Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

• takes place in the fictional Colombian village of Macondo
• it is founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia, a strong-willed and impulsive leader who becomes deeply interested in the mysteries of the universe when a band of gypsies visits Macondo, led by Melquiades
• Macondo takes a role in the civil war, sending a militia led by Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio's son
• While the colonel is gone, Jose Arcadio goes mad and must be tied to a tree. Acadio, his illegitimate grandchild, takes leadership of the town but becomes a brutal dictator.
• The Conservatives capture the town and Arcadio is shot by a firing squad.
• Colonel Aureliano avoids death multiple times until he signs a peace treaty. The town develops into a center of activity and foreigners begin a banana plantation near Macondo. The town prospers until a strike arises at the banana plantation and the national army is called in. The strikers are gunned down and thrown into the ocean.
• After the banana worker massacare, the town is saturated by heavy rains for almost five years. Ursula, Jose Arcadio's wife, says she is waiting for the rains to stop so she can die at last.
• The last member of the Buendia line, Aureliano Babilonia is born. He is left in solitude at the crumbling Buendia house where he studies the parchments of Melquiades. He has a love affair with his aunt which results in a son born with a pig's tail who is eaten by ants. 
• Aureliano finally deciphers the parchments and the house and town disintegrate into a whirlwind as he translates the parchments which contain the entire history of the Buendia family, as predicted by Melquiades. As he finishes translating, the entire town is obliterated from the world. 

Jorge Louis Borges (1899-1986)

"The Library of Baebel"

• narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival, and four walls of bookshelves
• though the order and content of the books is random, the inhabitants believe that the books contaian every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters and punctuation marks)
• though the majority of the books in this universe is gibberish, the library also must contain every coherent book ever written or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books
• the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages
• however, all books are totally useless to the reader and the librarians are in a state of suicidal despair
• nonetheless, Borges speculates on the existence of the "Crimson Hexagon" which contains a book that contains the truth of all other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God
• "The Book of Sand", another story of Borges, has an infinite book instead of library

Chinua Achebe (1930-)

Things Fall Apart

• explores the forces that drive the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a leader in the Umuofia clan, and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaris on his traditional Igbo community
• the title of the book comes from Yeats' "The Second Coming"

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

A Doll's House

• Nora leaves her husband Torvald after she realizes that her marriage is nothing more than a "doll house" in which she plays the role of doll in a perfect house
• when she is blackmailed by Krogstad because of an improper act that she commits in order to save her husband's life - forging her father's signature - her husband shows disgust at what she had done instead of gratitude - his only concern is his reputation

An Enemy of the People

• Dr. Stockmann is a popular citizen of a small town. The town has recently invested a large amount of public and private funds towards the development of baths, a project led by Dr. Stockmann and his brother, the Mayor
• the town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the baths
• However, as the baths are starting to succeed, Dr. Stockman discovers that waste products from the town's tannery are contaminating the baths. He nonetheless finds it difficult to get through to the authorities with a solution and the Mayor warns his brother that he should "acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community."
• Stockmann rents a hall in order to hold a town meeting and convince the people to close the baths but everyone just turns on him. Stockmann declares that "the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone."
• Stockmann considers leaving town with his family but decides to stay and set up a school for poor children instead.

The Wild Duck

• Gregers Werle returns to his hometown and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal
• over the course of the play the secrets behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "summons of the ideal"

Hedda Gabbler

• Hedda Gabbler, daughter of an impoverished general, has just returned from her honeymoon with Jorgen Tesman, a young reliable but uninteresting academic
• she doesn't love him and fears she may be pregnant
• the return of her former love, Ejlert Lovborg, who is a writer, throws their lives into disarray
• thanks to a relationship with Hedda's former schoolmate Thea Elvstad, he shows signs of rehabilitation and has just completed his masterpiece, thus posing a threat to Tesman as a competitor for a university professorship
• Hedda is jealous of Thea and hopes to come between her and Ejlert
• Tesman returns home from a party and finds the manuscript of Ejlert's masterpiece. 
• Lovborg confesses to Hedda that he has lost the manuscript but instead of telling him it has been found, Hedda burns it and encourages him to consider suicide. 
• Hedda tells her husband she has destroyed the manuscript to secure their future so that Lovborg will not become professor
• When news comes that Lovborg has indeed killed himself, Tesman and Thea are determined to try to reconstruct his book. Hedda is shocked to discover from Judge Brack that Ejlert's death in a brothel was probably accidental. She shoots herself. 

