American Lit: Middle to Late 20th Century Quiz

Answer: The Crucible

"The Crucible" is a dramatized representation of the Salem Witch Trials that occurred within the heavily Puritan-influenced Massachusetts Bay Colony during the late seventeenth century. While most of the play is fictionalized, much of it is historically accurate. Arthur Miller (1915-2005) went to Massachusetts to research the event, and the setting, the names of the characters, and the roles they played are adhered to mostly accurately. Miller's intent was to suggest that Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American government's hunt for communists was quite similar to the persecution and horrors perpetrated by the Puritan judges who condemned a number of people to die after finding them guilty of witchcraft. Eventually, the House Un-American Activities Committee required Miller to testify before its members. After Miller refused to name anyone the committee could pursue as potential communists, Miller was charged with contempt of Congress, fined, sentenced to jail, blacklisted, and denied a passport for travel outside of the United States.

Arthur Miller had a tremendous impact on the evolution of drama in the twentieth century and is considered as important as Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. He published his first play, "No Villain", in 1936 and continued to write more than thirty-five plays over the course of nearly seventy years, including "All My Sons" in 1947, "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, "A View from the Bridge" in 1955, and "After the Fall" and "Incident in Vichy" in 1964. He also wrote a few screenplays, most notably 1961's "The Misfits", which starred Marilyn Monroe, to whom he was married at the time though they would be divorced before the film was released.

Answer: Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) attended the Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women) but eventually graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in English Literature. Following the advice of her father, who was the head of an insurance company, Welty then went to New York and took advertising courses at the Columbia University School of Business.

After returning to Jackson, she began work as a writer for the radio station WJDX while writing articles for the society section of the "Commercial Appeal", the newspaper famously associated with Memphis, Tennessee. Eventually, she began work as a Junior Publicity Agent and photographer for the Depression Era Works Progress Administration.

This job required her to travel all over the state of Mississippi and meet a wide variety of people and families, and these experiences provided more than enough material for the number of stories she would write over her lifetime.

In addition to "The Optimist's Daughter", she also wrote a few other novels, including "The Robber Bridegroom", "Delta Wedding", and "The Ponder Heart".

She also wrote a great number of short stories, including "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (her first published story), "A Worn Path", "Petrified Man", and "A Visit of Charity". Through her writing tales involving involuted and dysfunctional families, unstable and morally challenged individuals, and violence and death, but all from the perspective of a narrator who speaks with an aloof or humorous tone, she contributed marvelously to the ongoing evolution of the Southern Gothic tale.

Answer: Howl

By the end of the 1960s, Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) had emerged in American society as a guru, particularly for youth who felt confused and lost because of the Vietnam War era. Ginsberg publicly read his poetry, held what he called "office hours" on university campuses, led be-ins (mass outdoor festivals of music and chanting), and led anti-war protests. He also achieved fame by his passive yet passionate speeches at legal hearings to persuade others to revise what he considered harsh laws against drug users and homosexuals. Ginsberg lived for several decades with his partner Peter Orlovsky, a fellow poet, and had written openly of their relationship in his poetry.

"Howl" had such a tremendous impact when it surfaced in 1955 because it condemned the prosperity and complacency of the American 1950s, celebrated American counterculture, and challenged the standards for writing poetry. His extremely lengthy lines, reminiscent of Walt Whitman's, were meant to represent the rapid and visual images of thoughts as well as their confusion.

The Beat Generation of the '50s advocated counterculture--psychedelic drug use, sexual liberation, rejection of materialism, and above all spirituality that often incorporated Eastern and Native American religion. The term "Beat Generation" is often credited to Jack Kerouac, famous for his book "On the Road". Supposedly, "Beat" refers to the young generation of Americans who had been "beat"ified after being "beat"en down.

