- Choose two characters from the works on the mandatory reading list and Compare and contrast these characters, addressing issues of race, gender, and class as applicable.
- Explore how these characters embody what it means to be an American. Support your explanation with examples from the text.
Reading List
Colonial & Early National Period –
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans
Mary Rowlandson: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Johnathan Edward: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Thomas Paine: Common Sense
Romantic & Dark Romantic Period –
Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving: The Devil and Tom Walker
Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Transcendentalism Period –
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self Reliance
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself
Realism in American Literature –
Frederick Douglass: A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Modernist Prose in American Literature –
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men
Modernist Poetry in American Literature –
T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Harlem Renaissance – Please read the following:
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Contemporary Period –
Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Richard Wright: Black Boy
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street