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Buddenbrooks

• portrays the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family, the Buddenbrooks, over four generations

"Death in Venice"

• Gustav von Aschenbach, a novelist, travels to Venice where he becomes obsessed by the androgynous beauty of an adolescent boy named Tadzio
• although an epidemic of Asiatic cholera breaks out, Aschenbach doesn't leave because of Tadzio who becomes a symbol of faded youth and of attractions Aschenbach never made reality
• his entire existence begins to revolve around this young boy, and the novel ends on Lido beach where Aschenbach is watching Tadzio play with his friends
• The boy wanders out to sea but turns and finally shares eye contact with the old man, and von Aschenbach dies

Magic Mountain

• Hans Castorp visits his cousin Joachim Ziemben in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps before WWI
• his departure is repeatedly delayed by his failing health and he remains there for 7 years
• he meets humanist and encylopedist Lodovico Settembrini, the totalitarianist Leo Naphta, the hedonist Heer Peeperkorn and his romantic interest Madame Chauchat

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

What is Art?

• rejects bad or counterfeit art as harmful to society inasmuch as it damages the people's ability to separate good from bad art
• detaches art from non-art or counterfeit art - art must crate a specific emotional link between artist and audience
• thus real art requires the capacity to unite people via communication; clearness and genuineness are crucial values
• the concept art embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings. He exemplifies this through the example of a boy who has experienced fear after an encounter with a wolf and later relates that experience, infecting the viewers and compelling them to feel what he had experienced
• according to him, the stronger the infection, the better is the art
• good art fosters feelings that fit with the particular religion of the time while bad art inhibits such feelings
• problem is that the upper class has entirely lost its religion and thus clings to art that was good according to another religion
• ancient Greek art extolled virtues of strength, masculinity and heroism according to its mythology's values, but since Christianity emphasizes the meek and humble, Tolstoy believes it is unfitting for people in his society to continue to embrace the Greek tradition of art
• he specifically condemns Wagner and Beethoven as being overly cerebral artists lacking real emotion

War and Peace

• tells the story of the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs against a background of Russian social life during the war against Napoleon

Anna Karenina

• Anna Karenina is the jewel of St. Petersburg society until she leaves her husband for the handsome and charming military officer Count Vronsky
• however, when Vrosnky's love cools, Anna cannot bring herself to return to her husband even though he will not permit her to see their son until she does
• she eventually kills herself

Anton Chekov (1860-1904)

The Seagull

• Irina Arkadina
• Konstantin Treplyov
• Trigorin
• Nina

The play centers on the romantic and artistic conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina, her son the playwright Konstantin and the famous middle-brow story writer Trigorin. The play has a strong intertextual relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The Cherry Orchard

• Lyubov Ranevskaya
• Varya
• Anya
• Gayev
• Dunyasha
• Yermolay Alekseyevich Lopakhin

Lyubov returns to her Russian country house with her adopted daughter Varya and her real daughter Anya. Her main problem is her lack of money and her orchard is consequently sold in auction to Lopakhin, a man whose ancestors were serfs on the property. In the end the orchard is chopped down by Lopakhin.

Three Sisters

• Olga Prozorov
• Masha Prozorov
• Irina Prozorov
• Andrey Prozorov
• Natasha Ivanovna
• Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershininw

Olga, Masha, Irina and Andrey are left stranded in a provincial backwater after the death of their army general father. They focus their dreams on returning to Moscow, a city they remember as a place where happiness is possible. Olga works as a schoolteacher, Masha is married unhappily to Fyodor Ilyich Kulygin, Irina dreams of going to Moscow and meeting her true love, and Andrey is in love with Natasha Ivanovna. Andrey marries Natasha and has a child and Masha begins an affair with Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Notes From Underground

• presents itself as excerpt from rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg
• Part 1 focuses on man's desire to distinguish himself from nature. The narrator describes this as his spitefulness. War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose and this is what determines human history. The narrator's desire for pain and paranoia is exemplified in a toothache.
• Part 2 focuses on three incidents: the first, an incident with an officer on Nevsky Prospect, illustrates the narrator's theories on insults and suffering; the second, Zverkov's dinner, relates to vacillation and "inertia"; the third, with the prostitute Liza, is the extension and embodiment of the narrator's theories on reason and advantage and on his view of the nature of man.

Begins:

"I AM A SICK MAN...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious)."