Answer: James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was born in Harlem, and he grew up under the austere "care" of an abusive step-father, a lay minister who believed wholeheartedly in a vengeful God who would punish all white people as they so very much deserved. Interestingly, Baldwin found solace in another church, a Pentecostal one, and became a popular preacher for a couple of years before he abandoned Christianity altogether because he had come to understand it as an oppressive and deceptive faith. During these early years, Baldwin had also come to understand that he was gay, and the church was not a friend of homosexuals just as it had not been a friend of the American slaves during the 1800s.

At the age of twenty-four, Baldwin had moved to Paris, France, not merely because he wished to escape the prejudices of American society and calm the resulting anger and frustration that he felt, but also because he wanted to explore his ability to write outside of the context of being understood as an African-American writer. Over the course of his life, Baldwin met and became friends with a number of influential people, including Marlon Brando, Nina Simone, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin also made frequent, lengthy visits to the United States, where he contributed greatly to the Civil Rights Movement.

Baldwin not only wrote novels but also poetry, social criticism, and short stories. One of his most famous stories is "Sonny's Blues".

Answer: John Updike

John Updike (1932-2009) grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, a town upon which his fictional Olinger is based. Several of his earliest stories are set in Olinger, and Updike commented once that his "Olinger" stories perhaps capture more than anything else he ever wrote the story of his own life, at least his early life. The "Olinger" stories, as they are popularly called, remain some of his most admired fiction according to Updike's fans.

Updike became one of America's most prolific writers, having written a great number of stories (such as his famous "A & P" and "Separating"), twenty-seven novels (such as "The Centaur" and "The Witches of Eastwick", which inspired the film with Jack Nicholson), eight books of poetry, a play, and countless book reviews. Some have speculated that he reviewed almost every major American writer of the twentieth century at some point or another, and while he was praised as one of America's greatest literary critics, he could also create a great amount of controversy, such as when he gave Toni Morrison's novel "A Mercy" a rather blistering review.

His prose is considered by critics, authors, and readers alike some of the best ever composed by an American writer, though some might say his fiction's substance is sometimes lacking. His two novels "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest" each won Updike a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; at that time he was one of only three American writers to be able to boast that claim. The other two writers were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner. Of course, Ernest Hemingway should have been included in that small group, but his first win was denied him after the Pulitzer committee's and board's unanimous decisions were overridden.

Answer: Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was born in Newton, Massachusetts. In the late 1950s, she attended several poetry workshops in Boston, including seminars led by the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University. She met Sylvia Plath during this time, and the two became good friends. Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death" is most obviously about Plath's suicide and Sexton's attempt to make peace with it. Unfortunately, Sexton took her own life in 1974 after nearly a lifetime of struggling with clinical depression.

While her career of publishing extended over only a period of fifteen years, her impact on American poetry has been a tremendous one. Following the influence of Robert Lowell, she championed the confessional style of writing poetry, a style characterized by a much more candid and autobiographical discussion of a writer's life than had previously been usual in American poetry. However, her purpose behind using this style was not to attempt an analysis or an explanation of behavior but rather to make experiences and all of the fierce feeling associated with them more tangible. Sexton herself explained that poetry "should be a shock to the sense. It should also hurt". This approach is evident not only in such poems as "Starry Night", which uses Van Gogh's painting as a representation of her struggle with death, but also "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman", which is a tender consideration of her daughter as she enters into adolescence.

Besides the titles of poetry collections mentioned in the accompanying question, Sexton also composed "All My Pretty Ones" (1962), "The Death Notebooks" (1974), and the posthumous "The Awful Rowing toward God" (1975).

Answer: Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon, who was born in 1937 on Long Island, has managed to maintain a very private lifestyle. However, some facts are known, such as that he earned a Bachelor's Degree in English from Cornell University, where he took a course from Vladimir Nabokov, and that he served a term in the United States Navy.

