English Literature

In this play, an Elizabeth Browning sonnet is found to be inscribed on a silver cigarette case. At an awkward birthday dinner in this play, a character tells a story about a parrot to a man she often refers to as a "Polack." In this play, a man accuses a woman of staying in the Flamingo after hearing how her husband Allen ray killed himself following a homosexual affair. Mitch courts a character who fondly remembers Shep Huntleigh in this play. That character says that she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers" after being raped by Stanley Kowalski. This play centers around Blanche DuBois, written by Tennesee Williams.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Eugene O'Neill

This man won the 1936 Nobel Prize in literature. This dramatist's troubled family life inspired his posthumous masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night. Who is this realist playwright of Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra?

Pequod

What was the name of Captain Ahab's ship in the Herman Melville novel Moby Dick?

Sancho Panza

Don Quixote's side kick

Cordelia

The only one of King Lear's daughters who is sincere about her love for him.

Simon Legree

Cruel slave dealer in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

Brom Bones

Ichabod Crane’s chief rival for the love of a young lady

Stephen Crane

This author's most famous work features characters such as Jim Conklin, Henry Fleming, and Wilson. Name this author who wrote The Red Badge of Courage.

Edith Wharton

This author wrote stories containing characters such as Mrs.Hale, Mattie Silver, Zena, and Ethan Frome. This woman drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.[1] Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth and the novella Ethan Frome.

James Fenimore Cooper

This author is best known for his Leather Stocking tales which feature characters such as Uncas, Chingachogook, Natty Bumppo also known as Hawkeye. Name this author who wrote The Last of the Mohicans

Neil Simon

Neil Simon This author included characters in his novel such as Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Name this author who wrote the Odd Couple and The Sunshine Boys

Arthur Miller

This author was married to the famous actress Marilyn Monroe. During his time as a writer plays such Death of a Salesman, which included characters such as Willy and Linda Loman and their sons Happy and Biff, along with The Crucible which features a group of young Salem who accuse villagers of witchcraft. Name this author.

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder This author and playwright is a three time Pulitzer Prize winner. Stories of his feature characters such as George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Name this author of Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Skin of Our Teeth.

Anne Bronte

Anne Bronte This author published a book using the pen name Acton Bell. Name this author who died of Tuberculosis at the age of 29 and wrote such novels as Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

The Yearling

This novel, set in the backwoods of Northern Florida, tells the story of young Jody Baxter and the fawn he adopts. Name this Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Marjorie Rawlings.

Samuel Beckett

In a work by this author, a black-robed Auditor serves as memories of being "back in the field" are invoked by a bodiless Mouth. A character created by this author fantasizes about "wandering in the Pyrenees" and angrily rejects a turnip offered by his companion. Willie recites newspaper headlines to his wife Winnie in a play by this author, who also created the dustbin-dwelling Nagg and Nell. This author of Happy Days and Endgame wrote a play featuring Pozzo and Lucky in which Vladimir and Estragon fruitlessly engage in the title action. Name this Irish absurdist author of Waiting for Godot.

Hermann Hesse

A novel by this author is written from the perspective of H.H., who joins a religious sect known as "The League." A character created by this author learns how to foxtrot on his 50th birthday and insults a bust of Goethe . This author created a gambling-addicted character whose former lover Kamala dies from a snakebite near a river served by the ferryman Vasudeva. A location created by this author is "for madmen only." In a novel by this author, Hermine and the saxophonist Pablo join the protagonist in the Magic Theater. Name this German author of Journey to the East, Siddhartha, and Steppenwolf.

Friedrich Von Schiller

Name this 18th and Early 19th German author wrote works such as Ode to Joy, a poem recited at the end of Behtoveen's Ninth Symphomy and the Wallenstein Trilogy.

