Based on a thinly disguised true story, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY is not only a biting portrait of the American dream gone sour but also a universal story about the stresses of urbanization, modernization, and alienation.
In addition to being a swashbuckling adventure tale, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, set in 1757 near Lake George, foreshadows America's ongoing racial challenges with remarkable prescience.
William Faulkner's tragic depiction of the corruption of the Old South aristocracy in the post-Civil War world uses a mix of complex stylistic and narrative devices to explore Southern memory, reality, and myth.
Novelist and conservative social critic James Fennimore Cooper was the first author to seriously portray American frontier scenes and characters.
A literary celebrity in his day, Truman Capote is known for both his fiction and non-fiction writing. His best-known work, IN COLD BLOOD (1966), was part of the New Journalism movement and combines facts with fiction to tell the story of two drifters who murder a Kansas farm family.
ELEMENTS OF THE NOVEL:
Characters, Symbols & Content
Widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and provocative contemporary American writers, Norman Mailer analyzes the myths and unconscious impulses that underlie human behavior, often stressing sex and violence.
Take the Quiz: Natty Bumppo, one of the first American literary heroes, was the lead character in which novel?
Symbols: In what novel does the senseless chatter of a bird symbolizes the incomprehensibility of war?
To Tell the Truth: My one great obsession is to find and slaughter the whale that maimed me.
Context & Hypertext: Examine photographs of Faulkner's Mississippi during the 1930s, and read a literary essay he wrote about the state.