Crime and Punishment

• portrays the haphazardly planned murder of a miserly aged pawnbroker and her younger sister by a destitute St. Petersburg student Raskolnikov, and the emotional, mental and physical consequences

The Brothers Karamazov

• it is the story of a patricide in which all of the murdered man's sons share varying degrees of complicity
• Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei Kazamarov; Pavel Smerdyakov, Agrafena Svetlova, Zosima

Begins:

"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place."

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Nausea

• concerns a dejected researcher, Antoine Roquentin in a town who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations such as his research project, the company of "The Self-Taught Man", his memories of a girl Anny, and even his own hands, encroach on his ability to define himself and on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, thus evoking in him a sense of nausea

No Exit

• "Hell is other people"
• play begins with a bellhop leading a man named Garcin into a hotel room
• Hell is portrayed as a gigantic hotel 
• the room has no windows and only one door
• Garcin is joined by Inez and Estelle
• all expect to be tortured but no torturer arrives
• instead they realize they are there to torture each, which they do by probing each other's sins, desires and unpleasant memories

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

The Plague

• tells the story of medical workers finding solidarity in their labor as the Algerian city of Oran is swept by a plague
• generally taken as metaphoric treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII
• story is told through the narrative of main character, Dr. Rieux
• explores the philosophy of existentialism - emphasizes the idea that we ultimately have no control and that irrationality of life is inevitable

The Fall

• set in Amsterdam
• consists of a series of monologues of a self-proclaimed "judge penitent" Jean-Baptiste Clamence
• tells of his success, upstanding role in society and his ultimate fall from grace

The Stranger

• Meursault goes to his mother's funeral where he is unaffected by it
• He befriends his neighbor Raymond Sintes who is a notorious local pimp and helps him dismiss one of his Arab mistress
• Later the two confront the woman's brother "The Arab" on a beach and Raymond gets cut in the resulting knife fight
• Meursault goes back to the beach and in a fit of lunacy shoots the Arab five times
• at the trial the prosecution focuses on the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother's funeral - the killing of the Arab is less important than whether Meursault is capable of remorse

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Madame Bovary

• Charles Bovary marries a beautiful farm girl, Emma, who is filled with desire for luxury and romance which she gets from reading popular novels (like Jane Austen's Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey)
• The Bovarys move to Yonville where Emma flirts with a young law student Leon. When he leaves to study in Paris, Emma begins an affair with a rich landowner, Rodolphe. She plans to run away with him but Rodolphe breaks off the plan the evening before.
• Emma and Charles attend the opera in Rouen one night and Emma reencounters Leon. They begin an affair while Charles believes she is taking piano lessons.
• Emma spends exorbitant amounts of money at the dressmaker's and her debts pile up. People suspect her of adultery and she commits suicide by swallowing arsenic.
• Charles is distraught and even more so after finding the letters Rodolphe wrote her. He dies and leaves their daughter an orphan. 

The Sentimental Education

• describes Frederic Moreau's life during the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman

Stendhal (1783-1842)

The Red and the Black

• Julien Sorel prefers spending his time reading or daydreaming about being in Napoleon's army than work with his father and brothers. He becomes an acolyte for the local Catholic Abbe, who secures him a post as tutor for the children of the Mayor of Verrieres, Monsieur de Renal.
• Over time, Julien begins an affair with the wife of M. de Renal and the affair is exposed by a servant, Eliza, who had designs of her own on Julien.
• Julien is banished and moves to a seminary where the director, M. Pirard, takes a liking to him, and he recommends Julien as a candidate for secretary to the diplomat and reactionary M. de la Mole.
• Julien tries to participate in the high society of Paris but the nobles look down on him as something of a novelty. He is torn between his ambitions to rise in society and his disgust at the base materialism and hypocrisy of Parisien nobility.
• Mathilde de la Mole, the daughter of Julien's boss, seduces him and they begin an affair. Mathilde reveals she is pregnant and M. de la Mole eventually grants Julien a stipend, a place in the army and his blessing to marry his daughter.
  However, M. de la Mole receives a letter from Mme. de Renal warning him that Julien is nothing but a social climber who preys on vulnerable women and rescinds all he is going to give Julien.
• Julien races back to Verrieres and attempts to shoot Mme de Renal but fails. He is sentenced to death. Mme. Renal eventually forgives Julien and she along with Mathilde attempt to bribe officials to release Julien, but fail. 