His novels are known for their complexity, and while he obviously is indebted to such writers as William Faulkner and James Joyce, Pynchon is not a mere imitator of other writers. He has established a style wholly his own, a style that is described as labyrinthine, eloquent, colloquial, and sometimes parodying. The narrator and the characters exist within a world of radical disorder while they search for structure, order, and meaning that consistently elude them. The characters also, in typical postmodern style, find themselves in ridiculously complicated and absurd plots. For example, in "V.", Pynchon's first novel, the plots consist of the following: diplomatic spy stories in nineteen-century Africa, the bombing of Malta during World War II, the surgical reconstruction of a woman's nose, and a hunt for alligators in the sewers of New York City.

Novels, aside from the ones mentioned in the question, include "Mason & Dixon" (1997), "Against the Day" (2006), "Inherent Vice" (2009), and "Bleeding Edge" (2013). Pynchon also published a collection of earlier written short stories in 1984 that was entitled "Slow Learner". A film adaptation of "Inherent Vice" was released in 2014; it was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starred Joaquin Phoenix.

Answer: Alice Walker

Following her attendance at both Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, Alice Walker returned to the South to contribute to the Civil Rights Movement and to teach. Settling for a while in Mississippi, she worked against segregation through voter registration and the growth of welfare programs. She also taught writing at two predominantly black institutions: Jackson State College (now known as Jackson State University) and then Tougaloo College, both located in Jackson, Mississippi.

Walker has written other novels, such as "Meridian" (1976), "The Temple of My Familiar" (1989), and "Possessing the Secret of Joy" (1992). Walker has also written several collections of short stories (one of her most famous being "Everyday Use"), collections of poems, and volumes of essays, some of which have provided insightful perspectives on the works of other Southern female writers like Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. In fact, her scholarship concerning Hurston has contributed to a greater understanding of this early-twentieth-century writer as well as to a rebirth of interest in her work.

Her 1982 novel "The Color Purple" is, of course, the story upon which Stephen Spielberg's movie is based. The movie adaptation was nominated for several Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture, Best Actress (Whoopi Goldberg), and Best Supporting Actress (Oprah Winfrey). Whoopi Goldberg did win a Golden Globe for Best Actress. Alice Walker published "The Same River Twice" in 1996 about how the filming of "The Color Purple" both challenged and changed her life.

Answer: Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros spent parts of her childhood not only in some of the poorest areas of Chicago, Illinois, but also in Texas and in Mexico. She earned a Bachelor's degree from Loyola University in Chicago and then a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. She has taught in San Antonio, Texas, and has used her position as a writer to champion Chicana feminism, particularly because this movement combines both women's issues as well as cultural ones. It is important to understand that while the term "Hispanic", referring to all Spanish-speaking cultures, incorporates Cisneros' culture, the term "Chicano" refers specifically to Mexican-American culture.

Cisneros has accomplished much for an evolving American literature that is becoming more and more multicultural, not just in theme and subject matter but also in style. Refusing to following the guidelines of an Anglo-American canon, Cisneros established a unique writing style that incorporates a Chicano flair for storytelling techniques. Furthermore, she often substitutes Spanish words for English when she feels the Spanish terminology conveys a better or richer understanding of whatever it is she is attempting to convey. Through the course of her stories, she also focuses on Chicano views on religion and relationships as well as Chicano holidays, foods, etc. The end result is a literature that challenges America's understanding of its identity. When we think of an American culture, just whose specific culture are we really picturing? Much of her fiction has also challenged the romanticized views of female sexuality by contrasting these views with a more realistic if not harsher view.

Answer: Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, a member of a prestigious family that could not only trace its lineage to the Puritans arriving on the "Mayflower" but also to the founders of Lowell Mills, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Other relatives included John Lowell, the federal judge appointed by George Washington,; Charles Russell Lowell III, a Civil War general and hero; Percival Lowell, the astronomer responsible for the Lowell Observatory; and Jonathan Edwards, the famous minister and author who wrote "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". The two poets referred to in the question are James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) and Amy Lowell (1874-1925).