Satan

This character's daughter opens a gate for him that cannot be closed again. As this character is thinking on Mount Niphates , the lack of pure joy on his face alerts another character to his plans. Abdiel abandons this character and participates in a battle against him. This character successfully disguises himself to trick Uriel. Mulciber builds this character's palace. "Squat like a toad," this character whispers into the ear of a woman to induce nightmares. This character tells Beelzebub that it is "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Name this character who causes "Man's first disobedience" in Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Toni Morrison

This author destroyed all video recordings and scripts of a play about the Dreaming title boy. One of this author's characters repeatedly asks "you rememory me?" in a stream-of-consciousness chapter, and another walks around with a noose every January 3rd, which she deems National Suicide Day. In a novel by this author with a prologue about Dick and Jane, a Shirley Temple mug causes Pecola Breedlove to desire the title feature. Stamp Paid appears in a novel by this author, in which the title character arrives at 124 Bluestone Road to the surprise of Paul D and her mother Sethe. Name this recently-deceased author of The Bluest Eye and Beloved.

The Sound and the Fury

A character in this novel frequently laments the smell of honeysuckle and dislikes his brother-in-law Herbert Head. That character thinks about convincing his father that he committed incest with his sister. This novel features a flashback to Damuddy's funeral and a depiction of Reverend Shegog's Easter sermon. This novel opens with a character looking for lost golf balls with Luster, and a character in it slaps his sister for getting her drawers muddy. That sister loses her virginity to Dalton Ames in this novel, and Quentin drowns himself at the end of its second section. Name this William Faulkner novel about the Compson family.

Light in August

One character in this novel responds to a tragedy by musing "Poor man. Poor mankind." That character isforced to resign from one post after his wife falls out of a window and dies while cheating on him in a Memphishotel. One character in this novel is adopted by the stern and religious Simon McEachern, who beats himfrequently. Two of the central characters of this novel never meet, but one witnesses the column of yellow smokethat emerges from a house fire set by the other. One of its characters is pursued in a lengthy manhunt aftermurdering Joanna Burden. This novel is largely narrated by the millworker Byron Bunch, who aids a pregnantteenager who has arrived in the town of Jefferson. This novel features characters Lena Grove and Joe

As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying One character in this work sees a sign saying "New Hope 3 miles", and soon afterwards claims that she believes in God. That character's father is eager to buy new teeth after his wife dies, and in one chapter of this work, Cash gives thirteen reasons for why he made a coffin "on the bevel". In this novel, Darl is arrested and sent to Jackson, Mississippi for burning down Gillespie's barn, and this book ends with Cash, Jewel, Vardaman, and Dewey Dell meeting their father's new wife. This novel about the Bundren family's journey to Jefferson to bury Addie's coffin, written by William Faulkner.

Elizabeth Browning

This author wrote "I barter curl for curl upon that mart" in a poem that begins "The soul's Rialto hath its merchandize." Another poem by this author describes an action as "freely, as men strive for right" and "purely, as men turn from praise." This author contemplated the "sweet years" of which "Theocritus had sung" in a collection that commands the reader to "call me by my pet name." Another poem in that collection asks, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Name this poet of Sonnets From the Portuguese, which was dedicated to her husband Robert.

Robert Browning

This poet described floating in the ocean, seeing a butterfly overhead, andreminiscing about his dead wife in the poem "Amphibian." The narrator of anotherpoem by this man claims "man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heavenfor?" That narrator dreams of working on one of the "four great walls in the NewJerusalem" alongside Rafael and Leonardo while painting his wife Lucrezia. Otherartworks in this man's poetry include a bronze statue of Neptune taming a seahorse cast by Claus of Innsbruck and placed near a painting of a woman who "liked whate'er she looked on." The narrator of a dramatic monologue by this poet killed his wife because she had "a heart too soon made glad." This poet of "Andrea del Sarto", My Last Duchess, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Absalom, Absalom

Name this William Faulkner novel in which Thomas Sutpen, a poor West Virginian, arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for him.

Truman Capote

This New Orleans born author's first book was Other Voices, Other Rooms. Name this flamboyant author whose more famous works are In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The Awakening

It tells of Edna Pontellier (pahn tell lee YAY) and her desire to fulfill her dreams rather than those she is expected to have in 19th century society. Name this novel written by Kate Chopin.

