Contexts of American Prose - AP English Literature and Composition

The line "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" appears later in this sermon and provided the title for Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Adapted from "Meditation XVII" in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes by John Donne (1624)

Hemingway was an expatriate who wrote terse, emotionally complex novels set mainly in Europe. He is not an exemplar of the Southern Gothic style, which is known for its setting of the American South and its use of macabre and grotesque events (often to provide social commentary).

This is Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Gothic writer who suffered from lupus and is perhaps best known for short stories such as “Good Country People,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and “Parker’s Back.” Her works are deeply invested in moral and ethical questions and in probing psychological examinations of her often poor, uneducated Southern characters.

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is set during World War II, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is set during the end of World War II, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, respectively. Only Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is set during peacetime.

This is William Faulkner. Yoknapatawpha comes from a Cherokee phrase and is based on real places in Mississippi, and many of his novels—such as Absalom! Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and _The Sound and the Fury—_are set here.

This is John Steinbeck, and the novel in question is the 1939 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Grapes of Wrath. It is set during the Great Depression and centers on a family of indigent tenant farmers who move from Oklahoma to California.

This is Cormac McCarthy, whose novels include All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men. His work often features apocalyptic settings, largely male casts, and dialogues of untranslated Spanish.

This is Vladimir Nabokov’s highly controversial Lolita. Although the book was largely regarded as pornographic and received little critical acclaim when it was first published, it has since become one of the most highly regarded novels of the twentieth century.

The writer in question is Junot Díaz. His other works include story collections titled Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and much of his short fiction revolves around Dominican-American immigrants.

This is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.

This is Toni Morrison. Her novels, which include The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Sula, and Song of Solomon, feature deeply developed characters and examinations of race and history.

Don DeLillo is a white novelist known for works such as Underworld and White Noise.

Although Warren denied them, parallels were often drawn between Louisiana governor Huey Long’s rise to political power and the life of his novel’s characters.

The Shipping News (1993) is a novel by the American author E. Annie Proulx. Proulx was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for the novel.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of Blood Meridian (1985), David Foster Wallace is the author of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections (2001), and Phillip Roth is the author of Portnoy's Complaint (1972)

“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) is by Herman Melville, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) is by O. Henry, “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) is by W.W. Jacobs, and “The Story of an Hour” (1894) is by Kate Chopin. “Brokeback Mountain” was published in 1997 by E. Annie Proulx.

E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News was published in 1993 and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

Accordion Crimes (1996), Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004), and Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988) are all by E. Annie Proulx. The Big Sleep is a 1939 novel by Raymond Chandler.

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) is Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Phillip Roth is the author of The Ghostwriter (1979), Raymond Chandler is the author of The High Window (1942), and Raymond Carver is the author of Cathedral (1983).

McCarthy wrote The Road (2006), No Country For Old Men (2005), All the Pretty Horses (1992), and Suttree (1979). He did not, however, write Freedom; that title is a 2010 novel by Jonathan Franzen.

Blood Meridian (1985) is set in the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s and early 1850s and concerns the adventures of a gang of scalp hunters. It is characterized as a Modern or Revisionist Western.