Lowell served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during 1947 and 1948. His book "Life Studies" won the National Book Award in 1960, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, once in 1947 for the book "Lord Weary's Castle" and again in 1974 for the book "The Dolphin".

Lowell, who was depressed and burdened by his family's powerful history, disappointed his family and left Harvard University after two years to study poetry under the tutelage of Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, who taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, he was highly influenced by the New Criticism and Fugitive movements, and many of his early poems are rather formal and difficult as a result. Interestingly, when he first met Allen Tate, he asked him if he could move in with Tate and his wife. Tate jokingly said that Lowell could if he agreed to pitch a tent on the front lawn. Lowell took the remark as a serious one and actually set up a tent there. Later, Lowell followed Tate and Ransom to Kenyon College in Ohio, where Lowell finished his college studies by majoring in Classics.

His poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke" refers first of all to his growing complacency as well as to that of many Americans who had grown so satisfied with their comfortable and wealthy lives that they were overconfident, indifferent to America's problems, apathetic, and essentially "tranquilized". In fact, Lowell refers to the decade as "the tranquilized '50s". The remainder of the poem is his remembering how his life used to stand for something, a time in the 1940s when he was so fired up about what he believed in that he was willing to go to jail for it. He refers to the time he spent in the New York jail at West Street because of his conscientous objection to America's fighting a war under the terms of an unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan, terms he felt would lead to the destruction of two different societies composed of innocents who had no say in what their governments wrere doing. He remembers other inmates who were beat up by other prisoners for what they believed in and lobotomized by a system seeking to make sheep of its citizens. No wonder, then, he and others became tranquilized.

Answer: Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) originally planned to be a cartoonist. Of course, she became a writer instead, but many critics claim that readers can see O'Connor's appreciation of the characters of comics through the characterization that so richly fills her stories. Despite growing up and living in a predominantly Protestant South, she remained a devout Catholic. As a result, her fiction often depends heavily on symbolism. Furthermore, her themes frequently involve matters of faith, grace, and morality, yet none of her stories every relies on didacticism, moralizing, or preachiness.

She is considered an American master of the short story, particularly the genre of Southern gothic, and her compositions are frequently anthologized. Many have most likely encountered not only "Good Country People", mentioned in the question, but also "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", "Revelation", "Everything that Rises Must Converge", and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own". As one can tell from many of her titles, O'Connor enjoyed parodying bits of colloquial wisdom and by extension the people who claimed to live by such wisdom--people who led unexamined lives yet believed they were essentially good people. She published only two novels over the course of her career--"Wise Blood" (1952) and "The Violent Bear It Away" (1960).

O'Connor died at the age of thirty-nine due to complications from lupus. She had been diagnosed with the incurable illness in 1952 but managed to live twelve more years despite a prognosis of only five. The illness went into a remission of sorts for a while; however, the corticosteroid treatment she was taking weakened her bones so that she was eventually forced to move around with crutches. Despite the side effects of her medication and the fatigue brought on by her lupus, she managed to write her two novels and twenty-four more stories.

Answer: Breathing Lessons

Amy Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrants. She attended San Jose State University as well as UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, where she took doctoral courses in linguistics. Much of her writing focuses on the Chinese-American experience while managing to speak on a much larger scale of the human experience itself, wrestling with the issues we all wrestle with: familial relationships, marital relationships, anger, frustration, love, sacrifice, and grief.

Her novel "The Joy Luck Club" is partially influenced by her discovery that her mother had given birth to four children (one died while still an infant) in China, where her mother was forced to leave them to escape an abusive husband.

Tan has written several other novels since "The Joy Luck Club": "The Kitchen God's Wife" (1991), "The Hundred Secret Senses" (1995), "The Bonesetter's Daughter" (2001), "Saving Fish from Drowning" (2005), and "The Valley of Amazement" (2013). She has also written works of non-fiction, such as "The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings" (2003), and children's books, such as "The Moon Lady" (1992) and "Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat" (1994). "Sagwa" was adapted to create an animated TV program for PBS.

