames Jan, but Mary’s bones are found in the furnace and Bigger is sentenced to death.

Question 23

Uncle Tom’s Children

Answer 23

Richard Wright
Am PoMo

An allusion to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story ‘Fire and Cloud’ was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938.

Question 24

James Baldwin

Answer 24

Am PoMo

He was a gay black man. He’s known for rejecting both white and black mainstream society—saying “a pox on both your houses”—and writing the “truth” as he saw it. He moved from America to France, presumably to get away from these folks.

Question 25

“Sonny’s Blues”

Answer 25

James Baldwin

Am PoMo

Question 26

Go Tell it on the Mountain

Answer 26

James Baldwin

Am PoMo

Question 27

Another Country

Answer 27

James Baldwin
Am PoMo

The story of a homosexual man named Rufus in NYC.

Question 28

The Fire Next Time

Answer 28

James Baldwin
Am PoMo

in which the author appraised the Black Muslim (Nation of Islam) movement, and warned that violence would result if white America does not change its attitudes toward black Americans.

Question 29

Giovani’s Room

Answer 29

James Baldwin
Am PoMo

David and Giovanni are homosexual lovers in Europe. David gets sick of Giovanni and goes and has sex with a girl he used to know, to prove he’s not incontrovertibly gay.

Question 30

Notes of a Native Son

Answer 30

James Baldwin

Am PoMo

Question 31

Thornton Wilder

Answer 31

Am PoMo

Playwright and novelist. Really very inspired by the modernists. Grew up in a small town and used this town as the setting for his two most famous plays.

Question 32

Our Town

Answer 32

Thornton Wilder
Am PoMo

inspired by Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925) and gained a huge success. It earned Wilder another Pulitzer. The story was set in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and traced the childhood, courtship, marriage, and death of Emily Webb and George Gibbs.

Question 33

The Skin of Our Teeth

Answer 33

Thornton Wilder
Am PoMo

inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, premiered in 1942. It depicted five thousand years in the lives of George and Maggie Antrobus, a suburban New Jersey couple, who, with their children Gladys and Henry and their maid Sabina, struggle through flood, famine, ice, and war only to begin the series all over again.

Question 34

Maya Angelou

Answer 34

Am PoMo

Famous black contemporary (though old) writer. She read her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration. All of her books are basically memoirs.

Question 35

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Answer 35

Maya Angelou
Am PoMo

most famous, title is allusion to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.”

Question 36

Heart of a Woman

Answer 36

Maya Angelou

Am PoMo

Question 37

Carsen McCullers

Answer 37

Am PoMo

Known predominantly as a “Southern Gothic” writer. She was a homosexual that wrote most of her novels after leaving the south.

Question 38

Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Answer 38

Carsen McCullers
Am PoMo

Southern Gothic novel about a dwarf named Lyman Willis.

Question 39

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Answer 39

Carsen McCullers
Am PoMo

a novel in the Southern Gothic tradition. It was set in the 1930s in a small Georgian mill town. The central characters are an adolescent girl with a passion to study music, an unsuccessful socialist agitator, a black physician struggling to maintain his personal dignity, a widower who owns a café, and John Singer, the deaf-mute protagonist. He is confidante of people who talk to him about loneliness and misery. When Singer’s Greek mute friend goes insane, Singer is left alone. He takes a room with the Kelly family, where he is visited by the town’s misfits. After discovering that his mute friend has died, Singer shoots himself - there is no one left to communicate with him.

Question 40

Member of the Wedding

Answer 40

Carsen McCullers
Am PoMo

described the feelings of a young girl at her brother’s wedding.

Question 41

Reflections in a Golden Eye

Answer 41

Carsen McCullers
Am PoMo

a psychological horror story set in a military base. Deals with suppressed gay desires.

Question 42

Flannery O’Connor

Answer 42

Am PoMo

She was a Catholic living in the Southern Bible belt. She’s known as a “Southern Gothic” writer. She claimed to use quirky violence and humor to speak loudly to those that were nearly deaf and speak bigly to those that were nearly blind.

Question 43

Wise Blood

Answer 43

Flannery O’Connor
Am PoMo

Hazel Mote, returns from the army with his faith gone awry. He founds the Church Without Christ, wears a preacher’s bright blue suit and a preacher’s black hat. He is accompanied by bizarre villains such as Asa Hawks, who pretends to have blinded himself, and Sabbath Lily, his daughter who turns into a monster of sexual voracity, and the fox-faced young Enoch Emery, who steals from a museum a mummy, which he thinks of as “the new jesus.” Enoch knows things because “He had wise blood like his daddy.” Eventually Enoch finds his religious fulfillment dressed in a stolen gorilla costume. Hazel buys an old Essex automobile, his own religious mystery: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” Haze murders the False Prophet, his rival, by running over him with his second-hand Essex, and faces his cul-de-sac.

Question 44

The Violent Bear it Away

Answer 44

Flannery O’Connor
Am PoMo

It is the story of a young man’s struggle to live with the burden of being a prophet and is representative of the author’s fierce, powerful, and original vision of Christianity. Young Francis Marion Tarwater has been reared by his fanatical, tyrannical grand-uncle Mason to be a prophet; when Mason dies, however, Francis rejects his mission and consequently suffers tortures of doubt and indecision. Although for a time he weighs the value of humanistic rationalism (as exemplified by his uncle George Rayber), Tarwater unexpectedly experiences a vision and comes to accept his calling.