Gertrude Stein

In one work by this author, the Hersland family moves to Gossols after Alfred marries Julia Dehning. That novel is subtitled "Being a History of a Family's Progress" and is set in Bridgepoint, as is a work by this author whose sections about Anna Federner and Lena Mainz bracket a long novella about the depressed, consumptive mulatto Melanctha Herbert. This author of The Making of Americans and (*) Three Lives also penned the Cubist poetry collection Tender Buttons and the poem "Sacred Emily," which contains the line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Name this author who coined the term "Lost Generation" and wrote of her time in France in an "autobiography" of her lover, Alice B. Toklas.

Ralph Waldo Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison Named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson, his most famous work explored the search for identity in society as a minority. Who is this award-winning author of Invisible Man?

George Bernard Shaw

What Irish playwright, a founder of the Fabian Socialists, won the 1952 Nobel Prize for Literature and wrote Androcles and the Lion and Pygmalion?

James Agee

A twentieth-century American write and critic, best known for his classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photos by Walker Evans, an account of sharecroppers in Alabama during the 1930s. He was posthumously awarded a 1958 Pulitzer Prize for A Death in the Family, his only novel.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott A nineteenth-century American author known for Little Women, Little Men, and other books for and about children.

Horatio Alger

Horatio Alger A nineteenth-century American author known for his many books in which poor boys become rich through their earnest attitudes and hard work.

W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden A British-born twentieth-century American write and critic. He is bet known for his poetry, which was influenced by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and, later, by his preoccupation with Christianity. This author's works include collections such as The Double Man and The Dyer's Hand.

Beowulf

Beowulf An Epic in Old English, estimated as dating from as early as the eight century; the earliest long work of literature in English. The critical events are the slaying of the monster Grendel and Grendel's Mother by the self-titled hero.

William Blake

An English author and artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This author is best known for his collections of poems Songs of Innocence (1789), which were eventually combined with Songs of Experience to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Poems in these works include The Tyger, which explores the dark and destructive side of god.

James Boswell (1740-1795)

9th Laird of Auchinleck, was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of his friend and older contemporary the English writer Samuel Johnson, which is commonly said to be the greatest biography written in the English language.

Aldous Huxley

This author depicted his own social milieu in novels such as Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point, he is best known for writing about a dystopian "World State" in the 1932 novel Brave New World. Extrapolating from Henry Ford's model of industrial production and contemporary advances in biochemistry, this author imagined a world in which the fictional "Bokanovsky's Process" is used to create human clones, which are then modified to posses different intellectual abilities, and sorted into social castes named after the Greek letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Inhabitants of the World State enjoy a prosperous existence, immersive entertainment known as Feelies, and the drug soma, but lack family connections and spiritual fulfillment. The shallow pleasures of the World State are contrasted with the ideals of John the Savage, a young man who grew up on a New Mexico reservation. John is initially delighted to meet the World State residents Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne, and excitedly quotes the "Brave New World" speech from Shakespeare's play The Tempest. However, John soon grows disgusted with "civilization." After the World Controller Mustapha Mond forbids John from living on an isolated island with the aspiring writer Helmholtz Watson, John unsuccessfully tries to retreat from society, and eventually hangs himself.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov This author worked closely with Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell Jr. to create stories such as "Nightfall," which describes a rare moment of darkness on a planet with multiple suns, and "Robbie," the first of this author's many works about robots with positronic brains. (The word "robot" was introduced by the Czech author Karel Čapek in the 1920 play R.U.R., which depicts the worldwide uprising of "Rossum's Universal Robots"). Before this author, most stories about artificial life had followed the template established by Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a scientist who tries to usurp God's power to create life is ultimately destroyed by his own creation.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning A nineteenth-century English female poet, this woman is best known for Sonnets from the Portuguese that contain lines such as "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

Robert Burns

Robert Burns An eighteenth-century Scottish poet known for his poems in Scottish dialect, such as "To a mouse," "A Red, Red Rose," and "Auld Lang Syne"

Lord Byron

A handsome and daring English poet of the early nineteenth century, known for his sexual exploits, his rebelliousness, and his air of brooding. He was a leader of Romanticism; his best-known work is Don Juan, a long poem of satire. Other works of his include Walks in Beauty, Darkness, and The Eve of Waterloo.