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

• Large output of novels and stories entitled La Comedie Humaine is a broad panorama of French society during the period of the Restoration and the July monarchy

Lost Illusions

• story of young, handsome talented man Lucian de Rubempre who travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name
• loses the woman, betrays his talent and sells out himself, his family and his mistresses
• dies in the end after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by Balzac's criminal mastermind, Vautrin

Le Pere Goriot

• part of La Comedie Humain
• follows Eugene Rastignac's entrance into heartless Parisian society
• heartlessness is emobodied by the cruel fate of Goriot who has reduced himself to a state of squalor to provide his daughters with the material luxury they desire
• these daughters do not even visit him as he is dying and Rastignac is the only attendant at his funeral

Moliere (1622-1673)

Tartuffe

• Orgon is convinced that Tartuffe is a man of great religious zeal and fervor
• Tartuffe is in fact a scheming hypocrite who wants to steal all Orgon's wealth, seduce his wife and marry his daughter

Jean Racine (1639-1699)

Phedre

• based on Euripdes' play "Hippolytus
• During the absence of her husband, King Thesee, Phedre falls in love with Hippolyte, the son of Thesee from a previous marriage

John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969)

A Confederacy of Dunces

• title derives from Jonathan's Swift epigraph "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know hi by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
• central character is Ignatius J. Reillly, an educated but slothful 30-year old man still living with his mother
• in his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful New Orleans French Quarter characters

The Neon Bible

• novel is a bildungsroman about a young man named David and his gradual learning of religious, racial, social and sexual bigotry

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

Mourning Becomes Electra


Characters:

• General Ezra Mannon
• Christine
• Orin
• Lavinia

Summary:

• updates the Greek myth of Orestes to the family of a Northern general in the American Civil War
• Agamemnon is General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra is Christine, Orestes is Orin and Electra is Lavinia
• the play is divided into three plays of four to five acts each - "Homecoming", "The Hunted", "The Haunted"

The Iceman Cometh

Characters:

• Harry Hope
• Hickey   

Summary:

• stages the story of the whiskey-soaked and disillusioned denizens of Harry Hope's saloon and the upheaval caused by the newly sober salesman Hickey who, with all the annoying zeal of a recent convert, urges his former drinking companions to give up their "pipe dreams"

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Characters:

• James Tyrone Sr.
• Edmund
• James Jr.
• Mary Cavan Tyrone

Summary:

• covers a fateful, heart-wrenching night at the seaside Conneticut home of the Tyrones
• James Tyrone Sr. is an Irish-born retired actor who squandered his gifts as a clasical thespian to make a career playing a particular role in a commercially successful but artistically unfulfilling play
• Edmund, the younger son, suffers from a respiratory condition and a deep disillusionment with the world around him after sailing the world as a deck hand
• James Jr. is an affable alcoholic and the object of stubborn attempts by his father to be set up in business
• Mary lapses between self-delusion and the haze of her morphine addiction as a result of the shoddy ministrations of a quack doctor during her difficult labor and delivery of Edmund years ago

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

The Glass Menagerie


Characters:

• Amanda Wingfield
• Tom Wingfield
• Laura Wingfield
• Jim O'Connor
• "Blue Roses"

Summary:

• This play is a memory play based on Tom Wingfield's memories.
• Tom works in a shoe factory to support his mother and sister. He is unhappy and finds escape in movies and literature.
• Laura is a shy girl conscious of her leg in a brace as a result of her condition, pleurosis. Her mother is eager to find a suitor for her. She enrols Laura in business school but Laura drops out due to her shyness.
• Tom invites Jim O'Connor, a friend of his from the factory, back to his house for dinner on his mother's prompting. Jim turns out to be Laura's crush from highschool.
• Tom confides to Jim that he has used the money for the electricity bill to join the merchant marines. After dinner, the lights go out as a result of the unpaid electricity bill.
• Jim and Laura talk and Jim tells Laura that he nicknamed her "Blue Roses" because he thought that was what pleurosis was. They dance and Jim accidentally knocks the horn off her glass unicorn. Laura notes it is now a normal horse. They kiss but Jim suddenly explains he has a fiancee and leaves.
• Amanda rounds on Tom for not realizing Jim was attached. Not long after Tom is fired from the shoe factory and leaves Amanda and Laura. However he cannot leave behind memories of Laura.

1. But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?

2. Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me. All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal! To vary that old, old saying a bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company! . . . A telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!

