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Part I. The Literature of Colonial America

1.

The most enduring shaping influence in American thought and American literature was

American Puritanism

11.

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 Revolution

3.

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

Autobiography

9.

The most outstanding poet in America of the 18th century was

Philip Freneau

10.

Philip Freneau's famous poem

The British Prison Ship

was written about his imprisoned experience.

11.

Philip Freneau

was considered as the

12.

Philip Freneau

has been called the

14.

In American literature, the eighteenth century was an Age of

Reason

and Revolution.

Part III. The Literature of Romanticism

1.

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

Slavery

5.

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

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 Cooper

16.

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

William Cullen Bryant

' s work, it has been called by an eminent English critic

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

Thoreau

26.

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 Emerson

41.

Ralph

Waldo

Emerson's

essay

The

American

Scholar

has

been

regarded

as

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 the

world's greatest masterpieces.

Part IV

. The Literature of Realism

1.

Realism had originated in the country

France

as a literary

doctrine that called for

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 Stowe

10.

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

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,

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 in

a 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

first

full-bodied

naturalistic

American

novel

and

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 WWII

1.

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

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

Gatsby

7.

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

9.

William Faulkner

wrote about the disintegration of the old social system in the American Southern States, and its effect