Lewis Carroll

This author's real name is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a nineteenth-century British writer, scholar, and photographer best known as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Ernest Lawrence Thayer

This American writer who wrote the work "Casey at the Bat", a poem about Casey, an arrogant, overconfident baseball player who brings his team down to defeat by refusing to swing at the first two balls pitched to him and then missing on third. The final line of this poem is, "There is no joy in Mudville- mighty Casey has struck out."

Robert Browning

An English poet of the nineteenth century whose many poems include "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" and "My Last Duchess."

Willa Cather

A female American author of the twentieth century known for works such as O, Pioneers! a novel set in Nebraska and My Antonia, the two most famous novels by what Virginia-born author?

Raymond Chandler

A twentieth-century American write known for his hard-boiled mysteries featuring private detective Phillip Marlowe, whose adventures chronicle the seamy underside of southern California. Many of his works, including The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely have been adapted for films.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie A twentieth-century English author known for her play The Mousetrap and her many detective thrillers and murder mysteries. She helped raise the "whodunit" to a prominent place in literature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An English author of the ealry nineteenth century. This man was a leader of Romanticism; his poems include "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Joseph Conrad

A British author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He based many of his works, including Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, on his adventures as a sailor.

e.e cummings

A twentieth-century American author who spurned the use of many conventions of standard written English in his poetry. He often avoided using capital letters, even in his name, and experimented freely with typographic connections, grammar, and syntax. He wrote poetry on love, the failing of public institutions, and many other subjects.

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens This Victorian age English author wrote books such as The Pickwick Papers, a book about London gentleman Samuel Pickwick and three other members of The Pickwick Club as they travel throughout the English countryside by coach observing the phenomena of life and human nature, and recording their experiences for the other members of The Pickwick Club, and book such as David Copperfield which is the author's favorite book and tells the story about David, the story of a boy who escapes his abusive stepfather to find a haven with his aunt Betsey. She sends him to school, and he falls in love with Agnes Wickfield, apprentices as a lawyer, and then falls in love with and marries Dora.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle An English author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, best known for creating the character Sherlock Holmes. Works of this author include "A study in Scarlet"( the first time Sherlock Holmes is introduced), "The Sign of the Four," and "The Hound of the Baskervilles"

Theodore Dreiser

A twentieth-century American write who was one of the major exponents of literary naturalism. His first novel, Sister Carrie, and his later masterwork, An American Tragedy, are noted for their frankness and unconventional morality.

George Eliot

George Eliot This author's real name is Mary Ann Evans;however, she uses a Nom De Plume. Her best-known novels are Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner.

T.S. Eliot

An American-born twentieth-century English author, he won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature his numerous works deal with general emptiness f modern life and with the revitalization of religion. Among his best-known works are the poems "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," and the pay Murder in the Cathedral.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson A nineteenth-century American lecturer and author; a leader of Transcendentalism. In his essay "Self-Reliance" and in other works., this author stressed the importance of the individual and encouraged people to rely on their own judgement.

William Faulkner

A twentieth-century author from Mississippi, this author won set most of his works in Yoknapatawpha county. His works include "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying". In 1949 this author won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.

Henry Fielding

An eighteenth-century English author
known for his novels, including Tom Jones and
Joseph Andrews, a parody of a contemporary novel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A twentieth-century American author know for his short stories and for his novels, including "The Great Gatsby" and "This Side of Paradise". He led a tempestuous life with his wife, Zelda, and was one of several talented Americans who were part of the Lost Generation, a group of American writers who established their literary reputations in the 1920s.

Robert Frost

A twentieth-century American poet. Three of his best-known poems are "The Road Not Taken," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Mending Wall" (the source of the line "Good fences make good neighbors").