3. LAURA: Little articles of [glass], they’re ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here’s an example of one, if you’d like to see it! . . . Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks! . . . You see how the light shines through him?

JIM: It sure does shine!
LAURA: I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one.
JIM: What kind of a thing is this one supposed to be?
LAURA: Haven’t you noticed the single horn on his forehead?
JIM: A unicorn, huh? —aren’t they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome. 

4. JIM: Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken?

LAURA: Now it is just like all the other horses.
JIM: It’s lost its—
LAURA: Horn! It doesn’t matter. . . . [smiling] I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!

5. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

A Streetcar Named Desire


Characters:

• Blanche Dubois
• Stella Kowalski
• Stanley Kowalski

Summary:

• Blanche arrives at the New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella. She informs her that she has lost Belle Reve, their ancestral home. 
• Blanche is disdainful of the cramped quarters of the Kowalskis' room and the apartment's location. She is immediately disliked by Stella's husband. Stella was happ to leave behind the social pretensions of her background in exchange for the sexual gratification she gets from her husband and is pregnant. Stanley suspects Blanche has cheated Stella out of her family inheritance. Blanche is also a heavy-drinker.
• During a poker game, Blanche annoys Stanley when she tries to get close to his friend Mitch. Stanley bursts into the bedroom where they are talking and throws the radio out the window. When Stella yells at Stanley and defends Blanche, Stanley beats her. The poker game breaks up and Blanche and Stella escape to their upstairs neighbor Eunice's apartment. 
• Stanley is remorseful and cries to Stella to forgive him. They eventually reunite. Mitch comforts Blanche.
• The next day, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley for a better man with an equal social status. She suggests contacting Shep Huntleigh, a millionaire. Stanley overhears Blanche and Stella's conversation and later threatens her with hints of rumors of her disreputable past. 
• One evening, Blanche is waiting for Mitch to take her on a date. She ends up paying the paper boy who came for his dues with a kiss. Later she reveals her past to Mitch - that her husband had committed suicide after she discovered his homosexuality.
• One month later, Stella is preparing a dinner for Blanche, Mitch and Stanley when Stanley comes in telling her news of Blanche's past. After losing the DuBois mansion, Blanche moved into a motel from which she was evicted because of her sexual liaisons. She was also fired from her schoolteacher job because of her affair with a student.
• During the dinner party, Stanley gives Blanche a one-way ticket back as a birthday present and indicates that he is aware of her past. The onset of Stella's labor prevents the imminent fight.
• Several hours later, Blanche is sitting alone in the apartment when Mitch arrives. He confesses he can never marry her but tries to have sex with her instead. She forces him to leave by yelling "Fire!"
• Stanley returns home from the hospital and Blanche tells him she will be leaving New Orleans with Huntleigh. They each celebrate their good fortune but things turn contentious when Blanche spurns Stanley. He ends up raping her. 

1. They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

2. There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly! . . . The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all that was left—and Stella can verify that!—was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated.

3. Oh, I guess he’s just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve.

4. I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


Characters:

• Brick
• Maggie
• Gooper
• Mae
• Big Daddy

Summary:

• it is the story of a Southern family in crisis, focusing on the turbulent relationship of a wife and husband, Maggie "The Cat" and Brick Pollitt, and their interaction with Brick's family over the course of a weekend gathering at the family estate ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of patriach and tycoon "Big Daddy" Pollitt
• Maggie, through wit and beauty, has escaped a childhood of poverty to marry into the wealthy Pollitt family, but finds herself suffering an unfilling marriage
• Brick, an aging football hero, has neglected his wife and infuriates her by ignoring his brother's attempts to gain control of the family fortune. His indifference and drinking date back to the recent suicide of his friend Skipper.
• Although Big Daddy has cancer, his doctors and family have conspired to keep this information from him and his wife. His relatives are in attendance and attempt to present themselves in the best possible light in order to receive the definitive share of his wealth. 

You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

"You told me! I told you!"

She had a naked child with her, a little naked girl, barely able to toddle, and after a while she set this child on the ground and give her a push and whispered something to her. This child come toward me, barely able t'walk, come toddling up to me and—Jesus, it makes you sick t'remember a thing like this! It stuck out its hand and tried to unbutton my trousers!

You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—you dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you'd face the truth with him!