Question 45

“Artificial Nigger”

Answer 45

Flannery O’Connor

Am PoMo

Question 46

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Answer 46

Flannery O’Connor
Am PoMo

a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law and their three children, are on a car journey. They encounter an escaped criminal called the Misfit and his two killers, Hiram and Bobby Lee. The family is casually wiped out by them when the grandmother recognizes the Misfit from his ‘‘Wanted’’ poster. The hallucinating grandmother murmurs: “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” The Misfit shoots her and says: “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Question 47

“Good Country People”

Answer 47

Flannery O’Connor
Am PoMo

a young woman with a sense of moral superiority experiences her downfall. The protagonist, Joy Hopewell, has an artificial leg as a result of a hunting accident. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy and she has changed her name legally from Joy to Hulga. Joy-Hulga tries to seduce a Bible salesman, a simple-seeming country boy, with the obvious phallic name of Manley Pointer. He turns out to be another ‘Hazel Motes’ and disappears with her artificial leg.

Question 48

Eudora Welty

Answer 48

Am PoMo

Novelist from Mississippi

Question 49

“The Worn Path”

Answer 49

Eudora Welty

Am Pomo

Question 50

The Ponder Heart

Answer 50

Eudora Welty
Am Pomo

Story of Daniel Ponder and his “trial wife.” The narrator of the story is Miss Edna Earle Ponder, one of the last living members of a once-prominent family, who manages the Beulah Hotel in Clay, Miss. She tells a traveling salesman the history of her family and fellow townsfolk.

Question 51

May Sarton

Answer 51

Am PoMo

New England poet, essayist, and diarist

Question 52

Lorraine Hansberry

Answer 52

Am PoMo

Playright. Born in Chicago, daughter of black intellectuals. Family bought a house in white neighborhood. First black woman to have a play on Broadway.

Question 53

A Raisin in the Sun

Answer 53

Lorraine Hansberry

Titles is allusion to Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Deferred.” Based on her own life. Key character, Beneatha.

Question 54

Gwendolyn Brooks

Answer 54

Am PoMo

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas but grew up in Chicago. She was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950. She is a witty poet who satirizes blacks and whites and attacks racial discrimination. She uses black language and rituals to proclaim black solidarity.

We real cool, we thin gin, etc

Question 55

Nikki Giovanni

Answer 55

Am PoMo

African American female poet. Born in Knoxville, TN

Question 56

Silvia Plath

Answer 56

Am PoMo

Studied confessional poetry with Robert Lowell (writer of “Skunk Hour”). Had a lot of psychological problems. Left America to study at Cambridge and met Ted Hughes, British poet, and married him. Writes about Jewish things and German things, uses the word “foot” a fair amount. Is often suicidal or violent.

Question 57

Ariel

Answer 57

Silvia Plath

Am PoMo

Question 58

The Bell Jar

Answer 58

Silvia Plath
Am PoMo

autobiographical story of Esther Greenwood living in a schizophrenic hell.

Question 59

“Daddy”

Answer 59

Silvia Plath
Am PoMo

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Question 60

“Lady Lazarus”

Answer 60

Silvia Plath
Am PoMo

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

Question 61

Anne Sexton

Answer 61

Am PoMo

also one of the confessional poets. Won Pulitzer Prize for her book Live or Die; shortly after, she committed suicide.

Question 62

“Her Kind”

Answer 62

Anne Sexton
Am PoMo

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

Question 63

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

Answer 63

Anne Sexton

Apparently retells Snow White in a more feminist way

Question 64

Robert Lowell

Answer 64

Am PoMo

Began writing poetry in conventional ways. Later moved to confessional school, mentoring Adriane Rich and Sylvia Plath. He came up with “raw” and “cooked” poetry. Protested Vietnam.

Question 65

“Skunk Hour”

Answer 65

Robert Lowell
Am PoMo

A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air–
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the
garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Question 66

“Memories of West Street and Lepke”

Answer 66

Robert Lowell
Am PoMo

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,

Question 67

Arthur Miller

Answer 67

Am PoMo

Married Marylyn Monroe, called before Un-American Activities Committee.

Question 68

All My Sons

Answer 68

Arthur Miller
Am PoMo

about a factory owner who sells faulty aircraft parts during World War II.

Question 69

Death of a Salesman

Answer 69

Arthur Miller
Am PoMo

It relates the tragic story of a salesman named Willy Loman, whose past and present are mingled in expressionistic scenes. Loman is not the great success that he claims to be to his family and friends. He is eventually fired and he begins to hallucinate about significant events from his past. Deciding that he is worth more dead than alive, he kills himself in his car - hoping that the insurance money will support his family and his son Biff could get a new start in his life. Critics have disagreed whether his suicide is an act of cowardice or a last sacrifice on the altar of the American dream.

Question 70

The Crucible

Answer 70

Arthur Miller
Am PoMo

It used the seventeenth-century Salem witch hunts as an allegory for McCarthy era - in Salem one could be hanged because of ‘‘the inflamed human imagination, the poetry of suggestion.’’

Question 71

Tennessee Williams

Answer 71

Am PoMo

Southern playwright from Mississippi

Question 72

Street Car Named Desire

Answer 72

Tennessee Williams
Am PoMo

Blanche Dubois comes to visit sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanely Kawalski. She overstays her visit because of dark things in her past. Tries to marry Mitch, but he finds out about her past. Finally, she’s taken to the looney bin. Blanche is, throughout the entire play, obsessed with her old age (about thirty).

Question 73

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Answer 73

Tennessee Williams
Am PoMo

Maggie and Brick are married but they aren’t having sex because Brick is sad his friend died. They are visiting Big Daddy and Big Momma (Brick’s parents), and Big Daddy is going to die. Brick’s brother is trying to get the money. Maggie cares, Brick doesn’t.

Question 74

Glass Managerie

Answer 74

Tennessee Williams
Am PoMo

In this semi-autobiographical play the domineering matriarch of the Wingfield family tries to find a “gentleman caller” for her fragile daughter Laura. This is a “memory play”; the narrator/character, Tom, continually shifts from narration to his “in scene” character.