Dashiell Hammett

A twentieth-century American write of finely crafted detective fiction. His novel "The Maltese Falcon" introduced Sam Spade, a tough, cynical, "hard-boiled" type of private eye. Hammett was jailed briefly and blacklisted after the infamous "red-baiting" hearing of the early 1950s.

Brave New World

A novel by Aldous Huxley that depicts the potential horrors of life in the twenty-fifth century. The title comes from a line in the play "The Tempest, by William Shakespeare.

Death of a Salesman

A Pulitzer Prize winning play by the American write Arthur Miller. Willy Loman, a salesman who find himself regarded as a useless in his occupation because of his age, kills himself. A speech made by a friend of Willy's after his suicide is well known and ends with the liens: "Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde

A novel by Robert Louis Stevenson about the good Dr.Jekyll, whose well-intention ed experiments on himself periodically turn him into the cruel and sadistic Mr.Hyde.

A Farewell to Arms

A novel by Ernest Hemingway, set in World War I. AN AA Farewell to Armsmerican soldier and an English nurse fall in love;he deserts to join her, and she dies in childbirth.

The Gift of the Magi

A short story by O. Henry. An extremely poor young couple is determined to give Christmas presents to each other. He sells his watch to buy a set of combs for her long hair, and she cuts off her hair and sells it to buy him a watch fob.

Gone with the Wind

A phenomenally popular novel by the American author Margaret Mitchell. Set in Georgia in the period of the Civil War, it tells of the three marriages of the central characters, Scarlett O'Hara, and of the devastation caused by the war.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath A novel by John Steinbeck about the hardships of an American farm family in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Forced off the land, they travel to California to earn a living harvesting fruit.

Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels A satire by Jonathan Swift. Lemuel Gulliver, an Englishman, travels to exotic lands, including Lilliput (where people are six inches tall), Brobdingnag (where people are seventy feet tall), and the lands of the Houyhnhnm (where horses are the intelligent beings, and humans, called Yahoos, are mute brutes of labor).

Nathaniel Hawthorne

A nineteenth-century American author known for his novels and short stories that explore themes of sin and guilt. His works include "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables."

Lillian Hellman

A twentieth-century American playwright and memoirist. Her plays, such as The children's Hour and Toys in the Attic, often deal with controversial social and physiological themes. This author's memoirs include "Pentimento" and "Scoundrel Time", an account of the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

O. Henry

A twentieth-century American author known for "The Gift of the Magi" and other short stories. He specialized in surprise endings. His real name was William Sydney Porter.

The Song of Hiawatha

An epic by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, based on the story of an actual Native American hero. This partially self-titled poem is based from a man from the Onondaga;however, Longfellow makes him an Ojibwa living near Lake Superior

Henry James

An American author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James is known for his novels, such as "The Turn of the Screw" and "Portrait of a Lady".

Jane Eyre

A novel by Charlotte Bronte, the self-titled character serves as a governess to the ward of the mysterious and moody Edward Rochester. He proposes to her, but the protagonist discovers that he is already married to an insane woman. Eventually the protagonist and Rochester are reunited and, in a famous line, "Reader, I married him."

Samuel Johnson

An eighteenth-century English author known for his wit and for his balanced and careful criticism of literature. This man compiled an important dictionary of the English language. The story of his life is told in the partially self-titled book by James Boswell.

James Joyce

A twentieth-century Irish author known for his novels, especially "Finnegan Wake", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", and "Ulysses", and for his short stories, especially the collection Dubliners.

John Keats

This nineteenth-century English poet, one of the leaders of Romanticism. His poems include "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Endymion," which contains the famous line "A thing of beauty is a joy forever". Tragically, this author died at the young age of 25.

Rudyard Kipling s

This English author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for his children's books such as "The Jungle Book" and " Just so Stories"; novels such as "Kim" and "The Light that failed"; and poems sch as "Gunga Din" and "The road to Mandalay." Some well-knowned lines from his works are "Est is east, and West is west", and "Never the Twain Shall Meet" and "The Female of the Species is More Deadly than the Male."