Yep, they're no-neck monsters, all no-neck people are monsters

Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe"

• story of chaos wrought on a woman's life when her cousin Lymon Willis, a deformed but powerfully charismatic dwarf, enters her world

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

• four lonely individuals who are marginalized misfits in their families/communities and who are each obsessed with a vision of his or her place in the world collect about a single deaf-mute with whom they share their deepest secrets
• adolescent who desires to write symphonies
• an itinerant drunk who believes he must organize poor laborers
• black physician whose desire is to motivate his people to demand their rightful place in American society
• cafe owner whose secret which is sexually ambiguous and who believes that the deaf Mr. Singer understands and validates his obsession

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

Delta Wedding


Characters:

• Fairchild family
• George Fairchild

Summary:

• the story unfolds through the overheard thoughts of the members of the Fairchild family
• the oversized clan deals with a large amount of external and internal issues that focus on both the unity and the conflict within this tight-knit Southern family
• the character of George stands out as the hero

"Why I Live at the P.O."

Characters:

• Sister
• Mr. Whitaker
• Stella-Rondo

Summary:

• Sister, the narrator, opens the story explaining why Mr. Whitaker broke up with her and married her sister, Stella-Rondo: she "told him I was one sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same."

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Characters:

• Mr. Shiftlet
• Lucynell

Summary:

• a one-armed tramp, "Mr. Shiftlet", walks to a run-down farm where an old woman and her retarded daughter Lucynell are sitting on the front porch
• Lucynell cannot talk
• Mr. Shiftlet persuades the old woman to hire him for work around the farm and for repairing a car. She says she can feed him, but not pay him.
• Over the next few weeks he repairs the car which he really wants and offers to marry Lucynell for money.
• After the wedding, Mr. Shiftlet takes Lucynell on a honeymoon, but abandons her in a diner on the first day, claiming she was a hitchiker. 
• As he continues driving towards Mobile, he picks up a boy and begins to lecture him about being good to his mother. 
• The angry boy jumps out of the car and Mr. Shiftlet prays that "God will break forth and wash the slime from this earth."

The Southern Gothic

• relies on supernatural, ironic or unusual events 
• uses these tools to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the south
• usually avoids antebellum stereotypes such as the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman and the righteous Christian preacher
• instead, the writer takes these archetypes and portrays them in a modern and realistic manner
• one notable feature is the grotesque, a stock character who possesses cringe-inducing qualities such as bigotry and self-righteousness
• Tennessee Williams described the Southern Gothic as a style that captured "an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience."
• writers include:
• Flannery O'Connor
• Carson McCullers
• Eudora Welty
• John Kennedy Toole
• Tennessee Williams

Alice Walker (1944-)

The Color Purple


Characters:

• Celie
• "Shug" Avery
• Albert Johnson, or "Mr.-"
• Nettie
• Harpo
• Sofia
• Squeak

Summary:

• an epistolary novel
• central character, Celie, is sexually abused by her father who is actually her stepfather
• she is forced to marry a widower with several children who is physically abusive
• when her husband's mistress, singer "Shug" Avery comes on the scene, Celie is initially threatened by this effervescent, liberated version of femininity
• Shrug, like "Mr.-", Celie's husband, has initially very little respect for Celie too and abuses Celie
• However, in time the two women bond, and Celie gradually learns what it means to become an empowered woman in her own right through both sexual and financial emancipation and she finds the strength to leave her tyrannical husband.

1. Harpo say, I love you, Squeak. He kneel down and try to put his arms round her waist. She stand up. My name Mary Agnes, she say.

2. Us sleep like sisters, me and Shug.

3. It must have been a pathetic exchange. Our chief never learned English beyond an occasional odd phrase he picked up from Joseph, who pronounces “English” “Yanglush.”

4. Well, us talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). . . .

5. Shug act more manly than most men . . . he say. You know Shug will fight, he say. Just like Sofia. She bound to live her life and be herself no matter what.

    Mr. ______ think all this is stuff men do. But Harpo not like this, I tell him. You not like this. What Shug got is womanly it seem like to me. Specially since she and Sofia the ones got it.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Herzog

Characters:

• Moses E. Herzog
• Ramona
• Madeline
• Junie
• Valentine
• Phoebe Gersbach

Summary:

• Moses E. Herzog is emerging from his second divorce. His career as a writer and academic has floundered and he is currently in a relationship with a vibrant woman, Ramona, but finds himself running away from commitment.
• Madeleine, his second wife, convinced Moses to move her and their daughter Junie to Chicago. However, this was a ruse, as Madeleine was merely carrying an affair behind his back with her best friend, Valentine. Madeline throws Herzog out and attempts to have him committed to an asylum.
• Herzog spends his time mentally writing letter he never sends. These letters are aimed at friends, family and famous figures.