Tan was diagnosed with Lyme disease in the early 2000s and has since helped found LymeAid 4 Kids to assist children with treatment for Lyme disease when their parents cannot afford the costs. Tan also is in the band The Rock Bottom Remainders, which consists of published writers. Members have included Stephen King, Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, Scott Turow, Matt Groening, and honorary member Maya Angelou. Amy Tan sang lead vocals on the band's covers of "These Boots Are Made for Walking" and "Chain of Fools".

"Breathing Lessons" is the title of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Anne Tyler, who has also written a great number of critically-acclaimed novels, such as "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant", "The Accidental Tourist", and "Ladder of Years".

Answer: Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. Her first book of poems, "A Street in Bronzeville", was published in 1945. The term "Bronzeville" was a name some journalists used to refer to the Chicago black ghetto. While her early poems focused on exposing white audiences to African American life in the ghettoes and the dream of an ideal integrated society, her latter poetry encouraged a black audience to take a more politically activist role in society. A significant change seemed to occur in Brooks' life after she attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fist University in 1967, and as a result of conducting poetry workshops in Chicago attended by members of a black gang called Blackstone Rangers, she drew closer to militant political groups. Over the course of her life, readers can trace the evolution of her poetry. At first it borrowed from the formal diction and concentrated images of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the phrasing of sermons from black Protestant preachers. However, eventually it began to rely on a more emphatically spoken language and to imitate the energetic, improvisatory rhythms of jazz as well as the cadences of African chants.

In 1968, she became the Poet Laureate of Illinois, a post she held until her death on December 3, 2000. In 1985, she served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Answer: July, July

Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1946. During the Vietnam War, he served in the 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment. One of the units in the division he served in had been involved in the My Lai Massacre, and when his unit eventually entered into the area surrounding My Lai, it was treated with great hostility. He and his men had no knowledge of the atrocities that had occurred. After his tour of duty, O'Brien attended graduate school at Harvard University and served as an intern for the "Washington Post".

He published his first novel "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home" in 1973. "Going After Cacciato" was published in 1978, and "The Things They Carried", in 1990. "Going After Cacciato" won the National Book Award in 1979, and selections from "The Things They Carried" have been frequently anthologized since that book's publication.

Other novels written by O'Brien include "Northern Lights" (1975), "The Nuclear Age" (1985), "In the Lake of the Woods" (1994), "Tomcat in Love" (1998), and "July, July" (2002).

Answer: Tennessee Williams

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in Canada, but his family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when he was nine years old. Some of his novels include "Dangling Man", "The Adventures of Augie March", "Herzog", "Seize the Day", "More Die of Heartbreak", and "Humboldt's Gift".

Toni Morrison (1931-) won the Prize in 1993. Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio. Some of her novels include "Sula", "Song of Solomon", "Tar Baby", "Beloved", and "God Help the Child".

Bob Dylan (1941-) became a Nobel Laureate in 2016. Born in Deluth, Minnesota, Dylan became one of the most influential song writers of the twentieth century. In addition to a great number of albums--such as "The Times They Are a-Changin", "Highway 61 Revisited", "Blood on the Tracks", and "Time out of Mind"--Dylan has also published several books, which include volumes of his lyrics, collections of prose poems like "Tarantula", and books of his art.

Other American winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature include Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O'Neill (1936), Pearl Buck (1938), T. S. Eliot (1948), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962), Isaac Singer (1978), Czeslaw Milosz (1980), and Joseph Brodsky (1987). It should be noted that of the last three listed here, the first two were immigrants from Poland while Brodsky was an immigrant from Russia. Furthermore, while Eliot was born in the United States, he later became a citizen of Great Britain.

While Tennessee Williams never won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did remarkably win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, as well as a Tony Award.