Kubla Khan

This evocative poem by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge about an exotic emperor. It begins with the line "In Xanadu did /A stately pleasure-dome decree"

The Last of the Mohicans

A novel by James Fenimore Cooper" part of "The Leatherstocking Tales." The leading character is Uncas, a noble Native American who helps a family of British settlers during the French and Indian War.

Leaves of Grass

A collection of poems by Walt Whitman, written mainly in free verse. Published with revision every few years until Whitman's death in 1892, it contains such well-known poems as "I Hear America Singing," "Song of Myself," and "O Captain, My Captain."

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

This story by Washington Irving features the central character Ichabod Crane, a vain and cowardly teacher and the rival in love of Brome Bones. Bones terrorizes Crane by disguising himself as a legendary headless horseman.

Doris Lessing

A recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, this British twentieth-century author is known for her vividly realistic and feminist novels, including the five-volume series "The Children of Violence" and "The Godlen Noteboo." She also wrote short stories, and collected in vlumes such as African Stories

D.H. Lawrence

A twentieth-century British author. Two of his best regarded works are "Sons and Lovers" and "Women in Love". This author also had the novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" banned as obscene in both Britain and the United States.

C.S Lewis

A twentieth-century British writer whose critical and theological studies include "The Allegory of Love" and "The Screwtape Letters". This author also wrote science fiction and children stories such as the "The Chronicles of Narnia," and "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe," which parallels the bible with characters such as Aslan being a symbol of Jesus.

Sinclair Lewis

A twentieth-century American author known for using his novels to criticize aspects of American life, such as small-town narrowness, insincere preachers, and the discouragement of scientific curiosity. His books include Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and Main Street. This author won the Nobel prize for literature on 1930.

Jack London

This American writer's best known novels are based on experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush. His wary works, include "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang", which made him one of the most widely read authors of all time. Unable to repeat his earlier success, this author died of a drug overdose in 1916

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

American poet that was influenced somewhat by the transcendentalism occurring at the time. He was important in building the status of American literature. A nineteenth-cen-tury American poet. Among his works are The Songof Hiawatha and "Paul Revere's Ride."

Little Women

A novel by Louisa May Alcott, about four sisters growing up in New Eng-land in the nineteenth century. The sequel, Little Men, was published in 1871.

Mary McCarthy

A twentieth-century American writer and critic noted for her satirical novels, such as The Groves of Academe and The Group, about the lives of eight Vassar College graduates. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is about her childhood as an orphan raised by diverse and unsympathetic relatives.

Carson McCullers

A twentieth-century Americanwriter whose short stories and novels, set mainly inthe South, portray the spiritual loneliness of outcastsand misfits. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published when this author was twenty-three. The Member of the Wedding was adapted for amemorable Broadway play and a 1952 film.

Norman Mailer

A twentieth-century American writer whose first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his wartime experiences, established him as a major novelist. His works of New Journalism — personal, sometimes fictionalized accounts of current po-litical events — include The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song, a so-called true life novel about the death of convicted killer, Gary Gilmore.

H.L. Mencken

A twentieth-century American writer known for his works of satire, mainly essays. This author and essayist mocked American society for its puritanism,its anti-intellectualism, and its emphasis on conformity.

A.A. Milne

A twentieth-century English author best known for his children's books about the adventures of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh.

John Milton

A seventeenth-century English poet.His greatest work is the epic Paradise Lost, which he dictated after he went blind. With Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, This author is considered one of the greatest of all English poets. A famous phrase from Milton's works is his statement of purpose in Paradise Lost: "to justify the ways of God to men." Also well known is the last line of his poem "On His Blindness": "They also serve who only stand and wait."

Moby Dick

A novel by Herman Melville.Its central character, Captain Ahab, engages in a mad, obsessive quest for Moby Dick, a great white whale. The novel opens with the famous sentence "Call me Ishmael."

A Modest Proposal

An essay by Jonathan Swift, often called a masterpiece of irony. Swift emphasizes the terrible poverty of eighteenth-century Ireland by ironically proposing that Irish parents earn money by selling their children as food.