Seize the Day

Characters:

• Wilhelm Adler (Tommy Wilhelm)
• Dr. Tamkin

Summary:

• Wilhelm Adler is a non-religious Jewish New Yorker in his mid forties having a midlife crisis. 
• He is financially irresponsible and leaves his family. 
• He falls for a con-artist, a shady psychologist named Dr. Tamkin.
• Tamkin puts Tommy's money into the commodities market but Tamkin and the money disappear when it becomes clear that Tommy's father won't be supplying any more money for speculation. 

Henderson the Rain King

Characters:

• Eugene Henderson
• Dahfu

Summary:

• Eugene Henderson is an unhappy millionaire and pig farmer who is searching for meaning and purpose in his life.
• His desperation at home brings him on a pilgrimage to Africa where he hopes to find a new meaning to his seemingly lacking life. 
• After his first native encounter ends in disaster, he arrives in a new village that declares him Rain King.
• With a newfound friendship with the native king, Dahfu, Henderson is brought unwillingly into the king's ritualistic search of a lion thought to be the reincarnation of his predecessor. 
• Henderson eventually returns, planning on becoming a doctor. 

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Toni Morrison (1931-)

Song of Solomon


Characters:

• Robert Smith
• Ruth Foster Dead
• Milkman Dead
• Corinthians
• Magdalene
• Pilate
• Macon Dead II
• Guitar Bains

Plot summary:

• Robert Smith, an insurance agent, leaps off the roof of Mercy Hospital. The next day, Ruth Foster Dead, daughter of the first black doctor in town, gives birth to the first black child born in Mercy Hospital, Milkman Dead.
• Milkman grows up loved and privileged but does not reciprocate the kindness and attention of his relatives. He is afflicted with a genetic malady, an emotional disease that has its origins in oppressions endured by past generations and passed onto future ones. 
• When Milkman is 32, Macon Jr., his father, informs him that his aunt Pilate may have millions of dollars hidden in her shack. Milkman robs Pilate with his best friend, Guitar Bains but only finds rocks and a human skeleton, his grandfather's. 
• Milkman goes to Pennsylvania because he thinks that the gold might be in a cave near his grandfather's old farm, but ends up looking for his long-lost family history instead. He discovers that his grandfather's original name was Jake and that he was married to an Indian girl Sing.
• Milkman heads down to Shalimar, his grandfather's ancestral home in Virginia. Unbeknownst to him, he is followed by Guitar, who wants to murder Milkman because he thinks Milkman has cheated him out of his share of gold. 
• Milkman finds that Jake's father was the legendary flying African, Solomon, who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa. However, he abandoned his wife and their children, including Milkman's grandfather, Jake. 
• Milkman's findings give him profound joy and a sense of purpose, and he becomes a compassionate, responsible adult. Milkman survives an assassination by Guitar and returns home to tell his parents about his discoveries.
• He finds that Hagar, his cousin and lover, has died of a broken heart. Milkman buries Jake's bones on Solomon's Leap, the mountain from which Solomon's flight to Africa began, and Pilate is struck dead by a bullet Guitar had intended for Milkman. 

1. The singing woman . . . had wrapped herself up in an old quilt instead of a winter coat. Her head cocked to one side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto

2. He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

3. Milkman closed his eyes and opened them. The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from. All walking hurriedly and bumping against him. After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street.

4. “Gold,” he whispered, and immediately, like a burglar on his first job, stood up to pee.
Life, safety, and luxury fanned out before him like the tailspread of a peacock, and as he stood there trying to distinguish each delicious color, he saw the dusty boots of his father standing just on the other side of the shallow pit.

5. O Solomon don’t leave me here

Cotton balls to choke me
O Solomon don’t leave me here
Buckra’s arms to yoke me
Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone
Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home.

