Part I. The Literature of Colonial America1. The most enduring shaping influence in American thought and American literature was American Puritanism11. Hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety, these were the Puritan values that dominated much of the early American writing.Part II. The Literature of Reason and Revolution3. Benjamin Franklin also edited the first colonial magazine, which he called the General Magazine.4. Benjamin Franklin's best writing is found in his masterpiece Autobiography9. The most outstanding poet in America of the 18th century was Philip Freneau10. Philip Freneau's famous poem The British Prison Ship was written about his imprisoned experience.11. Philip Freneau was considered as the " poet of the American Revolution. "12. Philip Freneau has been called the "Father of American Poetry."14. In American literature, the eighteenth century was an Age of Reason and Revolution.Part III. The Literature of Romanticism1. In the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving wrote The Sketch Book which became the first work by an American writer to win financial success on both sides of the Atlantic.2. In 1828, Noah Webster published his An American Dictionary of the English Language.3. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his remarkable dictionary named Dictionary of the English Language.4. The Civil War of 1861—1865 ended in the defeat of the Southerners and the abolition of Slavery5. The American Transcendentalists formed a club called the Transcendental Club.6. The Transcendental Club often met at Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord home.7.Washington Irving was regarded as the first great prose stylist of American romanticism.8. At nineteen, Washington Irving published in his brother's newspaper, his "Jonathan Old style" satires of New York life.9. In Washington Irving's work The Sketch Book appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature.10. In Paris, Washington Irving met John Howard Payne, the American dramatist and actor, with whom Irving wrote his brilliant social comedy Charles the Second, or The Merry Monarch.11. The short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is taken from Washington Irving's work named The Sketch Book.12.Washington Irving was the first American to achieve an international literary reputation after the Revolutionary War.13. Washington Irving' s first book appeared in 1809. It was entitled The History of New York.14. Washington Irving also wrote two biographies, one is The Life of Oliver Gold¬smith, and the other is Life of Washington.15. The first important American novelist was James Fenimore Cooper16. James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Spy was a rousing tale about espionage against the British during the Revolutionary War.17. The best of James Fenimore Cooper's sea romances was The Pilot. The hero of the novel represents John Paul Jones, the great naval fighter of the Revolutionary War.18. The central figure in the Leather stocking Tales is Natty Bumppo , who goes by the various names of Leather stocking,Deer slayer, Pathfinder and Hawkeye.19. To a Waterfowl" is perhaps the peak of William Cullen Bryant ' s work, it has been called by an eminent English critic " the most perfect brief poem in the language. "20.William Cullen Bryant was the first American to gain the stature of a major poet in the world literature.21. Among William Cullen Bryant's most important later works are his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey into English blank verse.22. Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Bells is perhaps the best example of onomatopoeia in the English language.23. Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven was published in 1845 as the title poem of a collection.24. Ralph Waldo Emerson was responsible for bringing transcendentalism to New England.25. Ralph Waldo Emerson's truest disciple, the man who put into practice many of Emerson's theories, was Henry David Thoreau26. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau began a two-year residence at Walden Pond.27. A superb book entitled Walden came out of Henry David Thoreau's two-year experiment at Walden Pond.28. From Henry David Thoreau's Concord jail experience, came his famous essay Civil Disobedience.29. Hester Prynne is the heroine in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter.30. Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale.31. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's first collection of poems entitled Voices of the Night appeared in 1838.32. The most scholarly of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's writings is his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.33. Besides lyrics and longer poems Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote dramatic works, among which Michael Angelo is the most conspicuous.34. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lowell are the only two American poets commemorated in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.35. After his death, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow became the only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.36. The American Romantic period stretches from the end of the eighteenth century through the outburst of the Civil War.37. The English author named Sir Walter Scott was, in a way, responsible for the romantic description of landscape in American literature and the development of American Indian romance. His Waverley novels were models for American historical romances.38. Published in 1823, The Pioneers was the first of the Leather stocking Tales, in their order of publication time, and probably the first true romance of the frontier in American literature.39. In The Pioneers, Natty Bumppo represents the ideal American, living a virtuous and free life in God' s world.40. In 1836, a little book came out which made a tremendous impact on the intellectual life of America. It was entitled Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson41. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay The American Scholar has been regarded as "America's Declaration of Intellectual Independence". It called on American writers to write about America in a way peculiarly American.42. Another renowned New England Transcendentalist was Henry David Thoreau a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson' s and his junior by some fourteen years.43. The way in which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter suggests that American Romanticism adapted itself to American puritan moralism.44. Herman Melville's world classic novel Moby Dick was dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne a novelist.45. It is said that in his late years, Herman Melville stopped writing novels and stories and turned to poetry, Clarel is his most famous poetic work.46. Herman Melville is best known as the author of one book named Moby Dick which is, critics have agreed, one of theworld's greatest masterpieces.Part IV. The Literature of Realism1. Realism had originated in the country France as a literary doctrine that called for "reality and truth" in the depiction of ordinary life.2. The arbiter of nineteenth century literary realism in America was William Dean Howells.3. Henry James probed deeply at the individual psychology of his characters, writing in a rich and intricate style that supported his intense scrutiny of complex human experience.4. Mark Twain, breaking out of the narrow limits of local color fiction, described the breadth of American experience as no one had ever done before, or since.5. Darwinism had an evident influence on naturalism. It seemed to stress the animality of man, to suggest that he was dominated by the irresistible forces of evolution.6. The poetic style Walt Whitman devised is now called free verse, that is poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.7. In his cluster of poems called Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman gave America its first genuine epic poem.8. There is no doubt that the solitary Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts, is a poet of great power and beauty.9. There was only one female prose writer in the nineteenth century. That was Harriet Beecher Stowe10. Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece is Uncle Tom's Cabin.11. Samuel Langhorne Clemens is better known by the pen name Mark Twain .12. One of Samuel Langhorne Clemens' best books Life on the Mississippi is built around his experiences as a steamboat pilot.13. The result of Mark Twain's European trip was a series of newspaper articles, later published as a book called Innocents Abroad.14. Mark Twain was the first literary giant born west of the Mississippi.15. Mark Twain's work The Mysterious Stranger tells of the visits of an angel to the village of Eseldorf in Austria in 1590.16. William Sidney Porter, whose pen name was O. Henry, was the author of The Cop and the Anthem.17. Many of O. Henry's stories tell about the life of poor people in New York.18. 0. Henry sympathized with the poor's lot and hated those rich who exploited and despised them. This is especially seen in his story entitled An Unfinished story.19. It is said that O. Henry imitated a French author named De Maupassant as a model, and there is indeed much in common between these two writers.20. The title of one of O. Henry's books The Four Millions indicates that he considered all the people of New York City worth writing about, instead of only the upper class.21. Henry James' first novel is Watch and Ward, which failed to make him famous.22. The novel which was described by an American critic as "an outrage to American girlhood" is Henry James' Daisy Miller .23. Henry James' first important fiction was A Passionate Pilgrim in which he took up for the first time the theme of The American in Europe.24. In 1881, Henry James published his novel The Portrait of a Lady, which is generally considered as his masterpiece.25. Henry James is considered the founder of Psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator.26. The name of the heroine in The Portrait of a Lady is Isabel Archer.27. In 1902 Jack London published his first novel A Daughter of the Snows .28. Martin Eden is the novel into which Jack London put most of himself.29. The first novel of Theodore Dreiser was Sister Carrie.30. The identification of potency with money is at the heart of Theodore Dreiser's masterpiece An American Tragedy.31. The protagonisw of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire is Frank Cowperwood.32. Theodore Dreiser visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and published Dreiser Looks at Russia the following year.33. Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie , a commercial and critical failure when first published in 1900, was reissued in 1907 and won high praise for its grim, naturalistic portrayal of American society.34. Mark Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age was an artistic failure, but it gave its name to the America of the postbellum period which it attempts to satirize.35. Three years' life on the Mississippi left such a fond memory with Mark Twain that he returned to the theme more than once in his writing career. His book Life on the Mississippi relates it in a vivid, moving way.36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was Mark Twain' s masterpiece from which, as Hemingway noted, "all modern American literature comes. "37. The best work that Mark Twain ever produced is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , which was a success from its first publication in 1884, and has always been regarded as one of the great books of western literature and western civilization.38. Stephen Crane is the pioneer who wrote in the naturalistic tradition.39. Stephen Crane's novel Maggi; A Girl of the Streets relates the story of a good woman' s down¬ fall and destruction ina slum environment.40. War in the novel The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane is a plain slaughter-house. There is nothing like valor or heroism on the battlefield, and if there is anything, it is the fear of death, cowardice, the natural instinct of man to run from danger.41. Benjamin Frank Norris' novel McTe ague has been called "the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel" and "a consciously naturalistic manifesto".42. Jack London's masterwork Martin Eden is somewhat autobiographical.43. O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi is a very moving story of a young couple who sell their best possessions in order to get money for a Christmas present for each other.Part V. Twentieth Century Literature (I) Before WWII1. The First World War stands as a great dividing line between the nineteenth century and the contemporary American literature.2. American writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a "Lost Generation " , devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization.3. The most significant American poem of the twentieth century was The Waste Land.4. The publication of The Waste Land, written by Thomas Stearns Eliot, helped to establish a modern tradition of literature rich with learning and allusive thought.5. In 1920, Sinclair Lewis published his memorable denunciation of American small-town provincialism in Main Street .6. F. Scott Fitzgerald summarized the experiences and attitudes of the 1920s decade in his masterpiece novel The Great Gatsby7. The Great Depression of the 1930s greatly weakened the American nation's self-confidence.8. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein who had lived in Paris since 1903, welcomed the young expatriates to her literary salon, and gave them a name "the Lost Generation".9. William Faulkner wrote about the disintegration of the old social system in the American Southern States, and its effecton the lives of modern people, both black and white.10. Ezra Pound was the leader of a new movement in poetry which he called the "Imagist" movement.11. Ezra Pound's major work of poetry is the long poem called The Cantos.12. One of Edwin Arlington Robinson's early books, Captain Craig, once came to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt.13. Edwin Arlington Robinson produced a large body of works and was honored with the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, 1925 and 1928.14. Robert Frost' s first book A Boy's Will brought him to the attention of influential critics, such as Ezra Pound, who praised him as an authentic poet.15. Robert Frost's second volume of poems was North of Boston16. "After Apple-Picking" is a well-known poem written by Robert Frost17. New Hampshire, one of Robert Frost's longest poems, is a very witty and wise anecdotal discussion about the values of life and character.18. At one time, Sandburg's reputation mainly rested on a multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln including "The Prairie Years" and "The War Years".19. Carl Sandburg' s love of folklore developed in time into a rather modern tendency to represent it in literature such as in his The People,Yes .20. Wallace Stevens was successful in two fields of activity which did not seem compatible with one another; he was a very successful businessman and a very re¬markable contemporary poet at the same time.21. At the age of 44, Wallace Stevens was finally persuaded to publish a book of poems, entitled Harmonium.22. The Necessary Angel is a collection of Wallace Stevens' s occasional lectures on poetry.23. For the publication of his Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.24. After his death, Wallace Stevens' s previously uncollected works appeared under the title Opus Posthumous.25. In 1915, Thomas Stearns Eliot published his Prufrock and Other Observations.26. In 1920, Thomas Stearns Eliot published his The Sacred Wood, containing, among other essays, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", the earliest statement of his aesthetics.27. In 1920, Thomas Stearns Eliot began to write his masterpiece The Waste Land, one of the major works of modern literature.28. As Thomas Stearns Eliot declared, he followed strictly the advice of his close friend Ezra Pound in cutting and concentrating The Waste Land.29. Thomas Stearns Eliot's later poetry took a positive turn toward faith in life. This was demonstrated by Ash-Wednesday,a poem of mystical conflict between faith and doubt.30. In his work The Hollow Men, Thomas Stearns Eliot satirized the straw men, the Guy Fawkles men, whose world would end "not with a bang, but a whimper."31. Few men of letters have been more fully honored in their own day than Thomas Stearns Eliot, and even those who strongly disagree with him seemed content with his selection for the Nobel Prize in 1948.32. Thomas Steams Eliot wrote seven plays, the best of which is Murder in the Cathedral, a verse play on an ancient historical subject, written in 1935.33. Thomas Stearns Eliot's last important work was Four Quartets, a profound meditation on time and timelessness, written in four parts.34. F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel This Side of Paradise, with its portrayal of casual dissipations of "flaming youth" , was an immediate commercial success.35. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his best novel The Great Gatsby. It is the story of an idealist who was destroyed by the influence of the wealthy, pleasure-seeking people around him.36. F. Scott Fitzgerald' s second novel The Beautiful and the Damned describes a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, undoubtedly modelled after himself and Zelda.37. The hero in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night is a psychiatrist who marries a rich patient. The author condemns the wasted energy of misguided youth.38. F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel The Last Tycoon remained unfinished.39. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway became the spokes¬ man for what Gertrude Stein had called "a Lost Generation".40. Emest Hemingway's stature as a writer was confirmed with the publication of his novel A Farewell to Arms in 1929. The novel portrayed a farewell both to war and to love.41. Set in Spain during the Civil War, the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls stated again Hemingway ' s view of love found and lost, and described the indomitable spirit of the common people.42. In the story The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway portrayed an old fisherman named Santiago, who shows triumphant even in defeat.43. In 1954, Ernest Hemingway was awarded a Nobel Prize for his "mastery of the art of modem narration".44. Numerous parallels exist between the events of Ernest Hemingway's life and those of his characters, but fewer were closer than those of Richard Cantwell, the hero of the work Across the River and into the Trees.45. In 1952, Ernest Hemingway published a successful novel entitled The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and occasioned the award of the Nobel Prize in 1954.46. In the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age became the symbol for an age, Ernest Hemingway' s novel The Sun also Rises painted the image of a whole generation, the Lost Generation.47. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms can be read as a footnote to The Sun Also Rises in that it explains how people, like Jake Barnes, come to behave the way they do.48. The Spanish war was conductive to Ernest Hemingway's writing The Fifth Column, a play which was universally deplored.49. John Steinbeck was the foremost novelist of the American Depression of the 1930s.50. In the short novel Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck portrayed the tragic friendship between two migrant workers.51. In the work The Long Valley John Steinbeck described the fate of the lowly whose instinctive responses to life led only to destruction.52. The Grapes of Wrath is generally regarded as John Steinbeck's masterpiece.53. In 1935, John Steinbeck published Tortilla Flat, a collection of short stories which vividly described the life of poor Mexican-Americans with affection and humor.54. John Steinbeck's post-war novel The Pearl reflected his bitter feelings against those greedy, rapacious elements of society which made the war possible.55. Quentin is a character in William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury56. Joe Christmas is a character in William Faulkner's novel Light in August.57. The works written by William Faulkner may be viewed as a culmination of the development of twentieth-century southern fiction.58. Katherine Ann Porter's novel Ship of Fools consists of three parts, "Embarkation", "High Sea" , "The Harbors"59. In her essay "Place in Fiction" , Eudora Welty emphasizes the importance of for literary creations. She is noted for her fidelity to the American South, so her major theme relate to place, traditional southern family relationships.60. Carson McCullers was said to touch William Faulkner in writing, and her well-known novels are and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe61. One of the important figures in the 1930s who tried to adapt European avantgardism to American writing is Nathanael West62. The New Criticism first emerged in 1920s as a reaction against the prevailing time-honored critical tendency to focus on thetheme often in disregard of the form of the work. The name is given by John Crowe Ransom's collection of critical essays The New Criticism .Part VI. Twentieth Century Literature (II) After WWII2. In poetry, Postmodernism strives to go against the vogue of the New Critical poem and its parent style, the High Modernism of the previous decades.4. Allen Ginsberg is the spokesman of postwar Beat Generation in American literary history.17. J. D. Salinger is probably best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye26. Joseph Heller's Catch-22is one of the most famous novels dealing with the subject of absurdity in typical "obscure" techniques.Part VII. American Drama1. Eugene O' Neill is the first master in the American history of drama.2. In 1916, Eugene O' Neill's first play Bound East for Cardiff was put on by the Province-town Players, which was significant not only for him but for American Drama.5. Eugene O' Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for his Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie between 1920 and 1922, and Nobel Prize in 1936.10. The Theater of the Absurd in the 1950s and 1960s refers to some plays, some of which center on the meaninglessness of life with its pain and suffering that seems funny, even ridiculous. Edward Albee is one of the representatives.Part VIII. Multi-ethnic Literature1. African American literature centers on a myth, though also biblical, quite different from that on which mainstream American literature is based.2. African American literature is patterned on a myth of_deliverance from slavery, that of the Hebrew prophet Moses leading the Jews in their flight from the bondage in Egypt.3. African American literature has undergone a long process of evolution. Its early form was oral, including songs, ballads and spirituals, in short, folk literature in its various manifestations.6. In the 1940 Richard Wright's Native Son came out as a watershed in the tradition of the African American novel.7. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are two of the most important female African American novelists.14. By far the most important person in the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes known as African Americans' poet laureate, who ultimately outgrew the movement, and developed into one of the major African American authors to help make African American culture.15. Langston Hughes was one of the founders of the black theater in the Federal Theater Project during the Depression. 18. Native Son by Richard Wright is a story about an African American adolescent's growth of awareness. It consists of three sections, namely "Fear", "Right" and "Fate".19. African American literature attained a higher degree of maturity in 1952 when Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man appeared in print.21. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon is seen as another milestone in African American literature after Native Son and Invisible Man. It tells the story of an African American trying to recover his family roots.29. Another important Asian American writer is Amy Tan, whose first novel, The Joy Luck Club, made quite a stir on the contemporary American literary scene and brought Asian American literature to the intensive scrutiny of readers and critics alike.。