Beloved

Characters:

• Sethe
• Denver
• Baby Suggs
• Howard
• Buglar
• Paul D.
• Mr. Garner's Sweet Home plantation
• Sixo
• Schoolteacher
• Amy Denver
• Stamp Paid
• 124 Bluestone Road
• Ella
• Lady Jones

Plot summary:

• Sethe, a former slave, has been living with her 18 year old daughter Denver.
• Sethe's mother-in-law, Baby Snuggs, had lived with them previously. Just beforeBaby Suggs' death, Sethe's two sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away, and Sethe believes they fled because of the presence of an abusive ghost that has haunted their house  at 124  Bluestone Road for years. Denver, however, likes the ghost which everyone believes to be the spirit of her dead sister.
• The novel begins when Paul D, whom Sethe has not seen since they worked together on Mr. Garner's Sweet Home plantation 20 years earlier, stops by Sethe's house. His presence resurrects memories for Sethe. 
• Sethe was born in the South to an African mother she never knew. When she was thirteen she was sold to the Garners who practiced a benevolent slavery. 
• Sethe chooses to marry Halle, another man-slave who proved himself generous enough to buy his mother's freedom by hiring himself on the weekends. Sethe and Halle have Howard and Buglar as well as a baby daughter. 
• After the death of Mr. Garner, Mrs. Garner asks her racist brother-in-law, known to the slaves as Schoolteacher, to help run the farm. He makes the plantation unbearable and the slaves decide to run.
• Schoolteacher capture Paul D and Sixo and he kills Sixo. Sethe is still intent on running and has already sent her children to Baby Sugg's house in Cincinnati. Schoolteacher's nephews seize Sethe in the barn and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter. Unbeknownst to Sethe, Halle is watching the event from above, where he lies frozen with horror. Afterwards, he goes mad, and Paul D sees him sitting by a churn with butter slathered all over his face. Paul D has to wear an iron bit in his mouth. 
• Schoolteacher whips Sethe for reporting his misdeeds and his nephews' to Mrs. Garner, even though she is pregnant. Sethe runs away nevertheless but collapses from exhaustion in a forest. A white girl, Amy Denver, finds her and nurses her back to health. Sethe names her second daughter Denver after his girl who helped her. 
• Sethe receives help from Stamp Paid, who rows her across the Ohio River to Baby Sugg's house. 
• Schoolteacher comes for Sethe to take her and her children back, but Sethe flees with them to the woodshed and tries to kill them. Only the third child dies, her throat having been cut with a handsaw by Sethe. Sethe later arranges for the baby's headstone to be carved with the word "Beloved."
• The sheriff take Sethe and Denver to jail but a group of white abolitionists, led by the Bodwins, fight for her release. Sethe returns to Baby Suggs house but Baby Suggs has sunk into depression and the community shuns the house.
• Meanwhile, Paul D endures torturous experiences in a chain gang in Georgia where he was sent after trying to kill the slave owner he was sold to by Schoolteacher. His traumatic experiences cause him to lock away his memories and emotions in the "tin tobacco box" of his heart. He eventually escapes and ends up on Sethe's porch in Cincinnati. 
• Paul D chases the house's resident ghost away, which makes Denver resent him.
• Sethe and Paul D look forward to a future together until they encounter a strange young woman sleeping near the steps of 124. Most of the novel's characters believe that the woman - who calls herself beloved - is the embodied spirit of Sethe's dead daughter. Denver develops an obsessive attachment to Beloved and Beloved is attached to Sethe. Paul D and Beloved hate each other but she controls him by moving him around the house like a rag doll and seducing him against his will. 
• When Paul D learns of Sethe's infanticide, he leaves 124 and begins sleeping in the basement of the local church. In his absence, Sethe and beloved's relationship becomes more intense. Beloved grows increasingly abusive, manipulative and parasitic, and Sethe is obsessed with satisfying Beloved's demands and making her understand why she murdered her. 
• Denver leaves to seek help from Lady Jones, her former teacher. Under the leadership of Ella, a woman who had worked on the Underground Railroad and helped with Sethe's escape, they attempt to exorcise Beloved from 124. However, when they arrive at Sethe's house, they see Sethe on the porch with Beloved, who is smiling at them naked and pregnant. 
• Mr. Bodwin, who has come to 124 to take Denver to her new job, arrives at the house and Sethe runs at him with an ice pick, mistaking him for Schoolteacher. She is restrained but in the confusion Beloved disappears and never returns.
• Paul D comes back to Sethe who has retreated to Baby Sugg's bed to die. Mourning Beloved, Sethe laments, "She was my best thing." But Paul D replies "You your best thing , Sethe." The novel ends with a warning that "this is not a story to pass on" and that the town and residents of 124 have forgotten Beloved "like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep."

1. 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

2. White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

3. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.

4. . . . [I]f you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you . . . [E]ven though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.

5. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe.